by Thomas Mann
Seven years later, Death in Venice appeared. It is a magnificent and complex story that traces the decline of a revered and respectable author, a man of stern self-discipline (in that respect not dissimilar to Thomas Mann himself), who goes on holiday to Venice and there becomes infatuated with a very beautiful fourteen-year-old boy. At one level the story concerns the hazardous nature of the artist’s quest for beauty; at another level it speaks as a psycho-cultural allegory for Europe, which in 1914 was to cast restraint to the winds in the name of confronting higher, more exacting experiences. Those experiences were, indeed, exacting—they exacted a terrible toll on a whole generation of young men. When the war came, however, Thomas Mann was an enthusiastic supporter of the German cause, and he was outraged by the liberal, democratic, Western views of his elder brother, Heinrich. The crowning work of Thomas’s polemically conservative stance is “The Reflections of a Non-political Man,” which appeared in 1918, in the year of Germany’s defeat, and gave ammunition to the forces of reactionary resentment that were to exert such a baleful influence on the Weimar Republic that was set up after the war. But in the early years of that republic, Thomas Mann began to revise his political allegiances. The “unpolitics” of “The Reflections” (which had, of course, been an intensely political work) gave way to the politics of Republicanism. Thomas defended the Weimar Republic against precisely those forces that disparaged it in the name of that spiritualized conservatism that he himself had defended so fiercely in 1918.
One of the fruits of that change of heart is the great novel The Magic Mountain, which appeared in 1924. It is at one level a profound narrative of human development, one that upholds the value and dignity of a gradual process in which the life of the mind is allowed to grow and expand and discover itself. At another level it is an historical novel about the ideologies of pre-1914 Germany and Europe, and it concludes in the carnage of the trenches. It is a demanding and complex work; yet in context its polemical force was clear (perhaps clearer then, in Germany, than it is to us now). Thomas Mann had changed sides politically, and his public—particularly his adversaries—knew it.
From this point on, politics rarely relinquished its hold over him. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 confirmed his status as a public figure of great note. His opposition to National Socialism, his marriage to a Jew, his lectures in the 1920’s and 1930’s, which increasingly voiced criticism of the anti-Enlightenment tendencies within German culture—all these factors conspired to make him the object of virulent attacks. From 1933 to 1938, he stayed away from Germany, living in Switzerland. In 1936 he was deprived of his German citizenship, and not long thereafter, his honorary doctorate from the University of Bonn was revoked. The writing was on the wall, and he emigrated to the United States in 1938, initially to the East Coast and then to Pacific Palisades in California. During the war he was a very high-profile spokesman who was prepared to work with the British and American authorities on anti-Hitler essays, talks, and broadcasts. In 1947 he published the novel Doctor Faustus, an anguished reckoning with the awful fact that all the profundity of German culture had been powerless to check the country’s slide into unspeakable barbarism. He returned to Europe in 1952, to Switzerland, settling in Kilchberg above Lake Zurich. It was here that he died on August 12, 1955.
Three matters need to be highlighted as salient features of Mann’s life. One is that he very much saw himself (even from his early years) as a high-bourgeois, indeed “classic” writer. Many of the photographs we possess of him display a degree of self-stylization—as the orderly figure, often wearing a three-piece suit, the respectable writer and grand paterfamilias surrounded by the tokens of substantial success. Yet—and this is the second strand I want to highlight—that orderliness was hard won; and it had to be defended against multiple inroads that threatened to bring turbulence and disarray. The publication of his diaries has made clear that Mann was, latently at any rate, homosexually inclined. The point of saying this is not to advocate the release of a set of interpretative search parties in quest of “queer themes” in his work. Rather, it is to suggest that Mann’s sexual proclivities tell us a good deal about his understanding of covert emotion, repressed feelings, hidden desires—and above all about his sense that such repression could generate a sublimated outlet in terms of inward, imaginative, spiritual creativity. The third strand, and again it is one that threatens to bring turbulence into his life of willed orderliness, was politics. By temperament Mann was, as both creative writer and discursive essayist, chiefly interested in questions of aesthetics and philosophy. Yet, almost in spite of himself, he found himself having to engage with the political implications of certain ideas, concepts, and values that were dear to him. And such was the historical turmoil of Germany in the first half of the twentieth century that public events would not leave him alone.
