Thomas Mann: The Art of Humiliation

I

Critics have noticed the atmosphere of decay and relish for humiliation in Thomas Mann’s early stories, in which sexual passion leads not to pleasure and love, but to ridicule and self-abasement. Yet no one has explained why he created this decadent atmosphere and masochistic theme. The homosexual subtext that swirls beneath the surface of the stories originated in his secret personal life. At the end of the nineteenth century, when Mann was in his early twenties, he rejected the idea of marriage and portrayed heterosexual relations as cruel and degrading. At the same time he felt unclean and guilty, ashamed and even disgusted about his homosexual longings and lovers. His solution to this emotional problem was to immerse himself in his art, which sublimated erotic passion and was inspired by suffering. The degraded characters in his early stories are very different from the hero of his late novel Felix Krull (1954), who confidently seduces both men and women.

In a perceptive early essay, the poet Howard Nemerov defined the plight of Mann’s characters: “Disappointed lovers of life and the world, those whose love has turned to hatred or to cynicism, those whose love is an abject and constantly tormenting surrender in the face of scorn… such are the protagonists of Mann’s early stories.” In Mann’s savagely portrayed world art becomes “a kind of ideal equivalent or substitute for sexuality.” Burton Pike’s introduction to Mann’s Six Early Stories missed a promising opportunity to analyse these little known works and merely noted that they portray “the alienation of a sensitive outsider from bourgeois society.”

Ronald Hayman, the best of Mann’s biographers, came closer to the mark by observing Mann’s revulsion against sexuality, “his lust to ravish himself secretly, to perpetuate artistic cruelty, to impose form on himself by… contempt and negation.” Like Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice, the young Mann had “gone through most of his life sacrificing chances of Dionysian passion on the altar of Apollonian restraint.” The characters in his early stories — “Fallen,” “Avenged,” “Little Herr Friedemann,” “Little Lizzy” and “Tristan” — abandon restraint and come to disaster. Mann seems to be imagining the effect on his own life if he had given in to his deepest impulses.

The perils of humiliation, the dangers of repression and fear of letting go, the temptations of beauty and degradation of the artist not only recur in his early stories but also in his major works. The immaculately dressed Thomas Buddenbrook, coming home from an agonising visit to the dentist, falls into the filthy gutter and dies. In Death in Venice a bully pushes Tadzio’s beautiful face into the sand; Aschenbach, humiliated by his ludicrous attempt to rejuvenate himself and by his hopeless passion for Tadzio, refuses to leave the cholera-infested Venice and dies there. In The Magic Mountain Hans Castorp is mocked by the seductive Clavdia Chauchat during the Walpurgisnacht festivities. In Mario and the Magician the waiter Mario is humiliated when hypnotised and forced to publicly kiss the magician Cipolla instead of his girlfriend, and would be executed after he’s murdered his tormentor. In Doctor Faustus the syphilitic musical genius Adrian Leverkühn collapses into insanity before a gathering of his devoted friends.

The dominant theme of humiliation was influenced by Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man and other insulted and injured characters; by Leopold Sacher-Masoch’s Venus in Furs(1870), in which the protagonist, infatuated by a cruel and dominating woman, asks to be her slave and encourages her to humiliate him; and by Friedrich Nietzsche’s concept of the artist’s need to suffer and destroy himself in order to create. InThe Genealogy of Morals (1888) he wrote: “This secret self-ravishment, this artist’s cruelty, this delight in imposing a form upon oneself as a hard, recalcitrant, suffering material… this uncanny, dreadfully joyous labor of a soul voluntarily at odds with itself that makes itself suffer out of joy in suffering… is the womb of all ideal and imaginative phenomena.”

Mann published these five stories between 1894 and 1902, shortly before the Hardenberg-Eulenberg Affair. This sensational scandal in the kaiser’s personal and political circle burst open in 1907 and showed how dangerous it was to be a homosexual in Wilhelmine Germany. It was sparked by the accusations of the journalist Maximilian Hardenberg about homosexual relations between the kaiser’s closest friend Philipp, Prince von Eulenberg and ambassador to Vienna, and General Kuno, Graf von Moltke. The notorious episode led to widespread public discussions of high-ranking homosexuality in Germany and had the same social effect as Oscar Wilde’s trial and imprisonment in England.

