Mephisto, Klaus Mann, 1936

 I picked up my copy of Mephisto during a vacation to the Pennsylvanian Appalachian Mountains at a small independent bookshop in the little town of Jim Thorpe/Mauch Chunk, which is actually aesthetically an appropriate match - this town has an almost Swiss Alpine appearance, and both this book and its author are unmistakable Germanic in all the important ways. I didn’t seek out this book. Rather, the last name of the author provided an intriguing surprise. 

Klaus Mann is a son of the eminent author Thomas Mann, one of my personal favorites, particularly due to the great Buddenbrooks. At the time of my trip to this mountain town, I was in the middle of writing and editing my first novel which heavily referenced Buddenbrooks. From somewhere within me, I had the notion that I could somehow relate to Klaus as a writer - in my mind, his relationship with his father, of which I knew nothing about at the time of my purchase of his book, somehow became connected to my own with my late father. I imagined that Klaus likely chafed and struggled under the literary shadow of his father and that he likely hadn’t approached the level of skill or status as a writer. This was suggested to me by the fact that the title referenced the same Faustian legend which his father had investigated in his own career. In some similar way, I view my father’s tastes, judgment, and intellect as somehow definitive, and I would like more than anything to have written a novel that would receive his approval of its quality. At the same time, I felt that I could maybe study and learn from the way this novel was written and crafted, much more so than I could by reading Buddenbrooks or The Magic Mountain, since those are superhuman masterpieces. 

By the time I got around to reading Mephisto I had finished my draft of my novel, and so, to indulge myself a little while at the same time being honest, this is the first time reading a novel from the new perspective of a “novelist.” I felt that my initial impression was accurate - Mephisto is very excellent in many ways, but some part of me feels that, if things went well for me in my writing journey, it might be within the realm of possibility that I could produce something like it. 

Before we describe some of Mephisto’s conceptual qualities, let us detail the background and plot. The novel is something of a “roman a clef” - based on true events in the author’s personal experience. Klaus Mann was a writer and critic involved in theater in Weimar Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. Mann was a socialist and homosexual. As the Nazi movement grew in strength and began to attain power in Germany, Mann became a dissident and eventually an exile alongside his father. However, Mann’s brother-in-law and friend, the theater actor Gustaf Grundgens (married to Klaus’s darling sister Erika), who before the rise of Nazism was a good friend of Klaus’s and was indeed also both a socialist and homosexual, took a different approach to the new regime. Grundgens did not go into exile, but rather adopted it to the benefit of his career, ending up director of the state theater company and protege to Hermann Gorring. In the eyes of Klaus, and in a twist of fate too strange to be fictional, Grundgens exemplified the character of the role for which he had become famous - Mephistopheles in Goethe’s Faust. 

The novel is a fairly direct transposition of the above situation. It is amazing to me that life can be so dramatic and so theatrical, but it seems to often be this way. The story starts with a flashforward depiction of a Nazi social function in 1936, the year of the novel’s publication, and during the apex of the career of the antihero/antivillain stand-in for Grundgens, named Hendrik Hofgen. The plot falls backwards in time and resumes at the beginning during Hofgen’s days as an impoverished but talented artist in “the provinces,” who dreams of success in the Berlin theater scene. We are introduced to Hofgen’s colleagues and acquaintances, who run the gamut of types, including actors, writers, communists, nazis, poor, wealthy, etc. Hofgen is consumed with his aspirations of a successful career, to the point of rejecting his birth name “Heinz” and adopting a new name “Hendrik” as a way to manifest the persona he wants to be and reject his past. The major theme of Hofgen’s life is the question of his authenticity versus his acting and how he crafts a persona of the person he wants to be, regardless of the destructive nature of that pursuit to his own character. He goes along charmingly manipulating anyone from whom he can gain an advantage, be it a raise, a new position, etc, for he has an artistic charisma that ensnares several women. He eventually marries the novel’s stand-in for Erika Mann, one Barbara Bruckner, daughter of a famous professor, writer, and privy councilor stand-in for the father of the author, Thomas Mann.

Prior to the Nazi takeover, Hofgen affected communist-leaning politics, dangling but never implemented the idea that he would found a socialist revolutionary theater. He leaves Hamburg to go to Berlin where he begins a surprisingly meteoric rise to stardom and wealth, culminating in the role of the evil scoundrel, Mephistopheles, which he is described as shockingly well suited for. At the time of the Nazi takeover, Hofgen is out of the country filming a movie, and he is confronted with the choice of whether to become an exile or to return. He decides to return after realizing that he is “a blond Rhinelander” and manages to become a protege to Hermann Goring by charming him and his actress girlfriend. Hofgen proceeds through the faustian myth and becomes one of the leading lights in the regime: wealthy and powerful. He even meets Hitler, who extends his approval to Hofgen due to Hofgen’s authentic but appropriate timidity in the face of the fuhrer. However, at the peak of his power, he attempts to play Hamlet at the state theater, a character who is explicitly presented to the reader as the epitome of Germanic civilization, and fails completely. He is applauded by the fearful audience, but Hofgen realizes this is due to his proximity to murderous power rather than his artistic force. Hofgen has sealed the faustian bargain and has lost his essence. 

There are some deviations from reality in the novel; for example, there is no direct analog character to Klaus Mann, and the author was reluctant to include homosexuality as part of the Hofgen character, apparently due to sharing this at-the-time vulnerability. Instead, the author imagines Hofgen in a secret BDSM relationship with a biracial Black German dominatrix named Juliette, termed Hofgen’s “Black Venus.” This replacement of Hofgen’s sexual “depravity” was described by the author as “negroid masochism.” I will discuss later how the novel is quite funny, but despite it being fairly clear that the author’s treatment of this relationship and descriptions of the Black German woman Juliette are intended to be absurd and funny, I don’t think this has aged well and will likely shock and offend many American readers in 2022.

