Heinrich Mann – Satirist, Democrat, and Exile: On a writer who knew Germany better than Germany knew itself.

There is a photograph from October 1940, taken at New York Harbor: Two elderly gentlemen stand side by side, both in coats, both with the seriousness of those days etched on their faces. One looks at the other – the other glances just past him. They are Heinrich and Thomas Mann, the two most famous brothers in German literature, and this picture, in its casual composition, reveals more about their relationship than a thousand pages of correspondence could. Heinrich, the elder, seeks eye contact. Thomas, the younger, neither turns away nor towards him. Unequal brothers, wrote the German scholar Helmut Koopmann, also in their relationship to one another.

Luiz Heinrich Mann was born on March 27, 1871, in Lübeck, the eldest son of the shipping merchant and later senator Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann and his wife Julia. Four years later, his brother Thomas was born, the one who would one day pave the way for him—and then, irrevocably, overshadow him. Tomorrow marks the 155th anniversary of Heinrich's birth. Reason enough to commemorate a man whose work was more prophetic than that of many a historian—and whose fate exemplifies Germany's relationship with its most challenging minds.

The Satirist of the German Empire

Heinrich's literary career began in that brief era when Wilhelmine Germany still believed in its own invulnerability. After abandoning his bookseller apprenticeship, completing a traineeship at the S. Fischer publishing house, and spending extended periods in Italy, he published the social novel "Im Schlaraffenland" (In the Land of Cockaigne) in 1900, which already revealed the satirical sharpness that would characterize his entire oeuvre. But it was with "Professor Unrat, or The End of a Tyrant" in 1905 that he achieved his breakthrough: The story of the pedantic high school teacher who is destroyed by his obsession with the variety singer Rosa Fröhlich was a dark parable of a society in which authority and hypocrisy formed an unholy alliance. A quarter of a century later, Josef von Sternberg adapted the story into the film "The Blue Angel," starring a then-unknown Marlene Dietrich. The film made Dietrich a global star. It did not make the author any richer.

Between his early novels and his later major work lies "The Small Town" from 1909, a novel unique in German literature: More than a hundred characters populate the stage of an Italian market town, drawn with psychological precision, in a work that celebrates democracy as a lived community—a quiet counterpoint to the Prussian authoritarian state.

The History of the Public Soul

But his masterpiece was to be something else entirely. Since 1906, Heinrich Mann had been working on a novel he himself called "The History of the Public Soul under Wilhelm II": "The Subject." In July 1914, two months before the outbreak of the First World War, the manuscript was completed. An advance excerpt in the newsreel "Zeit im Bild" was immediately censored; with the outbreak of war, all further publication was prohibited. A Russian translation appeared only in 1915, followed in 1916 by a small private German edition. The actual book publication took place in 1918, after the collapse of the German Empire—and the novel sold almost 100,000 copies in the first few months.

At its center is Diederich Heßling, a "soft child" who grows into a ruthless opportunist. Hessling fawns on those above him and bullies those below him, imitating the outward appearance of his emperor, adorning himself with empty phrases, and rising to become the most influential citizen of the fictional small town of Netzig through unconditional adaptation to the power structure. Heinrich Mann incorporated actual fragments of imperial speeches into Hessling's addresses—a technique that heightened the satirical effect. His antagonist, the old democrat Buck, a participant in the 1848 revolution, witnesses Hessling's machinations politically destroy him—and dies on his deathbed with a look on his face as if he had seen the devil himself. The final scene, in which a thunderstorm destroys Hessling's lavish monument unveiling, reads like a prophecy of the downfall of the German Empire itself.

The historian Hans-Ulrich Wehler later judged that no historian had been able to describe the role of the imperial-fanatical bourgeoisie as vividly as Heinrich Mann. And Heinrich Mann himself wrote to the Austrian writer Paul Hatvani in 1922: “Novels like those written by my kind are the inner history of our time, the history that no one yet sees or wants to acknowledge until fateful days terribly confirm it.” “The Subject” was more than a satire—it was a warning. That it went unheeded is one of the bitter ironies of German history.

Together with the novels “The Poor” from 1917, which focused on the proletariat, and “The Head” from 1925, which dissected the intellectual elites, “The Subject” forms the so-called Imperial Trilogy—a literary panorama of Wilhelmine society that stands unparalleled in German literature.

More than a friend, less than a friend

The relationship with Thomas Mann was the great drama of Heinrich Mann's life—a sibling rivalry of Old Testament proportions that dragged on for decades and whose scars never fully healed. In the early years, Heinrich was a literary role model for his younger brother; together they spent the years 1896 to 1898 in Italy. But the rift became apparent early on. When Thomas achieved his breakthrough with "Buddenbrooks" in 1901, Heinrich responded with "The Goddesses"—a counter-model that, instead of depicting decay and isolation, sang a hymn to life, the senses, and the Mediterranean.

Thomas, for his part, did not hold back with his devastating criticism. He wrote to his friend in Lübeck, Ida Boy-Ed, about Heinrich: The feeling that Heinrich's artistic personality aroused in him was far from contempt—it was more like hatred. Heinrich's books were bad, but in such an extraordinary way that they provoked passionate opposition. Marcel Reich-Ranicki later sought the cause of this sibling conflict in their differing sexual orientations: in Thomas Mann's hidden attraction to his own sex and in Heinrich's relationship with women, which bordered on libertinism.