When we come to explore the stories in this volume, we need to register at the outset that Thomas Mann, as a writer of short prose, was able to draw on a particular tradition within German prose writing that provided a narrative and structural correlative for the tensions of his complex personality. I have in mind the so-called “Novelle,” a genre that in both theory and practice had claimed the attention of major German literary talents from Goethe onward. Two aspects of this tradition need to be highlighted, in my view, and they can most readily be defined with reference to the work that is so often hailed as the original model for the “Novelle”—Boccaccio’s Decameron. (Goethe in fact borrowed the formal and thematic universe of Boccaccio’s masterpiece for his first collection of Novellen—The Conversations of German Emigrants [1795]—which very much inaugurated the genre in Germany.) Boccaccio puts before us a world in which all social and moral order has disintegrated because the plague has broken out in Florence. Ten young people, of impeccable social breeding, seven women and three men, flee from the chaos and seek refuge in a country estate. There, in order to repair the shattered fabric of their lives, and to pass the time in a seemly way, they agree to tell stories. Every day all ten participants offer a tale: the ten days, with ten narratives each day, give the “decameron” of the title. Often the stories acknowledge the experiences that have all too vividly imprinted themselves on the minds of these young people—the frightening swiftness and ease with which order can collapse into chaos. Yet the form of the telling—the courteousness and ceremony with which the ten days are organized, the actual narrative tone that is adopted with reference to the listeners—all these instances of storytelling as socializing performance produce a climate of civilized self-discipline. It is almost as though the act of narration can be made to contribute to a restitution of decency and decorum.
The legacy of this narrative model, as mediated by Goethe, to German letters in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries was a potent one. That legacy expresses itself in both thematic and stylistic terms. Thematically, the “Novelle” lives from and worries at the interplay of order and chaos in human affairs. Stylistically, it foregrounds the narrative mode itself; the narrative draws attention to itself—indeed often it moves into self-consciousness and self-reflectivity. When, then, we read (at one end of the historical spectrum) the Decameron and (at the other) Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice—both works concerned with the inroads of a plague—we are made acutely aware of what the process of storytelling amounts to. We are, in other words, made aware of the narratively mediated relationship between the world of which the story tells and the world to which it is told.
In the stories collected in this volume, Thomas Mann manages to combine real vividness of human interest, a sharp focus on characters, their psychological tensions and conflicts, with a sustained register of narrative reflectivity and thoughtfulness. Time and again, as we shall see, the experiential foreground becomes transparent against a background of ideas and concepts; upon the currents and countercurrents of mental life.
I want to begin by briefly looking at the stories in thematic terms. Our colle
ction opens and closes with two works that explore the relationships between human beings and animals (especially dogs). The later work—“Man and Dog”—is a charming personal memoir in which Mann talks (and the text does indeed have a spoken feel to it) with great affection about his dog Baushan. It is an agreeable and in many ways lightweight work (it is called an idyll)—engaging and surprising given that it comes from the pen of a writer who is often criticized for being too intellectual by half. But it does touch on issues that will concern us throughout Mann’s oeuvre—most particularly the relationship between human beings, with all the many rules and regulations of their socialized lives, and the natural vitality, anarchy even, of animals. (And, by implication, the story touches on the understanding that human beings have of the nature within them.) The early story “Tobias Mindernickel” is a disturbingly detached, claustrophobic little tale about an oddity, an outsider, who finds through acts of pity a kind of self-confidence, even (in the shocking ending) violent self-assertion.
