LIVING IN THE METAPHOR OF FICTION: THOMAS MANN';S FELIX KRULL

I have tried in this book to show that German literature, in the age I have been dealing with, was dominated by a morality or moral theology of strenuousness which also makes its appearance in politics; and to indicate how difficult its greatest writers have found it to move to a different vision of humanity and of what, in humanity, is most valuable. Their attempts to do this have usually ended in bathos and literary disaster. Stefan George's Maximin, Ernst Jünger's Der Arbeiter or Hofmannsthal's ‘Kinderkönig’ – a sort of glorified head chorister of the Vienna Boys' Choir – are warning examples of what I have in mind.

Thomas Mann made no such awful mistake. Throughout almost his entire work he identifies himself with the ideology of strenuousness. He endorses Adrian Leverkühn's appeal to ‘das Schwere’; he nowhere criticises this aspect of his hero's thinking and his work, nowhere renders its value problematic. He cannot step outside the ideology and view it critically – and yet he, like Rilke at the end of his own life's work, is vouchsafed a deliverance of sorts. But perhaps that is putting it too grandly. Perhaps it is better to say that at the end of his time, in his last major novel, Felix Krull, Thomas Mann is able to cock a snook at the whole business of ‘das Schwere’ and the value-scheme of the ‘dear purchase’. In doing so he makes a kind of in-joke at the expense of Friedrich Nietzsche, the church-father of this theology of strenuousness.