Mephisto

"It seems to me that the greatest works of literature deal with the human soul caught in the stampede of time, unable to gauge the profundity of what passes over it. like the characters in Yeats who live through terrifying events but cannot understand them: in this way history passes over most of us. Society is caught in a convulsion, whether of growth or death, and ordinary people are destroyed. They do not, however, understand that they are 'destroyed'." - Joyce Carol Oates.

MEPHISTO by Klaus Mann, translated from the German by Robin Smith New York, Penguin Books: 1977 (1936)

Hendrik Hofgen is a man obsessed. A journeyman actor, when the Nazis seize power in Germany, Hofgen renounces his Communist friends and deserts his wife further his career. His diabolical performance as Mephistopheles in Faust becomes his stepping-stone to fame. Hermann Göring makes Hofgen head of the State Theatre where he enjoys the adulation of the public, entree into high society, and his own mansion. Ultimately, the state of depravity that Hofgen portrays so brilliantly on stage envelops his life, his profession, and his country.

Klaus Mann wrote Mephisto while living in exile in Amsterdam. The protagonist, actor Hendrik Hofgen, was based on Mann's merciless observations of his brother-in-law Gustaf Grundgens (married to the novelist's sister, Erica Mann). Grundgens, an active Communist in the 1920s, had changed course smoothly in the 1930s, acquiring Hermann Goering as his protector and a prestigious job as Director of the German State Theater. Of Hofgen (Grundgens), Mann wrote that he was "the abject type of treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth." Hofgen's female counterpart, Lotte Lindenthal, an actress of meager skills, owes her position to goverment protection.

Though the book was published in Amsterdam in 1936, the Mann family's attempts to suppress the book led to decades of legal battles, the longest running lawsuit in German publishing history, and the banning of Mephisto in Germany in the 1960s.

Son of Nobel Prize winning novelist Thomas Mann, Klaus Mann (1906-1949) began his writing career as a drama critic in 1920s Berlin. Though born into a succesful family, his life was difficult. Relations with his famous father were painful, he was harassed because of his homosexuality, and tormented by his early perception of the evils of National Socialism, Klaus fled Germany in 1933, moving to Amsterdam and eventually to the United States, becoming a citizen in 1943.

After World war II ended, Klaus Mann returned to Europe, where he died from an overdose of sleeping pills at Cannes. Despondent at the growing hostility between the West and the Soviet Union, Mann feared another war and wrote that European intellectuals should protest by committing a wave of suicides. His publisher, Themistocles Hoetls, was the last person to see Mann alive. Mann's Der Vulkan (1939), a story of German exiles, is one of 20th century germnay's most respected novels. Mephisto is just as remarkable, a relentless vision by a man who saw it coming.