Abstract
The advanced scientific insights available to the young Thomas Mann in trying to come to terms with homosexuality included work such as that of Driesmans on racial mixing and creativity and of Hirschfeld on gender. With this help — whether or not he espoused Driesmans' racial theories — he could be enabled to overcome earlier images of the homosexual as inferior, feminine and capable only of passive kinds of artistic achievement. Thus in Tonio Kröger he can present a protagonist whose homo- or bisexuality is not an indelible stigma or a bar to literary creativity. The suffering and passivity previously characteristic of the sexually abnormal man are transferred to be characteristic of the creative writer; celibacy and distance from life are the condition of creativity, not the disadvantages of the man at odds with his sexuality. From this distance, Tonio can proclaim his love of life: a life which, seen in the persons of the blond and blue-eyed citizens of the north, unites elements of the ecstatic vision of the Nietzschean Übermensch and of the ordinary burgher ethos. The creativity which Tonio engages in is that of a lyric poet, but at the end his new-found distanced commitment to Leben seems to issue in a decision to become a prose writer, analysing and observing character much as Mann himself did. Remaining apart from life as Thomas Mann did not, he is a transitional figure in Mann's oeuvre.
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