Perhaps it is part of the tragedy of the writer Klaus Mann that his life is almost always told as a tragedy. The son of the world-famous Thomas Mann, who had to distance himself from his father’s aesthetic domains at an early age and yet kept coming dangerously close to them. The darling of the gods, who wasted himself early on through drugs, sexual excesses and political radicalization, who wanted to set up an intellectual counterforce to Nazi-rotten Germany in exile and who, to say the least, stumbled over the ropes of Stalinism. A homosexual dandy who revealed himself in his life and writing, who worked rapidly and aggressively, a child of his time, as he calls one of his autobiographies, indeed, whose entire work repeatedly sets up a mirror in various places in which he, Klaus Mann, can be seen in an elegant double-breasted suit in front of the ruins of his time.
Klaus Mann biography by Thomas Medicus: emaciated darling of the gods – Culture
