In combat Klaus Mann ignores the barriers

"Dear Madam Minister of the air force", "The Minister of the hunt", "Madam Minister-President": Klaus Mann (1906-1949) has no shortage of jeers for stopping actress Emmy Sonnemann, who married for the second time Hermann Goering in the spring of 1935. The young man comes to be stripped of his German nationality for his fight against the nazis, but did not abandon. It starts to load. "Never to run out of ideas, your husband, such a horsedrawn Lohengrin, landed at the door of your room in a State of the art Swan." And what guests at your wedding! There were all the old comrades in arms your good-humored husband did not kill. "Klaus Mann, the homosexual dandy of the Berlin nights, the child spoiled of Protestant gentry, long stationed in a decadent and fragile, character is one of the most courageous opponents of Hitler. As early as 1925, it multiplies articles, speeches, conferences. Sixty-seven consolidated texts in "against the barbarism 1925-1948" (Phébus) are extracted five volumes (2,200 pages) of "essays, speeches, chronic" published in the Rowolhlt editions. They were written in German until 1940, when the author abandons his tongue and chooses English.

The letter to Stefan Zweig

Most German artists and intellectuals have rallied to the new masters. They have swallowed their contempt for the new leaders, that they were vulgar and obscurantism. They believe that they were original, at least for the first time. They have accepted all compromises, the image of Richard Strauss signing a false statement accusing test of Thomas Mann, the father of Klaus, Wagner, to be "offensive to the greatest musical genius of the nation". Their comfort is the price. Klaus Mann was the reverse, the more difficult, the most courageous choice. (...) "Let therefore here this nagging lament of the cursed son, crushed by the paternal engineering", Thomas Mann, Nobel Prize in literature (1929), a reason to celebrate Michel Crépu in a lovely Foreword. "Consider instead this loneliness for what she has bigger of poignancy in the noblest sense of the term."

In combat, Klaus Mann ignores the barriers. Intrepid, the young man of twenty-four years disrupts his glorious senior and master Stefan Zweig (1881-1942). September 14, 1930, the nazi party moves from twelve to one hundred and seven seats in the Reichstag. The Austrian writer explains the ballot by a "revolt of the youth (...)". "against the slowness and the indecision of the"high"political." He sees an impatience, that it would justify almost, while the world changes. Klaus Mann was more mature. All what the youth "only shows us not the way of the future", protested and there it is "the choice of the regression.

The author of "mephisto" and "Turning point" has the intuition of the curse that hits the Germany the day where he sees Hitler gorging raspberry tarts in a Munich tea room. Very early, he seeks to understand the success of the nazis. It identifies the revenue of their success, all admitted today: control of the communication, speech based, seduction of the unemployed (25 of assets in 1931) and déclassés which will better enjoy "doing evil to do nothing." In America where it should go into exile, Klaus Mann continues to denounce the "bluff" of the new Chancellor, "detestable trader mixture of small cold and ambitious clown." And to defend the spirit of tolerance, compatible with "the spirit of struggle", but "never inconsistent with the cowardly spirit of compromise". In 1942, the writer enters the US Army. He participated in the campaign of Italy in the psychological service of the army, where he wrote leaflets encouraging German soldiers to go, and then he worked at the daily life of the American army, "the Stars and stripes". After the war, he noted: "...". Defeat in itself is not a disgrace to the contrary. The national shame, degradation, decomposition, and depletion of German life it was the national socialism.

Twenty years of fire and blood, lucidity of Klaus Mann is never put in default. If he denounced Nazism, there is no illusions about Communism. "The similarities between the two forms of Government are clear", he wrote in 1939 after the signing of the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact. Klaus Mann has its place in the side of Koestler and Orwell, two other solitaires. Everything he wrote on the disintegration of a society, the cynicism of the political class, the weakness of a frustrated people, violence, did not take a ride. Its author committed suicide just sixty years ago, on May 21, 1949, in Cannes.