In a letter of March 7, 1901 to his writer-brother Heinrich, the twenty-six-year-old Mann described his homosexual love as a rather innocent infatuation: “It is all a matter of … adolescent eroticism: I never seem to emerge from my adolescence… Otto Grautoff [his best friend] says I have simply fallen in love like a schoolboy.” Though he seemed to confine his sexual relations to kissing and embracing, the risks of ruin and prison were considerable. On June 29, 1900 he distanced himself from his mostly platonic lover Paul Ehrenberg (whose name inevitably recalled the prominent Prince Eulenberg). He explained that he had to abandon the dangers and distractions of their emotional life, which could destroy his reputation and career, and to sacrifice love for cautious self-protection: “One must not be too idealistic about these things. With every kind of respect for ‘love,’ one makes more headway without it. A prudence, incidentally, which to me personally is rather repulsive, but on this inferior planet, what can we do?”

The obvious solution to this sexual dead end was to begin heterosexual liaisons. Mann recorded in his Notebook that he and Paul Ehrenberg “have both been medically advised to have a relationship with a married woman,” who would provide the requisite experience without requiring a permanent commitment. Mann had always been attracted to blond and blue-eyed men and women, but in 1905 (aged thirty) he married Katya Pringsheim, a dark-haired girl from a wealthy Jewish family. This seemed to be a renunciation of his former life, but by marrying a slim, rather boyish wife with a handsome twin brother, he felt vicariously close to the man while he was intimate with the woman.

Mann satirized Katya’s family in Blood of the Walsungs (1905) and celebrated his marriage in Royal Highness (1909), a lighthearted Ruritanian tale in which the daughter of an American millionaire (based on Katya) marries Prince Klaus Heinrich.

Though Mann was not actively homosexual after his marriage, he was strongly drawn to and chastely longed for attractive young men, especially waiters in luxurious hotels and even his oldest son, Klaus. The homosexual theme, often combined with rejection and humiliation, recurs with many characters throughout his works: Tonio and Hans Hansen in Tonio Kröger, Aschenbach and Tadzio in Death in Venice, Hans Castorp and Pribislav Hippe in The Magic Mountain, Cipolla and Mario in Mario and the Magician, Adrian Leverkühn and Rudi Schwertfeger in Doctor Faustus, Lord Strathbogie and Felix in Felix Krull.

After Mann went into exile in 1933 and his house in Munich was seized, he was terrified that his homosexual diaries would fall into the hands of the Nazis and be used to destroy his reputation. “They will ruin everything, they will ruin me,” he exclaimed. “My life will never be right again.” He asked his second son, Golo, to pack his diaries in a suitcase and send them to Lugano, and warned, “I am counting on you to be discreet and not read any of these things.” Golo naively handed the suitcase to their chauffeur, who offered to take it to the train station but gave it instead to the Nazi authorities. In the end Mann’s lawyer managed to recover the incriminating diaries and sent them safely to Switzerland. It’s worth noting that three of Mann’s six children were homosexual.

II

Fallen (1894), a study in disillusionment and early sorrow, is told to a congenial group of men by a narrator who maintains a characteristically ironic distance (as in all these stories) and shows no sympathy for the victims. He describes a young medical student’s affair with an actress, which ends abruptly when he discovers an elderly rival who’s been paying for her services. The story confirms the narrator’s belief that there is a sexual double standard for men and women: “If two people are in love and the man seduces the girl, then he remains as much a gentleman as before… But the female is the doomed one, spurned by society, ostracised, fallen.”

The boyish actress Irma Weltner, who has a childishly delicate body, is supposed to have rejected several suitors and be totally unapproachable and disgustingly respectable. The decadent hero, who takes up the challenge to seduce her, has telltale dark rings under his eyes that suggest masturbation. Mann satirises the student’s absurd and rapturous mode of courtship — “He bent over her hand with surging passion, and pressed his lips against it in a long insatiable kiss” — as if he were acting a part with the older actress who lives alone in a poor part of town. Mann also describes his sexual excitement in erectile terms: “His body tightened. His muscles swelled”. The student seizes the chance for sex when he finds Irma crying and vulnerable and — following the clichéd scenario — “their young bodies embraced in violent writhing”.

