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His diaries record acute dread that the notebooks, with their frank record of his homoerotic feelings, would be seized and used to expose him. His son Golo retrieved them in a suitcase that was later sent on to him. The episode shows that exile threatened not only his property and readership but the private self he had kept hidden.
For three years after leaving Germany, Mann avoided openly denouncing the regime, partly to keep his books available to German readers and his German publisher operating. Pressure from his daughter Erika, recorded in the diaries, pushed against this caution. In February 1936 he published an open letter to Eduard Korrodi in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung that committed him to the emigration, and his citizenship was revoked soon after. The case shows how a writer's dependence on an audience can postpone moral commitment until the cost of staying silent exceeds the cost of speaking.
Mann burned his earlier diaries, but he sealed the surviving volumes with instructions that they not be opened until twenty years after his death. This made the diary a place for desires and judgments that his public role as a family patriarch and national author could not contain, including his attraction to young men such as Klaus Heuser and the waiter Franz Westermeier. By delaying disclosure instead of destroying the record, he managed his reputation while living and still left a posthumous record of the concealed self.
The diaries juxtapose world catastrophe with digestion, weather, cigars and the morning's pages of manuscript, without any sense of hierarchy between them. Read this way, Mann's rigid daily regimen of writing in the morning was not indifference but the mechanism that let him keep producing major novels such as Joseph and His Brothers and Doctor Faustus while displaced across countries. Holding the small structure of the day fixed kept the large work moving when everything outside was unstable.