The German Genius

bourgeoisie—to which he is also drawn—and that of an artist. This theme, the place of art in life, and its relation to “engagement” and politics, was to dog Thomas all through his career.
    Between their first successes and the outbreak of World War I, both brothers wrote a great deal and both had one more major triumph before hostilities sent them their separate ways. In Heinrich’s case it was Professor Unrat , published in 1905. This was about a small-town secondary-school teacher, Professor Rat, who is so loathed by his students that they nickname him “Unrat,” altering the meaning of his name from “counsel” to “excrement.” 28 Unbalanced by this, Unrat one evening follows a group of students to a shady nightclub near the town’s port, a club called the Blue Angel, where he intends to expose them and ruin their careers. Instead, he falls for the nightclub singer Künsterlin Fröhlich. His obsession is now threatened with exposure by the very students he had intended to disgrace, and it is he who begins to sink ever lower in society. Dismissed by his school, he marries the singer and, with the aid of the gambling that takes place in the club, exercises a corrupting influence on the whole town.
    Professor Unrat showed Heinrich at his bitter best but such was the nationalism in Germany at the time that his message was scarcely welcome. However, when the book was re-issued in the middle of the war it did much better, selling over 50,000 copies. It did even better in 1930 when Der blaue Engel ( The Blue Angel ) became one of the first sound films released in Germany, directed by Josef von Sternberg, with a script by Carl Zuckmayer and starring Marlene Dietrich as the nightclub singer.
    Der Tod in Venedig ( Death in Venice ), published by Thomas in 1913, was much better received. Gustav von Aschenbach is a writer newly arrived in Venice to complete his masterpiece. He has the appearance, as well as the first name, of Mahler, whom Mann fiercely admired and who died on the eve of Mann’s own arrival in Venice in 1911. No sooner has Aschenbach arrived than he chances upon a Polish family staying in the same hotel and he is struck by the dazzling beauty of the young son, Tadzio, dressed in an English sailor suit. The story follows the aging Aschenbach’s growing love for Tadzio; meanwhile he neglects his work, and his body succumbs to the cholera epidemic encroaching on Venice. Aschenbach fails to complete his work and also, deliberately, fails to alert Tadzio’s family to the epidemic so they might escape. The writer dies, never having spoken to his beloved.
    Aschenbach, with his ridiculously quaffed hair, his rouge make-up, his elaborate and dated clothes, is intended by Mann to embody a once-great culture now “deracinated and degenerate.” He is also the artist himself. In Mann’s private diaries, published posthumously, he admitted to being erotically stirred by young, handsome men, though his 1905 marriage to Katja Pringsheim (daughter of a well-known professor at the University of Munich and herself the first female student at that institution) seemed happy enough. The horrors lurking beneath the surface of the story also call to mind the general climate of opinion in “civilized” Europe in the run-up to war.
    B EER AND S ATIRE
     
    Simplicissimus was not only the name of a satirical magazine. It was also adopted as the name for one of the new “cabarets” in Munich. The city had a long tradition of popular entertainment—there were, according to one account, nearly 400 folksingers performing in Munich in 1900. 29 Their entertainment was tied to the popular beer-drinking culture of the city.
    But one man stood out: Frank Wedekind (1864–1918). His father was a doctor and his mother a singer and actress, and the family lived in Hanover. The doctor was a fierce democrat, had taken part in the 1848 revolution, and afterward escaped to America (his son’s name was actually Benjamin Franklin Wedekind). 30 In America the doctor made a quick fortune in land speculation and it was there, in San Francisco, that he met his wife, twenty-three years younger than he. He returned to Germany but, dismayed by Bismarck’s policies, immigrated to Switzerland and bought a castle in Lenzburg, where Frank grew up. He attended first the University of Lausanne and then the University of Munich but abandoned his legal and literature studies, taking a job as a publicity agent for the Swiss soup company