House of Exile

"This book was a real revelation to me. As you say it is described as a collective biography – subtitled “War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles” – and I thought it was going to be what it says on the cover, a collective biography of these people. What I didn’t realise was it was going to be so novelistic. I just love the conceit of these German avant-garde composers all living quite near each other in Los Angeles. Indeed. She sets the scene for all these different people, who are aware of course of the looming threat and they respond to it in different ways. Some jump ship pretty quickly, others keep hanging on, some are more overtly political and involved than others. So it’s this array of different voices. I suppose, in a way, it’s somewhat like the Peter Englund book. We follow these different people to wherever their fates take them. They end up being dispersed all over Europe, and many of them end up in America and in particular in LA. That’s where Thomas Mann ends up, of course. He leaves Germany but he would always have his desk with him, and his desk represents for him the real soul of Germany. That’s absolutely right. And as a result of reading this book I was reading Thomas Mann’s book The Genesis of a Novel , where he tells the story about how he wrote Doctor Faustus . It’s really remarkable that he’s engaged in this massive act of creative immersion – immersing himself very much in theories of music – and his neighbour in Los Angeles is Theodore Adorno, living around the corner, coming to help Mann with the musical theory bits of his book. At the same time he’s listening to the radio and following the course of the Second World War, and being increasingly involved in the discussion of what will become of Germany in the post-war period. So it’s this multi-layered life that he’s leading. And it was this book, House of Exile , which first turned me onto reading Thomas Mann’s own account of what he was doing at that time. This is a big point. I think the key word here is trust, actually. And I never felt that any of the invented or obviously imagined scenes were gratuitous. I never felt they were being done purely for literary effect. I know this is a dangerous thing to do, but I took what she was saying on trust. I felt I could trust the voice of the book. So even these scenes that if you were writing a conventional history you couldn’t put in, because there would be insufficient evidence and documentation, the things in them rang true. And let’s not forget that I’m not recommending history books here, I’m recommending books that are doing something new. I suppose there is a point to make that the phrase “experimental fiction” trips very readily off the tongue, and we all know what to look for in experimental fiction. Yeah. But sometimes experimental fiction isn’t very experimental, it’s almost a set thing. Whereas what we’re seeing here are experiments in history writing. And they seem to me entirely successful experiments."