Mephisto (novel)

Mephisto – Novel of a Career is the sixth novel by Klaus Mann, which was published in 1936 whilst he was in exile in Amsterdam. It was published for the first time in Germany in the East Berlin Aufbau-Verlag in 1956. This novel (a thinly disguised portrait of the actor Gustaf Gründgens), the Tchaikovsky novel Symphonie Pathétique and the emigrant novel Der Vulkan are Klaus Mann's three most famous novels. An award-winning 1981 movie was based on Mann's novel. The novel adapts the Mephistopheles/Dr Faustus theme by having the main character Hendrik Höfgen abandon his conscience and continue to act and ingratiate himself with the Nazi Party to keep and improve his job and social position.

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. Gründgens's homosexuality was widely known.

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. Gründgens and Mann had both belonged in the early 1930s to a strongly left-wing theatre group that in January 1933 was touring Spain. When Hitler was German Chancellor on 30 January 1933, the group was in Madrid, and Mann urged Gründgens not to return to Germany. When Gründgens disregarded Mann's advice and not only returned to Germany, but embraced the Nazi regime (for purely opportunistic reasons), Mann never forgave his former friend Gründgens. Klaus Mann was exiled in 1934; Gründgens became a renowned theater and movie director in Nazi Germany. 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 as he himself was gay and decided to use "negroid masochism" as the main character's sexual preference.