This Is Where We Came In by Lynne Sharon Schwartz

Author:Lynne Sharon Schwartz [Schwartz, Lynne Sharon]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781619023598
Publisher: Counterpoint

Heinrich Mann’s Man of Straw

American awareness of Heinrich Mann has not improved much since the day he reached New York Harbor on a Greek ship in 1940, following a wartime cloak-and-dagger escape to Lisbon through the goat paths of the Pyrenees. He came with his wife and nephew, to join his younger brother, Thomas, in exile. Mann’s biographer, Nigel Hamilton, in The Brothers Mann, stresses the irony of the New York Times report of the event: “Golo Mann, celebrated German author (he had yet to write a book!) and son of the famous novelist Thomas Mann, had arrived on American soil, ‘accompanied by his uncle Heinrich.’” (The succeeding quotes from Mann’s letters are also from this excellent biography.)

Uncle Heinrich, at that point, had written some dozen novels as well as novellas, short stories, plays and political essays; he was a major German man of letters, well traveled, widely known and esteemed on the Continent not only as a writer but as a partisan of progressive social movements and an enemy of authoritarian government. Despite all this, or perhaps because of it, he did not fit any better in American society than he had in his native Germany, from which he was chased in February 1933 (one newspaper called him “national vermin”), three weeks after Hitler became chancellor. He may be known today to moviegoers as the author of the novel Professor Unrat (i.e., “excrement”), on which the movie The Blue Angel is based. “My head and Marlene Dietrich’s legs,” as he wryly remarked.

The title of Heinrich Mann’s masterpiece, Der Untertan, means, literally, “the underling, the one below”: it connotes a slave-like person, or someone who slavers over his masters. When I first read Man of Straw, as it is lamely titled in English, I didn’t know when it had been written. I found it searing and frightening, like acid burning through metal—yet it has a comic streak, too. I had never read anything quite like it. It made Swift look mild; you would have to go back to Juvenal for anything approaching so thorough an indictment of a society and the people who sustain it. And yet Mann seemed much saner and more authentic than Juvenal ever had. How satisfying, I thought, that someone besides Charlie Chaplin had finally “done” Hitler and the Third Reich, albeit in the guise of looking back at the previous century.

Then I learned that Man of Straw was begun in 1906. A few chapters had appeared in periodicals in 1914, but all publication plans were dropped at the outbreak of war. The German people, editors told Mann, could not tolerate less than reverence for the kaiser at such a critical moment. Nor, obviously, could the kaiser himself. In the autumn of 1918 the war was lost and the kaiser forced to abdicate. The Republic of Germany signed the Armistice on November 11; Man of Straw was published and had sold seventy-five thousand copies by December.

So the book I had admired as brilliant satire was prophecy.

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