The Magician

by Colm Toibin

  “Are you a poet?” he asked him.

  “No. Sometimes I write a line or two and then I cross it out. I don’t even keep the paper.”

  “So, what do you do?”

  He realized that the question sounded like criticism.

  “I feel sorry for myself,” the young man said.

  One of the others began to laugh.

  “He doesn’t like Germany,” he said, “but he hates France even more.”

  “Do you still have your big house in Munich?” one of the thin-faced young men asked.

  “I believe it is to be confiscated,” Thomas said.

  “I was in charge of watching you during the Munich Revolution.”

  Thomas looked puzzled.

  “Don’t be so surprised. I was sixteen then and I looked innocent. I saw all your comings and goings and reported back.”

  “Why?”

  “For writing all those books,” another one said and sniggered.

  “You might have been shot,” the young man continued.

  “It would have done wonders for my reputation,” Thomas said.

  “Toller was the one who stopped it.”

  “I know that,” Thomas said.

  “And now here he is without a penny, but you and your family are in a big house. Someday, all of that is going to change.”

  “Do you mean under Hitler?” Thomas asked.

  “You know what I mean,” the young man answered.

  * * *

  Thomas swore to avoid the cafés completely, but he could not decline every invitation that came from fellow émigrés. What was strange, he thought, was that even the most political among them became more animated when they discussed their own plight, such as the loss of their property or problems with visas. When he studied them, he believed them to be a group already defeated, suffering from ailments, real and imaginary, waiting for news or money, their clothes becoming shabbier.

  Part of the reason he wished to avoid them was that he saw in them what he himself was slowly becoming. Like them, he waited each day for news, knowing that a headline in one of the papers or a story inside could dictate how soundly he would sleep and how darkly he would dream.

  All of the others had, in one way or another, denounced the regime. He was the only one who had not. He knew that, led by Brecht, they were watching him, the best-known among them. He and Katia had to be careful when they did decide to take a walk on the esplanade in the evening not to wear clothes that might appear new or expensive.

  One evening, at the end of an émigré dinner he had attended alone, Katia being indisposed, he found himself face-to-face with Ernst Toller.

  He had never understood how this unformed youth managed to become the leader of a revolution, ending as so-called president of the Bavarian Soviet Republic, if only for six days. He had no idea what had impelled Ernst Toller to want to turn Munich upside down.

  As Toller shook his hand with nervous enthusiasm and asked him if he had time for a coffee or a drink, it struck Thomas that the poet needed money. He had some cash with him, and thought he might offer it to Toller as soon as they were sitting down and perhaps suggest that if he owed money at his hotel, then his bill might be paid.

  Instead of mentioning money, however, Toller asked him what he thought of the work Klaus was doing to galvanize the opposition to Hitler outside Germany.

  “It puts the rest of us to shame,” Toller said.

  Thomas said that he had not been in touch with his son for a while.

  “He is brilliant,” Toller said. “He works tirelessly. Perhaps he will only be recognized in the future.”

  Thomas was used to hearing such remarks about Heinrich, but this was the first time he had heard someone speaking in this way about Klaus.

  “There is a reason I wanted to see you alone,” Toller said.

  He was even more nervous than before. Thomas wondered if he was going to ask for a large amount of money.

  “Erich Mühsam is being held by the Nazis. They arrested him after the Reichstag fire. I know he has been tortured. He is not like the rest of us. As you know, he is a playwright and a poet, but he is also an anarchist of the old school. He would not do himself any favors in prison.”

  Thomas remembered that Mühsam had been another of the unlikely leaders of the Munich Revolution.

  “Do you mean he would remain outspoken?”

  “Yes.”

  When their drinks came, they sat in silence.

  “He always spoke about you warmly,” Toller eventually said. “May I ask if you could help him?”

  “In what way?”

  “You are one of the most powerful Germans alive.”

  “Not now.”

  “But you must still have friends and associates?”

  “Among the Nazis?”

  “Among those who have influence.”

  “If I did, why would I be here?”

  “I am asking you because I am desperate. I cannot sleep thinking about him. There must be somebody you can contact.”

  “I have no friends among the Nazis.”

  Toller nodded sadly.

  “He is doomed, then. I can think of nothing else.”

  Walking home, Thomas asked himself if the émigrés really believed that he had enough influence to have a man released from prison. Toller’s request, he thought, had not been casual. He had put thought into it. The only Nazi that Thomas knew was Ernst Bertram and he could imagine Bertram’s surprise were he to receive a missive from Thomas Mann asking him to exert his influence to have an anarchist who had been involved in the Munich Revolution freed from prison.

  Even though he could do nothing, his very powerlessness made him feel uneasy. As he sat alone in his study, it struck him that he could stir up interest in Mühsam’s case in the wider world, maybe even in America, but this might make things worse for him. It might be best to do nothing. By the time he went to bed he knew that. But he did not know if his own motives were pure or not, if he had decided not to act to avoid trouble for himself, or for better reasons.

