Translated from German by Robin Smyth
Published by Penguin, 1977, 263 pages. Original version published in 1936.

“What do men want from me? Why do they pursue me? Why are they so hard? All I am is a perfectly ordinary actor…”

Hendrik Höfgen is, first and foremost, an actor. In fact, that could describe him entirely. A man who lives to act, who will do anything to be a star.

We first meet Hendrik at the height of his career. It is Germany in 1936, with the Nazis in power. The book starts with a party to celebrate Herman Göring’s 43rd birthday, and Hendrik is now director of the State Theatre.

The book then goes back to Hendrik’s past, after the end of the First World War and follows him as he manipulates, lies and compromises to get to the top. In his early years in the theatre, he claims to be a communist and talks about creating a “revolutionary theatre” but has absolutely no intention of following it through.

He has a secret mistress—Juliette, a mixed-race woman—the only woman who excites him. But he hides their affair from the world: after all, it wouldn’t do to be seen with a half-Black lover. He marries Barbara Bruckner, the daughter of a privy councillor. Barbara is too clear-eyed to be in love with Hendrik but marries him because he appeals to her compassion and pity.

When the Nazis come into power, Hendrik is out of the country. He remains in Paris and does not return to Germany: his name is on a blacklist because of his communist past. Barbara and her father are horrified by what is happening under the Nazis and leave the country.

But Hendrik has no such principles. When a fellow actress convinces Lotte van Lindenthal—an aspiring actress and girlfriend of a Luftwaffe general (later his wife)—to let Hendrik return to Germany, he does not hesitate to renounce his flirtation with communism. Because of his association with Lotte and her general, Hendrik’s career takes off. Eventually Barbara and Hendrik divorce.

This is a portrait of a truly amoral man, completely self-absorbed, a man who will stop at nothing to get what he wants—which is to reach the highest point of his career. Nothing much exists for him outside this desire. He is willing to betray friends, drop lovers (even Juliette is sacrificed to his ambition), and cosy up to unsavoury people, as long as it gets him where he wants to be. His greatest role, appropriately, is Mephisto in Goethe’s Faust.

“The actor Höfgen lives from one first night to the next, from one film to another, his calendar composed of performance days and rehearsal days. He scarcely notices that the snow melts, that the trees and bushes are in bud or in full leaf, that there are flowers and earth and streams. Encapsulated by his ambition as in a prison cell, insatiable and tireless, always in a state of extreme hysterical tension, Hendrik embraces a destiny that seems to him exceptional but is in fact nothing but a vulgar arabesque at the edge of an enterprise doomed to collapse.”

The book is based on Gustaf Gründgens, a well-known German actor, whose rise to fame continued during the Nazi regime and who was best known for playing Mephisto. He was briefly married to Klaus Mann’s sister Erika and was also reputed to have been Klaus Mann’s lover.

Mephisto was made into an excellent film in German, directed by István Szabó with Klaus Maria Brandauer in the title role. I remember seeing it in the early 1980s—which is what led me to the book.

Mann’s portrait of Hendrik Höfgen is chilling, as is his description of the early years of the Nazi regime. One of the guests at the birthday party at the beginning of the book says, “The gaiety of these beautifully groomed people doesn’t make one feel at ease…They move like marionettes. And there’s something hidden in their eyes; one doesn’t want to encounter so much anxiety and cruelty in a look. … There’s something insolent, provocative and at the same time hopeless… No one who feels happy to be alive could laugh like that.”

Scattered through the book are passages in italics that function as a sort of Greek chorus. I find this does not always work—it feels a bit contrived.

That said, this is a riveting study of a man’s overweening ambition.