THERE WAS JUST one occasion when Thomas Mann’s children found him in a state of despair. The maelstrom that swept Germany in 1933 overtook Mann while he was on an extended lecture tour abroad. When he began to suspect that he would be unable to return home, his first anxieties were for a number of notebooks, bound in oilcloth, that he had left locked in a Munich cabinet. These were his old diaries, which he feared might fall into the wrong hands. After weeks of growing disquiet, he forwarded to his son Golo, who was staying in Munich, the keys for the drawers and cupboards, explaining that he wanted the notebooks sent in a suitcase as freight to Lugano.1 Golo recalls a further instruction:
‘I am counting on you to be discreet and not read any of these things!’ A warning I took so seriously that I locked myself into the room while I was packing the papers. When I came out with the suitcase to carry it to the station, there was faithful Hans offering to take this bothersome chore off my hands. All the better, and why not?2
It was soon to emerge, however, that Golo’s excess caution almost proved his father’s undoing. By locking himself in his father’s study, he drew the attention of the chauffeur – Hans Holzner, in fact a Nazi informer – to the fact that something secret was involved. Holzner did indeed take the suitcase to the station, but he also reported the matter to the political police.3
Thomas Mann was now faced with a torment of waiting. On 24 April he noted his disquiet over the suitcase’s long delay; anxiety put out its first tentacles. Three days later the non-arrival of the case was already ‘uncanny’, and he slowly grasped that something was wrong. The following day his suspicion grew firmer: ‘The chauffeur Hans, gradually revealed as a Judas.’ On 30 April he woke up at five o’clock stricken with terrifying thoughts about the suitcase and the diaries. His outward demeanour began to suffer, as we know from the reports of his children. Golo describes how his father ‘fell prey to growing impatience, finally even to despair’.4 And Erika writes of this ‘unprecedented state of excitement, indeed desperation’, in which he found himself.
Finally, on 2 May, the all-clear arrived; the case was now on Swiss soil, probably in Lugano: ‘Significant and deep relief. The sense of having escaped a great, even inexpressible, danger, which perhaps never existed at all.’5
A weighty word, this ‘inexpressible’, for a man who knew how to choose his words. And in her own account of those gloomy weeks, his daughter uses equally striking terms:
As it transpired to his relief, the overwhelming issue was the diaries, which he believed not only to be definitively lost, but to have fallen into the hands of a mortal foe. In their unfathomable stupidity, however, they soon released the suitcase quite intact, and T.M., now ready for flight and unwilling to risk a repetition of anything similar, burned a large number of papers at the first opportunity.6 […]
Were they ‘compromising’, these neat exercise books? They may well have been. No lifespan is free of a ‘Bluebeard’s chamber’.
Later on Erika tones this down somewhat, explaining that nothing offensive need have occurred. But the Bluebeard metaphor continues to resonate. The little anecdote with which she continues is again far from reassuring:
When [Hugo von] Hoffmannsthal first got to know T.M., still in his youth, he is said to have declared that the entire personal impression he received was of someone uncommonly well-groomed, with an upper-class solidity and discreet elegance. His home, too, gave the same appearance: very fine and spacious, with valuable carpets, dark oil paintings, club armchairs, bright sleeping quarters, etc. ‘The only thing, though,’ the poet continued, looking down at his fingernails – ‘in a little side room there was suddenly lying – a dead cat…’
It is conceivable, then, she concludes this recollection, ‘that it was some “dead cat” or other that was being burned’.7
What Erika did not know, and what would have frightened her even given her suspicions, was the entry her father made in his diary on 30 April, at the high point of his despair: ‘My fears now bear first of all and almost exclusively on this assault on the secrets of my life. They are heavy and deep. Something frightful, even deadly, may happen.’8
This is a passage worth dwelling on rather longer than scholars have done up till now. The meaning seems clear, even if it may be construed in different ways. Does ‘they’ refer to the fears or to the secrets?9 Thomas Mann’s diaries are written in a style that presses ahead with its flow of thoughts, leaving fragments of sentences incomplete, so that ‘they’ are most likely the secrets; though the adjectives could apply to both, ‘deep secret’ is a well-established turn of phrase. Such heavy and deep secrets would also make sense of the ‘fatal consequences’, as only if they were heavy and deep could their disclosure have the most terrible effect.
But was it Mann himself whom these secrets indicated? In theory, his fears might have been for someone else, exposed in Germany to the vengeance of the Nazis and possibly in imminent danger by being named in this connection. This however is a farfetched speculation and not the meaning immediately suggested, as is also confirmed from another source. Golo, in his autobiography, quotes from the diary that he himself kept at this time. Thomas Mann had spoken about his fears in the family circle: ‘They will publish excerpts in the Völkischer Beobachter. They will ruin everything, they will ruin me. My life will never be right again.’10 The implication of suicide, if his secrets were exposed to the light of the world – that is strong stuff, even if we take into account that the nerves of the frightened man were extremely stretched at this time.11 If the Nazis had concocted from these diaries a poisonous broth containing no more than those elements familiar from the surviving volumes, perhaps this alone would have been sufficient to make his life a torment? It would not have been found so natural in Munich that Thomas was in love with his own son;12 his outbursts of hatred towards his brother would have been played upon, and the Nazis would have learned about the young Klaus Heuser, about the emotional adventure that gave rise to Death in Venice, and about the central experience of his early twenties, his youthful love for Paul Ehrenberg.13 All this dished out to a scornful press free of any legal restraint – it is easy to imagine how such a campaign might destroy even a stronger person, so why not Thomas Mann, who took decades to digest lesser insults?
