Colm Tóibín on Writing His Latest Novel About Thomas Mann

I had not read Thomas Mann until prison and his novel The Magic Mountain fascinated me. I have also heard of Colm Tóibín and knew he had written a novel about Thomas Mann, The Magician. One of my RSS feeds turned up An Interview with Colm Tóibín on The Believer, so I read the interview. It is a bit long, so it took two days. Much of it is interesting if you write or have an interest in Thomas Mann, but I suggest thinking on what Toibin has to a about writing certain forms of ugliness:

BLVR: And in Faustus, the Third Reich is happening parenthetically. All of the energies of the Third Reich are concentrated on Leverkühn. In spite of or because of that, the way you write about Mann’s relationship with antisemitism and Katia—I’ve been thinking about that scene with Alma Mahler all week, where it gradually becomes clear that she harbors a deep texture of antisemitic feeling, and that eventually crescendos into this long beautiful paragraph where you describe their journey out of Europe—how terrible Alma was, and how Heinrich’s wife, who seems to be this shambling loud rough annoying presence, was actually a good person, and in fact Alma was this strident antisemitic prima donna. 

But the fact is that you made antisemitism emotionally ambiguous in the only way it could be done, I think: at first, you don’t realize it’s antisemitism. First you think of Alma the way Mann does, as the widow of this great genius. Slowly it’s revealed that she has these sentiments that maybe only Katia would notice. It’s really skillfully done. How did you handle something that is unambiguous, like racial and ethnic hatred, using your method?

CT: I think the first thing is you have to be very careful. If it’s not there at all, you’re missing the point. If you overdo it, you’re post hoc, you’re after the event. I’m trying to deal first with a kind of casual antisemitism. So when Mann goes first into Katia’s house it isn’t antisemitism as much as him just asking his friend, “Are these people Jewish?” His friend doesn’t know, but the reader does. I’ve given enough information that they really have to know. Katia’s family don’t make sense in any other way. Then there’s Mann’s odd dislike for his brother-in-law and his father-in-law. It’s this odd feeling of: he just doesn’t like these Pringsheims. This goes away because he goes away, and he becomes more confident. You don’t want to make too much of this but nonetheless it’s there, a sort of shadowy antisemitism. 

There’s a moment when Thomas Mann’s brother-in-law says to Katia when the First World War is starting, “It’ll be good for your father. A lot of people don’t think he’ll support Germany because he’s Jewish.” Katia is surprised by the remark. But nonetheless it’s been said. In a way you just need to keep that going. Sometimes disappearing, sometimes rising again. 

And Alma Mahler. It was unbelievable that Alma married Mahler and Franz Werfel who were both Jewish. She said anything that came into her head, she was like a bird chirping; some of the chirps were antisemitic ones. 

By the 1920s, Mann realizes what antisemitism is beginning to mean all around him, so we don’t see it in him again. It is in the book as undercurrent, disappearing and arising again, there enough that you can see. It’s not merely Hitler and his henchmen. It comes in all these different ways. It was essential to capture Mann’s first dinner in the Pringsheim house when he brings his mother there to have dinner. And the reader, seeing it through the Manns’ eyes, realizes that the Pringsheims can be seen as rich Jewish people. It was a clash between Lübeck where the Manns came from and something that was just beyond them. The way Katia’s father spoke, for example. But nothing is simple here. The Pringsheims were close to the Wagners and loved Wagner’s music, as Thomas Mann did.

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