The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  He was less amused when Erika began arguing that the family would have to get used to the idea that they would never go back to their house in Munich again, they would lose it, just as they would have to forfeit all the money they had in German banks. Erika spoke as though she had learned this by heart and was reciting it as a way of forcing him and her mother to deal with a reality they had been avoiding.

  Erika wanted Thomas to make a statement that would break his connection with Germany for good. When a lecture he had given on Wagner was denounced by a long list of eminent figures in the Bavarian musical and cultural world including Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner, who had been a friend of his, Thomas felt it wisest not to respond. He presumed that they must have been put under pressure by the new regime. Erika, on the other hand, believed that he should use this opportunity to declare his loathing for the new government. He should call on his compatriots to oppose Hitler in every way. When Thomas finally did issue a statement, which was published in the Swiss press, he made sure that Erika did not see it before it was sent. He was not surprised when Katia told him that his daughter viewed its tone as ingratiating and spineless.

  At the beginning of the Great War, Thomas had a clear sense of his German audience. And when he gave his lecture in Berlin, he believed he was speaking to the people who shared his views about liberty and democracy, and also about what it meant to be German. These people had now become silent. There was no forum where he could address them. If he denounced Hitler from the safety of Switzerland, he would be denounced in turn. His books would be removed from bookshops and libraries. He would not be allowed to speak again.

  His views on the Nazis were known. He saw no value in repeating them while Golo and Katia’s parents were still in Germany, while he owned a house in Munich and had money in German banks. Also, attacking the National Socialists when they were no more than a fringe movement, a kind of nuisance, was different to attacking the German government, which was seeking legitimacy all over the world.

  As each letter came from Golo, they worried about his safety. But he did not seem frightened; instead, he wrote as though all Munich were a sort of theater or a spectacle that it was his duty to report on. Some of his news was sad, especially his accounts of visits to his grandparents, still living in their beautiful house but increasingly anxious about their future. His grandfather, he wrote, kept saying: “That we had to live to see this!” As far as the authorities were concerned, the Pringsheims were Jewish. Peter, Katia’s brother, had been dismissed from his job at Humboldt University in Berlin and, like his brothers, was making plans to leave Germany.

  Katia’s father wrote to her, and had the letter delivered by hand, to say that she should not write or call. She showed Thomas the passage that read:

  I am never sure, my little one, that everyone knows that you, my daughter, are the mother of Erika and Klaus Mann and the wife of Thomas Mann. Once it might have been a matter of pride in Munich. Now that you are in exile, I know that your children and your husband will need to speak out against the new order, and I understand that. But it will make our lives more precarious. We have always tried to be loyal Germans. I have loved the music of Wagner and I have done everything to support him, including helping to create Bayreuth. The only glimmer of hope in all this darkness has come from Winifred Wagner, and that is most unlikely as she is an ardent supporter of the man whose name I will not spell out. She has told us that she will help us, but we do not know what this means.

  Thomas noticed that while Elisabeth read the letter, it was not shown to the others. At meals, Katia let Erika do all the talking. She retreated to her quarters each evening as soon as she could and seemed relieved finally when Erika left to be with Klaus in France.

  Michael, who was fourteen, joined them in Lugano. Thomas remembered how reluctantly he had attended his violin lessons in Munich, and how his piano teacher refused to give him any more classes because of his surly response to instruction. But in his boarding school he had found an Italian teacher of the viola and the violin whom he did not alienate.

  “But how was he different to all your other teachers?” Katia asked.

  “He’s Italian and the other teachers laughed at him,” Michael said.

  “Is that why you liked him?”

  “His father and brother are in prison. If he goes back to Italy he will be arrested. And no one really needs a violin teacher. So he looked sad.”

  Michael spent several hours a day practicing, especially on the viola, and arranged to have his teacher come to Lugano two days a week to work with him.

  When Thomas told him that the music he played sounded beautiful, Michael scowled.

  “My teacher has told me that I have talent, that is all.”

  “What more do you want?” Katia asked.

  “Genius,” Michael said.

  It was Michael who suggested that Thomas take English lessons from his viola teacher.

  “His English is perfect, and he needs the money.”

  “He is Italian. I don’t want to speak English like an Italian.”

  “Do you want to speak English like a German?” Michael asked.

  Thomas agreed that he would take lessons, and he would try to read a simple book in English.

  In one of Golo’s letters he described a lunch in Munich with Ernst Bertram, who insisted that while he was all in favor of freedom, it was only for good Germans. And when Golo said that his father might never return to Germany, Bertram replied: “Why not? He is a German, after all, and we do live in a free country.” Bertram, he added, had tried to make excuses for not going to visit Thomas when he was in Lugano. He was not alone at the time, he had said, suggesting that he was under pressure not to maintain his friendship with Golo’s father.

