Aaron Gell at Liberties:
Before the author Klaus Mann was labeled a mongrel, a queer, a junkie, a communist, and in the curious judgment of the FBI, a “premature anti-Fascist,” he found himself tarred with perhaps the cruelest epithet of all: Dichterkind, they called him, the child of a poet. As with the celebrity offspring of our own era, the accident of his birth afforded the second of Thomas Mann’s six children — and the most keen to become a novelist himself — a measure of unearned fascination seasoned with resentment.
Despite a lifelong addiction to narcotics (especially heroin, dubbed tuna fish in his diaries), a mania for world travel, severe bouts of depression, and a highly active sex life, with a special fondness for “rough trade,” as a friend put it, Klaus was also a remarkably prolific writer, if not quite the artistic equal of the Nobel-winning heavyweight author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, with whom he was doomed forever to be compared. “Having begun my career in his shadow, I wriggled and floundered and made myself rather conspicuous for fear of being totally overwhelmed,” he admitted in his autobiography. But literary reputations are not fixed, and these days, while Thomas’ oeuvre has acquired the musty aroma of the canon, respected if not widely read, Klaus’ most famous novel, Mephisto, a savage indictment of the German cultural elite and its footsie with fascism, has come to feel perfectly contemporary, even urgent, nearly nine decades after its publication.
More here.
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