But so utterly shattered as to entertain thoughts of death? Even the new rulers of Germany would need something tangible, and they were still far from deciding how to deal with the Nobel prizewinner, a German national living legally abroad who at this point had still refrained from public declarations against the Nazi regime, and whose works were still available in the bookshops. There certainly was a group that sought in any event to get rid of him, but before his letter to the rector of Bonn University, there was still the vague possibility that he might return, and this tied the regime’s hands. So the secrets really must have been heavy and deep, to give the enemy a deadly weapon that could strike its victim even on neutral territory.
Mann’s recent commentators and biographers do indeed focus on what they view as ‘heavy and deep’. All of them, in so far as they have pondered the question, agree on one thing: the main secret, disclosure of which could have driven the author to suicide, was his ‘inversion’,14 his love of boys, the homosexuality concealed behind the bourgeois façade – for which he supposedly felt a sense of guilt.15 For a long while this key fact that stamps Mann’s entire work was glossed over, as earlier biographers simply did not want to know too much. But since this prudery has evaporated, and the late diaries have come to light, the belief today is that a master key to his life and work has been discovered: it was boys, and this was likewise the issue in April 1933, when their admirer considered suicide.
At first sight this reading has everything in its favour. It seems to be confirmed by a further entry on that dramatic day when Thomas Mann thought of suicide. On arrival in Basle, unnerved and wracked with worry, he noted in the evening a touching detail: ‘Katia and I sat holding hands a great deal. She more or less understands my fears concerning the contents of the suitcase.’16 This is the one place however where a ray of light from outside strikes his inner thought process, the only moment at which we can emerge from his mind, tormented by worries, and see him through another’s eyes. His wife Katia understands him ‘more or less’ – this may well refer to his young men, a subject on which she was more or less in the picture, even if they did not always bring it up at the breakfast table. Though this passage fits neatly into the traditional reading, it has a certain ambiguity. ‘Of course I cannot tell her everything,’ the young fiance confided to his diary in 1904: ‘She is not strong enough for my sorrow and torment.’17 How much did she know after thirty years of marriage? We know as little of this as of the way those secrets (in the plural) converge. One thing however we can say for certain: Katia was most likely aware very early on of her husband’s erotic sufferings and tendencies, at the latest in 1927 after the Klaus Heuser affair. And so despite her ‘more or less’ understanding, there must still have been a part that was obscure.
A second detail that seems to support the conventional reading is quite similar. This is the word ‘secret’ itself, which in at least two places in the later diaries refers unambiguously to homosexuality. Five years before his death, Thomas Mann wrote about his last love, for the hotel page Franz Westermeier: ‘Banal activity, aggressiveness, the attempt to discover how far he would go, is not part of my life, which requires a secrecy’ (10 July 1950). And the ‘compulsion to keep the secret’ holds him back from seeking an encounter with Franz on the hotel terrace (11 July 1950). When he feared an assault on the secrets of his life, would this then have been one of them? That could be the conclusion drawn, were it not for this ‘more or less’. One part lies open, but another remains concealed. There are indications where one secret certainly bears on the forbidden Eros, but this is interwoven with something worse.
IF YOU LIKE!
In the introduction he wrote in 1945 for an American edition of Dostoevsky’s short novels, Thomas Mann held that the demonic should be addressed poetically: to devote critical essays to it struck him as indiscreet, to put it mildly. The present investigation could be reproached as highly indiscreet, since it pursues the question as to what hard evidence of homosexual contact might have been noted in the early diaries. This question, though, has been puzzled over since the later diaries were published, which Mann expressly entrusted to posterity with all the ‘merry discoveries’ that he dryly promised in this connection (13 October 1950). And it is precisely these later diaries that yield scattered indications as to the nub of the question, and allow us to correct the suppositions of recent biographers in two important respects.
We do not know for certain, writes the best of these, Hermann Kurzke, but it seems likely that in early life Mann had some kind of bodily contact that ‘he experienced as demeaning, humiliating and besmirching, and that left a lifelong trauma. It might have been with young hustlers in Naples.’18
Kurzke is not the only biographer who brings on stage these Neapolitan hustlers, whom the young Thomas Mann may indeed have encountered; a scene that the traveller himself reveals when he writes to his close friend Otto Grautoff in 1896 that on the Toledo among a thousand other salesmen there are also procurers who in a sly hiss ‘offer to escort you to supposedly “very pretty” young girls, and not only girls…’19 Grautoff well understood what the ellipsis here was supposed to mean, all the more as the same letter contains a portrait of the city of Naples, ‘a physiognomy with a rather snub nose and somewhat pouting lips, but very beautiful dark eyes … ‘, which sounds more like that of a Neapolitan youth. To the complaint about the procurers, impossible to shake off, who extolled their wares to the point of coarseness, Mann adds the confession that he had almost decided on a rice diet, simply to rid himself of sexual desire.
