NOTES

NOTES TO CHAPTER ONE

1On 17 March 1933, writing from Lenzerheide, Thomas Mann arranged for Golo to be summoned to Munich. For a moment, at least, this calmed his fears, and when Golo arrived in Munich two days later, he noted: ‘I am now somewhat relieved about my old diaries and papers, which characteristically were my first and main concern.’ This relief however did not last very long. On 1 April he consoled himself that he had begun to grow accustomed to the fact that he would not be able to return to his customary life in the foreseeable future. The thought that immediately followed was: ‘I am much concerned about having my papers sent here, old diaries etc.’ (Thomas Mann, Diaries 1918–1939, ed. Hermann Kesten, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, London 1984, p. 142). A week later, in Lugano, the news was worse: ‘One must be prepared for house searches. Fresh anxiety about my old diaries. Imperative to bring them to safety’ (7 April 1933; Diaries 1918–1939, p. 147). The following day he sent Golo a letter and the key.

2Golo Mann, Reminiscences and Reflections: Growing Up in Germany, trans. Krishna Winston, London 1990, p. 302.

3Both Erika Mann and Peter de Mendelssohn still assumed that Hans Holzner took the case right away to the Munich ‘Brown House’, instead of to the station. (Cf. Tagebücher 1933–34, p. xi.) In point of fact, Holzner did take the case to the station, but on instructions from Munich it was searched by the frontier police at Lindau. They, however, were interested only in publishing contracts and other documents with a bearing on tax matters; the diaries were taken for drafts of novels and therefore considered irrelevant. Cf. Jürgen Kolbe, Heller Zauber. Thomas Mann in München 1894–1933, Berlin 1987, pp. 414 ff.

4Golo Mann, Reminiscences and Reflections, pp. 302 ff.

5[Extracts from Thomas Mann’s diaries, unless given from the much abbreviated English edition, are cited simply by date of entry. They may be consulted in the ten-volume Tagebücher edited by Peter de Mendelssohn and Inge Jens, Frankfurt 1979–95.]

6‘That this actually was everything, the entire diaries up to 1933, we did not suspect and learned only from the packets left after his death’ (Erika Mann, ‘Das letzte Jahr. Bericht über meinen Vater’, Autobiographisches, Frankfurt 1968, p. 7). In fact the burning took place in stages. The first auto-da-fé was in 1896. On 21 June 1944 Thomas Mann remarked on the ‘destruction of old diaries’. The following year he burnt still more of his diaries in his garden incinerator at Pacific Palisades, observed by Golo (cf. Tagebücher 1933–34, pp. xii ff.). On 15 September 1950 he had it in mind again to burn all his old diaries, but instead sealed them for a period of twenty-five years, later reduced to twenty. From the entry for 13 October 1950 it is clear that his intention was for these diaries to be made available for research after his death. From March 1933 to August 1955 they are complete, but the only earlier volume that has remained unscathed, as he used it as a source for Doctor Faustus, comprises the years 1918–21.

7Erika Mann, Autobiographisches, pp. 7 ff.

8Diaries 1918–1939, p. 154 [translation modified].

9In grammatical terms, the two contrasting principles are ‘constancy of subject’ versus ‘positional contact’. If there is a literary form in which the latter comes into its own, then it is undoubtedly that of the diary. Quite apart from this, however, there is something demonic in the way that precisely the important passages seem forcibly compressed into ambiguity – though perhaps these only show how hard it always is to understand someone correctly. Such understanding, however, is the object of the following considerations.

10Golo Mann, Reminiscences and Reflections, p. 302.

11At the start of his exile Thomas Mann fell prey to severe attacks of depression. To give just two examples from the beginning and the end of that gloomy year: ‘Horrible sense of frenzy, helplessness, twitching muscles, almost a shivering fit, and feared losing my rational faculties’ (18 March 1933; Diaries 1918–1939, p. 130); and ‘Tormenting, deep depression and hopeless conditions, hard to bear, a kind of mental goose-flesh, repeated time and again after brighter spells’ (4 November 1933).

12Two diary entries in 1920 are especially significant on his feelings towards the 14-year-old Klaus. On 25 July he writes: ‘Am enraptured with Eissi, terribly handsome in his swimming trunks. Find it quite natural that I should fall in love with my son’ (Diaries 1918–1939, p. 101). And on 17 October, ‘I heard some noise in the boys’ room and came upon Eissi totally nude and up to some nonsense by Golo’s bed. Deeply struck by his radiant adolescent body; overwhelming.’ This is followed by one of those typical editorial ellipses; a protective decency which the potential diary browser would certainly not have appreciated.

13We do not know whether the diaries from this early time were still extant at this point. Golo Mann speaks only of the notes from the 1920s; cf. Reminiscences and Reflections, p. 303; the ‘oilcloth-covered notebooks’ that fitted with other material into a suitcase may have included the thirty or so volumes used to cover the entire century to date (to take the average from the years 1918–21, precisely four years in four volumes). In later notes Thomas Mann may have looked back at the earlier ones, so that there would be no great difference as far as incriminating material was concerned.

14To use Mann’s own expression, ‘As for myself there is no doubt that “even” the Betrachtungen (Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man) are an expression of my sexual inversion’ (17 September 1919; Diaries 1918–1939, p. 66).

15An earlier and a more recent example. Jürgen Kolbe in 1987 wrote in somewhat hedged fashion: ‘No one should be able to exploit TM’s secrets and rush to the market with the muted needs and joys of his “lunar syntax”. In the hands of the Nazis these notes would have been a deadly weapon’ (Heller Zauber, p. 414). Martin Meyer, twelve years later, still writes in similar vein: ‘What there would have been could probably be concluded from additional assumptions in respect to those sporadic indications that Thomas Mann scattered from time to time in his diary for the rest of his life: on the one hand politics, the back and forth of conflicting feelings towards the “movement” under way in Germany since the 1920s. And on the other hand the homoerotic drive – which probably did not underlie the self-censorship of the chronicler after 1933, for the simple reason that there were no actual adventures to report: from this time on shy, occasionally more direct, glances at the unattainable had to suffice; or else a nostalgia, triggered by memories, for what the suitcase would have conveyed in terms of experience’ (Tagebuch und spates Leid. Über Thomas Mann, Munich/Vienna 1999, pp. 20 ff.). But the possibility that political vacillations might have been the basis for Mann’s fears is undermined by Meyer himself: ‘In any case it would not have needed too keen an imagination to “reconstruct” the mental orientation of these diaries: it emerges clear as day, after all, in the Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, what the author was then committed to – or better, what he was committed against’ (ibid., p. 101). This is precisely it: everything was already there in the Reflections. And even if Thomas Mann had been unable to escape a reluctant fascination for the sturdy SA columns with their openly male-bonding character, the open display of such vacillations, however unpleasant it might have been for him, would scarcely have been sufficient reason for him seriously to consider suicide. In his tough and unconditional will to grow old so as to leave behind him a late work, Thomas Mann was indistinguishable from Gustav von Aschenbach. Above all, vacillations of this kind could not be denoted by the expression ‘secrets of my life’.

