Erika and Klaus Mann in New York: Escape from the Magic Mountain

By Andrea Weiss

This is the riveting tale of two brave nonconformists whose dramatic lives open up new perspectives on the history of the twentieth century. Thomas Mann’s two eldest children, Erika and Klaus, were unconventional, rebellious, and fiercely devoted to each other. Empowered by their close bond, they espoused vehemently anti-Nazi views in a Europe swept up in fascism and were openly, even defiantly, gay in an age of secrecy and repression. In 1936, they fled to the United States and chose New York as their new adopted home. From the start, the two were embroiled by the literary and intellectual life, political turmoil, and shifting sexual mores of their times. Andrea Weiss engages their struggles, their friendships (Maurice Wertheim and Annemarie Schwarzenbach, among them), and their liaisons, as the siblings try to adapt to their new lives, all while introducing their work to an American audience for the first time.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Release date: Dec 20, 2012
• ISBN: 9780226049403

Book preview

Erika and Klaus Mann in New York: Escape from the Magic Mountain comes from In the Shadow of Magic Mountain by Andrea Weiss, © 2008 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved.

Chicago Shorts Edition, 2013

ISBN: 978-0-226-04940-3

Erika and Klaus Mann in New York

Escape from the Magic Mountain

ANDREA WEISS

Chicago Shorts

PERSONAE

Thomas Mann (1875–1955): Author of The Magic Mountain and many other novels. Recipient of 1929 Nobel Prize for Literature. Father of Erika Klaus and Golo Mann (as well as three other children).

W. H. Auden (1907–1973): English poet; though gay, marries Erika to help her escape from Nazi Germany

Christopher Isherwood (1904–1986): English novelist and friend of the Mann siblings

Klaus Mann (1906–1949): Son of Thomas Mann and brother of Erika

Erika Mann (1905–1969): German actress and writer; the first child of Thomas Mann and older sister to Klaus

Annemarie Schwartzenbach (1908–1942): Friend of the Mann siblings, she was a Swiss photographer, journalist, and traveler

Therese Giehse (1898–1975): German actress well known for her involvement in political cabarets and theaters

Die Pfeffermühle (The Peppermill): Erika Mann’s popular anti-Nazi literary cabaret. Opened in 1933 in Germany.

Upon arrival in New York, Erika and Klaus checked into the Hotel Bedford on East 40th Street, an upscale residential hotel housing a disproportionate number of German (predominantly German Jewish) émigrés. It was a comfortable, stylish place run by a German American couple, well-acquainted with the requirements for Gemütlichkeit. Blanche Knopf, wife of Thomas Mann’s American publisher, had discovered the hotel and booked their reservation.

Later that day a young dancer named Michael Logan arrived to deliver greetings from Annemarie Schwarzenbach, who had recently made her first trip to the United States. Annemarie and her American friend, photographer Barbara Hamilton-Wright, had traveled together by car into the Deep South as well as to Pittsburgh’s coal regions in order to document The Other America: the massive unemployment, labor unrest, and racial discrimination that constituted the underside of the American Dream. At that moment Annemarie was recovering in Washington, D.C., from a drug overdose, her emissary reported, but would soon be on her way to meet them in New York. Klaus found Michael to be very sympathetic, also intelligent, and in no time at all, "Michael reste la nuit chez moi. Tendresse."

Michael "reste la nuit on and off for the next month, until he suddenly disappears from Klaus’s diary. He’s replaced by Emery, an Italian boy who came in to clean the room. A tremendous flirt. Perhaps—perhaps this is the beginning of a great love." The great love lasted all of eight days, after which Klaus returned to Michael Logan.

Erika too found romance in New York City—in her own hotel no less. Among the many German guests staying at the Hotel Bedford was a doctor from Berlin, Martin Gumpert. When Annemarie arrived in New York, she became his newest and most troublesome patient. Erika wrote to her mother that Miro caused Gumpert and the siblings great annoyance throughout the height of absurdity [her drug withdrawal treatment]—what a stubborn angel of misfortune. With the stubborn angel playing an unwitting cupid, Erika and Martin soon became inseparable.

At this point in her life, for inexplicable reasons, Erika turned toward men, as Sybille Bedford put it. Certainly she very much loved Therese Giehse, that was a very important friendship, but I only know that once she turned, she went off women, she really became interested in men, she went off with people’s husbands even. A streak of opportunism can be discerned in her choice of partners; it may well have been sheer ambition that prompted the shift. Whatever the reason, Therese Giehse was in for a big surprise.

Before the Statendam had even docked in Hoboken, New Jersey, Erika began courting rich patrons for the New York opening of The Peppermill. Through the sheer force of her