Reminiscences of Thomas Mann

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At the time, Thomas Mann lived in a comfortable, spacious home in Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles. His house differed from neighboring villas in that it had a small separate wing which was Mann’s refuge. This wing consisted of a medium-sized square workroom with a free view through a picture window over avocado groves, a few houses, descending hills, and, at a distance, the Pacific Ocean. His bedroom was situated directly over his workroom and connected with it by a small staircase, so that Mann could go from one floor to the other without notice. This comfortably and rather elegantly furnished workroom, covered to the ceiling with bookshelves on two of its walls, was connected with the center of the house by a narrow passageway.

Thomas Mann always wore conservative clothes and behaved in conservative fashion. He looked like a cross between a modest, sparse university professor and a modest, sparse Middletown banker, and a little more serious, in the most basic sense of the word, than either. At first glance he did not stand out in any crowd or group, and had one not known who he was one hardly would have noticed him, except for one thing: occasionally, when something struck him, or amused him, a momentary sparkle of recognition, delight, just plain light, would come into his eyes, arresting for those at whom he directed it. Apparently, Mann himself was very much aware of the force of a look from eye to eye, for somewhere in his writings—I cannot remember where—he speaks of the eye, “that little mass of protoplasm, capable of suddenly casting a bridge over the abyss between two people,” or words to that effect.

But Mann was bourgeois and formal not just in his relations with the American world at large, which almost worshiped him during those years of war as the representative of “the other Germany” and might not have kept its distance had he been less forbidding; he maintained the same posture of correct and distant formality even in the circle of his friends and family.

Not long after I had begun my work with him, I witnessed a conversation between Thomas Mann and his brother Heinrich. Over a cup of tea, the two brothers, sitting at opposite ends of a long sofa, discussed various esthetic and literary problems, very much like two college professors who have just been introduced. Yet Heinrich was among the very few who called Mann by his first name. In fact I never heard anybody call Mann “Tommy” except his brother Heinrich and his wife Katja.

Those very close to him, including his children, frequently called him “Zauberer,” magician. This nickname was not so much a tribute to Mann’s magical power over words as the result of an evening long past during the Munich carnival season when Thomas Mann had put on a magician’s costume for the dance. Yet even during the night’s gay travesty Mann had remained true to himself, a strict and reserved gentleman, and had given other revelers to understand that the “magician” was only a nocturnal phantom and that no subsequent familiarity such as so often developed at the Munich carnival would be welcome.

One of Mann’s sons once confessed to me that he rarely sat down to a meal with his father without a little intellectual preparation. “I always prepare myself mentally to talk on some topic,” the son said, “otherwise I get stuck and there is silence.” The distance his sons kept from Mann was surprising enough, but their father took such an impersonal manner in dealing with them that he often spoke or even wrote about one of their books or articles as though he were criticizing the work of some author otherwise entirely unknown to him.

Every day, after laying down his pen at noon, Mann called his black poodle Niko (short for Nicodemus) and took a walk with him, cutting a lone figure in the streets of Pacific Palisades where there are no pedestrians. After his walk Mann sat down to a substantial lunch; the American custom of having a quick sandwich and glass of milk he disdained. After an afternoon nap, which was a necessity for him, he would either read, do some of his non-literary writing, such as political articles or statements, or, when I was there, work with me on his correspondence. On such occasions we would also discuss the war and its sometimes intolerably slow progress. Impatient, I exclaimed one day: “Things can never work this way!” Mann was amused by this exclamation, which in German sounds even more abrupt and childish. He kept using it from then on, unexpectedly, when someone asked his Olympian opinion on some of the great questions of the day. Thirteen years later, in 1954, when Mann had returned to Europe and become very displeased with postwar developments there, he sent me a copy of his Felix Krull inscribed: “Things can never work this way . . . in memory of bygone days.”

Mann’s correspondence was very extensive and almost everybody who wrote to him wanted something from him, whether it was Nelson Rockefeller, then Coordinator for Inter-American Affairs, who needed an inspiring statement, or a lowly Jewish fugitive from Hitler’s clutches, hoping to reach these shores before being overtaken by the Nazi avalanche pushing over Europe. Such pleas for help were usually not financial. They were cries for assistance in the baling, endless, labyrinthine task of obtaining an American immigration visa. Many times Mann wrote to Cordell Hull whom he had met personally, and pleaded for assistance, but Hull never answered. This grieved Mann deeply.

