The betrayed

Benrath Palace , which plays a central role as "Holterhof Palace" in Die Betrogene .

The betrayed is the last completed story by Thomas Mann . It was written between 1952 and 1953 and tells the story of a woman going through menopause who is approaching death under the deceptive guise of a miraculous rejuvenation. Like all of Mann's late works, this one is also written in a parody style (“In terms of style, I actually only know the parody”), which gives the impression that Felix Krull wrote the book while Thomas Mann was looking over his shoulder.

The Deceived was first published in Mercury in 1953 . In the same year the first book edition was published by S. Fischer Verlag . In 1958 the story was included in the Stockholm Complete Edition .

content

Rosalie von Tümmler, a widow for many years, lives with her daughter Anna and her son Eduard in Düsseldorf . While she has only a superficial relationship with her son, there is a far deeper bond with her daughter. Anna, almost thirty years old, studied painting and remained unmarried because of her clubfoot . Her mother regrets this, but on the other hand she enjoys the advantage of always having the trusted interlocutor around, even though the views of mother and daughter often diverge: While Rosalie is a passionate nature lover and for everything that concerns the female sex, Has an infallible instinct - she recognizes pregnancies at an early stage, for example -, Anna is rather cool and rational and in her painting - the story takes place in the 1920s - she is more committed to the tendencies towards abstract and ascetic design.

Rosalie explains this attitude of her daughter from her disappointment with her love life, but cannot accept it. She, who describes menstruation as a venerable female act of life , even turns into a daring thesis in view of Anna's monthly abdominal pain: Yes, you are clever and you are not on the best of feet with nature, but have to transfer it into the spiritual, in cubes and spirals , and since we are already talking about how one thing has to do with the other, I would like to know whether that is not connected, your proud, ingenious attitude towards nature - and that it gives you this abdominal pain when you have the rule.

Anna laughs at the idea. But Rosalie, plagued by menopause , did not come up with this topic by chance, because she suffers from the fact that her menstrual period has recently become more and more irregular and has now been absent for two months. So she finds herself only as dried shell , by nature excreted and mere junk . The adaptation of the soul to the new body constitution does not yet want to succeed.

At this stage in her life, she makes a new acquaintance. Eduard, who has been preparing for his Abitur and has determined that he will also need English skills for the rest of his life, has hired a private tutor, a young and sporty American named Ken Keaton, who came to Europe during the First World War and stayed here. Rosalie quickly developed a more than maternal affection for this young man. Not only Anna notices that, but Eduard too. Embarrassed, but without naming his actual motives, he suggests to his mother that he renounce Keaton's services from now on, since he has now gained a foundation in English. But Rosalie refuses. A little later she talks to Anna about her love. The daughter is unhappy about the torments of the mother and the intolerable situation, because Ken could be Rosalie's son from age. She makes all sorts of diplomatic suggestions on how to defuse the situation and reduce Ken's influence. But Rosalie keeps emphasizing that she doesn't want to know anything about it. When her period suddenly returns, she feels rejuvenated and confirmed in her right to love the young man. While she sees this incident as a result of the influence of her soul on the body, Anna remains rather worried, as it does not change the external facts and her mother also seems physically weakened.

Black swans

But when Ken, who shows a great interest in old Europe and accuses his own fatherland of its lack of historical atmosphere, suggests a trip to the rococo castle Holterhof on the Rhine, Ms. von Tümmler is immediately full of action. You set out on the water the following Sunday. When you reach your destination, you first stroll through the magnificent avenues of the stately park. The huge old trees and exotic plants there contradict Rosalie's idyllic sense of nature. She is only interested in feeding the black swans in the castle pond for the time being - especially since she can use this opportunity to eat some of the old bread that Ken brought for the animals and that has stored his body heat. Then you go inside the castle to take a guided tour. The war veteran, who drags down the memorized descriptions, shows the group of visitors a hidden wallpaper door , among other things , and when the other visitors move on, Rosalie and Ken slip into the secret rooms behind it. Rosalie falls into Ken's arms in the musty-smelling hallway. He leads them further into an alcove [...] whose wallpaper was interwoven with pairs of beaking pigeons. A kind of cause stood there with a carved cupid blindfolded holding something in one hand like a torch light . Rosalie regrets having to confess her love to Ken, of all places , in this grave and this dead air , and puts him off for the following night, when she wants to visit him in his guest room. The two of them leave the dead pleasure chamber , get outside and mingle with the visitors of the palace again.

