THOMAS MANN IN AMERICA

1.

Thomas Mann was exiled from Nazi Germany before his second exile in the United States. Mann—like Vladimir Nabokov, an exile from Bolshevik Russia—came from a wealthy patrician background but lost almost everything when he was compelled to leave his native land: books, possessions, houses, money, publishers, audience, friends, and citizenship. Both authors were impressively learned and had sophisticated and devoted Jewish wives who chauffeured, helped, and protected them. After leaving Europe, both established a new life in America: Mann from 1938 to 1952, Nabokov from 1940 to 1961.

But there were also important differences, and Thomas Mann was in a much more advantageous position. Both his names sounded American, which made it easier to fit into a new country (things would have been more difficult if he’d been named, like Hitler’s father, Alois Schicklgruber). Mann was distinguished looking and had a beautiful wife to whom, despite his strong attraction to handsome young men, he remained faithful. His talented older children, Erika and Klaus, were also well-known writers. Mann, who knew some English, had the dignity of a Spanish cardinal and the aura of a German general. He’d won the Nobel Prize in 1929, enjoyed an international reputation, and had a prestigious American publisher, Alfred Knopf, who was allowed to call him “Tommy.” He was still comparatively well off, earned substantial fees from lecture tours, and built a splendid house and garden in Los Angeles.

The acknowledged leader of the German exiles, Mann had influential political connections and was invited to spend two days in Franklin Roosevelt’s White House. After he became an American citizen—just after D-Day, June 6, 1944—Mann spoke at a fundraiser for the president’s fourth-term election campaign. Mann was transformed from a German nationalist in World War I to a good European between the wars and to an advocate of American democracy in World War II. Inspired by Erika and Klaus, who were passionate antifascists, he was a courageous and effective anti-Nazi propagandist in his personal letters, political essays, public speeches, and radio broadcasts to England and America. He did not portray American life in his fiction, but continued to write in German—though his books were burned in his own country—and greatly enhanced his reputation with a major novel, Doctor Faustus (1947). (Even Mann could not equal the stupendous success of the novel by the Catholic convert and émigré Franz Werfel, The Song of Bernadette [1942], which also became a popular movie.)

Nabokov, by contrast, had published his Russian novels in Berlin and was unknown in the United States. Desperately poor in Europe, he was reduced to giving language and tennis lessons. Living in cramped flats, he often had to write in the bathroom. An expert in butterflies as well as in literature, he worked as an entomologist at Harvard and as a teacher at Wellesley and Cornell. He lived modestly and emphasized his transience by renting a different house every year, but became a citizen in 1945. More dashing and flamboyant than Mann, he had a number of love affairs, but offered his wife the compensatory and pro forma dedications of all his books. Though his father (assassinated in 1922) had been a leading Russian statesman, Nabokov, more of a loner than Mann, was not politically engaged.

Both writers returned to Europe to live in Switzerland—Mann for political reasons, Nabokov after he’d earned enough money from Lolita to give up teaching. Mann’s postwar return to a comfortable villa in German-speaking Zurich for the last three years of his life reprised the five prewar years he’d spent there. Nabokov, who’d lived in Berlin and in Paris, settled into a luxurious hotel suite in French-speaking Montreux. Mann’s daughter Erika and Nabokov’s son Dmitri provided valuable assistance when their fathers were alive and kept the flame of their reputations burning after their deaths.

The situation of Mann’s older brother, Heinrich, was more difficult than Nabokov’s. In 1940 he had a dangerous escape, on foot through the Pyrenees, from Nazi-occupied France before taking a ship from Lisbon to New York. Though a well-known novelist in Europe, he had no reputation in America: no translations, no money, no knowledge of English. His health was poor and his second marriage, to Nelly Kröger, was terrible. She was euphemistically said to have been a barmaid, though her duties went well beyond the bar. The dignified Thomas hated Heinrich’s stupid, vulgar, sleazy, drunken, and unfaithful wife, who once opened her front door to greet her guests stark naked. Even more egregiously, the always unwelcome Nelly dared to interrupt Thomas’s conversation at the dinner table. Thomas got Heinrich a generous one-year, six-thousand-dollar job as a writer at Warner Bros., though his brother had nothing to contribute to the studio. But Thomas had to support him and his wife—a humiliating situation for Heinrich—after that sinecure evaporated.

