On the brothers – David Blackbourn in LRB (in 1998):

“Twenty years ago Nigel Hamilton wrote a double biography of the literary Brothers Mann, giving equal billing to the celebrated Thomas and the neglected Heinrich. It was certainly time to look again at Heinrich, whose importance as a public and literary figure had been taken for granted by an earlier generation of writers. Gottfried Benn called him ‘one of my gods’; Lion Feuchtwanger thought him the greatest of the writers who had set out not only to depict the 20th century but to change it. Hamilton made a strong case that Heinrich Mann deserved to be remembered as more than just the author of the book on which The Blue Angel was based.”

(…)

“All the more reason to welcome the translation into English (even if it is often dreadful English) of the correspondence between a great writer and one who does not deserve his current oblivion. Thomas liked to think of himself as a seismograph of his times. On the evidence of their letters, the faulted relationship between the brothers provides an even better fix on the rumbles of war, Communism, Fascism and exile.
Heinrich was born in 1871, Thomas four years later. They were the oldest of five children in a Lübeck patrician family. Both of their sisters, the bohemian Carla and neither Heinrich nor Thomas was ever close to their much younger brother Viktor. Their own relationship was difficult. ‘Heinrich,’ Thomas said, ‘could be so hurtful’ – but Thomas learnt to repay him with interest. They grew up with much in common. Children of Imperial Germany, they belonged to a generation of bourgeois youth that felt stifled by contemporary materialism and moral codes. Heinrich was the open rebel, Thomas’s alienation more inward – a pattern that persisted.”

(…)

“In a key letter from the time of his engagement, Thomas writes that he regards happiness as serious, difficult and severe, something to which he has submitted himself.”

(…)

“The two were finally reconciled in 1922, when Heinrich was seriously ill with peritonitis.
In the same year, Thomas embraced democracy in a speech ‘On the German Republic’, a symbolic moment in the process of distancing himself from apolitical conservatism. He continued to harbour private reservations about his brother’s work, but the two were now public allies. Both enjoyed huge success in the Twenties. Heinrich, even more prolific than before, was one of the premier writers of Weimar and talked about as a possible President of the Republic. Thomas, who still found writing an act of ‘perpetual hesitation’, won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929 – for Budden-brooks, not for The Magic Mountain, which had appeared in 1924. There are relatively few letters from these years, when the two saw each other often.
It is no surprise that political events play an increasingly central role. In 1932, Heinrich writes: ‘I share your opinion that overt barbarism will be unable to prevail in this country.’ When it did, both brothers became exiles, Heinrich in the South of France, Thomas in Zürich, where he could remain within the ‘sphere of German culture’.”

(…)

“Nor was it just the brothers whose lives were affected. Heinrich’s first wife, Maria Kanova, died after five years in a concentration camp; his daughter, Goschi, was stranded in Prague after contracting a disastrous marriage; his second wife, Nelly Kröger, eventually succeeded in her third suicide attempt. Thomas’s son, Klaus, took his own life after the war. Not all these tragedies were a direct outcome of exile and war: it was clearly not easy at the best of times to be a member of the Mann family. Belonging to the first family of anti-Fascism made it that much harder.
The two brothers spent most of the war in the USA. Thomas, despite occasional disdain for the ‘naive eagerness’ of America, was much more at home there – a crowning irony, given his First World War diatribe against the shallow, materialistic ‘civilisation’ of the Entente powers. He had first visited the country in 1934, reporting enthusiastically on Roosevelt, La Guardia and New York City (‘the only true metropolis in the world’). The following year he collected an honorary degree at Harvard and met FDR. By 1938, when he and Katja decided to move there permanently, he had extensive contacts and an offer to teach at Princeton. Heinrich, who crossed the Atlantic reluctantly in 1940, never really found his feet in the New World. By 1941, the two were reunited in Hollywood. The later letters show how much the balance of their relationship had shifted. Thomas was famous and financially secure, Heinrich an unemployed screenwriter who could not find a publisher and depended on hand-outs from his younger brother.”

(…)

“homas found himself branded a Communist ‘dupe’, attacked in Time magazine and Congress for fellow-travelling. In 1952, three years before his death, he returned with Katja to Europe.
On Heinrich’s 70th birthday in 1941, Thomas had welcomed his brother to America: ‘When the homeland becomes foreign, the foreign becomes the homeland. Most profoundly foreign to us today is Germany, that savage, reckless, and disintegrated country of our heritage and language.’ Four years later, returning the birthday honours, Heinrich quoted Thomas’s well-known remark upon arrival in the US – ‘Where I am, there is German culture’. The claim could be made of both men. The arc of their lives, from Lübeck on the Trave to exile, from enmity to partnership, had a representative quality – right to the end. Heinrich died as a Czech citizen in the US, Thomas as an American citizen in Switzerland.”

Read the article here.

Happiness is no fun. A married life can be worse than happiness.

Perhaps time to read Heinrich Mann.

And I would love to die as an American citizen in Switzerland.

It’s my dream.

One of my many dreams.