Sexuality and literary work
Mann's diaries reveal his struggles with his sexuality and paedophilia, his attraction to men and young boys finding frequent reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) uncovered the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio (2001) describes how, in 1911, Mann had stayed at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Venice Lido with his wife and brother, when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław (Władzio) Moes, a 10-year-old Polish boy (the real Tadzio). While the story found acclaim, his wife would later recall that her own uncle was disgusted to hear of this attraction: "I still remember that my uncle, Privy Counsellor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged: 'What a story! And a married man with a family!'"
In the autobiographical novella Tonio Kröger from 1901, the young hero has a crush on a handsome male classmate (modeled after real-life Lübeck classmate Armin Martens). In the novella With the prophet (1904) Mann mocks the believing disciples of a neo-Romantic "prophet" who preaches asceticism and has a strong resemblance to the real contemporary poet Stefan George and his George-Kreis ('George-Circle'). In 1902, George had met the 14-year-old boy Maximilian Kronberger; he made an idol of him and after his early death in 1904 transfigured him into a kind of Antinous-style "god".
Mann had also started planning a novel about Frederick the Great in 1905/1906, which ultimately did not come to fruition. The sexuality of Frederick the Great would have played a significant role in this, its impact on his life, his political decisions and wars. In late 1914, at the start of World War I, Mann used the notes and excerpts already collected for this project to write his essay "Frederick and the grand coalition" in which he contrasted Frederick's soldierly, male drive and his literary, female connotations consisting of "decomposing" skepticism. A similar "decomposing skepticism" had already estranged the barely concealed gay novel characters Tonio Kröger and Hanno Buddenbrook (1901) from their traditional upper class family environments and hometown (which in both cases is Lübeck). The Confessions of Felix Krull, written from 1910 onwards, describes a self-absorbed young dandyish imposter who, if not explicitly, fits into the gay typology, at one point considering, but ultimately refusing, the advances of a Scottish lord to accept him as his sugar daddy and in return be adopted and named as heir. The 1909 novel Royal Highness, which describes a young unworldly and dreamy prince who forces himself into a marriage of convenience that ultimately becomes happy, was modeled after Mann's own romance and marriage to Katia Mann in February 1905.
In The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp, in love with Clawdia Chauchat, recalls his schooltime when, as a fourteen-year-old, he adored a classmate, Pribislav Hippe, whom he asked, with his heart pounding, if he could lend him his pencil, of which he keeps a few scraps like a relic. Borrowing and returning were interpreted as poetic masks for a sexual act. But it is not just a poetic symbol. In his diary entry from 15 September 1950, Mann remembers "Williram Timpe's scraps from his pencil", referring to a classmate from Lübeck. The novella Mario and the Magician (1929) ends with a murder due to a male–male kiss.
Numerous homoerotic crushes are documented in his letters and diaries, both before and after his marriage. Mann's diary records his incestuous attraction to his own 13-year-old son, "Eissi" – Klaus Mann: "Klaus to whom recently I feel very drawn" (22 June). In the background conversations about man-to-man eroticism take place; a long letter is written to Carl Maria Weber on this topic, while the diary reveals: "In love with Klaus during these days" (5 June). "Eissi, who enchants me right now" (11 July). "Delight over Eissi, who in his bath is terribly handsome. Find it very natural that I am in love with my son ... Eissi lay reading in bed with his brown torso naked, which disconcerted me" (25 July). "I heard noise in the boys' room and surprised Eissi completely naked in front of Golo's bed acting foolish. Strong impression of his premasculine, gleaming body. Disquiet" (17 October 1920). His younger son Golo, homosexual like Klaus, suffered lifelong from the lower esteem his father showed him, the less handsome and somewhat clumsy – but ultimately he inherited more of his father's literary talent than the older one.
Mann was a friend of the painter and violinist Paul Ehrenberg, for whom he had feelings as a young man (from 1899 to 1904, at least until around 1903 when there is evidence that those feelings had cooled). The attraction that he felt for Ehrenberg, which is corroborated by notebook entries, caused Mann difficulty and discomfort and may have been an obstacle to his marrying an English woman, Mary Smith, whom he met in 1901. In 1927, while on summer vacation in Kampen (Sylt), the 52-year-old Mann fell in love with 17-year-old Klaus Heuser, to whom he dedicated the introduction to his essay "Kleist's Amphitryon, a Reconquest" in the fall of the same year, which he read publicly in Munich in the presence of Heuser. Jupiter, who has transformed himself into the form of the general Amphitryon, tries to seduce his wife Alcmene when the real Amphitryon returns home and Alcmene rejects the god. Mann understands Jupiter as the "lonely artistic spirit" who courts life, is rejected and, "a triumphant renouncer", learns to be content with his divinity. In 1950, Mann met the 19-year-old waiter Franz Westermeier, confiding to his diary "Once again this, once again love". He immediately processed the experience in his essay "Michelangelo in his poems" (1950) and was also inspired to write "The Black Swan" (1954). In 1975, when Mann's diaries were published, creating a national sensation in Germany, the retired Westermeier was tracked down in the United States: he was flattered to learn he had been the object of Mann's obsession, but also shocked at its depth.
