German writer and activist Klaus Mann was BOTD in 1906. Born in Munich, the eldest son of novelist Thomas Mann, he developed close relationships with his five siblings, notably his sister Erika and younger brother Golo. Educated at private schools, he developed an early interest in theatre. In 1924, he became a drama critic for a Berlin newspaper, producing his first play Anja und Esther (Anja and Esther) in 1925, starring Erika. After a brief engagement to a family friend, he began frequenting gay bars in Munich and Berlin, experiences recounted in his 1926 debut novel Der fromme Tanz (The Pious Dance). He lived a restless existence for the remainder of the 1920s, visiting Paris where he befriended gay celebrities André Gide and Jean Cocteau, continuing to write plays and essays, and undertook a world tour with Erika in 1927, chronicled in their book Rundherum; Das Abenteuer einer Weltreise. With the rise of the Nazi Party in Germany, he and Erika became involved in pacifist and anti-Fascist movement, performing at the cabaret Die Pfeffermühle (The Pepper Mill) and openly criticising Hitler’s rise to power. By 1933, Thomas and Klaus were included on a list of authors banned by the Nazi Party, and their books were burned in public. To avoid arrest, Klaus and his family fled to Zürich, Switzerland, and were later stripped of their German citizenship. Klaus edited the left-wing journal Die Sammlung, with contributions from Golo, Gide and Aldous Huxley. He also wrote a series of novels, notably 1936’s Mephisto, a Faustian tale about an actor who collaborates with the Nazi Party to ensure his success. He emigrated to the United States in 1936, settling in New York where he met his life partner Thomas Quinn Curtis. Later joined by Erika and Golo, they became key figures in a German left-wing expatriate community including fellow exiles Kurt Weill, Ernst Toller and Sonia Sekula, and continuing his journalistic critiques of the Nazis. In 1940, he, Erika and Golo lived briefly in February House in Brooklyn, a queer artistic commune with housemates Gypsy Rose Lee, Carson McCullers, W. H. Auden, Christopher Isherwood, Benjamin Britten, Peter Pears, Paul and Jane Bowles, Lincoln Kirstein and Leonard Bernstein. He became an American citizen in 1943, joining the US Army and served in a counter-intelligence unit in Italy during World War Two, interrogating German prisoners-of-war. He accompanied American and British Allied Forces to Germany in the final weeks of the war, and was one of the first people to visit concentration camps following liberation. After the war, he returned to the United States, assisting Erika in identifying escaped Nazi immigrants to the country. During the 1950s, Klaus came under FBI investigation for his Communist sympathies and homosexuality. Disillusioned by his treatment and in the grip of a long-term opiate addiction, he committed suicide in 1949, aged 42. Much of his writing was re-published by Erika after his death. Interest in his life and work was revived in the 1980s with István Szabó’s successful film adaptation of Mephisto, winning the Oscar for best foreign film.