Two conceptual qualities particularly strike me about the work; first, its initial absurd humor coupled with a shift in tone towards tragedy and sobriety as the Nazi takeover occurs, and second, its theatrical nature. 

The novel has at times a farcical comedy, powered by situational comedy and the absurdist elements, particularly characters. For example, there is a character named Theophilus Marder, a playwright who claims to be the most intelligent and forceful personality in Europe, who foretells of a coming catastrophe, bemoans the enfeeblement of modernity, and so on, but later rejects the Nazi takoever (despite its partial resonance with his rhetoric) and collapses into madness. His dialogue and letters to other characters are hilarious for their insulting directness. Hofgen’s sister presents lighter fare, jumping in and out of engagements every six months. The whole cast of the Hamburg theater engages in silly interactions. At the moment when the Nazis shockingly begin to really take over, the shifts to become more serious but laced with a very dark comedy. Structurally, interjections of something like a Greek chorus begins, which lends a tragic element. 

By theatricality, I mean that the novel is not written so much in a style of realism - it does not attempt to suspend the reader’s disbelief or extensively flesh out the characters as living, breathing people who could walk off the page. Instead, it emulates the condition of the theater, where there is a certain self awareness by the audience and the play actors together that their shared experience is an artistic event rather than a reproduction of life. It is somehow like the expressionist painting rather than the realist, or perhaps even further, it is like the “modern art” piece that draws attention to itself as an art piece object rather than to the subject contained within. In my mind, this is in contrast to most films and most realist novels where the opposite effect is intended. I think this theatrical effect is very fitting and harmonious in this novel, both due to the fact that its direct subject matter is theater and actors and to the interesting conceptual dynamic of the uncertainty of the line between the end of acting and the start of reality in Hofgen’s life. 

Politically, the description of the competition between the Nazis and Communists is quite interesting, and I was reminded of how all historical narrative is faced with survivor bias - at the time, in late 1920s and early 1930s, the Communists were a larger group than the Nazis and considered the greater threat to liberal democratic principles, capitalism, and to the elites (Junkers, industrialists, financiers, etc). In today’s popular discussion, there is less mention of the large role of communists in anti government and revolutionary activity in the weimar period due to the knowledge that it will be the Nazis that carry through with their takeover. But at the end of the book, Hofgen is confronted with a possible vision of a possible return to prominence for the communists and a seizure of power from the Nazis. I imagine that from where the author sat in 1936, a communist response seemed to be the most likely solution to the Nazi regime. Hofgen is constantly considering his “insurance policy” of hints of pro-communist leanings during his time in the region, planning a cover story to account for his collaboration and past action and to survive in the next future communist regime.

Early in the narrative, Mann presents the battle for the minds of the youth of Germany between Nazism and Communism in the venue of the actors of his home Hamburg theater, primarily Otto Ulrichs, a dashing and heroic young communist agitator and organizer, and Hans Miklas, a sulking and depressive young Nazi sympathizer. It appears that hope and energy constitute the communist activity, while resentment and impatience do the same for Nazism. At one point, Ulrichs gives a little speech about how the disaffected youth that are misled into Nazism are rightly rejecting the status quo and are searching for a redemptive ideology but can and must be saved from Nazism and shown the true revolutionary ideology of socialism, etc. 

Throughout the novel, Nazism is not directly described as an ideology or a movement - rather, the equivocations, rejections, and collaborations of the characters to the building movement and then the government give insight into what they saw in Nazism at the time as it unfolded. This is quite a different vantage point than we have today.  Mann expresses the fact that the Weimar Germany situation was untenable and granted that Nazism had an allure before it was fully revealed to be a more or less irredeemable expression of evil (which may not have been clear yet as of the writing of the novel), full of practical and mystical solutions to these problems. We see the messianic faith of Ulrichs and others towards the charismatic leader, the appeal to Germanic cultural beliefs, the seductiveness of a visceral, non-rational, heroic movement professing strength, discipline, salvation, and superiority. Without its later high crimes, Nazism appears more in keeping with a certain streak of German philosophy in the line of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, etc, rather than some aberration. We see characters downplay the risks of Nazism in real time, doubt the chances of war or of crimes, get swept up in the optimistic and glamorous aspects of the movement and regime, and so on. And yet, the exile movement is also described as a highly logical response to the new regime, the members of which seem to view the takeover as a kind of apocalypse or ending of Germany as they knew it. Mann characterizes the Nazi regime as fundamentally disappointing to the working class, such as Ulrichs, in that they are self-enriching elitists rather than reformers and populists. One note that I find interesting is to consider the fact that Germany had been led by the Prussian Kaiser only eighteen years prior to the publishing of the novel, and in some ways Nazism may have simply appeared a reversion to that “natural” state of affairs. 

Finally, the strangest impression I had while reading this work was from the timing of its writing and publication, in the year 1936. Klaus wrote this as a dissident exile critiquing the regime of his home nation which he viewed as violent and evil. But at the time, in 1936, the worst atrocities and horrors had yet to happen, and the reputation of the Nazis had yet to be cemented as evil incarnate in the minds of the rest of the world and of history. This makes the Faustian plot all the stronger and proves Klaus Mann to be quite prescient - there are many hints to a predicted future catastrophe, implications of a horrible war to be started by the militant regime. There is discussion of executions and torture of Jews and communists in concentration camps (which are commonly conflated with the later death camps), but I don’t believe there is any hint of something like the Holocaust on the horizon.