Joseph and His Brothers, Page 2
Thomas Mann
LITERARY AND MUSICAL CONTEXT
Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy.
First complete performance of Wagner's Der Ring des Nibelungen. Tolstoy: Anna Karenina. Death of Wagner. Hauptmann: Before Sunrise. Beginnings of naturalism in German literature. W^ilde: The Picture of Dorian Gray. Ibsen: The Master Builder.
Heinrich Mann's first novel, In a Family.
Fontane: Effi Briest. Chekhov: The Seagull.
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Germany unified: the Wilhelmine/Bismarckian Reich. The boom "foundation years" {Griinderjahre) begin, confirming Germany as a leading industrial power.
Birth of Hitler.
Fall of Bismarck. Wilhelm II's personal rule begins.
Wilhelm II announces German pursuit of "world politics.'
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS
DATE
AUTHOR'S LIFE
LITERARY AND MUSICAL
1897
1900
1901
1902
1903
1905
1905-10
1906
1907-
At Fischer's invitation, begins work on liis first noel. Publishes his first volume of collected short fiction, Little Herr Friedanann.
May: completes the novel Buddmbrooks. Samuel Fischer, sceptical about the chances of such a massie work by a barely known author, suggests that Mann abridge it. The young author persuades him to publish it as it stands.
Buddenbrooks appears, in t\ o volumes, and is well receied. Fischer brings out a single-volume cheap edition of the novel. It becomes a best seller, establishing Thomas Mann's fortunes and a broad popular reputation.
The volume Tristan appears, with six works including Tonio Kroger. Marriage to Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a wealthy Jewish academic family. Mann completes his only drama, Fiorenza, set in Renaissance Florence. Melodramatic and styiistically overelaborate, it never succeeds on the stage. Works on a number of projects that are destined never to be completed: a novel on Munich society, Maya; a historical noel on Frederick the Great of Prussia; a major aesthetic essay "Intellect and Art" ("Geist und Kunst"). Frustrated by his inabilits' to make progress with them.
Freud: Interpretation of Dreams. Death of Nietzsche. Conrad: Lord Jim.
Chekhov: Three Sisters.
Gide: The Immoralist. James: The Wings of the Dove.
Heinrich Mann: Iofessor Unrat. Wharton: The House of Mirth.
Galsworthy: The Man of Property {Forsyte Saga). Rilke: New Poems.
CHRONOLOGY
HISTORICAL EVENTS
German Navy Law begins the arms race. Biilow becomes Imperial Chancellor.
First Russian Revolution. "Red Sunday" in St. Petersburg.
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS
DATE AUTHORS LIFE
1909 Publishes tlie noel Royal Highness, on tlie surface a romance about an imaginan prince but meant as an allegon of the artist's life. .-Vs the second novel from the author of the highl- regarded Buddenbrooks,
it is judged to be lighrvveight.
1910 Starts a further artist allegon,; the ston, of the confidence trickster Felix h'ruU. Progress is difficult. Mann feels increasingly worried about how to repeat the success of Buddenbrooks with a comparable masterpiece.
191 1 May/June: a stay at the Lido. 'enice. Begins to write Death in Venice.
1912 June: Death in I^'w/ff completed and published. Begins work on The Magic Mountain, planned as a similar-length no ella and comic pendant piece ^"satT play"! to DeatJi in enice.
1914 Noember: First polemical essay in defense of Germany against her critics.
1915 Polemics continue, in particular against his brother Heinrich.
In no mood for fiction. de otes himself to a long, brooding work of culmral-political-autobiographical reflections.
1918 R^xions of an Unpolitical
Alan appears just before the war ends.
1918-22 At first, bitter withdrawal and a
search for any remaining congenial forms of consenatism. Disturbed by increasing right-wing iolence, resolves to make the best of the new sociopolitical simation.
LITERARY AND MUSICAL
CONTEXT
Gide: Straight Is the Gate.
Heinrich Mann: The Little Town.
Forster: Howards End.
Rilke: The .otebooks of Malte Laurids
Hofmannsthal: Eieryman. Hauptmann: Atlantis.
Jo"ce: Diibliners.
Kafka: The Metamorphosis. Ford: The Good Soldier. Woolf: The Voyage Out. Lawrence: The Rainbow.
