Thomas Mann (1) (1875–1955)

Hans visits his cousin in a TB sanatorium. 1000 pages later he's still there when the Great War breaks out.

That's arguably all you really need to know about this book, if you haven't read it, and it was pretty much all I remembered from the first time I read it (quite some time ago). Mann himself encourages readers to read it twice. More than twice would probably be better, but there are limits to how many times you can plough through a work this long. I certainly hope it won't be my last show more time...

So what is it really about? As usual with Mann, you can take your pick. It's a book with a lot of discussions of serious political and philosophical topics, with characters who explicitly argue for and are obviously meant to represent abstract principles and schools of thought, but it's also a book full of apparently trivial superficial detail about the everyday life of the sanatrium. The international clientele of the sanatorium is obviously sometimes parodying the clumsy process by which Edwardian/Wilhelmite Europe lurched towards war, but at other times the symbolism is more existential than political, as the patients step back from the real world to flirt with the seductive attractions of illness and death.

Basically, it's a book where you can find just about anything discussed to just about any depth, with no apparent rule to fix how much analysis should go on - say - the best way of wrapping yourself in blankets, as opposed to the utility of revolutions, the physics of the gramophone, the history of Freemasonry, or tonight's menu. Endlessly fascinating, occasionally infuriating (no-one but Mann could take over a hundred words to tell us that a record was the last act of Verdi's Aida), always magnificent.

(This was my 1000th review on LibraryThing!) show less

Mann's attempt at an elegy for German culture following Hitler and a postmortem to extract the inextricable elements in that culture that birthed the NS-zeit. Doctor Faustus doesn't fail, exactly, but it comes uncomfortably close to being an apologia at moments--not for Nazism, but for the abovesaid elements that combining volatilely permitted it. The pretext is a retelling of the Faust myth through the life of the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn, who is presented as a kind of show more Schoenberg-analogue in music (the twelve-tone system is his) if not in life, and who makes a deal with the devil for 24 years of unparalleled creative power in exchange for forswearing the capacity and the right to love.

Leverkühn is then a symbol of the German genius. It is as ponderous and heavy a genius here as we know it to be of old, with some added convolution or perplexity perhaps from the need to talk around the central shameful act of writing a book about the German genius, in any wise, in the mid-forties. Like, just shut your mouth for a decade or two, Thomas Mann, and then let's talk about how the modern era's most subtle and capacious culture (as it perhaps even really was, for the non-relativists among us) was brought low by its own good and evil. You know? Like, in The Magic Mountain Mann's heart was in the right place and he didn't have an agenda--slowly, carefully, he aired out the chambers and inspected the sores of pre–First World War Europe, a civilization sick in body and spirit. In Doctor Faustus, though, he does have an agenda. He is subtle and capacious in the best spirit of his people, and he does not stoop to, say, decrying the Nazis for their destruction of German culture (because, like, "true" German culture?) as your average sad old guy in the gasthaus without Mann's artistic responsibilities might. But he does, often, evince despair that he has lost the right to do even that decrying. In short, Mann's narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, comes ever-so-close, often, to espousing that the real tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust are the stain they left on German honour and the fact that we can no longer hear Bach or read Goethe without an astringent aftertaste. Mann described Zeitblom as a pastiche of his author and of course he was aware of this problem. But I think the lexicon of the "new social movements" is really apt here: he is mansplaining and derailing and not being a good ally. Sucking up all the air in the room. White people.

I think this is part of why so many of the novel-of-ideas parts of this were hieratic and sterile to me (tho I love The Magic Mountain so much): Mann is going into contusions, chasing his tail. (Let it be said now for the record, he is also right, and if he had had his lawyers sit on this manuscript till 1975 it might feel different). It may also be that I'm just too stupid (dummkopf! I mention in passing here that Mann's vision of Germany is seemingly that of a nation of 75 habilitationisten and privatdozente and country doctors and bohemian violinists and philistine colonels who nevertheless keep salons and try to touch the gesicht des Gottes. Although he diagnoses the Nazis with acuity, this still reduces them to the nature of a brain fever suffered by the bourgeois guardians of--not only culture, but history! governance!--who were too too enamoured with a certain politics brut. Where in fact the Nazis were real dudes too. And then the stolid peasant and bürger don't even get a look in--if the Nazis are a condition or affliction, the non-intelligensia are a mere backdrop. It's quiet arrogance, through and through--the kind of pride that comes before a you know what.)

