Volcano: A Novel Among Emigrants
by Klaus Mann, Translated By Carl Skoggard
In Volcano: A Novel Among Emigrants, Klaus Mann traces the fortunes of a representative array of Hitler refugees and resisters through the better part of a decade—from 1933 up to shortly before the publication of his novel, in spring of 1939. This is the earliest sustained evocation of the antifascist experience—a recounting of its psychology, of strategies and tactics—and therefore an important literary milestone.
Yet Volcano never stays serious for long; it wants to entertain every bit as much as instruct. The eldest son of Thomas Mann was always obsessed with acting and self-promotion, and if the Nazis’ power grab gave the signal for regime “power shows,” then his writing puts on a rival show of its own.
By turns horrific and melodramatic, sinister and cozy, Volcano aims to keep your attention at all costs. (When guardian angels eventually show up, they nearly steal the show.) Mann’s exiles, scattered from Los Angeles to Shanghai, gradually coalesce into a far-flung resistance movement. His main characters seem like emanations of the notoriously charged Mann family romance. At the heart of his novel is the father-son dynamic that played out in real life between Klaus and Thomas Mann, and which led to the son’s eventual destruction. Paternity of body and of books: such are the stakes in this extravagant chronicle, translated here for the first time into English.