Mann's infatuations probably remained largely platonic. Katia Mann tolerated these love affairs, as did the children, because they knew that it did not go too far. He exchanged letters with Klaus Heuser for a while and met him again in 1935. He wrote about the Heuser experience in his diary on 6 May 1934: "In comparison, the early experiences with Armin Martens and Williram Timpe recede far into the childlike, and that with Klaus Heuser was a late happiness with the character of life-relevant fulfillment ... That's probably how it is humanly, and because of this normality I can feel my life is more canonical than through marriage and children." In the entry from 20 February 1942, he spoke again about Klaus Heuser: "Well, yes − lived and loved. Black eyes that shed tears for me, beloved lips that I kissed − it was there, I had it too, I'll be able to tell myself when I die." He was partly delighted, partly ashamed of the depth of his own emotions in these cases and mostly made them productive at some earlier or later date, but the experiences themselves were not yet literary. Only in retrospective, he converted them into literary production and sublimated his shame into the theory that "a writer experiences in order to express himself", that his life is just material. Mann even went so far as to accuse his brother Heinrich of his "aestheticism being a gesture-rich, highly gifted impotence for life and love." When Mann met the aging bachelor Heuser, who had worked in China for 18 years, for the last time in 1954, his daughter Erika scoffed: "Since he (Heuser) couldn't have the magician (= Thomas Mann's nickname with his children), he preferred to give it up completely."
Although Mann had always denied his novels had autobiographical components, the unsealing of his diaries revealing how consumed his life had been with unrequited and sublimated passion resulted in a reappraisal of his work. Thomas Mann had burned all of his diaries from before March 1933 in the garden of his home in Pacific Palisades in May 1945. Only the booklets from September 1918 to December 1921 were preserved because the author needed them for his work on Doctor Faustus. He later decided to have them − and his diaries from 1933 onwards – published 20 years after his death and predicted "surprise and cheerful astonishment". They were published by Peter von Mendelssohn and Inge Jens in 10 volumes.
From the very beginning, Thomas' son Klaus Mann openly dealt with his own homosexuality in his literary work and open lifestyle and referred critically to his father's "sublimation" in his diary. On the other hand, Thomas's daughter Erika Mann and his son Golo Mann came out only later in their lives. Thomas Mann reacted cautiously to Klaus's first novel The Pious Dance, Adventure Book of a Youth (1926), which is openly set in Berlin's homosexual milieu. Although he embraced male–male eroticism, he disapproved of gay lifestyle. The Eulenburg affair, which broke out two years after Mann's marriage, had strengthened him in his renunciation of a gay life and he supported the journalist Maximilian Harden, who was friends with Katia Mann's family, in his denunciatory trial against the gay Prince of Eulenburg, a close friend of Emperor Wilhelm II. Thomas Mann was always concerned about his dignity, reputation and respectability; the "poet king" Goethe was his role model. His horror at a possible collapse of these attributes found expression in the character of Aschenbach in Death in Venice. Cases like that of the industrialist Friedrich Alfred Krupp, who felt driven to suicide after a homosexual affair became public, were not uncommon and had a deterrent effect. But as time went on Mann became more open. He tolerated his son Klaus bringing his various lovers to lunch in Pacific Palisades, and was only appalled when these – navy sailors and the like – had never heard of him or his works, which, unfortunately, was mostly the case, leading to short, surly diary entries about their lack of culture. When the twenty-two-year-old novelist Gore Vidal published his third novel The City and the Pillar in 1948, a love-story between small-town American boys and a portrait of homosexual life in New York and Hollywood in the forties, a highly controversial book even among the publishers, not to mention the press, he sent a copy to Thomas Mann who responded politely, calling it a "noble work".
When the physician and pioneer of gay liberation Magnus Hirschfeld sent another petition to the Reichstag in 1922 to abolish Section 175 of the German Criminal Code, under which many homosexuals were imprisoned simply because of their inclinations, Thomas Mann also signed. However, criminal liability among adults was only abolished through a change in the law on 25 June 1969 − fourteen years after Mann's death and just three days before the Stonewall riots. This legal situation certainly had an impact throughout his life; the man whom the Nazis labeled a traitor never had any desire to be incarcerated for "criminal acts".
