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克劳斯·曼：真性情的才子
The son of Mann
The son of Mann
By Allan Massie
Wednesday, 13th February 2008
Klaus Mann’s Journals don’t pretend to be a work of literature; they are jottings, records of day-to-day existence, full of names many of which will mean nothing to readers today, even, I suppose, to German ones. ‘I suddenly thought,’ he wrote in January 1933, ‘that these notes could seem terribly superficial to anyone who chanced on them, since they consist of no more than facts such as they are, in no way developed.’ Yet it is precisely in the lack of pretension that the fascination of these Journals rests. The volume covering the years 1931-36 (the only one I have yet read) gives by reason of its casual and generally unreflective immediacy the most vivid and touching record of the response of a highly intelligent young man to the turmoil and horror of that time. It was only a couple of days after he remarked on the terrible superficiality of his notes that Hitler was named Chancellor: ‘terrified; I didn’t believe it was possible.’ Nevertheless that night he went to the theatre in Berlin, took a train to Munich and slept well in his couchette. A few weeks later he would be an exile, not able to return to Germany till he did so as an officer in the American army in 1945.
Klaus was the eldest son of Thomas Mann, who now seems (to me anyway) more and more certainly one of the two or three greatest novelists of the 20th century. The family were close. Though Klaus was quicker than his father to come out in open opposition to the Nazis, and this made him sometimes impatient, his love and respect for ‘the Magician’ (the name by which the Mann children always referred to Thomas) were never diminished. He was himself a talented journalist, editor, dramatist, song-writer and novelist. Mephisto, if less substantial than his father’s greatest novels, is a brave and brilliant work, the opening chapter describing a grand ball held to celebrate Goering’s 43rd birthday is a wonderful piece of bravura and biting sarcasm. The Nazi leaders are unmistakable, though not identified by name:
As for Goering,
Mephisto was written in 1936 and published in Amsterdam. The central figure was a thinly-disguised portrait of the actor Gustaf Grundgens, once briefly married to Erika Mann, once a Communist, now Goering’s protégé. Klaus Mann said his purpose was ‘to analyse the abject type of treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth’. The type, found under all dictatorships is not extinct today, present also in democracies. It took courage for a German to write and publish such a novel in 1936, even without Germany. We are all — of course — anti- Fascists today. Things were different then. Klaus Mann’s fate, if the Nazis had ever caught up with him, doesn’t bear thinking on.
He was everything the Nazis detested and feared: Jewish on his mother’s side, intellectual, a Social Democrat, a modernist; also what they, and many respectable people, considered a decadent: promiscuously homosexual and addicted to drugs and alcohol. (He accepted all this as ‘an intensification of life’. It’s interesting, by the way, to see how easy access to drugs then was; you just went to the pharmacy for your morphine). At the same time he felt, like so many Germans, a powerful attraction to the idea of suicide, eventually succumbing to it in 1949. Several of his friends had gone that way previously, half-a-dozen at least being noted in the years covered by the first volume of his Journals.
Despite this, one is astonished and pleased by his resilience and vitality, his intellectual and political commitment. No doubt it helped to be Thomas Mann’s son, to be most of the time free from financial anxieties. But his life in exile must have been trying, always on the move, the model of the ‘engaged’ writer. He was endlessly sociable too, and rarely seems to have spent a day alone. One wonders at the quantity of work he achieved. Despite its being a bare record of his life day-to-day, one gets a keen impression of his character and personality, a strong sense of how one would have wished to know him and would have liked him. A touch of envy too, for his certainty that literature mattered. There are nice glimpses of other writers: Joseph Roth and Isherwood, for instance. For me, this Journal is a very happy discovery, to which I shall return frequently.