Other refugees—the German-Jewish playwright and former political prisoner Ernst Toller, the German-Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin, and the Austrian-Jewish novelists Joseph Roth and Stefan Zweig—had even worse fates. Overcome by fear and depression, Roth drank himself to death in Paris in 1939, Toller hanged himself in a New York hotel in 1940, Benjamin poisoned himself in Spain in 1940, Zweig and his wife poisoned themselves in Brazil in 1942. As Mann wrote in 1940 about the epidemic of deaths, “in Poland, Norway, Denmark, Holland, and Belgium an as yet untabulated number of our friends were either shot on the spot or took their own lives in order to escape the kind of death Hitler had in store for them.”

All the Jewish writers had been forced out of Germany. Mann, if he wished, could have stayed—like the actor Gustaf Gründgens (Erika’s first husband and the model for the antihero of Klaus’s novel Mephisto) and the Nobel Prize–winner Knut Hamsun in occupied Norway—and profitably collaborated with the Nazis. But he hated Hitler, left voluntarily, and suffered greatly in exile. Emphasizing his role as cultural leader of the exiles, he famously declared on arriving in the United States in 1938, “Where I am, there is Germany.”

2.

Mann left Europe for America during the “low dishonest decade” of the 1930s. The catastrophic prelude to World War II, during which the Allies made futile concessions to Germany, was marked by the Italian conquest of Abyssinia, the Japanese invasion of China, and the fascist victory in the Spanish Civil War, as well as by the Nazi occupation of the Rhineland, the Anschluss of Austria, the disastrous Hitler–Chamberlain Munich agreement, the occupation of the Czech Sudetenland, the duplicitous Hitler–Stalin nonaggression pact, and the German invasion of Poland that began the war on September 1, 1939. In the first years of the war the Germans conquered Europe. The tide turned in late 1942 with the Allied victories at El Alamein in North Africa and at Stalingrad on the Russian front. The postwar period in America was dominated by the Cold War with the Soviet Union, the anticommunist witch hunts, the Korean War, and the Berlin Wall.

Mann had been lecturing in Europe when he first went into exile in 1933 and did not return to Germany. In 1938, while lecturing in the United States and traveling on a Czech passport, he went into his second exile and did not return to Europe. He then remained in the America that Franz Kafka had only imagined. During his first year Mann accepted an appointment at Princeton at a full professor’s salary of six thousand dollars and then extended it for a second year, with a commitment to give five lectures on German literature. He lived at 65 Stockton Street, and was a congenial companion and political ally of Albert Einstein, Hermann Broch, and the critic Erich Kahler. Mann reacted very positively to America and noted, “it is a blessing to me to sink roots into this soil, and every new tie confirms me in my feeling of being at home. . . . I find people here good-natured to the point of generosity in comparison with Europeans, and feel pleasantly sheltered in their midst.” He was thrilled by flying over the Rockies from Denver to San Francisco and by the special treatment he got on the way to speak at Berkeley—a real American journey: “The two-hour flight, with an excellent breakfast above the clouds and the magnificent mountains, was a remarkable experience. Another was being fetched from the airport by a police guard and being driven with sirens howling through all the lights.”

Mann was also eased into American life by his formidable Jewish patron Agnes Meyer (1887–1970), the intellectual wife of the powerful, multimillionaire owner of the Washington Post. The daughter of German émigrés and fluent in the language, she frequently corresponded with and entertained Mann in her luxurious city and country mansions, translated and publicized his speeches, reviewed his books, and planned to write what he considered an intrusive book about him. She also criticized and tried to translate his novels, objected to his political views and (as the former lover of the French poet Paul Claudel) even tried to seduce him. Agnes also provided many valuable services. She introduced him to high-ranking government officials and used her considerable influence to get him lucrative positions at Princeton and the Library of Congress.

