Klaus Heinrich Thomas Mann (18 November 1906 – 21 May 1949) was a German writer and dissident. He was the son of Thomas Mann, a nephew of Heinrich Mann and brother of Erika Mann (with whom he maintained a lifelong close relationship) and Golo Mann. He is well known for his 1936 novel, Mephisto.
Background
Born in Munich, Klaus Mann was the son of German writer Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia Pringsheim. His father was baptized as a Lutheran, while his mother was from a family of secular Jews. Due to his being the grandson of Júlia da Silva Bruhns, he was also of Portuguese-Indigenous Brazilian partial descent.
Life and career
Mann began writing short stories in 1924 and the following year became drama critic for a Berlin newspaper. His first literary works were published in 1925.
Mann's early life was described by him as romantic, in beautiful upper-class surroundings (Je suis de mon temps. Kind dieser Zeit) but his homosexuality complicated his early adulthood, and he developed a difficult relationship with his father. After only a short time in various schools, he traveled with his sister Erika Mann, a year older than himself, around the world, visiting the U.S. in 1927; they reported on the trip in essays published as a collaborative travelogue entitled Rundherum in 1929. During his early travels often by car throughout Europe and North Africa as well as America and Asia, Erika was at the wheel or determined the itinerary and thus compensated for his inability to make personal and useful decisions. That assistance by his dearly-loved sister continued even into his later adulthood but could not save him from his own self-destructive behaviors and excessive drug use.
In 1924 he had become engaged to his childhood friend Pamela Wedekind, the eldest daughter of the playwright Frank Wedekind, who was also a close friend of his sister Erika. The engagement was broken off in January 1928.
During the time Erika travelled with Klaus to North Africa in 1929, they met Annemarie Schwarzenbach, a Swiss writer and photographer, who remained close to them for the next few years. Klaus made several trips abroad with Annemarie, the final one to a Soviet writers' congress in Moscow in 1934. During this time and after direct contact with Russian authors and intellectuals, he initiated his critical thinking towards communist ideals and totalitarian ideologies.
Since young adulthood, Klaus was using drugs, mostly opiates, to which he later became heavily addicted. His diaries document an attempted morphine-injection in 1933 when Hitler took power. Initially, the aspiring writer used opium, Eukodal and later heroin to possibly increase his creative energy, as this was often the case for artists and intellectuals in literary circles at the time. He underwent drug detoxification in Budapest during his frantic travels and at the Kilchberg Sanatorium in Switzerland. After 1936, during his stay in New York his drug use and sexual adventures became unconstrained.
In 1932 Klaus wrote the first part of his autobiography, which was well received until Hitler came to power.
In 1933 Klaus participated with Erika in a political cabaret, called Die Pfeffermühle (The Pepper-Mill), which came to the attention of the Nazi regime. The play, which included a daring critique of Hitler, was first performed in Munich and subsequently in Zurich. To escape prosecution he left Germany in March 1933 for Paris, later visiting Amsterdam and Switzerland, where his family had a house. The same year, Klaus Mann and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, together with Fritz Landshoff and Dutch publisher Emanuel Querido, founded Die Sammlung, a literary magazine, first published in September 1933 in Amsterdam. It was primarily affiliated with a number of influential German writers who fled from the Hitler regime during the first years of the establishment and consolidation of Nazi rule. But also other internationally acclaimed authors such as Aldous Huxley and Heinrich Mann contributed with essays and editorial work. The magazine was funded by the wealthy Annemarie Schwarzenbach and his father Thomas Mann, while Klaus served as its editor-in-chief from 1933 to 1935, when Die Sammlungs activity ceased. The publication ended also due to disagreements between Klaus and his father Thomas Mann as well as other contributors because of the frequent politically-motivated content.