Tristan (Thomas Mann)

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Tristan is a novella by Thomas Mann , which was written in the spring of 1901 (presumably January – April) and was published in 1903 as a volume of short stories "Tristan. Six Novels". It is laid out as a “ burlesque ” that describes the clash of “bizarre sense of beauty” with “practical reality”.

Publisher's cover of the first edition in 1903

content

Introduction of the protagonists

The solitary writer Detlev Spinell has evolved from the lowlands of everyday life in the icy mountain air of the sanatorium Einfried withdrawn. As a writer, he was unsuccessful. His only publication consists in a narrow novel, "printed on a kind of coffee sieve paper, with letters, each of which" looks "like a Gothic cathedral", which is set in "sophisticated salons [...] full of exquisite objects". In general, spinel has a strange aesthetic feeling which, for questionable reasons, often turns it into a “How beautiful! God, see how beautiful “lets break out. In the Einfried house, too, he writes with passion, albeit only letters, the large number of which he rarely receives an answer. The clinic director, Dr. Leander, despises his strange guest, and a cynical patient has baptized him because of his "strange appearance" and his "big carious teeth" because of "the rotten baby".

One day Mrs. Klöterjahn arrives, the wife of a Hanseatic businessman . Since the birth of her son Anton, who is bursting with strength and thus very much like his father, the ailing woman has had problems with the trachea , possibly also with the lungs , which she intends to cure here in the sanatorium. Soon the colorless, hard of hearing councilor Spatz joins her, whose function is limited to confirming everything her companion says.

Spinell immediately feels magically attracted by Gabriele Klöterjahn, a born Eckhof, curiously asks her about her origins and surroundings and learns that she used to play the piano , but has given up. Mrs. Klöterjahn tells how she got to know her husband: She sat with friends in her parents' garden, "miserably overgrown and overgrown and enclosed by crumbled, mossy walls [...] in the middle a fountain, surrounded by a dense wreath of irises". She was crocheting when her father suddenly introduced her to a young business friend with whom she fell in love and whom she married against her father's resistance. Spinel is deeply impressed by the garden scene and adorns it enthusiastically with details. Certainly they would have sung, and if he, Spinell, had been there, he would have seen a "small, golden crown, very inconspicuous but meaningful" flashing in Gabriele's hair. Impressed by the "weak grace and delicate charm" of his new acquaintance, Spinell asserts that the "whip deserves" whoever calls the former Miss Gabriele Eckhof by his current name Frau Klöterjahn.

The piano afternoon

During one of the other patients' sleigh excursions, Spinell meets Frau Klöterjahn in the salon in the company of the bored Councilor Spatz. After some persuasion he succeeds in persuading her to play some piano , although she objects that this has been expressly forbidden by the doctor. After a few nocturnes by Chopin , Spinell discovers the score of Wagner's opera Tristan und Isolde . Mrs. Klöterjahn chooses the longing, then the love motif: "Two forces, two raptured beings strived for one another in suffering and bliss and embraced each other in the ecstatic and insane desire for the eternal and absolute". Not even the ghostly brief appearance of the confused patient and pastor Höhlenrauch is able to disturb the overwhelming experience. In the subsequent “unearthly deep silence” the two linger in the faintly flickering candlelight for a while, entranced. Then Spinell, grateful and full of admiration for his beloved interpreter, falls on his knees in front of Gabriele with folded hands, while from a distance you can already hear the sledges returning home, "the clatter of bells, the crack of whips and the intermingling of human voices".

The letter

As Mrs. Klöterjahn's condition worsened, her husband, who goes about his business in his hometown on the Baltic Sea and considers himself indispensable there, is signaled to urgently return to his wife. The sight of the naive, vital person, who soon afterwards appears a little indignant with the fat little son Anton in his arms, turns Spinel into torture. Still under the impression of the common piano afternoon, he writes a turned letter to Klöterjahn. In it he verbally evokes the idyll in the Eckhof's Iris Garden, known to him from Gabriele's stories , the “touching and peaceful apotheosis , immersed in the evening glorification of decay”, and then scolded Klöterjahn against an “unconscious type”, a “ plebeian gourmand ” who wants to own and desecrate instead of just "looking" with awe. "The tired, shy beauty of death blooming in sublime uselessness" he had "degraded to the service of common everyday life [...]." While Gabriele is dying, little Anton continues “the low existence of his father”.

