FOLLOWING STANDARD practice, quotations have been inserted from English editions of Thomas Mann’s work where these are available. If it has been necessary to modify the translation, this is shown in square brackets in the endnotes, as is any further comment on my part.
The great bulk of English translations of Thomas Mann’s fiction and essays were made by Helen Lowe-Porter, who did valiant service in the quantity of her work, and whose rendering of Mann’s often elliptical style has been highly praised. It is generally recognized today, however, that her translations are not free of significant errors. Some examples of these are given by David Luke in the introduction to his new translation of Death in Venice and Other Stories, London 1998, pp. xlvii ff., though these mostly bear on straightforward points of language. One mistake that David Luke picks up, however, falls into a different category, with particular relevance to the texts of Thomas Mann that Michael Maar discusses. Ms Lowe-Porter has ‘almost incredibly’ omitted the very last sentence of Death in Venice, in which Aschenbach dies believing in a future reunion with Tadzio. In the present book, with its focus on Thomas Mann’s homosexuality, boy-love and motif of sexual violence, the fact that several passages that are central to Michael Maar’s argument have similarly disappeared in the English editions acquires a keener significance. Typically it is a short phrase, even a word, with which Mann ‘betrays’ to the careful reader the homosexual character of a depicted event, that has been omitted in this way; the endnotes indicate where I have had to retranslate these passages. And that this was not just an idiosyncrasy of Ms Lowe-Porter is shown by the mistranslation referred to in note 26 to chapter 1, where as recently as 1990 Richard and Clara Winston managed to reverse the meaning of a key letter in which Mann avows his love of boys. At work here is most likely an unconscious desire on the translators’ part to convey to English readers a text shorn where possible of unacceptable warts.
As far as concerns the fiction that was translated into English in his lifetime, it would seem that Mann had every confidence in Ms Lowe-Porter, and that her little omissions slipped through unnoticed by the author. A more accurate translation would not have attracted censorship, either in the USA or in Britain. There is one text, however, where the English translation was curtailed by two whole pages – a passage that is important to Michael Maar’s argument – and this time with Mann’s express consent.1 This is the celebrated speech on The German Republic, in which Mann argues that the homoeroticism that was a salient feature of right-wing terrorist bands could find an alternative outlet in a democratic politics. It is not hard to understand how, in the very different conditions of the Second World War, when Mann was the unchallenged intellectual leader of the German emigration, in an ever-puritanical America, and when a standard trope of anti-Nazi propaganda had been the alleged sexual perversity of Hitler and his followers, this speech from 1922 could appear in English only in this truncated form. It is not just out of historical interest, however, but to make Michael Maar’s case more intelligible to English readers, that they should have access to the following passage, which in the 1942 Knopf collection of Mann’s political essays, Order of the Day, would appear before the section break on page 42.