Assuming for a start that he did not succeed in this, with or without the diet, and assuming further that at least once he did follow one of those hissing pimps – what is there to say against the idea that the young Thomas Mann could have had a homosexual encounter, and that as a world-famous author approaching sixty, he still found this experience so burdensome and compromising that he viewed its revelation as a deadly peril, as the ruin of his reputation, preferring rather to end his own life?
The evidence against this is the letters and diaries, a closer reading of which subtly shifts the perspective. For two things in particular emerge from these. First of all, that Thomas Mann quite clearly never went beyond a shy kiss with these youngsters. This is not to deny that his straying through the mala vita quarters of Naples and Rome is plausible; on the contrary. Simply that it can never have come to a fulfilled homosexual encounter. This was something denied him throughout his life, as all private indications suggest.
‘Fulfilment,’ though, is precisely the word he used, when less than a year after the suitcase episode he leafed through the rescued diaries and revisited his last passion: the friendship with Klaus Heuser, who had been a household guest in Munich in autumn 1927 and whom he had then visited several times in Düsseldorf. Mann was ‘deeply roused, touched and moved’ by looking back on this experience:
which seems to me today to belong to a different and stronger epoch of life, and which I retain with pride and gratitude, as it was the unhoped-for fulfilment of a lifelong yearning, the ‘happiness’ inscribed in the book of man, though not commonness, and remembrance of which signifies: ‘I too’.
(24 January 1934)
This could still have all kinds of interpretation, and would raise the question what exactly he meant by ‘fulfilment’. The same holds for another word that has a more explicit sound to less chaste ears:
Read for a long time old diaries from the Klaus Heuser time, when I was a happy lover. The most beautiful and touching occasion the farewell in Munich, when for the first time I took ‘a leap into dreamland’ and rested his temple on mine. Now indeed – lived and loved. Dark eyes that spilled tears for me, beloved lips that I kissed – this was it, I too had this, I can tell myself when I die.
(20 January 1942)
What Thomas Mann understood by being a lover emerges from an interview with Klaus Heuser at the age of seventy-seven. Nothing more took place than an embrace and a kiss, and the object of Mann’s adoration could scarcely confirm even this; just the simple friendliness of a youngster who had in no way fallen in love, and realized almost nothing of the emotional magic he inspired.20 For Thomas Mann, however, we know that this kiss was the high point of his erotic life. Klaus Heuser, indeed, so Mann wrote on 16 July 1950 in making a kind of balance-sheet of his amours, was the youth who ‘permitted him most satisfaction’.
More vigorous homosexuals, however, aroused Mann’s indignation. After reading Gore Vidal he noted: ‘The sexual side, affairs with different men, I still find incomprehensible. How one can sleep with men’ (24 November 1950). And even if boys rather than men are the issue, those who approach them bodily rouse his strong antipathy:
Finished the book on or against Gide’s diary. Disgruntled against him by his all too direct sexually aggressive behaviour towards young people, without consideration or respect for them, without being ashamed of his age, soulless, really devoid of love. That I should expect something of this kind from a beloved youth! Unthinkable! To upset his admiration by vile-ness! Estrangement.
(6 October 1951)
But what if beside the beloved youths there were also unbeloved ones, if there were for Mann two strictly separate categories, one which embraced the divine boy who should not be too closely approached, and a second that comprised impersonal bodies and commercialized dolls of warm flesh? ‘I would say, we should separate the sexual organs from love!’ the twenty-year-old Mann instructed his friend Grautoff, simply following the bourgeois convention of his time.21 This sounds rather like juvenile grandiloquence, and it also stands in sharp contrast with his own teaching, expressed in his work with almost religious verve, the postulate of a sacred love in which the most corporeal mingles and has to mingle with the most spiritual. Now this postulate might precisely serve as restitution and repentance for a heartless fall into adventures of the flesh. But there is a phrase which makes such completed adventures rather improbable. Half asleep, the old man dreams of taking leave of Franzl, the last of his beloveds and ‘representative of the whole worshipped species’, with a kiss. Indeed: ‘Whether reality would ever have found me ready is a question in itself’ (6 March 1951). No other meaning seems possible than that reality never put him to the test, beyond a mere kiss. Which leads us to conclude that in the early diaries, as far as the ‘worshipped species’ is concerned, the most that could be described is daydreams, in no way crude facts.
These daydreams, however, Thomas Mann had long made public. What supposedly appeared to him as an ‘inexpressible danger’, in case it was bruited about, he actually spoke about regularly for thirty years. Especially if we avoid the mistake of transposing the liberalism of today back to a time when it was very risky or even impossible to acknowledge oneself a homosexual, we might well admire the degree to which he ventured this. Thomas Mann wrote about homoeroticism with surprising openness and courage. ‘The fact was that Tonio loved Hans Hansen, and had already suffered a good deal on his account,’22 he wrote already in 1903 in Tonio Kröger, and the coming decades brought no alteration in this matter. Hans Castorp, too, loved Madame Chauchat only because her Kirghizian eyes made her appear to him as a re-embodiment of his youthful flame Hippe. Neither Clavdia Chauchat nor Inge Holm nor any of the other dull female characters with whom Thomas Mann surrounds his heroes can stand up against the deeper attraction of a Hansen or Hippe.
