Thomas Mann’s World: Empire, Race, and the Jewish Question (review)

The publication of Thomas Mann’s ten volumes of diaries between 1977 and 1995 created a veritable renaissance of Thomas Mann scholarship. In the mid 1990s, several voluminous studies of his life and work by German, British, and American scholars appeared, notably Hermann Kurzke, Klaus Harpprecht, Donald Prater, Ronald Hayman, Anthony Heilbut, and more recently Yahya Elsaghe. Todd Kontje’s present monograph constitutes the latest endeavor by an American scholar to provide an extensive analysis of Thomas Mann’s life and work, this time by focusing in particular on the problematics of racism, imperialism, and antisemitism.

Kontje’s primary interest is “neither to exonerate nor to excoriate” (14) the author and his infamously shifting and changing world views, but rather to explore “his fiction in its dual role as a reflection of Thomas Mann’s personal preoccupation and the expression of the conflicts of his time” (14). In eight chapters, he traces his chosen themes and their diverse developments through representative texts, including Buddenbrooks, Wälsungenblut, Royal Highness, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, Doctor Faustus, and Confessions of Felix Krull. Guided by the interpretive model of Edward Said’s studies on orientalism and the strategies of New Historicism by Stephen Greenblatt and others, Kontje’s explorations of Thomas Mann’s oeuvre illuminate a variety of related themes such as exoticism, misogyny, homoeroticism, the ideological dialectics and sexual politics of the Magic Mountain and the Weimar Republic, the aesthetics of fascism, and the dynamics of ancient and modern cosmopolitanism. Occasionally, Kontje intertwines his textual analyses with pertinent theories, without becoming entrapped in them.

The author clearly is a sympathetic reader, who more than once concedes that he is charmed by Mann’s eloquent style and evocative narratives. He compares, for example, the reading and rereading of the Joseph tetralogy to the Stockholm syndrome as readers begin “to fall in love with the book that holds them hostage” (128). Despite his love affair with Mann’s work, Kontje never loses sight of its flaws. To give just one example, in his final assessment of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, he comes to the conclusion that it is “hopelessly confused and inherently contradictory” (84). Repeatedly, he summarizes the multilayered complexities of Mann’s texts with a playful preciseness, stating for example that the author “defends the Jews with an argument drawn from the language of anti-Semitism, and he condemns the Nazis in the language of European Orientalism” (123).

Instead of using John Woods’s recent translations of Mann’s major works, Kontje provides primarily his own translations. They are all in all quite sensible, with probably one major exception. Adrian Leverkühn’s Weltscheu and Weltverlangen signify and symbolize much more than mere “seclusiveness” and “longing for companionship” (154). They are part of Mann’s literary predilection for forming compound words containing “Welt” which invariably merge the personal with the universal, thereby reverberating with a very specific German Weltanschauung. From German classicism and romanticism to fascism, from Weltliteratur and Weltschmerz to Weltkrieg, Mann himself represents and reflects in prototypical fashion these englobing tendencies of German culture and history in his favorite role as German Weltbürger. The dialectical antithesis of this German fascination with Welt is its fixation on Innerlichkeit. It is a contradiction that finds its proverbial expression and ultimate sublation in Faust’s torn soul and its epic longing to understand “was die Welt im Innersten zusammenhält.”

More misleading than this translational shortcoming is the author’s one-sided assessment of Bachofen’s matriarchal mythography and its role in both the genesis of Mann’s world view and the discourse formation of modernity. According to Kontje, Mann focuses only on the reactionary corruption of Bachofen’s social utopia, thereby eclipsing the latter’s progressive conception and its long reception history, which ranges from Engels and Bebel to Bloch and Benjamin...