Funny enough for a so frequently forbidding novel, with a high bar of entry and all that, what kept me reading and what accounts for the quite-high-in-the-great-scheme-of-things rating I'm giving the book wasn't the ideas, it was the writing. I don't think of Mann as among the most trippingly beautiful writers, but this is up there with Death in Venice in terms of staging and lyricism. I will remember characters--both Zeitblom and Leverkühn, the unrequited love of the former for the latter, and the greater psychosexual web that humanizes the hieratic--Rudi Schwerdtfeger who finally got Adrian to call him du; Rüdiger Schildknapp who was the only one who could make him laugh; Kretzschmar and Kumpf and divers others of his teachers; poor little Nepomuk or Echo (weep for the beautiful child in fiction, my friends!)--and scenes (operatic influence here, I think)--Kretzschmar's lectures, Leverkühn's fateful trip to the brothel in Bratislava, the ill-fated marriage of Inez Rodde and Helmut Institoris, the campy, magisterial entry-stage-left of der teufel, and Leverkühn's final hideous crescendo, where he hauls himself down to hell like Don Giovanni or somebody only cursed to solitude even to the extent of having to show himself out. They made this a significant experience perhaps best compared to going into your first music lesson, being handled the most beautifully crafted instrument and densely orchestrated score, and expected to keep up with a quartet of virtuosi as they run through the inscrutable last string quartets of a twentieth-century master who fled in ' 39 and ended up teaching composition and theory to prematurely balding young American men with very thick glasses at oh let's say Brown.

(Listening to the Brandenburg Concertos as I write this, and it does seem clear how their smooth Apollonianisms, filtered through two hundred years of German cultural DNA, might give rise to a sense that something like the twelve-tone system was a supremely rational, and not a complexly alien, next step, in politics as well as music. No one who speaks German could be a bad man! I think Hitler's love of Wagner covers up a lot of complexity regarding the input of modernity into national socialism--an atavistic Kulturismus that sounds a bit like special pleading, of a sort that the Heidegger of "The Question Concerning Technology" would have approved. It's not that anything monstrous was going on or that the Nazis would have transformed Germany and Europe into a twisted surveillance technocracy avec bonfire parties, it's that the Jews and gypsies and communists and homosexuals were totally littering on the pristine mountain paths and we just really care about keeping the mountain paths clean and also they peed in the pure white snow. What I'm saying is that too much listening to Bach could make a certain kind of person at a certain kind of time value mountain paths more than non-German lives and then also see the imposition of twelve tones on music and death camps on Europe as an organic extension of the patternization in Bach. I know that's probably a fucked-up false equivalency, and I can see why Schoenberg hated this book (also because Mann borrowed part of Nietzsche's backstory for Leverkühn too and Schoenberg didn't want the world all thinking he had the syphilis).) show less

Thomas Mann es un escritor excepcional, no cabe duda. Su estilo es tan musical y lleno de vaivenes rítmicos que gusta dejarse llevar por el ritmo de las palabras. Sin embargo, Tonio Kröger es una novelita para separarnos de su personaje, para entender que no nos podemos acercar a él. Su protagonista, este Tonio Kröger, es un personaje que cada vez que se acerca a un conflicto emocional enraizado con su pasado, se monta un discurso grandilocuente para darse por satisfecho en su elección show more de ser un hombre aburguesado, elevado a la altura de la poesía y visto por los demás como alguien "importante".

Nada más lejos de la realidad, ya que todo se termina maquinando narrativamente como una estructura perfecta para poder ver la verdad de un ser aquejado por expectativas rotas en la niñez y la adolescencia, que se miente a sí mismo para sentirse parte de esos rubios de ojos azules que alaba por pura envidia. Es un personaje aquejado de un desprecio a su condición de mestizaje, a su tez morena propia de un natural del Mediterráneo. Es un personaje que busca la huida al ideal romántico del Norte y creerá disfrutar de aquella evanescencia de lo que significa su ciudad natal, sus recuerdos patéticos de niñez, sus expectativas rotas de conexión con sus dos amores del pasado, descubiertos en un baile que se idealiza pese a ser una coreografía de formalidades ridículas que nadie ve con excesiva felicidad.