1630 April 1933. Diaries 1918–1939, p. 154.

17Notizbücher 7–14, ed. Hans Wysling and Yvonne Schmidlin, Frankfurt 1992, p. 112.

18Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann. Das Leben als Kunstwerk, Munich 1999, p. 517. Cf. also Klaus Harpprecht: ‘Had he, for all his high-minded and strict principles, let himself purchase some pretty young boy – in Venice, or perhaps Naples? This may well have been.’ Thomas Mann. Eine Biographie, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1995, p. 91.

19Thomas Mann, Briefe an Otto Grautoff 1894–1901 und Ida Boy-Ed 1903–1928, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn, Frankfurt 1975, p. 81.

20Cf. the important study by Karl Werner Böhm, Zwischen Selbstzucht und Verlangen. Thomas Mann und das Stigma Homosexualität, Würzburg 1991, p. 381 and passim.

21Briefe an Otto Grautoff, p. 30.

22Tonio Kröger, in Death in Venice and other stories, trans. David Luke, London 1998, p. 139.

23This is why Heinrich Detering’s study on poetic camouflage, Das offene Geheimnis. Zur literarischen Produktivität eines Tabus von Winckel-mann bis zu Thomas Mann, Göttingen 1994, no longer takes Death in Venice into account: it is clearly beyond the limit where camouflage ceases.

24This is what Mann himself said with regard to Richard Wagner, speaking in poetic drama through the mouth of Siegmund. (Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn, Frankfurt 1960–74, vol. IX, p. 409.)

25Weber was a teacher at the Wickersdorf free school, a poet and avowed homosexual. Cf. Hans Wisskirchen, ‘Republikanischer Eros. Zu Walt Whitmans und Hans Blühers Rolle in der politischen Publizistik Thomas Manns’, in ‘Heimsuchung und süßes Gift.’ Erotik und Poetik bei Thomas Mann, ed. Gerhard Härle, Frankfurt 1992, p. 24.

26Letters of Thomas Mann 1889–1955, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1990, p. 93. [This translation has been modified: the Winstons render Mann’s ‘kaum bedingt’ as ‘scarcely’ instead of ‘scarcely qualified’, thus reversing the author’s meaning, which he makes still more clear in the letter referred to in note 27. The original can be found in Briefe, vol. I: 1889–1936, ed. Erika Mann, Frankfurt 1979, pp. 176 ff.]

27Letters of Thomas Mann, p. 96.

28Die Briefe Thomas Manns. Regesten und Register, vol. I, Frankfurt 1987, p. 293 (20/72).

29Thomas Mann, ‘Über die Ehe’, Gesammelte Werke VIII, pp. 195–9.

30Gesammelte Werke XI, pp. 847 and 849. Cf. in particular Wisskirchen, ‘Republikanischer Eros’, pp. 17–40. [An English translation of Mann’s speech The German Republic is given in Order of the Day, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, New York 1942. This however has been purged of a two-page passage referred to here that discusses homosexuality and politics, see ‘Extract from The German Republic’, pp. 113–15.]

31Wisskirchen, ‘Republikanischer Eros’, pp. 27–31. The events that Thomas Mann reflected in his speech were the assassinations of Erzberger in 1921 and Rathenau the following year, murders that were planned and carried out by monarchist secret societies. Wisskirchen assumes that the Municher Thomas Mann had additional information on the homosexual character of these male bands.

32Thus Hans Mayer’s commentary on Mann’s liaison with Klaus Heuser. Cf. Heller Zauber, p. 15.

33Homosexual circles within the Nazi movement initially had high hopes of liberalization, which were all the more bitterly disappointed with the murder of Röhm. Cf. Hans Blüher, ‘Die Gründung des 3. Reiches’, afterword to Pierre Klossowski, Die aufgehobene Berufung, Munich 1997. The other side of this coin is that in April 1933, when he still had to be assured of the SA’s allegiance, Hitler could not have ordered a major campaign against homosexuals.

34Such glances are found regularly in the diaries. Before the journey from Sanary to Zurich, Thomas Mann packed ‘boxes and several cases, including my black suitcase with the diaries and papers, which had caused me such worry’ (23 January 1934).

35A word Mann disavows in his letter to Kurt Martens of 28 March 1906, responding to Martens’s characterizing him as an ‘ascetic’ (Letters of Thomas Mann, p. 50).

36Gerhard Härle sees in Mann’s work ‘an archaic consciousness of guilt and deviation’ (‘Simulationen der Wahrheit’, in Heimsuchung und süßes Gift’, p. 75). In the preface to this volume of essays, Härle explains that ‘in the writer’s universe of values, erotic desire does not just signify increased pleasure and adventure, but forms the origin of a consciousness of guilt’ – a ‘guilt that is never completely depressing, but also never completely atoned’, and proves to be the stimulus for the entire work (ibid., p. 8). The notion of stimulating guilt is certainly of key importance, but that homoeroticism was ‘the fixed point of Mann’s productive guilt consciousness’ (p. 9) we shall dispute below. This interpretation has its reasons, it is even plausible, but not completely so. It leaves unilluminated a little decisive something, like a moon that rises time and again, but never reaches fullness.

37Death in Venice, in Death in Venice and other stories, p. 244. This is how Mann saw it even in his youth. To the self-accusation of Grautoff, who sought to be cured of his homosexuality by hypnosis and visited the celebrated doctor Albert Moll, he answers that this ugly whining got on his nerves and raised his ‘simple and stubborn pride, which knows that the whole world is innocent and stands seven times innocent before necessity’. Why should he suddenly view Grautoff through the eyes of a country vicar? ‘You are for me someone who understands unhappiness very well, with an insight into a good part of the mystical, sad and interesting vileness of God’s creation – but beyond this nothing. The instinct you believe should lead me to feel “repugnance and loathing” towards you is completely foreign to me […] You are innocent!’ (letter of 6 April 1897, in Briefe an Grautoff, pp. 88 ff.).

