Klaus Mann

Klaus Heinrich Thomas Mann , born the November 18th 1906 with Munich, deceased the May 21st 1949 with Cannes of a suicide, is a German writer . He is the son of the writer Thomas Mann, the nephew of Heinrich Mann and the brother, inter alia, of Erika and Golo Mann.

Life

Youth

Born with Munich, Klaus Mann is the son of Thomas Mann and his wife Katia Pringsheim, whose parents were secularized Jews. In 1915, he suffers from a acute Appendicite and spends several months in a private clinic. “That marked certainly me with life to have approached the death of so close with this age. By passing very close to me, the shade of dead left me its print. ”, he writes on this subject, in his first autobiography I am of my time . In addition, Klaus and its older sister Erika create a small theater for children, “Laienbund Deutscher Mimiker” (“Union of the German mimes amateurs”).

In 1922, after a disastrous report card, Erika and Klaus, which have also a bad mark of control, are sent in a hearth to the countryside, in Hochwaldhausen. Erika returns soon to Munich, while Klaus enters a boarding school progressist, the “Odenwaldschule”. However, it éprend of a classmate and must leave the boarding school, the following year. “It had the face which I liked. For certain faces, one can test tenderness if it were seen long enough and that the heart is sensitive. But there is only one face which one likes. It is always the same one, one recognizes it between thousand. ” he writes, in connection with this boy, in his second autobiography the Turning .

In 1924, before its baccalaureat, Erika enters the troop of max Reinhardt in “Deutsches Theater” of Berlin. Klaus becomes engaged to Pamela Wedekind, girl of the playwright Frank Wedekind. In September, the improbable couple settles in Berlin, where Klaus becomes dramatic Critique, the following year, for a review Berlin oise. It publishes its first news in various newspapers and periodicals.

The esthète

In 1925, in eighteen years, Klaus publishes its first play and a collection of news. The same year, it makes its first great voyage abroad, which leads it in England, to Paris, Marseilles, in Tunisia, with Palermo, Naples and Rome. Its first novel appears in 1926. The same year, Erika Marie with the actor Gustaf Gründgens, who would be, at that time, the lover of his brother, whereas it falls in love with Pamela Wedekind.

In 1927, Klaus leaves on a blow head for the the United States, with Erika, and travels throughout the world for nine months, visiting the Japan, the Korea and the Siberia. In the United States, where it meets his future friend Thomas Quinn Curtiss. On their return, Klaus and Erika write Tout together around. The adventure of a voyage around the world , a humorous notebook of voyage. With Paris, Klaus makes knowledge, in 1928, of André Gide, Jean Cocteau and Rene Crevel, of which he becomes the friend.

The first years of Klaus Mann are disturbed; its Homosexualité often makes of it the target of the religious bigots and the right-thinking people, and it has relational difficulties with his father, who is rather severe on his work of writer.

Fascinated, in its first years, by the fine esthetism of century and artistic refinement, it develops, in its tests of the years 1930 to 1933, the figure of the artist, according to the formula which it employs in connection with Gottfried Ben, like a " Me radically solitary, in an insulation tragique". Any political commitment seems to him excluded then. As a citizen, the writer can have political ideas, but his " passion créatrice" must have an autonomous space. If Klaus Mann admires Cocteau so much, it is that in its eyes, it represents the " fanatic of the form pure" , that which directs all its activity towards its position of artist. However, at the same time, influenced by the figure of Gide, it evolves of the esthetism to the engagement of the moralist and is detached from Gottfried Ben.

Engagement

Opponent of the first hour to the Nazism, it leaves the Germany as of the March 13rd 1933 and spends the following years between Amsterdam, the France and the Suisse, where its family settled. In exile, it founds with Amsterdam a literary review of combat against the Nazis, published by from Amsterdam editions Querido, Die Sammlung , which appears of August 1933 in August 1935. Among the collaborators, one finds Ernst Bloch, Bertolt Brecht, Albert Einstein, Trotski, Hemingway, Boris Pasternak and Joseph Roth. However, several withdraw themselves soon in front of the threat of Berlin to prohibit their books in Germany, in particular Alfred Döblin, the Austrian Stefan Zweig and his/her own father. With the beginning of the year 1935, it is deposed German nationality; but, thanks to the intervention of the president Beneš, the Mann family obtains the Czechoslovakian citizenship . Like Gide and Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann takes part, in 1935, in Paris, with the international Congress for the defense of the culture.

In 1936, it leaves for four months conferences to the United States. It becomes increasingly dependant with the drug, which it discovered in the Twenties, and dark in the depression. After a detoxification therapy, him and Erika take part, in 1938, with the war of Spain as correspondents. In 1939, they publish a book on the German emigration Escape to Life , recalling the history of Einstein, Brecht, Carl Zuckmayer, Ernst Toller, max Reinhardt and George Grosz; the book is encensé by the public and the critic. In the same way, the Volcano , the most important work and most ambitious of Klaus Mann, appears after two years of work with the Querido editions. Klaus Mann develops to with it its utopian vision of a socialist humanism where each one finds its place, “even the drug addicts, the homosexual ones, anarchists”. His/her father writes to him: “I read it from beginning to end, with agitation and recreation… Nobody any more will dispute that you are better than the majority - what explains my satisfaction by reading you…”

After its installation in the United States, in September 1938, he lives between Princeton, in the New Jersey and New York, where he founds a new literary review, Decision , intended to promote a cosmopolitan thought, which appears only of January 1941 in February 1942, in spite of warm welcome of the public, fault of a satisfactory financing. Disgusted by the German language, perverted by the Nazis, it starts to write in English, which causes him infinite sufferings. Victim of a depressive syndrome that the ardor of its intellectual engagement does not manage to compensate, feeling more and more only, it tries to commit suicide, by opening the veins. In 1942, it makes appear in New York, an autobiography in English, The Turning Point ( the Turning ), which it will take again, after the war, in German, and Speed , a poignant account on loneliness, nostalgia and despair. In 1943, he writes the test André Gide and the crisis of the European thought .

