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“Andrea Weiss proves here that complex life forms can thrive in the dark. In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain illuminates not only its primary subjects, Erika and Klaus Mann, but also the father who overshadowed them. A brilliant and important work of historical and literary portraiture.”
David Hajdu, author of The Ten-Cent Plague

“Not all the books on Earth, in either inky German or watery English, could save the life of the oldest son of Thomas Mann, who never mastered dad’s knack for sublimation. In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain divides its enthrallments evenly between the star-crossed siblings, but Andrea Weiss, who’s also made a movie on the subject, can’t help choosing sides. And the side she ends up choosing is that of Klaus, super-sensitive and suicidal, instead of Erika, brave, bouncy, and a show-off. Mind you, Klaus probably would not have made it even to age forty-two without Erika’s energy and cunning. Still, after the war against Hitler that had sent the whole family into nomadic exile, after a marriage of convenience to W. H. Auden and an adulterous affair with creaky Bruno Walter, Erika chose to devote herself to her celebrated father rather than her loser of a brother. And of Thomas, Nobel Prizeûwinning repressed homosexual, six-time father, would-be Goethe, superpatriot, and monster of indifference, Weiss is contemptuous and unforgiving.”
John Leonard, Harper’s

In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain
The Erika and Klaus Mann Story

Andrea Weiss

Germany’s leading literary family during the 20th century was headed by Thomas Mann and composed of six talented children, the most accomplished of which were Erika and Klaus. Long obscured by the fame of their domineering father, Erika and Klaus were prominent writers and artists in their own right who led fascinating, unconventional lives that mirrored the tumult and chaos of their times. In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is their story. Andrea Weiss’s remarkable biography chronicles Erika and Klaus’s equally remarkable lives. Openly gay during an era of secrecy and repression; defiantly anti-fascist during the rise of Hitler and the Third Reich; intimate friends with such luminaries as W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, André Gide, and Jean Cocteau; performance artists before the phrase had even been coined, In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain is rich in anecdote and eye-opening details, sending the reader spinning and tumbling into the minds of these two extraordinary but neglected literary figures.

Author is available for interviews. For more information, please contact Rob Hunt at (773) 702-0279 or rhunt@press.uchicago.edu