Thomas Mann's Artist-Heroes

Introduction. My Quest for Thomas Mann: The Biographical Context

3 INTRODUCTION My Quest for Thomas Mann: The Biographical Context I first read Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice and Seven Other Stories in a Great Books course during my freshman year at the University of Michigan in 1955. As a rebellious sixteen-year-old would-be writer I was immediately fascinated by the intellectually rich and demanding fiction, full of symbols and allusions, which raised so many provocative questions about the creative process. As Mann, expounding one of his great ideas, observed of the degrading and inspiring aspects of illness in “Goethe and Tolstoy” (1922): “Disease has two faces and a double relation to man and his human dignity. On the one hand it is hostile: by overstressing the physical, by throwing man back upon his body, it has a dehumanizing effect . On the other hand, it is possible to think and feel about illness as a highly dignified human phenomenon. . . . The genius of disease is more human than the genius of health.”1 The ambiguity of disease, its degradation and “dignity,” was a crucial theme in Mann’s work. I remained puzzled after reading the stories. I didn’t fully understand why, in “Tristan,” Spinell drove the tubercular Gabriele to a fatal hemorrhage ; why Tonio Kröger was suspected of being a criminal when he returned to his hometown; why Siegmund and Sieglinde committed incest in “The Blood of the Walsungs”; why Aschenbach wanted Tadzio to die in Death in Venice; why the deep family feeling in “Disorder and Early Sorrow” was so melancholy and destructive; why Cipolla pushed Mario to murder him in “Mario and the Magician.” The political implications of that violent act were also unclear. The seductive, disturbing element—the manifestation of fin-de-siècle decadence—impelled me toward Mann’s other works. I devoured Buddenbrooks , clarified by my reading of “Tonio Kroger,” and The Magic Mountain, foreshadowed by “Tristan.” I was enchanted by Tony Buddenbrook , unhappily married to Bendix Grünlich, and by Hanno, who, as a little boy, writes his own death date in the massive family history book. I was transfixed by the love affair of Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat (and delighted to discover that her name meant “hot cat”), and, when their ideological disputes became deadlocked, by the climactic duel between Settembrini and Naphta. I then pressed on to the dauntingly complex work about the demonic life and death of a syphilitic genius, Doctor Faustus, the perverse Black Swan and the coruscating Confessions of Felix Krull, in which the hero fakes a hilarious epileptic fit in order to dodge the draft. Intrigued by the autobiographical elements and the portrayal of German social history—demoniacal during the Hitler years—I came to admire Mann’s elegant style, high art, penetrating irony, subtle wit, depth of meaning and insight into European culture. Though intellectual and philosophical, his novels had riveting stories and vivid characters. I loved the encyclopedic quality of The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus— there was so much to learn from them—and though I read the Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy to the very end, I found the copious Egyptology a bit trying. After reading (while still in college) all of Mann’s fiction, I turned to his essays, especially the ones on the five titans who had the most profound influence on his work: Goethe, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzsche (Wagner’s sometime friend and implacable enemy) and Freud. Mann’s appreciative essays opened the doors to German literature, philosophy, psychology and music. Guided by Mann I read Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, Wilhelm Meister and Elective Affinities; fought my way through the major chapters of Schopenhauer’s The World as Will and Idea, especially “On Death . . . ,” which Thomas Buddenbrook reads just before he collapses and dies; and (eventually) most of Nietzsche and Freud. I also saw Wagner’s The Flying Dutchman, Die Meistersinger and Tristan and Isolde, but (despite Mann’s enthusiasm) could never face The Ring and Parsifal. Nietzsche’s incisive comment in The Case of Wagner—that Wagner was hysterical, convulsive, overexcited, unstable, even pathological— 4 introduction threw light on Mann’s use of music to incite the catastrophes in “Tristan” and “The Blood of the Walsungs,” on the record-playing chapter in The Magic Mountain and the diabolical compositions of Adrian Leverkühn (whose life is based on Nietzsche’s) in Doctor Faustus. I did not know German when I first...