THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020 43
the country. Mann rejected the concept
of inner emigration when it surfaced
after the war, and Zeitblom, with his
ineffectual reservations about the re-
gime, stands in for such compromised
figures as the playwright Gerhart Haupt-
mann and the poet Gottfried Benn.
The novel caused its own commo-
tion within the émigré community.
Leverkühn is presented as the origina-
tor of the twelve-tone method of com-
position—a historical distortion that in-
furiated Schoenberg. Mann was forced
to add a prefatory note in which he gave
Schoenberg credit. (The tale is laid out
in “The Doctor Faustus Dossier,” edited
by Randol Schoenberg, the composer’s
grandson.) Furthermore, the novel’s al-
legorical structure appears to equate the
diabolical complexities of modern music
with the death fugue of German poli-
tics. Schoenberg, who had perceived the
genocidal potential of Nazi anti-Semi-
tism far earlier than Mann had, under-
standably resented the implication. Yet
Leverkühn is in no way a stand-in for
Hitler: he is strangely righteous in his
cold-minded quest for extreme sounds
and apocalyptic visions. Mann com-
ments in his diaries that the composer
is a “hero of our times... my ideal.”
If a simple message can be extracted
from the pitch-black labyrinth of “Doc-
tor Faustus,” it is that art cannot escape
its context, no matter how much it strives
toward higher spheres. Ultimately, the
book is another Mannian ritual of
self-interrogation. Marta Feuchtwanger
once said of the novelist, “He felt in a
way responsible as a German.... He
defended the First World War and also
the emperor. Later on, it seems that he
recognized his error; maybe that was
the reason that he was so terribly upset
about the whole thing, more than any-
body else.” There is, she commented,
“no greater hate than a lost love.”
F
ew obvious traces of the emigration
persist in contemporary Los Ange-
les. A city that is flexing its power as an
international arts capital ought to do
more to honor this golden age of the
not too distant past. But the evidence
is there if you search for it. You can still
hear stories about the principals from
the composer Walter Arlen, aged nine-
ty-nine, and the sublime actor and ra-
conteur Norman Lloyd, aged a hundred
and five. A modest tourist business has
built up around the legacy of the émi-
gré architects. The homes of Thomas
Mann and Feuchtwanger are now under
the purview of the German govern-
ment, which offers residencies there to
scholars and artists. The programmers
at the Mann house, which has under-
gone a meticulous renovation, are so-
liciting video essays on the future of de-
mocracy—a topic as fraught today as it
was when the author took it up in the
nineteen-thirties.
The improbable idyll of Weimar on
the Pacific dissipated quickly. Werfel and
Bruno Frank both died in 1945. Nelly
Mann, Heinrich’s wife, died the previ-
ous year, by suicide; Heinrich died in
- Döblin went to Germany to assist
in the de-Nazification effort, meeting
with considerable frustration. Those ex-
iles who remained in America felt mount-
ing insecurity as the Cold War took hold.
McCarthyism made no exceptions for
leftist writers who had been persecuted
by the Nazis. Brecht left in 1947, the day
after he appeared before the House
Un-American Activities Committee, and
later settled in East Germany. Feucht-
wanger longed to return to Europe but,
having never been granted U.S. citizen-
ship, chose not to risk leaving.
Thomas Mann, who had become
an American citizen in 1944, felt the
dread of déjà vu. The likes of McCar-
thy, Hoover, and Nixon had crossed
his line of sight before. In 1947, after
the blacklisting of the Hollywood Ten,
he recorded a broadcast in which he
warned of incipient Fascist tendencies:
“Spiritual intolerance, political inquisi-
tion, and declining legal security, and
all this in the name of an alleged ‘state
of emergency’: that is how it started in
Germany.” Two years later, he found his
face featured in a Life magazine spread
titled “Dupes and Fellow Travelers.” In
his diary, he commented that it looked
like a Steckbrief: a “Wanted” poster.
To stand in Mann’s study today, with
editions of Goethe and Schiller on the
shelves, is to feel pride in the country
that took him in and shame for the coun-
try that drove him out—not two Amer-
icas but one. In this room, the erstwhile
“Greatest Living Man of Letters” fell
prey to the clammy fear of the hunted.
Was the year 1933 about to repeat itself?
Would he be detained, interrogated,
even imprisoned? In 1952, Mann took
a final walk through his house and made
his exit. He died in Zurich, in 1955—no
longer an émigré German but an Amer-
ican in exile.
“Oops, I set the thermostat too high.”
••