But Agnes was a bountiful tyrant. Mann courted and flattered the indispensable patron in his letters, but tried to keep her at a tolerable distance. He also recorded in his diary how much he dreaded her all-too-intimate visits and hated their stupid and humiliating friendship. He was unable to disguise his true feelings and Agnes told his son Golo that it was clear from Mann’s letters that he really despised her. Thomas then wryly told Golo, “since these letters are full of devotion, admiration, gratitude, concern, even gallantry, that is a very intelligent observation.” Their troubled relations reached a crisis in May 1943 when Mann, weary of bending the knee and swallowing the toad, could bear no more of her officious meddling and tried (in vain) to sever their relations. “Nothing was right, nothing enough,” he complained, “you always wanted me different from the way I am. You had not the humour, or the respect, or the discretion, to take me as I am. You always wanted to educate, dominate, improve, redeem me. In vain, I warned you.”

Once settled in America, Mann concentrated on writing, propaganda, and refugees. Recognizing the symbolic as well as the literary importance of his work in exile, he wrote every day with amazing tenacity and iron discipline, in hotels or on trains, while traveling, lecturing, or on holiday—and even when he was ill. He especially liked writing in a protective tent or wicker chair on the northern beaches of Holland and Sweden. When at home his busy routine was as regular as Immanuel Kant’s. From nine to twelve he wrote a page or two, about five hundred words a day, which he rarely had to change. He composed the next day’s work in his head while taking an hour’s walk with his dog. He then had a leisurely lunch and a short nap. In the afternoon he received visitors and took part in political discussions, answered his vast correspondence (with the help of secretaries), and prepared his lectures and broadcasts. If there was no dinner party, concert, opera, play, or film to attend, he’d play music on his violin or phonograph, and then read for a while before going to bed. On special occasions, for his grown children and guests, he gave dramatic readings from his work in progress. His literary creation in America equaled the fruitful twelve-year period from Buddenbrooks to Death in Venice and the next twelve years from Death in Venice to The Magic Mountain.

Mann took up his current novel, The Beloved Returns (1939), exactly as he would have done if he’d remained in Switzerland. “I must continue my work as well as possible,” he firmly wrote, “and at the same time adjust to entirely new conditions. That places quite a strain on my energies. . . . I am determined to continue my life with maximum persistence, exactly as I have always done, unaltered by events which injure me but cannot humiliate me and turn me from my purposes.” In that novel he invented a comment that Goethe had supposedly made in the early nineteenth century and applied it to the abject submission to Hitler by contemporary Germans: “they abandon themselves credulously to every fanatic scoundrel who speaks to their baser qualities, confirms them in their vices, teaches them nationality means barbarism and isolation.” He was delighted when Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at the Nuremberg war crimes trials, quoted this passage as if it had been written by Goethe rather than by Mann.

In 1943 Mann published Joseph the Provider, the final volume in his monumental Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy, which he began in 1926. This novel also reflected contemporary events by implicitly comparing the famine years in Egypt to the Depression in America, and Joseph’s bountiful salvation of the starving country to Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal rescue of the country from economic disaster.

The best prose writers of World War I—Ernest Hemingway, Robert Graves, Richard Aldington, and Erich Remarque—had taken a decade to recreate their military experience and did not publish their work until 1929. But in Doctor Faustus (1947) Mann achieved impressive historical objectivity and wrote his great novel while World War II was still being fought. The fictional biography of the syphilitic composer Adrian Leverkühn, based on the life of Nietzsche, runs parallel to the twelve-year rise and fall of the Third Reich. With the help of the Book-of-the-Month Club, this extremely intellectual German book sold an astonishing 250,000 copies in America.

The Holy Sinner (1951), the fourth novel Mann completed in America, reflected his political life and described the long penance of a good man who had inadvertently transgressed the law. Contrasting German- with English-language writers and confirming Scott Fitzgerald’s aphorism in The Last Tycoon, “there are no second acts in American lives,” Mann loftily announced, “Here in America the writers are short-lived; they write one good book, follow it with two poor ones, and then are finished.” But he himself was in for the long haul: “‘Life’ in the Goethean sense is in our tradition alone; it is less a matter of vitality than of intelligence and will.”

