Heinrich Mann by Henrik Eger
Heinrich Mann, 1903.
MANN, Heinrich. Born March 27, 1871, in Lübeck, Germany; died March 12, 1950, in Santa Monica, California. Considered by some critics to be the only German writer of his generation to fully develop his democratic thinking, he was a prolific author of novels, novellas, plays, satires, and political essays highly critical of bourgeois values. He was also an antifascist moralist who sharply attacked authoritarian arrogance and the subservience of subject classes. He frequently clashed with his younger brother, Thomas Mann, over values and Weltanschauungen [world views].
Mann published numerous essays, among them “Diktatur de Vernunft” (1923, Dictatorship of Reason), and many satirical novels, including Professor Unrat (1903, Small Town Tyrant)—filmed as Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). He was elected president of the Writing Section of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1930. During a time of heightened nationalism that swept over Europe, Mann published his essay “Bekenntnis zum Übernationalen” (1932, Confession for the Supernational), and a book-length study, Der Hass: Deutsche Zeitgeschichte (1933, The Hate: German Contemporary History).
After he, Albert Einstein, and the artist Käthe Kollwitz publicly urged the unification of the Social Democratic and Communist parties as a means of slowing the Nazi tide, Mann was forced to resign from the Academy. He fled to France (Paris and Nice) in 1933 and worked against fascism there, with Ernst Bloch, André Gide, and others.
His exile publications in France include novels and essays. Sensitive to censorship throughout his life, Mann used historical figures and epochs to exemplify modern democratic, rational principles based on “humanistic socialism,” especially in his masterpiece, the two-volume novel Henri Quatre, the King of France (Young Henry of Navarre, 1935, and Henry, King of France, 1938). King Henry, for Mann, becomes a Renaissance Bolshevik, the forefather of modern revolutionary socialism. At pivotal moments in the German novel, Mann inserted “moralités,” or conclusions in classical French, attempting to unite intellectually his native Germany with France, the land of his exile.
Heinrich Mann published several essays while he was in France: Der Sinn dieser Emigration (1934, The Sense of This Emigration), which contains “Schule der Emigration” (School of Emigration); Es kommt der Tag: Deutsches Lesebuch (1936, The Day Will Come: A German Reader); “Hilfe für die Opfer des Faschismus” (1937, Help for the Victims of Fascism), a speech; Was will die deutsche Volksfront? (1937, What Does The German Volksfront Want?); and Mut (1939, Courage). Reflected in many of Mann’s satirical essays is his belief that literature and politics are inseparable and that writers must concern themselves in their texts with intellectual freedom and political conscience.
Threatened by the invading German army, Mann fled France in 1940 and settled in the United States, where he initially worked as a filmscript writer in Hollywood (1940-41). His penchant for abrupt changes from neutral descriptions to grotesque exaggerations created an epic alienation effect enhanced by his new experiences of the American movie world.
Mann published numerous essays, among them “Diktatur de Vernunft” (1923, Dictatorship of Reason), and many satirical novels, including Professor Unrat (1903, Small Town Tyrant)—filmed as Der blaue Engel (The Blue Angel). He was elected president of the Writing Section of the Prussian Academy of Arts in 1930. During a time of heightened nationalism that swept over Europe, Mann published his essay “Bekenntnis zum Übernationalen” (1932, Confession for the Supernational), and a book-length study, Der Hass: Deutsche Zeitgeschichte (1933, The Hate: German Contemporary History).
After he, Albert Einstein, and the artist Käthe Kollwitz publicly urged the unification of the Social Democratic and Communist parties as a means of slowing the Nazi tide, Mann was forced to resign from the Academy. He fled to France (Paris and Nice) in 1933 and worked against fascism there, with Ernst Bloch, André Gide, and others.
His exile publications in France include novels and essays. Sensitive to censorship throughout his life, Mann used historical figures and epochs to exemplify modern democratic, rational principles based on “humanistic socialism,” especially in his masterpiece, the two-volume novel Henri Quatre, the King of France (Young Henry of Navarre, 1935, and Henry, King of France, 1938). King Henry, for Mann, becomes a Renaissance Bolshevik, the forefather of modern revolutionary socialism. At pivotal moments in the German novel, Mann inserted “moralités,” or conclusions in classical French, attempting to unite intellectually his native Germany with France, the land of his exile.