However, Rosalie can no longer keep her promise. In the evening her heavy bleeding repeats itself worryingly. A doctor is called and he quickly realizes that the supposed re-blooming of femininity can be traced back to an advanced carcinoma . There is no longer any prospect of a cure or even slowing down of the disease process. Rosalie lives for a few more weeks and during this time she often mentions the black swan that hissed at her when she ate Ken's bread. Shortly before her death, she has another clear moment and asks Anna: don't speak of deceit and the scornful cruelty of nature. Do not be shy about her like I do not. I don't like to go there - from you, from life with its spring. But how would spring be without death? After all, death is a great means of life, and if for me it lent the shape of resurrection and love-lust, it was not a lie, but goodness and grace .

For interpretation

Understanding history as a mere anamnesis of an insidious disease would only mean recognizing its surface structure, not its deep structure. For Thomas Mann is in truth once again developing one of his basic themes: that of the complex dialectic of life and death. Rosalie von Tümmler tends to have an enthusiastic, almost mystical adoration of all living things. But it is precisely because of her naive and enthusiastic piety to nature , with which she believes she must not be unfaithful to the great prerogative of nature, the renewal of all living things, that she violates the law of life of aging.

The morbid spring

The two motifs spring and death are inseparably linked in the whole story. Rosalie perceives the season of her birth as giving strength and youth and believes that nature can do real miracles, especially during this time . The repeatedly mentioned idea of the fountain of youth and the rod of life with which one is beaten at the Schmackostern belongs to this context as well as Rosalie's repeated distancing from the unbelief of the biblical Sara , which, however, with her pragmatic laugh at the assurance that she will still be in old age Having a child proves a clearly more objective relationship to the processes in nature than Frau von Tümmler. Her daughter describes her as a romantic with mystical ideas.

Spring crocus and autumn crocus

But while both the fountain of youth and the effect of the rod of life - which Rosalie once clearly apostrophized sexually - belong in the realm of the imagination, the motif of transience often manifests itself in the appearance of real nature in the story. The oak in the courtyard garden, a popular destination for walks, is already hollow and partially dead, only a few branches are still leafy in spring. Rosalie describes the ambivalent appearance of the crocus as follows: Isn't it strange [...] how much it resembles the autumn crocus ? It's as good as the same flower! End and beginning - you could confuse them, so they resemble each other - you could think you are transported back to autumn when you see the crocus and believe in spring when you see the farewell flower.
Anna, as if foreseeing the end of her mother, then says that nature in general has a graceful tendency towards ambiguity and mystification. This can also be seen when the ladies suddenly perceive the scent of musk while taking a walk and immediately discover that the source of this odor, which is often perceived as aphrodisiac, is a disgusting heap of rotting rubbish swirling around with blowflies .

Even the figure of Ken Keaton can be understood as the bearer of these ambivalent characteristics. Outwardly young and in the prime of his spring-like life, he has lost a kidney as a result of a war injury and is already the holder of a small disability pension. His great passions include the very early historical figures and the old customs of the European continent: It is also he who educates the bottlenose dolphins about, among other things, tasty Easter. Before visiting the palace, he enthuses that there is no such thing as crumbling with aristocratic grace in the New World, and so proves to be an advocate of decay and transience.

Scents and smells

Fragrances and smells already played an important role in Thomas Mann's early works. In the story Die Betrogene this motif of ambiguous smells is expanded. Rosalie von Tümmler is extremely odor-sensitive and combines the most varied of ideas and associations with the scents that nature gives her in the different seasons. She can't stand the musky scent already mentioned above, even if it is of less disgusting and obvious origin, whereas she not only associates the smell of roses with the myth of Cupid and Psyche , but also believes that the kingdom of heaven must smell that way. But at the moment of greatest bliss, when she is finally allowed to hug Ken, she is surrounded by the smell of mold and dead air.

Once she jokingly gave her painting daughter the task of transferring smells into pictures after Anna had rejected her suggestion that she had just made: she should paint something delightful for the heart, for example a lilac bouquet, next to it two Meissen porcelain figures , namely a gentleman, the one Throw the lady a kiss and the whole thing must be reflected in the table top. The gallant scene should therefore be seen twice - one can again think of the motif of puzzling and deceiving that pervades the whole story, but also of a shadowy second world that shows the reflective surface: the underworld or the realm of the dead.

