‘Can anyone?’ – Hands in Thomas Mann's estate library

Thomas Mann's book collection, which grew over the course of his life and was clearly influenced by the biographical steps of his journey into exile, is now largely housed in the Thomas Mann Archive at ETH Zurich. I had the opportunity to familiarise myself with it from 2016 to 2019 as part of a research project whose goal was to completely catalogue the traces of reading it contained. The result is the Thomas Mann Estate Library Online, where Mann's marginalia can be searched and found digitally.

My colleague at the time, Manuel Bamert, and I approached the collection, which today appears neatly dematerialised on the screen, physically and haptically at the beginning of our cataloguing work. It was sometimes a dusty business to leaf through each book page by page, searching for traces by hand, a total of approximately 1.2 million pages. Many fascinating phenomena relating to the history of books can be found in it: remnants of animal use such as bite marks from Thomas Mann's dog Niko; confiscation stamps from the Nazi era; even objects such as a nail file; and, of course, pen and writing marks from a wide variety of people whose hands the books passed through before, during and after Thomas Mann's lifetime.

The library has been accessible to researchers for decades; the first part of it was added to the archive in 1956, and since 1967 the Thomas Mann Archive has also been publishing the Thomas Mann Studies series, which at that time was explicitly dedicated to source-critical contributions. The books beneath my fingers bore witness to the continuing interest in research: there was no dust on the edges of those volumes that Mann was known to have read thoroughly and annotated. Among them is a two-volume edition of Albert Bielschowsky's Goethe. His Life and Works (Thomas Mann 509:1 and 509:2).

Goethe, as we know, was a lifelong reference point for Mann; as a literary inspiration, as a source of support and comfort in foreign lands, as a model of the “national poet” – and as a rival in this position. Accordingly, many books by and, significantly, about Goethe have been preserved from Mann's estate. Mann familiarised himself not only with the works, but also with their significance in Goethe's career: how old was Goethe when he wrote Werther? Which was his journeyman's piece, which his masterpiece? How was he perceived by the people of his time? How is he assessed by today's research?

Mann read Bielschowsky's two volumes avidly, as evidenced by the many traces of his reading in them. The books came into Mann's possession shortly after their publication in 1905. At that time, he was working on the story Schwere Stunde (Difficult Hour), in which a Schiller character describes the creative power of his rival Goethe with envy and admiration. Later, Mann's diaries, preserved from 1921 onwards, repeatedly mention his reading of “Bielschowsky”. The two volumes accompanied him for half a century, and the years between 1905 and 1955 could hardly have been more eventful and rich in development for Mann in his private life, his political thinking and his ongoing literary work.

A glance at Thomas Mann research allows us to roughly and approximately schematise Mann's self-reference to Goethe during this period: distancing himself in Schwere Stunde (1905), identification in Joseph in Egypt (1936), overcoming in Lotte in Weimar (1939), transgression in Doctor Faustus (1947). This movement can be seen in the traces of the “Bielschowsky” readings: Thomas Mann's young writing hand expressed “sympathy” in pencil cursive for the plan of a prose poem about the biblical figure of Joseph, which Goethe himself never realised. Here, in Bielschowsky, she also found justification for her “identification” with a previous literary giant.

Much later, in the 1940s, Mann reread the volumes. This is evident in a passage in the printed text that admires the breadth of Goethe's mind: at the same time, it says, he was able to reconcile the contradictions between the political ‘Xenien’ and the ‘most ethereal books of his Wilhelm’. The passage is underlined, this time in blue pencil. But the high praise no longer seems to have particularly impressed the writer of the accompanying marginalia. In Latin cursive, in the hand of the established author, it says: ‘Anyone can do that. Radio and Joseph.’

However, ‘everyone’ refers to none other than Thomas Mann himself: “Joseph” refers to the four volumes of the Joseph tetralogy (written between 1926 and 1943), ‘Radio’ to the political speeches that Mann gave from his exile in America, first in October 1940 and then regularly until 1945, to German listeners on the BBC. With the publication of Joseph, the great role model could be considered caught up with: ‘But Dr. Faustus is not my Faust at all, it is rather “Joseph”,’ Mann himself later judged (letter of 4 September 1951 to Walter Haußmann).

The two Bielschowsky volumes, as evidenced by their dedication from 1905, the archive entries from 1956, the barcode strips added to the estate library since then, and the dust-free book edges, have passed through many different hands. Thomas Mann himself dealt with them at very different stages of his life, thinking and writing: the marginalia of the young and mature reader show that they were touched by the same hands several times, but never twice by the same hands.