Mann’s novels have only three minor American characters. Imma Spoelmann, the daughter of an American millionaire (a character actually based on his young wife Katia), marries Prince Klaus Heinrich in Royal Highness (1909). The organist Wendell Kretschmar, born into a German community in Pennsylvania, is Leverkühn’s music teacher in Doctor Faustus. The rather bland young Ken Keaton becomes romantically involved with Rosalie Tümmler in The Black Swan (1953). America did not significantly influence Mann’s work, but he did take an active part in American cultural life.

From 1938 through 1941 Mann also opened a second front, fighting against the prevailing isolationism in his new country and its most notable spokesman, the heroic aviator Charles Lindbergh. Mann was instrumental in rousing the United States from its military torpor and warning it about the dangers of a Nazi-dominated Europe. George Orwell, reviewing Mann’s political speeches in Order of the Day in September 1943, also feared the disappearance of truth (a major theme in Nineteen Eighty-Four) and gave an excellent summary of Mann’s ideas, which precisely matched his own: “Thomas Mann watches the European tragedy with an unshakable certainty that this horror will come to an end and common decency will ultimately triumph. . . . He is a middle-class Liberal, a believer in the freedom of the intellect, in human brotherhood; above all, in the existence of objective truth. . . . He never budges from his ‘bourgeois’ contention that the individual is important, that freedom is worth having, that European culture is worth preserving.”

Mann’s prestige and authority were greatly enhanced by his invitation, with Katia and Erika, to stay overnight at the White House in January 1941. (He had previously attended a White House dinner on June 29, 1935.) “The dizzying height was the cocktail in the study,” he proudly wrote, “while the other dinner guests had to cool their heels below.” His shrewd analysis of Roosevelt, a “wheelchair Caesar,” concluded that the president had a “mixture of craft, good nature, self-indulgence, desire to please, and sincere faith.” That same month Mann optimistically concluded that his strenuous efforts had been productive and that America “is just beginning slowly, slowly, against ponderous resistance . . . to come to an understanding of the situation and the pressing necessities of the times.”

Heinrich’s poverty, obscurity, and isolation, and his miserable marriage to Nelly were, until her death, continuous and insoluble problems. Mann also devoted a great deal of time—a tremendous distraction from his writing—to generously helping many German-speaking and mainly Jewish refugees, both in Europe and America, with visas, money, jobs, and grants. “Our house has become a rescue bureau for people in danger,” he said, “people crying for help, people going under.” His daughter Monika was torpedoed at sea, clung to the edge of a boat for twenty hours and saw her husband drown, literally going under before her eyes. Mann took his responsibilities seriously and did everything in his power to help, protect, free, and support the refugees. In September 1942, he was one of the first people in America to verify reports that the Nazis were exterminating the European Jews. America had not only saved Mann’s life but made it possible for him to save the lives of others.

But Mann himself, though living in America, did not feel safe. The mandarin even considered fleeing to China (which had been conquered by the Japanese). In June 1940 he wrote to his old friend, the conductor Bruno Walter (who had a weird affair with Erika Mann), “If Hitler wins, not a single country on the Continent will be accessible to us again, and I would be surprised if America too did not also become impossible for us. What do you think of Peking? It has already been recommended to me several times.” When the Japanese attacked Hawaii, Mann exclaimed, “Pearl Harbor hit me hard. The loss of the ships can be borne. But so many precious young lives! How could the base have been caught so much off guard?” Instead of rejoicing that America had been forced to enter the war and would finally save Europe from Hitler’s domination, he humanely mourned the loss of lives and expressed amazement that America had been so disastrously taken by surprise. The war immediately made Mann, not yet a citizen, an enemy alien, though he joked, “Actually, I’m pretty friendly.”

