Cursed legacy
Subtitle: the tragic life of Klaus Mann
By: Frederic Spotts
Publisher: Yale University Press
Published: 2016
Language: eng
Number of pages: 338
ISBN-13: 9780300218008
Subjects: German Authors; Biography; German Novelists
Description: Son of the famous Thomas Mann, homosexual, drug-addicted, and forced to flee from his fatherland, the gifted writer Klaus Mann's comparatively short life was as artistically productive as it was devastatingly dislocated. Best-known today as the author of Mephisto, the literary enfant terrible of the Weimar era produced seven novels, a dozen plays, four biographies, and three autobiographies-among them the first works in Germany to tackle gay issues-amidst a prodigious artistic output. He was among the first to take up his pen against the Nazis, as a reward for which he was blacklisted and denounced as a dangerous half-Jew, his books burnt in public squares around Germany, and his citizenship revoked. Having served with the U.S. military in Italy, he was nevertheless undone by anti-Communist fanatics in Cold War-era America and Germany, dying in France (though not, as all other books contend, by his own hand) at age forty-two. Powerful, revealing, and compulsively readable, this first English-language biography of Klaus Mann charts the effects of reactionary politics on art and literature and tells the moving story of a supreme talent destroyed by personal circumstance and the seismic events of the twentieth century.
Notes: Includes bibliographical references (pages 312-327), filmography (page 328), and index.
Table of contents: title: Introduction; title: First writings 1906-24; title: First scandals 1924-28; title: First drugs 1929-32; title: Fleeing Hitler 1933; title: Homosexualities 1934-35; title: Lecturing to Americans 1936-37; title: Stalin's agent 1938-39; title: Farewell to Germany 1940-41; title: A new identity 1942; title: 'Misplaced' 1943; title: German problem children 1944-45; title: The shadow falls 1946-47; title: Todessehnsucht 1948; title: Death in Cannes 1949; title: Epilogue.