Marred by reticence
Piers Paul Read
REMINISCENCES AND REFLECTIONS: GROWING UP IN GERMANY by Golo Mann Faber, 125, pp. 338 In 1933, when Hitler came to power, Thomas Mann, lecturing abroad, deemed it wise not to return to Germany. The job of retrieving what he could of their money and possessions went to their second son, Angelus Gottfried, known as Golo, then a student of 24. In particular, he was told to recover his father's diaries. Golo packed them in a suitcase and gave it to the chauffeur to take to the station. Instead, the chauffeur, a covert Nazi, delivered it to the Gestapo. Thomas Mann was dis- traught. The diaries, covering the 1920s, contained passages which he feared could damage his reputation. Golo Mann, too, was afraid. 'They will publish excerpts in the Volkisher Beobachter,' he wrote in his own diary at the time. 'They will ruin everything, they will ruin me. My life will never be right again.' When his lawyer eventually retrieved them from the Gesta- po, Thomas Mann burned the incriminat- ing volumes.
What is frustrating about these re- miniscences of Golo Mann is that, while he tells this story, he does not say what it was in the diaries that would have comprom- ised his distinguished father. He remains throughout the dutiful fils a papa. It is only by reading between the lines that we realise that the old man (as Golo called him) was an unsatisfactory father — cold, prurient and obsessed with his work. As he himself wrote in his diary, 'Someone like me "ought" not to bring children into this world.'
Their mother, Katya, put her husband before her children — their happiness sacrificed to his genius; in Golo's case, to Joseph and his Brethren, the prototype of the unreadable megamasterpiece so famil- iar today. Life looked up for the young Golo only when he went to Salem, the boarding school near Lake Constance run by Kurt Hahn. The healthy-mind-in-a- healthy-body regime which was later trans- ferred to Gordonstoun appealed to Golo who found in the companionship of the other boys an affection he had been denied at home. It is left to Peter Demetz, in his introduction, to tell us that Golo was homosexual (`gay in an age of repression') and it is typical of the author's reticence about his personal life that we do not discover whether or not this proclivity emerged at Salem.
From Salem he went to study philosophy under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg. Jaspers tried to put him off. Philosophy was not a profession: all it equipped you to do was to teach philosophy and that was only possi- ble for the lucky few. 'Perhaps I could combine it with psychology?', suggested Golo. This is dismissed by Jaspers. `Psychology has degenerated into a mere semblance of a science'. 'Or sociology?' `Even worse.' Only slowly does Golo Mann turn to the study of history, in which he made his name in later life. His years of study were intellectual wanderjahre, and among the more interesting passages in these reminiscences are those which de- scribe the intellectual development of this young German between the two world wars.
Between school and university, he work- ed in a coal mine, and at Heidelberg joined an association of socialist students. He writes scornfully of his parents' conspi- cuous consumption during the Depression when troy were still well off, thanks to the Nobel Prize and the tremendous earnings of The Magic Mountain. They took trips, they ate and drank well, and two large cars stood in
the garage — an open American car and a German limousine. When they went to the theatre, the chauffeur waited in the lobby with their fur coats at the end of the perform- ance. This style of life, which they went to no trouble to conceal, made their growing num- ber of political enemies hate them all the more.
Of course Golo also benefitted from their prosperity — he was given a small car of his own — but despite this generosity he preferred his older brother and sister, Klaus and Erika, to his parents, although not their douche friends. 'Erika's birthday recently,' he wrote in his diary, 'with a great deal of alcohol and tiresome, even disturbing people . .
He shied away from such sophistication, nostalgic for his schooldays. 'How happy I was,' he writes in some tedious travelogues quoted in this volume, `to find myself suddenly only six kilometres from Salem!' As he readily admits, his development was slow: That I was really destined to be a writer, if only one who dabbles in history and philo- sophy, was something from which I hid for a long time. Unconsciously, I probably did not want to encroach on Klaus's territory and had to wait until my father died.
The tragedy for Golo Mann, which was also a tragedy for Germany, was that the father who was such a wonderful writer was such an unsatisfactory man. Germany suffered because this prominent opponent of the Nazis lived up to their caricature of decadence; Golo and his siblings suffered from their parents' neglect. Klaus was to commit suicide; Michael died from a mix- ture of alcohol and barbiturates and Golo does not seem to have been happy: 'we will never lack', he writes, 'for plentiful reasons for tears'.
He does not blame his father or any of the political and intellectual leaders who allowed Germany to fall into the hands of Hitler:
Where does the line run between guilt and inevitability? Nothing can be proven. The logical positivists tell us that a question that can never be answered is not a real question. Wrong. There are questions one must simply ponder, even if they do not permit an answer; and they can be the most serious questions of all.
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