Thomas Mann's Artist-Heroes

Preface

ix Preface Thomas Mann combined brilliant artistry with profound intellect, moderated by irony, humor and wit. More than any other modern writer he illuminated the questions surrounding art and the artist: What makes an artist? Why must he defy conventional society? How does he create? How does music inspire him? Why must he suffer? How is disease related to art? Mann’s fiction portrays a hierarchy of artist-heroes. Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice and Adrian Leverkühn in Doctor Faustus have created great literary and musical works, and Tonio Kröger is a promising young writer. Felix Krull, who leads a protean double life, is a confidence man and artist in deception. Detlev Spinell in “Tristan” and Siegmund Aarenhold in “The Blood of the Walsungs” lead pampered, precious lives and aspire to create, but are merely failed artists. Hanno Buddenbrook has extreme delicacy and musical talent, but has no chance to develop and dies in childhood. Hans Castorp in The Magic Mountain, another sensitive and observant outsider—an artist-type, if not an artist—also stands at an oblique angle to the universe. Artists also appear in the theater. Cipolla, the hypnotist in “Mario and the Magician,” uses his art for evil ends—the reverse of Leverkühn, who compacts with the devil to realize his true genius . The older children in “Disorder and Early Sorrow” want to be actors, and Christian Jacoby (like the young waiter Mario) is humiliated while performing on stage in “Little Lizzy.” The last two chapters, on Mann in America and memoirs by his family, provide more biographical context for Mann’s public and personal life as an artist. Mann was also the most prominent and outspoken anti-Nazi writer, and the most admirable representative of German culture in the first half of the twentieth century. Kafka wrote Max Brod that “Mann was one of those writers whose words I hunger for.”1 Arthur Koestler told Mann that during the Spanish Civil War, when he was in prison and awaiting execution , “the recollection of certain passages from Buddenbrooks (the brief scene in which the Consul, before his death, discovers Schopenhauer), certain motifs from The Magic Mountain, the Lübeck speech and the essay on Platen helped me more than any other spiritual resource.”2 Mann’s life reveals a man of magnanimity and courage whose mind, harnessing the threatening demons, remained creative and alert until the final hour. Mann’s impressive development during his sixty-year career—his political commitment, psychological insight and ironic style—give him fair claim to be one of the greatest novelists who ever lived. This critical and biographical book is not meant to be comprehensive. It considers only his best fiction and is intended for the educated reader as well as for the scholarly specialist of modern literature. I have used the H. T. Lowe-Porter translations, which Mann approved and are closer than current versions to his time, mood and style. x preface Thomas Mann’s Artist-Heroes ...