Writers and Cities (part one)

The article Across Germany by Water (Part Two) talked about the Manns in connection with Lübeck (photo above from the 1920s), just as one would talk about Theodor Fontane in connection with Neuruppin, Walter Kempowski in connection with Rostock, Alfred Döblin in connection with Berlin, Carl Zuckmayer with Mainz, Bertolt Brecht with Nürnberg, Goethe and Schiller with Weimar, Theodor Storm with Husum, Peter Rosegger with Graz, Heimito von Doderer with Vienna, Ernst Jünger with Heidelberg, Victor Klemperer with Dresden… The list is long of German writers who are associated for one reason or another with a particular German or Austrian city, and not to forget the Swiss writers and those to whom the Swiss offered refuge. I don't think the English are inclined to connect writers to cities. A few, perhaps. But then, wherever they were born, English writers have generally gravitated to London and the publishing houses there.

Students of German usually hear something about Goethe and Schiller even if their courses nowadays avoid the nineteenth century. Then they graduate and, because languages are seldom an end in themselves, these students go on to careers which may or may not involve talking and writing a bit of German. The chances are they won't have much time to find out more about German writers. They may not in any case have time to read much, even in English. What a lot they miss! What is the good of being able to speak another language if one is not at the same time experiencing that language as used by its master craftsmen? Anyone who has passed A-Level German can manage everyday transactional German. One can probably follow news headlines, read magazines, understand films and TV, in fact handle language of the concrete variety. However, what about the abstract language of thought and ideas? A second language opens a gateway to a complete new world.

If you don't know much about German literature you probably thought the writers listed above were mentioned because they represent absolute musts in the German literary canon. Not so! They were simply the names which came to mind as I was thinking about cities. Some of them are "musts" if you mean set texts for examination, but you are not likely to find Walter Kempowski in a degree course yet, I imagine, and certainly not the delightful Peter Rosegger. Victor Klemperer will probably appear in "Holocaust" studies, which will make him turn in his grave, for there was nothing he despised more than political correctness. Ernst Jünger might now be acceptable since he made it to over 100 years of age and this would probably compensate for his, now rather suspect, glorification of things military. Some of these names are worth "dropping", if you want to show off, but to me they are like good company. I like to see them on my shelves. Good books give me a feeling of security. I can always read them again. They remind me, when the vocabulary of public discourse gets narrow, of the huge variety of thoughts people have managed to think on their own, independently, without bowing to trends.

But to get back to the Manns. They were one of the leading families in nineteenth-century Lübeck, that ancient Hanseatic city and Baltic port, a place of patrician power and culture. Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, but it was his elder brother Heinrich who played a leading role in the Weimar Republic, and tried to educate Germans in real democracy. As he said, two thirds of Germans were Arbeiter und Angestellte but had no influence on government, which was firmly in the hands of the civil servants. Heinrich it was who wanted above all co-operation between leading intellectuals across Europe. Thomas Masaryk, the philosopher and first President of the Republic of Czechoslovakia after the First World War, was one of his friends. French writers of the day revered Heinrich Mann. As a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts he worked to liberalise school textbooks from their all too hierarchical view of German history. He realised before most the dangers of National Socialism. In Anti-Semitism, he said, the real threat comes from what people are not talking about. He knew that to defeat Hitler the opposition had to be united, and that meant including the Communists, anathema to most of the German political class.

Certain themes in particular come to mind in connection with the Mann family: suicide and homosexuality - four suicides at least; decadence and decline of the großbürgerlichen families, beautifully described by Thomas Mann in his most famous work Buddenbrooks, for which he received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929; the duty of intellectuals to engage with, if not in, politics; and lastly, the effect of emigration on German culture. To me the political theme is the most important from a present-day point of view, namely, the attempt made by both Heinrich and Thomas to influence German thought during and after the Weimar Republic. Detailed biographies of both brothers, as well as recordings of Thomas Mann speaking, can be found on the Living Museum website of the German Historical Museum http://www.dhm.de/lemo under the headings Weimarer Republik - Kultur, and on the website of the Thomas Mann Archive in Switzerland http://www.tma/ethz.ch. Both eventually emigrated and both continued to oppose the Nazi regime from abroad, but their political development differed insofar as Heinrich was already a vehement opponent and critic of authoritarian government well before the First World War.

In his writings and speeches Heinrich Mann tried desperately to stir up opposition, even going so far in 1933 as to sign a public appeal for the Communists and Social Democrats to unite against the National Socialists. Perhaps his most important works in this respect were Professor Unrat oder Das Ende eines Tyrannen (The Small Town Tyrant), Der Untertan (The Patrioteer), and the two volumes of Henri Quatre (about the French king Henry IV who was prepared to forego the salvation of his soul in order to free his countrymen from religious tyranny). The film version of Professor Unrat entitled Der blaue Engel brought fame to Marlene Dietrich but failed to convey the claustrophobic and narrow-minded small-town atmosphere which the book aimed to expose. Heinrich fell out with his brother over the latter's support for the First World War. During the Second World War, however, Thomas too wrote and spoke against National Socialist Germany. He made several broadcasts on the German Service of the BBC in 1941. But neither brother returned to live in Germany, although Thomas paid two important visits in 1949 and 1955.

