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Reviewed by:
  • Thomas Mann Chronik, and: Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. A Novella and Its Critics, and: Understanding Thomas Mann, and: Thomas Mann und die kleinen Unterschiede. Zur erzählerischen Imagination des Anderen
  • Hans Rudolf Vaget
Thomas Mann Chronik. Von Gert Heine und Paul Schommer. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 2004. xxi + 626 Seiten. €49,00.
Thomas Mann's Death in Venice. A Novella and Its Critics. By Ellis Shookman. Rochester, NY: Camden House,2003. viii + 312 pages. $75.00.
Understanding Thomas Mann. By Hannelore Mundt. Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press, 2003. xviii + 253 pages. $39.95.
Thomas Mann und die kleinen Unterschiede. Zur erzählerischen Imagination des Anderen. Von Yahya Elsaghe. Köln: Böhlau, 2004. ix + 408 Seiten. €39,90.

Thomas Mann is one of a small number of modern classics who continue to attract an audience well beyond the narrow circle of professional readers: men and women, old and young, still seem to enjoy picking up one of Mann's novels, stories, literary essays, or even one of his courageous political speeches, simply for the sheer pleasure of reading. These readers, out of curiosity about the author's life and his amazing family, may also turn to a volume of Mann's letters or diaries. The general public's curiosity about the Manns has indeed been increasing over the last two decades and shows no signs of abating. The striking accessibility of Mann's enormous body of work has had a remarkably beneficial effect on Mann scholarship, for it has attracted to this diversified field a number of non-academic but highly knowledgeable and doggedly devoted scholars—bankers, lawyers, civil servants, librarians, and booksellers—all of them amateurs in the best sense of the word, who have produced some of the most widely used standard books in the field. The most outstanding example of this type of scholarship, in my view, is the standard bibliography of Mann's writings: Thomas Mann-Bibliographie. Das Werk (Morsum/Sylt: Cicero Press, 1992), compiled by the late Georg Potempa, a banker, and Gert Heine, a Danish civil servant.

The most recent addition to that set of reference books comes in the form of a detailed chronicle of Mann's life, compiled by Gert Heine and Paul Schommer. This supersedes Hans Bürgin and Hans-Otto Mayer's Thomas Mann. Eine Chronik seines Lebens (1965 and 1974), produced long before the information explosion of the 1980s and 1990s, of which Heine and Schommer make judicious use, drawing as they do on diaries, letters, interviews, and the writings of other members of this most literary of German families.

Considering the fact that in films and books about the Manns, scenes from fictional works are increasingly used to fill the gaps in the extant documentary evidence, it is gratifying to see that Heine and Schommer shun such questionable compromises. In their chronicle everything is carefully documented. As one would expect, [End Page 584] the documentary evidence is especially plentiful for the later years. Thus, while the decade from 1900–1909 consumes 33 pages, the decade from 1940–1949 takes up over three times that many.

What we have here, then, is a reasonably complete and remarkably error-free record of Mann's activities during a long creative and politically active life of some 60 years. This record—for some stretches we have a day-by-day account—is easy to read and to access via a set of highly useful and illuminating indices of Mann's writings, names (some 2,300 items), organizations and associations, and newspapers and journals. From a mere glimpse of the index, one gets a vivid sense of Mann's wider orbit. Focusing on particular junctures of his life we can now see in one take, without having to go elsewhere, what, on almost any given day, he was reading, who he saw, which performance he attended, and where he stayed.

Naturally, no biographical record can ever be complete, nor is this one, richly detailed though it is. The Chronik, on principle, lists only major reading projects in preparation for a particular novel or essay. It does not list what Mann read at bedtime, although one could argue...

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