Wälsung blood

Katia Pringsheim , who, together with her twin brother Klaus, is said to have inspired Thomas Mann to create his Wälsungen siblings Sieglind and Siegmund.
(Painting by Franz von Lenbach , 1892)

Wälsungenblut is a novella by Thomas Mann . It was written in 1906 but was not published until 1921 and satirizes Richard Wagner's musical drama Die Walküre by describing the snobbish self-love and incestuous relationship of the rich, Jewish twin couple Siegmund and Sieglind . The title alludes to a passage in the Walküre in which Siegmund calls on his twin sister Sieglinde to incest (and adultery) with the words "Bride and sister are you to the brother / so bloom then, Wälsungenblut". The Wälsung are a legendary Germanic family.

The story is one of the most controversial works of Thomas Mann because of its stereotypical, anti-Semitic rated ideas and character drawings, who prevented its intended publication in the Neue Rundschau due to anger in the Pringsheim house .

content

Mr. Aarenhold is a Jewish private citizen who, as a mining entrepreneur, “directed a huge and inexhaustible stream of gold into his coffers”. His adult children Kunz and Märit and the nineteen-year-old twins Siegmund and Sieglind still live in his villa. While the older siblings pursue their professions or their training - Kunz is in the military, Märit is studying law - the twins despise middle-class normality and career thinking. Spoiled by fate, they are preoccupied with themselves and love “one another for the sake of their exquisite uselessness. But what they spoke was sharp and sparkling ”.

Siegmund has given up studying art history again, not only because his fellow students bathed too seldom for his olfactory nerves, but also because he himself recognized his mediocre talent for drawing and is far from having “fiery expectations of his artistry.” Sieglind is engaged and will soon marry the ministerial official von Beckerath. Right at the beginning of the story - he is invited to a middle-class second breakfast at Aarenholds' - he is mercilessly targeted by the pointed siblings, without even being able to cope with them in the least rhetorical. His reaction remains weak, and the twins, full of contempt for his “trivial existence”, expect nothing else from him: “They accepted his poor answer as if they found that it was appropriate for him and that his manner was the defense of the Jokes. ”When Siegmund, with mock formal politeness, asks Beckerath for his“ grace and grace ”to allow his sister to visit Richard Wagner's Valkyrie one last time with her brother that same evening before the wedding , and the Fiancee agrees kindly, it turns out that Siegmund has long since obtained the tickets.

In the evening it starts to snow. While the flakes are falling outside, the twins climb into the gently warmed carriage. “You were in the heart of the city. Lights flashed past the curtains. All around the steady beat of their horses' hooves, around the silent speed of their carriage, which carried them bouncy over the uneven ground, the engines of great life roared, yelled and roared. And shut off from it, softly protected from it, they sat quietly in the quilted, brown silk cushions - hand in hand ”.

When they arrive at the opera, they encounter, not for the first time, their own mirror images in the Nordic gods Siegmund and Sieglind and triumphantly witness how Sieglind uses a strong magic potion to put the hated Hunding, whom she was forced into as a husband, into a deep sleep in order to be able to give in to her passion for Siegmund afterwards. The twins listen with fascination to the musical love frenzy of their counterparts. During the breaks in the theater, they hardly speak and suckle, while slowly walking along the corridors and stairs as if in a trance, seemingly indifferent to the “cognac cherries” and “maraschino sweets” they brought with them.

On the way home, the two of them sit in the carriage in silence, "cut off from everyday life". They can achieve nothing "that could have averted the wild, ardent and exuberant world that worked on them with magic, drawn them to and within." They split up after a quick and taciturn get-together at the dinner table, but it is for Siegmund, who has retired to his bedroom, it is clear that Sieglind will appear again and, as always, wish him good night. In front of the mirror he begins to try out the theatrical poses seen earlier, goes, like his opera model, with tragic dragging steps to the bearskin lying on the floor, and there, "absorbed in the sight of his own reflection", seems exhausted low. When Sieglind comes to him, already half undressed for the night, she is horrified at first because she believes he was injured or ill. As worried as her Germanic stage model, she kneels down next to him and begins to stroke him. “Her loose hair fell down onto her open, white dressing gown. Under the tips of her bodice, Siegmund saw her small breasts, the skin color of which was like smoked meerschaum. "

First Siegmund tries to fight off their kisses. But when he looks at her "just as he looked at himself before" and realizes again that "she is just like him", all barriers break. As if in an “act of revenge” against the clumsy Hunding alias Beckerath, both “like the hopeless” get intoxicated by their “caresses that overflowed and became a hasty tumult and in the end just a sob”.

You come to again as if numb. After Sieglind's embarrassed question what happened to Beckerath, Siegmund, after initially speechless, finds his way back to the old eloquence and at the same time explains the incestuous relationship of the siblings to the future permanent state: Beckerath should be “grateful”. "He will lead a less trivial existence from now on."

publication

The novella was to be published for the first time in the literary newspaper Neue Rundschau in 1906, but Thomas Mann withdrew it at short notice after a conversation with his brother-in-law Klaus Pringsheim on December 15, as he feared a dispute with his wife Katia's family if the work was considered by the public Key narrative should be understood. Like the title characters who enter into an incestuous relationship in the story, Katia and her brother Klaus were twins and came from a wealthy Jewish family. The January edition of the Neue Rundschau then had to be reprinted. According to the memories of various contemporary witnesses, however, waste sheets of the novella, which had been used as wrapping paper for other books by Fischer-Verlag, were kept by the employee of a Munich bookstore, so that rumors about the content of the story spread in Munich.