  Golo added that he had given a dinner party in the house so that the best bottles in his father’s wine cellar could be consumed. He was slowly packing up books and sorting papers.

  Each time he heard such news, news that suggested he would not be seeing his old house again, it almost surprised Thomas. He was still following daily reports in the hope that Hitler’s power would fade or that he would be assassinated or that a rebellion would take place within the ranks of the army against the Nazi leaders.

  At first, when books that offended the Nazis were burned in Berlin, Thomas was relieved that his own were not among them. But when Erika returned, she pointed out that all the important German writers, including Heinrich and Klaus, and Brecht and Hermann Hesse, had their books tossed into the fire. It was hardly a badge of honor, she insisted, to be excluded from this. Thomas noticed Katia nodding silently. When Golo wrote to let them know that although Ernst Bertram had fully supported the burning of the books, he had seen to it that Thomas’s work was not included, Katia read the letter first before handing it to him and leaving the room.

  It proved easy for Golo to have furniture and paintings and books removed from the house in Munich and taken to Switzerland by pretending that he was selling them. Golo also managed to withdraw large sums of money from his father’s bank account. While there were manuscripts and letters, including all the letters from Katia written from Davos, that he would like to have transported out of Germany, the most important set of papers, Thomas knew, were his diaries. They were in a safe in his study in Poschingerstrasse. No one had ever seen them. Katia, he supposed, knew of their existence and must have realized, since they were always locked away, that they contained private material. However, she would never have envisaged that peppered through pages that dealt with banalities such as the weather and where he gave lectures were references to his intimate dreams and his erotic life.

  He needed to get the diaries out of Munich. He had to plan a way to have the safe opened, and the diaries sent to him without being read.

  His dreams about sex had made their way into stories and novels, but in fiction they could easily be interpreted as literary games. Since he was the father of six children, no one had ever openly accused him of priv
ate perversions. If published, however, the diaries would make clear who he was and what he dreamed about. They would show that his distant, bookish tone, his personal stiffness, his interest in being honored and attended to, were masks designed to disguise base sexual desires. While other writers, including Ernst Bertram and the poet Stefan George, had let the world know of their homosexuality, Thomas had locked his sexual interests inside a diary that was, in turn, locked in a safe. If he were now exposed, he believed, he would be despised all the more because of his duplicity.

  Katia was resigned, he thought, to the loss of the house and the possibility of a long exile, but not to her husband being disgraced.

  “How strange it is,” she said, “that we are now Jewish. My parents never went near a synagogue. And I thought of the children as pure Manns, but now they are Jewish because their mother is Jewish.”

  She worried that Golo was staying too long in Munich. She also worried about how Erika and Klaus, now in their late twenties, would make a living since Germany was closed to them. She had no idea, Thomas thought, that there was another danger. It was something he could not share with her without actually revealing the content of the diaries. She would be appalled at how idiotic he had been to offer such a hostage to fortune.

  Of all his children, he thought, Golo, even when he was a child, was the best at keeping a secret. At the table, he liked to watch carefully and give nothing away. Thomas was confident that when he sent him the key for the safe, asking him to remove the oilcloth-covered notebooks without reading them and put them in a suitcase and send them by freight mail to Lugano, Golo would do as he was asked.

  When Golo indicated that this had been done, Thomas felt relieved. All he had to do now was wait for them to come.

  Slowly, things became more difficult for Golo in Munich. The banks refused to allow him to withdraw any more money. He believed that he was being watched and could be detained at any time. He was unable to prevent the authorities from confiscating both of the family cars, and as the confiscation took place he realized that Hans, the family chauffeur, was the one who had informed the Nazis that he had plans to drive one of the cars to Switzerland.

  On being accused of informing, Hans grew arrogant and began to strut around the house, threatening the cook and the maids that he would have them arrested. It was clear, since Golo was in earshot, that he meant him to know that he could be arrested too.

  Golo, arriving in Lugano, told his parents this story and added casually: “And I trusted Hans with that suitcase, which he promised to take to the post office for me. God only knows what he did with it. He probably handed it over to the Nazis.”

  When Katia left them, Thomas asked Golo if the suitcase he had trusted Hans with was the one containing the diaries.

  “He offered to take it. I thought that he would attract less attention. I felt I was being watched. It seemed like the best solution. I might have waited and carried it with me, but I thought you wanted it sooner.”

  “Did he bring you back a receipt or a piece of paper to say that he had put it in the mail?”

  “No.”

  For one second as Golo glanced at him uneasily, Thomas realized that Golo had a sense of what was in the diaries. He wondered if he had flicked through the pages or read some passages. If he had done so, he would have quickly deduced why they were kept in the safe and why they, and not other papers, had needed to be sent to Lugano.

