Between two Worlds Bourgeois and Artist Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann grappled with it his entire life – this inner tension between bourgeois existence and his calling as an artist. We explore a conflict that shaped his literary work more than anything else.

“The artist is done for so soon as he becomes a man and begins to feel.” The realisation Thomas Mann allows the fictional character Tonio Kröger to come to in the eponymous novella sounds paradoxical. And yet it resonates over and over again in the early works of the Nobel Prize-winning author. His assumption is that art can only be produced by those who live in isolation from the “familiar, ordinary world” on the fringes of society, and who consequently look down with a mixture of contempt and arrogance on all those who know neither ecstasy nor weariness of self and life. Those to whom the doors to higher realms remain closed in the banality of their predictable lives. It must have been all the more shocking for the lonely, exhausted poet Tonio Kröger to be told one day by his friend Lisaweta Iwanowna: “You are an ordinary man astray, Tonio Kröger, – an erring commoner”, but indeed a citizen too, and one who ultimately embodies a dull, unspiritual life, incapable of art.

The inner conflict

The parallels between the fictional character and his creator are unmistakable. Thomas Mann was born in 1875 into a wealthy, respected Lübeck merchant family. Like his protagonist Tonio Kröger, Mann left his Hanseatic home at an early age to begin a new life in Italy – that of a writer. Yet, while he managed to distance himself physically, he never fully severed his emotional ties to his bourgeois origins, much like his literary alter ego Tonio Kröger. Thomas Mann found himself trapped in the existential struggle between his role as a citizen and his calling as an artist, a conflict inherent in his very identity, with his North German father embodying one way of life, his Brazilian mother another. When he allows Tonio Kröger to lament, “I stand between two worlds, am at home in neither, and in consequence have rather a hard time of it”, he likely voiced his own sense of ambiguous belonging, a metaphorical existence between two stools, a theme that runs through many of his early works.

Artist v. citizen

Caught between artistic and bourgeois worlds, Thomas Mann’s characters grapple with this duality in different ways. Gustav von Aschenbach is another figure, alongside Tonio Kröger, who embodies both worlds. The protagonist of the 1911 novella Death in Venice is a celebrated writer, ennobled for his literary achievements – an author who does not live in conflict with society, on its margins, but is fully integrated into it. His life is that of a disciplined citizen, guided by Prussian ideals of virtue and discipline, which see him start his days “with a cold shower over chest and back”, driven by his personal motto: “persevere” (durchhalten). Yet, beneath this self-restraint, Aschenbach remains an artist and an aesthete. When the aging writer encounters 14-year-old Tadzio, a vision of absolute beauty, during a stay in Venice, his rigorously controlled existence starts to unravel, ultimately leading to the death in Venice that gives the novella its name.

In the 1903 novella Tristan, however, the conflict between the bourgeois and artistic worlds is not embodied by a single character. Set against the backdrop of a sanatorium high up in the mountains, two very different male characters represent two opposing lifestyles: failed writer Detlev Spinell and businessman Klöterjahn. Spinell, described in the sanatorium as a “dissipated baby” on account of his weakly physiognomy, suffers from no actual physical ailments and remains in the sanatorium only because he believes that illness and the proximity of death ennoble people. Klöterjahn, on the other hand, well-fed and wealthy, embodies vitality and continuity, reflected in the robustness of his very name. Standing symbolically between these two men is Gabriele Klöterjahn, the businessman’s wife – delicate, pale and suffering from a damaged windpipe after the birth of their son. Drawn to the morbid artist, who urges her to play the piano, she succumbs to his influence – an act that ultimately costs her her life.

Autobiographical characters

And then there’s Hanno Buddenbrook, the youngest member of the family portrayed in Thomas Mann’s great social novel Buddenbrooks. As the subtitle suggests, this monumental work chronicles the decline of a once-wealthy and respected Lübeck trading dynasty, with each successive generation turning more and more towards art and away from the bourgeois world. Already sickly, lonely and introverted as a child, the sole male heir, Hanno Buddenbrook, is entirely unsuited to taking over his father’s business. His singular passion is playing the piano, and particularly the melancholic, morbid music of Richard Wagner. When Hanno, who never fully matures, draws two neat lines after his name in the family records, symbolising the end of the family’s legacy, it is a moment of profound significance. No other character more powerfully illustrates how deeply Thomas Mann drew material for his prose from his own life – from the irreconcilable conflict between two worlds that resided within Mann himself. In many ways, Hanno Buddenbrook is a reflection of Mann’s younger self.