The will to happiness

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The will to happiness is an early story by Thomas Mann . It was first published in Simplicissimus , vol. 1, nos. 21-23 (August 22, August 29 and September 5, 1896 ). The first book was published in 1898 in Der kleine Herr Friedemann. Novellas (= Collection Fischer VI). In 1958 , The Will for Happiness was included in the Stockholm Complete Edition of Thomas Mann's Works.

Trevi Fountain

content

Paolo Hofmann, a childhood friend of the first-person narrator, has a serious heart condition. When the young painter falls in love with Ada von Stein, a beautiful, rich Jewish young lady, her father refuses his daughter's hand because he is concerned about her constant happiness. Hofmann then left Munich , the home of the von Stein family, and went on a journey - apparently in order to die lonely somewhere. The narrator received no news from him for five years - but neither did he receive an obituary notice! Then he meets him by chance in Rome and can finally deliver the message that he has been carrying around with him since Paolo's departure: Baroness Ada has commissioned him to tell his friend that she will never say yes to any other man. The two friends spend a few weeks together in Rome, then one morning the narrator meets Paolo packing up: he has received a letter from Baron von Stein in which the latter withdraws the decision he made five years ago after he has abandoned Ada's constant inclination could convince for Paolo - she knocked out the hand of another applicant who would have been very welcome to the father-in-law. Paolo makes one last tour of Rome with his friend. They linger a little longer in front of the Fontana di Trevi , and the narrator hands Paolo a travel glass so that he can drink from the water in the fountain. But the moment he puts the glass to his lips, the whole sky flares up. The glass shatters on the edge of the fountain without Paolo having drunk. - What is left to report? The narrator explains succinctly that Paolo died the morning after the wedding night, almost on the wedding night itself. Only his urge to enforce his happiness, the union of the sick with the healthy, kept him alive for so long. But also in the face of the bride and young widow nothing but triumph could be read at the funeral.

Remarks

In this early narrative, some outmoded set pieces and anti-Semitic clichés become apparent. While Thomas Mann introduces the baron as a stock market speculator and describes his behavior as that of a baptized Jew who wants to conceal his origins, he presents the baroness as an "ugly little Jew in a tasteless gray dress" with "large diamonds" on her ears sparkle.

Like Tonio Kröger, Paolo Hofmann has certain features of the author. As with Thomas Mann himself, the mothers of the two literary figures come "from the bottom of the map" and form an exotic contrast to the honest German father, who has a solid existence as a businessman. With her beauty, but her forms too ripe for her age, Baroness Ada is somewhat reminiscent of Esther in Theodor Fontane's Poggenpuhls . This likewise rich young lady is described as "pompous, almost pomposissima" - the authors seem to use a certain cliché with this type of woman.

The fact that The Will to Happiness is a youth work cannot be overlooked. B. the symbolic thwarting of the enjoyment of the Trevi Fountain water - who drinks from this fountain, so the popular saying will return - is applied quite thickly. But here, too, there is a motif that should recur in Thomas Mann's works: that of the "impossible" and promptly fatal love. If it is a sick person who is actually prescribed chastity, who enforces his wish to unite with the person he loves and dies from it, then the disdained handicapped Johannes Friedemann drowns himself . Gustav von Aschenbach dies in Venice because, despite all warnings, he is walking in the footsteps of the boy in the contaminated city, to Rosalie von Tümmler , who is much too old for her son's head of house, death comes in a gentler form, while behind the Shooting of Rudi Schwerdtfeger in Doctor Faustus on the one hand a real jealousy drama in which a woman who is also too old for her lover plays a role, on the other hand there is Thomas Mann's homophile interest in Paul Ehrenberg .

literature

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Jacques Darmaun: Judengestalten. In: Thomas Mann, Germany and the Jews. Niemeyer, Tübingen 2003, p. 26.
  2. ↑ Thomas Mann: The will to happiness . In: Thomas Mann, Collected Works in Thirteen Volumes. Volume 8, Fischer, Frankfurt 1974, p. 49