Reinhard Heydrich's memo about Thomas Mann, July 1933.
In my Thomas Mann essay in this week's New Yorker, I mention a critical and dramatic moment in the author's life, one whose full dimensions became clear only long after his death. On Feb. 11, 1933, twelve days after Hitler became Reichskanzler, Mann left Germany to deliver a series of lectures on Wagner in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris. He and his wife, Katia, then went on vacation in Switzerland. Mann returned to his native land only in 1949, and did not live there again. Because the departure had been entirely unplanned, a great quantity of papers remained at Mann's house in Munich, including volumes of his diaries, in which his same-sex desires were very evident. Mann soon began to worry that the diaries would fall into the hands of the Nazis, who could have made a propaganda bonanza out of them — or, possibly, have tried to blackmail Mann into returning to Germany and endorsing the regime.
The events that ensued inspired the most effective sequence in Colm Tóibín's recent novel The Magician. Golo Mann, one of the author's sons, undertook the risky task of packing up the diaries and other important documents. Under strict orders to keep the journals secret, Golo took the precaution of locking the door while he crammed them into a suitcase alongside other papers, including the typescript of Joseph and His Brothers. Golo was preparing to ship the Koffer, weighing thirty-eight kilograms, when he encountered the family chauffeur, Heins, who offered to take care of it. Golo handed it over — a questionable decision, since Heins had admitted his Nazi sympathies. As weeks went by and the suitcase failed to appear in Switzerland, the family came to suspect that Heins had brought it to the police. In fact, as later researches established, the shipment made it as far as the border in Lindau, where a police official named Neeb detained it. Opening the suitcase, Neeb found a set of contracts that showed Mann's considerable earnings as an author. He got in touch with the Bavarian political police, offering to send the material for inspection. His report aroused great curiosity, as the document below attests. "Eilt sehr!" is written on the top — extremely urgent. The contracts were sent to Munich, information was copied down, the contracts were sent back, and Neeb allowed the suitcase to proceed over the border.
Neeb wrote in his memo: "A look through the suitcase revealed that it contained only manuscripts of Thomas Mann's novels and short stories. It gives the impression that Thomas Mann does not intend to return to Germany in the near future.” Either the official failed to notice the diaries, or, as Hermann Kurzke speculates in his remarkable biography Thomas Mann: Das Leben als Kunstwerk, possibly he decided that private matters were better left private. The memo has the manner of a punctilious bureaucrat, one would presumably have made a thorough inspection. In any case, the suitcase arrived intact, and Mann had the impression that it had not been disturbed. He never learned what a stroke of luck been granted to him; the Neeb memo was published in 1987, in Jürgen Kolbe's book Heller Zauber: Thomas Mann in München 1894–1933.
Neeb addressed his memo to "O. Sektr. Müller," in Abteilung VI of the Munich Polizeidirektion. This was Heinrich Müller, who would rise to become chief of the Gestapo and would play a crucial role in the planning of the Holocaust. His superior was the fiendish Reinhard Heydrich, who ran Abteilung VI, the political division of the Bavarian police. There is no question that if the entire suitcase had been sent to Munich its contents would have been of extraordinary interest to Heydrich and his boss Heinrich Himmler. The Nazis were very exercised about Thomas Mann, who was widely seen as an apostate from the right-wing cause on account of his embrace of the Weimar Republic in 1922. In July 1933, Heydrich went to the trouble of writing up a two-page memo detailing Mann's ideological crimes, leading to an ominous conclusion: "This anti-German, Marxist, pro-Jewish attitude, one hostile to the national movement, gave reason to issue a protective custody order against Thomas Mann, which, however, could not be carried out on account of his absence." Of that document Mann had no inkling. But he was right to suspect, as he said on various occasions, that if he had remained in Germany he would have wound up in Dachau, or dead. Even when he was in Switzerland, there was a not unjustified fear that he could be kidnapped or assassinated. (For more, see Paul Egon Hübinger, "Thomas Mann und Reinhard Heydrich in den Akten des Reichsstatthalters v. Epp," Vierteljahrshefte für Zeitgeschichte 28:1 [1980], pp. 111–43.)
A fruitless thought experiment: what would have happened if the Nazis had published incriminating excerpts from the diaries, including those detailing his 1927 infatuation with the eighteen-year-old Klaus Heuser, which could have been interpreted as indicating a physical affair? (As I write in my New Yorker piece, Heuser's own later testimony suggests that nothing of the sort happened.) Perhaps Mann would have been driven to despair, even suicide. Or — I admit this is extremely unlikely — perhaps he would have written an essay saying, yes, I have been attracted to men, though I have never acted on those impulses — so what? He had come close to making such an admission already. It is implicit in the bizarre 1925 essay "On Marriage," which spends an inordinate amount of time discussing the impossibility of gay desire, as if this were an ordinary factor in any man's decision to marry. A 1920 letter to the gay poet and educator Carl Maria Weber is also moderately forthcoming. Behind the mask of bourgeois reserve, there was a deep streak of defiant pride in Mann, and I don't think his response to a Nazi exposé would have been quiet either way.
Profuse thanks, as ever, to Hans Rudolf Vaget.
