The first episodes of Confessions of Felix Krull appeared in 1911. But Thomas Mann broke off and turned to Death in Venice, one of the most haunted, dark-veined of his inventions. In 1936, when including the picaresque fragment in a collection of tales, Mann noted: “I was not destined to turn back to Felix Krull.” Yet throughout his life, and in the deliberate unfolding of his art—The Magic Mountain, the Joseph tetralogy, Doctor Faustus—Mann saw by his side, like a gay, secret sharer, the figure of the rogue. He adverted to it, briefly, in 1943. But the hour was too bitter, and there was ripe in Mann the compelling intimation of Faustus.
In 1954, the seventy-nine-year-old novelist took up what the man of thirty-six had laid aside. Starting on the actual page left incomplete in 1911, Mann wrote with fantastic ease. He did not alter a word or intonation in the preceding fragment. The coherence is total, the timbre of the voice unchanged. There is no other example in literature of so precise a leap over time and age. Faust inheres in Goethe’s entire work, from 1772 to the 1830s; but there is between the early Faust and the apotheosis of Part II a profound change of intonation. In Felix Krull, the sequence is unbroken.
This alone would suggest that the Confessions had their special place in Mann’s sensibility, that the silhouette of the confidence man lay near its center. Against the gravity of the major novels, against the metaphysical hauteur of Mann’s stance—as artist, as exile, as heir to Goethe—Felix Krull sets its laughter. The knowledge that the story lay in reserve (the incomplete is the artist’s freedom) may have consoled Mann as he strove to impose rational shape on the fierce disorder of German experience. Moreover, it allowed him distance from his own work.
Mann was a writer stiffened by the public solemnity of his performance. The novels exacted from the life rigid, exemplary postures of labor and prophecy. Because they were drawn from the high matter of religious and national myth and because they passed nearly at once from the personal into the domain of the classic (the Germans make their great artists numinous, as they do their political masters), Mann’s novels, stories, and essays towered over his person. He came to think of what he had wrought as awesome and signally exterior to himself; he meditated on the authority of his work as might his readers or critics. Hence the strain of oratory, of nervous pomp, in Mann’s self-awareness.
But Felix Krull would not stay buried. In his long sleep, the seed of parody and subversion ripened. The Confessions guarded in Mann the gift of irreverence. They stepped between the master and the work, and laid upon its monumental façade a garland of laughter.
There are no translations.
Pain is not bread; the French word is warm, with a resonance of glebe and famine. Home is not Heim; the German has covert echoes of refuge, asylum, workhouse, yet it shades into the strong excitement of Heimat, Heimatland, the homeplace of national consciousness, the hearth of political exaltation. English has no exact equivalent.
What is true of the single word is truer of the sentence, paragraph, or page. Even the simplest statement does not pass unaltered into another language; each language frames the world uniquely. Furthermore, a writer who matters hammers out his own language from the general quarry. All literary style is language inside language, thus, all that translation can hope to do is recompose something (as much as possible) of what the foreign writer might have put down had he felt and chosen in another language. At the level of normal prose discourse, this is difficult enough; prose has its own very subtle structure, and the syntax of a language codifies complex traditions of behavior and a historical convention of the real. When we deal with poetry, translation is either an honest crib, a crutch to be laid beside the dictionary, or it is an imitation, a re-enactment of parallel gestures in a medium radically transformed.
Great translators—and they are disastrously rare—act as a kind of living mirror. They offer to the original not an equivalence, for there can be none, but a vital counterpoise, an echo, faithful yet autonomous, as we find in the dialogue of human love. An act of translation is an act of love. Where it fails, through immodesty or blurred perception, it traduces. Where it succeeds, it incarnates.
All these difficulties are, in the case of Felix Krull, only a starting point for our sense of difficulty because the problem of rendition here has a particular twist, and it takes us to the heart of the book. Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull is a Chinese box, parody encased in parody. Within each section, Thomas Mann’s use of style, the singular craft of idiom and grammar, is itself the source of irony and intricate diversion.