Engaged in the American army, it spends six months to Fort Ten, in the Arkansas, from January in July 1943, then is transferred like public relations to the Station Complement (company of the Staff). The September 25th 1943, it is officially naturalized American. Envoy at the end of 1943 with Casablanca and in Italy to take part in the “psychological warfare”, it writes leaflets and texts of propaganda intended for the radio stations and the loudspeakers of the trenches, before taking part in the countryside of Germany. Then, it leaves the army, remains with Rome and Amsterdam, before leaving for New York and the California.

Difficult post-war period

After the war, he proposes, as a journalist, to take part in the rehabilitation of German, but he realizes soon, with sadness and dislike, that the writers of the exile are ignored in their country, and almost without future. At that time, its books are refused by the editors of the Federal Republic of Germany. Lucid on the European crisis of conscience, it expresses serious doubts about the denazification of Germany. In prey with serious material difficulties, despaired by the suicide of his/her friend Stefan Zweig, after Rene Crevel and Ernst Toller, feeling his/her Erika sister, with whom it always had very strong bonds, to move away from him, Klaus sinks again in the drug, of which it had succeeded in getting rid in 1938, after years of dependence, alternating periods of weaning and relapses. After an suicide attempt missed in 1948, he pains to write his new novel The Last Day . It does not manage practically any more to write but under the influence of drug. The May 21st 1949, it dies of a strong amount of sleeping pills, in Cannes, in its hotel room.

In its newspaper, Thomas Mann written with Stockholm, the May 22nd 1949: “It should not have done that. The act obviously occurred whereas it did not expect itself it, with sleeping pills which it had bought in a hardware store in New York. Its stay in Paris was full of consequences (Morphine).” One month and half later, he writes with Hermann Hesse: “My relationship with him was difficult and not free from a feeling of guilt since my existence projected by advance a shade on his. He worked too quickly and too easily. ”

On its tomb, with the cemetery of Large Jas, his/her sister, Erika, made engrave a sentence of the Gospel according to Luc, who was to be used as epigraph with The Last Day , the political novel to which Klaus Mann worked right before its death: “That which seeks to save its life will lose it, but that which loses its life, that one will save it”.

Writer

Klaus Mann is the author of political texts ( Escape to Life , in collaboration with Erika Mann, his/her sister), but also of press articles, plays ( Anja and Esther in 1925) and of Romance, such the pious Dance , first German novel openly homosexual, Fuite in North (1934), history of militant a Communiste, Johanna, taken refuge in Finland, where it will have to choose between her love for a man, Ragnar, and its engagement, to which it chooses all finally to sacrifice, which returns to the need for the Intellectuel S for giving up their ivory tower to engage in the political combat (in what he is opposed to Stefan George, holding of art for the art and one of its Masters in literature with Frank Wedekind), pathetic Symphonie (1935), on Tchaïkovski, Mephisto (1936), most famous of its books, the first published in Amsterdam, regarded as one of the best novels of the 20th century, or the Volcano (1939), chronicle of exiled German between 1933 and 1939.

After a first autobiography, I am of my time (appeared in 1932), the Turning (published initially in English, before being rewritten in German after the war and published in 1952) is a testimony of an exceptional interest, as well on the intellectual and literary life German in the years 1920, as on the condition of the Germans exiled under the Nazi regime. In the same way, it leaves a bulky newspaper , important testimony on a man, his meetings, his convictions, its doubts, its fascination of the death, whose drafting covers the period which goes from 1931 to 1949.

In 1968, the federal constitutional Court German interdict publication of Mephisto with the reason until it should be waited that the memory of the late one is dissipated. In 1981, facing a formal prohibition, the Rowohlt editions decide to publish the novel, which becomes immediately a bestseller. More largely, in the years 1970-80, Klaus Mann, which was hardly regarded up to that point that as the son of Thomas Mann, knows finally the recognition for its work, looked at now, with the republication of its books, like one of most original of its generation.

Works

Anja and Esther ( Anja und Esther , 1925), theater
pious Dance ( DER fromme Tanz , 1926), Romance
the Fifth Child ( Kindernovelle , 1927), new
Alexandre. Novel of the Utopia ( Alexander: Novel DER Utopia , 1929), Romance
I am of my time ( Kinder dieser Zeit , 1932), autobiography
Fuite in north ( Flucht in den Norden , 1934), Romance
the pathetic Symphony ( pathetic Symphonie: Ein Tschaikowsky-Novel , 1935), Romance
Mephisto. History of a career ( Mephisto: Novel einer Karriere , 1936), Romance
Ludwig. News on the death of the king Louis II of Bavaria ( Vergittertes Fenster , 1937), new
the Volcano. A novel of the German emigration (1933-1939) ( Der Vulkan: Novel unter Emigranten , 1939), Romance
the Turning. History of a life ( The Turning Not , 1942, Der Wendepunkt, ein Lebensbericht , posthumous publication 1952), autobiography
Andre Gide and the crisis of the modern thought , 1943
Condemned to live , 1943

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