  * * *

  More and more German writers and artists and their families were leaving the country, including Heinrich’s new girlfriend, Nelly Kröger. Heinrich and Mimi had split up some years before. Mimi and Goschi were now living in Prague. Heinrich often wrote to Thomas about his guilt at leaving them and his worry about their fate. He could not invite them to Nice, since he could barely make ends meet for himself. When Nelly came, it would be even harder.

  Heinrich also sent cuttings from the French newspapers to Thomas, with passages underlined. Thomas and Katia planned to reciprocate but then forgot. Thomas decided that he should write to his brother every Saturday, even if there was no news. He could let Heinrich know the novels and poetry he was reading, aware that Heinrich was more interested in political developments.

  When Heinrich came from Nice to stay with them, he was intrigued by the number of exiles living in Sanary. He usually woke early and went into the center to get the newspapers and see who was in the cafés. By the time Thomas and Katia came down for breakfast, Heinrich had all the fresh news. While Thomas thought that most of the Germans in Sanary, including Brecht and Walter Benjamin and Stefan Zweig, met merely to grumble in congenial company, Heinrich said that he discussed art and politics with them.

  “No matter who is in power in Germany,” Thomas said, “these men will feel left out.”

  “You should spend more time with them,” Heinrich said. “They see beyond the war, and even beyond the peace. They meet to discuss ideas. Important books will come from this.”

  “They want to make a new world,” Thomas replied. “And I rather liked the old one. So I would hardly be any use to them.”

  Heinrich poured more coffee and settled back into his chair.

  In the evening, they took walks on the esplanade before depositing Heinrich at one of the cafés, Thomas and Katia relieved to go home without him.

  When he was with Heinrich, he listen
ed, he smiled, and he made sure, if they were in a restaurant, that he paid the bill. He asked after Mimi and Goschi, and he asked after Nelly Kröger.

  It was agreed that, once she came to Nice, Nelly and Heinrich would visit Sanary and stay in one of the small hotels. Thomas and Katia would take her and Heinrich for a celebratory dinner when she arrived.

  In the lobby of the hotel, when they went to collect them, Thomas saw a young blond woman sitting beside his brother. He believed for a few seconds that she was someone from the hotel, or from the bar. He noticed how formal Katia became as Nelly stood up and clapped her hands and let out a whooping cry, causing those around to stare at her.

  “Oh, a big lovely dinner, with bubbles and then wine and soup and then lobster or will we have duck? Do you think they will have duck, my little duck?”

  She fondled one of Heinrich’s ears.

  “For you, they will have everything,” Heinrich replied.

  Nelly directed her gaze to Katia as they walked towards the restaurant.

  “When it’s hot I’m cold and when it’s cold I’m hot. I don’t know what that says about me! I hope I’m not frigid after my long journey. But the rattling of a train, they say, is a tremendous warm-up.”

  Katia looked coldly into the distance.

  At the table, when Heinrich sought to inform Thomas about something he had read in an afternoon paper, Nelly interrupted.

  “No politics, and no talking about books.”

  “What would you like to talk about?” Thomas asked. “You are the guest.”

  “Oh, food and love! What else is there? Perhaps money, perhaps the chance of us ladies getting fur coats before the winter. And fur hats, and silk stockings.”

  There was a long table in the restaurant occupied by a group of staid and middle-aged French people. They were speaking quietly to one another and seemed surprised when Nelly, having ordered cognac at the end of the meal, demanded that the evening not end before she was allowed to toast France and all the French.

  Since she did this in German, she did not, Thomas saw, endear herself to the long table.

  She persisted, even when Heinrich suggested that she sit down, even as waiters hovered, looking concerned.

  “To France,” she said. “I drink to France. Do you not want to drink to France?”

  When, finally, she sat down, she turned her attention to Heinrich.

  “Darling, I want a night on the town. I would like to start in a plush bar and end in a dive by the port. Shall we?”

  “This is why I have been longing to see you,” Heinrich said.

  “Katia,” Nelly asked, “do you know the best places for a real night out?”

  “I have never been on a real night out in my life,” Katia said.

  “Oh, then you must come with us. You can leave Bismarck at home. I am sure he has another book to write.”

  * * *

  The more émigrés who came to Sanary, the more the locals appeared to resent them. Thomas did not enjoy being singled out as a German as he walked in the streets, nor did Katia take any pleasure from entering a shop and being glared at once her nationality became clear. Elisabeth and Michael, at sixteen and fifteen, who were still going to school, wished they could live in a place where the language they spoke did not set them apart.

  Thomas decided that they would go back to Switzerland, where Elisabeth and Michael could go to German-speaking schools once term began. They hoped that Monika, who had grown depressed in Sanary, might find something useful to do in Switzerland.

  As soon as they returned, Katia set about finding them another English teacher to supplement the work of the Italian.

  “Yes, I know about Dante,” she said to Thomas, “the middle of the journey and the dark wood and all that, but it won’t help me to buy carrots in a grocery or to tell a plumber about a leaking pipe. We need to learn proper American English.”

