Pedestal Problems
Reading time 6 min.
How does one become
and stay a classic?
A look at Thomas Mann
In 1975 when the great German writer and Nobel laureate Thomas Mann would have turned 100 years old, Marcel Reich-Ranicki, Germany’s most influential literary critic at the time, viewed Mann with despair. No, to be exact, he despaired at how others viewed him. Thomas Mann had apparently become a lifeless classical writer. No one, to whom Reich-Ranicki reached out, wanted to commemorate him.
Thomas Mann had become desperately unloved. Author Hans Erich Nossack’s rejection was especially harsh: “I’ve always found Thomas Mann’s prose so contrary that I only read his books for educational purposes and that only with the greatest effort. For me, Thomas Mann is an example of how one should definitely not write.” And Hannah Arendt, the great philosopher, responded, “As far as Thomas Mann is concerned, I count myself among those people to whom he means very little.” Such was Thomas Mann’s situation in 1975.
Even during his lifetime, Thomas Mann, who had reached millions of readers with his “Buddenbrooks” and “The Magic Mountain”, was disparaged by his dear colleagues – and that almost without exception. Bertolt Brecht wrote a satirical poem in 1931, Robert Musil griped about the “great writer”, Joseph Roth claimed that he “thinks worse than he writes” and Gottfried Benn called him a “shredded intellectual”.
When it came to Thomas Mann, a poet so attentive to form and style, there was obviously a strong desire from the very beginning to knock him off his polished pedestal.
When it came to Thomas Mann, a poet so attentive to form and style, there was obviously a strong desire from the very beginning to knock him off his polished pedestal. This was true of his contemporaries who had to suffer his fame and pedantic sense of honour, as much as by the next generation of writers who tried to ridicule his position as a “representative” and “prince among poets”.
Today, in 2025, however, Thomas Mann’s position as a German classic seems unshakeable. Last year when Germany marked the 100th anniversary of the publication of “The Magic Mountain” and this year, the 150th anniversary of his birth, it seemed as if the young generation had rediscovered this writer for themselves, as if they took joy in losing themselves in his linguistic labyrinths, as if behind the facades and masks they recognised all the perils and abysses. Take for instance the issue of the literary magazine “Neue Rundschau” (2024/3) that emphasised the relevance of “The Magic Mountain” based on the many new attempts to conquer it. In the article, author Merve Emre presented the intriguing argument that Clawdia Chauchat was Hans Castorp’s true mentor who exacted a far more demanding education than the famous alpha males Naphta and Settembrini. And Sarah Pines made the case that the entire 20th century is contained in the rooms of the sanatorium on Magic Mountain. A new generation has followed a trail of curiosity laid by Susan Sontag who had personally met Thomas Mann at a young age and was forevermore captivated by him, because with Mann, “all of Europe fell into my head”.
How could this happen? How could “The Unloved”, as Marcel Reich-Ranicki described him on his 100th anniversary in 1975, suddenly become the all-outshining lodestar of 20th-century German literature and cast all other writers of general renown in the shadows? How did this lifeless, rigid monument become an author of vibrant, radiant power?
How did this lifeless, rigid monument become an author of vibrant, radiant power?
Thomas Mann himself set the process of de-monumentalisation in motion – with instructions permitting the publication of his diaries 20 years after his death. And thus in 1977, when his diaries from 1918 to 1921 and those after 1933 were published in almost unredacted form, a baffled, bewildered, enraptured and flabbergasted public was confronted with an entirely different Thomas Mann. And what the author’s image lost in pathos and floral fragrance, it gained in truthfulness and, yes, humanity. The author himself suddenly appeared alongside his work – and in this ambiguity, both the man and his oeuvre suddenly acquired a whole new dimension. The posters that S. Fischer Verlag printed last year commemorating Thomas Mann’s 150th anniversary could be seen hanging in bookshops and student flats around the country. “Went back to bed after breakfast” reads one, and another: “Less than refreshing night. Partying be damned.”
These were all wonderful gems from his diaries, documents of almost grotesque self-referentiality that noted every symptom of an oncoming throat ache or weltschmerz. Even Thomas Mann’s lifelong effort to suppress his homosexuality became visible. Yes, his fears mercilessly exposed all the vulnerability behind his seemingly pompous existence as a writer. Suddenly one could see not only the monument, but also an old man struggling every day to maintain composure.
And it was exactly at this point of his existence that I was able to warm up to this classic myself, someone I had always steered well clear of in my own writing. For this is the big problem with classics. Eventually they reach a clothing size that no longer seems to fit normal life.
I used to find his style so impenetrable and hermetically sealed with irony, his life and work too sublime, too “classical”, too pruned to form, both in writing and in life that I doubted I could ever glimpse his innermost world and revive him as an author for myself and for my readers. But when I began reading his diaries from 1933, the year he was forced to leave Germany, when he suffered like a dog because he couldn’t return and because the National Socialists he so despised had laid claim to “German culture”, I became acquainted with an entirely new Thomas Mann. He didn’t know what to do or where to go. Like Odysseus, he wandered aimlessly through Switzerland and France, moved eleven times in his first year in exile, from hotel to hotel, clueless, helpless, searching. It is touching to read how this great man faltered, how he didn’t know where he should settle down and whether his works would/should/could ever be published in Germany again. It tore him to pieces. “Cannot really eat and cannot sleep, and the thought of the complete demolition of my existence, the thought of having to go into exile, a fifty-seven-year-old so deeply tied to the cultural tradition and the language of a country, so terribly dependent on it, keeps me in a state of constant anxiety and shock.” Perhaps one can only become a classic if one can be shaken to the core?
Perhaps one can only become a classic if one can be shaken to the core?
And perhaps the political climate of 2025 had to change so dramatically that Thomas Mann’s horror at watching a democracy perish made me realise this was no longer a historic phenomenon but a real danger in the present day. I don’t know. All I know is that I was able to get to know this larger-than-life Thomas Mann through his own diary entries of 1933 in a new way for the first time, not in adoring prostration, but with eyes and heart wide open, with a sense of its ambivalence. Perhaps it’s not a bad idea when after slinking and crawling around the classics for years, we ask ourselves why they don’t open themselves to us.
And when we accept that every past was only a moment of an indeterminable present in the beginning, when we see all the fractures in Thomas Mann’s life and, above all, the veneration for him, it can increase our curiosity about the literature and art of our present day – in all their ambivalence. For even now, new classics are being created right before our eyes. Wonderful, isn’t it?