Klöterjahn then went to see the poet personally, describing him as a “buffoon” and “coward” who was “afraid of reality”, while constantly quoting in a corrupted manner from Spinell's letter, which he called a “wipe full of stupid injuria”. He knew from Gabriele's letters that spinel was a quirky subject, but his intrigues were of no use to him; he, Klöterjahn, reserved the right to take legal action. Spinel is an envious "wretched man", a "donkey", a "insidious idiot" and "dangerous to the public". He, Klöterjahn, on the other hand, has, as he asserts several times, "the heart in the right place". His angry torrent of words is only ended by the alarming entrance of Councilor Spatz, who calls Klöterjahn to his wife's bed. Her condition has worsened dramatically, she is now suffering from her lungs and has spat "an awful lot of blood". The fact that her death is imminent remains unspoken, but is later discreetly indicated by her "curtained window".

During the walk that follows, Spinell meets little Anton Klöterjahn and his luscious nanny. When the little one sees him, “the horrible thing happens that Anton Klöterjahn begins to laugh and cheer” and breaks out into a “fit of animal well-being”. Horrified, Spinell turns and walks away, "with the violently hesitant step of someone who wants to hide the fact that he is running away inside."

interpretation

Subject

The central theme of the novella is the conflict between the spirituality of artistry , which tends towards illness and death , on the one hand, and the vital, lively physicality of the "real" bourgeois world on the other, two principles that the protagonists, the poet and the Hanseatic businessman, caricatured more than ideal be represented. Thomas Mann repeatedly occupied himself with the subject, early on in the novella Tonio Kröger , and later mainly in the novel The Magic Mountain .

In general, Tristan contains some anticipations on the magic mountain . The parallels between Haus Einfried , a sanatorium for people with lung disease that promise solitude and peace , and the Berghof in the Davos Alps cannot be overlooked . The imperious-authoritarian clinic director Hofrat Behrens sounds in Tristan as Dr. Leander on. Also the “lying cures”, the “completely wrapped in blankets and fur” patients expose to the “sunny frost on the terrace”, the quirky roommates, the winter excursions in the area, all of this anticipates the world of the magic mountain.

The whole thing is acoustically accompanied by the Tristan motif known to contemporaries from Wagner's opera , the symbolism of an unhappy love that leads to death. Thomas Mann parodies the Wagner cult at the beginning of the 20th century, but not Wagner's work itself.

characters

Spinel

With Detlev Spinell, Thomas Mann caricatures amoral aestheticism , a literary movement that was in full bloom when the novella was written. In literary terms, Spinell has nothing more to show than a short novel, more of a notebook than a book, printed in oversized letters and “on a kind of coffee screen paper” (meaning handmade paper ). It takes place in glamorous salons and lavish women's rooms, full of ancient furniture and priceless gems. A sanatorium employee had read the "novel" in an idle quarter of an hour. She found it "ingenious, which was her way of paraphrasing the judgment 'inhumanly boring'". Spinell compensates for his narrow oeuvre with his theatrical enthusiasm for everything “beautiful” and hours of writing letters.

Tall and plump, with carious teeth and no beard, he is called "the rotten infant" behind his back. Spinel is also the name of a mineral that appears like a valuable stone, but is actually of little value. The author Arthur Holitscher is said to have been the model for the external appearance of Spinel .

Mr. Klöterjahn

On the one hand, Mr. Klöterjahn embodies vitality and vitality, but on the other hand also rudeness and vulgarity. He has “his heart in the right place” and knows how to pronounce words like “coffee” or “Bottersemmeln” in a pleasurable way that makes spinel uncomfortable. "Klötern" is colloquially a synonym for "rattle", but also for "urinate", and "Klöttern" is a synonym for "testicles", especially in northern German-speaking countries. No wonder that Klöterjahn will one day find its unadulterated continuation in his son and that the sickly withered Spinel hates him and mocks his name, regardless of the fact that this - unlike his own - lends credit to the world.