The majority of stories in the volume explore the theme of art and the demands that it can make on those who create it and respond to it. Mann is careful to sustain a level of psychological argument throughout. We can feel this most readily in “Tonio Kröger,” which is, at one level, a superlative study of the pains of adolescence, which derive from the hurtful mismatch between emotional needs on the one hand and intellectual, imaginative growth on the other. The story captures very finely the oscillations in Tonio’s self-awareness between the wish to be ordinary and the pride of not being ordinary. Similarly, at one level, Death in Venice is unforgettable as a study of the idiocy of the holiday romance, of the infatuation that occurs when a middle-aged man casts aside the constraints and disciplines of ordinary practical living and answers the call of youth, beauty, of what he takes to be Life with a capital L. There is, of course, much more to the story than that. But it is remarkable how richly Mann explores the psychological theme. One example must suffice. For much of the story Aschenbach deludes himself about the nature of the attraction that he feels for Tadzio. Drawing on a tradition from Greek philosophy, he tells himself that beauty is the only absolute that is perceivable by the senses, and that, therefore, his rapt contemplation of the boy is the expression of his spiritual mission as an artist. Yet such thoughts, although they do indeed partake of a powerful tradition of Western metaphysical thought, are, in the psychological frame of the story, merely pretentious self-delusion.
To make the point in slightly different terms: in Thomas Mann’s art, the psychological issue is made also to articulate philosophical and epistemological themes, themes that address the interplay of Geist (spirit) and Leben (life). German philosophy from Kant onward, via Hegel, Schopenhauer, Marx, Nietzsche, Freud, and Heidegger, has constantly explored the rival claims of (to put the matter at its most simple) knowing and living. Two of these thinkers are especially pertinent to our reading of Thomas Mann’s stories—Nietzsche and Freud. Both of them address the glory and the blight of human self-consciousness. For Nietzsche the critical spirit is supremely the agency that unmasks and debunks the crudity and mindlessness of the life force. Yet at the same time he condemns that agency as effete, sick, questionable in its inability to engage with the tumultuous authority of life. For Freud, the emergence of human identity is essentially a drama of tragic separation from the mother. Selfhood is, then, a pained condition, one made of trauma and repression and transgression. Repression produces both the revelatory creativity of great art and the malign creativity of neurosis. The tensed condition of human identity is precarious; the dangers are omnipresent and threaten at every turn to make inroads into the desperately defended territory of civilized living. These issues can be heard in “Tristan,” in the battle between Spinell and Klöterjahn for the soul of Gabriele, in Tonio Kröger’s lament for the curse of knowingness, in Aschenbach’s eerie dream at the cemetery in Munich, when images of tumultuous, abundant, teeming life harbor the death threat (the glistening eyes of the tiger) in their midst.
The third strand of this thematic complex has to do with Mann’s sense of the psychopathology of European civilization in the first half of the twentieth century. The destabilizing, destructive energies within the self can precipitate themselves in corporate conflict, war, and carnage. Self-loathing writ large can, in other words, become a national death wish. Asceticism and self-denial can produce a longing for willed, worshipped simplicity, for untrammeled mass hysteria. Implications of this kind can be felt in Death in Venice. We feel that the Dionysian orgy of Aschenbach’s final dream could easily become a political orgy, could modulate into the any-order-is-better-than-none ethos of warmongering Europe.
If, then, these are some of the thematic energies of the stories, what of their literary mode? To begin with a point I have already made: there is, throughout these narratives, an interplay of (for want of a better word) realism and (again for want of a better word ) ideas. There are any number of vivid scenes, scenes that are expressive of both concrete particularity and philosophical import. One could think of Spinell’s flight from the monstrously energetic baby at the end of “Tristan,” of Tonio Kröger‘s return to his hometown, of Aschenbach’s attempt, in Death in Venice, to leave Venice, followed by his elated return when he discovers that his luggage has gone astray. On all these occasions, the sharply etched foreground is laid transparently against a play of ideas and concepts.