38‘Über die Ehe’, p. 196. [The ‘Venetian sonnets’ referred to here are those of August von Platen.]

39‘What am I suffering from? From sexuality … Is it then going to destroy me? […] How I hate it, this sexuality, which takes everything beautiful as its result and effect! Ah, it is the poison that lurks in all beauty!’ (Briefe an Grautoff, p. 80).

40Diaries 1918–1939, p. 198.

416 May 1934, ibid., p. 210.

42Letter to Klaus and Erika Mann of 19 October 1927; Erika Mann, Briefe und Antworten, vol. I, 1922–1950, ed. Anna Zanco Prestel, Munich 1984, pp. 17 ff. Mann plays ironically with the meaning of sündigen, as he does in his well-known letter of apology to Gerhart Hauptmann (Briefe I, p. 234). As far as Klaus Heuser is concerned, nothing would change in the openness with which the family joked about him. On the subject of his remaining unmarried, Erika jibed in 1954: ‘Since he could not have the M[agician], he preferred to leave the whole thing well alone’ (29 August 1954). ‘How relaxed the tone has become!’ as Hermann Kurzke remarked quite correctly (Das Leben als Kunstwerk, p. 384), but Mann could already be relaxed a full quarter-century earlier.

43‘His remarks on Adrian’s character. Anachronism of the student jargon. The homosexual substratum, for the most part intangible’ (3 January 1946).

44‘Bitte sehr!’ in the original. From a letter to Kuno Fiedler of 22 November 1954 (printed in the appendix to Tagebücher 1953–1955, ed. Inge Jens, Frankfurt 1995, p. 697). Seven years previously Mann had already severely corrected Fiedler, when he wrote an ill-humoured review of Doctor Faustus and saw himself depicted in Zeitblom. (Thomas Mann. Selbstkommentare: ‘Doktor Faustus’ und ‘Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus’, ed. Hans Wysling with the collaboration of Marianne Eich-Fischer, Frankfurt 1992, pp. 196 ff.) The trust shown in this late letter is that much more remarkable.

45Michael Mann, Schuld und Segen im Werk Thomas Manns, celebratory lecture given in Lübeck, 6 June 1975.

46‘Meine Zeit’, in Thomas Mann, Essays, vol. VI, ed. Hermann Kurzke and Stephan Stachorski, Frankfurt 1977, p. 160.

47Letter of 12 December 1838; acknowledgement to Henning Ritter for this reference.

48Gesammelte Werke XI, p. 514.

49Reinhard Baumgart, ‘Der erotische Schriftsteller’, in Thomas Mann und München, Frankfurt 1989, p. 20.

50Hans Wollschläger, Wiedersehen mit Dr. F. Beim Lesen in Letzter Zeit, Göttingen 1997, p. 22.

51‘Sleep, Sweet Sleep’, in Past Masters, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, London 1933, p. 274.

52Briefe an Grautoff, p. 90.

53Ibid., pp. 106 ff. The verses are part of the refrain from Platen Mann considered as a motto for Buddenbrooks. The ‘dread’ he returns to in his own poem ‘Nur eins’: ‘We, to whom God gave gloomy sense / And pointed out all depths of shame and dread’ (ibid., p. 109).

54Letter to Heinrich Mann of 13 February 1901, Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann 1900–1949, trans. Don Reneau et al., Berkeley, CA, 1998, p. 46.

55‘A Brother’, in Order of the Day, p. 156.

56Letter to Heinrich Mann of 8 January 1904, Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, p. 63. Even here the ambiguity is not completely removed, as theoretically at least this could also be read as his having something worse to forget that was done to him. But the far more likely sense is the opposite.

57‘Im Spiegel’, in Gesammelte Werke XI, pp. 331 ff.

58Letter of 15 July 1906 to Samuel Fischer; Thomas Mann. Briefe vol. III, 1948–1955, ed. Erika Mann, Frankfurt 1979, p. 451.

59Thomas Mann, ‘Dostoyevsky – in Moderation’, preface to The Short Novels of Dostoyevsky, New York 1945, p. x.

60Cf. Briefe I, p. 45. In The Genesis of a Novel, London 1961, Mann speaks of artistic inhumanity and the ‘colouring of existence by this sense of guilt’ (p. 144).

61Cf. Michael Maar, Geister und Kunst, Frankfurt 1997, pp. 200 ff. and passim, also Martin Meyer: ‘He took it for granted that Katia would completely enter and share his destiny. But along the way Erika was also assigned a kind of sacrificial role – which Mann saw as to her own advantage. This has to be expressed in a harsh fashion, for Mann does so himself. One of the most terrifying sentences in the diary, and at the same time one of his last notes in California, reflects what was simply declared as a ‘concern’: ‘[…] K[atia]’s suffering on account of E[rika]. My gratitude for her and my concern for her, as she could so easily follow her brother. ‘ And then in the unconcealed expression of a death wish, this sentence: ‘Certainly she does not want to live any longer than us’ (Tagebuch und spätes Leid, p. 79).

62‘Dostoyevsky – in Moderation’, p. x.

63Letter to Ida Boy-Ed of 19 August 1904, cf. Briefe an Grautoff, pp. 149 ff. The same year he wrote to his brother Heinrich: ‘Der Tag carried a quite long essay of mine, supposedly on Gabriele Reuter, but taken very generally and personally’ (Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, p. 48). This ‘supposedly on’ stands invisibly in the titles of all his essays.

64‘Bilse und ich’, in Gesammelte Werke X, p. 22.

65Cf. ‘Dostoyevsky – in Moderation’, p. xi.

66Mann wrote to the publisher Paul Steegemann on 18 August 1920: ‘Great moralists have mostly been great sinners also. Dostoevsky is said to have been a debaucher of children’ (Letters of Thomas Mann, p. 98).

67Sigmund Freud, in his essay on ‘Dostoevsky and Parricide’, asks ‘why there is any temptation to reckon Dostoevsky among the criminals. The answer is that it comes from his choice of material, which singles out from all others violent, murderous and egoistic characters, thus pointing to the existence of similar tendencies within himself, and also from certain facts in his life like his passion for gambling and his possible confession to a sexual assault upon a young girl’ (Standard Edition, vol. XXI, London 1961, p. 178). The footnote that Freud adds at this point refers among other sources to Stefan Zweig’s 1920 publication Three Masters (English edition, London 1938), where the question is discussed as to how far Dostoevsky transgressed the bounds of law, and ‘how much of the criminal instincts of his heroes was realized in himself’. Mann could also have read in this text about the sado-masochism that Freud imputes to Dostoevsky, and the sexual-neurotic origin of epilepsy and latent homosexuality. Cf. also the commentary to Mann’s preface in Essays VI.

