Bluebeard's Chamber

Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann

Michael Maar, David Fernbach

• Publisher: Verso
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN: 9781786635754
• eBook ISBN: 9781786635761
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: German Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Over the last twenty years, critical discussion of Thomas Mann has highlighted the role of his homosexuality for his creative work. This not only is presented as a dynamic underlying Mann's creative work, but also is the supposed reason for the theme of guilt and redemption that grew ever stronger in Mann's fiction.
Michael Maar mounts a devastating forensic challenge to this consensus: Mann was remarkably open about his sexual orientation, which he saw as no reason for guilt. But sexuality in Mann's work is inextricably bound up with an eruption of violence. Maar pursues this trail through Mann's writings and traces its origins back to Mann's second visit to Italy, during which the Devil appeared to him in Palestrina. Something happened to the twenty-one-year-old Thomas Mann in Naples that marked him for life with a burdensome sense of guilt...but what exactly was it?

CHAPTER ONE

ROOM WITH DEAD CAT

THERE WAS JUST one occasion when Thomas Mann’s children found him in a state of despair. The maelstrom that swept Germany in 1933 overtook Mann while he was on an extended lecture tour abroad. When he began to suspect that he would be unable to return home, his first anxieties were for a number of notebooks, bound in oilcloth, that he had left locked in a Munich cabinet. These were his old diaries, which he feared might fall into the wrong hands. After weeks of growing disquiet, he forwarded to his son Golo, who was staying in Munich, the keys for the drawers and cupboards, explaining that he wanted the notebooks sent in a suitcase as freight to Lugano.¹ Golo recalls a further instruction:

‘I am counting on you to be discreet and not read any of these things!’ A warning I took so seriously that I locked myself into the room while I was packing the papers. When I came out with the suitcase to carry it to the station, there was faithful Hans offering to take this bothersome chore off my hands. All the better, and why not?²

It was soon to emerge, however, that Golo’s excess caution almost proved his father’s undoing. By locking himself in his father’s study, he drew the attention of the chauffeur – Hans Holzner, in fact a Nazi informer – to the fact that something secret was involved. Holzner did indeed take the suitcase to the station, but he also reported the matter to the political police.³

Thomas Mann was now faced with a torment of waiting. On 24 April he noted his disquiet over the suitcase’s long delay; anxiety put out its first tentacles. Three days later the non-arrival of the case was already ‘uncanny’, and he slowly grasped that something was wrong. The following day his suspicion grew firmer: ‘The chauffeur Hans, gradually revealed as a Judas.’ On 30 April he woke up at five o’clock stricken with terrifying thoughts about the suitcase and the diaries. His outward demeanour began to suffer, as we know from the reports of his children. Golo describes how his father ‘fell prey to growing impatience, finally even to despair’.⁴ And Erika writes of this ‘unprecedented state of excitement, indeed desperation’, in which he found himself.

Finally, on 2 May, the all-clear arrived; the case was now on Swiss soil, probably in Lugano: ‘Significant and deep relief. The sense of having escaped a great, even inexpressible, danger, which perhaps never existed at all.’⁵

A weighty word, this ‘inexpressible’, for a man who knew how to choose his words. And in her own account of those gloomy weeks, his daughter uses equally striking terms:

As it transpired to his relief, the overwhelming issue was the diaries, which he believed not only to be definitively lost, but to have fallen into the hands of a mortal foe. In their unfathomable stupidity, however, they soon released the suitcase quite intact, and T.M., now ready for flight and unwilling to risk a repetition of anything similar, burned a large number of papers at the first opportunity.⁶ […]

Were they ‘compromising’, these neat exercise books? They may well have been. No lifespan is free of a ‘Bluebeard’s chamber’.

Later on Erika tones this down somewhat, explaining that nothing offensive need have occurred. But the Bluebeard metaphor continues to resonate. The little anecdote with which she continues is again far from reassuring:

When [Hugo von] Hoffmannsthal first got to know T.M., still in his youth, he is said to have declared that the entire personal impression he received was of someone uncommonly well-groomed, with an upper-class solidity and discreet elegance. His home, too, gave the same appearance: very fine and spacious, with valuable carpets, dark oil paintings, club armchairs, bright sleeping quarters, etc. ‘The only thing, though,’ the poet continued, looking down at his fingernails – ‘in a little side room there was suddenly lying – a dead cat…’

It is conceivable, then, she concludes this recollection, ‘that it was some “dead cat” or other that was being burned’.⁷

What Erika did not know, and what would have frightened her even given her suspicions, was the entry her father made in his diary on 30 April, at the high point of his despair: ‘My fears now bear first of all and almost exclusively on this assault on the secrets of my life. They are heavy and deep. Something frightful, even deadly, may happen.’⁸

This is a passage worth dwelling on rather longer than scholars have done up till now. The meaning seems clear, even if it may be construed in different ways. Does ‘they’ refer to the fears or to the secrets?⁹ Thomas Mann’s diaries are written in a style that presses ahead with its flow of thoughts, leaving fragments of sentences incomplete, so that ‘they’ are most likely the secrets; though the adjectives could apply to both, ‘deep secret’ is a well-established turn of phrase. Such heavy and deep secrets would also make sense of the ‘fatal consequences’, as only if they were heavy and deep could their disclosure have the most terrible effect.