Even if this could be read out of the picture, moreover, that would be hard to do with the tale of Gustav von Aschenbach. Here the final veil of camouflage falls away,23 the female ancillaries are sent home, and the idolized Tadzio stands temptingly at centre stage. From 1912 at the latest, with Death in Venice, in which the protagonist who falls blindly in love with a boy is Mann’s own thinly disguised alter ego, his open secret was known well outside the narrow circle around Stefan George. If twenty years later he was prepared to escape through death the disclosure of his homophilia, he would never have been able to publish the Venice story. Or he would have spent the time following its publication – under the Kaiser and before the freer era of the Weimar Republic – in a frightful state of agitation. Nothing would shield him from some reader or other being crude enough to say: ‘Each word here comes from experience; there is nothing in it that was not coined exactly from his own life.’24 Whatever the fears were that Thomas Mann had at this point – and of course he was nervous of criticism – they did not restrain him from developing over the years a concern of an exactly opposite kind. Had he slandered homoeroticism with the story of Aschenbach’s demise? Carl Maria Weber made this kind of point to him, and he undertook energetic steps to rescue his reputation.25 If only Herr Weber had been present at the discussion he had recently had one evening with Willy Seidel and Kurt Martens! It could not have escaped him then that Death in Venice was a celebration. And the author would certainly not want:
you and others to have the impression that a mode of feeling which I respect because it is almost necessarily infused with mind (far more necessarily so, at any rate, than the ‘normal’ mode) should be something that I would want to deny or, insofar as it is accessible to me (and I may say that it is so in a scarcely qualified way), wish to disavow.26
That is excessively tortuous, no doubt – and in a fashion that we shall encounter again on another occasion – but it is unambiguous, and would be so even if he did not add in the same letter: ‘Tell me whether one can “betray” oneself any better than that.’27 He intended to betray himself, it was the addressee who was rather clumsy and slow on the uptake, so that three weeks later Mann had once again to add a final word:
‘Scarcely qualified’, in other words: almost unqualified. You did not understand this, and you praise me for my power of empathy. But that is not the way things are, and without a personal adventure the Goethe story would not have led on to Death i[n] V[enice].28
The false impression was thus erased, in the minds of Herr Weber and others. Thomas Mann did not deny that his feelings were those of Aschenbach; he denied that they were not. And if this denial was made to a small group – in which it would certainly circulate, and deliberately so – he was not shy before the wider public either. The letter to Weber was private, but that to Hermann Keyserling was public. Though its theme was ‘On Marriage’, Thomas Mann devoted long passages to homoeroticism and its double aspect of damnation and pride.29 No one had raised this question with him. He spoke of it even when not asked, not just using an opportunity that arose, but seeking and forcing the opportunity even if it was not exactly suitable. ‘I will venture in this connection, which remains a political one, and with all due caution and respect, to speak of the particular realm of feeling that was alluded to in my last remarks,’ he declared in his speech on The German Republic, and we should be aware that he really was venturing somewhat, the ‘nonpolitical’ Thomas Mann of the Reflections, the adornment of reaction, standing before a conservative audience in Berlin’s Beethovensaal in 1922 to declare that he had undergone a fundamental change and become a republican, and going on to justify this reversal, among other ways, by the fact that Walt Whitman in his phallically brimming fervour was the singer of democracy, and that democracy and male love stem from the same roots.30 He was seeking to win over the völkisch youth who were terrorizing the republic in their secret male bands; this is the political context he refers to.31 But the impression is given that there is scarcely a subject he speaks on that he would not bend in this sense to allow him a short visit to this region of feeling. When he wandered into it again personally, five years later at the time of Klaus Heuser, he never made any secret of this. ‘No double life, it was something everyone knew.’32
So in 1933, then, was a mere kiss that had long been publicly fantasized enough to drive him to suicide? There is a distinction, of course, about whether what falls into the hands of the adversary are private records or literary works, just as there is a more forceful distinction between revealing oneself to a circle of accessories or being placed publicly in the pillory. But what kind of pillory would this have been? The darkness of those years should not prevent us from making minor distinctions. The raging persecution of homosexuals did not follow immediately on the Nazi seizure of power.33 The sharpening of paragraph 175 came into force in September 1935; it was only from that point on that all sexual relations between men were penalized – as they were to remain until the end of Thomas Mann’s life – as well as any intimate contact or kiss. The Röhm putsch, a decisive turning-point, was still a year away, and it is instructive how Mann commented on this. According to the customary reading, he found here a sharp and extreme version of the fate that might have threatened him, if his diaries had been rummaged. The murder of the homosexual Röhm and the campaign of the Nazi press – it was to be expected that he not only followed this news eagerly, but that his thoughts would wander back to April of the previous year, when he had feared he would himself become a victim of the new regime.