Mann earned most of his income from his exhausting, annual, five-week lecture tours, an ordeal Auden wittily described in “On the Circuit” (1963):

Mann spoke in all the major cities and universities in America, from a tumultuous crowd of eighteen thousand at Madison Square Garden in New York to minimal audiences in remote outposts like the high school in Topeka, Kansas, and the State College for Women in Denton, Texas. But wherever he went the hosts demanded the maximum from their captive. “These Americans certainly know how to bleed you dry,” the sixty-seven-year-old traveler complained to Agnes Meyer, “not to say grind you down; they themselves have no nerves at all, and it never occurs to them that someone else might tire. One party lasted literally from six to one o’clock: dinner, followed by a mass reception.” The intellectual nadir of his California years was a visit from the teenaged Susan Sontag. Presumptuous and precocious but way out of her depth, she found Mann “courteous and correct and boring.”

Despite his lack of bonhomie, his inherent stiffness and reserve, Mann gave masterly performances on the platform. He wrote Agnes, with astonishment, “in Montreal the police had to be called out when the overflow crowd refused to move and was threatening to crush in the doors. In Boston something like 1,000 persons had to be turned away. I ask myself every time: What do these people expect? After all, I’m not Caruso. Won’t they be completely disappointed? But they aren’t. They declare it was the greatest thing they have ever heard.” He could lecture in English from a translated speech, but needed Erika’s help in fielding questions from the audience. “I love this child immensely,” he told Agnes. “The mixture, or the existence side by side, of a vein of comedy and a vein of dark ardency in her nature has something deeply touching and appealing to me.” Erika also helped him prepare his fifty-five wartime broadcasts in German, recorded at the NBC studios in Hollywood. They were relayed by the BBC to listeners inside wartime Germany and later published as Listen, Germany! (1945). Mann reminded people brave enough to hear the illegal broadcasts that there was still a free Germany among the exiles and that only a complete rejection of the Nazi leaders could rehabilitate the country.

In December 1941, just after America entered the war, Mann accepted a position—underwritten by Agnes Meyer—as Consultant in German literature at the Library of Congress. For an annual salary of five thousand dollars, which relieved his financial problems, Mann visited Washington for two weeks a year, gave a lecture, and advised the Librarian (the poet Archibald MacLeish) about their collections in German literature. In the 1940s Mann gave highbrow but well-received talks such as, “The War and the Future,” “Germany and the Germans,” “Goethe and Democracy,” “Nietzsche’s Philosophy” and “The Theme of the Joseph Novels,” which were posthumously published by the Library of Congress in 1963. Mann hated school and never went to university. But his popularity and respect in America were confirmed by the seven honorary doctorates (which brought no monetary compensation) that were awarded by Berkeley, Columbia, Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Rutgers, and Hobart College. These doctorates replaced the one from Bonn University that had been revoked in 1936 after the Nazis deprived him of German citizenship.

3.

The appointment at the Library of Congress freed Mann from teaching duties at Princeton and enabled him to move to the milder weather of Los Angeles. The city reminded him of the climate and scenery of Egypt and Palestine, and helped him finish Joseph the Provider. He first rented a modest place at 740 Amalfi Drive in Brentwood, and then built a grand house, on the cliffs overlooking the ocean, at 1550 San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades. He liked California and found the “hilly landscape strikingly similar to Tuscany. I have what I wanted—the light; the dry, always refreshing warmth; the spaciousness compared with Princeton.” But only ten months later he became somewhat disenchanted with his new paradise. Comparing the Technicolor foliage to the more subtle display of fall hues in Switzerland and on the East Coast, he said, “I liked it better in Küsnacht and even in Princeton. Here everything blooms in violet and grape colors that look rather made of paper.” Still, California had many advantages. “Perhaps the sunniness and vividness of this region, this easy living and somewhat slack oversized seaside resort, is helpful,” he remarked. “The strange oceanic desert climate here still often tires me, but at the same time sharpens the appetite.” He also boasted of the semitropical winters, rather like the south of France, as he walked beneath the swaying palm trees and gazed across the azure Pacific where great naval battles were being fought in the Coral Sea and at Midway: “I went walking without an overcoat on my favorite promenade above the ocean, sat a long while on a bench in the sun—it is bearable at this season—and looked dreamily out at the blue theater of war.”

