Son of the famous Thomas Mann, homosexual, drug-addicted, and forced to flee from his fatherland, the gifted writer Klaus Mann's comparatively short life was as artistically productive as it was ...devastatingly dislocated. Best-known today as the author ofMephisto, the literary enfant terrible of the Weimar era produced seven novels, a dozen plays, four biographies, and three autobiographies-among them the first works in Germany to tackle gay issues-amidst a prodigious artistic output. He was among the first to take up his pen against the Nazis, as a reward for which he was blacklisted and denounced as a dangerous half-Jew, his books burnt in public squares around Germany, and his citizenship revoked. Having served with the U.S. military in Italy, he was nevertheless undone by anti-Communist fanatics in Cold War-era America and Germany, dying in France (though not, as all other books contend, by his own hand) at age forty-two. Powerful, revealing, and compulsively readable, this first English-language biography of Klaus Mann charts the effects of reactionary politics on art and literature and tells the moving story of a supreme talent destroyed by personal circumstance and the seismic events of the twentieth century.
RÉSUMÉ
Cet article s'inscrit dans l'hypothèse de l'encadrement développée par Charolles (1997), et réexaminée ultérieurement sous divers angles. Une condition syntaxique est mise au jour par Fuchs et ...Fournier (2003), à laquelle nous portons une attention particulière : à savoir, l'antéposition nécessaire du sujet (S) par rapport au verbe (V), suivant un terme initial cadratif. Nous réinterrogeons le lien entre encadrement et position du sujet à la lumière d'un corpus de contes oraux. Nous défendons l'hypothèse que dans certains cas, lorsqu'ils apparaissent dans des sections stratégiques du conte, les syntagmes spatio-temporels suivis de l'ordre VS peuvent être regardés comme proprement cadratifs.
Shylock the German Doring, Tobias
Shakespeare studies (Columbia),
01/2021, Letnik:
49
Journal Article
Recenzirano
The sequence seeks to introduce us to the early eighteenth-century milieu of the Frankfurt Jews where Süß Oppenheimer has his business establishment and where the courtly emissary, sent by the ...spendthrift Duke of Württemberg to borrow money to support his lavish lifestyle, first meets him to negotiate a loan. First we see Oppenheimers servant open the door and welcome the embarrassed emissary, his carriage leaving for a more respectable part of the city. Mann's harsh portrait of this figure-though primarily targeting Gustaf Gründgens, an even greater stage celebrity and General Director of the Preußisches Staatstheater-culminates in the actor's cant about the innocence of playacting: "Ich bin doch nur ein ganz gewöhnlicher Schauspieler!" ("But I am just an ordinary actor!")-a plea that resonates with the whitewashing of his career that Krauß later attempted in his memoir.5 In the Weimar era, he already had a reputation for the Jewish roles he played with great success and gusto, among them the gothic usurer villain in the 1926 silent horror film Der Student von Prag and, needless to say, various Shylocks: in the spectacular and massive 1921 staging of Merchant, which Reinhardt mounted in the grand arena of the Großes Schauspielhaus Berlin, Krauß starred in the role, repeating this feat two years later in Felner's opulent silent movie Der Kaufmann von Venedig (released in the US in 1926 under the title The Jew of Mestri). In "Elements of Antisemitism," part five of their Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno analyze civilization as a process by which the primeval power of mimesis-what they call "the organic adaptation to otherness," a numbing and a fatally assimilative force of compulsive imitation- has been increasingly subdued, domesticated, and transformed into new modes of behavior, first "in the magical phase" into an "organized manipulation of mimesis" and later, "in the historical phase," into "rational praxis" and work.7 Civilized society, they argue, may no longer indulge in old mimetic practices because they threaten loss of self-control, hence must be banned and consciously worked off, in strenuous cultural efforts that range from "the religious ban on graven images through the social ostracizing of actors and gypsies to the education which 'cures' children of childishness.
Thomas Mann's two eldest children, Erika and Klaus, were unconventional, rebellious, and fiercely devoted toeach other. Empowered by their close bond, they espoused vehemently anti-Nazi views in a ...Europe swept up in fascism and were openly, even defiantly, gay in an age of secrecy and repression. Although their father's fame has unfairly overshadowed their legacy, Erika and Klaus were serious authors, performance artists before the medium existed, and political visionaries whose searing essays and lectures are still relevant today. And, as Andrea Weiss reveals in this dual biography, their story offers a fascinating view of the literary and intellectual life, political turmoil, and shifting sexual mores of their times. In the Shadow of the Magic Mountain begins with an account of the make-believe world the Manns created together as children—an early sign of their talents as well as the intensity of their relationship. Weiss documents the lifelong artistic collaboration that followed, showing how, as the Nazis took power, Erika and Klaus infused their work with a shared sense of political commitment. Their views earned them exile, and after escaping Germany they eventually moved to the United States, where bothserved asmembers of the U.S. armed forces. Abroad, they enjoyed a wide circle of famous friends, including Andre Gide, Christopher Isherwood, Jean Cocteau, and W. H. Auden, whom Erika married in 1935. But the demands of life in exile, Klaus's heroin addiction, and Erika's new allegiance to their father strained their mutual devotion, and in 1949 Klaus committed suicide. Beautiful never-before-seen photographs illustrate Weiss's riveting tale of two brave nonconformists whose dramatic lives open up new perspectives on the history of the twentieth century.
