Exile literature – he was allowed to consider himself anonymous

On October 13, 1940, when the Greek “Nea Hellas”, “a ship full of stranded, famous celebrities,” as Klaus Mann noted, reached New York, and founded at the pier, Heinrich Mann suspected that nothing would be like before. It was shortly after nine in the morning, he saw the reception committee, also discovered his brother Thomas, waving like all the others. After the entry formalities were done, he went with short stiff steps and in an upright attitude towards the waiting ends, elegant as always. The newcomers were welcomed. Faces radiant everywhere. Then a particularly long and serious hug with the brother.

The fear had come to an end for the refugees tomorrow. They had finally escaped Hitler. But Heinrich Mann’s joy was limited. He thought of the lost, of France, which had been home to him since 1933, of the strict escape over the Pyrenees, which had brought him to the edge of the collapse, and he thought that only, on that day, exile began. The last thing he had seen from Europe was Lisbon, the city, which continued to remove itself, “incomprehensibly beautiful”. Later he would write: “A lost lover is not more beautiful.” Yes, he was saved. But the stranger, the unknown country, he looked at without interest and curiosity.

The next day, the “New York Times” reported the arrival of the refugees. Among them, it said, Golo Mann, the son Thomas Manns, was accompanied by his uncle Heinrich. The message could not be found out who this uncle was. “In California Beverly Hills and in Santa Monica,” wrote Ludwig Marcuse about the companion Heinrich Mann in 1960, “he only looked back.” He was in the wrong place. America didn’t know him and he didn’t know America. He had lived in France. France was also exile in the strict sense. But there he had friends »and most of his eight -year stay, the French employed him. King Henri IV. “The two volumes” were an unusually happy work, the best gift of fate … “Then the sentence:” The overview of the work and existence of this author can be over. “

An Italian publisher asked Heinrich Mann for a sketch of his life in 1946. The balance sheet sober. And yet: »He also writes and is alive in America, both no longer public when he decreases and compares. That is two opposite livelihoods …, he was allowed to consider himself anonymous. «The report, previously unknown, is now in the ninth volume of the great collection of essays and journalism, an editorial pioneering act that has been published in Bielefeld Aisthesis Verlag since 2009. He brings the scattered, sometimes unpublished work of the past ten years, tracked down in the archives of the USA, Moscow and Prague, in Lübeck and Marbach, around five hundred pages of text, which is commented on over a thousand pages in the second half -band, enriched with a lot of documentary material.

Once again you can see Heinrich Mann committed and wide awake at work. He wrote at his memoir work “A age is visited”, “an autobiography as a criticism of the age experienced by indescribably strict and cheerful glory, naive wisdom and moral dignity,” as Thomas Mann says, and in the novels “reception in the world” and “The breath”. Most recently, he worked on a book that was supposed to deal with the Prussian king Friedrich II but was no longer finished, a late answer to the essay “Friedrich and the grand coalition” of his brother published in 1914. But he did not want to draw the radiant winner, the proud ruler, but the young, beaten, humiliated youth, the victim of tyrannical education. The title already revealed the contrast picture: “The sad story of Frederick the Great”.

All of this was impotent with unprecedented willpower and discipline to the difficult living conditions. “I’ll desperate soon,” Heinrich’s wife Nelly wrote to her friend Salomea Rottenberg in New York in September 1941. She wished she had five thousand dollars, then her husband could work, “how and what he wants”. “Now we are not able to get the food for tomorrow. How can you work there? ”He ignored the misery without complaint and continued his journalistic activities after initial skepticism, summed up the ten years of Hitler in 1943, remembered Carl von Ossietzky, praised Kisch, Döblin, Oskar Maria Graf, Feuchtwanger and Paul Merker, sent a message to the Soviet Union under the title» Looked at Emile Zola again, the dead companion Max Herrmann-Neiße and Stefan Zweig. He was silent about current political events and events. He rejected all requests, the fragmented emigration as in France when it came to the leading personality.

When the war ended, post came from Germany again. He should come home, he was written to him, where you urgently need him, to East Berlin. Heinrich Mann opened the letters, read a carefully line by line and put them aside. He had lost his wife Nelly in December 1944, and since then his situation had become even more bleak. Lonely and grieving, observed by the FBI, dependent on the support of the brother, on December 28, 1948, he added a letter to the friend Pinkus, written in French, according to the signature with the remark: »Old writer first -rank, in retirement. Always a clairvoyant spirit, whose serenity turns into indifference. “

“The natural would now be if I was in Berlin.” He knew it. But: »You will trust me that the prevention must be considerable if I have so far. I still hope. ”In May 1948 Heinrich Mann wrote to Johannes R. Becher, who repeated the invitation and also informed him that the construction publisher had already released his” subject “in 1945. “When the Germans always lose a war,” said Heinrich Mann sarcastic, “print my ‘subject’.” Katia and Thomas Mann advised to return. She would have been a late honor. He hesitated. He had grown old, haunted by changing suffering. Most recently, he lived in a small apartment, did his shopping, read, wrote letters, listened to music. “He will hardly go,” said the brother after the many conversations they had held, “he is, God knows, excused. But it was ready to ask for him «.

After a long persuasion, Heinrich Mann finally decided to return to Berlin to take over the presidential office of the Academy of the Arts of the GDR. The ship’s passage was already booked when he no longer woke up one morning. It was March 11, 1950.

Heinrich Mann: Essays and Publicistics. Critical total edition in 10 volumes, Vol. 9: October 1940-1950, ed. by Bernhard Veitenheimer with the collaboration of Wolfgang Klein, Aisthesis Verlag, 2 vols.