68In theory there is no route from one to the other, from the here of life to the there of literature. Even if he seeks to do so in autobiography, there is no way that the author can bridge this gulf and transpose himself from the disordered here into the planned and prescribed there. The ‘I’ of the author, whether he will or no, has always a different status from that of a fictional character. What emerges in writing as the ‘I’ is the autre moi, which Marcel Proust sharply distinguishes from the empirical author, with all his vices and vanities, whom Sainte-Beuve wrongly believed he needed only to have dined with enough times in order to form a picture of his creation. One possible conclusion would be to forbid in principle the drawing of any conclusions back from fiction to lived experience. Yet the price of this ban would be quite serious. It contradicts not only every reader’s experience, all intuition, and the common sense that the theorists who propose it hold at bay with the same effort with which they reject its infringement as biographism. Such a general ban also conceals a mountain of interesting little distinctions. And this still does not alter the fact that there are cases in which authors employ different tricks to try and bridge the gulf. It is not Sainte-Beuvism if one refuses to ignore such attempts. On the contrary, it would be philologically dubious to artificially blind oneself to the signals with which an author seeks to entice the reader from the there of fiction into the here of life; an author who in speaking of himself will again not hesitate, if things get too close, to push it all back over the gap into the realm of fiction.

69Diary entry for 27 April 1951. Perhaps the intention here was a kind of political satire, the fabricated confession of a fellow-traveller in the style of a Soviet forced confession, rather than notes from underground; but nothing more certain can be said on this matter.

70Gesammelte Werke XIII, p. 55: ‘I will say that Tolstoy’s work is at least as markedly autobiographical as my own tiny effort’ (Briefe I, p. 62). It is interesting that in discussing the diaries, Martin Meyer quotes four times Mann’s apparent claim that ‘everything after the Tonio Kröger story has essentially nothing to do with his own experience’ (Tagebuch und spätes Leid, p. 17). Does this mean that Mann lied throughout his whole diary? But if you read on, you can see that Mann says the very opposite. The sentence falls in a passage on the cluelessness of Agnes B. Meyer, Mann’s unloved American patron, who was planning a book on him at that time and whom he took as a model for the ‘Thamar’ episode in Joseph. ‘Lunch with her. Awkwardnesses treated with incomprehension. The story: great impression. Psychologisms about me for her book. Cluelessness such as my total lack of involvement with people, the lack of influence of emotion on my writing, at least since Tonio Kröger’ (4 June 1942).

NOTES TO CHAPTER TWO

1Joseph and His Brothers, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, London 1989, pp. 718–19.

2Briefe an Grautoff, p. 90.

3On the notion and technique of literary camouflage, cf. Detering, Das offene Geheimnis.

4Cf. Maar, Geister und Kunst, pp. 322 ff. What must one not know about Rumpelstiltskin, what is his unmistakable mark of identity? And what does it mean if Goethe in Der West-Östliche Divan follows Morgenröte with the non-rhyming Hatem, if Kafka’s protagonist is named ‘K.’ and Herman Hesse’s ‘Harry Haller’, if on one occasion Proust calls his hero ‘Marcel’ and Paul Thomas Mann’s hero is ‘Paolo Hofmann’? Quite certainly in each case it means something different, but in every case a piece of information is missed if one sticks rigidly to one side of the gulf. In Mann’s work in particular, the play on his name is revealed time and again as a trick to overcome this gulf, as a camouflage signal and a token that the reference here is to his own empirical and unmistakable Thomas Mann self. Composers from Bach to Shostakovitch have done likewise.

5Little Herr Friedemann, in Death in Venice and other stories, pp. 14, 15, 20.

6Ibid., p. 27.

7The accumulation of scenes in which a bystander is humiliated – Dedner calls them ‘mocking scenes’ – has not been unnoticed by Thomas Mann scholars. Cf. Burghard Dedner, ‘Entwürdigung. Die Angst vor dem Gelächter in Thomas Manns Werk’, in Härle (ed.), Heimsuchung und süßes Gift, pp. 87–102.

8Cf. Hans Rudolf Vaget, Thomas Mann. Kommentar zu sämtlichen Erzählungen, Munich 1984, p. 71. The author of this review, which hovers between alienation and admiration, was Heinrich Mann’s friend Ludwig Ewers, Tommy’s ‘famous enemy’ (cf. Briefe an Grautoff, p. 90), who considered himself a ‘Uranian’, as emerges from a letter of Heinrich, and who seems to have been well-informed as to the adolescent needs of Thomas Mann. Heinrich wrote to Ewers that in Tomy’s [sic] case sleeping with a not too voracious young girl would suffice to cure everything. Cf. Harp-precht, Thomas Mann, pp. 95 ff.

9On the subtext of this sale scene, cf. Detering, Das offene Geheimnis, pp. 163–5.

10Tobias Mindernickel, in Stories of a Lifetime, vol. I, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, London 1961, p. 63.

11Ibid., p. 64.

12Ibid., p. 67.

13Cf. ‘Dostoyevsky – in Moderation’, p. viii.

14Tobias Mindernickel, p. 51.

15Ibid., p. 57.

16‘Über den Alkohol’, Gesammelte Werke XI, p. 718.

17The Wardrobe, in Stories of Three Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, p. 77 [translation modified]. Reinhard Baumgart comments on this conclusion: ‘A paragraph as sweet in tone as gloomy in deed, glaring in its significance and completely underhand. For who, woman or man, is being stabbed here, and for what “good reason”? And does the emphasis of the attack being fairly “above the waist” not indicate silently that it was rather the zone below that attracted the knife? At any event the good and bad reasons are left unspoken, as if they were self-explanatory.’ (Selbstvergessenheit. Drei Wege zum Werk: Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka, Bertolt Brecht, Frankfurt 1993, p. 50.) The good reason is not made any more explicit in Andersen’s The Sandhills of Jutland, which was one of Mann’s possible sources for The Wardrobe. Cf. Maar, Geister und Kunst, pp. 50 ff.