《克劳斯·曼日记》无意以文学作品的面目示人；它是札记，是生命历程的实录，对于今天的读者，甚至对于德国读者来说，日记中出现的很多名字只是红尘众生而已。1933年1月，他写道：“我突然想到，偶然读到这些日记的人会觉得它十分肤浅，因为它不过是实事实录，未做任何润色升华。”然而这些日记的动人之处恰恰在于不虚饰。正是以这种漫不经心、不假思索和直截了当的叙述风格， 1931-36年卷（我只读了这一卷）极为生动地记录了一个才华横溢的青年对那个时代的动荡和恐怖所作出的反应，读来打动人心。在他评价日记内容十分肤浅之后仅仅几天，希特勒被任命为总理，他写道：“可怕；我不信这是真的。”然而那天晚上，他去了柏林的剧院，还搭火车去了慕尼黑，而且在卧铺上安然入睡。几周后，他成了流亡者，直到1945年才以美军军官的身份重返德国。
克劳斯是托马斯·曼的长子。现在似乎（至少在我看来）越来越可以肯定，在20世纪最伟大的前两、三位小说家中，托马斯·曼必居其一。曼家成员关系亲密。虽然克劳斯先于父亲公开反对纳粹，有时对父亲还不表明立场颇不耐烦，但他对“魔术师”（托马斯·曼的孩子们一直这么称呼父亲）的爱和尊敬从未减弱。克劳斯是一名出色的记者、编辑、剧作家、歌曲作者和小说家。虽说不及其父成就非凡的小说那般宏大，克劳斯写的《梅菲斯特升官记》仍是一部大胆而优秀的作品。这部小说第一章描写为祝贺戈林43岁生日而举行的盛大舞会，华美的文字与辛辣的嘲讽相得益彰。书中的纳粹头目虽然没用真名，却一目了然：比如戈林。
《梅菲斯特升官记》写于1936年，在阿姆斯特丹出版。主人公影射了演员古斯塔夫·格吕根斯，格吕根斯与艾丽卡·曼（译者注：托马斯·曼的女儿）有过短暂婚史，曾经加入德国共产党，后来成为戈林的亲信。克劳斯·曼说他写这部小说的目的是“剖析知识份子中的丑类，他们靠背叛、靠出卖才华换取廉价的名声和一时的财富。”这类人，现今在所有的独裁体制中仍未绝迹，在民主国家也同样存在。对于一个德国人来说，在1936年写作并出版这样一部小说——即使不是在德国本土写作和出版——需要极大的勇气。今天我们当然都反对法西斯；而当时的情形则不同。如果被纳粹抓住，克劳斯·曼的命运简直不敢想象。
他具备纳粹所憎恨和害怕的一切特质：犹太血统（母系）、知识份子、社会民主党人、现代主义者；还被纳粹，以及许多体面人，认为是生活堕落：滥交的同性恋者、瘾君子、酒鬼。（他把这种生活方式看作是“一种生命强化剂”。顺便提一句，有趣的是当时得到毒品太容易了；你只需走进药店就能买到吗啡。）同时，像许许多多德国人一样，自杀的念头强烈地吸引着他，他最终在1949年自杀。此前，他的多位朋友已经以这样的方式离世。在日记的第一卷中，他至少记录了六位朋友的自杀。
尽管如此，他的韧性和生命力、他的智识和政治立场却令人惊异、让人快慰。无疑，托马斯·曼之子的身份帮了他，使他大部分时间能免于经济困顿。但流亡生活一定是艰难的，总是漂泊不定，这是“靠写作谋生”的作家的生活常态。他没完没了地出入社交圈，几乎没有一天是独自渡过的，他能有时间写出那么多作品真令人称奇。虽然他的日记完全是坦诚的写实之作，读者却能从字里行间强烈地感受到他鲜明的个性，极想了解他、喜欢他。读者还会对他产生一丝嫉妒，羡慕他历尽沧桑依然坚信文学的份量。日记中有对其他作家的有趣描写，比如约瑟夫·若斯（Joseph Roth）和伊舍尔伍德（Isherwood）。对我而言，这部日记是一个快乐的发现，我会经常重新翻阅。
The son of Mann
The son of Mann
By Allan Massie
Wednesday, 13th February 2008
Klaus Mann’s Journals don’t pretend to be a work of literature; they are jottings, records of day-to-day existence, full of names many of which will mean nothing to readers today, even, I suppose, to German ones. ‘I suddenly thought,’ he wrote in January 1933, ‘that these notes could seem terribly superficial to anyone who chanced on them, since they consist of no more than facts such as they are, in no way developed.’ Yet it is precisely in the lack of pretension that the fascination of these Journals rests. The volume covering the years 1931-36 (the only one I have yet read) gives by reason of its casual and generally unreflective immediacy the most vivid and touching record of the response of a highly intelligent young man to the turmoil and horror of that time. It was only a couple of days after he remarked on the terrible superficiality of his notes that Hitler was named Chancellor: ‘terrified; I didn’t believe it was possible.’ Nevertheless that night he went to the theatre in Berlin, took a train to Munich and slept well in his couchette. A few weeks later he would be an exile, not able to return to Germany till he did so as an officer in the American army in 1945.