The title is parody: imagine something florid, Plutarchian, yet converse to the subject. Fielding struck the same note: The Life of Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great. Bekenntniss signifies confession, attestation; it has its distinct legal, moralistic edge. Yet who is inviting us into his solemn confidence? An embezzler, grand larcenist and con man. Hochstapler is a sonorously sordid word; it spans a gamut of villainy, from sharping and suave theft to plain forgery. In short, the title is calculated to suggest that abundant seventeenth- and eighteenth-century literature of rogues’ memoirs, highwaymen’s monitory reminiscences, and cony-catchers’ pamphlets and ballads that enter the serious novel via Defoe, Fielding, Smollett, and Lesage. More precisely, Mann refers us to the most famous of German picaresque tales: Grimmelshausen’s Simplicissimus. In the baroque wildness and buffoonery of the adventurous Simplicissimus, Mann, no less than Brecht, found a counterpart to the modern. There are numerous affinities between Grimmelshausen and Felix Krull; at times Mann insinuates a direct quote into his own fiction. Simplex and Felix are brothers under the skin; their very names echo.
The next parody is nearer the center of the box. Splintered by historical crises and the division of Germany into petty states, German literature has a short, uneven record. It has produced or brought to excellence few genres entirely its own. But among these one would put the Erziehungsroman, or Bildungsroman (no other literature has challenged the primacy of the German name). In the Erziehungsroman, the novel is conceived as a tale of ripening, a paideia. We attend on the history of a man from childhood to ripe self-consciousness. In its classic mode—Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, Keller’s Der Grüne Heinrich—the “novel of education” simulates, in the gradual deepening of stylistic resource and narrative poise and in the widening scope of confronted plot, the parallel unfolding of the hero’s own identity. We grow as we read.
Other literatures have produced famous examples: Dickens’ David Copperfield, Flaubert’s L’Education sentimentale, Joyce’s Portrait of the Artist. But the motif of the coming of age, of the soul at school, has a particular grip on the German sensibility. When writing the most characteristic of modern Bildungsromane, Jean-Christophe, Romain Rolland chose a German protagonist. Felix Krull is a beautifully exact, barbed parody of this distinctively national genre.
Erziehungsromane begin, inevitably, with a canvas, filial or mutinous, of the hero’s family. The storms and pomp of the bourgeois father, the harbor of pardon in the mother’s room, the crotchets of aunts and uncles, the revels of the clan (marvelously rendered with all their after-dinner drowsiness in Joyce and Proust), form the necessary overture to the portrait of the artist, magnate, or sensualist as a little boy. So it is in Felix Krull, but with an acid difference.
The Krull ménage is bankrupt, bibulous, high as old venison. Under its silver miter and purple cope of wax, Loreley extra cuvée is vinegar. Mama measures Olympia’s thigh with a tape measure, and the little boy observes the streak of crass lechery “in their unusual intimacy.” The dominant note of sanctified corruption is fixed in the name of Felix’ godfather, Schimmelpreester. Literally, Mildew-priest. But perhaps the conceit is gayer and more arcane: in certain Moselle vineyards, the mildewed grapes, harvested before sunrise, yield a rare Eiswein (the French speak of pourriture noble ). From the mildewed stock will spring the cold, sparkling vintage of young Krull.
The “novel of ripening” takes its hero on a ritual quest. His voyage (with its dim roots in the chivalric ordeal) leads through successive trials of initiation: school, the choice of profession—itself a word with archaic, sacramental overtones—and eros. David Copperfield and Studs Lonigan enact the same stylized convention, though the idiom differs. The quest of Felix Krull holds up to the mystery of man’s schooling, of his coming to maturity, a mirror of derision. By grace of forgery and feigned illness, Krull plays truant and perches in bed sucking stolen sweets. In a scene of brilliant slapstick (rare in Mann), the young Galahad escapes conscription. Traditionally, the Bildungsroman pauses over the hero’s discovery of his vocation: he hears the imperative of art, religious faith, or social commitment. He shoulders his pack for the long day’s voyage. But no such voice disturbs Krull in his alert reverie of sensual affluence. He is a magpie born. All that glitters is not gold; some of it turns out to be topaz.
Often the sting of parody lies in the small, erudite touch. Consider the road Felix Krull follows when carrying the stolen jewels to Master Jean-Pierre (pierre, of course, signifying stone and the guardian of heaven). It leads between church and cemetery, then down a little street, the rue des Vierges Prudentes. These Wise Virgins are in the Gospel, and we meet them in medieval romances. Here they give access to the rue de l’Echelle au Ciel. The impertinent allegory is plain: Felix Krull is ascending heaven’s ladder. But it leads to the Ritz.
