Alexander: A Novel of Utopia
by Klaus Mann
Translated by David Carter
Hesperus Press. 214 pages, $15.95
FOR SOME TIME NOW, familiarity with the works of Klaus Mann (1906–1949) in the English-speaking world has been limited to a small but devoted cadre of readers. Understandably, Klaus Mann, a noteworthy literary figure on both sides of the Atlantic from the 1920’s to the 1940’s, will forever be obscured by his much more famous father, Thomas Mann. Nevertheless, the small amount of notoriety given to Klaus Mann is oftentimes limited to his novel Mephisto (1936), a condemnation of Germans who abandoned their moral and ethical integrity during the Nazi regime. Mephisto, which remains one of the best selling German novels in the U.S., was made into an Academy Award-winning film in 1981. Klaus Mann devotees, however, believe that more of his œuvre deserves recognition and eagerly snatch up any new publication by or about this fascinating figure.
It is with this sense of anticipation that we greeted the recent appearance of two titles in rapid succession in the U.S. First came Andrea Weiss’s biographical study, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain: The Erika and Klaus Mann Story (University of Chicago Press, reviewed in the G&LR’s Sept.-Oct. 2008 issue.) And now we have a new translation of Klaus Mann’s Alexander: A Novel of Utopia (Hesperus Press), a fictitious biography of Alexander the Great that speculates on the conqueror’s psychological motivations. The book was first published in 1929 and had not previously been available in English.
Those familiar with Klaus Mann’s life and work will recognize thematic elements in Alexander that reappear in much of his later writing. Biographers and critics have commented on the anxiety Klaus Mann felt growing up in the overwhelming presence of his world-renowned father. Laurence Senelick commented on this familial tension in his essay “The Dancing Dichterkind” in this journal (Nov.-Dec. 2003). This sort of paternal–filial conflict appears early on in Alexander. In his novel, Mann depicts Alexander’s father, Philip of Macedonia, as something of a rube, someone easily swindled by the cultured and sophisticated Greeks. Given the obvious Oedipal dynamic, Philip is destined to be superseded by his son. By foregrounding this theme in his novel in this way, Klaus Mann was addressing this anxiety with the cheekiness that he used to pique his own father. He also stated in print that André Gide, not Thomas Mann, was the most important writer of their time.
Another theme running through Alexander, particularly the first half of the novel, is the ascendancy of a new generation, a youth culture, in the post-World War I era. In the novel, the younger generation sets out to rectify the mistakes of their parents. We read, for instance, that “Alexander was united in enthusiastic comradeship with his soldiers, who were as young as he. They all loved each other: all of them were no older than twenty-five.” The view that the people just coming into maturity must remake a world destroyed by their parents finds expression in other of Klaus Mann’s writings. In an essay titled “The War and Post-War Generation,” he bemoaned the sorry state of the world and declared that with his generation “everything begins anew.”
The themes present in Alexander, then, are both familiar and important to those studying Klaus Mann’s life and work, and for that we can be grateful. If we want to go beyond thematic issues, however, we are stymied by Carter’s unsatisfying translation of Alexander. Admittedly, there are varying philosophies of translation. Carter notes in his introduction that he’s trying to be faithful to Klaus Mann’s style, which is to say, he has decided to produce a quite literal adaptation of the original. In many instances, the language is far from conversational and even, at times, borders on the unintelligible. Thus, for example, we get: “After all he did all the same bring about the alliance between Athens and Thebes, admittedly when it was not of much use any more.” Or this: “Did blood flow, or would it only almost have flowed?” So while we might hope that Hesperus Press’s willingness to publish this work marks a burgeoning interest in Mann and his work in the English-speaking world, we must also fear that this translation will not help the cause in the long run.
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Timothy K. Nixon, assistant professor of literature at Shepherd Univ. in Shepherdstown, WV, is editing a collection of Klaus Mann’s short works.