18Afterword to Frühe Erzählungen, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn, Frankfurt 1981, p. 670. It is not only in Mann’s planned stories that knives recur, they do likewise in the world of his dreams. In his seventh notebook, the young fiance notes down a ‘morning dream of Katia’: ‘When I asked for my medication, the word “jealousy” somehow fell between us, and I said: “Let them be jealous! The more jealous they are, the better!” Then she took a kitchen knife from the table and threatened me with it, apparently in all seriousness.’ (Notizbücher 7–14, p. 103. The dream dates from 1904.)

19Cf. Hans Wysling in the Thomas-Mann-Handbuch, ed. Helmut Koop-mann, Stuttgart 1990, pp. 368 ff.

20Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, Harmondsworth 1957, p. 446.

21In his old age, Thomas Mann related this afternoon event in Palestrina, in which he saw the Devil in person sitting on a sofa – a vision he experienced as outrageously oppressive – to the set designer, poet and painter Fabius von Gugel, when the latter was about to make a prolonged visit to Rome. It was from him that the story was handed down to posterity by Peter de Mendelssohn. Cf. Der Zauberer. Das Leben des deutschen Schriftstellers Thomas Mann. Erster Teil 1875–1918, Frankfurt 1975, pp. 292 ff. Why Mann should have recognized the visitor right away as the Devil is a question which clearly was never asked. One possibility could be that he was somehow ready and waiting for such a visit. See also chapter 3, p. 100.

22Buddenbrooks, p. 208.

23Ibid., p. 95.

24Tonio Kröger, p. 191.

25Cf. Geister und Kunst, pp. 108–16.

26Cf. Regesten und Register, p. 49 (03/3).

27Tonio Kröger, pp. 176, 177 [translation modified].

28Ibid., p. 161.

29This ‘lush ripening’ of his art was also what Thomas Mann promised himself when he wrote to Grautoff before his southern journey that he would not be an artist worth the name if he did not ‘conceive at least a dozen stories in Italy’ (Briefe an Grautoff, p. 59). The ‘heredity on his mother’s side’ that drew him there is one of the many autobiographical signals in this story: Thomas Mann’s mother Julia Bruhn, born in Brazil, had ‘inclinations to the “south”, to art, even to Bohemianism’, inclinations that her son believed, in the Goethean style, he had inherited from her along with her musicality and her pleasure in spinning yarns. (Cf. Thomas Mann – Agnes B. Meyer. Briefwechsel 1937–1955, ed. Hans Rudolf Vaget, Frankfurt 1992, pp. 162 ff.)

30Tonio Kröger, p. 154 [translation modified].

31This is how Kurzke sees it, in commenting on this passage: ‘But this is simply something that Mann dreamed up. The letters to his friend convey no trace of it’ (Das Leben als Kunstwerk, p. 76). Apart from the fact that it is not quite true, since some traces are actually conveyed, does Kurzke expect Mann to have told his most intimate secrets in a letter? Kurzke misses the literary realization of this descent and concludes that on this occasion at least Mann need not be taken at his word. The present chapter may serve as a commentary on this conclusion.

32The Fight Between Jappe and Do Escobar, in Stories of Three Decades, pp. 328–9.

33Ibid., p. 338.

34Ibid., p. 331.

35The subject of the tale is drawn from Mann’s notes for Maja, the novel of Munich society that he planned after Buddenbrooks but never carried out; he also made use of it for Doctor Faustus.

36Anekdote, in Gesammelte Werke VIII, p. 414.

37Ibid., p. 415.

38Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years, trans. Denver Lindley, London 1955, p. 124.

39Ibid., p. 121.

40Ibid., p. 126.

41A Sketch of My Life, Paris 1930, p. 39.

42Ibid., p. 41.

43The Hungry, in Stories of Three Decades, pp. 170–1.

44Death in Venice, in Death in Venice and other stories, p. 252.

45Ibid., p. 252 [translation modified].

46Ibid., p. 258.

47Tonio Kröger, p. 154.

48Death in Venice, p. 249.

49Gesammelte Werke X, pp. 698–9.

50Bruno Frank, Politische Novelle, Berlin 1928, pp. 147–80.

51Death in Venice, p. 259.

52Ibid., p. 246.

53Ibid., p. 260.

54Ibid., pp. 260–1.

55Ibid., p. 261.

56Thomas Mann, Aufsätze, Reden, Essays. Band II. 1914–1918, ed. Harry Matter, Berlin/Weimar 1983, pp. 12, 14. In the Gesammelte Werke, the emphasis on this ‘testimony of blood’ is omitted; Matter takes it from the original edition.

57The German Republic, p. 9.

58‘The Making of The Magic Mountain’, in The Magic Mountain, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, London 1999, p. 722.

59Cf. Thomas Mann an Ernst Bertram, Briefe aus den Jahren 1910–1955, ed. Inge Jens, Pfullingen 1960, p. 156.

60The Magic Mountain, p. 491.

61Ibid., p. 493.

62Ibid., p. 494.

63Ibid., p. 496.

64Ibid., pp. 496–7.

65Ibid., pp. 124–5.

66Cf. Geister und Kunst, p. 322.

67The Magic Mountain, p. 616.

68Ibid., p. 462.

69Gesammelte Werke X, p. 880.

70Ibid., p. 881.

71Cf. Freud, Moses and Monotheism (Standard Edition vol. XXIII, p. 135).

72‘Tables of the Law’, in Stories of a Lifetime, vol. II, London 1961, p. 289.

73Mario and the Magician, in Stories of a Lifetime, p. 211.

74Ibid., p. 212.

75Apart from Erika’s stimulus, with this pistol shot Thomas Mann harks back – or forward – to the story of the tramcar murder, which he intended to tell in Maja, and which is central to the plot of Faustus.

76Briefe I, pp. 299 ff.

77The Transposed Heads, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, London 1941, p. 62.

78Ibid., pp. 62, 68.

79Lotte in Weimar, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, London 1940, p. 272. [In North America this novel is published as The Beloved Returns.]

80Ibid., p. 244.

81Ibid., p. 220.

82Ibid., p. 229.

83Ibid., p. 246.

84Ibid., p. 248.

85Ibid., p. 341.

86How Thomas Mann underlays this with (or perhaps superimposes on it) the literary background of the robber-girl in Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘The Snow Queen’ is explored in Geister und Kunst, pp. 174 ff. See also there the similarities made between Rosza and Leverkühn’s Hetaera Esmeralda.

87Joseph and His Brothers, p. 117.

88Ibid., p. 119.

89Ibid., p. 1004.

90Ibid., p. 113.

91Ibid., p. 373.

92Ibid., p. 374. [Here the translation has been modified, as the key phrase ‘in Ängsten der Jungfräulichkeit’ disappears without trace in Ms Lowe-Porter’s version.]

