In February 1933, only a few weeks after Hitler had been appointed Chancellor (Reichskanzler), Klaus Mann’s uncle, Heinrich Mann, had been put under political pressure and forced to resign from the Prussian Academy of the Arts. Gottfried Benn (1886-1956) was appointed as acting President of the Poetry Department; this poet was one of only very few artists of standing who remained in the institute which had been “gleichgeschaltet” (brought into line with Nazi doctrine). Unlike Thomas Mann, Alfred Döblin, Jakob Wassermann and other colleagues, who had resigned more or less voluntarily by the beginning of May, Benn was quick to offer his services to the new regime, from which he – in his political naiveté – hoped would return Germany to its former strength and bring about the “victory of the national idea”.

Klaus Mann wrote a personal letter to him from his exile in France, making no bones about his bitter disappointment: “What could induce you to put your name – to us a byword for high standards and an all but fanatic purity – at the disposal of men whose lack of standards is unmatched in European history and from whose moral squalor the world recoils?” Benn reacted to the accusations, which had also been expressed by author Joseph Roth in an article in the Parisian Neues Tagebuch, by publishing an open letter in the Deutsche Allgemeine Zeitung on 25 May. In this letter, Benn defended his position by declaring his loyalty to both the German people who had lawfully elected the present government - a government which, he maintained, would not have done anything to the emigrants if they had stayed in the country.

Benn’s public solidarity with the Nazis did not last very long and his writings were also banned in 1938. He admitted his fatal error of judgement in his autobiography Doppelleben [Double Life] which appeared in 1950, but still continued to issue some very dubious statements about exile from his vantage point as an inner emigrant.