>Erika remembered a time during the shortages of the First World War when food had to be divided but there was one fig left over. ‘What did my father do? He gave this fig just to me alone . . . the other three children stared in horror, and my father said sententiously with emphasis: “One should get the children used to injustice early.”’
>Some things ran in the family. Homosexuality, for instance. Thomas himself was gay most of the time, as his diaries make clear. So were three of his children: Erika (also just most of the time; she made an exception for Bruno Walter, among others), Klaus and Golo. Suicide was a family theme too. Both of Thomas Mann’s sisters committed suicide, as did his sons Klaus and Michael, as did the second wife of his brother Heinrich. Also, gerontophilia. Bruno Walter was almost as old as Erika’s father; and in 1939 Elisabeth married the literary critic Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, who was 36 years her senior.
>Thomas Mann had not encouraged Klaus to become a writer, noting in his diary that his 14-year-old son’s intention to send stories to magazines was ‘a folly from which he must be dissuaded’.
>Maar insisted that one theme impelled and nourished Mann’s imagination more than any other. He found image after image from the beginning to the end of his work of murder, blood, knives and sexual pleasure. He suggested that this was the key to Mann’s work and perhaps to his life. ‘We can venture,’ he wrote, ‘the thought experiment that if Thomas Mann had committed an actual crime and sought to give an account of it in his work, the work would not have taken a different form than it actually has.’ He suggests – almost convincingly – that in Naples, in the mid-1890s, when he was a very young man, Thomas Mann did something, or witnessed something, or was closely implicated in something that involved sex and murder. And that what he did, or what he witnessed, both maimed and energised him and made its way into the work of sixty years.
>Eventually, he sent Golo a key to the safe where [the diaries] were, imploring him not to read them. ‘My fears,’ he wrote in his diary when their arrival was delayed, ‘revolve first and foremost almost exclusively around this threat to my life’s secrets. They are deeply serious. The consequences could be terrible, even fatal.’
>It was reported that ‘many queer-looking people’ could be seen going into Klaus’s hotel room in New York, as indeed they could. Klaus remarked in his diary that he liked ‘porters, waiters, liftboys and so on, white or black. Almost all are agreeable to me. I could sleep with all of them.’ Sybille Bedford recalled that what attracted Klaus ‘were the professional louts’.