The decisive break came with the First World War. In 1915, Heinrich protested against the widespread enthusiasm for the war with his famous essay on Zola—and in it, he directly referenced his brother's pro-war writings. Thomas responded in 1918 with "Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man," a monumental reckoning that Klaus Mann later described as "a single German fratricidal war." Thomas brusquely rejected a reconciliation proposed by Heinrich in 1917.

Only a serious illness suffered by Heinrich led to a reconciliation in 1922. Thomas, by then shaken by the assassination of Walther Rathenau and the rise of the far right, had publicly declared his support for democracy for the first time in his speech "On the German Republic"—a belated approximation to the position that Heinrich had always held. But the rivalry remained a painful thorn in their side. Thomas wrote to a friend: "Perhaps, separated, we are more one another's brother than we would be at a shared banquet table." Shakespeare might have expressed it similarly—and indeed, Thomas Mann used a quote from Hamlet to describe the relationship: more than friendly, less than friends.

Overcoming the Mountain

When the National Socialists seized power in January 1933, Heinrich Mann, as president of the poetry section of the Prussian Academy of Arts, was one of the most prominent figures in German culture. In February, he, along with Käthe Kollwitz and Albert Einstein, had signed an appeal for united action between the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and the Communist Party (KPD) against the Nazis. The response was swift: expulsion from the Academy, revocation of his citizenship, and the burning of his books on the bonfire of May 10, 1933—alongside the works of Brecht, Tucholsky, Feuchtwanger, Kästner, and all the others whose names read like a "Who's Who" of the German progressive intelligentsia.

Heinrich Mann was on the first list of those denaturalized by the German Reich. As early as February 1933, he emigrated to France, where—thanks to his excellent command of French—he considered the country less a place of exile than a adopted home. He settled in Nice and embarked on a tireless anti-fascist activism: He assumed the honorary chairmanship of the German Writers' Association, the presidency of the German Freedom Library, and initiated the Lutetia Circle, the committee for the preparation of a German Popular Front, which aimed to unite communists and social democrats in exile. He wrote the political polemics "The Hate" and "The Meaning of This Emigration" and contributed countless articles to exile journals such as "Die Neue Weltbühne" and Klaus Mann's "Die Sammlung."

During these years, he also created his major late work: the two-volume historical novel "The Youth of King Henry IV" and "The Completion of King Henry IV," published in 1935 and 1938. It was an attempt to portray a positive hero in times of barbarity—the good king who defends tolerance and reason against the fanatics of his era. The work remains one of the most important German historical novels and an outstanding testament to exile literature.

In August 1940, after France's military defeat, Heinrich Mann's most dramatic hour began. Together with his second wife Nelly, his nephew Golo Mann, as well as Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler-Werfel, he fled across the Pyrenees to Spain, an escape organized by the American smuggler Varian Fry. Heinrich Mann was sixty-nine years old. Alma Mahler-Werfel later wrote about the ascent through the blazing September sun: Nelly Mann had to carry Heinrich more than he could have climbed himself. Exhausted, the small group reached Barcelona, ​​then Lisbon, and then the life-saving ship to New York—that final passage out of Europe which Walter Benjamin had also intended to take. Benjamin took his own life in Portbou on the Spanish border, believing he would be sent back.

Californian Solitude

Heinrich Mann spent his last decade in Los Angeles, increasingly isolated. The American continent remained foreign to him until the very end. He initially worked as a screenwriter for Warner Brothers, but success eluded him; financially, he depended on the support of his brother Thomas, who lived a far more comfortable life in nearby Pacific Palisades. In 1944, Nelly Mann took her own life. Heinrich withdrew further and further into himself and wrote his autobiography, "An Age Is Examined"—a memoir that, however, sold poorly. After his death, his manuscripts and correspondence went to his longtime friend Lion Feuchtwanger.

Feuchtwanger, who himself lived in close proximity to Heinrich Mann in Los Angeles, had already admitted in 1927 in his "Attempt at a Self-Portraitation" that three colleagues had significantly influenced him: Heinrich Mann had changed his diction, Alfred Döblin his epic form, and Bertolt Brecht his dramatic form. It was a rare public testament to the esteem in which Heinrich Mann was held by his fellow writers, while the general public had long since preferred his brother Thomas. Kurt Tucholsky, the great satirist of the Weimar Republic, stood as a social critic in the tradition of Heinrich Heine—and thus in close intellectual kinship with Heinrich Mann, whose novel "The Loyal Subject" provided the disillusioned Tucholsky, after 1918, with an explanation of who had been to blame for the catastrophe of the First World War.

In February 1949, Heinrich Mann was elected president of the newly founded German Academy of Arts in East Berlin. The GDR awarded him the National Prize, First Class, for Art and Literature. A return to Germany was planned; his suitcases were packed. But Heinrich Mann died on March 11, 1950, in Santa Monica, sixteen days before his seventy-ninth birthday and just a few weeks before his planned move. Arnold Zweig took over the position intended for him. His urn was later transferred to East Berlin—a posthumous homecoming that had been impossible for the living man.

Walking through Lübeck today, the city both brothers transformed into world literature, one finds the Buddenbrook House prominently displayed. A chapter there is dedicated to Heinrich Mann, no more. The true tragedy of his life lies not in his being overshadowed by his brother, but in the fact that his work, which saw through Germany before Germany saw through itself, never received the recognition it deserved. "The Subject" is now required reading in schools. But it must be read again and again—not as a historical document, but as a warning. For the character of Diederich Heßling, the opportunist who fawns over those above and kicks those below, is not an invention of the Wilhelmine era. He is timeless. Heinrich Mann knew this. He wrote it down for us. It is up to us to read it.

Sapere aude!

S. 

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