It occasionally aroused his mild anger—though he laughed about it at the same time—that of the innumerable petitioners for articles, contributions, statements, appeals, forewords, and so on, hardly any ever offered him money. “What do these people think?” he would murmur. “After all, a man like me also needs money!” One day he suddenly decided that Alfred Knopf, his lifelong publisher, should pay him more. He studied his contract with Knopf and then dictated a long letter to the publisher full of financial data, asking for a better royalty arrangement.

Knopf replied in great detail and very cordially, pointing to several errors in Mann’s calculations and suggestions. “All right,” said Mann when he showed me Knopf’s reply, “I suppose I’m just no businessman.” Actually, he was very happy with his arrangements with Knopf and was grateful for all that Knopf did for him.

One day Mann’s mail brought a letter from the widow of a railroad magnate with a small volume of poems printed on expensive paper. Her husband, said the lady, though a successful businessman, had really been in secret a poet and writer of aphorisms. She now had had his work privately printed and wanted Mann’s honest opinion “for I want my husband to be judged by his peers.” As it was Mann’s custom to answer every letter, I reminded him of the poems after a few weeks and asked him whether he had read the booklet. “Well, I looked at it,” he said. I asked him what he had thought of it. “Oh well,” he answered, “you know, I think I could have written just as well.” Then he laughed and asked me to write that he had “read the little volume with interest and found it quite touching.” He then added with a strict mien: “That will suffice.”

At five o’clock, after the labors of correspondence, tea was served. It was taken in the large living room. Visitors appeared and there was a good deal of conversation. Thomas Mann enjoyed it if people reported on all sorts of daily occurrences but disliked those conversations about mankind’s ultimate concerns that some of his visitors felt obliged to instigate. He preferred to hear about an adventure caused by a flat tire.

Thomas Mann and his touching, patient wife Katja were quite domestic. Evenings Mann liked to listen to records. His favorite was Wagner. I asked him once how he could explain it that he and Hitler had the same favorite. “There is no mystery to that,” Mann said. “Hitler is attracted by the nationalistic element in Wagner, and I by the international element.” When he did not listen to music he read or conversed. Quite frequently, when he felt like it, and the group of guests suited him, he read from a manuscript on which he had just been working. He read with a dry voice, giving however special and, it seemed, delighted emphasis to all ironic passages. The fulsome praise of his listeners he accepted with gentle skepticism. For mildly critical objections which were occasionally expressed by some guest in a fit of temerity, he had no ear whatever. They did not interest him.

In his ordinary social contacts he was anything but haughty. Once after a cocktail party at his house where Charles Boyer had been among the guests, Mann’s children complained that there had been two young girls present who had lionized Boyer and asked for his autograph. They thought that in their father’s house a man like Boyer should be made to feel at home and not be molested by starry-eyed fans. Mann listened to their criticisms and then said, somewhat depleted: “I suppose I did not behave too well myself then. I also said to Mr. Boyer that it was quite an exciting experience to come face to face with such a famous movie star whom I have seen quite a few times on the screen.”

Though Mann rarely complained and instead listened to the complaints of others quite patiently, he was often depressed. He ascribed his depression mainly to the war and the German situation. Skeptical and sophisticated though he was in almost every respect, he hated and despised the Nazis with an elementary violence, and tolerated no excuses of any kind for any of their doings. As a vastly educated observer of history and political developments he examined the causes of Naziism in several of his political essays with trenchant objectivity, but his personal attitude was one of almost compulsive contempt. In one of his weekly radio broadcasts to Germany over the BBC he called the Nazis men with “verjauchten Gehirnen,” which, if there were a literal translation, would be considerably stronger than “putrefied brains.” The Allied conduct of the war often filled him with impatience, but at no time did he doubt for a moment that the democracies would win.