Mann, a great movie fan and friend of Charlie Chaplin, preferred the glamour of Hollywood to the dry academic life in Princeton. Most of the German exiles had settled in southern California and gathered in the stimulating salon of Greta Garbo’s screenwriter, Salka Viertel. Mann was then reunited with many old friends: the writers Franz Werfel, Bruno Frank, Lion Feuchtwanger, and Mann’s old political adversary Bertolt Brecht, as well as the film director William Dieterle and, for musical help with Doctor Faustus, Bruno Walter, Igor Stravinsky, and Arnold Schönberg. Mann, who didn’t feel entirely at ease in an English-speaking ambience, remained cocooned in the German colony. (It’s a pity that he never knew the most cultured and intellectual young Austrian directors, Billy Wilder and Fred Zinnemann.) Mann did not become close to any American writers but had some contact with three English émigrés: W. H. Auden and through him Christopher Isherwood (both were homosexual and spoke German) and Aldous Huxley. Mann praised Huxley’s novels and essays but roundly condemned the influential but pernicious drug-induced mysticism of The Doors of Perception (1954).

The postwar period brought a series of crises and deaths. In April 1946, while completing Doctor Faustus, Mann miraculously survived a life-threatening lung cancer operation in Chicago, which tested his characteristic “sympathy with death.” Like the patients he’d described in The Magic Mountain, he had a pneumothorax procedure and, after a rib and two-thirds of his lung were removed, joined the Half-Lung Club. He was allowed to smoke after he recovered and (like Hans Castorp) soon resumed his daily quota of cigars.

When Nelly Mann committed suicide in 1944, Heinrich was shattered. Thomas, relieved and even pleased, coldly said, “My brother has (fortunately) lost his wife. . . . It was high time that this union was dissolved through death. It was ruinous.” Franz Werfel and Bruno Frank died the following year. Mann had always had a curiously aloof and impersonal connection with his oldest son, Klaus, a homosexual and drug addict who committed suicide (like Mann’s two sisters) in Cannes in May 1949. Klaus had enjoyed the considerable advantages of Thomas’s culture, wealth, fame, prestige, and influence, but found it difficult to free himself from his father’s domination, establish an independent life, and create his own identity. “My relationship to him was difficult,” Mann told Hermann Hesse, “and not without feelings of guilt, for my very existence cast a shadow on him from the start.” More angry than sympathetic about Klaus’s suicide, Mann felt his son had shown a selfish lack of concern for Katia and Erika and “should not have done this to them.” Heinrich—Thomas’s last strong though troubled tie in California— died in March 1950 before he could return to a lucrative post in East Germany.

Mann’s fourteen years in America began well and ended badly. He mistakenly thought that in the democracy that had just defeated fascism he was free to express his own beliefs (as guaranteed by the Constitution), oppose the anticommunist witch-hunts led by Joseph McCarthy and Richard Nixon, and work for world peace. Though the Communist Party was not illegal, anyone labeled a communist would be personally and professionally ruined. Mann badly misjudged the hostile political climate during the Cold War and—in a notable contrast to his caution about speaking against Hitler’s regime from 1933 to 1936—acted boldly and provocatively.

In Los Angeles in September 1947, Mann bravely opposed the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC), which was investigating communist infiltration in the movie industry. He supported the Committee for the First Amendment, organized by the film director John Huston, to fight threats of a blacklist and of censorship and to defend the rights of citizens to express their ideas and join legal political groups. Mann refuted the charges against Hollywood, compared the witchhunts to Nazi persecutions and declared: “I have the honor to expose myself as a hostile witness. I testify that I am very much interested in the moving-picture industry and since my arrival in the United States nine years ago, I have seen a great many Hollywood films. If communist propaganda had been smuggled into them it must have been most thoroughly buried. I, for one, never noticed anything of the sort. . . . As an American citizen of German birth I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency.’ . . . That is how it started in Germany.”