It was on 30 June 1934 that he learned of the ‘mutiny of the SA and Röhm, who had been expelled and dropped by Hitler’. A short description of the events follows, with the usual disgust at the ‘swamp of lies, crudeness and crime’. Two days later, on 2 July: ‘The extent of stupid shamelessness is unimaginable, there has never been the like of it. Just as enormous is the silliness of making some kind of morality purge out of it, and speaking of a “cleansing storm”.’ ‘Silliness,’ that is his only word for it, which he had also used the previous day, in the only sentence he devotes to the supposed personal disgust that was the pretext given for the murder in Nazi propaganda: ‘Hitler’s operation against Röhm’s villa in Wiessee, where Heines was surprised in bed with a young man and shot. A silly emphasis on the long acknowledged “moral failings”.’ That is all; he says nothing more on the subject. Is ‘silly’ the expression he would have used, if he saw here an example of something he had trembled over for a whole month? One would expect a stronger reaction, a glance back at the missing suitcase;34 some word other than this tranquil expression, which is hard to reconcile with the previous year’s hysteria.
But it fits exactly with something else. It fits with the tone in which Thomas Mann deals with his homoeroticism in all his remarks, a tone of surprising casualness and nonchalance. This is the second impression that emerges: Mann was never the type to see himself as a sinner on account of his sensual yearnings. Despite his Protestantism, he was never sufficiently ‘Quakerish’35 to feel guilt on account of his deviant desires. His work never displays any example of the kind of guilt feeling with which recent scholarship has sought to explain so much, a guilt that is supposed to thrive from an awareness of sexual deviation.36 Why indeed should he feel guilty for something in which he was in the best artistic company, for something in which he also saw the foundation of his own artistic practice (6 August 1950) and which for all the problems it raised he accepted always as sacred – ‘impossible here, absurd, depraved, ludicrous and sacred nevertheless’, in his words about the declaration of love whispered by Aschenbach?37 Sometimes we even seem to hear the very opposite. In the Franzl episode, he wrote in his diary that ‘non-responsiveness’ to the beauty of male youth was to him ‘incomprehensible to the point of contempt’ (28 August 1950). It is not remorse expressed here, much rather pride of belonging to an elite, however stigmatized. ‘Platen and others, of whom I am not the lowest, have known this disheartening experience of shame and pain, which however has its pride’ (11 July 1950). Shame and pride, but no sense of guilt. ‘In fact,’ he notes with this scarcely concealed pride in the essay on marriage, ‘it is not good to denigrate or make fun of a zone of feeling that gave rise to the Medici memorial and David, the Venetian sonnets and the Pathétique in B-flat’.38 It is one thing that sexuality was a cause of suffering for him throughout his life,39 though even this had its occasional bright spots. But self-flagellation and a deadly taboo? The atmosphere of the diaries and letters is far removed from this. It is much freer than was long suspected in the case of the reserved Hanseatic burgher. One need only leaf a bit more through the entry that describes the suitcase episode. Scarcely a year later, he comments on Platen’s ghazal, I am as wife to man, as man to wife to you: ‘How his spiritualized passion, beyond eroticism, entered into my blood when I was in love!’ (25 February 1934).40 This is as little darkened by pangs of Protestant conscience as is his enthusiasm after seeing a German film when he reflects on the ‘joy in youthful bodies’,
i.e. male bodies in their nakedness. This is a feature of German ‘homosexuality’ and is lacking among the attractions of French and American products: the depiction of young male nudity in flattering, even adoring, photographic illumination, whenever the occasion presents itself. […] The Germans, or German Jews, who present this, are quite right: basically there is nothing ‘more beautiful’, and the idea that this ‘most beautiful’ is the most common of all, ‘a daily occurrence’ as I expressed it in ‘Joseph’, once again made me smile.
(4 February 1934)
If the cinema spectator seizes such an occasion to see homosexuality as a national characteristic, this indicates yet again how in no way did Mann feel personally condemned: the ‘German’ is as questionable and deep as he; no cause to feel himself chosen by Satan. Three months later he buried himself in his old notes from the time of his love for Paul Ehrenberg; the melancholy sense of that faded era spoke to him ‘intimately and with deep sorrow’, and in looking back he saw that he too had in his way experienced the all-too-human, had even been able to hold in his arms that which he yearned for. The experience with Klaus Heuser was ‘a late surprise, with a quality of benign fulfilment about it but already lacking the youthful intensity of feeling, the wild surges of exultation and deep despair of that central emotional experience at twenty-five’.41 The sentence with which he ends this retrospective should give cause for reflection to those interpreters who make such a great case out of the sense of deviation that allegedly consumed the paterfamilias in secret. Deviation is from a rule, a norm, a canon. What Thomas Mann understood by these things we can learn from the passage that immediately follows: ‘This is doubtless the normal rule of human affections, and owing to this normality I can feel more strongly that my life conforms to the scheme of things than I do by virtue of marriage and children’ (6 May 1934). This is more or less the opposite of what he should have said, if he had wanted to support the current received opinion.