En definitiva, Tonio Kröger se encuentra atrapado por la narración, por esa afirmación autoindulgente de su idealizada condición burguesa. Ni su confidente amiga, la bohemia polaca Lisaveta, lo conseguirá desprender de sus idilios febriles que no le dejan vivir viviendo, sino no-vivir pensando que vive. Y a pesar de todo, de que no es una lectura que busque una conclusión satisfactoria y que se empeñe en sacarnos del personaje para verlo en su realidad más cruda; es esta sorpresa como lectores y el interés que genera cuando entendemos que ese "no he entendido nada", en realidad es un "me gustaría haber visto algo que no había, pero ha sido interesante que me saquen del personaje para que sea crítico con él y vea lo absurdo e irónico que es todo". show less

"...where the hideous death lurked in secret—at such times the atrocious seemed to him rich in possibilities, and laws of morality had dropped away."

The novel astonished me. It wasn't what I expected. It is quite brilliant, a masterpiece.

Unlike others, I didn't find this novel explicitly about pedophilia--unlike Lolita, which distinctly and undeniably is. I know that won't sit well with everyone. I can understand that. When I watched the 1971 film of the novel, that pedophilia lust was a show more major aspect and exacerbated by the shameful exploitation and lack of protection for "the most beautiful boy in the world," the real youth, Björn Andrésen. But the novel is about so much more than that. It is about lust, but also lust for life, for youth, for beauty, for being loved in spite of outward appearances (ironic, I know) by a misguided man who never so much as even speaks a word to the boy.

The man is Gustav von Aschenbach, age 50, who, up to this point, has over-intellectualized his whole life, putting Art with a capitol A as the most desirable and potent of all things. He has never been a physically robust or a remarkably attractive person and does not seem to, thus far, possess any passion, except in theory. He has a grown daughter and had a wife who has since died. He describes their marriage as having been happy, although that seems faint praise since he doesn't even call her by name. From an early age, he has given his truest devotions to his work. That is what has provided his life, if not passion, its meaning, satisfaction, staid acclimation, respectability, honors, and financial reward. His work has been accomplished with deliberate study and steadfastness. His whole identity is Artist. A tightly controlled one.

When he decides to go for a vacation to Venice ("Not far, not all the way to the tigers"), it is the first sign Aschenbach is not quite as satisfied as he once was. He is repulsed by ugliness, and especially the ugliness of, we slowly learn, of aging. And he is aging.

The brilliance of Mann is how deftly he takes readers down the emotionally stifled deterioration of Aschenbach, through so many successively progressive stages, until ultimately to his complete humiliated, unraveled, unfettered indulgence of his long ignored emotions.

Upon seeing a remarkably beautiful 14 year old boy at his Venice hotel (we can agree that we too can be momentarily smitten by a remarkable beauty, at any age; we too have eyes)--begins in earnest his slow but pointed rejection of his own aging and transforms the rejection into an absurd hope, then obsession, and then a truly wicked disregard for danger. All for the sake of a ridiculous projected fantasy of a reciprocal budding love with this boy. An elixir.

It's not an easy novel to experience, but it's not exactly about outright sexual deviance either. It is full moral abandonment of self-regard due to fear of aging and death.

It's a story of such pathos, repugnance, and, under Mann's genius, deep sadness, even pity. Aschenbach began a needlessly tragic journey with a mere natural, but much belated observation about his own capacity for lust that he has dismissed since his youth for the sake of his plans for success. When his intellectualizing about Eros and Socrates and whatever Classicism he has hitherto relied on for balance and harmony, when those begin to ring more and more hollow, he progressively becomes consumed by "the tigers" he once avoided, to self obliteration.

And it started with a small belated recognition of delight in feelings,

"Past emotions, precious early afflictions and yearnings which had been stifled by his rigorous programme of living, were now returning in such strange new forms. With an embarrassed, astonished smile, he recognized them..." show less