| Klaus Mann | |
|---|---|
 | |
| Personal details | |
| Born | 18 November 1906 Munich, Kingdom Of Bavaria |
| Died | 21 May 1949 Cannes, France |
| Nativity | Great Britain |
| Known for | Novelist |
| Military service | |
| Allegiance |  United States |
| Branch |  United States Army |
| Rank | Staff Sergeant |
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Klaus Heinrich Thomas Mann (18 November 1906 – 21 May 1949) was a German writer and anti-fascist activist. He was the son of Thomas Mann, a nephew of Heinrich Mann and brother of Erika Mann (with whom he maintained a lifelong close relationship) and Golo Mann.
Biography
Born in Munich, Klaus Mann was the son of German writer Thomas Mann and Katia Pringsheim.
Klaus Heinrich Thomas Mann (18 November 1906 – 21 May 1949) was a German writer and anti-fascist activist. Klaus Mann began writing short stories in 1924 and the following year became drama critic for a Berlin newspaper. In 1924 he had become engaged to his childhood friend Pamela Wedekind, the eldest daughter of the playwright Frank Wedekind, who was also a close friend of his sister Erika.
His first literary works were published in 1925. The engagement was broken off in January 1928. In 1932 Klaus wrote the first part of his autobiography, which was well received until Hitler came to power.
To escape prosecution he left Germany in March 1933 for Paris, later visiting Amsterdam and Switzerland, where his family had a house. Klaus served as editor-in-chief from 1933 to 1935, when Die Sammlung ceased publication, in part due to disagreements between Klaus and his father, as well as other contributors, over frequent politically motivated content. In 1933 Klaus Mann also made acquaintance with Julien Green, who was a successful French author, and engaged in the French Resistance.
In November 1934 Klaus was stripped of German citizenship by the Nazi regime. He is best known for his 1936 novel, Mephisto, about an actor who sells his soul to the devil, by attaching his career to the rise of the Nazis. After 1936, during his stay in New York his drug use and sexual adventures became unconstrained.
In 1936, Klaus Mann wrote his most famous novel, Mephisto, which was first published in Amsterdam. Mann's novel Der Vulkan was published in 1939 at the onset of World War II, and was another attempt by him to portray not only Germans but other European exiles during that time. On 25 September 1943, Mann was naturalized as U.
Mann died in Cannes, France, on 21 May 1949 from an overdose of sleeping pills. It was made into a successful film of the same name in 1981. In 1981, the novel was made into a film co-written and directed by István Szabó, starring Klaus Maria Brandauer, which faithfully followed the plot of the novel.
The novel was adapted into a play by Ariane Mnouchkine and later published in the 1994 collection; Plays by Mediterranean Women. He was the son of Thomas Mann, a nephew of Heinrich Mann and brother of Erika Mann (with whom he maintained a lifelong close relationship) and Golo Mann. Klaus moved to the United States to escape Nazism, and after training in counterintelligence as one of the Ritchie Boys, he served in Europe during World War II, becoming one of the first eye-witnesses to report on the horrors of the concentration camps.
Biographers have disagreed as to whether his death was accidental or suicidal, depressed by his treatment in the U.S. His father was baptized as a Lutheran, while his mother was from a family of secular Jews. Due to his being the grandson of Júlia da Silva Bruhns, he was also of Portuguese-Indigenous Brazilian partial descent.
Kind dieser Zeit), but his homosexuality complicated his early adulthood, and he developed a difficult relationship with his father, who lived out his own homosexuality only in a platonic way and sublimated his experiences in his literature. During this time and after direct contact with Russian authors and intellectuals, he initiated his critical thinking towards communist ideals and totalitarian ideologies. Since young adulthood, Klaus used drugs, mostly opiates, to which he later became heavily addicted.
