Thomas Mann’s literary obsession with Nietzsche’ philosophy was lifelong, continuously evolving, and constantly subversive. His early short stories were preoccupied with Nietzsche’s Wagner reception and cultural critique of decadence; the middle-period novella, “Death in Venice” engaged with the mythical pair of the Dionysian and Apollonian; the novel Doktor Faustus, his self-proclaimed “Nietzsche book,” combined Nietzsche’s biography, aesthetics, and “the problem of the German.” In each phase, Mann’s reception was never simply dutiful, but rather mischievously pitted one Nietzschean position against another, deriving dramatic force from the often contradictory capaciousness of his thought. This chapter focuses on a work not always considered as part of Mann’s Nietzsche reception: Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, an early short story later expanded to become Mann’s last novel. The text playfully juxtaposes Nietzsche’s “problem of the actor” and his ideal of self-fashioning, what Alexander Nehamas describes as Nietzsche’s “life as literature.” It explores issues of style, taste, parody, “gay science,” and the concerns attendant upon the translation of Nietzsche’s literary philosophy back into literature proper. It shows how the parody and mockery of Nietzschean ideals cannot help but fall in with the models they turn on, and the implications for our understanding of Nietzsche’s own writing.

The chapter uses a discussion of Pirandello’s theoretical essay On Humor to place his idea on comic literature in the broader contexts of his career, of international comic literary traditions, and of thought on humor in relation to contemporary developments in psychology, philosophy, and literature studies. The essay approaches On Humor as both a declaration of a personal poetics and a sort of manifesto, describing its structure, content, and the way Pirandello uses it to position his own work within – and sometimes opposed to – literary traditions in Italy and, in particular, the rest of Europe. A central point that emerges from the essay is how deeply attuned Pirandello was to international advances in various fields, responding to such figures as Sigmund Freud and Henri Bergson, even as he was particularly wedded to his Italian forebears.

This chapter uses Heidegger’s and Arendt’s joint reading in 1925 of Thomas Mann’s novel The Magic Mountain (1924) to argue that Heidegger’s lived literary practice in the 1920s does not match the invocations of poetic specialness that the philosopher theorizes from the mid 1930s onwards. Drawing on Heidegger’s letters to Arendt, as well as on the lecture courses from the mid 1920s which Heidegger used to clarify the arguments that became Being and Time, the chapter reconstructs Heidegger’s response to Mann’s novel. The episode suggests a counterfactual alternative mode of Heideggerian literary reading. Mann’s novel, as a model to think with, emphasizes the exchange with others and the competing discourses that resist grounding in a more fundamental viewpoint, such as the phenomenological ontology of the early Heidegger or the “thinking” of the later Heidegger. At the same time, the reading of Mann allows us to re-contextualize Heidegger’s engagement with his scientific and philosophical contemporaries, such as Einstein, Bergson, and Russell.

After an introductory discussion about Mann’s and Heidegger’s direct comments about each other, I explore how Mann and Heidegger are situated with regard to what has been called conservative revolution. Mann not only helped to gain currency for the concept of conservative revolution, but he also defended it against what he considered its right-wing and/or fascist spoilers, before eventually providing a thorough criticism of it in his Doctor Faustus. Heidegger’s recently published Black Notebooks show that in the 1930s and 1940s his thought veered towards the direction of conservative revolution, as described in Mann’s novel. To complement the understanding of conservative revolution, I also draw on Hugo von Hofmannsthal’s seminal speech from 1927, which helps to determine how much Heidegger’s philosophy partakes of the spirit of conservative revolution in Germany.

It is hardly surprising, given Gustav Mahler’s conservative disposition toward literature, that studies of his reception among writers have only marginally featured in an otherwise remarkably wide and sophisticated spectrum of critical engagements with the composer. The poets he set to music were inevitably older figures, usually folk-influenced, and he gave fin-de-siècle Vienna’s vibrant literary scene of coffeehouse intellectuals and salonnières (Arthur Schnitzler, Hermann Bahr, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, et al.) a comfortably wide berth. Nonetheless, important examples of his influence on subsequent writers do exist, first among them Thomas Mann, who based the name and physical description of the central character of his 1912 novella Death in Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach, on Mahler. This and subsequent cases are reviewed here, among them Stefan Zweig, Kurt Frieberger, Ingeborg Bachmann, Peter Rosegger, and others from the very recent past.

In 1852, Wagner described his text for the Ring cycle as “the greatest poem that has ever been written.” This chapter asks to what extent the musical innovations – responding to historical linguistics – were formative for a generation of writers as well as composers. To what extent did innovation in one medium engender innovative techniques in another? After contextualizing Wagner’s operatic reforms within his early writings and related moments within the history of the genre, it explores a cornucopia of modernist writers working in the shadow of the Ring cycle: from Wilde, D. H. Lawrence, and Aubrey Beardsley, to Yeats, Mann, and Beckett; from Mallarmé and Dujardin to Zola and Proust, to name but a few. It traces the profound influence on literature of leifmotivic techniques, as “carriers of feeling,” amid the shift to words as a dereferentialized system of signs. The role of alliteration, direct parody, interior monologue, and involuntary memory all contribute to the overall view that appropriation and influence of “reformist” techniques in literature and linguistics remained in the hands of authors, regardless of Wagner’s predictions for his own literary greatness.