“A delightful modern-romantic group portrait of the Manns en famille.”
— New Yorker
“The decay of France, the paranoia of Germany, the coming disasters. the shining myth of Europe … A sensitive, cultivated European looks at his world, his life and describes them in an apt and telling phrase.”
— The New York Times Book Review
“Fifty years after the collapse of the Weimar Republic in Germany and the coming to power of the Nazis, the fascination that troubled era holds for the American public shows no signs of abating. The events, the personalities, indeed the entire Zeitgeist of that crazy world on either side of the fatal year 1933 have become a staple of pop history, movies, and television specials, most of them so awash in cliches that a sense of unreality threatens to envelop those crucial years in our recent history. A most welcome anchor of reality in this sea of melodrama is the recent appearance of two classic autobiographies by prominent exemplars of the German conscience, the liberal anti-Nazi artistic spirit that came so close to extinction at Hitler’s hands. Of the two, Klaus Mann is probably the better known to American audiences … his autobiography [is] certainly one of the great autobiographies of the century and probably the definitive one of the life of a German exile. … Not only very good reading but also essential in the literature of twentieth-century exile.”
— Carl Zuckmayer, Bloomsbury Review