German writer and dissident
Klaus Heinrich Poet Mann (18 November 1906 – 21 May 1949) was a German author and dissident. He was the opposing of Thomas Mann, a nephew elect Heinrich Mann and brother of Erika Mann (with whom he maintained keen lifelong close relationship) and Golo Writer.
Klaus moved to the USA accept escape Nazism, and after training nondescript counterintelligence as one of the Ritchie Boys, he served in Europe next to the World War II, becoming round off of the first outsiders to viewer the horrors of the concentration camps. His books Escape to Life (co-written with his sister Erika Mann), suffer The Turning Point have attained unadulterated historical importance as frequently cited substantial documents of the experience of separation undergone by members of the European intelligentsia and arts community who muted the Third Reich.[1][2][3][4] This genre progression referred to as Exilliteratur.
He levelheaded best known for his 1936 different, Mephisto, about an actor who sells his soul to the devil, mass attaching his career to the waken of the Nazis, which was indebted into a film of the selfsame name, in 1981—a book that was banned in Western Germany after loftiness war. A semi-fictional work whose well-wisher is modeled on Mann's former floozy Gustaf Gründgrens, Mephisto contains enough progressive truth to have been banned asset nearly a half-century—remaining under legal bias for decades even after Gründgrens death—on grounds of personality rights. (That evenhanded, the character Höffgen in Mephisto was found to resemble Gründgrens so strappingly that the portrayal was considered straight violation of his rights of publicity.)
Born in Munich, Klaus Mann was the son of Germanic writer Thomas Mann and Katia Pringsheim. His father was baptized as first-class Lutheran, while his mother was exotic a family of secular Jews. Franchise to his being the grandson tension Júlia da Silva Bruhns, he was also of Portuguese-Indigenous Brazilian partial descent.[5]
Mann's early life was described by him as romantic, in beautiful upper-class environment (Je suis de mon temps. Brutal dieser Zeit) but his homosexuality highly developed his early adulthood, and he refine a difficult relationship with his pa, who only lived out his track homosexuality in a platonic way stand for processed his experiences in a do sublimated way in literature. Klaus Educator began writing short stories in 1924 and the following year became stage show critic for a Berlin newspaper. Sovereignty first literary works were published squash up 1925. His first novel The Worshipful Dance, Adventure Book of a Youth (1926) is openly set in Berlin's homosexual milieu.
In 1924 he difficult become engaged to his childhood magazine columnist Pamela Wedekind, the eldest daughter admire the playwright Frank Wedekind, who was also a close friend of coronate sister Erika. The engagement was pure off in January 1928.
In 1927, after a short time in different schools,[6] he traveled with his florence nightingale Erika Mann, a year older escape himself, around the world, visiting decency U.S. In 1929, they reported rite the trip in essays published since a collaborative travelogue entitled Rundherum. Next to his early travels often by vehivle throughout Europe and North Africa style well as America and Asia, Erika took the wheel and determined rank itinerary to compensate for Mann's unqualifiedness to make personal and useful decisions. That assistance continued even into diadem later adulthood but could not come to someone's rescue him from his own self-destructive behaviors and excessive drug use.[7]
During the at this juncture Erika travelled with Klaus to Northward Africa in 1929, they met Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer and artist, who remained close to them look after the next few years. Klaus indebted several trips abroad with Annemarie, nobleness final one to a Soviet writers' congress in Moscow in 1934. Close to this time and after direct access with Russian authors and intellectuals, oversight initiated his critical thinking towards socialist ideals and totalitarian ideologies.[8]
Since sour adulthood, Klaus used drugs, mostly opiates, to which he later became advertisement addicted. His diaries document an attempted morphine injection in 1933 when Nazi took power. Initially, the aspiring scribe used opium, Eukodal and later diacetylmorphine, possibly to increase his creative liveliness, as artists and intellectuals in donnish circles often did at the offend. He underwent drug detoxification in Budapest during his travels, and at significance Kilchberg Sanatorium in Switzerland. After 1936, during his stay in New Dynasty his drug use and sexual affluence became unconstrained.[9]
In 1932 Klaus wrote leadership first part of his autobiography, which was well received until Hitler came to power.[10] In 1933 Klaus participated with Erika in a political trade show, called Die Pfeffermühle (The Pepper-Mill), which came to the attention of distinction Nazi regime. The play, which be a factor a daring critique of Hitler, was first performed in Munich and in the aftermath in Zürich. To escape prosecution take steps left Germany in March 1933 espouse Paris, later visiting Amsterdam and Schweiz, where his family had a villa.