Thomas Mann was no ascetic groaning under the scorpions of unwelcome desire. He was bold enough to have Goethe wake up in the seventh chapter of Lotte in Weimar with a morning erection. Behind the patrician façade of his household, things were different from how they were customarily imagined. No one took offence when Klaus brought back his various boyfriends, or Erika spent days in a drugged-out state. And for their part these two took no offence if their father asked them not to stand in the way of his latest conquest:
I call him [Klaus Heuser] du and at our last farewell pressed him to my heart with his express consent. Eissi [Klaus] is requested to withdraw graciously and not disturb my circle. I am already old and famous, and why should it only be you who profit from this?42
Such was the tone in the Mann household. The late diaries show how the patriarch actually enjoyed it when the family teased him and made fun of his deep looks at waiters. When his heart was aching over Franzl, he noted: ‘For the rest, nothing is dearer to me than if Erika jokes about these events, conversations with him, the present of five francs, etc.’ (28 July 1950). Even in front of his wife, who found Franzl’s eyes ‘very flirtatious’, he has no secrets here. ‘I told her he had long been aware that I have a weakness for him’ (12 July 1950). He turns round and round in his mind what exactly it is that enchants him about the divine youth. ‘It must be lovely to sleep with him, but I don’t have any special image of his limbs’ (19 July 1950). Whatever it is that colours his passion, it is certainly no burning awareness of sin. Nor does he object to this passion being deduced from his work. ‘Now, well and good,’ he comments in his diary on Erika’s remarks ‘on the homosexual foundation of the novel’ (3 March 1951). It is Felix Krull she refers to, returning to the subject again nine months later. ‘Erika on the journey home on the arch-pederastic (“gay”) character of the scene. Soit’ (31 December 1951). The gesture of acceptance is always the same, also when his daughter tells him her suspicions about his favourite grandchild: ‘Erika maintains over supper that Frido shows all the signs of homosexuality. I cast doubt on the possibility of drawing this conclusion from a childhood gracefulness. […] Anyway – so be it’ (4 January 1949).
This acceptance is not something he displayed only within the family. With Adorno, too, he discussed the underlying homosexuality of Doctor Faustus.43 And a year before his death he wrote to an acquaintance:
Your letter was […] an interesting document, full of humour, and quite right in substance, even if a more widespread practice of homosexuality (and it is indeed pretty widespread and scarcely arouses offence) would scarcely be a sufficient measure against the stereotyping and dumbing-down of the world. The inclination is not that widespread and will in all likelihood never be so. As for me I am concerned, I am far from finding fault if someone accuses me of it. If you like!44
First, ‘something frightful, even deadly may happen’, and then this ‘if you like!’ – the two hardly chime together. And if twenty years lie between the two expressions, Mann’s sovereign gesture is not just the lassitude of old age. As early as 1920 little was lacking and he could have said the same ‘if you like!’; with a certain reservation he had already done so. In the letter to Weber mentioned above he confessed his emotional adventures before a circle that he could not expect to remain silent on the subject; indeed he expected just the opposite. This seems, to put it mildly, not the most sensible way of keeping a secret whose disclosure might leave only the option of suicide.
Three days after he considered this worst of all steps, Thomas Mann lay awake for a long while in the night, ‘tormented by old things’. These old things, which cannot be a permanent state as his sexual inclination was, are mixed up in his thoughts with the secrets: ‘I could not sleep until 3 o’clock, tormented by old things and especially by the affair of the suitcase, behind which lurks a murderous peril’ (2 May 1933). We do not know what this suitcase concealed, but perhaps Mann’s anxiety over the secrets of his life was not just hysteria, perhaps these secrets really were heavy and deep; perhaps across the decades the boy question covered something that flared up for a moment that black April, when he had reason to fear that the door of his innermost chamber would be broken open.
I HAVE WORSE THINGS TO FORGET
On the hundredth birthday of his father, Michael Mann presented his life’s work in a major speech under the double star of felix culpa. What was happy or lucky in Thomas’s life is easy to recognize, the ‘basis of enjoyment and sunniness’ that he still felt pervaded him in old age (27 August 1950). But the shadows that fell upon him could not be overlooked, and it was not only his son who traced the share of guilt.45 Thomas Mann himself spoke of this guilt in defending himself against priestly attacks in the lecture ‘My Time’. In post-war Germany, a religious board had denied his work any Christian character. Greater figures than himself had been attacked in this way, which awakened memories; in his own case however he had particular doubts, which related less to the content of his writings than to the impulse to which these owed their existence:
If it is Christian to experience life, one’s own life, as guilt, blame, duty, as the object of religious discontent, as something in urgent need of restitution, salvation and justification, then those theologians who maintain that I am characteristic of non-Christian writers are not quite correct. For in all likelihood it is seldom that the output of a life – even if this seems playful, sceptical, artistic and humorous – has arisen so completely, from the beginning to its approaching end, from just this frightening need for restitution, purification and justification, as has my personal and so little exemplary attempt to practise art.46
These are fine, even noble words, whose truth one need not doubt, even if one can ask at the same time whether this is the whole truth. Jacob Burckhardt confessed at the age of twenty that he would at any moment exchange his life for never having been born, and if it was possible, return into his mother’s womb, even though he had committed no crime and had grown up in favourable circumstances.47 Thomas Mann’s basic feeling seems to have had a quite similar coloration, when he concluded his obituary on his son Klaus with the words that one could hardly speak of ingratitude for such an ambiguous and guilty present as that of life.48 For the disciple of Schopenhauer – or the born melancholic – guilt lies not in what is committed or omitted, but rather in being itself – a sexually aberrant being, in Mann’s case, as the consensus of recent research tends to believe.