Second, it is important to register that the stories call upon structural statement to invest incidents with powerfully symbolic significance; in ways that are characteristic of the “Novelle” tradition, the shaped modality of the narrative invites us to be reflective readers. In “Tonio Kröger” the protagonist can never, it seems, break free from the tensions that haunt his adolescence. Hence so many details—phrases, events, characters—from his past recur throughout the text. Yet at another level, Tonio does make headway. At the end of the story, he manages to affirm his divided allegiances as the precondition for better art (and perhaps also better living). The last few lines of the letter he writes to Lizaveta, which forms the closing section of the story, almost exactly repeat the last few lines of the first section. The difference is that in the beginning the words are applied to Tonio by the third-person narrator; at the end they are written in the first person—he applies them to himself. The implications of this structural parallelism are absolutely crucial: Tonio has now truly become the narrator to and of his own experience. The moment of narrative self-consciousness wonderfully expresses the nature of Tonio’s growth. Aschenbach’s journey to Venice and into death is attended at every turn by fateful incidents (the dream in Munich of the jungle, with the mention of the eyes of the crouching tiger prefiguring the description of the cholera, the dandy on the boat who anticipates the Aschenbach who leaves the hotel barber with his hair dyed and his lips painted), by ominous figures (the tramp in Munich, the unlicensed gondolier, the street musician whose bared teeth suggest the skull forcing its way through the flesh). As is the case with “Tonio Kröger,” Death in Venice invites us to reflect on the narrative mode at work in the story. It is a supremely, almost claustrophobically, ordered account of the vulnerablity of order in human affairs. In this sense, it is a tale that calls itself into question. It could have been written by Aschenbach himself; and, in a sense, it is destroyed by him. The narrative statement of Death in Venice achieves a dizzying copresence of multiple meanings as levels of social realism, psychological analysis, and philosophical rumination interlock. Moreover, Mann is superb at weaving into his work allusions to or quotations from other writers. One could think of the references to Greek thought and to Nietzsche in Death in Venice, of the Wagner quotations in “Tristan,” of the Schiller references in “Hour of Hardship.”
I hope, then, that these stories will give pleasure to the reader and that that pleasure will elicit multiple readings. “Tristan” is fascinating for the irony that sees both the limitations and the dignity of the contrasting character
s (Klöterjahn may be coarse and clumsy, but his love for his wife is real; Spinell may be an attitudinizing aesethete, but he does understand the subversive intensity of Wagner’s “Tristan and Isolde”). “Tonio Kröger” is memorable for its expression of intensely felt mood, of grief and outrage, of love and betrayal, and (as I have tried to suggest above) for its lucidity and clarity of structure. “The Child Prodigy” is extraordinary in its understanding of how and why it is that art is, in large measure, a social phenomenon, a performance at which the audience is not simply the dupe but also the creatively colluding partner. “Hour of Hardship” makes us understand the sheer attrition involved in Schiller’s battle to force his tired, sick body to sustain mental creativity against all the odds. Death in Venice never ceases to enthrall by virtue of its ability to be at one and the same time the tragedy of the spiritually creative self and the painful fable of the degradation inflicted by sexual infatuation. And finally, “Man and Dog” is noteworthy for its splendid understanding of the complex interdependence between master and animal—and also for the delightful note to the effect that there are three categories of people that Baushan the dog cannot bear—policemen, monks, and chimney sweeps.
One final remark by way of conclusion. Thomas Mann writes superb German; he exploits the language’s ability to create elaborate structures of statement, an architectonics of coordination and subordination. Time and again Mann proves himself to be the master of the many-layered statement. Jefferson Chase is splendidly alive to the feel of Mann’s German. Not even he, however, can capture the ambiguity of one particular phrase in Death in Venice, because that ambiguity only works in German. The phrase comes at the beginning of a sentence that describes Aschenbach’s wish to plunge ever deeper into the darker recesses of cholera-ridden Venice. The phrase is “auf den Spuren des Schönen.” The first three words are unproblematic; they mean “on the tracks of.” But the last two words—”des Schönen”—pose the problem. They are a genitive, but of what noun? It could be either der Schöne, the beautiful male (that is to say, the boy Tadzio), or das Schöne, which means “the beautiful” (in the abstract). In English one has to plump for one or the other. Jefferson Chase is, in my view, right when he goes for “on the beautiful boy’s trail.” But the ambiguity that is there in the German is the great ambiguity that destroys Aschenbach: when does the pursuit of the beautiful become the obsession with a physically beautiful body? When does the metaphysical slither into the physical? Aschenbach himself hardly knows. And the story in which he figures makes us uncertain too. But that uncertainty is the hallmark of the richness of this story and of the narrative genius this volume puts before us.