Context
Klaus Mann fled to exile in March 1933 to avoid political persecution by Hitler's regime. In Amsterdam he worked for the exile magazine Die Sammlung, which attacked national socialism. His friend and publisher Fritz Helmut Landshoff made him a "relatively generous offer", as Mann wrote to his mother on 21 July 1935. He was to receive a monthly wage to write a novel. Mann originally intended to write a utopian novel about Europe in 200 years. However, Mann discarded this idea stating that he could not write an apolitical novel at that point in history. The author Hermann Kesten suggested that he write a novel of a homosexual careerist in the Third Reich, with the director of the state theatre Gustaf Gründgens as a subject matter.
In 1924, Klaus Mann, his sister Erika, Gründgens, and Pamela Wedekind had all worked together on a stage production of Mann's Anja und Esther and had toured through Germany. Gründgens and Erika Mann got engaged while Klaus Mann similarly got engaged to Wedekind. The first two got married in 1926 but divorced in 1929 and Wedekind married writer Carl Sternheim a year later. Klaus Mann was exiled in 1934, Gründgens became a renowned theater and movie director. While Mann never called Gründgens an adversary, he admitted "moved antipathy". Although he attacked Gründgens in newspaper articles, Mann hesitated to use homosexuality as a theme in the novel and decided to use "negroid masochism" as the main character's sexual preference.
After the novel's publication in 1936, the newspaper Pariser Tageszeitung presented it as a roman à clef. Mann resented this characterization and argued that he had not written about a particular individual, but about a type of individual.
Read more about this topic: Mephisto (novel)
Famous quotes containing the word context:
“The hippie is the scion of surplus value. The dropout can only claim sanctity in a society which offers something to be dropped out of—career, ambition, conspicuous consumption. The effects of hippie sanctimony can only be felt in the context of others who plunder his lifestyle for what they find good or profitable, a process known as rip-off by the hippie, who will not see how savagely he has pillaged intricate and demanding civilizations for his own parodic lifestyle.”
—Germaine Greer (b. 1939)
“The hard truth is that what may be acceptable in elite culture may not be acceptable in mass culture, that tastes which pose only innocent ethical issues as the property of a minority become corrupting when they become more established. Taste is context, and the context has changed.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Parents are led to believe that they must be consistent, that is, always respond to the same issue the same way. Consistency is good up to a point but your child also needs to understand context and subtlety . . . much of adult life is governed by context: what is appropriate in one setting is not appropriate in another; the way something is said may be more important than what is said. . . .”
—Stanley I. Greenspan (20th century)