In 1949 Mann visited Weimar in East Germany to receive the Goethe Prize and sent birthday greetings to the East German poet and Minister of Culture Johannes Becher. He attended a dinner for the black communist scholar W. E. B. Du Bois, and joined an appeal for Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, who were soon executed for treason. In 1951 he joined a Peace Crusade with the popular black singer Paul Robeson, an outspoken communist who’d appeared in Red Square. In April, Mann’s name—along with those of Albert Einstein, Lion Feuchtwanger, Frank Lloyd Wright, Norman Mailer, and Marlon Brando—appeared on a list issued by HUAC of those “affiliated with various peace organizations or Communist fronts.” HUAC, quite typically, made no distinction between peace groups and communist groups, and Mann’s statement that he was a noncommunist rather than an anticommunist fell on deaf ears. Finally, Mann vowed not to make any more political statements, which could be dangerously distorted, and wryly remarked, “the world needs peace—but I need it too.”

The Korean War, fought between 1950 and 1953, intensified postwar anticommunism and created an even more hostile atmosphere for Mann. As Anthony Heilbut wrote, “the Beverly-Wilshire Hotel refused to rent its facilities to a political group because of his participation; the Library of Congress cancelled his scheduled lecture. As Mann joined protests against the jailing of the Hollywood Ten and the firing of schoolteachers suspected of being Communists, he found ‘the media had been closed to him.’ ”

His ninety-nine-page FBI file helps to explain why Mann, especially sensitive to criticism as a German-born exile, was driven out of America. Like all FBI files of that time, it contained many false statements based solely on hearsay evidence, deliberately distorted the victim’s views, and refused to see the difference between a liberal and communist. The file included biographical information about Mann, reported his speeches, and criticized his sponsorship for entrance to the United States of a Polish writer whom it called “a Communist and possibly a German espionage agent.” It listed Mann’s well-intentioned but gullible support of communist front organizations, and even demeaned his literary reputation by quoting a misguided middlebrow review in the New York Times of June 6, 1947, which criticized Mann’s “ponderous and turgid style” and “desperate solemnity.”

The FBI condemned Mann’s idealistic speech “The Coming Victory of Democracy” (1938) as “strongly radical, and particularly strongly pro-USSR,” a country that was then an anti-Nazi ally. It quoted Mann’s ill-advised statement in the Los Angeles Times of June 9, 1948, that the highly respected Marshall Plan—conceived by a former five-star general and President Truman’s secretary of state—was merely “a means of paying off European countries to abandon socialism [a dirty word] and arm them for possible war against Russia.” He compounded the felony by warning patriotic Americans that the United States today was “dangerously close to a fascist police state.” Confusing him with Heinrich, the FBI reported that Thomas was awaiting funds that would enable him to go back to East Germany.

The FBI file also included several libelous attacks in extreme right-wing journals by Mann’s bête noire, the Berlin-born émigré journalist Eugene Tillinger (1907–66). Going back to World War I in his exposé, “The Moral Eclipse of Thomas Mann” (Plain Talk, December 1949), he showed “Mann’s record to be that of an erstwhile champion of the Kaiser’s Kultur, of an early appeaser of Goebbels’s ‘culture,’ and of an upholder of the Soviet school of amorality.” Tillinger also wrote, in the New Leader of June 18, 1951, “when I recently exposed Thomas Mann as an upholder of Soviet amorality, calling attention to his long record as a signer of pro-Communist appeals and supporter of pro-Communist causes, the novelist, infuriated, claimed that he had become the innocent victim of a ‘witch hunt.’ . . . Mann seems definitely to have lost all sense of decency. . . . Mann’s outburst extolling the notorious Stalinist agent [Johannes] Becher . . . explodes, once and for all, the great myth of Mann as a ‘loyal fighter for democracy’ and opponent of totalitarianism.”

