The German Genius

was conservative and anti-Semitic, not qualities that would be long associated with Heinrich, but it was also polemical and anti-monarchist because the editors felt that Wilhelm II had “sold out” to capitalist and moneyed groups in Germany at the expense of the hard-working bourgeoisie. 23 Heinrich wrote a great deal for the magazine, from militarism (a bête noir of his) to anti-Semitism to Nietzsche, whom he found the most interesting modern philosopher.
    For a time the brothers’ careers ran more or less in parallel, for by now Thomas’s new novella, “Der Wille zum Gluck” ( The Will to Happiness ), was appearing in yet another new Munich magazine, the satirical weekly Simplicissimus . This publication was the brainchild of Albert Langen, the son of a rich industrialist who had originally started a publishing house and only turned to the magazine later. Just 15,000 copies of the first edition were sold but even so the magazine soon became the sharpest-tongued publication in all Germany. Very liberal, Simplicissimus constantly attacked the government of the Reich and supported the workers against the employers. The emperor accused the magazine of undermining Germany’s international prestige, and in 1898 a lawsuit was brought against Langen, as publisher, Frank Wedekind, as writer, and Thomas Heine, a cartoonist. Langen fled to Switzerland, remaining in exile for five years, while Heine and Wedekind were imprisoned for six and seven months respectively.
    This publicity only helped the magazine, sales soared to 85,000, which helped it attract other writers like Ludwig Thoma (himself imprisoned later) and Rainer Maria Rilke. Soon after Thomas Mann began writing for it, he was asked to join the staff. He was, as we would say today, a copy-taster, vetting the stories sent in for publication. In this way he met many writers, satirists, and cartoonists of the day.
    It was about this time that differences between Heinrich and Thomas began to appear. Their only collaboration, a Bilderbuch für artige Kinder ( Picture Book for Good Children ), was produced in 1896–97, but with Im Schlaraffenland ( In the Land of Cockaigne ; 1900), and Buddenbrooks (1901), the divergence of the brothers became obvious. Thomas’s Buddenbrooks was a long, beautifully written account of a declining bourgeois family, which owed as much to Thomas’s reading—and appreciation of—Tolstoy, as to anything else. But the book was bleak. Thomas Budden-brook and his son Hanno die at a relatively early age—Thomas in his forties, Hanno in his teens—“for no other very good reason than they have lost the will to live.” Behind their fate lies the specter of Darwin, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, nihilism, and degeneracy. Although it sold only slowly to begin with, it was critically well received, and eventually earned for Thomas enduring fame and the Nobel Prize. 24
    Heinrich’s Im Schlaraffenland , on the other hand, has been described as “the first completely ‘new’ novel of the twentieth century in Germany,” showing a debt to Balzac, Maupassant, and Zola. “Half my being consisted at this time,” he said later, “of French sentences.” The story concerned the temptations of an innocent young writer anxious to make his mark in fin-de-siècle Berlin. Into this apparently simple story line, Heinrich brought to bear his acid powers of observation, a mordant eye for the corrosive aspects of social climbing, lust for money, commercial deceit, and sham in all its guises. It was an angry book, “impudent,” as his publisher described it, and cast in a style that hadn’t existed before, at least not in Germany. Heinrich was close to a breakdown after producing it, but the book was unique in the history of the German novel, “the first major foundation of German expressionism.” 25
    Whereas Heinrich became ever more acerbic, an ever louder critic of Wilhelmine Germany (as he was one of the first, much later, to predict the annihilation of the Jews by the Nazis), Thomas was more melancholic, more interested in the arts. 26 This affected his choice of follow-up to Buddenbrooks , a work in which, as Thomas later said, “I learned to use music to mould my style and form.” This was Tonio Kröger , which he later described as the “dearest” of all his books and the most personal. 27 Tonio Kröger is about a young writer’s struggle to find his true self as an artist, his disillusion and his comparison of the life of the