Joyce: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man.
Heinrich Mann: Man of Straw. Spengler: The Decline of the ]Vest. part i ,part 2. 1927).
CHRONOLOGY
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Death of Ed ward VII.
Morocco crisis.
Sinking of the Titanic. German Social Democratic Part)' polls more votes in general election than any other party.
August: Outbreak of W'orld War I.
Russian Revolution; Russia and Germany make separate peace.
Salzburg Festival inaugurated.
End of World War I; Wilhelm II abdicates; declaration of a German republic.
DATE
1919
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS
AUTHORS LIFE
LITERARY AND MUSICAL CONTEXT
1920 1921-2
1922
1923 1924
1925
1926-33
1927
1928 1929
1930
1931-2
Public statement in speech "On the German Republic." From then on moes steadily toward social democracy.
Publishes The Magic Mountain. The intended noxella has grown into a massixe noel. taking issue allegorically \ith the social and political problems of the dav.
Active as a member of the Literary- Section of the Prussian Academy of .rts, where the cultural and ideological issues of the Weimar Republic are fought out by leading writers of left and right.
PubUshes "Mario and the Magician." an allegorical tale of Italian fascism. Receixes the Xobel prize for Uterature—but expressl)- for his first novel, Buddenbrooks. (The prize committee's most influential member disapproxes of the liberalism implicit in The Magic Mountain.)
JoNce: Ulysses.
EHot: The Waste Land.
Brecht: Drums in theXight.
Rilke: The Duino Elegies; The Sonnets
to Orpheus.
Forster: A Passage to India.
Ford: Parade's End {to 1928).
^bolf Mrs. DoUoway. Kafka: 77?^ Tnal.
Hesse: Steppenwolf.
Final part of Proust's Remembrance
of Things Past.
Brecht/Weill: The Threepenny Opera.
Doblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz-
Remarque: All Quiet on the Histern
Front.
Its
Freud: Civilization
Discontents.
Musil: The Man Without
Qualities.
Broch: The Sleepwalkers.
CHRONOLOGY
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Versailles treaty signed; Weimar Republic constituted; a "Soviet Republic"
established in Munich and swiftly repressed.
The Kapp putsch.
Political assassinations—of Erzberger, Rathenau—by right-wing extremists:
the Republic threatened by violence.
Mussolini's march on Rome; Itahan Fascists come to power.
High point of German inflation; Hider's Munich putsch fails.
Hindenburg elected as second Chancellor of the Republic, in succession to Friedrich Ebert.
Trotsky expelled from Russian Communist Party.
Wall Street crash; world economic crisis.
Growing electoral support for Nazis.
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS
DATE 1933
1934
1936
1938 1939
1940
1941
1942
1942-3
1942-5
1943
AUTHORS LIFE
February: Mann travels abroad with a lecture on Richard \ agner. Reports of the lecture become the pretext for a hate campaign against him by-Nazis and fellow-travelers. (Since the early thirties, he has been prominent as a defender of the Weimar Republic and an 6pponent of rising Nazism.) Mann's family warn him to stay abroad. It is the beginning of exile. Autumn: after short stays in various places in France and Switzerland, settles in Kiisnacht near Zurich.
Publication, still in Germany, of The Stories of Jacob, the first olume of the four-part noel Joseph and His Brothers. May-June: first visit to the United States. Publishes the second volume of the tetralogy, Toungjoseph.
Joseph in Egypt appears. The Nazis deprixe Mann of his German nationality. He takes Czech citizenship. Emigrates to the United States and holds a isiting professorship at Princeton. Publishes The Beloved Returns, a novel about the older Goethe.
Moves to Pacific Palisades,
California.
Becomes Germanic consultant
to the Library of Congress.
Anti-Nazi broadcasts to Germany for the BBC. Joseph the Provider completes the Joseph tetralogy. Begins writing Doctor Faustus.
LITERARY AND MUSICAL
CONTEXT
Lorca: Blood Wedding.
Malraux: Man's Fate.
Klaus Mann: Mephisto.
Freud: Aloses and Monotheism. Sartre: Nausea.
Joyce: Finnegans Wake. Steinbeck: The Grapes of Wrath. Isherwood: Goodbye to Berlin. Greene: The Power and the Glory.