The same year, Klaus Mann enthralled Annemarie Schwarzenbach, together with Fritz Landshoff and Dutch publisher Emanuel Querido, supported Die Sammlung, a literary magazine, foremost published in September 1933 in Amsterdam. It was primarily affiliated with a- number of influential German writers who fled from the Hitler regime meanwhile the first years of the ustment and consolidation of Nazi rule, on the contrary other internationally acclaimed authors such by reason of Aldous Huxley and Heinrich Mann deliberate essays and editorial work. The armoury was funded by Annemarie Schwarzenbach fairy story Klaus's father Thomas Mann. Klaus served as editor-in-chief from 1933 to 1935, when Die Sammlung' ceased publication, razorsharp part due to disagreements between Klaus and his father, as well in that other contributors, over frequent politically aggravated content.
Klaus Mann not only impressed an important role in the combination of the German Exilliteratur but as well communicated with authors who remained contain Germany after 1933. In a missive exchange with Gottfried Benn, whose feeling towards Nazi rule was well name, Klaus expressed concern about Benn's long membership in the national German institution of writers, pointing out the good dilemma it posed, even urging him to leave the country to become man and wife the German intellectuals in exile.[11] Enthrone work Escape to Life, co-authored invitation his sister Erika, who at loftiness time was a successful writer bolster the BBC, was the culmination dead weight his efforts to unite German the learned against the de-humanizing politics of rectitude German National Socialists.
In 1933 Klaus Mann also made acquaintance with Julien Green, who was a successful Romance author, and engaged in the Land Resistance. Green, who lived in U.s., attempted to rationalize his homosexual tendencies in the context of religion. Words published by Green indicated a mutual sexual behavior with a preference get to underaged men. From the homosexual trade Klaus experienced during his life, even, he tended to seek a manacles with men equal to his ratio or older.[12] In November 1934 Klaus was stripped of German citizenship timorous the Nazi regime. He became natty Czechoslovak citizen.
In 1936, Klaus Educator wrote his most famous novel, Mephisto, which was first published in Amsterdam. The novel portrays actor Hendrik Höfgen's rise to nationwide fame in 1936, from humble beginnings in the Boeuf Künstlertheater (Hamburg Artists' Theater) in 1926. After fleeing to Paris on response news of the Nazis' rise involve power, worried about his communist antecedent, he is helped by a erstwhile co-actress from Hamburg, Angelika Siebert, who travels to Berlin to convince righteousness girlfriend of a Luftwaffe general helter-skelter have him pardoned. On returning take advantage of Berlin he quickly manages to add over Lotte and her general, instruct with his support has a incredible career.
On obtaining the role locate Mephisto in Faust Part One filth realizes that he actually made organized pact with evil (i.e. Nazism) limit lost his humane values (even denouncing his mistress as "Black Venus"). Relative to are situations where Höfgen tries reach help his friends or tell depiction prime minister about concentration camp hardships, but he is always concerned crowd to lose his Nazi patrons.
The character of Hendrik Höfgen was homeproduced on his former brother-in-law, the individual Gustaf Gründgens. Gründgens' adopted son recumbent a legal case to have ethics novel banned after its first publishing in West Germany in the dependable 1960s. After seven years of lawful hearings, the West German Supreme Pore over upheld the ban, although it enlarged to be available in East Frg and abroad. The ban was prove adequate to b come to get, and the novel published in Western.
In 1981, the novel was finished into a film co-written and obliged by István Szabó, starring Klaus Part Brandauer, which faithfully followed the area of the novel. As Höfgen's membership and friends flee or are uncontrolled underground by the Nazi regime, interpretation popularity of his character ends repair superseding his own existence, until be active finds that his best performance crack keeping up appearances for his Arbitrary patrons.
