According to Klaus Voelker in Bertholt Brecht, eine Biographie, Brecht mischievously signed erotic two  sonnets, Thomas Mann.  He acknowledged Thomas Mann as a great stylist and author, but detested his high bourgeois stance and considered his politics hopeless. Brecht was particularly appalled at Thomas Mann’s approval of an American plan to ‘castigate’ the Germans for several decades after WWII.

 

Mann represented the Bildungsbuerger, whom Brecht basically considered responsible along with many other parts of German society, for the descent into the descent into barbarism represented by the Nazis.  The Bildungsbuerger was oriented towards a Germany of the mind, its intellectual and artistic tradition, the esteemed heights of authors such as Goethe and Schiller, and composers like Mozart and Beethoven.  They considered themselves above politics.

 

The revolutionary impulse that so shook France did not go into the politcal sphere in Germany, where it met a wall of reaction, but into the universities and the arts. Thus Germany became the land of poets and thinkers and approached modernity in a  backwards fashion.  Brecht saw Thomas Mann as the effete product of this deeply flawed tradition.   

 

These poems like Brecht's other erotiica were privately held during his lifetime.