Reflection, water and swamp

The pond at the back of the castle

Not only Rosalie's proposal for a painting contains this motif of reflection. Holterhof Castle also meets the trippers twice: They came to the castle, to the shiny, circular pond in which it is reflected . So if a rapprochement between man and woman is shown twice in the imaginary painting, now here is the crumbling and morbid scene of the embrace between Rosalie and Ken. This phenomenon also continues inside the castle. The sheen of the parquet floors, which can only be walked on in boat- like felt slippers, absorbs the shadows of the people like still water […], while high mirrors […] still give the illusion of unpredictable lines of rooms . The first hidden door that the castle guide shows the visitors - Rosalie and Ken only use the second - consists of a mirror. The closer Rosalie comes to embracing Ken and the ominous turn of the story, the more often the mirror motif appears, and at the latest with the word "shadow" one should definitely think of the ancient idea of the realm of the dead - especially since the hugging scene shortly afterwards in one at least pseudo-antique ambience plays.

However, water, the natural "mirror" that was fatal to Narcissus in ancient mythology , does not only appear in this context in the story. The deceptive fountain of youth may also contain water, but in any case it should be noted that Rosalie refuses to take the tram to Holterhof, but lets rent a private boat, and that she mainly speaks of the black swans before visiting the castle, swimming in the park's moat. This motif is also concentrated around the climax of the narrative, and it is certainly legitimate to associate the waters mentioned with the river Styx , i.e. the path into the mythological underworld: at the moment when Rosalie almost made her wish for love sees fulfilled, she must see herself deceived and say goodbye.

Part of this water metaphor is also the motif of the swamp and moisture, which also appears several times in the story. At the very beginning is of a bottom fold the speech from which to warm, humid days of June ascend smells that Rosalie commented as follows: This is Sunday heated breath of nature [...] and saturated with moisture, so it blows us delightfully from her womb to . Female fertility is alluded to here, similar to the conversation about the wind pollination of the moisture-loving white poplars, which is not mentioned again by chance towards the end of the story: They stand on the edge of the somewhat slimy body of water on which the black swans slide around.

The connection between the themes of moisture, swamp, slime and female sexuality is just as obvious as its connection with the motive of death. The vision of the damp, bustling jungle in Death in Venice appears to have a similar function .

Literary allusions

Although Rosalie von Tümmler does not read much, according to her daughter, it is she (and not the unusually intelligent Anna) who repeatedly refers to literary traditions. The reminiscence of the Bible cannot be overlooked in the numerous references to Sara, which Rosalie expressly does not want to take as a model: I, I don't want to have laughed. I want to believe in the miracle .

Cupid and Psyche ( Jacques Louis David )

zephyr

But Rosalie is not only familiar with the Bible. In view of the stinking pile of rubbish, she quotes almost verbatim from Schiller's Kabale und Liebe - but not a sentence that would be heard on stage and therefore familiar to theater-goers, but rather a stage direction: such a Schranze, extremely ridiculous, of which it is said that he comes in with a loud screeching and spreads a muskrat smell over the whole ground floor. How I always had to laugh at the job! If her knowledge of this passage actually has to be based on reading the Schiller text, it remains unclear how she got to know the originally Greek fairy tale Amor and Psyche , which was handed down in the version of Apuleius . The event was often designed in words, pictures and musical processing and may be part of the educational heritage. In any case, Rosalie knows one scene of the story very well: Psyche, who has never seen her lover, bends over the sleeper one night, an oil lamp in hand, and realizes that it is Cupid. Apuleius describes in great detail the visual impression she receives. Rosalie, on the other hand, does not go into Cupid's visible beauty at all, but says, when Psyche bent over the sleeping Cupid with the lamp, his breath, his curls and cheeks would certainly have filled her nose with [...] fragrance .

Here, unlike the quote from Cabal and Love , she interprets an olfactory experience into a text or a myth in which it was originally not to be found. But why this connection between Rosalie's fate and the ancient legend? The outcome of Amor and Psyche presents, after various entanglements, a happy ending, from the finally concluded marriage a daughter emerges, Voluptas , lust. This is exactly what Rosalie intends to experience for the first time in her relationship with Ken: Now the thought of his awakening strokes of the rod leaves my whole interior flooded, flooded with shameful sweetness. I desire him - have I ever wanted? Bottlenose dolphin coveted me when I was young, and I put up with it, consented to his wooing, took him to marriage in his splendor, and we cultivated lust at his request. This time it's me who desires, of my own accord, on my own .