But was it Mann himself whom these secrets indicated? In theory, his fears might have been for someone else, exposed in Germany to the vengeance of the Nazis and possibly in imminent danger by being named in this connection. This however is a farfetched speculation and not the meaning immediately suggested, as is also confirmed from another source. Golo, in his autobiography, quotes from the diary that he himself kept at this time. Thomas Mann had spoken about his fears in the family circle: ‘They will publish excerpts in the Völkischer Beobachter. They will ruin everything, they will ruin me. My life will never be right again.’¹⁰ The implication of suicide, if his secrets were exposed to the light of the world – that is strong stuff, even if we take into account that the nerves of the frightened man were extremely stretched at this time.¹¹ If the Nazis had concocted from these diaries a poisonous broth containing no more than those elements familiar from the surviving volumes, perhaps this alone would have been sufficient to make his life a torment? It would not have been found so natural in Munich that Thomas was in love with his own son;¹² his outbursts of hatred towards his brother would have been played upon, and the Nazis would have learned about the young Klaus Heuser, about the emotional adventure that gave rise to Death in Venice, and about the central experience of his early twenties, his youthful love for Paul Ehrenberg.¹³ All this dished out to a scornful press free of any legal restraint – it is easy to imagine how such a campaign might destroy even a stronger person, so why not Thomas Mann, who took decades to digest lesser insults?

But so utterly shattered as to entertain thoughts of death? Even the new rulers of Germany would need something tangible, and they were still far from deciding how to deal with the Nobel prizewinner, a German national living legally abroad who at this point had still refrained from public declarations against the Nazi regime, and whose works were still available in the bookshops. There certainly was a group that sought in any event to get rid of him, but before his letter to the rector of Bonn University, there was still the vague possibility that he might return, and this tied the regime’s hands. So the secrets really must have been heavy and deep, to give the enemy a deadly weapon that could strike its victim even on neutral territory.

Mann’s recent commentators and biographers do indeed focus on what they view as ‘heavy and deep’. All of them, in so far as they have pondered the question, agree on one thing: the main secret, disclosure of which could have driven the author to suicide, was his ‘inversion’,¹⁴ his love of boys, the homosexuality concealed behind the bourgeois façade – for which he supposedly felt a sense of guilt.¹⁵ For a long while this key fact that stamps Mann’s entire work was glossed over, as earlier biographers simply did not want to know too much. But since this prudery has evaporated, and the late diaries have come to light, the belief today is that a master key to his life and work has been discovered: it was boys, and this was likewise the issue in April 1933, when their admirer considered suicide.

At first sight this reading has everything in its favour. It seems to be confirmed by a further entry on that dramatic day when Thomas Mann thought of suicide. On arrival in Basle, unnerved and wracked with worry, he noted in the evening a touching detail: ‘Katia and I sat holding hands a great deal. She more or less understands my fears concerning the contents of the suitcase.’¹⁶ This is the one place however where a ray of light from outside strikes his inner thought process, the only moment at which we can emerge from his mind, tormented by worries, and see him through another’s eyes. His wife Katia understands him ‘more or less’ – this may well refer to his young men, a subject on which she was more or less in the picture, even if they did not always bring it up at the breakfast table. Though this passage fits neatly into the traditional reading, it has a certain ambiguity. ‘Of course I cannot tell her everything,’ the young fiance confided to his diary in 1904: ‘She is not strong enough for my sorrow and torment.’¹⁷ How much did she know after thirty years of marriage? We know as little of this as of the way those secrets (in the plural) converge. One thing however we can say for certain: Katia was most likely aware very early on of her husband’s erotic sufferings and tendencies, at the latest in 1927 after the Klaus Heuser affair. And so despite her ‘more or less’ understanding, there must still have been a part that was obscure.

