"After Einstein, you are the most important German alive," a U.S. government agent tells Thomas Mann near the end of his life, in Colm Tóibín's fictional biography. Imagine that! And oh, how he has, and then some, against the panoramic sweep of the twentieth century.
Mann, born in 1875, was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature between the two world wars but in Tóibín's telling, he left the politics mostly to his left-wing brother and six (!) children while under the care of his assimilated Jewish wife, Katia, who tolerates, even facilitates his attraction to men because she had been appalled by her own father's serial philandering. If the real Katia was anything like Toibin's compelling creation, then the world owes her an enormous debt for enabling Thomas to shut the door to his study and write such master works as Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, which was inspired by Katia's stay at a Swiss sanitarium.
Tóibín smartly identifies the location and year of each chapter to pinpoint the historical context of his mindset. Born in Lubeck to a Brazilian mother, he is disinherited by his burgher father. Mann marries way above his station in Munich where, as a young writer, he concludes this about his country just as it is about to declare war:
Germany, despite the strength of its military, was, he thought, fragile. It had come into being because of its common language, the language is shared with these poems. In its music and its poetry, it had treasured things of the spirit. It had been ready to explore what was difficult and painful in life. And it was hemmed in now, isolated and vulnerable, by countries with which it had nothing in common.
Mann initially treats current events as annoying interruptions to his writing, which has earned him both fame and money. His refusal to use his influence eventually drives a wedge between him and his older, more politically engaged brother, a less committed novelist who gets all the best lines:
"This is how empires end, “ Heinrich said, “a mad old bat being treated obsequiously in a provincial hotel. It will all be swept away.“
“Eternity will be bourgeois.”
Unfortunately, he can't ignore the real world as Germany rises from the ashes of the first world war. First the communist revolution in Munich (who knew?) followed by the relentless rise of Naziism. Here, as the Manns are first forced to flee to Switzerland, and then to the United States, The Magician turns into a thriller, one with a twist that will resonate among gay readers when the shipping of Mann's private diaries is bungled and he fears international exposure.
Tóibín treats Mann's appreciation for classical music--the mostly German kind--almost as a sublimation for his sexual orientation. This becomes most explicit in a Manhattan record store where his interaction with two simpatico clerks reads almost like a seduction. Near the end of the novel, while Mann is California dreamin', Tóibín also uses classical music to indict the German character. His Mann accuses it of releasing passions that can be as destructive as they are sublime which seems a bit of a stretch for a philistine like me.
Refugee life (first stop: Princeton) affords Tóibín the opportunity to examine American insularity prior to the bombing of Pearl Harbor and Mann's ambivalent relationship with Agnes Meyer (mother of Katharine Graham, the eventual publisher of the Washington Post), who did more than anyone else to keep him and his family safe, and living in the style to which they oh-so-luckily had become accustomed prior to their flight from Europe. During a dinner party at Meyer's house, Katia speaks her mind for the first time, giving an early, articulate voice to the "never forget" strategy adopted by so many Holocaust scholars and reminding me just how far Germany has come from its ugly past.
The Magician would be a great book even if Thomas Mann had never actually existed. That he did, and that Tóibín has credibly resurrected him from dim recollections of his work, is its own bit of magic: I can't wait to re-open Death in Venice and read Buddenbrooks for the first time.
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