But not only the end of the legend has a connection to Thomas Mann's story. Because in Apuleius' version two subservient, but potentially also destructive powers intervene in Psyche's fate: the river - the water motif is also hidden here - and Zephyros , the west wind. The latter ensures, among other things, that Psyche gets into the castle-like building where she begins her love life with Cupid. This Zephyros - according to another ancient myth, by the way, the jealous murderer of Hyakinthos - is mentioned again: Rosalie likes to speak of wind pollination, that is to say: of the love service of the Zephyr to the children of the hallway . For Rosalie, the wind not only carries smells from place to place, but also has a clearly erotic meaning. On the boat trip she sings to herself with her eyes closed: O water wind, I love you, do you love me too, you water wind? and in this compound it combines the two most important motifs of the story: death in the form of the deceptive, reflecting water leading into the hereafter and love in the form of the fertility-giving wind that serves the lovers.

light and darkness

Rosalie's closed eyes when declaring her love for the "water wind" in the bright morning light are reminiscent of the Cupid statue in the castle's secret cabinet, which holds a light source in her hand but is blindfolded at the same time. So she apparently does not want to or should not see what is happening in the hidden room. According to Apuleius, Psyche also holds the lamp in her hand that Rosalie mentions. But at Thomas Mann she doesn't use this lamp. She doesn't see, she just smells. Similarly, Rosalie also refuses to follow Anna's appeal and at least for a moment to see Ken “not in the transfiguring light” of her “love”: You are doing him an injustice with your 'daylight', which is such a false, so completely misleading light. This refusal to open her eyes, figuratively as well as literally, works almost like the counterpart to her wish initially expressed to the painting daughter that she should try to convey what is invisibly happy to the eye .

Personal names

Cupid's ride on a dolphin (porpoise?) ( Peter Paul Rubens )

It is no coincidence that Frau von Tümmler's first name is Rosalie and she is a passionate rose lover. The symbolism of the rose leads into a field of tension of opposing topoi such as love and death, passion and renunciation, joy and pain. In addition, the rose refers to femininity in general and to female sexuality in particular. Rosalie's last name is also not chosen by chance. The name porpoises she has indeed of her late husband, the ge is alive quite unabashedly in the field of erotic romps has. If you think of the main motifs of the story, you will also find the association with water, the habitat of the porpoises . The term bottlenose dolphin is less common for a hunger well (a special case of the karst spring), which is known for its irregular, often stronger swelling water from underground caves in spring. A comparison with Rosalie's disease symptoms is obvious here. The bottlenose dolphin, a species of dolphin, can also be related to the Greek goddess Demeter , whose symbolic animal species is the dolphin . This marine mammal and the goddess Demeter represent in Greek mythology the principle of the feminine and its manifestations as a virgin on the one hand and mother archetype on the other. Bottlenose dolphins symbolize in addition the female genitals (in Ancient Greek Delphys called) whose malignant cancer infestation turns out her femininity at Rosalie as a cause of the alleged re-flowering and death of so deceived causes.

Ken possibly owes his last name to the film actor Buster Keaton , who had similar qualities in athletics to the literary figure, but was known for his always petrified expression. Shortly before finishing work on the narrative, Mann commented on Keaton in his diary in admiration. Outwardly, however, the Ken Keaton of the story is more similar to Golo Mann's friend Ed Klotz, who also frequented Thomas Mann's house in Pacific Palisades and who possibly owes his first name to Eduard von Tümmler.

The origin of the name of the family doctor Dr. Oberloskamp : That was the name of the Düsseldorf lawyer from whom Thomas Mann had received the Merian booklet on Düsseldorf with information on Benrath Castle and other information, such as the times of Rhine shipping.

Professor Zumsteg, who is supposed to have an eye for Anna's pictures that Rosalie misses, bears a name that appears frequently, especially in Switzerland. Mann may have been thinking of the Zurich art collector Gustav Zumsteg , who, however, like his Kronenhalle, in which he only exhibited pictures from 1957, is not mentioned in Thomas Mann's diaries from the time of the betrayed .

The "impossible love" with Thomas Mann

The motif of “impossible” love , combined with that of death , appeared in Thomas Mann's works at an early age. In 1902 he asked Hilde Distel from Dresden about the details of a murder that had taken place there the year before: an almost fifty-year-old woman had shot the much younger musician and composer Gustav Adolf Gunkel in the tram . But when the man was able to infer from the reports that Hilde Distel compiled that this was the act of a mentally deranged, not a “normal”, but “too old” and therefore jealous lover with no chance, he lost interest in those involved actual people.