Brecht: Mother Courage and Her
Children.
Camus: The Stranger.
Hesse: The Glass Bead Game. Brecht: Galileo.
CHRONOLOGY
HISTORICAL EVENTS
January: Nazis come to power by constitutional means, but swiftly establish one-party state with violent suppression of opponents. Beginning of the Third Reich.
Outbreak of Spanish Civil War.
Austrian Anschluss.
Germany occupies parts of Czechoslovakia; attacks Poland, ignores Anglo-French ultimatum. September: World War II begins.
German Blitzkrieg conquers France.
Germany invades Sovdet Union.
Tide of war turns against Germany in Russia and North Africa.
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS
1944 1945
1946 1947
1949
1950 1951
1952
1954
1955
AUTHORS LIFE Takes U.S. citizenship.
Doctor Faustus published.
PubHshes 77?^ Genesis of Doctor
Faustus, which describes the
roots of the work in the events
of the time.
Death of brother Heinrich.
PubHshes The Holy Sinner, a
parodistic retelHng of the
medieal legend of Pope
Gregory.
Disturbed by McCarthyism and
drawn to Europe for cultural
reasons, but unwilling to return
to Germany. Settles in
Switzerland for his remaining
years.
Publishes Confessions of
Felix Krull, Confidence Man, a
completed first part of the novel
begun in 1911 and abandoned
in the twenties.
12 August: Thomas Mann dies
in Zurich.
LITERARY AND MUSICAL CONTEXT
Broch: The Death of Virgil.
Orwell: Animal Farm.
Sartre: The Age of Reason; No Exit.
Camus: The Plague.
Gruppe 47 founded by young
German writers.
Orwell: Nineteen Eighty-four.
Beckett: Molloy; Malone Dies.
Beckett: Waitingfor Godot.
Nabokov: Lolita.
CHRONOLOGY
HISTORICAL EVENTS
Normandy landings; allied advance on Germany from west and east. EndofWorldWarll.
Start of Cold War.
Marshall Plan instituted: U.S. aid for European postwar recovery.
Foundation of two separate German states, the Federal Republic and the Democratic Republic. McCarthy anticommunist witch hunts in USA. NATO founded.
Korean War. West German production outstrips prewar Reich.
SIXTEEN YEARS
(For the 1948 American edition o{Joseph and His Brothers in a single volume)
This piece of work is not unlike a pyramid—differing from its brothers, those monsters on the edge of the Libyan desert, only in that it did not demand the sacrifice of hecatombs of lashed and gasping slaves but was built by the patience o{ one man over long years—and to see the entire enterprise, previously divided in four parts, presented now as the unity it is between the two covers of a single volume, evokes in me, apart from justifiable amazement at a scarcely imaginable achievement of the bookbinder's craft, many memories and a pensive, autobiographical state of mind.
Long years—and upon closer reflection, their tally, including interruptions, some of which were rather extended, comes to a good sixteen: a period of time whose history has been as "rich with stories" as the willfully independent product that grew out of them, though rich in ways that one might expect to prove quite detrimental to epic equanimity. Is it too much to expect that posterity (assuming we can expect posterity to emerge yet in something like decent intellectual shape) may on occasion pause to wonder how during those years, from 1926 to 1942, when heart and brain were besieged daily by the wildest demands, such a narrative as this—a great, calm current of seventy thousand lines, bearing tidings of primal events shared by all humankind, stories of love and hate, blessing and curse, fraternal strife and paternal suffering, arrogance and repentance, of lives cast down to be raised up again—how such a comedic song of humanity (if one may be permitted to call a spade a spade) could be nurtured and completed under those turbulent circumstances? As for me, my feelings are not those of wonder, but of gratitude. I am grateful to this work, which was my staff and my stay along a path that often led through many a dark valley—it was my refuge, my comfort, my homeland, a symbol of stability, the guarantee of my own steadfastness amidst a storm of change.