Contrasting pairs, which Spinell and Klöterjahn may recall, Thomas Mann had already done in terms of motifs - with gentle irony instead of caustic caricature - and complemented rather than contradicting one another: Hanno Buddenbrook and his friend Kai Graf Mölln, Tonio Kröger and his school friend Hans Hansen.

Gabriele Klöterjahn

Gabriele Klöterjahn, the "femme fragile", bears the supernaturally tender name of the archangel Gabriel . At the beginning of the novella she is completely under the influence of her husband, and is consistently referred to simply as "Mr. Klöterjahn's wife". Even though in her youth she was open to intellectual and cultural matters and played the piano , she soon succumbed to the fascination of her energetic husband, whom she consciously chose against the resistance of her father and whose way of life she adapted. Spinell succeeds in uncovering the hidden ambitions and longings in Gabriele's personality: while she is playing Tristan on the piano in the sanatorium , her real nature comes to light again, which of course alienates her from her husband's self-confident world and ultimately leads to her death.

Art Notes

In one of the dialogues Detlev Spinell says that reality is "flawed factuality". He thinks it is clumsy to meet her greedily for reality. Gabriele Klöterjahn perceives the word combination greedy for reality as “a correct word of the writer. There is a lot in it [...], something independent and free, which even denies respect for reality. ”She suspects that art surpasses reality, that design through art creates a“ higher reality ”.

Autobiographical

Primarily related to the figure spinel, Thomas Mann makes his own way of working public: “For someone whose civil profession is writing, he got miserably slowly from his place, and whoever saw him had to come to the conclusion that a writer is a man who finds it harder to write than anyone else. […] On the other hand, one has to admit that what finally came about gave the impression of smoothness and liveliness. ”Thomas Mann never made a secret of the fact that writing was an effort. He only wrote two or three hours a day in the morning on his novels and stories and rarely put more than one page on paper. "It was always more difficult for me to write than others, all lightness is there in appearance" (on December 10, 1946 to Gottfried Kölwel). Thomas Mann has “layered his life's work up into greatness in small daily work from hundreds of individual inspirations” (quote from The Death in Venice , 1913, p. 23).

Footnotes

  1. ↑ Thomas Mann, Tristan . Berlin: S. Fischer Verlag (1903).
  2. ^ According to Thomas Mann's diary notes on February 13, 1901 and March 24, 1953.
  3. ↑ http://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/kl%C3%B6tern
  4. ↑ https://de.wiktionary.org/wiki/Kl%C3%B6ten

literature

Facsimile of the manuscript
  • Thomas Mann: Tristan , in: The death in Venice and other stories , Frankfurt 1954, ISBN 3-596-20054-7
  • Jehuda Galor: Tristan , in: Interpretations Thomas Mann , Stuttgart 1993, ISBN 3-15-008810-0
  • Hans-Jürgen Geerdts: Thomas Mann's “Tristan” in the literary tradition . In: Georg Wenzel (ed.): Considerations and overviews. On the work of Thomas Mann. Berlin / Weimar 1966, pp. 190–206.
  • Wolfdietrich Rasch: Thomas Mann's story "Tristan" , in: ders., On German literature since the turn of the century. Collected Essays. Stuttgart 1967, pp. 146-185.
  • Ulrich Dittmann Thomas Mann . Tristan . Philipp Reclam Jun. Stuttgart, 1983. ISBN 3-15-008115-7
  • Peter Paintner: Explanations on Tristan Tonio Kröger Mario and the magician . Bange, Hollfeld, 1984, ISBN 3-8044-0307-7
  • Heckner, Nadine and Walter, Michael: Thomas Mann: Tristan. C. Bange Verlag: Hollfeld, 2008. ( King's explanations and materials ).

Web links

Wikibooks: On the art notes in «Tristan»  - learning and teaching materials