The murder in the tram appeared decades later in Doctor Faustus . Superficially, the murderess here has the features of Mann's sister Julia and acts out of jealousy. In the background, she also embodies Thomas Mann's own longing for the young Paul Ehrenberg , whose features the murder victim takes on in the novel. Here, as in the much earlier novella Death in Venice , love is "impossible" because (if you see the figure of Ines Institoris as the personification of Thomas Mann's longings) same-sex - Thomas Mann's homophile tendencies also seem in numerous other places in his works. They can also be found hidden in Die Betrogene , for example when Rosalie philosophizes: This time it's me who desires, of my own accord, on my own, and I have my eye on him like a man . Shortly afterwards it says: youth is feminine and masculine, the relation of old age to it, but not happy and confident in its desires, but full of shame and apprehension in front of it and all of nature, because of its unsuitability. This, too, is reminiscent of the agonies in love of the aging Aschenbach and the Phaedrus motif in death in Venice .

In other works by Thomas Mann, love is "impossible" for other reasons, e.g. B. Because of his appearance , the hunchback Johannes Friedemann has no chance of winning Gerda von Rinnlingen's heart. Death, however, usually does not appear in the guise of a gentle deception, as in the present story, but has clear traits of self-destruction. In Little Herr Friedemann the disabled and thus hopeless lover drowns himself after he has been pushed back by the object of his desire. Aschenbach stays in Venice , although he is well aware of the dangers of the cholera epidemic , and finally dies in the face of his beloved Tadzio. Paolo Hofmann, who has a heart condition, almost dies on the wedding night himself because the will to be happy was stronger than reason. Even the child protagonists in How Jappe and Do Escobar fight each other are driven to throw themselves into the fighting in the face of the skinny and girlish Johnny Bishop, although nothing else is further from him than violence and endangering his own body. The subject is taken to extremes in the aforementioned Doctor Faustus . Here the protagonist Adrian Leverkühn is explicitly forbidden to love human beings, and he interprets the terrible death of the little Echo as a result of the violation of this devil's pact. Compared to these examples, Rosalie von Tümmler's death can actually be seen as a mild one , as it says in the last sentence of the story.

On April 2, 1953, after sending the manuscript to the publishers, Thomas Mann noted in his diary: A certain elation that it was done. Erika's remarks about how much it belongs in my 'original stuff'. Tells of Klaus' excitement about the fact that all my love stories belong to the realm of the forbidden and the deadly [sic!] - when I am 'happy husband and father of six.' Yes, yes ... This story, still the same, is still an exaggeration. So at least not weak.

An “impossible love” connects Thomas Mann with Düsseldorf, the setting of the novel. 17-year-old Klaus Heuser came from Düsseldorf, with whom he fell in love on Sylt in the summer of 1927 and whom he later invited to Munich.

Thomas Mann's sources

Thomas Mann's diaries from 1952 and 1953 can be seen quite precisely from which sources the narrative was fed. One day at breakfast Katia Mann told her husband about a Munich aristocrat who had suffered the same medical disaster - including the misinterpretation in the context of a love story with her son's head of house - as Rosalie von Tümmler. Mann took up the subject quickly and, while still in America, asked the doctor Dr. Inform Rosenthal about possible clinical findings. He stood above Düsseldorf and the Rhineland. a. in correspondence with Grete Nikisch, but then, having returned to Europe, seems to focus more on the information provided by Dr. To have left Oberloskamps. The Thomas Mann archive contains the Merian booklet on Düsseldorf (volume 4, issue 5, May 1951), which Rudolf Oberloskamp had sent him. For his descriptions of the Benrath Castle, Mann used the representation of the same subject in Emil Barth's autobiographical novel Der Wandelstern (first published in 1939, again in 1951). The use of the book Apuleius is not entirely certain, but it is also very likely. Amor and Psyche 'with a comment by Erich Neumann: Eros and Psyche: A Contribution to the Mental Development of Feminine , Zurich 1952.

Exact knowledge of the book and music of the Traviata / Lady of the Camellias can be assumed for men. It makes sense to think of Alma Mahler as well.