The growth of spirit through the ache of love is the crucial theme of the Bildungsroman: Wilhelm Meister and Mignon; David Copperfield and Dora; Julien Sorel and Madame de Rénal. The adolescent sheds his green bark when first he tastes the salt and anguish of intelligent desire, when he passes from the itch of indiscriminate longing to the large narrowness of single passion. In bourgeois civilization, this rite de passage is as decisive and stylized as are the puberty-rites of the Papuan or the armored vigil of the medieval knight. From Goethe to Proust, the novel has made of the first realization of mature love its epiphany.
Felix Krull takes a lighter view. Convinced that “with me the satisfaction of love is twice as sweet and twice as penetrating as with the average man,” this Don Juan of bellhops flits from housemaid to whore, from lady novelist to queenly Iberian bosom. He takes sex as lesser men eat oysters, with a happy gulp. Though his sensual spasms are, as he tells us, of unusual power, Krull remains esentially neutral. He kindles but does not burn. Eleanor Twentyman and Nectan Lord Stranthbogie yearn for the golden boy with equal, irreconcilable lust. He moves between them, lithe as a dancer. That gives the Confessions their grace, their ease of motion. But it is also their radical weakness. We can no more become imaginatively entangled in Krull than we could in a brilliantly dexterous monkey. The tightrope on which he performs his capers is stretched over a void of feeling.
Only once is there an initiation, an education of feeling in the real sense. Professor Kuckuck’s lecture on cosmology stands out with edgy grandeur from the quicksilver lightness of the tale. Not even the man’s risible name, with its double hint of mental eccentricity and amorous license, can detract from the marvels he invokes:
This interdependent whirling and circling, this convolution of gases into heavenly bodies, this burning, flaming, freezing, exploding, pulverizing, this plunging and speeding, bred out of Nothingness and awaking Nothingness—which would perhaps have preferred to remain asleep and was waiting to fall asleep again—all this was Being, known also as Nature, and everywhere in everything it was one. I was not to doubt that all Being, Nature itself, constituted a unitary system from the simplest inorganic element to Life at its liveliest, to the woman with the shapely arm and to the figure of Hermes. Our human brain, our flesh and bones, these were mosaics made up of the same elementary particles as stars and star dust and the dark clouds hanging in the frigid waste of interstellar space.
As it stands (and the fact that the novel is unfinished makes our bearings uncertain), Kuckuck’s initiation of Krull into the alchemy of science suggests the revelations of Mephistopheles to Faust. There is more than a hint of Satanic clairvoyance in the traveler with the small gray beard and “starlike eyes.” But if there is parody here, it is of a yearning kind. Goethe was the titular daemon of Mann’s own consciousness as artist and man. No less than Doctor Faustus, the one episode of lyric gravity in Felix Krull pays homage to the greatest of German poets and to his chosen myth of knowledge and damnation.
Though Goethe stands intact, Mann himself emerges from the Confessions delightfully mocked. His place in the lineage of the Bildungsroman was eminent. In Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kröger, The Magic Mountain, and the Joseph novels, Mann had produced classic studies of education through life, of the flowering of perception in the individual. To Mann, as to Goethe, the fact of crescence, in leaf as in man, was the model and justification of the artist’s striving. If there is a contrary to humane education, a ripening through subversion, Felix Krull is a master apprentice. Being a novel of “un-education,” the Confessions parody the core of Mann’s achievement.
One could show in detail how often Felix Krull recasts into laughter or shifts subtly out of right focus specific themes and passages from the major fictions. Armand’s tumble with Diane Philibert mocks the perils of Joseph in the house of Potiphar. Krull’s examination by the medical board parodies one of the moments of highest pathos in The Magic Mountain: Joachim Ziemssen’s attempt to wrest from the doctor the permission to return to his regiment. It is as if Mann’s last novel looked back on the proud but somewhat ponderous array of his work with a glint of doubt. Only a very great artist or one from whom the nearness of death has purged vainglory can so regard his labor.
But parody draws short breath; the Chinese box is a miniature game. Felix Krull is weakest where it is most purely a game, a stylistic charade on Grimmelshausen, the Bildungsroman, and Mann’s own novels. The book is kept vital by a deeper impulse. Below the baroque wit and pastiche of the rogue’s chronicle moves a strong theme of social satire.
