The Magician
62 pages • 2-hour read
Colm TóibínThe Magician
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Chapters 10-12Chapter Summaries & Analyses
Content Warning: This section of the guide includes discussion of antisemitism, brutality, torture, murder, gay sexual orientation, emotional abuse, substance abuse, and mental health conditions.
Chapter 10 Summary: “New Jersey, 1938”
After Germany refuses to renew their passports, Czechoslovakia grants Thomas and Katia honorary citizenship, though the Manns continue to live in Switzerland. Following Germany’s military occupation of Czechoslovakia, Thomas, Katia, and their younger children emigrate to the US, where Thomas takes a teaching position at Princeton University. His sense of exile becomes greatest in New Jersey, which feels utterly foreign to him.
Elisabeth, Thomas’s favorite daughter, tells Thomas that she plans to marry the much older Giuseppe Borgese, a professor of Romance languages in Chicago. Elisabeth’s news saddens Thomas.
Thomas’s application for an American visa runs into trouble since he accidentally lists his nationality as German instead of Czech. The visa application languishes until Katia reaches Agnes Meyer and the White House and all but manages to secure citizenship for not only the Manns, but also Albert Einstein.
Klaus and Erika visit the Manns in Princeton. Klaus is experiencing significant anxiety. He stays up at night, crashing into objects, and has frequent showdowns with Katia and Erika. The oldest Mann children, now in their thirties, are still financially dependent on Thomas and Katia. During Erika and Klaus’s visits, Thomas often takes long walks in Princeton, sometimes passing a pool where handsome young men bathe. Thomas takes care not to stare obviously, as such conduct is inappropriate in a professor. However, he wishes he could be like these men, entering the pool uninhibited. The pool reminds him of the painting that hangs in his study, Hofmann’s Die Quelle, which features three young men in the nude.
Around this time, Life magazine plans a photo shoot of the Mann family. Auden, Erika’s husband, will join them for the shoot. On the day of the shoot, Auden brings Christopher Isherwood along. Thomas is immediately annoyed by Auden and Christopher’s sardonic, flippant manner. Everything they say seems a veiled insult to Thomas, especially when Auden mentions the Princeton pool, as if suggesting impropriety on Thomas’s part.
When Isherwood speaks in German to Thomas, Thomas winces at how he simply transplants German words into an English structure. His patience snapping, Thomas replies slowly, in English, asking Isherwood to behave like a normal person when the photographer from Life arrives. Humiliated, Isherwood draws away from Thomas. The shoot is a success, giving the impression of a happy, extended clan with Thomas as the paterfamilias.
Chapter 11 Summary: “Sweden, 1939”
Accompanied by Katia and Erika, Thomas is in Sweden to deliver lectures when war is declared. Thomas’s disbelief at the sudden event soon changes to panic, since the Manns must get out of Sweden before the borders close. Help arrives via Agnes Meyer, who arranges for someone from the Swedish ministry to escort the Manns to the airport. The officer asks them to abandon most of their luggage since the flight to London is packed and must fly low over German airspace (per Germany’s mandate). The flight is an anxious affair, and everyone on board is consumed with fear. One woman, asked to abandon her suitcase because it won’t fit in the overhead compartment, threatens to travel only in her underclothes. Thomas realizes that, as afraid as the Manns may be, they’re much better off than people in Germany, who don’t have the luxury of a government official escorting them to a plane heading west.
From London, the Manns board the SS Washington to New York. Though the ship is packed, Erika manages to get Thomas a first-class berth, which he’s to share with four other men, while she and Katia travel in economy. The women want Thomas to use the opportunity to work on the Goethe book. When his co-passengers discover that he’s German, they treat him with hostility, calling him “mollycoddled” by his wife and daughter. Alighting from the ship, Erika again arranges priority passage for her parents. Thomas senses that the other exhausted passengers resent the Manns, just like people resented him and Katia in Munich during the revolution as they exited an opera in their grand clothes.
Thomas wonders if Hitler was among the Munich crowd watching the wealthy leave an opera in chauffeured cars, while they had little to eat. He imagines that Hitler wanted to watch the opera too, but the tickets were out of his reach. He would have been turned away from the theater.
Soon after arriving in the US, Thomas and Katia visit Agnes to thank her. Agnes assures Thomas that she’ll start working on procuring visas for the rest of his family. Meanwhile, he must lecture around the US, denouncing Germany—but must not suggest that the US join the war. Thomas agrees, and he asks Agnes for a check to help out writers who are in real danger in Europe. Elisabeth gets married a few months later, and Thomas behaves impeccably at the wedding, despite disliking her husband.
Chapter 12 Summary: “Princeton, 1940”
Michael, Gret, and their six-week-old son Frido are finally in Princeton with the Manns when the family learns that a German U-boat torpedoed the City of Benares, the ship carrying Monika and her husband, Jeno, to Quebec, Canada, in the middle of the Atlantic. Jeno is confirmed dead, but Monika’s fate is unknown. After a period of unbearable panic, the Manns finally receive a telegram from Erika that Monika was rescued and taken to Scotland, where she’ll stay for a few days before joining her parents. Another telegram arrives from Golo, announcing his imminent arrival in Princeton from Europe, along with Heinrich, Nelly, Alma Mahler, her new husband (Franz Werfel), and rescue worker Varian Fry.