One can only ask whether such a static guilt, the sin of a being trapped by a blind will, explains the shadow over this particular life, and whether it was sufficient stimulant for his work. Many experts on Thomas Mann write as if they have doubts on this subject. In the words of Reinhard Baumgart, ‘On a terrifyingly narrow foundation of intensive experience and convulsion in life, a veritable Gothic dome of structural richness will be erected. Those who admire it may ask how this was possible; those whom it dismays would like to know why it was so necessary.’49 Hans Wollschläger approaches the question with the same mixture of admiration and dismay, in his re-reading of Doctor Faustus:
Sense of sacrifice, rather than sense of loss, is a sufficiently ambiguous designation for Mann’s mood at work; what moves it is something especially active, and it was as deed, not as suffering, that Mann remained aware of it when he looked back with hindsight. Would this active force be the clue that leads to the secret of his life?50
Mann’s lecture quoted above spoke not of deeds but of religious discontent, yet there are utterances of his in which guilt has a less passive stamp. In the 1909 essay ‘Sleep, Sweet Sleep’ he found words about sin which sound rather different from those of ‘My Time’:
Only the Philistine considers that sin and morality are opposed ideas: they are one, for without knowledge of sin, without yielding to harm and destruction, all morality is nothing but sheer flabby virtuousness. It is not purity and innocence which are morally desirable, not cautious egoism and a contemptible knack at keeping a good conscience; not these, but the struggle and compulsion, the pain and passion, that make up morality.51
Philistine, flabby, egoism, contemptible – much is offered here to disparage the non-sinner and ennoble the bad conscience. The question arises – and it is always the same question – whether this disparaging is simply a disinterested consideration, or whether it is spoken pro domo, which seems indicated not just by the vigour of expression, but also by the autobiographical character of this very intimate text. At all events sin here is considered as something arising from struggle and compulsion, passion and pain, and not as something original that every human being has to bear.
Nor could the young Thomas Mann have had original sin in mind when he wrote to Grautoff from Rome of the ‘Augean stable’ of his conscience.52 The following year he quoted from a poem of Platen, how ‘The frightened heart has suffered / Desire and fear and dread’, saying that this verse, in all its beauty, clarity and brevity, reflected his own condition with perfect accuracy.53 Two years later, in winter 1900, he had ‘really dreadful depressions with quite serious plans for self-elimination’. This was the onset of his love for Ehrenberg, with its torments and its ‘indescribable, pure, and unexpected inner joy’,54 a time from which we have exultant letters of his as well as suicidal ones. It might seem for a moment that we had here ‘the bad conscience, the sense of guilt, the anger at everything’, which from his own youth he recognized in ‘brother Hitler’,55 that what was responsible was simply youth with its idleness and the violent outbreak of indistinctly directed sexuality. But soon something quite different flickers into life again in the notes and letters. In January 1904 he replies to his brother Heinrich, who had reproached him for smuggling an attack on him into a review: ‘You characterize it, in an extremely elegant paraphrase, as vile – well! I could defend myself […]; but I don’t want to forsake my deed, but instead accept responsibility for it – I have worse things to forget.’56 But what exactly? Certainly not, it seems, the turmoil of sexuality, but deeds, actions, vileness and worse. Three years later the turmoil had for the time being ceased: he was married to a princess of a wife, in a state of unparalleled happiness, bathed in fame, his name pronounced only in hushed tones, he had two thriving children – making him ‘a charlatan with a taste for excess and offensive in every sense’.57
What he describes with such irony in this autobiographical sketch – ‘In the Mirror’ – gives nothing away as to how he really feels inside. And it is easy to overlook the confession made in a letter to his publisher of the previous year, concealed as it is by the chatty tone. ‘Work is difficult, and often enough a joyless and arduous nitpicking. But not to work – that is hell.’58 Hell, we must conclude, is where he lives if he cannot reshape into his work the grief and torments of which he says nothing to Katia; and we remember here what he will later say about Dostoevsky: ‘His life, which could not bear ultimate frankness, ultimate exposure before the eyes of the world, was ruled by the secret of hell.’59
The suffering does not vanish after Tonio Kröger, it undermines his middle years, and in old age assumes almost autocratic power. Since the publication of Mann’s diaries, we know how serious he was in quoting Prospero’s ‘And my ending is despair’. His final years were racked by this despair. At the time of the Franzl turbulence in 1950, he wrote on 28 August: ‘I still find every memory essentially painful, and orient myself completely to looking ahead’. The following year even this glance ahead becomes more sombre: ‘I’m generally terrified of everything. My memories are almost entirely painful, and the future seems to hold only renunciation’ (15 December 1951). From time to time there are still ‘wayside images’, glances at young men that give him a moment’s joy. But a further year later, in this deep, dark, final depression of old age:
My decline, my old age, shows itself in the way that love seems to have disappeared from me, and for a long while I have not seen a human face that I could mourn. My mood is now only lifted to kindness by the contemplation of animals – beautiful dogs, poodles and setters.
(20 December 1952)
This should at least have eased his feelings of guilt, if the cause of these was forbidden love. But their pressure did not decline; in his final years Thomas Mann was concerned almost entirely with forgiveness, the healing pendant of guilt. A long life accumulates many reasons for feeling guilty, precisely in the case of the self-seeking artist, who scrounges off life as the ‘vampire’ of art does on him,60 and in whose shadow so much withers.61 It can certainly not have been this artist’s sense of guilt, nor even the semi-religious Schopenhauerian version – however strongly they may both form undercurrents or superstructures on a more specific guilt feeling – that connects with the ‘old things’ set down in black and white in the early diaries, in such terms that their exploitation by the enemy would have been enough to drive him to suicide. And it is neither original sin nor the guilt of the egocentric artist that in his late work calls for forgiveness, the idea around which the late work circles. The primary guilt there is action, not being.