Satire suggests the other Mann, Heinrich Mann, whose The Blue Angel and Der Untertan are notorious derisions of bourgeois, imperial Germany. The arcane involutions of Thomas Mann’s style, his vision of the artist as reader of omen and myth, contrast with the notion of the satirist. Yet, as Georg Lukács has argued, Thomas Mann is one of the major witnesses to the crisis of the bourgeois order. Mann recorded, with the veracity of intense artistic scruple, the manners, inflections, and values of that mercantile, middle-class regime that spun the fine, tough web of its morals over the harsh facts of industrial profit from 1830 to 1914. Mann is heir to Balzac and Zola. In Buddenbrooks and the early novellas, in the image of familial citadels that shimmers behind the fevers of The Magic Mountain, the world of nannies and gilt edge, of paternal cigars and little folk in sailor’s hats, the ideals of bourgeois law, of station and decorum, which came to utter hideousness on the Marne and the Somme, have their memorial.
But being a great artist, a man in whom truth speaks louder than design, Mann could not but express his premonitions of its ruin. He saw the cracks branching with ghostlike rapidity along the walls of the old house of order; he heard the deathwatch beetle gnawing at the beams. Thus he spoke out, against his own bias as a patrician, against his own adherence to the stability of aesthetic and moral values. It is this that gives the end of Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kröger, and The Magic Mountain their nostalgic yet pitiless irony. Death in Venice is epitaph to an age.
When Mann returned to the fragment of Felix Krull in 1954, the polity of bourgeois values lay in rubble, as did the actual streets on which Consul Buddenbrook had walked. There was worse: men knew, in a way which only Kierkegaard and Nietzsche had foreseen, that the proud edifice of liberal, humanistic values, the very construct of art and culture, had produced from within—in some mysterious mechanism of self-damnation—the age of the concentration camp and of atomic incineration. How this came to pass and what it bodes for the future of Western consciousness is the theme of Doctor Faustus. Felix Krull returns to the background of social and moral crisis in the mode of laughter, as a satyr play reverts to the plot of tragedy.
The satiric shafts fall thick, but with concentration of design. The opening mocks the spurious largesse of the Krull household; the absurd tinkle over the door chimes Strauss’s “Enjoy Your Life” at the very moment when the establishment is sapped with ruin. When creditors strip the house, its master falls like a stuffed dummy. Following this, the novel embarks on its flyting of wealth, bourgeois snobberies, philistine manners, and high-minded politics. Krull’s oration to the King of Portugal is venomous fun. Every cliché of class condescension and paternalism is argued into literal absurdity:
By his very existence the beggar, huddled in rags, makes as great a contribution to the colorful picture of the world as the proud gentleman who drops alms in his humbly outstretched hand, carefully avoiding, of course, any contact with it. And, Your Majesty, the beggar knows it; he is aware of the special dignity that the order of the world has allotted to him, and in the depths of his heart he does not wish things otherwise. It takes the instigation to rebellion by men of ill will to make him discontented with his picturesque role and to put into his head the contumacious notion that men must be equal.
The satiric trope that underlies the Confessions is, of course, disguise. Nothing is what it appears. In Langenschwalbach, Felix poses as an infant Paganini, though he can’t play a note on the violin. In his dressing room, Müller-Rosé turns from a lustrous dandy into a grubby, worn-out cabotin. By larceny of wit, Krull manages to spout all foreign languages without, in fact, knowing any: he is the quintessence of the Berlitz dream. He slips into the skin of the Marquis de Venosta as into a safecracker’s gloves: “Clothes make the man, marquis—or perhaps the other way around: the man makes the clothes.” Such is his power of counterfeit that he appropriates not only the marquis’ signature, affluence, and turn of phrase, but also that which we can least hand over to another man, the baggage of our private memories.