The loss of his German public was very painful for him, and his fury against the Nazis was still further deepened by it. Of course he had a large American audience, he was highly esteemed, he was showered with honors in his new country. That was some consolation. But he felt that translation ruined his work. Even though he spoke English only fairly well (though very fluently), his immensely differentiated sense of language made him aware even of the tiniest flaws and shortcomings in the translation of his works. He knew that his style was essentially untranslatable; that the nuances, the ironic accents, the double and even triple meanings of certain words which he used with such relish became casualties of the translation; that cadences were displaced, that the rhythm was disturbed, and that his often immensely baroque sentences rolling on to safe denouements after breathtaking journeys in German became shipwrecked in English. He was very appreciative of the work of Mrs. Lowe Porter, who largely devoted her life to the translation of his novels. He was grateful that she had given him his English-speaking public, and that she did her task with great talent and infinite care. But even she could not alter the fact that the English language was just not the right medium for him, or any other language, for that matter, except German. “I really am only writing for posterity,” he once said to me. This was not at all a piece of extravagant self-appreciation but a somewhat sad yet confident statement, reflecting his belief that his beloved German language would in due course be liberated from its barbaric perverters.

After Mann had completed his monumental Joseph series, he experienced an emotional deflation. To several people he wrote that “in all these dark years of Hitlerism and emigration this book was my support. I now miss my work on it.” Yet he was not entirely satisfied with this greatest and most ambitious of his undertakings. When I asked him how he liked it, now that it was completed, he replied somewhat surlily: “Well, at least you can call it a triumph of tenacity.” The idea for the series had been on his mind for more than thirty years. And he had always thought of the conversation between Pharaoh and Joseph as the climax of the entire effort, a sort of summit of his life’s work. But now that it was done, he found the result “somewhat disappointing.” Why? He could not say. On the other hand, he felt that the chapter on Thamar, which, like the Pharaoh-Joseph conversation, comes in the fourth and final volume of the series, and had been published separately in a special luxury edition before the whole book appeared, had come off beyond his expectations, and he professed to be very fond of it. He gave me a copy with the somewhat strange inscription: “For KK, this touching rarity.”

In the summer of 1943 I was drafted into the army and sent to a camp in Texas for my basic training. To this desolate place, Mann wrote me a letter of consolation which read in part:

. . . I hear that you have arrived at the place of your preliminary destination, that you have, so to speak, a regular address, no matter how unnatural it sounds to me [this refers to the APO address], and I should therefore like to send you some lines of my sympathy on the stationery which you purchased for me, so that you should not think “out of ear shot, out of mind” or “he does not have to do KP, and for what others have to do he feels no concern.” But it is of concern to me, though all I can do is to give you the well known scribbling to read without your having to copy or translate it. . . . You probably will only get used to not getting used to it (Hans Castorp). Forgive my quoting myself! But who pulls himself together vis-a-vis his secretary! ... I have to stop now . . . the war is really going almost fearfully well . . . we will hardly need you and Golo [one of his sons], who has also been called up, any longer against Hitler . . . at the most we will need you against Hirohito, the Victor Emanuel of the rising sun. . . . All the best, your old “boss” Thomas Mann.

When the war was over and he had had his drastic lung operation, Mann resumed work on his Faustus novel. Then he wrote me a letter to Germany, where the war had carried me, in which he said: “The patched up old miracle man strains and scribbles again quite industriously on the Faustus novel which is growing into a ‘misshapen giant snake.’ This is what Brahms used to call Bruckner’s symphonies. We geniuses just don’t understand a single thing about one another.” In the same letter he thanked me for a very flattering magazine article about him that had appeared in the new Germany. But his reaction to the piece was quite truculent. He wrote: “I have read the article. In such a way, and sometimes with even greater solemnity, they now write about me. Funny, they always gave me toads to swallow, and all of a sudden I have turned into a sort of Merlin, old Goethe and miraculous vieillard whose views span the ages. . . .”

Then, great though his gratitude and affection were for the United States, he returned to Europe, not to Germany though he traveled there, but to Switzerland, to live once again surrounded by the German language. I visited him there in 1951 or so. He was very thin and already quite frail. When I left, he said: “Things don’t look good to me.”