Bluebeard's Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann - Softcover

Maar, Michael

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1786635755 ISBN 13: 9781786635754

Publisher: Verso, 2019

Synopsis

Over the last twenty years, much critical discussion of Thomas Mann has highlighted his homosexuality. This not only is presented as a dynamic underlying Mann’s creative work, but also is the supposed reason for the theme of guilt and redemption that grew ever stronger in Mann’s fiction, and for his panic in 1933 that his early diaries would fall into the hands of the Nazis.

Michael Maar mounts a devastating forensic challenge to this consensus: Mann was remarkably open about his sexual orientation, which he saw as no reason for guilt. But sexuality in Mann’s work is inextricably bound up with an eruption of violence. Maar pursues this trail through Mann’s writings and traces its origins back to Mann’s second visit to Italy, during which the Devil appeared to him in Palestrina. Something happened to the twenty-one-year-old Thomas Mann in Naples that marked him for life with a burdensome sense of guilt...but what exactly was it?

About this title

About the Author:

Michael Maar has taught at Stanford University and is a member of two German academies. A leading literary critic, he now lives in Berlin.

Review:

“Germany’s most gifted literary critic of the younger generation.”—London Review of Books

About this edition

• Publisher: Verso
• Publication date: 2019
• ISBN 10: 1786635755
• ISBN 13: 9781786635754
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 160