93Ibid., p. 390.

94‘But since we were filled with longing to know each another completely, we set to work at once, and I stayed with her until the following morning.’ Confessions of Felix Krull, p. 125.

95Joseph and His Brothers, p. 751.

96Ibid., p. 380.

97In the carriage, before they set to work, they have an evidently obscene conversation, ‘which I scruple to set down, since I am sensible enough to see that its freedom lies beyond the compass of my voluble and chatty pen.’ Confessions of Felix Krull, p. 123.

98Joseph and His Brothers, p. 377.

99Ibid., p. 385.

100Ibid., p. 410.

101Ibid., p. 420.

102Ibid., p. 796.

103For example, the crocodile that eats its way up the chained prisoner’s thigh.

104Joseph and His Brothers, p. 803.

105Ibid., pp. 813–14.

106Ibid., p. 811.

107Ibid., p. 830.

108Ibid., p. 775.

109Ibid., p. 1070.

110Ibid., p. 1113.

111Ibid., p. 1114.

112Selbstkommentare, p. 218.

113Joseph and His Brothers, pp. 329–30.

114Ibid., p. 1022.

115Ibid., p. 1021.

116Ibid., p. 1110. [The second sentence here is missing from Ms Lowe-Porter’s version.]

117Ibid., p. 1021. ‘There is no art, no culture, not a single genuine deed (action), which all the forces of life have not combined to produce, the bad ones as well as the good’ (Gesammelte Werke X, p. 609). This, like the commentary of the Joseph narrator, is quite against the view of Schopenhauer, who tended to the view that it would be better if the events of the world did not exist at all. The justification for blameworthy acts is provided more by the other source that already governs Aschenbach’s dream, in which the Apollonian spirit collapses before Dionysus. Did not Nietzsche say that frightful talents, those regarded as inhuman, were the sole ground on which all humanity could grow, in its impulses, acts and deeds? At least he may have said something similar; at least this is how Thomas Mann cited him in his 1921 paean to the Hermann Ungar novel Knaben und Mörder from which the above quote is taken.

118Joseph and His Brothers, p. 1040.

119Ibid., p. 1106.

120Ibid., p. 1021.

121Ibid., p. 1022.

122Cf. Paul Scherrer and Hans Wysling, Quellenkritische Studien zum Werk Thomas Manns, Bern/Munich 1976, pp. 258–92. Whole chest-fuls of stimuli and source material were examined in this archival rummaging. The story of Hanegiff, however, does not appear here. Wysling quotes on p. 284 how Mann wrote that he had found enlightenment from Freud on the ‘culturally highly fecund morbid world of incest dread (Inzestangst), murder remorse (Mördergewissensnot), and yearning for salvation (Erlösungsdrang).’ (‘Freud’s Position in the History of Modern Thought’, in Past Masters, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, London 1933, p. 172 [translation modified]). Nothing in this summary of sources, however, falls under the middle term in this triad.

123The Holy Sinner, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, London 1997, p. 25.

124Ibid., p. 26.

125Ibid., p. 224.

126‘I no longer thought of you / Until yesterday my sinful hands / Found the key in a fish’. See Hartmann von Aue, Gregorius der gute Sünder, translated from the middle and late High-German by Burkhard Kippenberg, Stuttgart 1963, p. 211.

127The Holy Sinner, p. 184.

128Ibid., p. 188.

129Ibid., p. 226. Though hidden in its unobtrusiveness, a certain form of address recurs in the fisherman scenes: ‘Husband, husband,’ his wife addresses him (p. 162) [‘Mann, Mann’ in the German], ‘I don’t feel right, I am not a bit comfortable about the way you acted to the wanderer!’ His response is to accuse her of doting on the fool, to which she replies: ‘No, husband.’ Likewise with the visitation from Rome: “‘Man,’ replied the shorter stranger […], ‘man, have no concern about us’ (p. 188). After his confession the cleric consoles him: ‘Man, you speak after your understanding’ (p. 194). There are certainly all kinds of ‘Mann’ salutations with no reference to the pale confessor, so that it is impossible to decide whether this should be taken as an allusion to Thomas or not.

130This could be read either as an extreme contraction or a one-sided compilation, but in fact it is simply a fair average, as can be checked from the collection Selbstkommentare. The quotations in order are from diary entry of 1 January 1946; Selbstkommentare pp. 206, 138, 117; Gesammelte Werke XI, pp. 168 and 298 ff.; and Selbstkommentare, p. 141.

131Selbstkommentare, p. 104.

132The Genesis of a Novel, p. 80.

133Ibid., p. 144. [The second phrase quoted here is missing from Ms Lowe-Porter’s translation.]

134Selbstkommentare, p. 154.

135Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, London 1992, p. 157.

136Ibid., p. 150.

137Selbstkommentare, pp. 106 ff.

138Doctor Faustus, p. 143.

139Cf. Viktor A. Oswald, ‘Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus: The Enigma of Frau von Tolna’, in Germanic Review 23 (1948), pp. 249–53, and Geister und Kunst, p. 316.

140Doctor Faustus, pp. 228, 237. Cf. Michael Maar, ‘Der Teufel in Palestrina’, in Literaturwissenschaftliches Jahrbuch 30 (1989), p. 218.

141Doctor Faustus, p. 229.

142Ibid., p. 253.

143‘With K[atia] on the “murders” in the book: Reisi, Annette, Preetorius, Geffcken. Bad, bad. […] I paid for those “murders” with a lung operation, which was undoubtedly connected with that work’ (18 July 1947).

144Doctor Faustus, p. 489.

145Selbstkommentare, p. 333.

146Doctor Faustus, p. 290.

147Selbstkommentare, p. 72. Revenge was on the part of the seduced, not of the Devil. Thomas Mann wrote to his colleague Charles Jackson of Adrian’s ‘deadly revenge for his defeat’ (ibid., p. 88). The fairy-tale layer that he again superimposes (with Andersen’s boy-killing Ice Maiden) is examined in Geister und Kunst, pp. 140–43.

148Lieselotte Voss, Die Entstehung von Thomas Manns Roman ‘Doktor Faustus’, Tübingen 1975, p. 110.

