In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain : the Erika and Klaus Mann Story

276 Pages·2010·4.84 MB·English

by  Weiss

ANDREA WEISS is professor of film/video in the media and communication arts department at the City
College of New York. She is an Emmy Award–winning documentary filmmaker and the author of Paris
Was a Woman: Portraits from the Left Bank (1995) and Vampires and Violets: Lesbians in the Cinema
(1992).
The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637
The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London © 2008 by The University of Chicago
All rights reserved. Published 2008
Printed in the United States of America 17 16 15 14 13 12 11 10 09 08 1 2 3 4 5
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-88672-5 (cloth) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-88674-9 (e-book) ISBN-10: 0-226-88672-7
(cloth) Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Weiss, Andrea.
In the shadow of the magic mountain: the Erika and Klaus Mann story / Andrea Weiss.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN-13: 978-0-226-88672-5 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-10: 0-226-88672-7 (cloth: alk. paper) ISBN-13:
978-0-226-88674-9 (e-book) 1. Mann, Erika, 1905–1969. 2. Mann, Klaus, 1906–1949. 3. Mann family. 4.
Authors, German—20th century—Biography. 5. Women authors, German—20th century—Biography. 6.
Artists—Germany—Biography. 7. Expatriate artists—Biography. I. Title.
PT2625.A42Z95 2008
838′.91209—dc22
[B]
2007021032
PHOTO CREDITS: All photos are from the Erika and Klaus Mann Archive, Literaturarchiv Monacensia,
Munich, unless stated otherwise.
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of the American National Standard
for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992.
IN THE SHADOW OF THE MAGIC
MOUNTAIN
The Erika and Klaus Mann Story
ANDREA WEISS
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago and London

