In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story by Andrea Weiss

Author:Andrea Weiss
Language: eng
Format: mobi, epub, azw3
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Published: 2010-09-14T22:00:00+00:00

“Who has the youth has the future,” wrote Erika.

It seems Erika had to harden herself to her own devastating revelations, requiring her to leave out any personal connection to her subject—with the exception of one brief lapse in the prologue. While doing the research in the border towns around Germany, she interviewed countless firsthand witnesses to the Nazi indoctrination program, including one woman, a Mrs. M., the wife of a Nazi official, who drove over the Alps for a clandestine meeting with Erika in Switzerland. Erika was surprised to find herself overwhelmed with homesickness as soon as she heard Mrs. M’s voice, because she had “the southern accent that I love. And she will be able, surely, to tell me about Munich, my native city, my childhood home that I have not seen in over four years. Sometimes in dreams I wander in its streets, or float dreaming over the Marienplatz, across the old section of the town, down towards the Isar River.” Erika could not allow herself to succumb to such feelings, and cut short her momentary nostalgia: “But Mrs. M. and I have things to discuss; no time for emotional excursions into dream cities.”

The comment was pure Erika—she had little patience for emotional excursions, her own or Klaus’s. Much as Klaus wore his heart on his sleeve, Erika distanced herself from messy human sentiments and stuck instead to moral certainties and clear plans of action. It may well have been Klaus’s demanding emotional frailty that made her cut off examination of her own feelings; whatever the cause, the effect was a certain coldness and lack of sensitivity.

The book’s publication in autumn 1938 turned out to be good timing, as the political climate of American isolationism was finally starting to change. Sales were also helped by Thomas Mann’s introduction, and the cover, a swastika engulfed by bright red flames, was an eye-catcher. To Erika’s surprise, School for Barbarians became a best seller (it sold 40,000 copies in the first three months), and Erika became, by her own reckoning, one of the highest paid and most requested female lecturers in the country.

When war broke out in Europe in 1939, Erika pleaded the case for American involvement in an essay, “Don’t Make the Same Mistakes.” It was published in 1940 in the book Zero Hour: A Summons to the Free, a collection of essays that grew out of conversations she had with the poet Stephen Vincent Benét about the urgent need for the United States to mobilize for war.

Erika’s essay, the only one in the book by a woman and the only one by a non-American, tells the story of her becoming politicized after the poetry reading-turned-riot back in Munich in 1932. She uses the device of writing a letter to a young man she encounters on a train between Chicago and Los Angeles, who represents her younger, more innocent self. In emotional tones she impresses upon him the need to act: “Things have gone too far already. And it is America, it is your country, it is you who will have to make the decision.

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