Charting an Underlying Kinship

...The movie, Hamilton rightly observes, was "a dazzling perverse celluloid love story whose original social satire had been excised...

...It is a rather dense book, too, not merely because a great deal is crammed on the page in rather small type, but also because of Nigel Hamilton's rather ponderous manner (perhaps not entirely inappropriate to the study of Thomas Mann, if not to that of his more volatile elder brother, Heinrich...

...Unfortunately, a role of that kind can be, and was for Heinrich, "a yoke, a limitation, of his freedom as a writer and—which is no different really—as a human being...

...Of course, Thomas was also turned into a political symbol: During World War II, he became one of the principal spokesmen for those Germans who decided to leave their country rather than come to terms with the Nazis...

...Hamilton is perhaps correct in seeing this as a crucial turning point: "...as much as anything, it was the Senator's death which would set the two boys on their path to greatness...

...Reviewed by George Woodcock Author, "The Writer and Politics," "Anarchism," "Canadian Literature" This is a long book, as its subjects—leading figures in modern European literature who happened also to be siblings—deserve...

...Hamilton's judgment is indicative of his approach...

...In the 1930s, Heinrich became...

...His literary approach was established at an early age, and none of his later productions excelled in quality or in popularity the great epic of Budden-brooks, begun when he was 22...

...The book is more than a mere family chronicle, though...

...like Malraux in France—something of a legend, symbolizing the intellectual opposition to the return of political reaction in Germany...

...She had read Heinrich's poems, she knew his ambition was no dream...

...Once circumstances changed, Heinrich's role withered, and his literary repute with it...

...His conception of biography is progressive: a line of life leading upward to success, or alternately, dipping down toward failure...

...The slight failings of The Brothers Mann, however, detract little from its importance: It is the first biography of either Thomas or Heinrich Mann to appear in English, as well as the first study in any language of how these two brothers—who wrote so differently—affected each other's careers and lives...

...Thomas was by nature the more conservative...

...A scant seven volumes of his vast output has been translated into English, while almost the whole of Thomas' oeuvre has found its way into our language...

...As a writer, he has been kept long enough in that limbo the experimenters and innovators of one age are so often consigned to by the next...

...Their mother, dark-haired, Latin in temperament, ignorant of commerce, deeply and artistically musical, 'cared nothing about the reports' as Thomas put it in Tonio Kroger...

...Thus Hamilton's work is equally important for the light it throws on the predicament of German writers caught in the events that led to the Nazi assumption of power, to World War II and to the divided Germany of the postwar era...

...Still, by the end of this dual biography I found Heinrich the more fascinating personality, the more admirable man...

...New editions of the book appeared immediately in Germany and abroad under the new title: but it was Sternberg's extraordinary film that went storming into cinematic history...

...Without her we may well wonder whether either would have achieved what they did...

...It is sadly ironic that he achieved his greatest popular acceptance when his 1905 novel...

...Doubtless Thomas' was the greater literary achievement, and he was right when he criticized the absoluteness, the "absurdity" of some of Hein-rich's political stands...

...The careers that followed were extraordinarily unalike, yet linked to the end by sibling rivalry, by disagreement and by an underlying kinship that differing personalities and philosophies could never entirely rupture...

...Moreover, the total lack of illustrations—except for a dustcover montage showing a melancholy Heinrich looking down on a cockily self-complacent Thomas—is an omission that will disappoint readers like myself who would have liked a few visual clues to aid their mental reconstruction of the brothers' lives...

...Hamilton has a predilection for the works of Thomas' final years—the last of the Joseph novels, Doctor Faustus and Felix Kroli, but remarkable as these are, they cannot in my view be considered superior or even on a par with those earlier masterpieces—Budden-brooks, The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice...

...An experimentalist, a satirist, radically committed in politics from the days of his opposition to World War I, Heinrich always appealed more to fellow writers and other members of the European intelligentsia than he did to the general reading public, which took Thomas to its heart...

...Indeed, one of the most interesting things about The Brothers Mann is the way Hamilton has brought together and contrasted—in something near their extreme forms—the two types of the modern writer, the engaged and the detached...

...Senator Heinrich Mann—the disapproving father of the two writers—died in 1891, and since neither son was inclined to carry on in the business, the firm vanished...

...But this pattern does, it is true, allow the lives of the brothers to be observed in satisfying contrast, since Heinrich achieved for only short periods the success that his talent—so much more original and inventive than Thomas' —seemed to deserve...

...It was she who would finance the publication of his first novel, she who would guide both Heinrich and Thomas to their first successes, who stood behind them and between them when they fought...

...The former is haunted by the artistic purity he has abandoned, the latter is tempted always toward the world of action he has shunned...

...Accordingly, even those works that must be regarded as among the finest German novels of the 20th century—The Little Town, Henri Quatre and Man of Straw—are no longer widely read, and Heinrich is seldom mentioned today as an internationally important writer...

...Heinrich (willingly) and Thomas (reluctantly) found themselves involved as symbolic figures in the violent history of Germany and Europe between World War I and the 1950s...

...It is high time he was rediscovered, and perhaps Nigel Hamilton's book will initiate this process...

...Professor (Jurat, was filmed as The Blue Angel, marking the debut of Marlene Dietrich's fabulous legs...

...Thomas and Heinrich were born in the little city-state of Lilbeck, the scions of a decaying merchant dynasty founded by Johann Siegmund Mann in 1790...

...But up to that point he had dedicated most of his life to writing for its own sake, and by comparison to his brother he remained aloof...

...With his death all further obstacles to their literary inclinations were removed, moral and financial...