The Magician review – the revival of Thomas Mann and pre-war German sensibility

The Magician by Colm Toibin (Penguin), £18.99.

Colm Toibin’s The Magician is a deeply European novel, even when part of the action occurs in America. An impersonation of the life of the writer Thomas Mann, its range and compass are extraordinary. Moving from late-nineteenth-century Germany, which formed and inspired Mann, to the advent of the Nazi regime which he publicly opposed and sought refuge from in the US, it is a considerable achievement to have fictionalised this shadowy figure in all his personal and political complexity. The Magician is a rich and beautifully crafted story.

Mann became – and remains – a monumental figure in Germany and German literature, but monuments can be remote and elusive. What Toibin succeeds in doing is to humanise and portray him in all his vulnerabilities. He did something similar in his earlier fictional treatment of Henry James in The Master. As Toibin tells me over email, both men “in their books … seemed in great control” but “in their lives, it was otherwise”. Both had ambivalent sexual feelings and were deeply reticent about them. 

The Magician takes the reader inside Mann’s world; into his upper-middle-class origins in the Hanseatic city of Lübeck and the early and astonishing literary success of his family saga, Buddenbrooks. It draws out the impact on him and his growing family of the First World War (which he patriotically supported) and of the 1918 uprising in Munich (where he then lived), which ended in the Bavarian monarchy being overthrown. The author also describes vividly the cultural turbulence and economic catastrophe of the Weimar Republic and the subsequent horrors of the Nazi regime.

Toibin corrals Mann’s politically controversial family (including his brother Heinrich, also a writer) onto a fictional stage in which the drama is driven as much through the Mann family as through Mann himself. His novels are almost side-events, mentioned in passing. Indeed, Mann sometimes seems closer to being an observer of his own life than its central protagonist.

As for his underlying bisexuality, this is subtly but insistently articulated, not least by referencing some of Mann’s own fictions, especially his novella, Death in Venice. In fact, Toibin remarks, Mann “barely speaks in a book that is filled with dialogue,” and the novel evokes “a picture of the world around him – public events, family – and … [leaves] … him to watch the world as though helplessly”. The fictionalised Mann is revealed less through what he is made to say than through his private thoughts and reflections recorded for his diary. 

Toibin assembles an amazing cast of characters as the Mann ménage exits Munich, some taking refuge initially in Switzerland, but all coming together to spend the Second World War in the US. Alongside Mann’s strong-minded wife, Katia, and his six wilful children, he makes room in the American chapters for numerous cultural celebrities reluctantly and claustrophobically exiled on the West Coast. Alma Mahler, Arnold Schoenberg and Bertolt Brecht are but a few of the walk-on characters. 

Mrs Roosevelt features prominently, too, alongside rich and influential supporters of Mann’s efforts to obtain US residence and to get his wider family out of Nazi-occupied Europe. At times it all can seem a little overwhelming for the reader, but Toibin never loses control of his cast of characters or his narrative. 

“Magician” was the nickname Mann’s children gave to their father, not without irony. Mann was the author of The Magic Mountain, published only a few years after the First World War and a celebrated author in and beyond Germany thereafter. But as his children grew into adulthood, he came across as distant and formal. He induced in them lifelong resentments and an often paralysing sense of awe. But from Toibin’s vantage point, on most days, Mann was a “high bourgeois, buttoned-up man, no magic at all”.

The Mann children were, despite or because of their father, fiercely independent, even anarchic individuals. Some led very public and controversial lives, especially Klaus and Erika, whose freewheeling sex lives and left-wing politics drew the attention of the authorities in Europe and later in the US. Despite their frequent criticisms of him, most of his children (and his brother) are depicted as happily sponging off him financially.

Once Mann and Katia had moved to Switzerland and then to the US in 1938, the rest of his family followed, often with his help. In America, Mann tried to avoid the limelight, though he saw it as his duty to speak out against the Nazis (who would undoubtedly have incarcerated him if he had not taken the exile route) in speeches and broadcasts. 

As the war drew to a close, he and his part-Jewish wife were unwilling to return to Germany but unsure where to live next. There were pressures on him to play a part (even possibly as President of the Republic) in the post-war reconstruction of his homeland. Still, some Germans resented him for taking what they saw as the “easy road” of wartime exile. Toibin captures this uncertainty well. He draws out Mann’s determination never to forget that Germany was culturally indivisible, even if, by then, it was divided politically.

Mann was in large measure the genuine article, an exemplar of high German culture. But he was also something of a chameleon, adjusting to the world around him and to the shadows he himself cast. Today might Mann be seen as something of a relic or fossil from an earlier era?

 Toibin sees him as a “pale shivering novelist who put on many masks” and though “he may be a fossil now … when I [Toibin] was in my late teens, he was all the rage among students. No one would dare not read The Magic Mountain. The world has moved on. But I have not. I belong to that Europe that might well be disappearing”. 

The Magician is something of an elegy for a Germany formed before the First World War and for a great writer with a deeply German and European sensibility. Adrift as his world disintegrated around him, Mann never really reconciled himself to the post-war settlement and lived out his remaining years in Switzerland. Toibin has given renewed life to Thomas Mann in fictional form and written a very fine novel in the process.