It was not until 1921 that the story appeared in book form, illustrated by Thomas Theodor Heine , as a private print by Phantasus-Verlag. This edition was published as a photomechanical reprint in 1975 by Aufbau-Verlag Berlin and Weimar. In 1958 the story was included in the Stockholm Complete Edition of Mann's Works. Compared to the original version, Mann defused the ending in the later published versions and replaced the closing punch line “We started him, the Goi !” With the wording above. Thomas Mann owes the name beganeft to Katia's father Alfred Pringsheim . However, the father-in-law did not know what his son-in-law had in mind when he asked him for a Yiddish expression for a horned groom. Katia Mann commented on this in 1973 in her unwritten memoir : “If Thomas Mann had had the impression that there was an illicit relationship between me and my brother, he would have separated from me immediately or withheld it, but not announced it to the world in a novella . It was as clear as day that something like this could not have existed. "

interpretation

Siegmund's figure is characterized by extreme aestheticism and narcissism . “He is a décadent par excellence . Following the example of Huysmans' novel À Rebours , published in 1884 , which was soon to be seen as a manifesto of decadence , Siegmund and his sister Sieglind lived 'against the grain' - à rebours - of the despised bourgeois normality and perfumes himself, shaves twice a day and changes ties several times. He is clearly drawn androgynous and can therefore find himself in his sister: “You are just like me.” Thus the union with the sister demonstrates less an incestuous act than narcissistic self-enjoyment.

The incest performed on the kitschy polar bear skin - “a cipher of sterile self-deprivation”, which points to an “uncreative habit” and therefore became a “favorite motif of the era” - also contains an ironic swipe by Thomas Mann at the aestheticism of his time. In his self-styling, Siegmund can only clumsily imitate what he experienced on stage (the incest in Die Walküre also happens on a bear's skin), but cannot himself become artistically productive. Wealth prevents him from doing this: “He was too astute not to understand that the conditions of his existence were not exactly the most favorable for the development of a creative gift.” Because “The endowment of life was so rich, so many, so overloaded that there was almost no room for life itself. ”- The luxury of bourgeois life paralyzes Siegmund's creative abilities, as it were. And the author still has so much sympathy for his negative figure that he lets her recognize the typical Mann artist credo in her instinctive suffering from her creative deficiency:

“There was a pain in Siegmund's chest, a burning or aching, something like a sweet tribulation - where to? after what? It was so dark, so shamefully unclear. He felt two words: Creativity ... Passion. And while the heat was throbbing in his temples, it was like a wistful glimpse that creation came from passion and again assumed the form of passion. [...] He looked at his own life, this life made up of softness and wit, pampering and negation, luxury and contradiction, opulence and intellectual brightness, rich security and flirting hatred, this life in which there was no experience , only logical game, no sensation, only killing labeling. "

This indicates the artist-citizen conflict that is so constitutive for Thomas Mann's work. Thomas Mann also feared that the luxury that his marriage to Katia Pringsheim brought him would lose his artistic productivity. Because for him the sword of Damocles of threatening amateurism always hovered over that carefree life . However, Thomas Mann was not only aware of this danger, but - in contrast to Siegmund - was able to make use of the wealth: “Oh, wealth is a good thing […]. I am an artist enough, corruptible enough, to be enchanted by it. ”Because the basis for his artistry is always the passion that he would like to maintain even in the face of the new, improved living conditions.

filming

The novella was filmed under the same title in 1964 under the direction of Rolf Thiele . Performers were: Rudolf Forster (Count Arnstatt) - Margot Hielscher (Countess Isabella) - Michael Maien (Siegmund) - Gerd Baltus (Beckerath) - Elena Nathanael (Sieglind). The singer Ingeborg Hallstein had a guest appearance in the small role of Comtess Märit Arnstadt.

literature

• Helmut Koopmann (Ed.): Thomas Mann Handbook. 3rd edition, Kröner, Stuttgart 2001, ISBN 3-520-82803-0 .
• Tobias Kurwinkel: Apollonian outsiders. Configurations of Thomas Mann's "basic motif" in narrative texts and film adaptations of the early work. With an unpublished letter from Golo Mann about the making of the film adaptation “Der kleine Herr Friedemann”. Königshausen & Neumann, Würzburg 2012, ISBN 978-3826046247 .
• Ariane Totzke: The Utopia of Assimilation. On the stigmatization of the Jewish in Thomas Mann's "Wälsungenblut" . In: active word. 61, No. 1, 2011, pp. 45-61.

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas Mann chose the name Beckerath because of the difficult collector relationship between his father-in-law Alfred Pringsheim and Adolf von Beckerath , the most important non-Jewish art collector in Berlin at the time .
2. ↑ Klaus Harpprecht : Thomas Mann, Eine Biographie , Rowohlt, Reinbek 1995, p. 270.
3. ↑ Peter de Mendelssohn : The magician. The life of the German writer Thomas Mann . 1. Volume, Frankfurt 1975, pp. 662-667.
4. ↑ ^{a b} Jochen Schmidt: The story of genius-idea in German literature, philosophy and politics from 1750 to 1945. Knowledge Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1985, Volume 2, p. 240.
5. ↑ Thomas Mann: Letters to Otto Grautoff 1894–1901 and Ida Boy-Ed 1903–1928. S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1975, ISBN 3-10-048183-6 , p. 156.

Web links

Wikiversity: Thomas Mann: Wälsungenblut (1921). With lithographs by Th. Th. Heine.  - course materials