A traditional biography generally focuses “on” the life of a character. Hildegard Möller’s biography, however, pays just as much meticulous attention to the character’s surroundings. This revives the eternal debate, still lively among literary purists – see the controversy over reading Guy Môquet’s letter in schools – on whether the environment is necessary to grasp the deep meaning of a work. It’s a bet somewhat won for this Berlin historian who, acknowledging the absence of a “comprehensive” study on Thomas Mann’s family, specifically attempts to trace the female dynamics that governed the intimate workings of the “Mann clan.” These elements shed relatively new light on the influences of daily life and the private domain on the intellectual and emotional developments of the author of “Buddenbrooks.” For instance, the “horribly difficult” birth of his first child inspired this letter: “I had an idea of what life and death are; but of birth, I knew nothing at all. Now, I know that it is an affair as profound as the other two.”
At the center of this family web is Katia Mann, the wife and mother of an impressive lineage, whose merit lay in holding “this family of eight together.” Yet, she was also the most discreet of Thomas Mann’s “women,” to the point of stating: “In this family, at least one person must not write.” In a relationship whose nature oddly recalls Sigmund Freud’s with his daughter Anna, there is Erika, the “favorite” daughter. Barely concealed rival to her mother, she was actively involved in public relations work aimed at raising awareness of her father’s work across the Atlantic. “The family’s reputation largely depended on the public activities of these women,” notes Hildegard Möller.
Around a “totemized” Thomas Mann, whose international fame intensified, the family life of the six children – three daughters and three sons – organized itself. Or rather, it was agitated.
But the author – and this is one of the great interests of this work – does not get sidetracked by the iconic figure of the writer. She details for us the moods of a man seemingly “without compassion” at the time of his sister’s suicide, or later, reacting to his son Klaus’s drug-driven suicide with a simple note in his journal: “he shouldn’t have done that.” A “father who appeared even to his children as too distant and too cold” and whose “silence was more impressive than the announcement of a punishment.”
The biographer’s tactic, in contrast, manages to show us that by retreating into writing, Thomas Mann assured himself a means of escaping indescribable anxieties: those foremost of his acknowledged homosexual inclinations, more easily managed in his stories than in reality, and one episode of which provided material for the successful writing of “Death in Venice.” Those anxieties were also due to destabilizing prospects, for a man lazily entrenched in his habits, of a salvific and prolonged exile to the United States because of the rise of Nazism and the censorship of his novels. Finally, those related to a “panic fear of poverty” from which he reportedly suffered since his youth.
For several of his children, the relationship of identification with this unattainable human monument of German literature was naturally through writing. Erika planned to create a biography of her father but ultimately only managed to publish a book on the last year of his life. Monika attempted “memories,” conceived and in progress when Thomas Mann passed away, only spurring jealousy in her sister and criticism from her mother. “Immersed in his father’s work,” Michael, the musician son who returned to live in America, “ended up being imprisoned by it,” explains Hildegard Möller.
An engaging book concerning, moreover, the cultural richness of an era for which the Mann family was not the last of its knowledgeable witnesses.
Hildegard Möller, “Thomas Mann, A Family Affair,” Editions Tallandier, 2007, 384 pages, 29 euros.
