Little Mr. Friedemann – Still Relevant Today?

One of the earliest stories by the then-young author is Little Mr. Friedemann, first published in 1897 and now considered something of a special case within the Mann community. Thomas Mann himself described the tale of the “little hunchback” as his literary breakthrough in his 1940 lecture On Myself, and critics have read it as a sketch for the central themes of his entire oeuvre. But beyond its significance for the author and his readership, Mann’s work is also a mirror of its time of origin and—as a rereading reveals—of our own present.

Little Mr. Friedemann tells, on the one hand, of the suffering of a person whose body does not conform to the prevailing ideal; and perhaps, in Mann’s typically masked fashion, also of the unhappy longing for love of someone who is sexually and romantically queer. From today’s perspective, however, the story also revolves around the failure of a heteronormatively desiring man: avant la lettre, the protagonist is an incel—an “involuntary celibate,” as such men have come to be known in online forums since the 2010s and in sociological studies since. His resigned way of life and tragic end fit neatly into the program of self-discipline, hopelessness, and self-hatred that characterizes this cohort of men, who suffer from their lack of (hetero)sexual relationships.

The story introduces us to the prototype of Thomas Mann’s eerily sorrowful antiheroes: Johannes Friedemann. After a disappointed youthful infatuation, he vows to suppress his romantic and sexual impulses for the rest of his life. He attributes the reason why the girl of his dreams once turned to another boy to his physical deformity—Johannes is small and hunchbacked. As an adult, he compensates for this by cultivating an appreciation for nature and the arts, yet remains lonely throughout his life—a misfit at the margins of respectable society.

The plot begins when “little Mr. Friedemann” is directly contrasted with a secondary character, the “unusually tall” merchant Stephens. Fresh from the stock exchange, the two are strolling down the main business street when Gerda von Rinnlingen passes by in a carriage—and Johannes, against all his resolutions, falls in love at first sight. The scene crystallizes his life’s problem: it’s about “small” versus “large” (business) men competing in the marketplace of the sexes for goods such as affection, validation, and romantic or sexual fulfillment.

This mirrors precisely the lived reality of those who today call themselves incels. They move within a system of hierarchies in which men’s access to women is regulated through struggles for dominance and status among men, while women are blamed for the perceived unfair distribution of female attention. The femme fatale of Thomas Mann’s era is called a “Stacy” in incel jargon; otherwise, she remains the fantasy of the desirable yet unattainable temptress.

In Mann’s story, it is Gerda whom Johannes imagines as the cold and cruel agent of his downfall. Through the narration of his subjective experience, readers can reconstruct the fictional events: Four days after first seeing her on the street, Johannes and Gerda meet by chance in an opera box, where he abruptly flees without greeting her. The next day, he pays her a brief visit at her home—she and her husband have only recently moved to town. Lonely and scrutinized in her new surroundings, she is glad to find in him a potential companion for making music and invites him to a social evening the following week. He attends—but withdrawn and taciturn. He isolates himself until she takes pity on the lost-looking guest. When she expresses sympathy for his suffering and sense of alienation, he suddenly becomes physically aggressive: “All at once,” the text reads, he throws himself down before her and presses his face straight into her lap.

Johannes experiences this as his total capitulation to her power—there is no doubt about that. All his long-repressed emotions break forth. But how should she react? After a moment of shock, she pushes the strange man away and escapes with a “laugh,” which he, humiliated, interprets as mockery and contempt. His will to live is spent; the story ends with his death in a nearby river. The text offers no glimpse into Gerda’s inner world. What prompted her laughter is left for us to imagine: a nervous attempt to play down an embarrassing situation for them both? A trivialization of sexual harassment? Or genuine scorn for someone whose friendship she had sought in vain?

The tragedy of the “little hunchback” lies in the fact that Gerda does not treat Johannes as a pitiable disabled man to be excluded, but rather meets him humanly, at eye level. That he ends up in her “friend zone”—that she does not respond to him as a potential sexual partner—may have many reasons, of which his stature is only one. Another is her status as a married woman; yet another, that he gives her no chance to truly get to know or appreciate him. He, for his part, cannot accept her offer of friendship because he is unable to perceive her as a person beyond his heteroromantic desires.

The idea of ideal masculinity, the fantasy of fatal femininity, the market mechanics of a gendered society, and the social pressures its members endure—Thomas Mann did not invent these things. His literary arrangement exposes social phenomena that, amplified and disseminated by digital networks, remain strikingly current. Johannes Friedemann’s self-absorption leads to self-destruction. Little Mr. Friedemann thus reveals a tragic tendency also found in today’s incel ideology. As we can read here, in Thomas Mann, its roots reach back to the nineteenth century.