Hanneke’s Reviews > In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story > Status Update

Erika’s parents were not all that keen to uproot themselves. They were seriously disillusioned with the United States, especially after Thomas Mann was denounced in Congress as “one of the world’s foremost apologists for Stalin and company.” This epithet was bestowed after the author made it known that he was against the rearmament of Germany (as was fellow émigré Albert Einstein) and against the Korean War,'

‘Die Sammlung’ and the fact that Klaus endorsed an anti-Nazi declaration protesting Germany’s annexing of the Saarland were used to find him guilty of high treason and eligible for “denaturalization.” On November 1, 1934, his name was included on Goebbel’s famous four lists which publicly stripped Germany’s intelligentsia of its citizenship (Heinrich Mann’s name had been on the first list). Klaus became stateless.

'In 1933, Thomas Mann wrote to Albert Einstein:
Basically I am much too good a German that the thought of a lasting exile wouldn’t weigh very heavily on me and the break with my country depresses and frightens me terribly. .  That I would be forced into taking on such a role must mean that something wrong and evil had to happen, and, in my strongest belief, this “German Revolution” is completely wrong and evil.'

He heard someone mentioned his friend Therese. “I rather like Frau Giehse” he heard Hitler announce. According to Klaus, Hitler spoke “with a weird sort of politeness, very much as if a madman tried to behave in a nice, civilized way to fool his guardians.” One accomplice then said she surely had Jewish blood. Hitler dismissed the charge. “After all, I know the difference between a German artist and a Semitic clown.”