Salon kontrovers: Briefe – schreiben und lesen - „Lieber Lamm in der weiten Welt! – Deine unvergeßliche Häsin“. Aus dem Briefwechsel zwischen Thomas Mann und Katia Mann
"Controversial Salon: Letters - writing and reading - "Dear Lamb in the wide world! - Your unforgettable Doe". From the correspondence between Thomas Mann and Katia Mann
Thomas Mann, born in Lübeck in 1875, published the family novel "Buddenbrooks" in 1901. Despite the success, he feels lonely and like his hero in the novella of the same name, Tonio Kröger, "weary unto death of depicting the human, without participating in the human." He feels like Tonio Kröger in a dilemma: "a bourgeois who has lost his way in art, a bohemian homesick for the good nursery". He seeks to resolve this dilemma by starting a family that gives him the stability to continue writing. His dilemma: he must suppress his secret longing for young men, sublimate that "primeval stuff", cultivate and refine that hated "sexuality" as best he can. And keep writing. Was the marriage then a calculated decision?
And yet he is different from his Tonio. He courted Katia Pringsheim, born in 1883 into an educated, bourgeois, wealthy, German-Jewish family in Munich. For almost a year, he wrote her love letters that are downright effusive, enchanting, captivating, seductive, desperate, hesitant, confused, overwhelming. Katia behaves like a damsel in distress, hardly responding to his letters; but Thomas besieges her until, after a year, he is allowed to marry the 21-year-old, even though she would rather continue studying mathematics and playing tennis. Just 9 months after their wedding trip, the eldest, Erika, was born, followed by Klaus and four more children.
Katia accepts Thomas's homosexual tendencies, which he mostly sublimates anyway. She takes care of the children, the household, the negotiations with the publisher. She was the mother of the Mann company. Is Katia feeling confined in her marriage, Thomas Mann unsatisfied? Despite the tensions, they affectionately call each other by pet names: she the Doe, he the Deer.
After the wedding, she wrote the letters that he hardly responded to anymore. Katia even suspects at one point that he doesn't even read her letters. That cannot be true. Because many of her impressions and observations find their echo in his work, especially in "The Magic Mountain" and in his extensive "Diaries". Her letters are by no means "spoken into the void", but still touch the modern reader due to their clarity, directness, and literary quality. Her letters did not even need to be answered, as they stand on their own. They should be counted among the canon of German literature, like the letters of Mme de Sévigné in French.
It is an overall asymmetrical exchange of letters. And in this edition of our "controversial Salon", it is more of an "introverted Salon". Looking ahead to the 150th birthday of Thomas Mann next year.
Just like in the Mann house, dialogues about connections are held in this Salon.
Image (C) Federal Archives Berlin (Image 183-H27031), via Wikimedia Commons"
Hallo, ich bin Maya.