The hero’s ideal vision is shattered when he makes an unannounced visit and discovers a rival eating breakfast and comfortably ensconced in Irma’s rooms. After a farcical argument, the pitiful old man, swearing vague retaliation, is forced to retreat. The denouement occurs when the hero finds some banknotes next to Irma’s bed and realises, despite her pure reputation, that she’s a courtesan. She feebly justifies her mercenary behavior by claiming that she needs the money, all actresses must have a protector and everyone in town — except the hero — knows what she is. The young man, shocked and horrified, deceived and humiliated, escapes with his reputation intact. Irma, the fallen woman, must continue to sell herself and be scorned by society. The narrator reveals that he was the young medical student in the story, and one of the listeners cynically confirms that females are corrupt and the sexual double standard still applies: “If a woman is swayed by love today, then tomorrow she’s swayed by money”.

The short, overlooked tale Avenged (1899) is powerfully perverse and psychologically intriguing. The hero Anselm, though depraved, craves a completely spiritual intimacy with a woman. He finds a suitable candidate in the ugly and repulsive Russian-German Dunya Stegemann, who has a flat chest and narrow hips, fleshy nose and drab hair. He even ungallantly tells her that their mental intimacy provides a striking “contrast to the distinct aversion which I have for you physically”. He overcomes his disgust when — to arouse his lust and exhibit her amour-propre — she tells him she has slept with another (undiscriminating) man, and now seems more available and repulsively desirable. Anselm thinks he’s doing her a great favor by condescending to sleep with her, and is surprised and humiliated when she seizes emotional power, repays him for his insults and arrogance, and avenges herself by rejecting his crude overtures with a mocking smile.

Mann excluded Fallen and Avenged from his Stories of Three Decades (1936) and began that collection with the more complex and impressive Little Herr Friedemann (1897). T. J. Reed wrote that the young Mann, already a “cynic and nihilist,” offers “glittering but brittle examples of virtuosity.” His cool, detached stories portray “pathetic, even pathological anecdotes,” in which the “renunciation of the full pleasures of normality is finally broken up by passion.”

Little Herr Friedemann opens suddenly with a dramatic statement: “It was the nurse’s fault.” The drunken nurse had dropped the month-old infant, who becomes a hunchback like King Richard III. (“Deformed, unfinished, sent before my time / Into this breathing world, scarce half made up”.) Throughout the story Mann repeats that Friedemann is a deformed cripple, pigeon-breasted and hump-backed. Since love brings him only pain, he finds it safer to stand apart from life, and compensates for his emotional loss with a fine appreciation of literature, music and theater.

The women also come off badly in this story. His nurse is drunken, his mother dies, his ugly sisters remain unmarried and Gerda Rinnlingen (who has the same first name as Thomas Buddenbrook’s beautiful and artistic wife) drives him to suicide. Gerda is misleadingly described by an envious rival in the town as without “a trace of feminine charm in her looks or gestures or her laugh — they completely lack everything that makes a man fall in love with a woman”.

Friedemann first sees Gerda driving a hunting-cart with a pair of thoroughbreds and brandishing a whip, which alludes to Nietzsche’s famous aphorism: “You are going to women? Do not forget the whip!” useful advice in this case. When Gerda stares at him, he feels humiliated; when they bend down to retrieve her dropped fan at the opera, he’s overcome by her perfumed proximity: “Their heads were quite close together and just for a second he got the warm scent of her breast. His face was drawn, his whole body twitched, and his heart thumped so horribly that he lost his breath”.

He screws up his courage to visit her home, though he’s only as high as her chest, and agrees to accompany her piano with his violin. But he suffers her cruel mockery and can only respond with impotent rage. Realising that she is his fate, he abandons his lifelong role as spectator and becomes a participant in life: “though he had tried his best to defend his peace, her coming had roused in him all those forces which from his youth up he had sought to suppress, feeling, as he did, that they spelled torture and destruction”. Under the guise of sympathetic inquiry, Gerda cruelly asks about the origin of his deformity — a subject that has always been avoided in polite society. Her interrogation shatters his protective carapace and forces him to confess that his entire thirty-year life has been nothing more than foolish lies about the reality of his wretched existence and deceitful fantasies about the possibility of love.

