Gabriele Annan

This book is beautifully designed and printed, and very well translated by Mary Whittall. The English sometimes sounds a bit gnarled, but so does Kokoschka’s idiosyncratic German: not because Czech was his first language, though; his father was a German-speaking Czech from Prague, his mother Austrian; he was born in Lower Austria in 1886, grew up in a suburb of Vienna, and trained at the famous School of Arts and Crafts there. Whittall even manages the puns: in a letter of June 1930, for instance, Kokoschka jokingly compares his own indigence to that of Der arme Heinrich (‘Poor Heinrich’), the hero of a Medieval epic and a recent play by Gerhard Hauptmann. The passage ends er im Kreuzzug an leitender stelle (ich im Bummelzug von Gabes nach Reval). Literally this means: ‘he is a leading position in the crusades, I on a slow train from Gabes to Reval.’ Whittal renders it: ‘he in the vanguard of a crusade (I in the guard’s van from Gabes to Reval).’ She must have been pleased with that, and quite right too.

Queen consorts usually have their lives written by the Barbara Cartlands of biography, romantics like Joan Haslip whose life of the famous fascinator Elizabeth of Austria, the last empress but one, was as spirited as its subject. Gordon Brook-Shepherd is not that kind of writer at all (nor was his empress that kind of empress). A former foreign correspondent and deputy editor of the Sunday Telegraph, he is a specialist in modern Central European history who munches informatively through the events on his plate. No dramatics for him, and no psychologising either.

The Red Countess’ – die rote Gräfin – is well-known in Germany. More green than red now, and never any redder than the SPD, she is 81, still an active political journalist and still publishing Die Zeit, her country’s most prestigious political weekly, which she edited from 1968 to 1973. At one time she was asked to stand for Bundespräsident. She is definitely not nobody, and the writings collected here are imbued with a calm self-confidence that turns out to be her salient characteristic. It rests on the conviction that she can tell right from wrong. She has always acted accordingly, without any soul-searching or fuss.’

The Mann family romance is among the tragic real-life soap operas of the century, a large-cast drama of genius, talent, fame and infamy, fraternal hatred, rocky and rock-hard marriages, open and covert sexual deviancy, secrets and suicides. It provided material for Thomas, Heinrich, Erika and Klaus Mann’s novels and plays, and for plenty of biographies and psycho-literary studies besides. Golo Mann is the third of Thomas and Katja Mann’s six children. He was born in 1909 and must have been the model for the little boy nicknamed Beisser (Biter) in his father’s comical and touching novella Unordnung und Frühes Leid (‘Early Sorrow’) – which, he says, ‘others greatly admired but I found embarrassing’. Graceless, bumbling Beisser is outshone by his flower-like sister Lorchen, who has stolen their father’s heart with her pretty ways. Beisser suffers from terrible rages and is made to stand in a corner where he screams and screams until he turns blue. The nanny thinks he is having a fit, but it’s only the blue nursery distemper coming off on his wet cheeks. Golo Mann quotes his mother’s diary on the subject of himself as a small child:’

‘It’s ages since I got over being a sexual psychopath,’ Wedekind wrote, ‘and yet, I shall never forget it: those were happy days.’ His Diary of an Erotic Life is a record of those happy days between 1887, when he was 23, and 1894. A few pages of short entries cover the period 1908 to 1918. That was the year he died, after several botched operations on his appendix. The last entry is a poem to his wife Tilly. She was a beautiful actress much younger than he was, and they had two little girls. In the poem, Wedekind sets her free. The marriage was going badly – she had tried to commit suicide a few months before. He speaks of his dreary illness: perhaps he foresaw his death. The poem is an affectionate, fatalistic farewell ballad – the ballad form used ironically, as Heine used it. Wedekind admired and regularly parodied Heine. In order to get a rhyme the translator has decided to call Tilly ‘dear lass’. Wedekind just calls her Tilly. The invocation has to be repeated three times because it occurs in the refrain, and that is a pity. The translation of the prose, on the other hand, gets Wedekind’s throw-away, disillusioned tone rather well.’