CONTENTS
Preface
1. Kindertheater
2. Journey without Sleep
3. The Lights Go Down
4. Pathetic Symphony
5. Escape to Life
6. The Turning Point
7. The Last Day
8. Rainy Night, Windy Morrow
Notes
Index
PREFACE
Erika and Klaus Mann once claimed to be twins, an outright lie which betrays an
emotional truth. They shared the easy intimacy and fierce loyalty of twins,
empowering them to live lives that were unconventional, adventurous, and in
many ways exemplary. They were vehemently anti-Nazi in a Europe swept away
by fashionable Fascism. They were openly, even defiantly, gay in an age of
secrecy and repression. And although they both joined the American army, they
were intellectual pacifists when the entire world was at war.
These two rebellious, free-spirited children of the Nobel Prize–winning author
Thomas Mann were creative artists in their own right. They were serious
authors, performance artists (before the term was coined), and political
visionaries whose searing essays and lectures still have relevance today. I
consider them to be an extraordinary “couple,” even more fascinating together
than either would have been alone. Born perhaps fifty years too early, Erika and
Klaus Mann were so modern in their outlook and style that they strike a familiar
chord with us today.
I can no longer recall the first time I heard the names Erika and Klaus Mann.
They have achieved a kind of cult status in Germany today: among the youth
culture for their uncompromising anti-Nazi stance, and among the gay/lesbian
community for their liberated views on sexuality. All of their books are now in
print in Germany, including many that were unprintable during their lifetimes.
Berlin, that German capital of contradictions, is a city I adore and often consider
my second home. So I knew their names and something of their reputations for a
long time, but it was with my close friend Wieland Speck, roughly a decade ago,
that I first entered their world. Wieland and I, both filmmakers, both guests of
the Jerusalem Film Festival in the summer of 1997, sat on the veranda of the
Jerusalem Cinematheque late one night and over a bottle of wine cooked up a
scheme to collaborate on a film about them. That seed of an idea eventually
became Escape to Life: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story, a fiction/documentary
hybrid we co-directed, and my partner Greta Schiller produced, which was
released theatrically in Europe in 2001 and broadcast in many countries around
the world.
Wieland Speck’s long-term hospitality, the loan of his books for indefinite
periods, his willingness to translate a confusing paragraph for me at any hour of
the day or night—for these and more, I am grateful. While we developed the
film that grew up alongside of this book, Erika and Klaus Mann managed to
creep into every breakfast conversation, every late-night musing on the meaning
of life. At each stage of the project our collaboration pushed me to have new
insights into and a better understanding of the lives of Erika and Klaus Mann.
My erstwhile writing workshop colleagues, Adam Levy and Lili Cole, read
this manuscript in bits and pieces many times over in different versions, and are
due my deepest thanks for all their astute and helpful critiques. Along with them
I must mention David Hajdu, master word-smith, who taught me so much about
nonfiction storytelling. Carolyn Dinshaw at New York University was more
helpful than she’ll ever know, and NYU’s Bobst Library was the ideal place for
me to disappear for many months while I mentally occupied a far-distant time
and place.
Speaking of Bobst Library, deep in the stacks on its eighth floor there is a row
of bookcases roughly fifteen feet long, floor to ceiling, devoted solely to books
by and about Thomas, Heinrich, Erika, and Klaus Mann. This row, which
seemed quite daunting to me when I first began to read my way through it, is a
tribute to the enduring literary legacy of the Mann family. In all the time I spent
in Bobst Library, however, I never saw another person enter this particular row. I
never was asked to return one of the many books piled high in my carrel so
another library user could look at it. The Mann family’s popular readership
today, at one large urban university at least, doesn’t begin to compare with that
same family’s literary stature. I hope, for Erika and Klaus’s sake, that this book
will begin to change that.
But the library stacks yielded only a small slice of the story I wanted to learn.
With Wieland I ambled through Berlin, revisiting where Erika and Klaus spent
the wild years of the Roaring Twenties in Germany’s Weimar Republic. We
explored Munich, where they were born and grew up, and we stood on the spot
where the grand Mann family villa once graced the banks of the Isar River
before it was destroyed by Allied bombs. We spent enough time in Munich to
see the city through their eyes and learn to love it. We visited their large country
house in Bad Tölz, which the family sold for war bonds during World War I, and
which is now a nunnery, and we walked down the path to the pond where they
learned to swim. We wandered along the shores of Lake Starnberg, where Erika
and Klaus strolled in 1927 when they decided to make their first crazy round-
the-world trip. Our path took us past the castle of the Bavarian king Ludwig II,
about whom Klaus wrote his sad, lovely tale “The Barred Window,” a personal
favorite of mine. We flew to Zurich, to Hirschenplatz, where the Hotel Hirschen
once showcased Erika’s anti-Nazi cabaret after she could no longer perform it in
Germany. Back in New York City, Greta Schiller and I lunched at the Hotel
Bedford on East Fortieth Street, where so many of their romantic dramas were
enacted and where they were “at home” for the first time since going into exile.
From all these places, the ghosts of Erika and Klaus Mann called out to me,
beckoned me further, teased me and taunted me before they would initiate me
into their secret world.
In Paris I visited “Tomski”—the esteemed, aging drama critic Thomas Quinn
Curtiss—who was the great love of Klaus’s life. He had already begun to be
confused and muddled in his mind, and I had to unravel his comments about
Klaus to glean any meaning from them, but just to be in his presence and in his
period-piece apartment on the Seine brought me closer to Klaus himself. I
interviewed Elisabeth Mann Borgese, the younger sister of Erika and Klaus, who
had only the kindest words for her brother and tried to temper her harsh words
for her sister.* I met with friends of the siblings—the great, under-recognized
author Sybille Bedford, the photographer Marianne Breslauer, the actor Igor
Pahlen, all of whom have since died—to try and understand Erika and Klaus
from the perspective of their close-knit circle of friends. Robert Lawrence, who
worked with Klaus in Rome after the end of World War II, gave me new insights
into the difficulties and disappointments Klaus faced in his final years. My
heartfelt gratitude goes to these people, witnesses to a long-gone era, who shared
their precious memories with me.
This book came out in an earlier, shorter version in Germany, under the same
title as my film, Escape to Life, and timed to coincide with the film’s release. I
was fortunate and honored to have as my German editor Dr. Uwe Naumann of
Rowohlt Verlag, a leading expert on the life and writings of Klaus Mann. His
expertise saved me from sloppy mistakes and misunderstandings, yet he was
careful never to impose his own interpretations. My literary agents, Faith Evans
of London and Anoukh Foerg of Munich, were both excited and encouraging
about this project in its initial stages, and it may well have never gotten off the
ground without them.
Rowohlt Verlag in Hamburg, responsible for Erika and Klaus Mann’s literary
estate, has granted me carte blanche permission to quote from their published
and unpublished writings. Frido Mann, nephew to the siblings, has graciously
allowed me to reproduce their photographs. Ursula Hummel and Gabriele Weber
of the Erika and Klaus Mann Archive in Munich went way beyond their job
descriptions to locate materials for me and facilitate my many disruptions to
their smooth-running archive. Anne Siegel helped with the seemingly endless
research and organized procuring all the photographs. Dana Frank read an early
version of the manuscript with enormous care and rushed her comments to me
even though she was in the middle of a demanding cross-country launch of her
own book. Her scrawls all over the margins saved my book from numerous
contradictions and unclear formulations. My friends Katharina Oguntoye,
Carolyn Gammon, and Jörg Fockele came through with translation help when I
got lost in Erika Mann’s somewhat impenetrable and cryptic correspondence.
With the great gift of an Independent Scholar Fellowship from the National
Endowment for the Humanities, I was able to devote an uninterrupted year to
completing the manuscript after working on it in fits and starts for way too long.
It was a chance meeting with William Germano that directed my itinerant
manuscript to its rightful home, the University of Chicago Press, where
Executive Editor Douglas Mitchell immediately confirmed my own feeling of a
perfect fit. Thanks to editorial associate Tim McGovern, production editor Leslie
Keros, and copy editor Russell Harper for magically transforming the
manuscript into a book.
Greta Schiller and Ilana Schiller-Weiss had to live with Erika and Klaus for
too many years than was really fair to ask of them. My deepest gratitude goes to
them for so many things, but most of all their relentless faith in me.