Hence Krull’s constant identification with Hermes. Hermes is both god of thieves and master of mask. One recalls his filching of identity in the myth of Amphitryon. Mann found, in Molière’s and Kleist’s treatments of that myth, disturbing studies of the mercurial. Like the god, Krull is a virtuoso of disguise; whenever it suits him, he takes a new soul off the hanger:
… in each disguise I assumed I looked better and more natural than in the last. I might appear as a Roman flute-player, a wreath of roses twined in my curly locks; as an English page in a snug-fitting satin with lace collar and plumed hat; as a Spanish bullfighter in spangled jacket and broad-brimmed hat; as a youthful abbé at the time of powdered white wigs … whatever the costume, the mirror assured me that I was born to wear it, and my audience declared that I looked to the life exactly the person whom I aimed to represent.
Everyone is deceived. That is the barb of the satire. The children “of the noble family of Siebenklingen” hurry to acclaim the fake violinist; the King finds in the counterfeit marquis a tone and philosophy “appropriate to your origin.” Mann is saying that a social order that had made of cant its holy writ and that has lived by ruthless exploitation and pretended gentility is ready to be plundered. More than ready: in its hysterical blasé frivolity, the bourgeois world welcomed those who came to rob it, whether they were Ivar Kreuger, the match king, or Felix Krull, embezzler.
That is the meaning of the finest scene in the novel. Diane Philibert cries out: “Armand, you shall steal from me. Here under my very eyes. That is, I’ll shut my eyes and pretend to both of us that I am asleep. But secretly I’ll watch you steal.… Go on, steal away from my side, prowl, find and take it! It is my dearest wish.” And when she begs, “beloved, turn me over and whip me till I bleed!” the satire strikes at the nerve of abasement, of masochism in a decadent society.
Like Balzac, Mann makes of the erotic the principal medium of his critique. It is in the chase and enforcement of desire that the truth will out. With our clothes we shed our assumed morals. Mann parodies a characteristic motif in fin-de-siècle memoirs—the housemaid’s sexual initiation of the young master. Under Krull’s complacent narrative obtrudes the unsavory economic and social fact:
It was different with the son of the house, who may well have won her favour as he developed, and she may have had the feeling that in satisfying him she was not only performing a domestic duty but advancing her social position. Thus it happened that my desires encountered no serious resistance.
Gifted with hermaphroditic charm (love in the arms of larceny), Felix-Armand-Loulou moves among the rich like a catalyst of infatuation. Lords envision him in kilts; American heiresses plead for scandal. There is a fine, harsh sagacity in the double entendre of our slang: prick as phallus and needle. Either will burst the gaudy balloons of money or caste. The Confessions remind us that whatever its outward elegance, a society is naked twice: in bed and in the grave.
As we have it, Felix Krull is a fragment—Part I. How would this picaresque masque have ended? Mann’s death makes it impossible to know for certain. But there are hints of a crowning device.
The story moves up a spiral staircase set with mirrors. It is allegoric of that Nietzschean theory of “eternal recurrence” which fascinated Mann. Everything seems to be happening twice, in near facsimile. The two young people, seen as an icon of youth and exotic beauty on the balcony of the Frankfurter Hof, will obviously recur in the guise of the Novaros in Argentina. Ribeiro, the handsome espada, is wearing a costume identical with that in which Schimmelpreester decked young Krull; and the bullfighter’s features are those of the marquis. Dona Maria Pia (Zouzou) is Zaza reincarnate; in their tense, erotically jealous relationship, she and her mother re-create Olympia and Mrs. Krull. The authentic Venosta and his counterfeit are, of course, twin reflections of a single image. The rest of the novel would have followed their adventures as they receded or drew near in a gallery of facing mirrors. Only Kuckuck seems unique and able to see through Felix Krull. There are hints that he will reappear as guide or unmasker.
We know that the fancy-dress party will end in an unsavory dawn, that Krull will be found out. The opening sentence of theConfessions tells of weariness, leisure, and complete retirement. There are frequent hints of prison. It is vital to the conventions of a rogue’s tale that the trickster should be tricked. Is Krull exposed by Kuckuck? Does he overreach in some high blaze of erotic or financial larceny? Does he go to prison in order to clear the name of his twin, the true marquis? Yet there are also intimations of a happy ending. Schimmelpreester “was to intervene in my destiny decisively and providentially.” The voice of the Confessions is tired, but not broken.
We cannot say more. In Felix Krull, Mann relaxed into a sovereign ease of fancy. The details of the story may not have been fixed in his own mind. If they were, the artist bore his secret into death. There, as well, Hermes is guide.