At Gerda’s party Friedemann falls on his knees, trembling and shuddering and, like an infant, buries his face in her lap. Attempting to express his humiliating passion, he can only utter “my God, oh, my God” — a hopeless exclamation or prayer for help. She pushes him away — what else could she do? — and as she utters a scornful laugh he drags his feeble body to the nearby river and drowns himself. Friedemann’s absurd outburst recalls the hopeless proposal of Alexander Pope — deformed by tuberculosis of the spine and only four-and-a-half-feet high — to his married friend Lady Mary Wortley Montagu. She greeted Pope’s absurd declaration of love with “an immoderate fit of laughter, from which moment he became her implacable enemy.”

Friedemann suffers a double humiliation: first as a defensive hunchback; then, as he tries to seem normal, his long-repressed emotion destroys his well-regulated life. He commits suicide because Gerda mocks his deformity, he has lost his one great chance for love and can no longer bear his wretched renunciation. Continuing to explore the theme of degrading heterosexual love that destroys the hero’s ability to create, Mann said “the real subject of my story was passion as a distraction [from art] and as destructive of dignity.”

Two other modern writers also created characters who are defensively suspicious of love. In Joseph Conrad’s Victory (1915), Axel Heyst believes it is safer “to look on and never make a sound,” and confesses, “I only know that he who forms a tie is lost. The germ of corruption has entered into his soul.” When Heyst breaks his resolution and rescues Lena both he and his beloved must die. In D. H. Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover (1928), Oliver Mellors, emotionally devastated by his first marriage, fearfully enters into a relationship with Connie and confesses, “a man could no longer be private and withdrawn… Now he had taken the woman, and brought on himself a new cycle of pain and doom. For he knew by experience what it meant.”

The title of Little Lizzy (1897) is ironic, for the huge anti-hero is neither a little man nor a little girl. The lawyer Christian Jacoby — insecure and cowardly, self-tortured and disgusting — is a stout colossus, gigantic and flabby, with thick, column-like legs. Like Irma and Gerda in the previous stories, his wife’s evil character is described before she actually appears. Amra combines malice with “a sensuality both tormented and cruel.” Mann says the reason why Amra married Jacoby is unfathomable, but he adores her and she sadistically dominates and degrades him.

When Amra plans to have a lavish party and provide entertainment for her guests, she orders her husband to become the striking finale and wear an infantile drag costume she personally designs for his maximum humiliation: “Christian, suppose you come on at the end as a chanteuse, in a red satin baby frock, and do a dance. . . . And you must sing, too”. The shy and miserable Jacoby at first refuses to appear on stage but, wishing to please his wife in every way, finally submits to her will.

At the party Amra’s lover, Alfred Läutner, who’s written the music for Jacoby’s song, accompanies her on the piano. When Jacoby appears on stage, “The whole audience stiffened with amazement as that tragic and bedizened bulk shambled with a sort of bear-dance into view… The lamentable figure exhaled more than ever a cold breath of anguish”. He sings, “I can polka until I am dizzy, / I can waltz with the best and beyond, / I’m the popular pet, little Lizzy, / Who makes all the menfolks so fond”.

Jacoby’s act is not a success and the audience, more horrified than entertained, feels outraged sympathy for the pathetic victim. In the midst of his performance on stage he suddenly realizes that Amra and Läutner have themselves been performing in bed and are deliberately mocking him. He then collapses and is pronounced dead by the young doctor, whose final words, “All over,” refer to the performance, the party, the marriage, Jacoby’s life and perhaps even the liaison of the guilty lovers. In this story of sadism and sex, Amra is not satisfied merely to cuckold her complaisant husband, but must also twist the knife by having her lover play a musical part in his public humiliation, degradation and death.

Though Jacoby’s macabre exhibition seems wildly improbable, a strikingly similar event took place before the kaiser, who enjoyed watching such self-abasement, during the Eulenberg scandal in November 1908. In real life as in Little Lizzy a grown man, dressed in a ludicrous women’s costume, publicly performed a musical dance and, in front of a shocked audience, suffered a fatal heart attack.

