The Magician
Tóibín’s biographical novel of Thomas Mann begins in the Hanseatic port of Lübeck in 1891, where Thomas, overshadowed in his literary ambitions by his elder brother Heinrich, seems destined to follow his father into a mercantile future, a prospect that changes with his father’s death and his mercurial mother’s move to Munich. The young Mann attempts to live up to expectations in his emotional life, too. Despite the advice of his friend Paul Ehrenberg that ‘marriage is not for you. Anyone who follows your eyes can see where they land’, Thomas weds Katia Pringsheim and has a large family. His same-sex yearnings can only be expressed to his diary, in furtive embraces and in his writing; only when Mann was nearing the end of his life, it is suggested, did Katia realise his orientation. Literary success and lionisation in parallel with the rise of National Socialism present Mann with a dilemma; as a German writer of worldwide renown, how is he to oppose Nazism whilst at the same time protecting those whom he cares about or feels indebted to, such as his German publisher?
Early on, Hitler and his adherents seem a collection of irrelevant blowhards until suddenly they are not, making this a novel for our times. Mann’s own Odyssey as an émigré, a German writer with acquired Czech nationality who finds himself caught in the toils of U.S. emigration, also has contemporary resonance. Painstakingly researched, Tóibín’s magnificent novel succeeds in even the smallest cameo parts, as in his portraits of an acerbic Alma Mahler and of an astute Eleanor Roosevelt—and of Mann’s remarkable children, perhaps Erika most of all deserves a novel to herself.
