Published in 1918, Der Untertan by Heinrich Mann (1871-1950) - previously issued in the United States only in parts under the title "Man of Straw" - is a satirical novel that connects the tradition of nineteenth-century German literature with the larger problems faced on the eve of the Nazi era. This edition of The Loyal Subject is introduced and edited by Helmut Peitsch. The translation is adapted, with new portions translated by Daniel Theisen.
First published in 1918, Man of Straw is a sharp indictment of the Wilhelmine regime and a chilling warning against the joint elevation of militarism and commercial values. The 'Man of Straw' is Diederich Hessling, embodiment of the corrupt society in which he moves; his brutish progression through life forms the central theme of the book.
The first full-length study in English of Heinrich Mann's literary work and political activism. Heinrich Mann, once counted among the most important literary figures in Germany, is known to most English-speaking readers only as the brother of Thomas Mann, or in connection with Marlene Dietrich and the film "The Blue Angel,"which was based on one of his novels. Only a few of his novels and stories and virtually none of his hundreds of provocative essays are available in English. But he deserves special attention for the window his work provides ontothe intellectual, social, and political history of Germany, especially Germany's struggle with the question of democracy in the early twentieth century. In his essays and novels, Mann exposed Germany's resistance to democracy wellbefore the First World War, and especially during the Revolution of 1918/19 and the Weimar Republic he made the education of the German people to democratic values and a democratic form of government the center of his life and work. Professor Gunnemann's book is the first work in English that explores Heinrich Mann's work in detail. Special attention is given to the history of the reception of Mann's works in Germany, which is also a history of that nation's self-understanding. Karin Verena Gunnemann is professor of German at Agnes Scott College in Atlanta.
One of the greatest modern historical novels reissued on the Overlook Duckworth imprint; Young Henry of Navarre traces the life of Henry IV from the King's idyllic childhood in the mountain villages of the Pyrennes to his ascendance to the throne of France.
A classic, controversial book exploring German culture and identity by the author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, now back in print. When the Great War broke out in August 1914, Thomas Mann, like so many people on both sides of the conflict, was exhilarated. Finally, the era of decadence that he had anatomized in Death in Venice had come to an end; finally, there was a cause worth fighting and even dying for, or, at least when it came to Mann himself, writing about. Mann immediately picked up his pen to compose a paean to the German cause. Soon after, his elder brother and lifelong rival, the novelist Heinrich Mann, responded with a no less determined denunciation. Thomas took it as an unforgivable stab in the back. The bitter dispute between the brothers would swell into the strange, tortured, brilliant, sometimes perverse literary performance that is Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, a book that Mann worked on and added to throughout the war and that bears an intimate relation to his postwar masterpiece The Magic Mountain. Wild and ungainly though Mann’s reflections can be, they nonetheless constitute, as Mark Lilla demonstrates in a new introduction, a key meditation on the freedom of the artist and the distance between literature and politics. The NYRB Classics edition includes two additional essays by Mann: “Thoughts in Wartime” (1914), translated by Mark Lilla and Cosima Mattner; and “On the German Republic” (1922), translated by Lawrence Rainey.
In 1933 the author and political activist Heinrich Mann and his partner, Nelly Kroeger, fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in the south of France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950. Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Lübeck, Heinrich was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture. Nelly was twenty-seven years younger, the adopted daughter of a fisherman and a hostess in a Berlin bar. As far as Heinrich's family was concerned, she was from the wrong side of the tracks. In House of Exile, Heinrich and Nelly's story is crossed with others from their circle of friends, relatives, and contemporaries: Heinrich's brother, Thomas Mann; his sister, Carla; their friends Bertolt Brecht, Alfred Döblin, and Joseph Roth; and, beyond them, the writers James Joyce, Franz Kafka, and Virginia Woolf, among others. Evelyn Juers brings this generation of exiles to life with tremendous poignancy and imaginative power. In train compartments, ship cabins, and rented rooms, the Manns clung to what was left to them—their bodies, their minds, and their books—in a turbulent and self-destructive era.
Inhaltsangabe:Abstract: In the beginning of the 20th century numerous changes in the social, economic and political level flow together. In the ambivalent spirit of end time and break-up different trends of literature are unfolded. For the young Heinrich Mann these processes continue in his early work as a writer and qualify for interpretation and the hope to overcome the Fin de siécle trend. The selected novels of this work Im Schlaraffenland Ein Roman unter feinen Leuten (1900), Professor Unrat oder Das Ende eines Tyrannen (1904) and Die Kleine Stadt (1909) represent the development of this intention. At first they appear as a satirical criticism of the society and later in the second half of the decade as a draft for a democratic society. In the following the former novels Im Schlaraffenland and Professor Unrat are mentioned without subheading. This work shall point out the very development phase of Heinrich Mann between 1900 and 1909 until the beginning of his political writing. As a result of biographical and literary effects he takes up a special position and shows a change in his early work. His critical and satirical examination of the society associated with a special style of speech open out in a preachy democratic ideal of the society after the turning year 1905. On the one hand these positions make the career of the man of letters difficult in the German nationalistic empire. On the other hand they make him to become a precursor of a vanguard readership. Before the philosophical influence of Friedrich Nietzsche and the literary effect of predominantly French origin on Heinrich Mann will be dwelled on, this work will give a short overview of the literary understanding. After this the three mentioned novels will be discussed in the chapters 2., 3. and 4. and will be correlated. It will become apparent that there is a strong breach of Heinrich Mann in his satires and his democratic utopia. After the year 1905 Heinrich Mann changes his mind back to the time of reconnaissance, Jean Jacques Rousseau s ideal of the society and the trilogy imagination of liberty, equality and brotherliness of the French revolution of 1789. His guiding themes of power and spirit, the dualism of the society and the individual and the problems of the artist are therefore at the figure of change in the first decade of the 20th century. Inhaltsverzeichnis:Table of Contents: HEINRICH MANN: MIRROR AND ANTAGONIST OF HIS TIME1 INTRODUCTION3 1.The Fin [...]
