Profession: writer

Mehring’s caustic satire — verse, songs, novels and more — profoundly irritated the Nazi régime. He contributed to Walden’s magazine ‘Der Sturm’, meeting Lasker-Schüler and Trakl in his circle. He was a founder-member of Berlin Dada, his great friend Grosz, as well as Huelsenbeck, Hausmann, Baader, Jung, Herzfelde and Heartfield, all fellow-agitators. He took Schwitters up to meet Grosz. Piscator staged his play, and Reinhardt got him (and Tucholsky, who became a friend) writing for his cabaret ‘Schall und Rauch’. He was friendly with Horváth and Toller. Grosz faithfully supported him after MGM’s stipend expired.

Mann was widely lauded as the greatest 20th-century German novelist; Heinrich was his brother, Klaus his son. Hesse was a friend from 1904, and Toller from WWI days. Mann drew extensively upon his friend Adorno’s musical knowledge, and greatly respected Musil, who however distrusted Mann. Wedekind and he knew each other well in Munich; Grosz found him full of himself in New York. Neighbours in exile included Einstein and Broch in Princeton, and Schoenberg, Brecht and Döblin in L.A. (the first fell out with him, the other two had never hidden their dislike). Freud wrote as a friend on Mann’s 60th birthday.

Mann was a significant satirical and critical voice in Weimar Germany. Kollwitz and he tried to unite artists against Nazi policies, and together visited Einstein to seek his support. Mann collaborated with Piscator, cooperated with Sternberg, shared a house with Roth, and corresponded with Polgar, Erdős, Aragon, Schnitzler, Wells and Lasker-Schüler. He fled over the Pyrenees (aged and unfit) with Werfel, and found himself part of an exiled community in California with Brecht, Feuchtwanger (both long-term friends), Döblin, Herzfelde and Bloch, overshadowed and supported in his decline by his less widely-liked brother Thomas.

Feuchtwanger was internationally the most widely read German author in inter-war years, and stood up publicly against nazism. He mentored Brecht, the start of a lifelong friendship. Many of his friends in the literary and cultural world remained (or became) neighbours in exile, first in the south of France (Werfel, Piscator, Koestler, Thomas and Klaus Mann, Kisch, Roth, Zweig), later in Los Angeles (Heinrich Mann, a lifelong friend, Döblin, Herzfelde, Schoenberg, Lang, Remarque, Huxley, Wilder.) Feuchtwanger pulled off the prodigious feat of counting both Brecht, and the notoriously awkward Thomas Mann, among his best friends.

Canetti, a charismatic literary outsider, had Kraus as an influential teacher and mentor. Through Herzfelde he met Brecht, Grosz, Heartfield and Babel. Broch, Berg and Musil were other friends. Wotruba became particularly close — Canetti spoke of an artistic brotherhood. Other than Waley, Read, Russell and Vaughan Williams, he impatiently despised most of those he met on his return to England, above all Eliot. Gombrich found him a home, Adorno interviewed him, while Thomas Mann tried and failed to meet him. His old acquaintance Joyce became his cemetery neighbour.

Tucholsky has been described as much read, but not well known; a satirist and a polemical critic of conventional values in Weimar Germany, he was a colleague and collaborator of Heartfield on the magazine AIZ. He and Grosz were mutual admirers and correspondents. He co-authored a revue with Polgar, and was a colleague of Kästner, who (quite affectionately) called him a small fat Berliner, trying to stave off catastrophe with his typewriter. Aged twenty-one, Tucholsky went to Prague to surprise his favourite writer, Brod, with a home-made model landscape; Kafka, also present, was impressed by the swing of Tucholsky’s walking-stick.