Golo Mann (born Angelus Gottfried Thomas Mann; 27 March 1909 – 7 April 1994) was a popular German historian and essayist. After completing a doctorate in philosophy under Karl Jaspers at Heidelberg, in 1933 he fled Hitler's Germany. He followed his father, the writer Thomas Mann, and other members of his family in emigrating first to France, then to Switzerland and, on the eve of war, to the United States. From the late 1950s he re-established himself in Switzerland and West Germany as a literary historian.
Mann was perhaps best known for his master work German History in the 19th and 20th Century (1958). A survey of German political history, it emphasised the nihilistic and aberrant nature of the Hitler regime. In his later years, Mann took issue with historians who sought to contextualise the crimes of the regime by comparing them with those of Stalinism in Soviet Union and with wartime Allied bombing. At the same time he was sharply critical of those, broadly on the left, who carried a unique German guilt for the Holocaust not only back into the pre-Nazi past but forward in a manner that seemed to question the legitimacy of the postwar Federal Republic.
Mann was born in Munich, the grandchild, on the side of his mother, Katia, of the German Jewish mathematician and artist Alfred Pringsheim and the actress Hedwig Pringsheim, and on the side of his father, the writer Thomas Mann, of the Lübeck senator and grain merchant Johann Heinrich Mann and his Brazilian wife, the writer Júlia da Silva Bruhns who was of Portuguese-Indigenous Brazilian descent.
As a child, he pronounced his first name as Golo, and this name was adopted. He had an elder sister, Erika Mann, an elder brother, Klaus Mann, and three younger siblings, Monika, Elisabeth and Michael.
In her diary his mother describes him in his early years as sensitive, nervous and frightened. His father hardly concealed his disappointment and rarely mentioned the son in his diary. Golo Mann in turn described him later: "Indeed he was able to radiate some kindness, but mostly it was silence, strictness, nervousness or rage." Among his siblings he was most tightly connected with Klaus, whereas he disliked the dogmatism and radical views of his sister Erika.
An average pupil, he received a classical education at the Wilhelms-Gymnasium in Munich beginning in September 1918, revealing talents in history, Latin, and especially in reciting poems, the latter being a lifelong passion. "Longing to be like the others", at school he joined a nationalist youth association (Deutsch-Nationale Jugendbund) but was soon talked out of it by the conversations he heard at the family table: discussion of the need for "tolerance and above all peace, and therefore of above all, so Franco-German reconciliation". Later in the 1920s he shared his father's enthusiasm for Pan-European Union.
New horizons appeared to open in 1923, when Mann entered the Schule Schloss Salem, a famously spartan boarding school where he was joined by his sister Monika, near Lake Constance. He felt liberated from home, enjoyed the new educational approach, and developed an enduring passion for hiking. Yet in 1925 Mann suffered a mental crisis that overshadowed the rest of his life. "In those days the doubt entered my life, or rather broke in with tremendous power ... I was seized by darkest melancholy."
Upon the final school exams in 1927, he commenced his studies of law in Munich, moving the same year to Berlin and switching to history and philosophy. He used the summer of 1928 to learn French in Paris and to get to know "real work" during six weeks in a coal mine in Lower Lusatia, abruptly stopping because of new knee injuries.
At last Mann entered the University of Heidelberg in spring 1929. Here he followed the advice of his teacher Karl Jaspers to graduate in philosophy on the one hand, and to study history and Latin with the prospect of becoming a schoolteacher on the other. He nevertheless found time to join a Social-Democratic Party student group in the autumn of 1930. The students were sharply critical of the party leadership in Berlin for tolerating the presidentialist Brüning government. In May 1932, Mann finished his dissertation, Concerning the terms of the individual and the ego in Hegel's works, which was rated with an average cum laude. (While recognising Mann's literary potential, Jaspers suggested to Mann that the lack of originality and clarity in his analysis is something that would have shamed his father).
Golo Mann's plans to further his university studies in Hamburg and Göttingen were interrupted in January 1933 by Adolf Hitler's appointment as German Chancellor. His father, who never hesitated to articulate his dislike for National Socialism, and his mother moved to Switzerland. Golo Mann looked after the family house in Munich in April 1933, helped his three younger siblings leave the country and brought the greater part of his parents' savings via Karlsruhe and the German embassy in Paris to Switzerland.
On 31 May 1933, Mann left Germany for the French town of Bandol near Toulon. He spent the summer at the mansion of the American travel writer William Seabrook near Sanary-sur-Mer and lived six further weeks at the new family house in Küsnacht near Zürich. In November, he joined the École Normale Supérieure at Saint-Cloud near Paris for two intensive, instructive years as lecturer on the German language. At that time, he worked for the emigrants' journal Die Sammlung (The Collection) founded by his brother Klaus.
In November 1935, Mann accepted a call from the University of Rennes to lecture on German language and literature. Mann's travels to Switzerland suggest that the relationship with his father was easier, perhaps because Thomas Mann had learned to appreciate his son's political knowledge. But it was only when Golo Mann helped edit his father's diaries in later years that he realised fully how much acceptance he had gained. In a confidential note to the German critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki he wrote, "It was inevitable that I had to wish his death; but I was completely broken-hearted when he passed away".
In 1936, Thomas Mann and his family were deprived of their German citizenship. His father's admirer, the Czech businessman Rudolf Fleischmann, helped Golo Mann obtain Czechoslovak citizenship, but plans to continue studies in Prague were disrupted by the Sudeten crisis.
Early in 1939, Mann traveled to Princeton, New Jersey, where his father worked as guest professor. Although war was drawing closer, he hesitantly returned to Zürich in August to become editor of the emigrant journal Maß und Wert (Measure and Value).
As a reaction to Adolf Hitler's successes in the West in May 1940 during World War II, and at a time when many of his friends in Zürich were being mobilised for the defence of Swiss neutrality, Mann decided to join a Czech military unit on French soil as a volunteer. Upon crossing the border he was arrested at Annecy and brought to the French concentration camp Les Milles, a brickyard near Aix-en-Provence. In the beginning of August, in what was then unoccupied Vichy France, he was released by the intervention of an American committee. On 13 September 1940, he undertook a daring escape from Perpignan across the Pyrenees to Spain. With him were his uncle Heinrich Mann, the latter's wife Nelly Kröger, Alma Mahler-Werfel and Franz Werfel. On 4 October 1940, they boarded the Nea Hellas headed for New York City.
Mann stayed at his parents' house in Princeton, then in New York City where he lived for a time in what his father described as a "kind of Bohemian colony" with W. H. Auden (with whom his sister Erika contracted a marriage of convenience), Benjamin Britten, the tenor Peter Pears and others.
In the autumn of 1942, Mann finally got the chance to teach history at Olivet College in Michigan, but soon followed his brother Klaus into the US Army. After basic training at Fort McClellan, Alabama, he worked at the Office of Strategic Services in Washington, D.C. In his capacity as intelligence officer it was his duty to collect and translate relevant information.