Klaus Mann, letter to Steinberg Verlag, December 1948
Die Begegnung mit ihm – nicht mit dem Menschen, sondern mit dem Werk, in welchem diese reiche, komplexe Menschlichkeit sich offenbart – hat mir mehr als irgendeine andere geholfen, meinen Weg, den Weg zu mir selbst zu finden.
[This encounter – not with the man himself, but with the work in which this rich, complex character reveals itself – helped me more than any other to find my way, the way to myself. (trans. ed.)]
Klaus Mann talking about André Gide in his autobiography Der Wendepunkt (“The Turning Point”, 1952)
André Gide was one of Klaus Mann's early literary inspirations, possibly even the lodestar of his literary life, as Mann himself makes clear in his eminently readable autobiography Der Wendepunkt (“The Turning Point”, 1952): “What he had to offer me, what drew me to him, was a kind of moral, intellectual ‘authorisation’: a spiritual legitimation and artistic objectification of my subjective restlessness and uncertainty.” Mann’s lifelong – albeit extremely one-sided – admiration of Gide’s work and character, which in Mann’s view embodied the essence of the good European, was expressed in several essays and culminated in the monograph André Gide and the Crisis of Modern Thought, initially published in English by New York publishing company Creative Age in 1943. After the war ended, Klaus Mann began translating his work into German. This lengthy and laborious project, well documented as such as Mann’s diary, was finally completed in July 1947. The German version, André Gide. Die Geschichte eines Europäers was published in the spring of 1948 by the Swiss publishing company Steinberg Verlag which specialised in works by exiled authors and was able to promote the book by stating on the cover that Gide had been awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1947. This letter from Klaus Mann to his publisher Selma Steinberg, written in Pacific Palisades at the end of December 1948, just a few months before his death, indicates that sales of this work were slow and impeded by significant obstacles, due in particular to the conditions that prevailed in postwar Germany. The letter also shows the importance which the author attached to this work, and even more to its reception by German readers.
Further reading:
Schaenzler, Nicole: Klaus Mann. Eine Biographie. Frankfurt am Main: Campus Verlag 1999.
Fischer, Erich: Steinberg Verlag, Zürich. In: Ders.: Geschichte des deutschen Buchhandels im 19. und 20. Jahrhundert. Drittes Reich und Exil. Teil 3: Der Buchhandel im deutschsprachigen Exil 1933–1945. Teilband 1. Berlin/Boston: De Gruyter 2021, S. 345–347.
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