The time of origin and the first diffusion

The story was written with a few interruptions and under external circumstances that weighed heavily on Thomas Mann. In the ten months over which his working hours at Die Betrogene extended, the decision and the realization of the move from the USA back to Europe fell, where at first no suitable accommodation could be found and homesickness for the comfortable house in California, that had to be sold negatively affected the mood of the author. The death of his son-in-law Giuseppe Antonio Borgese also brought restlessness into his usual work rhythm, and considerations about his own age did not make him happier. In his diary he complained several times about his unwillingness to work, under whose influence he drove the emergence of the betrayed with difficulty in places, especially since, as he once noted, neither Ken nor Rosalie were particularly close to his heart. Towards the end of the work, encouraged by his wife and eldest daughter Erika, to whom he read excerpts from his work, Thomas Mann's mood lifted again, especially the rapid sales of the first editions and some positive feedback after the book was in print had gone, contributed to the "exhilaration" that he had felt after finishing work on the "primal stuff". While he initially had concerns about the "crass clinical" character that the preoccupation with his old topic of love and death had assumed this time, he now stated that not every critic used the dialectic of the conversations between Anna and Frau von Tümmler and the book, in spite of its ostensibly feminine subject matter, was apparently not a women's book, but apparently felt this swan song as a certain climax and a fitting conclusion to his life's work. In the following time he suffered again from a lack of enthusiasm for work and wanted a perspective that continued work on Felix Krull , the fragment from his youth, could not really give him.

expenditure

Facsimile of the manuscript as a bibliophile print

First edition with original publisher's cover 1953

The betrayed. In: Merkur 7th year (1953), issues 63–65.
The betrayed. In: Stories. Stockholm Complete Edition of the Works. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 1958
The betrayed. In: Stories. Volume 8 of the Collected Works. S. Fischer, Berlin / Frankfurt 1960
The betrayed. In: Stories. Volume 8 of the Collected Works. S. Fischer, Frankfurt, ISBN 3-10-048177-1
The betrayed. In: Late Tales. Frankfurt edition. S. Fischer, Frankfurt 1981, ISBN 3-10-048225-5
The betrayed. Narrative. Fischer Library, Frankfurt 1988, ISBN 3-10-048217-4

Audio book

The betrayed. Performer: Inge Keller . 2 CDs. Patmos, Düsseldorf 1998, ISBN 3-491-91004-8