Thomas had six children, Erika, Klaus, Golo, Monika, Elisabeth and Michael. Only one of them, Golo (1909-1994), did return to Germany from emigration to become a much-respected historian. His chief works are Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (1958), Wallenstein: Sein Leben erzählt (1971) and Eine Jugend in Deutschland (1986). The facts of his life appear, like those of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, in the excellent website of the Deutsches Historisches Museum in Berlin www.dhm.de/lemo/html/biografien/MannGolo/.

Emigration affected all the Manns in very different ways. For later generations it is easy to assume that leaving Hitler's Germany behind and starting a new life in a free country must have provided a wonderful opportunity. But imagine the reality of that time! Nowadays we travel so quickly from continent to continent without even being conscious of the distances. We are aware that we have the right to seek work anywhere in the European Union; we may find a job and a home anywhere in the world if we have something to offer the chosen new country. And we native speakers of English don't even have to learn another language, so that if we are writers we can carry on writing in our own language, we easily adopt local variations in English, we fill in (or fill out) all the necessary forms without having to find a friendly translator. In any case, we form a careful plan of our future if we decide, of our own free will, to emigrate. We take time to find out as much as possible about the new country well in advance of our departure. We are not forced to give up our connections with the home country and we know that most of our friends and family will still be there if we want to come back, and we probably keep our British citizenship. Certainly, as the British Consulate in Frankfurt once assured me, no-one would ever take it away against our will. Any money or property we leave behind is in no danger of being seized.

The Mann family was relatively fortunate in being able to leave Europe by gradual stages via Switzerland or France, but the departure from Germany was both forced and hasty. Thomas Mann and his wife Katja were on a tour of Europe in 1933 when their children warned them not to return, and Heinrich Mann emigrated to France immediately after his exclusion from the Academy or Arts in the same year. Both brothers had their German citizenship removed by the National Socialist regime. There had been five children in the family of Senator Mann of Lübeck: Heinrich, Thomas, Julia, Carla and Viktor, the youngest, born in 1890, nineteen years after Heinrich, the oldest. The two sisters had already died through suicide long before Hitler came to power. Viktor had not attracted adverse attention from the Nazis and remained in Germany. In 1949 he published his very readable autobiography Wir waren fünf in which he tells the story of the Mann family from the grandparents in Lübeck to his experiences in Bavaria during the Weimar Republic and under Hitler (3596122759). Apart from this book, Viktor Mann did not follow the literary careers of his brothers, becoming instead an agricultural inspector. His nephew Golo Mann commented critically in Eine Jugend in Deutschland, and perhaps a little unkindly, on Viktor's survival during the Nazi period:

"My uncle Viktor, my father's much younger brother, told me with glee that the interior minister of the fallen Bavarian government, a man called Stützel, had had dirty feet when they came to drag him out of bed and arrest him. Later I made the interesting observation that whenever someone fell from power, whether a democratic minister or a dictator, the story always included a reference to something dirty about his body when describing his nocturnal arrest. It belonged to the ritual of spite. Uncle Viktor also heaped scorn on the former Bavarian prime minister Held, for whom he had actually voted; now Viktor commented that his speeches during the campaign had been pathetic. In the process of shifting his loyalties from the old master to the new, Uncle Viktor had to despise the old one as best he could. Not only for other's benefit, also for his own. After all, one was an honourable man, one of millions of fellow travellers, as they were later called…..Uncle Viktor, with his diploma in agriculture, was working for the Bavarian Handelsbank, and not even in a supervisory position. Now he advanced rapidly to the rank of director, and exchanged his modest apartment in the eastern part of Munich for a much more elegant one in Schwabing; he owed his advancement to the departure of his Jewish colleagues."

The fifth of Thomas Mann's children, Elisabeth, his youngest daughter, was the last to die aged 83 on February 8^th 2002, not long after taking a central role in the making of both a three-part television film (ASIN: B00005UL59) and a documentary series about the Mann family. Both of these are immensely well directed by Heinrich Breloer and well worth seeing when they are shown again. Particularly impressive were Armin Mueller-Stahl as Thomas and Monika Bleibtreu as his wife Katia. However, since neither series presents a straightforward chronological account but rather a descriptive portrait, viewers really need to study the biographies of the main protagonists first. Elisabeth Mann married in 1939 her professor of music, Giuseppe Borgese, with whom she fell in love while studying piano at the Zürich Conservatoire. Quite unlike the rest of the family, she became Professor of Political Science in Canada. She founded the International Ocean Institute and fought with passion for the conservation of marine resources. She was awarded the Order of Canada in 1988, and Germany's highest civilian honour, the Cross of the Order Pour le Mérite, like her father Thomas and brother Golo. Her biography was written in 2001 by Kerstin Holzer (3463404141).