This autobiography by the son of Thomas Mann has a double value:-
first as a distinguished autobiography, a sensitive portrait of a
young man growing up in between-wars Germany, second as a loving
intimate portrait of his father. A vivid picture of what the first
war meant to a child, with its violent patriotism, its
deprivations; then the moral disorder of Berlin youth in the '20's
and his attempts to express himself against the rising tide of
fascism, one of the reasons for the family exile. Finally, the
measures taken in ?? and here to carry on the fight - now
epitomized in this autobiography as he waits to get into the Army,
in the U.S.A. Not always easy reading, but important as an
emotional and philosophical as well as factual record. (Kirkus
Reviews)
In this second installment of his autobiography (following Kind
dieser Zeit), Klaus Mann describes his childhood in the family of
Thomas Mann and his circle, his adolescence in the Weimar Republic,
and his experiences as a young homosexual and early opponent of
Nazism. He also describes how, after the Reichstag elections of
September 1930, friends and family began to discuss the looming
prospect of emigration and exile. When Stefan Zweig published an
article claiming that democracy was ineffective, Klaus replied: "I
want to have nothing, nothing at all to do with this perverse kind
of `radicalism.'" After hearing one of his working-class lovers in
a storm trooper's uniform say, "They are going to be the bosses and
that's all there is to it," Klaus fled to Paris in March of 1933.
He became one of one hundred thousand German refugees in France,
losing his publisher, friends and associates, and readers in the
process. He describes finding a German Jewish publisher in
Amsterdam and the difficulties of starting a journal of emigre
writing. In 1934, his German passport expired and he was forced to
renew temporary travel documents every six months. The President of
Czechoslovakia offered citizenship to the entire Mann family in
1936 but then Hitler invaded that country and Klaus emigrated to
the United States. Despite statelessness, bouts of syphilis and
drug abuse, neither his pace of travel nor publication slowed. His
novel Der Vulkan is among the most famous books about German exiles
during World War II but it sold only 300 copies. Klaus stopped
reading and writing German in the U.S. "The writer must not cling
with stubborn nostalgia to his mother tongue," he writes in The
Turning Point. He must "find a new vocabulary, a new set of rhythms
and devices, a new medium to articulate his sorrow and emotions,
his protests and his prayers." This extraordinary memoir, an
eyewitness account of the rise of Nazism by an out gay man, was
Klaus Mann's first book written in English.
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