In After the Victorians, A. N. Wilson reported:

“The kaiser was being entertained in Prince Fürstenberg’s Schloss. The orchestra was to play in the hall while General Dietrich von Hüber-Huseler, head of the military cabinet and a crucial figure in the armaments negotiations between Germany and Great Britain, appeared in one of Princess Fürstenberg’s voluminous ball gowns, complete with feathered hat and fan. He executed a graceful dance to the music, described by those who had seen him enact the turn on earlier occasions as a beautiful performance, if a little too dainty for a man in his position. The general acknowledged the applause gratefully, blew kisses to his audience, and exited to a passage off the improvised stage. The audience then heard a loud crash, and calls for a doctor. Two medics were summoned, but too late. The 56-year-old general had died of heart failure. While everyone panicked and wondered what to do, rigor mortis began to set in. His Imperial Majesty was terrified, in the light of the Eulenberg debacle, that the public, let alone the international press, should learn that one of his most trusted associates and military advisers had died in drag.”

Tristan (1902) reverses Mann’s previous pattern. In this story the brutish husband humiliates the precious aesthete, who has provoked the death of his sick wife by encouraging her to play the music from Wagner’s tumultuous opera. The narcissistic Detlev Spinell is not really ill, but is attracted to the morbid ambience of the tuberculosis sanatorium for aesthetic rather than medical reasons, for its perfect Empire style rather than for its doctors. This hairless “dissipated baby” spends most of his time writing numerous letters, which are never answered, and reading his own mediocre novel, printed in thick Gothic type. He avoids direct looks and creeps up stealthily to the tubercular patient Gabriele Klöterjahn, with whom he shares fine white hands and a passion for music.

Gabriele’s name recalls the angel with the golden halo or with the little gold crown that Spinell imaginatively awards her as well as Gabriele D’Annunzio, the Italian poet and epitome of the decadent Nietzschean of the 1890s. Her ethereal delicacy and deathly beauty, marked by her strained expression and the little blue vein in her brow, resembles the qualities of those frail, languid young women who stand on the threshold of awakened sensuality. Her tuberculosis — like that of John Keats and the Brontës, young artists cut down early in life — has a certain pathetic appeal that a disease like cancer could never evoke.

Tristan, both comic and tragic, challenges Mann’s own devotion to literature and satirises the idea that art is a superior substitute for life. The pathology in the sanatorium is blatant and pandemic, but also strangely seductive and “artistic.” The softness and dandyism of Spinell’s poetry, art and music challenges the masculine qualities of physical strength represented by Herr Klöterjahn, who exists on an “extremely low evolutionary level” and embodies Charles Darwin’s theory of the “survival of the fittest.”

Gabriele’s antithesis, her loud and good-humored but anxious and attentive husband, has a robust appetite as sound as his bank account. The departure of Klöterjahn for his home on the Baltic Sea and of the guests (apart from the moribund confined to their beds) on a sleighing expedition leaves Gabriele alone with the sinister Spinell. As they move from the realm of the real to the ideal, he calls her by her maiden name, Eckhof, and invests her commonplace and commercial home town, Bremen, with all the majesty of Venice: “a city like no other on earth, full of hidden beauties and nameless adventures.” With lyrical ecstasy, Spinell insists that the radiant ladies in her circle must have been singing. Gabriele explains that they were actually crocheting and Klöterjahn later adds the unromantic assertion that they were, in fact, chatting about a homely recipe for potato pancakes.

Gabriele is expressly forbidden to play music that might excite her nerves, intensify her malaise and even incite an attack of her illness. Nevertheless, Spinell first tempts her to play some gentle Nocturnes by the tubercular Chopin, which reveal that she — and not he, the passive listener — is the consummate artist. She stops playing Chopin after three Nocturnes, but night begins to encroach on her life. Though Spinell seems unmanly, perhaps even impotent, they are drawn together — like the flirtatious wife and her seductive suitor in Tolstoy’s The Kreutzer Sonata — by the passionate Sehnsuchtsmotiv that expresses a longing for suffering, consummation and death, the “boundless, unquenchable exultation of union in the eternal beyond!” After Gabriele’s debilitating performance on the piano, Spinell falls on his knees before her in a parody of the angel Gabriel’s Annunciation to the Virgin. In Wagner’s opera, Tristan dies of wounds and Isolde follows him in death. In Mann’s story, Spinell lives and Gabriele dies after playing a convulsive and hysterical passage from Wagner’s work. Both characters are compelled to participate in and become exalted by the music.