Klaus Mann's Der fromme Tanz (1926) was the first German mainstream novel featuring a homosexual character. Critics have focused on autobiographical aspects in the novel, particularly the difficult ...relationship the author had with his father, Thomas Mann, as well as on the author's open and positive attitude towards homosexuality. The article contends that Mann's novel is more than a historical document of queer life in Weimar‐era Germany; it also fostered hope for new worlds of relationality and queer desire. To make this case, the article analyzes Der fromme Tanz alongside texts by Ernst Bloch and José Esteban Muñoz, making the idea of utopia relevant to contemporary queer theory again. The main character's determination to find his own path, even his inability to consummate his love, is a refutation of the widespread homophobic belief that same‐sex desiring men are incapable of establishing long‐lasting relationships. The character's unflinching hope in the future expresses a longing for new social relations and alternative ways of being an individual in the world.
...zeigt die Historikerin Dagmar C.G. Lorenz in ihrer 2018 erschienenen Studie Nazi Characters in German Propaganda and Literature, die ich folgend näher besprechen werde, dass in Borcherts Drama das ...Jahr 1945 als "ultimate collapse" und nicht als "liberation from a regime of terror" (125) angelegt sei und für die deutsche Nachkriegsgesellschaft "a silent consensus about collective victimhood" (127) bereitgehalten habe, der es rasch popularisierte. Die Studie besteht aus den drei Teilen "The Origins and Conceptualization of Nazi Figures after the First World War," "Contested Nazi Characters" und "The Problem of Nazi Identity and Representation after 1945." Im folgenden Abschnitt "Writing about Nazis—a postwar dilemma" geht es abschließend um Des Teufels General (1946) von Carl Zuckmayer, das eingangs erwähnte Drama Draußen vor der Tür von Wolfgang Borchert, Der Zug war pünktlich (1949) von Heinrich Böll und Die größere Hoffnung (1948) von Ilse Aichinger.
In Felix Lenz's thorough discussion of Agnès Varda's film Cléo de 5 à 7 (1962), Cléo wandering as a terminal cancer patient serves as metaphor for both the classic fear of death and for the modern ...struggle with patriarchal structures. While the Flaneuse maintains solid ground within a varied landscape of literature and film, her appearance in Die Lust zu gehen remains predominantly white, heteronormative, middle class, and often, still marginalized, despite the appearance of refugees, migrants, and people of color who reflect Europe's shifting sociological and economic landscape. The interesting proximity between the authors' home institutions suggests potential to create a homegrown/local Flaneuse discourse, looking perhaps to recent events such as the 2015 refugee crisis or to Germany's (delayed) response to the viral #metoo movement of 2017, or to more varied German-language Austrian, Swiss, or nonnative directors' and authors' reflections on the gendered perspectives of urban walking for the twenty-first century from a West German angle, and thereby capturing more successfully the interests of an increasingly diverse German-speaking academic audience.
Because no other book has captured so well the inner experience of exile and return to/visit of the “old country” as this masterpiece. The book contains all elements of noir, including corruption, ...greed, abuse of power, and a fight against mafia. Klaus Mann wrote this book while in exile from Nazi Germany and modeled its hero on his former brother-in-law, the famous, corrupted German actor who was a favorite of many Nazi luminaries (interestingly, he was able to return to an acting career after WWII and successfully blocked publication of Mephisto in Germany after the war, while Klaus Mann died of overdose…) David Foster Wallace wrote This is Water: Some Thoughts, Delivered on a Significant Occasion, About Living a Compassionate Life for the commencement speech at Kenyon College in 2005, a year before he tragically took his life. ...as in the other books I have cited here, many of the themes in this novel are palpable today—the plight of the forgotten, the struggles of migrant farmworkers (and immigrants of all sorts), the incredible disparity in wealth and power, the devastation of natural disasters, the injustice and oppression particularly on poor, marginalized populations, and, our need to organize to combat the power and corruption in many sectors of corporate America.
Klaus Mann’s knowledge of writing and staging plays led to interest in exploring dance. His novel Der fromme Tanz (1925) and the dance-pantomime libretto Die zerbrochenen Spiegel (1926) deal ...specifically with this movement medium. This article first addresses Mann’s experience of watching Weimar dance performances, which developed his idea of “erschütternde Anmut,” and explores its connection with his conceptualization of spirituality. The novel’s protagonist, Andreas Magnus, desires to break away from his bourgeois home and embark on a “pious dance” in Berlin. In the pantomime, the main character, Prinz Narzissus, lives a decadent, self-absorbed existence, dancing ecstatically between three mirrors, but gives no regard to an impending mass of workers. I argue that, for Mann, dance serves predominantly as a solitary spiritual guide that celebrates the body and the carnal. This self-absorbed model, however, does not fit into the changing society of the workers’ demonstration and demands social awareness.
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