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Fictional Orientations in Thomas Mann's Biography

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  01 December 2020

Herbert H. Lehnert
Herbert H. Lehnert*
Affiliation:
University of California, Irvine
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Extract

THIS STUDY is to show an interrelationship between Thomas Mann's fiction and certain attitudes he displayed during the course of his life. The word “orientation” is useful because it denotes a practice everybody uses every day. It is similar to the process that shapes a number of words in such a way that they comprise artistic sense in a literary work of art, which we will call “poem.”

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Type
Research Article
Information
PMLA , Volume 88 , Issue 5 , October 1973 , pp. 1146 - 1161
Copyright
Copyright © Modern Language Association of America, 1973

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References

1 The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1961).

2 This polemical simplification does not do justice to Northrop Frye's Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, N. J.: Princeton Univ. Press, 1957), but it is intended as a description of one of its tendencies. The considerations of this article have been influenced by Frye's The Educated Imagination (Bloomington : Indiana Univ. Press, 1964).

3 From the Thomas Mann Archive of the Eidgenôssische Technische Hochschule, Zurich, Switzerland (Mp. X, 236, p. 3).

4 From the MS at the Zurich Archive. For the context see Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke in zwolf Bdnden (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960), iv, 834. Hereafter cited in text.

5 A letter to Hans Reisiger of 10 Aug. 1933, excerpts of which were printed in an Auction Catalog (Stargardt, 13–14 Jan. 1969), reports that Joseph had arrived in Potiphar's house. Continuous progress is mentioned in some letters after this one.

6 Corrected from “des ewigen halsstarrigen Protestanten” which is even nearer to the Dostoevsky quotation from Betrachtungen (see p. 1150).

7 See n. 3 (Mp. X, 236, p. 5).

8 Auction Catalog 574, Auction 11–13 Nov. 1965, Stargardt, Marburg, p. 46.

9 Notebook 2, Thomas Mann Archive, Zurich, pp. 18–19. Quoted in my Thomas Mann: Fiktion, Mythos, Religion (Stuttgart: Kohlhammer, 1965), p. 53, in a discussion on Der Bajazzo.

10 Thomas Mann—Heinrich Mann, Briefwechsel (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1968), pp. 13–14.

11 Briefwechsel, p. 20, 1 April 1901.

12 Notebook 7, Thomas Mann Archive, Zurich, p. 52. Quoted by Hans Wysling, “Zu Thomas Manns ‘Maja’ Projekt,” in Paul Scherrer and Hans Wysling, Quellenkritische Studien zum Werk Thomas Manns, Thomas Mann Studien i (Bern: Francke, 1967), p. 31.

13 vin, 336. Cf. also vm, 267, in Die Hungernden.

14 Wysling (see n. 12), pp. 23–47.

15 Wysling (seen. 12), p. 31. Cf. Nietzsche, Werke in drei Bdnden (Munchen: Hanser, 1960), I, 48. See Frank Baron, “Sensuality and Morality in Thomas Mann's Tod in Venedig,” Germanic Review, 45 (1970), 115–25, esp. p. 118. The sentence “Und meine Seele . . ., ” incidentally, is Nietzsche's style.

16 Briefe 1889–1936 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1961), p. 53.

17 For the text of the notes and comment see Hans Wysling, “Geist und Kunst” in Scherrer-Wysling (seen. 15), pp. 123–233. See also T. J. Reed, “‘Geist und Kunst’: Thomas Mann's Abandoned Essay on Literature,” Oxford German Studies, 1 (1966), 53–101.

18 Briefe 1889–1936, p. 165; 5 July 1919.

19 Vorwdrts, Berlin, 17 Jan. 1919, No. 29/30. Emphasis either the editor's or Mann's.

20 23 Dec. 1919 Catalog, Auction 23–24 May 1967, Stargardt, Marburg, p. 62.

21 See Murray Krieger, The Tragic Vision (Chicago: Univ. of Chicago Press, 1966), pp. 86–113. Krieger, for his purpose, stresses the hope the narrator Zeitblom feels after the “Lamentation of Doctor Faustus” is over. Undoubtedly, a “hope beyond hopelessness” is in the text (vi, 651). But Zeitblom's hope takes little away from the proud desperation of Adrian Leverkuhn. The composer's art and attitude is not only a negation of German classical esthetic humanism, but also the extreme consequence of its primary component, estheticism. The hope expressed by Zeitblom and, in a rather complicated way, also by Adrian, is only one of religious justification for going undauntedly the way of esthetic elitism. Adrian once has the vision of a different art of the future, freed from “solemn insulation,” serving a new community which will not possess a culture but be one (vi, 428–29). Zeitblom, after hearing that, is shocked. He feels that this statement does not sound like his friend. The reader is to notice Zeitblom's bourgeois limitations here. Leverkuhn indeed is not talking about his own style. His vision reaches beyond Zeitblom's horizon, and beyond that of his own works. Future art is, for Leverkuhn, not tragic, but, on the contrary, “serene and modest” (vi, 429). The tragic vision in Leverkuhn is incorporated in his art and person, but Mann has Adrian's intelligence recognize its limits.

22 Notes to Doktor Faustus, Thomas Mann Archive, Zurich. Quoted in my Thomas Mann, p. 158. The old Faustus notes from notebook 7 in Wysling, “Zu Thomas Manns ‘Maja’ Projekt,” seen. 12, pp. 37–38. The earlier entry is from 1904, the later one from 1905. The notebook is dated 1901, which caused Thomas Mann to refer to it by that date in Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, xi, 155, an error frequently unrecognized.

23 Briefe 1948–1955 (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1965), p. 16; 31 Jan. 1948.