Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art

Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art by Hermann Kurzke, tr. Leslie Wilson. Princeton University Press, 581 pp., $35.00. The popularity of this book in Germany seems to be based not on newly discovered facts but on a construct of motivations leading to the novels. If he preferred his dreamy, musical mother, Mann ultimately chose to emulate the character of his father, a grain merchant and senator for Lubeck, by marrying a wealthy woman, laboring for public acclaim, and clinging to a Germanic tradition. This last was called into question by the rise of the Nazis and he never lived in his homeland after 1933. Those of Mann's Diaries that he did not destroy were unsealed in 1975. Donald Prater in Thomas Mann: A Life (1995) notes the newly revealed homosexual tendencies, "never pronounced" and existing perhaps only in the interests of literature. Kurzke, however, places much emphasis on Mann's emotional turmoil over various young men, a picture of repressed sexuality any analyst would find revealing. Indeed, it is n ot difficult to believe that literature might serve as an outlet for that which the author, bound by his father's conventions, could not otherwise bring to fruition. Characters, male or female, might be based on a friend with whom he was secretly obsessed, whole novels on the emotional conflict never resolved. As Kurzke would have it, "The biography of his heart stands spellbound in his writings." Interesting as this argument is, it suffers from the selective use of appropriate material, the lack of notes in the American edition, and the feeling that much of the personal detail may ultimately add little to the scope of novels that aspire to reflect society.

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