Klaus was the eldest son of Thomas Mann, who now seems (to me anyway) more and more certainly one of the two or three greatest novelists of the 20th century. The family were close. Though Klaus was quicker than his father to come out in open opposition to the Nazis, and this made him sometimes impatient, his love and respect for ‘the Magician’ (the name by which the Mann children always referred to Thomas) were never diminished. He was himself a talented journalist, editor, dramatist, song-writer and novelist. Mephisto, if less substantial than his father’s greatest novels, is a brave and brilliant work, the opening chapter describing a grand ball held to celebrate Goering’s 43rd birthday is a wonderful piece of bravura and biting sarcasm. The Nazi leaders are unmistakable, though not identified by name:
As for Goering,
Mephisto was written in 1936 and published in Amsterdam. The central figure was a thinly-disguised portrait of the actor Gustaf Grundgens, once briefly married to Erika Mann, once a Communist, now Goering’s protégé. Klaus Mann said his purpose was ‘to analyse the abject type of treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth’. The type, found under all dictatorships is not extinct today, present also in democracies. It took courage for a German to write and publish such a novel in 1936, even without Germany. We are all — of course — anti- Fascists today. Things were different then. Klaus Mann’s fate, if the Nazis had ever caught up with him, doesn’t bear thinking on.
He was everything the Nazis detested and feared: Jewish on his mother’s side, intellectual, a Social Democrat, a modernist; also what they, and many respectable people, considered a decadent: promiscuously homosexual and addicted to drugs and alcohol. (He accepted all this as ‘an intensification of life’. It’s interesting, by the way, to see how easy access to drugs then was; you just went to the pharmacy for your morphine). At the same time he felt, like so many Germans, a powerful attraction to the idea of suicide, eventually succumbing to it in 1949. Several of his friends had gone that way previously, half-a-dozen at least being noted in the years covered by the first volume of his Journals.
Despite this, one is astonished and pleased by his resilience and vitality, his intellectual and political commitment. No doubt it helped to be Thomas Mann’s son, to be most of the time free from financial anxieties. But his life in exile must have been trying, always on the move, the model of the ‘engaged’ writer. He was endlessly sociable too, and rarely seems to have spent a day alone. One wonders at the quantity of work he achieved. Despite its being a bare record of his life day-to-day, one gets a keen impression of his character and personality, a strong sense of how one would have wished to know him and would have liked him. A touch of envy too, for his certainty that literature mattered. There are nice glimpses of other writers: Joseph Roth and Isherwood, for instance. For me, this Journal is a very happy discovery, to which I shall return frequently.
