Cursed Legacy
The Tragic Life of Klaus Mann
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- US$32.99
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- US$32.99
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Son of the famous Thomas Mann, homosexual, drug-addicted, and forced to flee from his fatherland, the gifted writer Klaus Mann’s comparatively short life was as artistically productive as it was devastatingly dislocated. Best-known today as the author of Mephisto, the literary enfant terrible of the Weimar era produced seven novels, a dozen plays, four biographies, and three autobiographies—among them the first works in Germany to tackle gay issues—amidst a prodigious artistic output. He was among the first to take up his pen against the Nazis, as a reward for which he was blacklisted and denounced as a dangerous half-Jew, his books burnt in public squares around Germany, and his citizenship revoked. Having served with the U.S. military in Italy, he was nevertheless undone by anti-Communist fanatics in Cold War-era America and Germany, dying in France (though not, as all other books contend, by his own hand) at age forty-two.
Powerful, revealing, and compulsively readable, this first English-language biography of Klaus Mann charts the effects of reactionary politics on art and literature and tells the moving story of a supreme talent destroyed by personal circumstance and the seismic events of the twentieth century.
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This absorbing biography draws a three-dimensional picture of the life of Klaus Mann, novelist, playwright, essayist, gay rights advocate, and seemingly the unluckiest man of letters in the years around WWII. Spotts (Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics) reveals Mann as a genius in his chosen profession, who saw his career thwarted on one hand by the rise of Nazism in his homeland and on the other by the specter of his withholding father, Thomas, the intimidating giant of early 20th century German literature. The author traces Klaus's path from young, dilettantish provocateur in Munich to serious intellectual-in-exile in the U.S., where he tried (and failed) with increasing urgency to warn the public about Hitler. Mann wrote several now-celebrated works, most famously 1936's Mephisto, a thinly veiled account of a real-life actor who sold his soul to the Third Reich, but Mann died at age 42, in poverty and relative obscurity. The arc of his story is as tragic as the subtitle promises but is peppered with enough drugs, flings, and cameos by famous names that it never feels like a slog. Spotts quotes liberally from Mann's diary, which, with its references to life as a refugee and to America's racial problems, feels particularly timely now.
