The Pious Dance The Adventure Story of a Young Man

Klaus Mann, the gifted son of Thomas Mann, published this first novel in 1925, when he was 18. Set mainly in Berlin during the brilliant and tragic years of the short-lived Weimar Republic, it is very much a young man's workromantic, posturing, wide-eyed. The esthete Andreas Magnus aspires to be a painter but instead leaves the cocoon of home to explore the depths of the Berlin demimondethe scarlet world of the cabarets and boulevards, back alleys and rooming houses, of strong drink, cocaine and rampant sex, transvestites, homosexuals and lesbians. His is the ``lost generation,'' too young to have fought in the Great War of 1914-18, wandering amidst the moral debris. A gay friend kills himself outside his door; more a witness than a participant, he, himself, is enamored of a young man who fathers a child upon his one female friend and slips away to Paris. Following his traces, Andreas observes in the bohemian quarter the lurid carnival and bacchanalian revels of the Artists' Ball. Not in Berlin, not in Paris, nor anywhere else will he find the God he seeks, the love he longs for, the Meaning of Life that eludes him.