  As Golo and he sat down on armchairs facing each other, it was the closest Thomas had ever been to his son. The fact that it might be best to say nothing seemed to make Golo more comfortable. Unlike his two older siblings, he had an ability to take an interest in a mind other than his own. Now, Thomas imagined, he perceived what was preoccupying his father. After all, he had been in the house, silently watching, throughout the years.

  What would also be strange, he thought, to anyone who might read the diaries was how remote his household had been from the common lives of Germans. While his fellow citizens owned banknotes that were worthless, he earned dollars. He had spent that time living in a luxury he took for granted. In politics, he had become more liberal, more internationalist, but in how he lived he was more insulated.

  At the beginning, in the 1920s, he had disliked the Nazis because there was something low about them; he thought that they would remain, at most, a thorn in the side of a struggling Germany. He imagined a group of them now reading his diaries page by page, irritated by his self-absorption, and then coming across passages that would make them sit up. Instead of following his aimless days, they would, with fire in their eyes, find scenes and phrases to mark and note.

  His two eldest children, he understood, could not be damaged as he could be. Their standing in the world depended on their open dismissal of easy sexual categories. Any effort to undermine their reputation would be banished by their own careless laughter and that of their friends. But no one would be amused if sections of his diary were to be published.

  In the mornings, when he woke, he imagined that this would be the day the suitcase would come. He was not sure if it would be delivered by the post office van or by some other official vehicle. As soon as he got dressed, Thomas began to watch from the upstairs window. Downstairs, since his makeshift study overlooked the front of the house, he could see anyone coming or going. He noted the postman when he showed up but he only ever had letters and small packages.

  Since the house was quiet, Thomas believed that he would hear the van that would deliver the suitcase. He listened out for the sound of an engine. The more he learned about the Nazis, the more he understood their talent for publicity. Were Goebbels to be handed the diaries, he would know what treasure he now possessed. He would select the most damaging details and make them news all over the world. He would transform the reputation of Thomas Mann from great German writer to a name that was a byword for scandal.

  Having found a bookseller in Zürich, Thomas added a request for any book on the life of Oscar Wilde to the list of books that he wished to buy for his small provisional library. While he did not expect to go to prison as a result of any disclosures, as Wilde did, and he was aware that Wilde’s life had been dissolute, as his had not, it was the move from famous writer to disgraced public figure that interested him. How easily and quickly it happened to Wilde, and how ready the public was to accuse!

  Over and over, he went through in his mind what was in the diaries. Some of the personal content was harmless. He wrote, he remembered, about his tender love for Elisabeth, feelings that would befit any father. No one, not even the most malevolent Nazi, could have the slightest objection to his tone when he wrote about Elisabeth. What made him wince, however, were his memories of what he had written about Klaus. As a youth, his eldest son had struck him as being especially beautiful. Once, on coming into the bedroom that Klaus shared with Golo, he had found Klaus naked. The image had remained with him, enough for him to record in his diary how strangely attractive he found his son.

  There must have been, he thought, a few more times when he wrote in his diary about the allure of Klaus’s body, or how aroused he was by the appearance of Klaus in a swimsuit.

  These were thoughts that not many fathers must have felt, he imagined. He was sure that he could not be completely alone but he was aware that the few other fathers, perhaps very few, who found their son sexually attractive had not been foolish enough to share what they were feeling. He himself, of course, had told no one, and he was certain that neither Klaus nor any other member of the family had the slightest idea what was going on in his mind.

  Instead, he had noted it all in his diary. Now, somewhere in Germany, it was possible that those pages were being examined by people who had every reason to want to wreck his reputation.

  If the phone rang in the house, Thomas worried that it would be someone to tell him that sections of his diaries had appeared in some newspaper. He paced up and down the road outside the house hoping for the sound of an engine that might belong to a van that
might deliver his suitcase. If they had fallen into the hands of the Nazis, he wondered if he could deny that the diaries were his, insist that they were a clever forgery. But they were too detailed, he knew, they contained too much day-to-day information that no one could invent.

  And they contained accounts of moments that he treasured but could share with no one. Casual glances at young men who had come to his lectures or whom he encountered at a concert. Glances that were sometimes reciprocated and then became unmistakable in their intensity. While he enjoyed the homage he received in public and appreciated the large audiences he attracted, it was always these chance meetings, silent and furtive, that he remembered. Not to have registered in his diary the message sent by the secret energy in a gaze would have been unthinkable. He wanted that which had been so fleeting to become solid. The only way he knew to make this happen was to write it down. Should he have let it pass so that it would have faded completely, this, the story of his life?

  * * *

  The section of the diaries that most worried him described his feelings for a boy called Klaus Heuser, whom he had met six years earlier, in the summer of 1927, when he and Katia had gone, with their three younger children, to Kampen on the island of Sylt in the North Sea.