《克劳斯·曼日记》无意以文学作品的面目示人；它是札记，是生命历程的实录，对于今天的读者，甚至对于德国读者来说，日记中出现的很多名字只是红尘众生而已。1933年1月，他写道：“我突然想到，偶然读到这些日记的人会觉得它十分肤浅，因为它不过是实事实录，未做任何润色升华。”然而这些日记的动人之处恰恰在于不虚饰。正是以这种漫不经心、不假思索和直截了当的叙述风格， 1931-36年卷（我只读了这一卷）极为生动地记录了一个才华横溢的青年对那个时代的动荡和恐怖所作出的反应，读来打动人心。在他评价日记内容十分肤浅之后仅仅几天，希特勒被任命为总理，他写道：“可怕；我不信这是真的。”然而那天晚上，他去了柏林的剧院，还搭火车去了慕尼黑，而且在卧铺上安然入睡。几周后，他成了流亡者，直到1945年才以美军军官的身份重返德国。
克劳斯是托马斯·曼的长子。现在似乎（至少在我看来）越来越可以肯定，在20世纪最伟大的前两、三位小说家中，托马斯·曼必居其一。曼家成员关系亲密。虽然克劳斯先于父亲公开反对纳粹，有时对父亲还不表明立场颇不耐烦，但他对“魔术师”（托马斯·曼的孩子们一直这么称呼父亲）的爱和尊敬从未减弱。克劳斯是一名出色的记者、编辑、剧作家、歌曲作者和小说家。虽说不及其父成就非凡的小说那般宏大，克劳斯写的《梅菲斯特升官记》仍是一部大胆而优秀的作品。这部小说第一章描写为祝贺戈林43岁生日而举行的盛大舞会，华美的文字与辛辣的嘲讽相得益彰。书中的纳粹头目虽然没用真名，却一目了然：比如戈林。
《梅菲斯特升官记》写于1936年，在阿姆斯特丹出版。主人公影射了演员古斯塔夫·格吕根斯，格吕根斯与艾丽卡·曼（译者注：托马斯·曼的女儿）有过短暂婚史，曾经加入德国共产党，后来成为戈林的亲信。克劳斯·曼说他写这部小说的目的是“剖析知识份子中的丑类，他们靠背叛、靠出卖才华换取廉价的名声和一时的财富。”这类人，现今在所有的独裁体制中仍未绝迹，在民主国家也同样存在。对于一个德国人来说，在1936年写作并出版这样一部小说——即使不是在德国本土写作和出版——需要极大的勇气。今天我们当然都反对法西斯；而当时的情形则不同。如果被纳粹抓住，克劳斯·曼的命运简直不敢想象。
他具备纳粹所憎恨和害怕的一切特质：犹太血统（母系）、知识份子、社会民主党人、现代主义者；还被纳粹，以及许多体面人，认为是生活堕落：滥交的同性恋者、瘾君子、酒鬼。（他把这种生活方式看作是“一种生命强化剂”。顺便提一句，有趣的是当时得到毒品太容易了；你只需走进药店就能买到吗啡。）同时，像许许多多德国人一样，自杀的念头强烈地吸引着他，他最终在1949年自杀。此前，他的多位朋友已经以这样的方式离世。在日记的第一卷中，他至少记录了六位朋友的自杀。
尽管如此，他的韧性和生命力、他的智识和政治立场却令人惊异、让人快慰。无疑，托马斯·曼之子的身份帮了他，使他大部分时间能免于经济困顿。但流亡生活一定是艰难的，总是漂泊不定，这是“靠写作谋生”的作家的生活常态。他没完没了地出入社交圈，几乎没有一天是独自渡过的，他能有时间写出那么多作品真令人称奇。虽然他的日记完全是坦诚的写实之作，读者却能从字里行间强烈地感受到他鲜明的个性，极想了解他、喜欢他。读者还会对他产生一丝嫉妒，羡慕他历尽沧桑依然坚信文学的份量。日记中有对其他作家的有趣描写，比如约瑟夫·若斯（Joseph Roth）和伊舍尔伍德（Isherwood）。对我而言，这部日记是一个快乐的发现，我会经常重新翻阅。
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