Klaus Mann
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Klaus Mann (November 18, 1906 – May 21, 1949) was a German writer.
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[edit] Life and work
Born in Munich, Klaus Mann was the son of German writer Thomas Mann and his wife, Katia Pringsheim. His father was baptized as a Lutheran, while his mother was from a family of secular Jews. He began writing short stories in 1924 and the following year became drama critic for a Berlin newspaper. His first literary works were published in 1925.
Mann's early life was troubled. His homosexuality often made him the target of bigotry, and he had a difficult relationship with his father, who had little respect for him. After only a short time in various schools, he travelled with his sister Erika Mann, a year older than himself, around the world, and visited the US in 1927. In 1933, Mann left Germany and moved to Amsterdam, having been stripped of German citizenship by the Nazi regime. He became a Czechoslovak citizen. In 1936, he moved to the United States, living in Princeton, New Jersey and New York. In the summer of 1937, he met his partner Thomas Quinn Curtiss, who was later a longtime film and theater reviewer for Variety and the International Herald Tribune. Mann became a US citizen in 1943.
He worked for the American army during World War II in Italy and returned to Germany after the war.
Mann's most famous novel, Mephisto, was written in 1936 and first published in Amsterdam. The novel is a thinly-disguised portrait of his former brother-in-law, the actor Gustaf Gründgens. The literary scandal surrounding it made Mann posthumously famous in West Germany, as Gründgrens' adopted son brought a legal case to have the novel banned after its first publication in West Germany in the early 1960s. After seven years of legal hearings, the West German Supreme Court banned it by a vote of three to three.
Mann's novel Der Vulkan is one of the 20th century's most famous novels about German exiles during WWII.
He died in Cannes of an overdose of sleeping pills. He was buried there in the Cimetière du Grand Jas.
[edit] Selected bibliography
- Der fromme Tanz, 1925
- Anja und Esther, 1925
- Revue zu Vieren, 1927
- Kind seiner Zeit, 1932
- Treffpunkt im Unendlichen, 1932
- Symphonie Pathétique, 1935
- Mephisto, 1936
- Der Vulkan, 1939
- The Turning Point, 1942
- André Gide and the Crisis of Modern Thought, 1943
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