A second detail that seems to support the conventional reading is quite similar. This is the word ‘secret’ itself, which in at least two places in the later diaries refers unambiguously to homosexuality. Five years before his death, Thomas Mann wrote about his last love, for the hotel page Franz Westermeier: ‘Banal activity, aggressiveness, the attempt to discover how far he would go, is not part of my life, which requires a secrecy’ (10 July 1950). And the ‘compulsion to keep the secret’ holds him back from seeking an encounter with Franz on the hotel terrace (11 July 1950). When he feared an assault on the secrets of his life, would this then have been one of them? That could be the conclusion drawn, were it not for this ‘more or less’. One part lies open, but another remains concealed. There are indications where one secret certainly bears on the forbidden Eros, but this is interwoven with something worse.

IF YOU LIKE!

In the introduction he wrote in 1945 for an American edition of Dostoevsky’s short novels, Thomas Mann held that the demonic should be addressed poetically: to devote critical essays to it struck him as indiscreet, to put it mildly. The present investigation could be reproached as highly indiscreet, since it pursues the question as to what hard evidence of homosexual contact might have been noted in the early diaries. This question, though, has been puzzled over since the later diaries were published, which Mann expressly entrusted to posterity with all the ‘merry discoveries’ that he dryly promised in this connection (13 October 1950). And it is precisely these later diaries that yield scattered indications as to the nub of the question, and allow us to correct the suppositions of recent biographers in two important respects.

We do not know for certain, writes the best of these, Hermann Kurzke, but it seems likely that in early life Mann had some kind of bodily contact that ‘he experienced as demeaning, humiliating and besmirching, and that left a lifelong trauma. It might have been with young hustlers in Naples.’¹⁸

Kurzke is not the only biographer who brings on stage these Neapolitan hustlers, whom the young Thomas Mann may indeed have encountered; a scene that the traveller himself reveals when he writes to his close friend Otto Grautoff in 1896 that on the Toledo among a thousand other salesmen there are also procurers who in a sly hiss ‘offer to escort you to supposedly “very pretty” young girls, and not only girls…’¹⁹ Grautoff well understood what the ellipsis here was supposed to mean, all the more as the same letter contains a portrait of the city of Naples, ‘a physiognomy with a rather snub nose and somewhat pouting lips, but very beautiful dark eyes … ‘, which sounds more like that of a Neapolitan youth. To the complaint about the procurers, impossible to shake off, who extolled their wares to the point of coarseness, Mann adds the confession that he had almost decided on a rice diet, simply to rid himself of sexual desire.

Assuming for a start that he did not succeed in this, with or without the diet, and assuming further that at least once he did follow one of those hissing pimps – what is there to say against the idea that the young Thomas Mann could have had a homosexual encounter, and that as a world-famous author approaching sixty, he still found this experience so burdensome and compromising that he viewed its revelation as a deadly peril, as the ruin of his reputation, preferring rather to end his own life?

The evidence against this is the letters and diaries, a closer reading of which subtly shifts the perspective. For two things in particular emerge from these. First of all, that Thomas Mann quite clearly never went beyond a shy kiss with these youngsters. This is not to deny that his straying through the mala vita quarters of Naples and Rome is plausible; on the contrary. Simply that it can never have come to a fulfilled homosexual encounter. This was something denied him throughout his life, as all private indications suggest.

‘Fulfilment,’ though, is precisely the word he used, when less than a year after the suitcase episode he leafed through the rescued diaries and revisited his last passion: the friendship with Klaus Heuser, who had been a household guest in Munich in autumn 1927 and whom he had then visited several times in Düsseldorf. Mann was ‘deeply roused, touched and moved’ by looking back on this experience:

which seems to me today to belong to a different and stronger epoch of life, and which I retain with pride and gratitude, as it was the unhoped-for fulfilment of a lifelong yearning, the ‘happiness’ inscribed in the book of man, though not commonness, and remembrance of which signifies: ‘I too’.

(24 January 1934)

This could still have all kinds of interpretation, and would raise the question what exactly he meant by ‘fulfilment’. The same holds for another word that has a more explicit sound to less chaste ears:

Read for a long time old diaries from the Klaus Heuser time, when I was a happy lover. The most beautiful and touching occasion the farewell in Munich, when for the first time I took ‘a leap into dreamland’ and rested his temple on mine. Now indeed – lived and loved. Dark eyes that spilled tears for me, beloved lips that I kissed – this was it, I too had this, I can tell myself when I die.

(20 January 1942)

What Thomas Mann understood by being a lover emerges from an interview with Klaus Heuser at the age of seventy-seven. Nothing more took place than an embrace and a kiss, and the object of Mann’s adoration could scarcely confirm even this; just the simple friendliness of a youngster who had in no way fallen in love, and realized almost nothing of t...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Chapter One: Room with Dead Cat
• Chapter Two: ‘Voluptuousness and Hot Guilt’
• Chapter Three: Credemi
• Afterword: Giving the Devil His Due
• Acknowledgements
• Translator’s Note
• Extract from The German Republic
• Notes