Mann, Heinrich

Heinrich Mann (1871 Lübeck – 1950 Los Angeles) was a writer and a leading European intellectual of the first half of the 20th century. From the mid-1890s until the end of his life, he produced novels, novellas, stories, plays, essays, as well as newspaper articles and speeches. His style has been called realist, satirist, expressionist, fabulist, moralist and utopian. If he is best known as the author of Professor Unrat oder das Ende eines Tyrannen (1905) – The Blue Angel (1931) – it is his two-volume fictional biography of the French king, Henry IV (1553-1610), that is his most ambitious and important work. The first volume, Die Jugend des Königs Henri Quatre, was published in 1935, and the second, Die Vollendung des Königs Henri Quatre, in 1938 (Querido, Amsterdam), while Mann lived in exile in France. Recently Overlook Press reprinted Eric Sutton’s adequate, if sometimes rather eccentric, translation into English (Henri Quatre, Secker & Warburg, London, 1937-39).

In the 1930s, Heinrich Mann was a committed political activist in the fight against fascism. He was inspired by the life of Henry IV as an example of good leadership. His narrative opens with Henry’s childhood in the Pyrenees:

The boy was small and the mountains were enormous. He clambered from path to path through a tangle of sunlit, sweet-smelling bracken, with cool lairs in their depths. From behind a jutting rock a waterfall thundered down from a great crag. Two eyes, two sharp eyes, peered across the forest-mantled slopes…How the boy loved to stare into the shimmering blue depths of heaven until his vision swam!

It continues with the richly-told story of Henry’s life: his conversion to Catholicism and return to Protestantism and back again, his ascension to the throne of Navarre, and the throne of France, his marriages and affairs. Against a background of warfare, religious rivalry, murderous intrigue and massacre, the author never loses sight of the image of the boy who ran barefoot with his ragged friends and shared their simple village meals of garlic, bread and wine.

Compared to Henry’s childhood, true or imagined, Heinrich Mann’s early years were defined by rules and boundaries. He recounts in one autobiographical story, Der Freund (The Friend), that on the street where he lived, he was forbidden to go beyond Dreifalt’s grocery shop in one direction and the Hotel Duft in the other. It was a complex class-bound atmosphere that was later recreated by his brother, the novelist Thomas Mann, in Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie (1901). As a child, Heinrich relished the small freedoms he discovered when he read or drew, or when he disobeyed authority (a subject developed in his antimonarchist novel, Der Untertan, 1916). He wanted to become an artist, and sketched throughout his life, especially at times of great stress. (In 1940, during his escape from war-torn Europe, crossing to America by ship, he spent the entire journey in his cabin, drawing nudes). Not surprisingly, his texts are strongly visual, and critics often speak of Mann’s Bildkraft.

Like his 16th century hero, Heinrich Mann was an idealist for whom thought manifested as action: on paper, on the stage, in politics, and reciprocally, action expressed thought. This Gleichnis – at once a moral principle and an aesthetic synthesis – of Geist (thought and spirit) and Tat (deed and action), Mann saw personified in Henry IV’s qualities of vision and courage: to rebuild a ruined kingdom, fight against persecution, establish religious tolerance, and to remain close to his subjects by improving education and living conditions, supporting agriculture, draining swamps, building roads, bridges and canals, and planting trees. Above all, Henry is shown to be a man of great compassion.

Mann loved French culture, history and literature. He once described Voltaire’s work as an attempt to relate everything, all that we know, and argued that this great literary gesture, to reveal a world of empathy and concurrence, is egalitarian – ist gleichmacherisch von Natur – and that it is the essence of democracy. In 1931 (to bring French ideas of freedom and justice to German readers, just as Heinrich Heine and Ludwig Börne had done a century before), he published a collection of essays, Geist und Tat: Franzosen 1780-1930, in which he reprinted his controversial piece on Zola. (Originally published in 1915, Heinrich had written that Zola was aware that as his work became more political, it also became more human, and Thomas Mann thought this was criticism of his own apolitical stance). For many years Heinrich Mann had already distanced himself from mainstream German culture; with Geist und Tat, followed a few years later by the Henry-epic, he placed himself firmly in the European humanist tradition.

On 30 January 1933, Hitler became German Chancellor and by 15 February, Heinrich Mann had been expelled from his position as president of the literary section of the German Academy of the Arts. By 22 February, he had escaped into exile. The previous morning, in his Berlin apartment, he had dressed as usual – bow-tie, hat, coat, gloves – and in temperatures well below freezing, carrying a briefcase and umbrella, he walked to the tram that would take him to the Anhalter-Bahnhof. Nelly Kröger, whom he had known since 1929, was clear-headed enough to buy his train ticket and check in a small suitcase in advance. ( She followed him a few months later, and they married in Nice in 1939). He traveled to Frankfurt, where he spent the night. The next day he caught another train, to Karlsruhe, where he changed some money – 100 Reichsmark into francs – and still carrying briefcase and umbrella, as well as a small suitcase, he crossed the bridge across the Rhine to France. (That same day, the police arrived at his apartment to arrest him). The briefcase contained the research notes he’d been collecting since 1925, when he first visited Pau, Henry’s birthplace, and the manuscript of his work-in-progress, the life of Henry IV, that he hoped would become a persuasive Gegenbild to Hitler.

Gegenbild and Gleichnis: this was the fabric of Mann’s thought and work. Photographs of Nelly bear a striking resemblance to the portraits of Henry’s mistress, Gabrielle d’Estrées, and Nelly became the model for Heinrich’s depiction of Gabrielle. Another analogy can be found in the book, between the fascist terror-campaign of the Night of the Long Knives at the end of June, 1934, and the historical event about which Mann was writing at the time, the massacre of French Huguenots on 24 August 1572, St Bartholomew’s Day.

Heinrich Mann once predicted that he would always be writing about Germany: Es war mir schon in meiner Jugend klar, dass ich mein Leben lang den Roman der deutschen Gesellschaft schreiben würde. He also said that the significance of his departure from Berlin only revealed itself when he had to leave Europe altogether. It is extraordinary to think how far he had to travel – emotionally, culturally and geographically – to maintain a perspective on his place of birth. In a sense, he is the boy who stared into the distance until his vision swam. Readers of these two volumes will see recent history emerge from the canvas of the past, and some will also recognise the author Heinrich Mann in the portrait of his hero Henry IV.

The Books

Mann, Heinrich: Henry, King of France / translated by Eric Sutton. - New York : Overlook Press, 2004. - 786 pages
ISBN 1-5856748-85
Original title: Die Vollendung des Königs Henri Quatre (German)

Mann, Heinrich: Young Henry of Navarre / translated by Eric Sutton. – New York: Overlook Press, 2004. - 585 pages
ISBN 1-58567-487-7
Original title: Die Jugend es Königs Henri Quatre (German)