The Manns head to New York to meet Golo and the others. As Katia rests at their hotel, Thomas visits a record store he found during a previous visit, fondly recalling the attention that the store’s British owner and assistant paid him. Now, the men flirt with Thomas, and the assistant shares that one of his friends attended a lecture by Thomas. Thomas feels seen and understood by the men as they suggest records to him, including works by Mozart and Haydn as well as Gurrelieder by Arnold Schoenberg.
The next day, Thomas and Katia meet their guests at the docks. Alma, dramatic and larger-than-life, openly disparages Nelly and makes loud remarks about her second husband’s Jewish heritage, alarming Thomas. However, as the group walks together, Alma is warm with Thomas and Katia, drawing them in a charmed circle. Leaving Alma and Franz in New York, the Manns return to Princeton, where Golo is happy to see baby Frido.
Over the next few days, as the Mann family spends more time together, Nelly grows more isolated. Matters reach a head when Katia invites Alma and Franz to dinner. When Nelly mentions that she went looking for a bar in Princeton the previous night, Alma remarks, “In Vienna, we have names for a woman who does that” (297). Nelly gets up from the table. As she plays a jazz record in the next room, Katia screams at her for her uncouth choice. Heinrich and Nelly retire from dinner. After Alma and Franz leave, Katia remarks that Nelly is a social embarrassment, a “trollop,” and a “barmaid.”
The next day, Golo admonishes his parents for treating Nelly so poorly. The Manns favor Alma, but the truth is that right before their perilous journey out of France, Alma planned to sell an original score by Bruckner to Hitler himself. The only reason the deal fell through was that the German embassy refused to pay Alma in cash as she had asked. Not only was Alma ready to conduct business with Hitler, but she also made remarks against Jews that wouldn’t be out of place in a Nazi conference. Nelly, conversely, was kind and gracious toward Alma and even helped Golo lift Heinrich when the older man was too weak to walk.
Chapters 10-12 Analysis
In this section, the Manns, particularly Thomas, go from being dispersed to being in permanent exile. As the previous section foreshadowed, the Manns move to the US, far more removed from Germany than Switzerland or France: “America [does] not belong to him, or to Katia either” (226), Thomas notes. For him, exile also means exile from his language. The absence of German words and mannerisms renders Thomas clueless, even comical. In a tragicomic sequence, Thomas asks a cab driver in Princeton, “What is this place called, where we are now?” (229). Annoyed by Thomas’s European intonation, the cab driver stiffly responds, “‘NEW. JERSEY’” […] as though he was making an important announcement” (229). Katia can’t hold back her laughter, and Thomas knows she’ll repeat this story to the children, and they’ll pass it on in turn “ad nauseam” (229).
Amplifying the sense of exile are Thomas’s attempts to navigate a relationship with his adult children. He feels cut off from their lifestyle and values, notably Klaus and Erika’s financial extravagance and Elisabeth’s decision to marry an older man whom Thomas considers “[a]n old goat” (235). Thomas sees that he and Katia are exiled not just from Germany but from the old ways of thinking, as is most obvious when Golo scolds his parents for their treatment of Nelly. Katia uses outmoded and sexist terms, calling her a “trollop,” “slattern,” and “barmaid” for trying to find a pub by herself. Golo rightfully calls out the implicit class bias in Katia’s words, telling her and Thomas, “I trust that, since we are in exile now, we have not brought with us the snobbery that so maimed our lives […] in Munich” (302).
Another culture clash sequence occurs when English writers W. H. Auden and Christopher Isherwood visit the Manns. Thomas dislikes their casual manner and their sly references to the Princeton pool, in which young men swim. Throughout the scene, Thomas feels “mocked” or “ridiculed.” Tóibín uses humor to make Thomas’s irritability come alive, such as when the author notes that Auden is taking in his beautiful front room “[a]s though some of the objects in it would soon belong to him” (246). The text describes Auden as a lean countryside dog, always barking to draw attention to itself, suggesting that Auden’s showy manner, his mimicking of Virginia Woolf, and above all, his easy acceptance of his same-gender attraction vex Thomas. Auden is as far from old Lübeck as he could be and is a painful reminder to Thomas of his displacement.
This section describes many perilous situations as war breaks out, such as the torpedoing of Monika’s ship, Golo’s dangerous journey out of Europe, and the Manns’ flight and sea passage from Holland. The journey to the US shows the Manns both their privilege and their precarious position as Germans in the new world. Thomas feels fear while flying over German airspace, but realizes that his anxiety is a “pale shadow” of the terror that those hounded and killed by Nazis experience. Such people “[h]ad not been lucky enough to be spirited by a government official from a luxury hotel to a plane flying west” (264). In addition, Tóibín draws on the public memory of the Nazis’ World War II atrocities to highlight the stark contrast between the privileged and the condemned. For instance, when a woman on the plane creates a scene over not being allowed overhead luggage, the suggestion is rife that around the same time, people in concentration camps had even their clothes and shoes seized.
The passage on the SS Washington emphasizes Thomas’s privilege, not just as a respected, wealthy writer but also as the patriarch of his family. Erika and Katia ensure that Thomas gets a first-class berth so he can work on his novel in peace. However, the privilege is countered by the hostility Thomas faces from his berth-mates, who speak derogatorily about him among themselves, indicating that they don’t care whether he hears them. At the same time, Thomas’s focus on his work in the crowded, hostile environment shows his uncanny ability to build himself a writing sanctuary wherever he goes. His prioritization of his writing is obvious when his berth-mates call him “mollycoddled” and Thomas notes down the word in his journal so that he can later research its meaning and etymology.
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