Being Bi. Mixed-race and mixed-up with Thomas Mann

It all began with a dead woman, her stillborn baby at her breast - though I didn’t know that when I wrote my novel IDENTITTI and had my protagonist Nivedita explain the chasm that separates her from the literary canon:

Blood Sugar: Plantation Roots of a Literary Dynasty

It is no coincidence that all the references Nivedita has—that is: all the references I was aware of at the time—come from Anglophone literature. In Germany, being mixed-race is so inconceivable that we don’t even have a word for it. Okay, we do have words for it, like "Rassenmischung". Only there are no human races, so they can’t be mixed, and the decline of humankind due to the allegedly harmful mixing of these non-existing races, as predicted by Nazi racial theory, is equally hooey—ideological hooey, at that.

But isn’t “mixed-race” just English for Rassenmischung?

Not quite. Let me explain.

Where the German word Rasse is based on the biological concept of genetically distinct lineages—now even obsolete with reference to animals—the English word race has undergone a shift in meaning and now references the socially constructed nature of race. That doesn’t mean every person who uses the word race has reflected on that aspect or is even aware of it. But it is at least contained in the word, whereas Rasse means biological race and nothing else.

As regards racism German language and literature are decades behind English: The empire writes back!

And then I found out that Thomas Mann—Thomas “Where I am is Germany” Mann—was mixed-race. His mother was Brazilian and throughout his life, he felt… somehow different.

Like me.

Why didn’t they teach us that at school? Instead of portraying Thomas as a hyper-disciplined Mann who wrote every morning from precisely nine to noon and approached everything else with equally clear rules—the exact opposite of teenagers craving excess and ecstasy.

Civilizing Dark Julia

Even when I studied German Literature at university – where we read Mann in depth and mainly autobiographically - I didn’t learn about Julia Mann: Born 1851 in Paraty as Julia da Silva-Bruhns. Julia, who would never have come to Lübeck and never have married Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann if her mother Maria Luísa da Silva had not died giving birth to her sixth child. Julia remembers her dead mother with the small body of her stillborn sister at her breast, like a door closing, the end of her childhood paradise. Julia was five years old. A year later, her father Johann Ludwig Hermann Bruhns, a German emigrant to Brasil, sent her and her sister back to his hometown of Lübeck, where the da Silva-Bruhns girls’ skin color attracted so much attention that children followed them through the streets, laughing and shouting. Julia couldn’t understand any of these shouts; she didn’t speak a word of German.

Veronika Fuechtner, Professor of German studies, Jewish studies and gender studies at Dartmouth College, New Hampshire, refers to Julia’s time at the boarding school she was send to in Lübeck, as a process of violent “civilization,” aimed at driving the “n-word education” out of dark Julia. She had grown up in Brazil under the care of Anna, her black nanny, who had taught her Afro-Brazilian folk songs—which Julia would later sing to her children and grandchildren, and which Klaus Mann would consider very daring—and a syncretic Catholicism in which the whole world was alive and enchanted. This belief in magic and rebirth was literally beaten out of her in Germany.

And I think it’s that, more than anything else that touches me so deeply about this story, turning my view of German literature upside down: Thomas Mann’s mother, like my father, grew up believing in reincarnation!

Erasing the Brazilian Connection

We know all this from Julia da Silva-Bruhn’s autobiography FROM DODO'S CHILDHOOD, which she wrote in 1903, and which Veronika Fuechtner describes as an “ur-text” for the Mann family: Julia’s lifelong yearning for Brazil; her lost mother tongue, which she unlearned to the same extent as she learned German; her Otherness in Lübeck’s upper-middle-class, which Thomas Mann memorialized in almost all of his novels—we need only think of Tonio Kröger’s “dark and fiery mother,” whom Kröger’s father had “pulled up from the bottom of the map”.

Indeed, Thomas Mann declared in an interview with Brazilian writer Sérgio Buarque de Holanda that his mother’s origin was central to his and his brother’s understanding of literature, more so than all European influences. More so than all European influences!

Why Academia Still Fears Hybrid Histories

Why, then, has Thomas Mann’s Brazilian background been so little researched? Why did it take until 2018 before the first biography of Julia Mann was finally published?

“In scholarly literature, the argument is often: He didn’t talk about it so it’s not relevant,” Veronika Fuechtner explains. “But it’s important to read that silence. When he addressed his mother’s origins, he spoke of Latinity. I find that word Latinity very interesting in this context, because it Europeanizes the Brazilian story, relocates it to a European south rather than a global south.” However, Fuechtner continues, that was probably less due to Mann’s shame at being mixed-race than to racism in the German Empire. Cancel culture in “the Kaiserreich”? And the indomitable Thomas Mann let that influence him? And to such an extent that he blocked the publication of Julia’s memoirs at every turn. FROM DODO'S CHILDHOOD was not published until after his death.