This is also how Thomas Mann viewed the writer who he believed to inhabit hell. In Dostoevsky there could be no misunderstanding as to what particular sense of guilt his life’s work was based on. In his 1945 essay, Mann expressed himself in words quite similar to those he was to use five years later in ‘My Time’. But now with a significant addition:
Undoubtedly the subconscious and even the consciousness of this titanic creator was permanently burdened with a heavy sense of guilt, a sense of the criminal – and this feeling was by no means of a purely hypochondriac nature.62
At the root of Dostoevsky’s sense of guilt, therefore, Thomas Mann finds not the God-seeking Russian soul – which would have made it so easy to reinterpret this guilt feeling in a metaphysical sense – but rather something tangible, something ‘non-hypochondriac’. If we bear in mind the supreme, indeed sacred place that the Russian writer assumed in his life, likewise that this introduction was contemporary with the writing of Doctor Faustus; if we recall that this novel almost obtrusively puts Dostoevsky alongside Nietzsche and that the portrait of Leverkühn is by his own confession a self-portrait; if we then bring in the fear over the deadly secrets of the diaries, then a certain suspicion begins to arise. It is the inkling that on this occasion, too, Mann did the same as he had done in his portraits of Chamisso, Kleist and Platen, of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Gide, Verlaine, of Wagner, Michelangelo, Chekhov and Schiller: ‘In my productions I reveal myself with such passion that a few indiscretions against others scarcely come into consideration.’63
This is what Thomas Mann wrote in 1904, and he remained faithful to this confession also in his essays. All critical writings, whatever they may reveal about their subject, are for him simply opportunities for that passion, only expressions ‘with you as their occasion’, as he put it in his early apologetic Bilse und ich; and as applies to them all: ‘It is not you I discuss, on no occasion, please be consoled, but me, myself …’64 This holds at least for the above-named series whose self-revealing character is so well known and attested by scholarship that it borders already on the trivial. It is only in the case of Dostoevsky that no one as yet has turned the view of the subject portrayed back to the portrayer himself. We may hesitate somewhat in making this move, but the question can still not be avoided whether at the end of the day, the guilt feeling of this gigantic creator was likewise of a non-hypochondriac kind.
With this question, or inkling, the point is reached at which one might well falter: would it not be better to break off the discussion and withdraw to the safer terrain of ignoramus, ignorabimus? But it is Mann himself who signals us on. By the detour of illness, which is ‘clearly and unambiguously sexual in origin’, he traces Dostoevsky’s guilt to a traumatic event and an early crime. In Crime and Punishment it is said of Svidrigailov that his past concealed a ‘criminal case with a flavour of bestial and as it were fantastical crudeness, for which he would in all likelihood have been sent to Siberia’. As Thomas Mann explains:
It is left to the more or less willing imagination of the reader to guess what this affair might be: in all probability it is a sex crime, possibly a child rape – for this is also the secret or a part of the secret in the life of Stavrogin in The Possessed, that icy and contemptible masterful person before whom weaker creatures grovelled in the dust, possibly one of the most weirdly attractive characters in world literature.
In one section of the novel, Stavrogin confesses an assault on a young girl, a violent fragment ‘full of a terrible realism transcending the bounds of art’ (almost literally the same description that he was to give shortly after of his own Doctor Faustus).65 Precisely this, the violation of a child, was – as Thomas Mann only indicates in the preface, but in an early letter treats as a credible on dit – the crime that sunk Dostoevsky’s life into a sense of heavy guilt.66
The subject here, however, was not Fyodor Dostoevsky, but sinister characters in world literature. Without troubling himself overmuch, Mann bridges here a gulf that is theoretically forbidden. The author in flesh and blood is one thing, the character made of ink something else, and any conclusion drawn from the latter to the former inevitably courts the reproach of mingling or confusing the two spheres. It is a reproach which Mann himself would have heard, in common with many other readers, had it already been raised at a time when the insulting term ‘biographism’ had not yet been coined. He read Dostoevsky as Freud and Proust had read him,67 and drew from the inner life of his characters conclusions about the life of their creator, thus basing a biographical assumption on fiction. Whether or not this is permissible is an academic question, which cannot be avoided,68 but which need not however divert us from the obvious. And what is obvious is that the gulf between life and fiction was indeed bridged by the author, that this was his habit, that he could not do otherwise, and that this appeared self-evident to him. This is how he reads; this is how he can be read. Before we retreat therefore to the safe ground of the unknowable, let us follow his invitation to do what immediately suggests itself. We get no confession in the style of Stavrogin; his ‘idea of a gruesomely monotonous confession of guilt in the Russian style,’ as Mann put it in 1951, he had never carried out.69 But he does not tire of repeating that his writing is strongly autobiographical, that he always speaks only of himself, and that he can say, even has to say, that he had ‘never invented anything’.70
The early diaries were burned. Thomas Mann took his secrets with him into his tomb. But this was a tomb in the Egyptian style: the palatial edifice of his work.