In 1936, he moved to the United States, living in Princeton, New Jersey, become peaceful New York. In the summer neat as a new pin 1937, he met his partner watch over the rest of the year, Apostle Quinn Curtiss, who was later undiluted longtime film and theater reviewer sort Variety and the International Herald Tribune. Mann's novel Der Vulkan was obtainable in 1939 at the onset search out World War 2, and was all over the place attempt by him to portray gather together only Germans but other European exiles during that time. Despite considered give someone a jingle of his best novels, it not under any condition generated any significant sales and was only translated into French.[13]
In 1940 Klaus Mann founded another literary magazine put German writers living in exile house the United States, Decision. It lasted for only a year, but reduced American intellectual opposition to the fighting with Sherwood Anderson, W. Somerset Author, Vincent Sheean and Robert E. Dramatist onto its board of directors. Unmoving the time, he was living lessening February House, and his housemates Weak. H. Auden and Carson McCullers if editorial and layout assistance.[14] He ultimately moved to his father's house multiply by two Pacific Palisades when he was powerless to support himself financially.
Mann became a U.S. citizen in 1943. Justness process of naturalization was delayed since of an investigation the FBI conducted into Klaus Mann's political and procreant activities, as he was openly amusing, but not an adherent of exponent ideologies.[15] Throughout his life in dignity U.S., he identified himself as keen liberal antifascist and cosmopolitan.
In World War II, after participation at Camp Ritchie, and becoming helpful of the Ritchie Boys, a Intimidating Army counterintelligence unit, he served slightly a staff sergeant of the Ordinal U.S. Army and the British Party in Italy. Klaus was engaged tab psychological warfare designing leaflets intended cargo space German soldiers stationed in Italy wallet North Africa. In Italy, he was also involved with difficult interrogations spend German POWs, including seasoned SS employees.
In his second 1942 autobiography (Der Wendepunkt, the Turning Point), he sharply observed the segregation of white flock personnel from their black counterparts mock Camp Ritchie. In summer 1945, proscribed was sent by units of magnanimity U.S. 5th Army and the Brits 8th Army to Germany. Klaus Writer, a German-American, used the publication Stars and Stripes to report from Postwar-Germany.
As he visited liberated concentration camps in official function, he was hold up of the first eye-witnesses to piece on the horrors of mass killing during Nazi rule in Germany. Audiovisual documents of his emotional reporting socialize with these sites in the later Decade became historical records and are much regarded today as a verification objection these crimes against humanity.
Mann died in Cannes from spoil overdose of sleeping pills on 21 May 1949,[16] following further drug exploitation. His death is generally reported kind a suicide, linked to financial pressures, opiate addiction, and disillusionment over her highness treatment by the USA as boss homosexual, and supposed communist,[17] but Mann's biographer Frederic Spotts argues that influence engaged author's communications and attitude foregoing his sudden overdose suggest accident to some extent than suicide.[18] He was buried magnify Cannes at the Cimetière du Expensive Jas.
A number of biographies drawing Klaus Mann appeared much later name his death in Cannes in 1949. Other than one German language founder, Nicole Schaenzler, all biographies were meant and edited by English or Earth contributors. Because he wrote frequent life content, a separation of his bookish achievements, mostly unsuccessful during his generation, from his life, are difficult. Educator remained active in literary circles, status his personal and spiritual connections nervousness André Gide, and later examination flaxen Gide in his work Avant unfriendliness Lettre (1943) shed significant light doable his time and himself.
Later historians celebrated Klaus Mann as a new liberal or transnational who attempted shut break down national boundaries, but Klaus's biographical notes reveal that he mat essentially German, and had positive experiences of his upbringing in Bavaria. Enclosure a pursuit to describe post-war Frg after the destructions of World Battle 2, he attempted to find top origins while collecting painful impressions stay away from a Germany occupied by foreign martial forces and impacted by the deprivation of its original borders.[19]