The Magic Mountain was completed in Munich in 1924 and published that same year. Between its conclusion and the day when I found the courage to put to paper the words "Deep is the well of the past," the first sentence of "Descent into Hell," my overture to Joseph and His Brothers, the only thing I produced was a short story, "Despair
SIXTEEN YEARS
and Early Sorrow," improvised for the magazine Neue Rundschau on the occasion of my fiftieth birthday and arising from one of those states of active relaxation that have come over me with a certain regularity whenever I have been released at last from a task of many years. In much the same way The Beloved Returns was followed by the metaphysical jest of The Transposed Heads and the completed Joseph stories by a defense of human civilization directed against Nazism and entided Tables of the Law. Slowly—from that first day when I commenced the fantastical essay that forms my story's introduction and is itself reminiscent of an intrepid expedition equipping itself for its mission—slowly and with considerable worry as to how much time and space it was all taking, the parts of my mythological novel grew until it saw the light of day as The Stones of Jacob —simply because there was manuscript enough for a rather substantial volume, but not because my opus had been planned as a multivolume work, as a series of novels or as a "tetralogy." Ah, it had all been quite different in the planning—different, just as always. Just as Buddenbrooh was intended to be a mercantile tale, some two hundred fifty pages long, and then got out of hand; just as The Magic Mountain was really supposed to be a story only the size of "Death in Venice" and to serve as its grotesque sequel, and then hypertrophied all on its own—
in much the same way, then, I had first imagined a triptych of novellas with a religious hue, the first of which was to have been of a mythic, biblical character, and in it I had decided to offer a lively retelling of the story of Joseph. Habent sua fata libelli [books have their own fates]—not just after their publication, but especially during their creation. When he sets his hand to them, the author knows little about them. They have a will of their own and know better. The novellas from the days of the Reformation and Counter Reformation vanished, and for more than a decade and a half I was to remain under the spell of my mythic, biblical story, which, as long as the plan remained at all tenable, was conceived as an ongoing, unified narrative, as a single volume, though now swelling to unfortunate size — so that one can well say that only here and now, after years of a "mutilated" existence, has the story appeared in its true form.
It has been my custom to accompany fictional works with essayistic offshoots, which often may be inspired or demanded by external events, but in essence have no purpose other than to strengthen mc in my fictional task. And so the treatises "On the German Republic" and "Goethe and Tolstoy"—to name only two—belong to Magic Mountain, just as the essays on "Germany and the Germans" or on
JOSEPH AND HIS BROTHERS
Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche belong to Doctor Faustus. It would be tedious to list all the critical escapades and glosses that belong to Joseph and are colored by it, for they fill volumes and make up the majority of what has appeared in English in the collections Order of the Day and Essays of Three Decades. As if a sixty-page preface to The Stories of Jacob had not been sufficient to get me into the mood and equip me for a journey into the land of myth, in 1926, the year I began my novel, I followed up with an infatuated analysis of Kleist's Amphytrion; and one need only read the mythicizing sentences that introduce my Lessing lecture to see that it also belongs to the "theme," or, shall we say, just a little gentle pressure establishes a connection with it. I even interrupted my narration at that time with another independent narrative, with Mario and the Magician, a story with a strong political cast, for its core concern is the psychologies of fascism and "freedom" and how the latter, being devoid of will, is left at such a great disadvantage over against its opponent's robust will.
One must keep in mind that at the time I began Joseph postwar political tension in Germany had already grown very acute and that during the decade of the twenties I had, thanks to my political writings, subjected my artistic work to pressures, to the psychological disruptions and encumbrances, of nationalist hatred—pressures unaltered by official honors that were awarded me by the German Republic, but that in turn placed me under obligation for all sorts of academic speeches on festive occasions. Along with these came unofficial statements, articles, and lectures that eschewed all politics. The Stories of Jacob was already finished and part of Young Joseph written when, in early 1930, I embarked on a journey to the Near East, to Eg)pt and Palestine, though it could hardly have still been seen as a research trip, and instead served merely as on-the-spot verification of relevant studies in which I had immersed myself from a distance. All the same, I did see the Nile's landscapes with my own eyes, from the Delta all the way up (or down) to Nubia, plus sites in the Holy Land, and my impressions were put to good use in the third volume, Joseph in Egypt, part of which was written in Germany. To it belongs the essay "Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner." Fifty years had passed since that great musician of the theater had closed his eyes in Venice, and cities in various countries had invited me to lecture on his art. I wrote much more than I could deliver orally and first read an abridged version of my critical adulation before a quite sympathetic audience at the University of Munich on February 10, 1933, only to