literature

Theodor W. Adorno : From a letter about "The Deceived". first time in: Akzente. Journal of Literature. Hanser, Munich 2.1955, pp. 284-287. ISSN 0002-3957
James N. Bade: The betrayed from a new perspective. The autobiographical background to Thomas Mann's last story. Fischer, Frankfurt M 1994, ISBN 3-89501-046-4
Reinhard Baumgart: Deceived fraudsters. To Thomas Mann's last story and its history . In: Heinz L. Arnold: Thomas Mann. Ed. Text and criticism, Munich 1976, pp. 99-107, 1982, ISBN 3-921402-22-0 , ISBN 3-88377-124-4
Cesare Cases: Thomas Mann. "The betrayed" . In: Cesare Cases: Keywords on German literature. Critical Notes. Europa, Vienna 1969, pp. 161–177.
Yahya Elsaghe: Smell in Thomas Mann's late work. About the blind enjoyment of numbing scents. In: Aurora. Magazine for culture, knowledge and society. September 1, 2007, accessed August 30, 2015 .
Yahya Elsaghe : The imaginary nation. Thomas Mann and the "German". Fink, Munich 2000, ISBN 3-7705-3455-7
Volkmar Hansen: "The bread of the black swans". Schloss Benrath and Düsseldorf in Thomas Mann's story "Die Betrogene". In: Bilanz Düsseldorf '45. Culture and society from 1933 to the post-war period. Edited by G. Cepl-Kaufmann, W. Hartkopf and W. Meiszies with the collaboration of M. Matzigkeit. Grupello, Düsseldorf 1992, pp. 381-392, ISBN 3-928234-06-4
Wilfried Hansmann: "... this product of the late Rococo ..." Thomas Mann and Schloss Benrath . In: Düsseldorfer Jahrbuch, vol. 65. Droste, Düsseldorf 1994, pp. 141-183.
Jörg Hausmann: There is something coming. In: New Ruhr newspaper. Lower Rhine. Zeitungsverlag, Essen 1981 (December 24).
Titus Heydenreich: Eros in the underworld. The Holterhof excursion in Thomas Mann's story “Die Betrogene” . In: Eberhard Leube (Hrsg.): Interpretation and comparison. Festschrift for Walter Pabst. Schmidt, Berlin 1972, pp. 79-95.
Dirk Juergens: Thomas Mann's novella "Die Betrogene" or the withdrawal of "Doctor Faustus" . In: Dirk Jürgens (Ed.): Mutual Exchanges. Sheffield-Munster Colloquium II . Lang, Frankfurt am Main 1999, pp. 325–341.
Maria Kublitz : Thomas Mann's The Deceived. In: Renate Berger, Monika Hengsbach, MK (eds.): Women, femininity, writing. Documentation of the conference in Bielefeld in June 1984. Literature in the historical process. NF Vol. 14. Special volume for arguments. Vol. 134. Berlin, Argument-Verlag 1985, pp. 159-170, ISBN 3-88619-134-6
Jeffrey Meyers: The Black Swan. In: Jeffrey Meyers: Disease and the Novel 1880-1960. Macmillan, New York-London 1984, pp. 83-92, ISBN 0-333-37555-6
Joseph Mileck: A Comparative Study of "The Deceived" and "Death in Venice" . In: The modern language review. Maney & Son, Leeds 42.1957, pp. 124-129. ISSN 0026-7937
Michael Möllmann: Thomas Mann's old work: The Deceived - Content and Interpretation. Grin Verlag, Norderstedt 2006, ISBN 978-3-640-16051-8
Johannes Pfeiffer: About Thomas Mann's story "Die Betrogene". in: active word. Schwann, Düsseldorf 8.1957, pp. 30-33. ISSN 0512-0152
William H. Rey: Justification of love in Thomas Mann's story "Die Betrogene" . In: German quarterly for literary studies and intellectual history. Metzler, Stuttgart 1960, pp. 428-448. ISSN 0012-0936
George C. Schoolfield: Thomas Mann's "The Deceived" . In: The germanic Review. Washington DC 38.1963, pp. 91-120. ISSN 0016-8890
Margot Ulrich: '… this little myth of mother nature'. On Thomas Mann's last story “Die Betrogene” (1982) . In: Rudolf Wolff (Ed.): Thomas Mann. Stories and short stories. Collection of profiles. Vol. 8. Bouvier, Bonn 1984, pp. 121-134

Footnotes

↑ Thomas Mann, The Origin of Doctor Faustus , Amsterdam (1949), p. 51.
↑ Erich Heller, Thomas Mann. The ironic German , Frankfurt a. M. (1975), p. 348.
↑ Merkur, Volume 7 (1953), Issue 63–65.
↑ The model for the fictional Holterhof Palace was Benrath Palace .
↑ See KNLL, Volume 11, page 61.
↑ If the novella still likes the fragrant bouquet of lilacs, which reminds the narrator of his childhood experiences, both the sensitive Hanno Buddenbrook and Hans Castorp find the odor of corpses, which is not completely masked by the scent of flowers, to be peculiarly familiar.
↑ This motif connection also occurs in other writers, for example in Gottfried Benn and in Max Frisch's novel Homo faber , which is also comparable to Die Betrogene in that an actually "impossible" and "forbidden" love affair is thematized here: Faber loves one young girl who could not only be his daughter in the years to come - as Ken could be Rosalie's son - but who actually turns out to be his birth child. In Frisch, too, from the beginning of this tragic and fatally ending incest story, the motif of dying and transience played a dominant role.
^ Son of the Art Academy director Werner Heuser
↑ Wolfgang Schneider: The old man and his swarm . Article from August 18, 2013 in the portal tagesspiegel.de , accessed on December 9, 2013
↑ Lars Wallerang: Klaus Heuser enchanted his niece and Thomas Mann . Article from October 27, 2013 in the portal wz-newsline.de , accessed on December 9, 2013
↑ Hanjo Kesting: Double life of a loner. Thomas Mann in his “Diaries 1940–1943” . Article from December 3, 1982 in the zeit.de portal , accessed on December 9, 2013
↑ Hermann Kurzke : Thomas Mann. Life as a work of art . Verlag CH Beck, Munich 1999, edition 2006, ISBN 978-3-406-55166-6 , S, 381
↑ Emil Barth, Letters from the years 1939 to 1958 , Wiesbaden (1968), p. 303. The New German Hefte also deal with the parallels between Mann's and Barth's text in their issue No. 9 (1962 ).