Using Tillinger’s attacks as ammunition, the FBI called Mann “one of the world’s most noted Communists.” Though Mann, in the New York Times of April 11, 1951, “specifically denied charges of Communist front activities contained in an article by Eugene Tillinger,” he was forced into the impossible position of trying to prove a negative and convincing the authorities that he was not, in fact, a communist. The file reveals that Mann, despite continuous harassment, was not afraid to express unpopular views. Though he was never investigated by HUAC or threatened with jail or deportation, he was nevertheless publicly and shamefully condemned as a disloyal Red.

There was a radical change from Mann’s first positive impressions of America to his bitter and furious response to the malicious personal attacks. He privately called the witch hunts, combining the worst traits in the American character, “a disgusting exhibition of primitive Puritanism, hatred, fear, corruption and self-righteousness.” Attempting to explain the intolerable situation and his emotional anguish to friends in Europe, he exclaimed, “the sick tense atmosphere of this country oppresses me and I have to steel myself, despite trembly nerves, to ward off detestable and mortally dangerous attacks on me. . . . I have no desire to rest my bones in this soulless soil [to] which I owe nothing, and which knows nothing of me.” The final blow came when Erica, suspected of being a Communist and persecuted by the FBI, was forced to leave America.

At first Germany seemed a promising refuge, and after his triumphant tour in 1949 of both sides of the divided country many people thought he would become president of the postwar German republic. Referring to his fifty-two-year career as a writer, he observed, “It is really curious that a life of playing games and dreaming can—if only you go on with it long enough—lead to your being treated like royalty.” But the praise soon turned to vilification by his enemies, who made him feel he was back in Nazi Germany. Mann declared that these envious and exculpatory Germans now vehemently denied both their tacit and overt support for the evil regime and “never found any other fault with the monster Hitler than that he lost the war.” Anthony Heilbut wrote that in the early 1950s Mann became “the butt of vicious assaults by German writers, who questioned his abandonment of the fatherland in its hour of greatest need and identified themselves with the heroes of the ‘inner emigration.’ . . . Mann was excoriated on all sides. His supplicants became his enemies. Some refugees recalled his initial attempts to retain a German audience [in the mid-1930s]; conversely, others accused him of being too unforgiving toward the Germans. Still others simply disliked his [traditional] style; missing the spirit of parody, they found him egregiously middlebrow.”

These attacks on Mann in Germany made Switzerland the most promising possibility, though the country had often been condemned by modern writers. In Under Western Eyes (1911), Joseph Conrad called Geneva “this odious town of liberty . . . of deplorable banality . . . comely without grace, and hospitable without sympathy.” In “One Trip Abroad” (1930), Scott Fitzgerald, whose mentally ill wife had been ineffectively treated by Carl Jung and confined to an asylum in Switzerland, depressingly described it as “a country where very few things begin, but many things end.” In Graham Greene’s film script for The Third Man (1949), Harry Lime (played by Orson Welles) caustically observed, “In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock.”

Yet the pristine lakes and towering mountains, the cleanliness and comfort, the efficiency, order, and stability of the country has appealed to many famous authors, and in 1952 Mann returned to his German cultural heritage in neutral Switzerland. The cool reserve of Protestant Zurich, in contrast to the easygoing Catholic Gemütlichkeit of Munich and Vienna, was more like his native city, the north German Lübeck. In his last peaceful and greatly honored years, Mann published The Black Swan (1953) and Confessions of Felix Krull (1954). In addition to Mann, Rainer Maria Rilke, Stefan George, James Joyce, Robert Musil, Hermann Hesse, Erich Remarque, Ignazio Silone, Irwin Shaw, Jorge Luis Borges, Georges Simenon, Graham Greene, and Elias Canetti also lived and died there.

The noble and idealistic Mann had been brought down in America by the hornet jabs of a lying journalist. Comfortably settled into a productive and prosperous life in California, Mann could have ignored the attacks and concentrated as always on his work. But he was deeply disillusioned by the toxic political atmosphere that reminded him of the Hitler years and felt personally betrayed by the country that had given him a poor return for his contributions to its cultural and political life. Mann felt he no longer belonged in America and wanted to live out his last years in a less paranoid and more tolerant European country. In his third exile the militant humanist and Kulturträger could still proudly say, “Where I am, there is Germany.”