149Michael Mann, Schuld und Segen im Werk Thomas Manns, p. 22. Just as it struck the Ishmaelite on his first conversation with Joseph’s brothers how they repeatedly returned to the noun ‘well’, so it may have struck the Lübeck dignitaries on this festive occasion how frequently in his lecture Michael Mann spoke of the artist as guilty, as a highly talented sinner, even of murderers: of the ‘brilliantly loathsome artist-murderer Daedalus’, of Jakob Lenz, who ‘perished from the illusion that he had committed the murder of his beloved’, of Hoffmann’s goldsmith Cardillac, who became ‘an actual murderer’ (p. 11). Sixteen months after this speech, Michael Mann killed himself on New Year’s Eve with a mixture of alcohol and barbiturates; it has often been maintained that it was the work on his father’s diaries that drove him to this, but some scholars take a different view. Cf. Hans Wisskirchen, Die Familie Mann, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1999, p. 145.

150Selbstkommentare, p. 302.

151Doctor Faustus, p. 509.

152Ibid., p. 511.

153Ibid., p. 510.

154Ibid., p. 513.

155Ibid., p. 515.

156Ibid., p. 468.

157Selbstkommentare, p. 300.

158The Black Swan, trans. W. R. Trask, Berkeley 1990, p. 139.

159‘On Schiller’, in Last Essays, trans. Richard and Clara Winston, London 1959, p. 68. He had already at this point pronounced the nonchalant ‘if you like!’ in relation to his homosexuality.

160Confessions of Felix Krull, p. 393.

161Ibid., p. 398.

162Ibid., p. 408. See also note 24 to chapter 3.

NOTES TO CHAPTER THREE

1Briefe an Grautoff, p. 97.

2If we want to arrange this into phases, we find first of all the simple – if transposed – account of a criminal act – in Tobias Mindernickel, in The Wardrobe, in Buddenbrooks. Tonio Kröger begins the second and reflexive phase, with the effort of symbolization. The events cannot be undone, but they are still burdensome, and are therefore given a supportive meaning: a meaning that breaks down time and again and has to be created anew in each work. In The Magic Mountain’s allegorical dream, this meaning is spelled out as a message to humanity; this does not remove the guilt, but rather elevates it, so as to give the individual sinner breathing space beneath it. Yet this elevation also does not last, and what seemed to have healed over breaks out in new guise, as is typical of traumatic memories. The urge now becomes ever stronger to denote the act, to annul the ban by a liberating word. This would be nothing unusual for students of trauma. What is unusual – that a literary work of world stature emerges from it – does not fall in their domain.

3Briefe an Grautoff, pp. 79 ff.

4Ibid., p. 85.

5Ibid., p. 87.

6Ibid., pp. 90 ff.

7Ibid., p. 94.

8Ibid., p. 97. This ‘ugly tale’ combines the themes of unbridled sexual passion and deadly humiliation. At its climax, the stigmatized man is forced to dance in women’s clothing.

9Ibid., p. 90.

10‘Oh my Rome!’ Thomas Mann complained back in Munich, in February 1896, ‘If I could only see your pillars again! And your people …’ (ibid., p. 70).

11Doctor Faustus, p. 155.

12Widespread speculation at the beginning of the twentieth century ‘endowed Hungarians with the reputation of being especially inclined towards male love. Thus the very title of the anonymous novel Teleny, attributed to Oscar Wilde, signals that this is the story of a homosexual youth.’ (Detering, Das offene Geheimnis, pp. 273 ff.)

13Doctor Faustus, pp. 222, 400.

14Confessions of Felix Krull, p. 122. The green liqueur that Rosza drinks would likely be the herbal concoction Centerbe, popular in Italy at the turn of the century.

15Doctor Faustus, p. 222; A Sketch of My Life, p. 13.

16Confessions of Felix Krull, p. 125.

17Gesammelte Werke XI, p. 399.

18Doctor Faustus, pp. 357–8, 403.

19Donald A. Prater, Thomas Mann. A Life, Oxford 1995, p. 28.

20Cf. A Man and His Dog, in Stories of Three Decades, London 1946, p. 456. Surreptitiously, this deals with the ‘shameful horror of illegitimate and damned passion’ (Early Sorrow, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter, p. 526 [translation modified]). Strikingly strong words are pronounced on the occasion of the ‘meeting in the open of two strange dogs’, which counts among ‘the most painful, thrilling and pregnant of all conceivable encounters’ and is surrounded ‘by a demonic and uncanny atmosphere’ (A Man and His Dog, p. 457 [translation modified]). The snuffling dogs ‘are bound to each other with some obscure and equivocal bond which may not be denied’, indeed ‘the same sense of guilt weighs on them both’ (p. 459). The tie between canine and human activities is also drawn by an aside in Joseph. When Jacob kisses Rachel at the well, dogs spring up barking at them, ‘as the creatures do when men, for good or evil, lay hands on each other’ (Joseph and His Brothers, p. 151). Why this ‘good or evil’?

21Cf. diary for 5 May 1945. In the next sentence, he fortunately retracts this. ‘On the other hand, it is impossible to execute a million people without imitating the methods of the Nazis.’

22The historian Laura Schettini examined for me the daily papers Il corriere di Napoli, Il Mattino, Il Messaggero and Tribuna, as well as the police files in the Naples state archive. The striking thing about the crimes of wounding recorded there is that the victims either lie or keep silent about their assailants. The men who had to be treated for knife wounds in the Pellegrini hospital, for example, typically maintained that while taking a walk they had intervened in a quarrel and got caught up in a fight; the women declared that someone unknown had suddenly attacked them from behind. A certain Fortuna Esposito, according to a police protocol of 14 October 1896, claimed to have ‘stabbed herself out of nervousness’. The motive for this nervousness clearly had something to do with the presence of the camorra. As was only to be expected, the Torre Argentina quarter, where Mann stayed in Rome, was also the scene of stabbings; one would hardly expect the Roman population to stay crime-free for half a year simply because the future author of Buddenbrooks was living among them. None of the deeds reported or mentioned merits being examined in detail or placed in the spotlight. It is clear on the other hand that in southern Italy, at the turn of the twentieth century, conditions were different from those in Prussia, and things happened between Neapolitan heaven and Roman earth that were not recorded in police files. The failure to find such documentary evidence certainly does not imply the falsification of a hypothesis that might have been verified by such a finding.

23Joseph and His Brothers, p. 1023.