  * * *

  When the first issue of Die Sammlung, a literary magazine edited by Klaus, arrived from Amsterdam, where he was living, Thomas saw his name in the list of future contributors. While he had not given specific permission for his name to appear, he had, he supposed, agreed to write for the magazine at some point. But no one had told him, least of all Klaus, that it was going to take such a strident political line. Both Heinrich in an article and Klaus in an editorial vehemently attacked the Nazi regime, Klaus writing that, although the publication was not exclusively political, it had a political mission that was unequivocal.

  Since his lecture in Berlin in 1930, Thomas had still done nothing to provoke the authorities. In France and in Switzerland in these first years of exile, he had been careful to give no interviews. His reticence, he understood from Bermann, his publisher, was noted in Berlin. The Nazis might be inclined to confiscate his property and refuse to renew his passport and the passports of his family, but they continued to allow his books to be sold.

  He contemplated the idea that someday in the near future his books would be withdrawn in Germany, and it frightened him. He thought back to Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, the books for which he was most famous, and realized that they would have been paler books, less confident, less intense, had he known when he was writing them that no German would be permitted to read them. At the time he wrote those books, he did not have to think of them as imaginative interventions in the fraught public life of his own country. Such high-flown thoughts were not necessary. The relationship between his words and the German reader had been calm and natural. There would come a time, he knew, when that relationship would have to be broken, but he wanted to postpone it for as long as he could.

  And now Klaus, by printing his name as a future contributor to the magazine, had dragged him into the net of émigré disaffection, putting everything at risk.

  “Yes,” Katia said, “I agree that it was a misjudgment. He should perhaps have included a chapter from the novel Heinrich is working on instead of an attack on Hitler. And the editorial is, you are right, too strident, although no one could disagree with it. And it might have been better to have left out the names of future contributors.”

  “Klaus has deliberately sought to include me in his pantheon of dissidents.”

  “Klaus is hotheaded and inconsiderate,” Katia said, “but he is not devious or sly. I suggest a gentle letter, but one that emphasizes that this must not happen again.”

  It might have been left like that, Thomas thought, had not a trade magazine in Germany published a warning to booksellers from the Office for the Furtherance of German Writing that they should not handle Klaus’s magazine. When Bermann, alarmed by this, contacted Thomas to say that his association with this troublemaking publication could involve the removal of his books from circulation, Thomas, without consulting Katia, sent a telegram to the trade magazine to confirm that the character of the first issue of Die Sammlung did not correspond to its original aims.

  His telegram, in turn, was attacked in German-language newspapers in Prague and Vienna. He knew, because Golo told him, how upset Klaus was and how he had taken to calling his mother collect late at night to say that his life was blighted, as his father had no respect for what he did. Klaus could not believe, Golo said, that his father would betray him in this way.

  “He likes to use my name when it suits him,” Thomas said. “And he has no problem about compromising me at the same time.”

  “Denouncing Hitler is hardly a way of compromising you,” Golo said.

  “Decisions about my denouncing Hitler will be taken by me and by no one else.”

  Golo stood up and left the room.

  Soon Katia appeared.

  “No telegrams in future without consulting me,” she said sternly. “But it was a great help that you sent it.”

  “I don’t think—”

  “Oh yes it was, it allowed me to tell Klaus that his father is as hotheaded as he is, and that seemed to please him.”

  Thomas was expecting an avalanche of criticism from Erika and was prepared
to ask her if she would spare him much of it. He and Katia were busy moving into a three-story villa in Küsnacht, on the lake close to Zürich. When Erika came to stay, she went with her mother to purchase new furniture and she oversaw the arrival of books and paintings that they had managed to rescue from Munich. It looked as if this engaged her, for the moment, more than the plight of her brother, who remained in Amsterdam.

  Having received permission from the Swiss authorities to restage The Peppermill, the anti-Nazi cabaret that she had produced in Germany before her departure, she began to rewrite the songs to make them connect with current events. The phone was busy all day as she made bookings and hired new performers.

  “I want them to hate me,” she said as the date of her opening neared.

  “Well, that won’t be hard,” Monika said.

  “I want the Swiss to hate me, but nonetheless to stay until the end of the show. I want the Nazis to know that I am still in business. And if everyone did what I am doing, then Hitler would soon be painting our hallways at less than the going rate.”

  “If there was no Hitler, what would you do?” Golo asked.

  “I don’t think in ‘ifs,’ ” Erika said.

  “But you just said ‘if everyone did what I am doing,’ ” Golo pointed out.

  “Golo, I am too busy to be consistent. I have too much to do.”

  The Peppermill played to packed houses. Thomas was amused when Katia told him that when the cabaret went on tour, Erika and a lady friend traveled first class and stayed in the best hotels, while the rest of the cast traveled in second class and stayed in cheaper hotels.

  “She has never been a socialist,” Thomas said. “Even when she was a baby she believed in the free market.”

  In Amsterdam Erika met Klaus, who had been officially declared stateless by Goebbels, causing Thomas to realize that his own semi-stateless position should not continue for much longer. He considered applying for Czech citizenship, as Heinrich had done. Thomas had met Edvard Beneš, the Czech foreign minister, at a conference and was informed by him that his application would be warmly received. Since her own German passport would soon reach its expiry date, Erika explained to her parents on her return, she had decided to strike out on her own and look for a foreign husband.