“The artist is done for so soon as he becomes a man and begins to feel.” This paradoxical realization, voiced by Thomas Mann’s fictional Tonio Kröger, echoes throughout the author’s early work. Mann suggests that only those who live apart from the “ordinary, respectable” world can truly create art-outsiders who look down, with a mix of contempt and superiority, on those who never experience either ecstasy or existential fatigue. For people whose lives follow predictable paths, the doors to higher realms remain closed.
All the more devastating, then, for the lonely, exhausted poet Tonio Kröger to hear his friend Lisaweta Iwanowna declare: “You are an ordinary man astray, Tonio Kröger, – an erring commoner.” A citizen, nonetheless, embodying a dull, unspiritual existence incapable of art.
The inner conflict
The parallels between Mann and his fictional characters are unmistakable. Born in 1875 into a wealthy and respected merchant family in Lübeck, Mann, like Tonio Kröger, left his hometown as a young man to pursue a new life as a writer in Italy. Even as he managed to distance himself physically, he never fully severed his emotional ties to his bourgeois roots-just as his literary alter ego never truly escapes his own. Mann was inevitably caught in the existential contradiction between citizen and artist, a tension woven into his very identity: his North German father represented one way of life, his Brazilian mother another. When Tonio Kröger says, “I stand between two worlds, at home in neither, and as a result, life is rather difficult,” he’s voicing Mann’s own sense of ambiguous belonging-a metaphorical existence “between the stools,” a theme especially prominent in his early stories.
About ZEITGEISTER
ZEITGEISTER, the Goethe-Institut’s global culture magazine, publishes four issues a year featuring essays, interviews, and creative contributions from international writers and artists. The latest edition marks Thomas Mann’s 150th birthday, offering a sharp, contemporary portrait of the Nobel laureate. The issue explores Mann’s lifelong tensions-between bourgeois roots and artistic ambition, tradition and modernity-and traces his journey from Lübeck to Los Angeles. With accessible guides to his novels and fresh perspectives on his legacy, ZEITGEISTER invites readers to rediscover a writer whose questions still resonate today.
Artist Versus Citizen
Mann’s characters grapple with this tension in different ways. Alongside Tonio Kröger, Gustav von Aschenbach is another figure who straddles both worlds. The protagonist of the 1911 novella Death in Venice is a celebrated writer, honored for his literary achievements. He’s not an outsider at odds with society, but a model citizen, guided by Prussian ideals of virtue and discipline-beginning each day with “cold water poured over chest and back,” living by the motto: “persevere.” Yet, despite his self-restraint, Aschenbach remains an artist and an aesthete. When the aging writer encounters the 14-year-old Tadzio, the embodiment of absolute beauty, during a stay in Venice, his tightly controlled existence unravels, culminating in the titular death in Venice.
In the novella Tristan, published in 1903, the conflict between citizen and artist isn’t embodied in a single character. Instead, set against the backdrop of a mountain sanatorium, two very different men represent opposing ways of life: the failed writer Detlev Spinell and the businessman Klöterjahn. Spinell, described in the sanatorium as a “decayed infant” because of his frail appearance, suffers no physical ailments and stays only because he believes that illness and the nearness of death ennoble a person. Klöterjahn, by contrast, well-fed and prosperous, embodies vitality and continuity-his very name a testament to life’s persistence. Symbolically caught between the two men is Gabriele Klöterjahn, the businessman’s wife, weakened and frail after childbirth and suffering from a damaged windpipe. Her interactions with Spinell, the morbid artist who urges her to play the piano with abandon, ultimately cost her her life.
Autobiographical figures
Then there’s Hanno Buddenbrook, the youngest member of the family at the heart of Mann’s great social novel Buddenbrooks. As the subtitle suggests, this monumental work chronicles the decline of a once-wealthy and respected Lübeck merchant family, with each generation turning further toward art and away from bourgeois life. The only male heir, Hanno Buddenbrook, is sickly, lonely, and introspective from childhood. Entirely unsuited to take over the family business, his passion is reserved for the piano and the death-haunted music of Richard Wagner.
When Hanno, who never reaches adulthood, draws a “neat, clean double line” under his name in the family chronicle-believing that no one will come after him-it’s telling. No character illustrates more clearly how deeply Mann drew the material for his prose from his own life, from the irreconcilable conflict of two worlds within him. Hanno Buddenbrook is, in many ways, Mann’s younger self.
Translation: Sue Pickett
Copyright: Text: Goethe-Institut, Gina Arzdorf. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution – Share Alike 3.0 Germany license.