Dr. Müller, sensing danger, summons Klöterjahn and his infant son back to the sanatorium. Though Klöterjahn insists that only Gabriele’s trachea (rather than her lungs) are affected, the doctor warns him that the trachea is also an important bodily organ. Spinell had not written to Klöterjahn after he’d gone back to the Baltic, but sends him a letter when they’re both living in the sanatorium. He seizes the opportunity to display his literary skill and to condemn what he considers the husband’s desecration of his wife. The hateful and insulting letter ironically accuses him of doing exactly what Spinell himself has done to Gabriele: “you lead her idle will astray, you beguile her… You take that deathly beauty… and debase it”.

Klöterjahn energetically responds with a manly face-to-face confrontation. He calls him a canting hypocrite and contemptible cur, and justly accuses him of intriguing behind his back. Their intimidating interview is interrupted by Gabriele’s confidante, who announces that a tragedy has occurred offstage: “She has brought up so much blood, such a horrible lot of blood… She was sitting up quite quietly in bed and humming a little snatch of music [Wagner’s Sehnsuchtsmotiv]… and there it came… my God, such a quantity you never saw”.

(Alma Mahler, femme fatale and widow of the composer, described the real-life physical and sexual stimulation of Wagner’s music: “when Zemlinsky was playing Wagner’s Tristan the moment of truth struck them: ‘I leaned on the piano,’ wrote Alma, ‘my knees buckled, we sank into each other’s arms.’”

Spinell prefers Gabriele dead rather than married to Klöterjahn, and cruelly believes that it’s exquisitely beautiful for her to die while he himself remains alive. Though the crude husband may be unworthy of his ethereal wife, the sinister and possessive Spinell neither loves nor protects her.

The story concludes with a second confrontation, between Spinell and the outrageously healthy infant Anton, the child he might have had if he married. Anton laughs, shouts, screams and surrenders himself to his instincts in an unseemly response to his mother’s death: “He squealed, he crowed with inconceivable delight — it was positively uncanny to hear him”. Anton’s unmusical cacophony and triumphant life force frighten and humiliate Spinell and force him to run away. He flees from life, from guilt and from the reality of death. But little Anton is also partly responsible for his mother’s hemorrhage. The same fierce vitality and energy, which he inherited from his father, undermined Gabriele’s health after his difficult birth and left her vulnerable to Spinell’s aesthetic assaults. In the combustible mixture of disease, decadence and music, Spinell does not sacrifice himself for art but makes Gabriele his own artistic sacrifice.

Flaubert’s Madame Bovary (1857) and Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina (1878) adhere to Victorian morality and punish their heroines for sexual transgressions. In Mann’s early stories, by contrast, the sexually predatory women triumph over and destroy the weak men. In Tristan, a more sophisticated variant, the feeble aesthete causes the death of the sick heroine, and is humiliated by her offensively healthy husband and infant son. In his 1913 review of Mann’s stories, D. H. Lawrence observed that for Mann and his characters, “physical life is a disordered corruption, against which he can fight with only one weapon, his fine aesthetic sense, his feeling for beauty, for perfection.”

In his early twenties Mann was torn by social and sexual tensions. He wanted to fully express his homosexual longings, but thought they were shameful and repressed them. His risky homosexual diaries, which he kept throughout his life, provided a secret way to release the conflicting emotions that were an essential source of his work. The grotesque and satiric early stories portrayed his resentment, fear and even hatred of women. Frustrated and angry, he retreated from ordinary emotional entanglements into the perfection of his art. His early works were the first attempts to reconcile his physical desires with his aesthetic sense, a lifelong pursuit that animated his later masterpieces.