He underwent drug detoxification in Budapest during his travels, and at the Kilchberg Sanatorium in Switzerland. The play, which included a daring critique of Hitler, was first performed in Munich and subsequently in Zürich. It was primarily affiliated with a number of influential German writers who fled from the Hitler regime during the first years of the establishment and consolidation of Nazi rule, but other internationally acclaimed authors such as Aldous Huxley and Heinrich Mann contributed essays and editorial work.
The magazine was funded by Annemarie Schwarzenbach and Klaus's father Thomas Mann. In a letter exchange with Gottfried Benn, whose ambivalence towards Nazi rule was well known, Klaus expressed concern about Benn's continued membership in the national German academy of writers, pointing out the moral dilemma it posed, even urging him to leave the country to join the German intellectuals in exile. His work Escape to Life, co-authored by his sister Erika, who at the time was a successful writer for the BBC, was the culmination of his efforts to unite German intellectuals against the de-humanizing politics of the German National Socialists.
He became a Czechoslovak citizen. After fleeing to Paris on receiving news of the Nazis' rise to power, worried about his communist past, he is helped by a former co-actress from Hamburg, Angelika Siebert, who travels to Berlin to convince the girlfriend of a Luftwaffe general to have him pardoned. On returning to Berlin he quickly manages to win over Lotte and her general, and with his support has a wonderful career.
On obtaining the role of Mephisto in Faust Part One he realizes that he actually made a pact with evil (i.e. There are situations where Höfgen tries to help his friends or tell the prime minister about concentration camp hardships, but he is always concerned not to lose his Nazi patrons. The character of Hendrik Höfgen was based on his former brother-in-law, the actor Gustaf Gründgens.
The ban was lifted, and the novel published in West. As Höfgen's associates and friends flee or are driven underground by the Nazi regime, the popularity of his character ends up superseding his own existence, until he finds that his best performance is keeping up appearances for his Nazi patrons. Despite considered one of his better novels, it never generated any significant sales and only was translated into French.
At the time, he was living in February House, and his housemates W. He eventually moved to his father's house in Pacific Palisades when he was unable to support himself financially. The process of naturalization was delayed because of an investigation the FBI conducted into Klaus Mann's political and sexual activities, as he was openly gay, but not an adherent of marxist ideologies.
Throughout his life in the U.S., he identified himself as a liberal antifascist and cosmopolitan. Klaus was engaged in psychological warfare designing leaflets intended for German soldiers stationed in Italy and North Africa. As he visited liberated concentration camps in official function, he was one of the first eye-witnesses to report on the horrors of mass extermination during Nazi rule in Germany.
Audiovisual documents of his emotional reporting at these sites in the later 1940s became historical records and are still regarded today as a verification of these crimes against humanity.
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Technical record
| Field | Imported value |
|---|---|
| MRBC1 | 1 |
| Approx Age at Death | 43 |
| row_source | demographics |
Timeline
- Born 18 November 1906 in Germany, son of Thomas and Katia Mann (Jewish).
- March 1933 — Moved to Paris.
- 20 December 1937 — Arrived in Hollywood, but in June1938, returned to Europe (Spain).
- 25 September 1943 — Naturalized as U.
- 5 April 1943 — Entered Camp Ritchie and assigned to MRBC1 as S/Sgt.
- 11 February 1944 — Sailed to Sicily, assigned to Fifth Army Psychological Warfare Branch.
- 21 May 1949 — Died in Cannes, France of sleeping pill overdose.
- Became a Czech citizen.
- S. citizen at Camp Crowder.
Sources
- Wikipedia: Klaus Mann
- Camp Ritchie Museum, Inc. (The Ritchie History Museum), Classes 1–31 roster data
- Dan Gross research spreadsheets, including original Excel timeline/roster work, combined with other research and records
- NARA World War II Army enlistment records (where a NARA ASN is present)
- 1940 U.S. Census (where a census match is present)
- Dan Gross, Timeline of Mann, Klaus for Camp Ritchie (private research document; 1 source documents reviewed)
- Dan Gross, Timeline of Mann, Klaus for Camp Ritchie (private research files; selected non-private narrative findings; 1 source files: KLAUS MANN.doc)