cahn

From selenak. This is a book that plays with the line between biography and historical fiction: it quotes extensively from letters and other primary sources, but does not really cite the sources, and also sometimes talks about what characters were thinking when there doesn't seem to be any source at all, in language that is more flowing and lyrical than I usually expect from a biography.

It is about the German writer Heinrich Mann (the brother of the writer Thomas Mann, who, sorry Heinrich, may be more familiar) and his wife Nelly Kroeger-Mann, whom I got interested in when selenak had me watch Youtube clips of Alec Guiness playing Heinrich Mann in Christopher Hampton's play Tales from Hollywood. (The links to the clips are in the second paragraph.) It's also about the milieu of the years 1934-1944 as approached from the viewpoint of (primarily but not exclusively) the other German authors who had to leave Germany and the people around them: Heinrich's brother Thomas, Bertolt Brecht, and others, whose thoughts and letters and words paint a picture of what they were all going through and what all of this must have been like. Also, very weirdly, Virginia Woolf is one of the people who shows up in the prose on a regular basis; this is weird because as far as I can tell, she had nothing to do with any of these other people (I guess the author speculates they might have crossed paths once), and every time she showed up I was like "...what is she doing here??"

Anyway -- it's a good book and it really brings home how jarring and difficult this emigration experience must have been for all of these displaced people. (I'm also rereading The Oppermanns right now, which as a fictional portrait of that same 1933-1934 era through a mostly-non-intellectual-character lens is an interesting point-counterpoint.) Nelly Kroeger-Mann eventually committed suicide, but reading their letters and the kinds of things they had to go through, I almost found it more surprising that more of them didn't think about it more. (Except for Thomas Mann, who definitely comes across a bit as someone who had a charmed life and could be a jerk about it, too, ha.) I thought the book was well worth reading, and in many places quite beautiful.

selenak's less incoherent review is here.