Thomas Mann and Bertolt Brecht: Anatomy of an Antagonism

Abstract

Mann and Bertolt Brecht. Indeed, there are plenty of documents testifying to their mutual dislike. Occasionally, the nastiness and vindictiveness acquired high literary quality. Brecht, a master of crude humor, did most of the attacking while Mann contented himself with disdain and irony in his replies. One could dismiss all this as a mere literary feud or speak about feelings of competition and personal resentment between the two writers. Yet, such literary psychology does not really help us understand this relationship. As far as we can judge, Thomas Mann and Brecht were not jealous of each other as writers. It was different with Robert Musil, Alfred D!blin and Arnold Zweig, who regularly made deprecating remarks about the author of The Magic Mountain and the tetralogyJoseph and His Brothers. These novelists rejected a completely different narrative standpoint of a successful rival. contrast, Brecht never felt it necessary to compare himself to Mann in order to establish his own identity. He knew who he was. Besides, if he was at all prepared to recognize the principle of specialization in the arts, he felt himself primarily to be a dramatist and poet. neither case could Thomas Mann, the novelist and essayist, be considered a competitor. Nor was it a question of allegiance to rival literary schools or movements. the talk Meine Zeit (My Times) delivered by Mann in 1950 on the occasion of his seventy-fifth birthday, he remarked: In recollection, I can say that I never tried to be in vogue. I never belonged to a school or coterie which set the style of the day. Neither the naturalists, nor the neo-romantics, neo-classicists, symbolists, expressionists, or whatever they were called. I was never supported by a school and rarely praised by men of letters. I For the most part this is true even though it is unintentionally comical and formulated somewhat spitefully. Obviously it is absurd to contend that the world fame of the author Thomas Mann came about essentially without praise, i.e., without the literary criticism of specialists. What is true is that the expressionists in the period around 1920 found the author Thomas Mann an interesting subject, mainly for their mockery. Of course, there was another