Still, I believe there might be another explanation for his reticence, for the loud silences, the secret hidden in plain view. I suspect he didn’t talk about it because there was no language for it.

Thomas’ brother Heinrich Mann was more outspoken about their mother, as he was more outspoke about most things. In 1907 he published the novel BETWEEN THE RACES, its heroine Lola clearly based on Julia. Carl Korn’s 1907/08 review in DIE NEUE ZEIT was damning: “The novel’s heroine is the offspring of a Brazilian mother and a German father, and the writer aims to show her standing homeless between the races, her mother’s southern blood and the solid lines of her character inherited from her father causing conflicts within her, which will only hurt her either way. In reality, since these conflicts are fought out almost exclusively on erotic territory, the problem is not a tragic one, but the old trivial woes of the hysteric.”

Korn’s review sounds spookily like the mails and Facebook messages I received after the publication of my novel about being mixed-race: people telling me Nivedita had no real problems and was making a fuss about nothing. As if a different subjectivity were only relevant when it reported horrific oppression.

Nazis, N-Words, and the Making of ‘Deutschtum’

The Mann’s were oppressed of course. We might not think of Thomas Mann as a writer with a so-called “migration background” (as opposed to his migration foreground when he fled to the U.S. in the 1930s), but the Nazis did. The newspaper ANGRIFF urged in 1932: “We must demand with the utmost stridency that this writing mixture of Indians, N*****s, Moors, and who knows what else may no longer call himself a ‘German writer.’” If there’s one thing we can count on, it’s that fascists will throw the n-word into the discourse at every opportunity and if there isn’t an opportunity they’ll make one.

Exile altered Thomas Mann’s attitude to his lineage. He began to refer to his complex family history as to the source of his cosmopolitanism, and wrote in a letter to the antifascist Karl Lustig-Prean that Brazil was his mother country. The Brazilians agree, by the way, Thomas Mann has always been one of theirs. In addition, his experiences helped him towards a more intimate understanding of his wife Katja’s experiences of antisemitism. At least that’s how I understand Thomas’ writing about the parallels between his being mixed-race and the Jewish experience. And on their walks around Los Angeles, Thomas Mann told his favorite grandson Frido endless stories about Julia. Julia is central for an understanding of Thomas, and Brazil is central for an understanding of Julia Mann.

Southern Blood/Northern Mind: The Duality That Shaped Modern Literature

Julia yearned for her childhood paradise for the rest of her life, especially for her black foster mother Anna, who had curled the young girl’s hair so that Julia would look more like her. Even Julia’s pet name Dodo—as in From Dodo’s Childhood—was given to her by Anna. Dodo is an Afro-Brazilian term of endearment, meaning small and lovable.

Yet this story has yet another side; Anna was not an employee but a slave, and Julia’s closest childhood friend, Anna’s daughter Luciana, was probably Julia’s half-sister and the illegitimate daughter of Johann Bruhns. Thomas Mann’s grandfather was a huge slaveowner. Once Bruhns had brought his daughters to Lübeck (and married his sister-in-law), he returned to South America to take care of his coffee and sugar plantations. And the plantation system was inconceivably brutal. Even under good conditions, 5% of slaves died within the first year of arrival.

Brazil worked more slaves than any other country, at the same time it was a very hybrid society, and interracial marriages were an everyday occurrence. Although Thomas Mann’s mother is generally framed as Portuguese to make her “whiter,” she probably had black and definitely indigenous ancestors. Being mixed-race was an issue for the Manns on more than one level—and in equal parts dangerous and desirable.

Mixed-Race Ancestry as Radical Literary Theory

How I wish I could have grappled with these conflicts at school and university. And not just the productive ones, but also the bizarre and exoticizing ones. For instance, Thomas Mann imagines “Southernness” as a source of musicality (his mother sang so beautifully) and creativity (his own), while the North stands for intellect and stability. His whole work is imbued with notions of the North and the South, Even in his Nobel Prize speech, he claimed: “The South … is the essence of sensual, intellectual adventure, of the cold passion of art. The North, on the other hand, stands for … the bourgeois home.” And as much as he identified with being a writer, there was always a fragility to that identity. This part of his being was never easy and straightforward for him. That’s another thing I wish I could have grappled with

But above all, I wish the literary world would grapple with it: the most German heart of German literature was mixed—the heart of German literature is mixed!