Heinrich Mann published several essays while he was in France: Der Sinn dieser Emigration (1934, The Sense of This Emigration), which contains “Schule der Emigration” (School of Emigration); Es kommt der Tag: Deutsches Lesebuch (1936, The Day Will Come: A German Reader); “Hilfe für die Opfer des Faschismus” (1937, Help for the Victims of Fascism), a speech; Was will die deutsche Volksfront? (1937, What Does The German Volksfront Want?); and Mut (1939, Courage). Reflected in many of Mann’s satirical essays is his belief that literature and politics are inseparable and that writers must concern themselves in their texts with intellectual freedom and political conscience.
Threatened by the invading German army, Mann fled France in 1940 and settled in the United States, where he initially worked as a filmscript writer in Hollywood (1940-41). His penchant for abrupt changes from neutral descriptions to grotesque exaggerations created an epic alienation effect enhanced by his new experiences of the American movie world.
Brothers Heinrich & Thomas Mann.
Mann’s novels written in American exile include Lidice (1943), the story of the Czech resistance to Heinrich Heydrich’s oppressive regime; Der Atem (1949, The Breath), an autobiographical work which condenses events into a few days at the outbreak of World War II; Empfang bei der Welt (posthumous, 1956, Reception of the World), a satire in fairy tale form; and the incomplete Die traurige Geschichte von Friedrich dem Grossen (posthumous, 1960, The Sad Story of Frederick the Great), a critique of Prussian-German history in the form of filmic dialogue.
Although Mann openly presented socialistic interpretations of the events he described, he did not argue an extreme communist or Marxist point of view. During the latter part of his life, he shifted from aggressive political engagement to a more skeptical stance in which human conflicts were displayed in an elegant style his brother Thomas termed a “product” of Heinrich’s “sage avant-garde” [“Produkt eines Greisen-Avantgardismus”].
Although Mann openly presented socialistic interpretations of the events he described, he did not argue an extreme communist or Marxist point of view. During the latter part of his life, he shifted from aggressive political engagement to a more skeptical stance in which human conflicts were displayed in an elegant style his brother Thomas termed a “product” of Heinrich’s “sage avant-garde” [“Produkt eines Greisen-Avantgardismus”].
Heinrich Mann, 1871-1950.
Mann’s autobiography Ein Zeitalter wird besichtigt (My View of an Epoch) appeared in 1946. Four years after the end of World War II, he wrote, “I anticipated what was to become of Germany. Afterwards I was accused of it as if I had been responsible” (Letter to K. Lemke, May 27, 1949). Eleven years after his burial in Santa Monica, California, his remains were flown to East Berlin. His manuscripts and papers are at the Literary Archive of the German Academy of Arts in Berlin and in the Schiller-Nationalmuseum in Marbach, Germany.
Consult: U. Weisstein, Heinrich Mann (Tübingen, 1962); E. Zenker, ed., Heinrich Mann Bibliographie (East Berlin, 1967).
HENRIK EGER
Heinrich Mann, Wikipedia, Jan. 18, 2016.
Heinrich Mann, Lebendiges Museum Online, Berlin, Jan. 18, 2016.
Originally published in Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century: An Analysis and Biographical Dictionary , edited by Martin Tucker.
New York, Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 448-50.
Consult: U. Weisstein, Heinrich Mann (Tübingen, 1962); E. Zenker, ed., Heinrich Mann Bibliographie (East Berlin, 1967).
HENRIK EGER
Heinrich Mann, Wikipedia, Jan. 18, 2016.
Heinrich Mann, Lebendiges Museum Online, Berlin, Jan. 18, 2016.
Originally published in Literary Exile in the Twentieth Century: An Analysis and Biographical Dictionary , edited by Martin Tucker.
New York, Greenwood Press, 1991, pp. 448-50.
