With the prophet

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Stefan George (portrait of Reinhold Lepsius ), whose aestheticist understanding of art was criticized by Thomas Mann in his story. The prophet he describes there, "with a tremendously high, pale forehead that recedes and a beardless, bony, raptor-like face of concentrated spirituality," clearly reminds of George's physiognomy , as this painting also shows .

With the Prophet (1904) is a short story by Thomas Mann . The experience described there goes back to a reading by the poet Ludwig Derleth , to which Thomas Mann was invited on Good Friday week in 1904. Derleth, who belonged to the George circle , lived conscious of a prophetic mission. His passionate endeavor was aimed at a new hierarchical order of a purified Catholic Christianity, which he proclaimed with revolutionary pathos in his "Proclamations".

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Significantly, the self-proclaimed prophet Daniel does not appear in the story himself, but leaves his proclamations , which are supposed to be the subject of this Good Friday evening, in his bare apartment (on the top floor of an ordinary suburban apartment building) by one of his disciples in front of selected guests read out.

The dozen or so invited include a Polish painter with his girlfriend , a Jewish poet with his pale and corpulent wife, a spiritist who looks “martial and sickly” at the same time , a young philosopher “with the look of a kangaroo”, a graphic artist “with an old man Child face ”, a limping“ erotic ”, an unmarried young mother of noble origin, an elderly writer, an overgrown musician, a rich lady who is late, and the novelist who does not fully belong to this illustrious circle and does so through Tried to cover up modest reserve.

Even if Daniel himself cannot be present, he is visually present in the room through a portrait photo that stands like an icon on an "altar-like shrine". It shows a "about thirty-year-old young man with a tremendously high, pale forehead that receded pale and a beardless, bony, bird of prey-like face of concentrated spirituality".

His sister Maria Josefa, who seems to be worshiping her brother like a saint, receives the newcomers in the attic apartment, which is solemnly lit by flickering candles. The disciple who is supposed to recite the prophet's proclamations and who has specially traveled from Switzerland that evening is the last to arrive: a stocky and stocky young man, short-necked and ugly with a sullen, plump face and bulging lips. What he delivers with a “wild and loud voice” for two and a half hours are “sermons, parables, theses, laws, visions, prophecies and daily orders, which are in a style mixture of psaltery and revelation tones with military-strategic and philosophical-critical technical terms in colorful and unpredictable series ”follow one another.

The reactions of the hypocritically moved audience range from "extinguished eyes directed up to the ceiling" to faces "buried in the hands" to crooked fingers that write "something uncertain" in the air. The novelist, however, whose perspective decisively shapes the tenor of the story, is only plagued by increasing back pain and feelings of hunger and is mainly thinking about how he could soon get closer to the secretly adored Sonja, the daughter of the rich lady. How liberated does one step silently and immediately "onto the dreary suburban street" after the end of the event.

For interpretation

The domicile and work of the prophet are almost always described with latent, nonetheless biting irony and mercilessly ridiculed. Thomas Mann's devastating criticism of the aestheticist circle around the neo-romantic lyric poet Stefan George is most clearly expressed right at the beginning of this story. Since the first paragraph already summarizes all forms of irony and all aspects of criticism (sometimes quite openly, sometimes symbolically disguised), it is quoted here in full as a representative of the actually necessary analysis of numerous details:

There are strange places, strange brains, strange regions of the mind, high and poor. On the outskirts of the big cities, where the lanterns are sparse and the gendarmes go in twos, you have to climb up in the houses until you can't go any further, to the sloping attic chambers where young, pale geniuses, criminals of the dream, crossed with one another The poor brood, right up to cheaply and meaningfully decorated studios, where lonely, indignant and internally consumed artists, hungry and proud, wrestle with ultimate and desolate ideals in the smoke of cigarettes. Here is the end, the ice, the purity and the nothing. There is no contract, no concession, no indulgence, no measure and no value here. Here the air is so thin and pure that the miasms of life no longer flourish. Defiance reigns here, the external consequence, the desperate self, freedom, madness and death ...

In an overwhelming syntax and imagery, Thomas Mann relentlessly accuses the elite group of writers of inhumanity and presumption. The author's hostility to life, which contradicts his own understanding of art in every respect, culminates in the final words of the reading: "I hand you over to plunder - 'the world!'" when it comes to the public impact on all the sky-storming pseudo-poetic bombast. It turns out to be surprisingly sobering and quite earthly, even banal: “The novelist has been looking in vain for a long time for a suitable posture for his aching back. At ten o'clock the vision of a ham roll came to him, but he chased it away manfully. ”When he is finally released from the“ uncanny mixture of brutality and weakness ”, from the“ crazy images ”and the“ vortex of illogic ”, he wants just take the shortest route home and "have dinner like a wolf!"

Title page of Ludwig Derleth's «The Proclamations»

Remarks

  • Ludwig Derleth was also portrayed by Thomas Mann in Doctor Faustus , as Daniel zur Höhe [Chapter XXXIV (continued)]. Concerning the proclamations , the fictional biographer Serenus Zeitblom reports: “His poetic dreams were aimed at a world subject to the pure spirit in bloody campaigns, held in horror and high discipline by him, as he did in his, I believe, only work, the one before had described proclamations that appeared on hand-made paper after the war , a lyrical-rhetorical outburst of indulgent terrorism, which had to be given considerable verbal power. "
  • According to Thomas Mann, this type of aestheticism helped pave the way for fascism. "The steepest aesthetic nonsense that has occurred to me," said Serenus Zeitblom.
  • The distant, well-behaved novelist is a self-portrait of the young Thomas Mann, the rich lady his future mother-in-law Hedwig Pringsheim . Their daughter Sonja, who is only mentioned by name but did not appear at the prophet's office because of an inflammation of her foot , alludes to Katia Pringsheim , Thomas Mann's future wife.
  • The disciple from Switzerland is said to have been modeled on Rudolf Blümel (after Hans Rudolf Vaget ).

expenditure

  • Thomas Mann: The child prodigy. Novellas (Difficult hour. With the prophet . Good luck. How Jappe and Do Escobar fought). S. Fischer Berlin around 1917. 31st - 39th thousand. Title page with printed censorship mark. Fischer's Library of Contemporary Novels, Sixth Series, Vol. 6
  • Thomas Mann: Selected stories . Bermann-Fischer, Stockholm 1948. 6. – 12. Edition, 860 pages. Thin print, linen (Stockholm Complete Edition). Contents: Little Mr Friedemann / Disappointment / Tristan / Tobias Mindernickel / Tonio Kröger / The way to the cemetery / Mr and dog / The wardrobe / Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull / Death in Venice / With the prophet / Disorder and early suffering / Difficult hour / Mario and the magician / The child prodigy / The swapped heads / The law.
  • Thomas Mann: All the stories. S. Fischer Frankfurt 1963. Linen. 763 pages, red spine label with gold writing. Vision, favor, the will to happiness, disappointment, death, little Mr. Friedemann, the Bajazzo, Tobias Mindernickel, the wardrobe, avenged, Luischen, the way to the cemetery, Gladius Dei, Tristan, the hungry, Tonio Kröger, the child prodigy , Fortune, With the Prophet , Difficult Hour, Wälsungenblut, Anecdote, The railway accident, How Jappe and Do Escobar fought, Death in Venice, Lord and dog, Disorder and early suffering, Mario and the magician, The exchanged heads, The law , The Deceived, The Boy Enoch (fragment).
  • Thomas Mann: All the stories. Volume 1. Fischer-Taschenbuch-Verlag, Frankfurt 1987, ISBN 3-10-348115-2 , pp. 355-363

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