24I owe the reference to Satanism in Italy to Christian Milz and Professor Thomas Hauschild who read the German edition of this book. The latter has gathered the results of his many years’ research in southern Italy into a recent book Magie und Macht in Italien (Gipkendorf 2003). The trail indicated by these readers is obscure but in no way absurd. All the less so, as there is a literary source that can be read as a parallel text to Mann’s own subtext: Prinz Kuckuck. Leben, Thaten, Meinungen und Höllenfahrt eines Wollüstlings, by Mann’s fellow Municher Otto Julius Bierbaum. This author, in his roman à clef published in 1906 and the following years but today forgotten, portrayed in his protagonist the notorious dandy Heymel (whom he unsuccessfully tried to blackmail with the book), and depicted the decadent life of Europe’s upper ten thousand in the years around 1890. Bierbaum’s character Felix Henry is initiated into homosexuality by the fisherman Tiberio, and engages his travelling companion Karl, also in love with Tiberio, in a life-and-death struggle hushed up by the police. One chapter expressly describes conditions in Naples, which drive Karl with his Protestant upbringing into an outbreak of heathen sensuality. ‘Here he no longer touched antique bronzes with his eyes; he let his limbs feel living flesh. He frequented the ancient established baths, where young attendants stalked around naked and were ready and willing for scenes à la Petronius, for which they displayed a native talent.’ This bathing temple described in such detail also served as a contact for other establishments, as the narrator went on to recall: ‘What did it help him that here in this Naples, where any nuance of vice could have its way, he could be a spectator of Satanic masses, at which, as Raffiano was ready to swear on the blood of the holy Januarius, real nuns and monks took part? A tasteless comedy! Suitable perhaps for travelling German gymnasium teachers, eager for a “glimpse into the abyss of Roman decadence”. Sacrilege for an entrance fee of 50 lire – how stupid!’ (Prinz Kuckuck, vol. II, Munich/Leipzig 1908, pp. 388 ff. and 395). The effect that such a Black Mass might have had on the young Thomas Mann is easy to imagine.

References to performances of this kind are even to be found in tourist guides. A 1970 guidebook, for example, specifically mentions the street in which the visitor to Naples alighted according to his letter to Grautoff, and the surrounding ill-famed neighbourhood: ‘On the right side the via S. Lucia branches off, widened in 1620 after the plans of Domenico Fontana, with the demolition of fishermen’s huts that formerly stood here. At the end of the 19th century, the street developed into one of the most famous and visited places of pleasure in the city. Today it forms part of the Santa Lucia quarter, full of big hotels and elegant shops … To the right, via S. Lucia turns into via Chiatamone, the name of which (from the Greek platamon) refers to the numerous grottos formed long ago at the foot of the volcanic rock of Monte Echia. Inhabited since prehistoric time, and the site of Mithratic cults, they later became a place of festive gatherings, which sometimes degenerated into scandalous orgies. The caves were accordingly destroyed by order of the Spanish viceroy Pedro de Toledo. In 1565, the embankment was surrounded with walls and became the goal of pleasure-seeking tourists of the upper classes. In the mid-18th century the first hotels were established here, including the famous “Crocelle” in what are now numbers 26 and 27, where diplomats and noble travellers particularly stayed, joined also for example by Giacomo Casanova, who sought customers here for Sara Goudar’s gamblingden. On the left, at number 50, the spas and baths “al Chiatamone” were located, which used two springs of cold water […] for both external and internal usage’. (Cf. Touring Club Italiano, Napoli e dintorni, Guide d’Italia, vol. XIX, 5th edition, Milan 1976, p. 316.)

It is not without interest that some fifteen months later, another illustrious visitor stayed at number 31, via S. Lucia – Oscar Wilde. What should hold our attention here, however, is the reference to the Mithras cult, if we recall the indications of Professor Kuckuck when he explains the game of the bloody corrida to Felix Krull. (Both their names are evocative of Bierbaum’s hero Felix, known as ‘Prinz Kuckuck’.) Kuckuck explains the sacrifice of the bull, described as the ‘animal god’ and ‘horned underworld’, with a ‘very ancient Roman shrine whose existence testified to a deep descent from the high cult level of Christianity to the service of a divinity well disposed towards blood whose worship, through the wide popularity of the rites, almost outstripped that of the Lord Jesus as a world religion’. The next day, Felix Krull inquires yet again of Professor Kuckuck about this religion that had been so narrowly defeated. ‘He could not add much, but answered that those rites had not been so completely driven from the field, for the smoking blood of a victim – the god’s blood, that is – had always been a part of the pious, popular ceremonials of mankind, and he sketched a connection between the sacrament of communion and the festal, fatal drama of the day before’ (Confessions of Felix Krull, pp. 402–3). This is an historically accurate description of the Roman cult of Mithras, an association Thomas Mann also made when he inspected San Clemente in 1953 before his Papal visit. ‘The utmost antiquity, deep down to the realm of Mithras’ (Diary, 1 May 1953). The suggestion of blasphemy is also found in Kuckuck’s explanation. Late forms of the Mithras cult were to lead in 1910 to a scandal on Capri, where the French baron Jacques d’Adelswärd-Fersen performed homosexual black masses in the grotto of Tiberius.

The connection between modern Satanism and the Mithras cult recurs again in Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, where the author describes the sect leader Trelawney, whom the narrator Nicholas Jenkins twice comes into contact with. Powell scholarship suggests that Trelawney is based on Aleister Crowley, the most famous Satanist of the twentieth century. On their second encounter in August 1939, Trelawney delivers from his sick bed a monologue interrupted by the sober replies of Mr Duport. Duport wants to know whether there will be war against Hitler.

‘What do you think, Dr Trelawney?’

‘What will be, must be.’

‘Which means war, in my opinion,’ said Duport.

‘The sword of Mithras, who each year immolates the sacred bull, will ere long now flash from its scabbard.’

‘You’ve said it.’

‘The slayer of Osiris once again demands his grievous tribute of blood. The Angel of Death will ride the storm.’

(Anthony Powell, The Kindly Ones, London 1997, p. 666)

In this highly comic scene, moreover, it becomes clear that the Mithras cult was always present in Crowley’s obscure circle.

I plan to present the striking omnipresence of the Devil motif in Thomas Mann’s work in a special study.

25A Sketch of My Life, p. 38.

26The Fight Between Jappe and Do Escobar, p. 339.

27Confessions of Felix Krull, p. 256.

28Death in Venice, p. 239.

NOTE TO TRANSLATOR’S NOTE

1See Thomas Mann’s letter to Agnes E. Meyer of 26 May 1942, in which he thanks her for reminding him of the omission of this passage, and officially agrees. Thomas Mann/Agnes E. Meyer Briefwechsel, 1937–1955, ed. H. R. Vaget, Frankfurt 1992, pp. 400–403.