Klaus Mann

He began as the young writer of a restless generation. Exile turned him into one of its most determined witnesses.

Klaus Mann was born in Munich in 1906, the son of Katia and Thomas Mann. He worked as a theatre critic and published Der fromme Tanz while still in his teens. After the Nazis took power, he left Germany, edited the anti-fascist exile journal Die Sammlung, and wrote the novels Mephisto and Der Vulkan. He later emigrated to the United States, became an American citizen, and served with the US Army in Europe during the Second World War. His fiction, essays, journalism, and autobiographical writing repeatedly return to art, sexuality, exile, political responsibility, and the temptations of compromise. He died in Cannes in 1949.

His characters search for a role. Mann kept asking what that role requires when history enters the room.