Customer Reviews

Thomas Mann: Tonio Kroger (German Texts)

5 star:		(3)
4 star:		(0)
3 star:		(0)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(0)

 

 

In this short story, Mann very nicely depicts the problems of the lonely artist, who will always remain an outsider because he is different. In the short story it becomes obvious that it is very difficult for the protagonist Tonio Kroeger to accept this. Tonio Kroeger, who is a writer, falls in love with two people, Hans and Ingeborg, who have blue eyes and blond hair, because they possess the qualities he is longing for. He wants to be as care free as Ingeborg and Hans Hansen, who are not plaged by profound thoughts eliciting them to be depressed. It is extremely well written and will have a lasting effect on you.

In this short story, Mann very nicely depicts the problems of the lonely artist, who will always remain an outsider because he is different. In the short story it becomes obvious that it is very difficult for the protagonist Tonio Kroeger to accept this. Tonio Kroeger, who is a writer, falls in love with two people, Hans and Ingeborg, who have blue eyes and blond hair, because they possess the qualities he is longing for. He wants to be as care free as Ingeborg and Hans Hansen, who are not plaged by profound thoughts eliciting them to be depressed. It is extremely well written and will have a lasting effect on you.

A story of the artist, of the mad in the world longing nothing more than to walk among the happy and commonplace. Of love and the inability to express it but from afar and embracing the anguish and tumult of it all for that is life! Mann knows the struggle, the mark of Cain as Hesse put it, and offers a guide for those with little dust in their eyes and comfort that you alone my friend are not mad and that the madness is not bad but nothing merely there to embrace and see. I highly recommend this short story for the artist in us all.

In this short novella, more so than in his other works, Thomas Mann parades his artistic pretensions with naïveté and inadvertent honesty. Oh, how the poor artist has to suffer, oh, how he must suppress his feelings in order to arrive at an artistic end-product, oh, how he has to put up with the conventions and inconveniences of surrounding bourgeois life. As thoroughly bourgeois as the man next door, whom he nevertheless sneers at, Mann contrives a tale both silly and flawed. In between the lines, he confesses to homoerotic tendencies, making sure to stay well within a well-honed bourgeois sense of decorum.

To all this there are but two intriguing aspects. First there is the suggestion that Schiller's "Don Carlos" admits of a homoerotic deconstruction, which however is not conclusively explored, and is introduced more as a hint or a tease. Then there is the line, "God damn the spring! ... It is and always has been the ghastliest part of the year" Written in 1903, this is very likely the source of T.S. Eliot's "April is the cruelest month..." written in 1922. Mann has Tonio deliver the spring-damning line to the cardboard character pompously named Elisabeta Ivanovna --- somebody seems to have overdosed on Tolstoy and the other Russians --- while his Anglo-American "disciple" follows up, eleven lines down from his own April-complaint, with "Bin gar keine Russin, stamm' aus Litauen, echt deutsch." Quite appropriate company, if you think of it.

I Found this story to be the tale of a self-indulgent, self absorbed, and truly arrogant man. Tonio Kroger is an unhappy soul who hides behind the claim of being an artist. How can one put down and demean the people he wishes to be like? Tonio is the victim of poor self esteem that could be easily escapable if he would only see that he is the cause of all his "suffering". As you all can see, I was not particularly fond of this selection but I give two stars anyway due to the fact that I only had to put it down 10 times while I was reading it rather than the 25 that normally accompanies this sort of reading.