Gladius Dei

" Munich shone " - Odeonsplatz with Theatinerkirche (scene of the story)

Gladius Dei ( Latin for God's sword ) is a novella by Thomas Mann from 1902. It anticipates motifs from his 1907 play Fiorenza .

content

The novella is set on a bright June day in Munich during the late Art Nouveau period , when the city was one of the world's leading art metropolises. The sky is made of blue silk , art is in bloom, art is in control, art stretches its rose-wrapped scepter over the city and smiles , in short: Munich shone .

While everyone is enjoying the atmosphere, the young man Hieronymus strides through Schellingstrasse , scowling, with gaunt cheeks, his face covered by a hood . After a short prayer in the Ludwigskirche , near Odeonsplatz, in a shop window of the Blüthenzweig art dealership , he discovered a reproduction of a painting showing a Madonna and Child in what he believed to be an overly revealing manner: “ A woman to get mad ”, two passers-by (from whom Hieronymus learns that the original was bought by the Pinakothek , that the artist is highly valued and that he even dined with the Prince Regent twice ) is misleading about the dogma of the Immaculate Conception .

Finally, after two days, during which Jerome tried in vain to cool his indignant soul and to scare away the memory of the frivolous image of the half-naked beauty from his head , Jerome believes that on the third night he received an order and a call from on high , who asks him to raise his voice against lighthearted nefariousness and impudent beauty . With the words “ God wants it! “He therefore enters the said art shop, where he is initially ignored by all the snobbish customers. Herr Blüthenzweig, however, sharply rejects his appeal to remove the picture and turns away. Jerome then gives a fiery speech against the nefarious ignorance and rejected hypocrisy of such works, against the shameless idolatry of art and finally asks Blütthenzweig to burn the painting with a hot fire and to scatter his ashes in the wind .

The art dealer then has Hieronymus thrown out of the shop by the packer Krauthuber, a heavily breathing giant figure, nourished with malt, a son of the people of terrible hardiness . In the sulfur-yellow wall of clouds above Theatinerstrasse, Hieronymus believes he can make out a broad sword of fire , whereupon he strides with the words " Gladius Dei super terram [...] cito et velociter ".

interpretation

With his caricature of God's avenging sword, Thomas Mann ironically attacked the sterile art business of his time in general and the flourishing Munich renaissance cult in particular. The term renaissance stands for a time without creativity of its own, in which it is only possible to reproduce the past, i.e. to create mere imitations, even more unimaginative: to make mere photos of imitations, i.e. reproductions of reproductions. Art is reduced to decor. The original art experience is replaced by a voyeuristic consumer attitude. Art only has a function as a commodity. Its significance is no longer determined by the artist, but by the merchant acting as an art dealer. But even the critic of such commercial reproducibility turns into mere reproduction: as a copy of his Renaissance model (see the following paragraph) he himself becomes a ridiculous epigone and his flaming protest becomes a mere copy .

Jerome

Girolamo Savonarola
(1452–1498)

Jerome clearly bears the traits of the Italian penitential preacher Girolamo Savonarola . So he shares with the Dominican not only the first name and the external appearance, but especially his energetic demeanor against the “ depravity ” of the world. Religious fanaticism is also present in the figure , reminiscent of the darkest periods of the Middle Ages : He enters the art shop with the mission-conscious words “ God wants it! ”- the translation of the“ Deus lo vult ”, the late Latin motto with which Pope Urban II called in 1095 for the first crusade against the unbelievers. The appeal to Blüthenzweig to burn the painting is also a reminder of the inquisitors and pyre of the age. The evocation of Gladius Dei , the sword of God, at the end of the novella heralds the apocalypse and judgment of the world , the separation of sinners from the righteous. It is certainly no coincidence that the Ludwigskirche in Munich, which Hieronymus visited, has a fresco on the same subject. In addition, the same motto was Florence's motto during the reign of Savonarola, which even appears on coins.

Flowering branch

The art dealer Blüthenzweig, however, represents Hieronymus' antagonists in every respect. The art objects in his shop embody the Florentine Renaissance instead of the Middle Ages . Hieronymus' ardent religious fanaticism counters Blüthenzweig with complete cultural indifference. He countered the reference to his own conscience with the cool reply that it was " a completely irrelevant institution for us ". But art itself, in Blüthenzweig's worldview, has to be subordinate to the interests of business. Works of art are valued exclusively according to their market value and touted to the customers in the same flat phrases " lovely ", " full of charm ", " grace itself ", " extremely pretty, cute and admirable ". The buyers themselves are smelled , categorized according to financial capacity and treated accordingly. At best, respect is paid to power , i.e. state authority, but not to the conviction and conscience of a non-customer. Thomas Mann paints the ideal image of a capitalist- oriented trader and also gives him a clichéd Jewish name, which at the same time could be an allusion to the Munich company Hanfstaengl, which is known for its reproductions of paintings .

Sword symbolism

The sword mentioned in the title Gladius Dei ( Sword of God ) remains constantly present in the course of the story. It already appears at the beginning with the young people who whistle the Nothung motif , because Nothung is the name of Wotan's sword in Richard Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung , which heralds the twilight of the gods - and thus also a world judgment. But Hieronymus himself also sees himself as a sword, as God's instrument for the implementation of his will, which is given to Hieronymus as a command and call from on high .

Above all, however, the sword motif naturally appears in the theatrical finale, when the Gladius Dei stretched out over the happy city like an apocalyptic fire sign in the sulfur light . At the end of the novella Thomas Mann refers again to Savonarola: "Gladius Dei super terram ...", whispered his plump lips, and, rising higher in his hooded cloak, with a hidden and convulsive shake of his hanging fist, he mumbled, trembling : "Cito et velociter!" - On the night of April 5, 1492, Savonarola supposedly had the vision of a sword in the sky during a violent thunderstorm raging over Florence, which he made the motif of his next sermon. His words have been handed down: “Ecce gladius Domini super terram, cito et velociter!” (“Look, there is the sword of God over the earth, swift and swift!”).

Art city Munich

Finally, in Gladius Dei you can also see Thomas Mann's cheerful, ironic confrontation with his long-term residence, the Bavarian capital of Munich, which at the end of the 19th century had not only risen to become the second metropolis of the empire , but also to the leading art city in Germany. While Mann on the one hand valued the cheerful Mediterranean atmosphere as a counterpoint to his sober Protestant hometown Lübeck , on the other hand he nonetheless had reservations: On the one hand, Munich's artistry seemed to him at times a bit "false" and "artificial". It is no coincidence that art is largely present in the novella only as a reproduction and as such becomes a mere commodity for enterprising dealers like Blüthenzweig. The author also did not hide the fact that large sections of the population were not at all receptive to art, but lived dullly. This Munich is represented in the novella by the burly Packer Krauthuber, the malt-fed son of the people .

literature

Thomas Mann: The will to happiness and other narratives. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 1991, ISBN 3-596-29439-8 , pp. 192ff.
Thomas Mann: Death in Venice and other stories. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 2004, ISBN 3-596-20054-7 , p. 231ff.