The Artist and Society: Tristan, Tonio Kröger and the Early Stories

Abstract

Buddenbrooks can be regarded as the pinnacle of Thomas Mann’s early fiction. Between its completion in 1901 and the publication of his second major novel, The Magic Mountain in 1924, lay a period of almost a quarter of a century. During that time, Mann finished a further novel, Royal Highness (1909) and published a series of short stories and novella, notably Tristan (1903), Tonio Kröger (1903) and Death in Venice (1912). Royal Highness is a deceptively light-hearted novel; underneath its idyllic story line of a provincial German prince falling in love with a gifted and highly self-conscious American girl lies a more serious (albeit entirely affectionate) study of the clash between the anachronistic mores of traditional Germany and the moneyed opportunism of the new world, between the competing forms of government of monarchy and democracy, and, indeed, between the overlaps and divisions between the private sphere of the family and the public sphere of politics. But this was a side to the novel not fully appreciated by his contemporaries, who expected the tragic undertones of his Buddenbrook study to be further explored. As Mann himself later admitted, the novel was a little too self-consciously on the side of life, too obviously the product of a writer satisfied with his lot and the social order.51 It is Mann in his minor mode.