I recently visited the north German city of Lübeck, which was, a millennium ago, a leading member of the Hansa League that dominated the shipping-trade in the Baltic and North Sea, and, much more recently, the birthplace of Thomas Mann, one of my favourite novelists and to whom I had come to pay homage. A scholarly friend tells me that Lübeck was also the adopted home of Dieterich Buxtehude, the Danish composer and celebrated organist from the Baroque period and that when Johann Sebastian Bach was a young man, he walked from Arnstadt to Lübeck – a distance of 400km – to hear Buxtehude play. Unlike Bach, I took the train from Hamburg, a journey of merely seventy-five minutes, and I spent several enjoyable hours walking around the city, stopping briefly to sample some kaffee und kuchen in a café owned by Niederegger, a local company that has been making marzipan flavoured confections for the past two hundred years. I can confirm that the cake in Lübeck is excellent.
I discovered Thomas Mann’s work as a teenager – Death in Venice plus some short stories – and during my twenties I worked my way through several of his major books, including The Magic Mountain, The Holy Sinner, and Buddenbrooks, his famous early story which was set in Lübeck. In recent years I have read Dr Faustus and re-read most of the earlier novels, and this year’s challenge is Joseph and His Brothers, the tetralogy set in Biblical times. First question: why is Thomas Mann’s four volume novel referred to as a tetralogy, whereas Laurence Durrell’s and Elena Ferrante’s four volume novels are always called quartets? Is there a reason or is this simply convention. Second question: why do I find Mann’s work so impressive and engaging, always a pleasure to be reacquainted with? It was this latter question that preoccupied me as I strolled around Lübeck in the winter sunshine.
Looking out of the train window, the landscape of Schleswig-Holstein had struck me as familiar: it was as if I were taking a trip across southern England: gentle hills, deciduous woodland, green pasture, and slow-flowing streams. The trees, hedges, and garden plants in the city were just the same as those you would find in a comparable English town, and the pathway along the river, which bounds on all sides the island where the old part of the city was built, felt just like the riverside paths in the town where I grew up, perhaps the only difference being the greater width of the Trave.
If the natural environment of Mann’s hometown reminded me of mine, the built environment was at least slightly different. The architectural styles of the older buildings are distinct, with steeper pitched roofs, presumably to deal with higher snowfall, and a far greater influence of Gothic forms and motifs. However, most contemporary buildings looked similar in style and construction to those in England. The German roads were full of the same sorts of cars as English roads, so too the restaurants serve similar styles of food. There were a few interesting looking pubs in Lübeck with typisches local food, but then it is also possible to find good quality wurst und kartoffelsalat in London nowadays; and pizza, kebabs, and sushi and available everywhere. While buildings only change gradually, cars and restaurants change more quickly. Now that the similarity of the physical environments is becoming matched by the growing uniformity of the cultural environments, Lübeck felt as much like my home as Mann’s.
The two languages are also close. Counting from one to twelve in English and German one can immediately see the shared etymologies, unlike counting from one to twelve in English and French. And popular culture for young men seems to be common among the English and the Germans: Hamburger SV were playing a home game the day I was in Lübeck, and when I returned to the Hamburg Hauptbahnhof in the early evening, there were many groups of local football fans, celebrating their 2-1 victory in the traditional ways: drinking beer, singing and chanting, and urinating in the streets. Even our faces look the same. Germany is the only country I have visited where I am regularly mistaken for a local, at least until I start to speak, at which point my very limited foreign language skills reveal that I am an Anglo and not a Saxon.
One conclusion of these reflections would be that I like Mann’s writing because his world is very close to my world. We are separated in time by a century, but that appears to be a greater difference than being separated by the North Sea. If my visit to Lübeck felt like going home, then my reading of Mann’s work could be understood as an exploration of a shared cultural history. On reflection, I found this conclusion too easy, for reasons that Mann himself would have understood.
Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck in 1875, to a father who was a successful local grain merchant and a mother who had been born in Brazil. Her father was also a merchant from Lübeck, who had emigrated to South America for business reasons. Her mother – Thomas’s grandmother – was a Brazilian-born woman of Portuguese descent: Maria Bruhns-da Silva. When he was sixteen, Mann’s father died and the family moved to Munich, where he lived for the next forty years. For Mann, the conflict between the northern temperament – cerebral, commercial, and Protestant – and the southern temperament – emotional, artistic, and Catholic – was a central theme of his early writings. It was a conflict he felt deeply within himself, due to his culturally blended ancestry, and some of his early characters (Tonio Kröger) and his early stories (Buddenbrooks) explore the tension experienced by those who discover that they do not fit in the society into which they were born, because they carry within themselves an alien element, in his case, an artistic sensitivity that is at odds with the pragmatic bourgeois culture that surrounds them. In other books, he writes about men who long to escape the pragmatic bourgeois culture of their birth, and embrace a less emotionally restrained, more passionate form of life, but their attempts tend to end in failure (Hans Castorp) or disaster (Gustav von Aschenbach).
It has never been very clear to me what Mann thought was the source for the problem of his culturally conflicted protagonists. Did northern and southern blood not mix well? Or did the source of the tension lie in the child’s early ambiguous feelings for their parents? One can easily recall German speaking authors, contemporaries of Mann, who laid stress on the physiological basis of character (“the blood and the soil”) and others who laid stress on the failures of child rearing (“the Oedipal complex”). Mann himself was greatly influenced by the writings of Nietzsche, who in The Birth of Tragedy presents Western culture since the time of Socrates as the triumph of Apollonian rationality and order, over Dionysian creativity and chaos. Whatever the source of the conflict, in Mann’s early work it manifests itself in the estrangement of the artist from the heimat. He repeatedly presents the reader with characters touched by the creative spirit, who no longer feel comfortable in the place they came from, and therefore seek a new place to call home, but whose search is doomed to failure.
In his later work after he himself had become an émigré, first in Zurich, then in Los Angeles, and finally, once again in Zurich – expelled from his homeland, his books burned by representatives of the elected government of his own people – his perception of the problem changed. His focus was no longer on the division between the northern and the southern, the bourgeois and the artist, and the inevitable conflict this caused for those who were some admixture of the two, but rather between the cosmopolitan and the nativist, that is, between those who embraced the best of the many cultures of the world and those who clung doggedly to their own, even to the worst of their own. His celebration of the life and work of Goethe – in critical essays and his late novel, Lotte in Weimar – testifies to his determination to find something redeemable in German culture, reminding us that the greatest German poet was a man who loved Italian landscape and culture, read and enjoyed Persian poetry, and was a man who devoted much of his life in politics to the support and encouragement of the theatre, literature, and Enlightenment philosophy.
As I walked around Lübeck I reflected on all of this. What draws me back to Thomas Mann’s books is not just the quality of the writing, but its subject matter. The experience of homelessness is not just felt by those with artistic temperaments and sensitivities, who are unable to live comfortably within the culture of commercial life and bourgeois respectability. It is also felt, more forcibly, among those whose fate is to be expelled from their family and their society, as Joseph was by his brothers in the Old Testament story, which Mann chose to re-tell during the time that he himself had been expelled from Germany by his fellow citizens. Mann explores these questions of belonging and exile by means both of contemporary stories and the re-telling of myths, without ever finding a stable or satisfactory resolution. For some, there is never a place truly to call home, only the unending search.
I am fortunate that I have never been forced to leave my homeland and that my rejection of many of its traditions and habits are mostly tolerated. I left my hometown voluntarily many years ago, dissatisfied with its suburban smugness, and found a place to live that supports the blend of bourgeois commercial culture and bohemian artistic culture that most appeals to me. I have never tasted exile – in Dante’s words, I have never had to accustom myself to the taste of other’s bread and become familiar with the climb of other’s stairs – and for that I am grateful. Likewise, I am happy to be reminded by Mann’s novels, that what is irksome about the culture into which I was born, can be compensated for by discovering what is better from elsewhere.
What separates the English from the Germans is minor compared with that which unites them – their nature and culture, their landscape and language – and for these reasons Thomas Mann’s world is my world too. While I found Lübeck curiously familiar, it is Mann’s deliberate distancing of himself from his birthplace that continues to make his work enlightening.