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| Thomas Mann and Paul Ehrenberg |
23.1 “No shouldring the wheel, no budging the cart”
23.2 Capital of Bavaria : Munchen! Birthplace of Richard
Strauss & Carl Orff, Heinrich Himmler & Eva Braun, Werner Herzog &
Andreas Baader.
Mann lives in Munich from 1894 ( 19 years old ) until 1933 ( his exile )
23.4 3 relic of some forgotten enthusiasm…Giacomo Meyerbeer…
Leverkuhn sits with his back to the painting of the French Opera composer , author of "Robert le Diable" !
Giacomo Meyerbeer (born Jacob Liebmann Beer; 5 September
1791 – 2 May 1864) was a Prussian opera composer of Jewish birth who has been
described as perhaps the most successful stage composer of the nineteenth
century. With his 1831 opera Robert le diable and its successors he gave the
genre of grand opera 'decisive character'. Meyerbeer's grand opera style was
achieved by his merging of German orchestra style with Italian vocal tradition.
Apart from around 50 songs, Meyerbeer wrote little except
for the stage. The critical assaults of Wagner and his supporters, especially
after his death, led to a decline in the popularity of his works; his operas
were suppressed by the Nazi regime in Germany, and were neglected by opera
houses through most of the twentieth century. Meyerbeer's works are only
infrequently performed today.
23.4 Harmonium & a Bechstein grand piano in the house
23.5 badly darkned painting ( 1850 ) picturing the Golden
Horn with a view of Galata. Horns ?
23.6 Meet de Rodde’s
Widow (Frau Senator) Rodde
; dark eyes, brown hair…she wanted to enjoy them herself… amused by slightly
off-color but never vulgar remarks…
Daughter Inez,
the older one… destine for a tragic deed…, a blond… writer of well crafted
letters
Daughter Clarissa,
the younger one, aa blond training for a dramatic career… penchant for the
whimsical and the macabre… ( a Gothic avant la lettre with the Skull fanaticism
of the nazi’s ).. she has a hollow book of Hippocrates containing poison. Clarissa will take her own life… SZ will get
the book as a memento.
23.7 The room was the stage of social gatherings…
23.8 list of person
associated with the Rodde salon
A married couple by
the name of Knöterisch … he looking a perfect Teuton ( Sugambrian or Ubian
)… a savage cello – player
Dr. Kranisch the
scholar…numismatist
The painter friends
Leo Zink and baptist Spengler; An Austrian funny faunish fellow & a
German hypochodrial sneak
Rudolf Schwerdtfeger,
a talented young violonist… blissfully applying himself to flirting with
the fair sex…even mature women ( hint hint )… is about to die early and
tragically…shrouded in uncanny horror…with a pout and steelblue eyes … a good,
technically brillant musician…Likes AL
In these social gatherings, at least three attendents will
have a dramtic end : Inez, clarissa and rudolf schwerdtfeger
23.9 Rudiger Schildknapp the anglophile translator will move
to Munich too. He is a real buddy to AL
23.10 Schildknapp
visits other artistic – bourgeois salons meets other people who he introduces
to AL ( and probably SZ too )
The Publisher of Radbruch & co
Elderly wealthy
couple SChlaginhaufens
His excellency von
Riedesel
Herr Bullinger a rich
industrialist
Wagnaerian heroine
Tanya Orlanda
Felix mottl
Schiller’s great –grandson
Herr von Gleichen –Russwurm
, a historian
Jeanette Scheurl, a
woman of peculiar charm and trustworthiness, highly intelligent but fashionably
ugly , an author , a novelist…trusting and devoted friend of Al for many years…
23.11 the city I
speak is Munich at the end of the regency…( 1910 )… the southern city of
carnival
Mann, describes an artistic and intellectual milieu he knew well enough. Widow Rodde's salon closely resembles the ones by Mann’s mother Julia ( also a Senator widow). The daughters Inez and Clarissa are modelled on Mann’s sisters Julia ( Lulu ) and Carla. Both sisters committed suicide, Carla in 1910 and Julia in 1927.
Rudiger Schildknapp is modelled after Hans Reisiger,
Mann’s parasitic friend...
Hans Reisiger (1884–1968) was a German writer and
translator. Mann had met him by at least 1913 and in the years that followed,
until 1933, he was a close friend of Mann and his family. His translation of
selected poems from Leaves of Grass, which appeared in 1919, left no
discernible impression on Mann, who seems not to have read it. (Walt Whitman,
Grashalme: Neue Auswahl, trans. Hans Reisiger [Berlin: S. Fischer, 1919]). But
the second collection of writings by Whitman that he published three years
later, Walt Whitmans Werk (or Walt Whitman's Work), elicited Mann's interest
even before it was published. On 31 May, 1921 (ten months before its
publication), Mann noted in his diary: "On Sunday evening Reisiger visited
us and read some of his translations, which led on to discussions of Whitman's
love of men."
Schwerdtfeger, the handsome virtuoso violonist might be Paul Ehrenberg, the musician whom Mann had loved when he was a young man.
Schwerdtfeger, the handsome virtuoso violonist might be Paul Ehrenberg, the musician whom Mann had loved when he was a young man.
Paul Ehrenberg (1876–1949) was a German violinist and
impressionist painter, brother of Carl Ehrenberg and half-brother of Hilde
Distel.
Ehrenberg was a student of the painter Heinrich von Zügel.
He was a member of the Luitpoldsgruppe and Künstlergenossenschaft. His work,
shown in many Munich exhibitions, included portraits, still lifes, landscapes,
and animal paintings. He married the painter Lilly Teufel.
Ehrenberg was an excellent violinist, who often played
chamber music with Thomas Mann. Based on the evidence of Thomas Mann's letters
and diaries, Mann was infatuated with Ehrenberg, and they had an intense
personal relationship from 1899 to about 1903. Mann based several characters in
his published writings on him.
Nepomuk, Al’s nephew is drawn after Mann’s favourite grandson
Frido
Mann lived in the same street as AL : Ramberg strasse
Mann lived in the same street as AL : Ramberg strasse
( source Todd Kontje, The Cambridge introduction to Thomas
Mann )
23.12 Excursions with
Schildknapp on the bicycle
23.13 theatrical
castles of the people’s favourite madman : Ludwig 2 , King of Bavaria, sponsor
of Wagner’s niebelungen and the Bayreuth festival
23.14 Adrian made an
acquintance of a spot that he would one day choose as the framework for his
personal life : Pfeiffering near Waldshut and the Schweigestill farm.
23.15 …Klammer Pool … the Rohmbühel…a tree-crowned hill…a
barefoot dairymaid… ahuge tree in the courtyard…: all similarities of the
buchel farm of AL’s youth…
23.16 Notice the chained dog “Kaschperl” which is a
particularity not remembered from his childhood
23.17 1 winged victory of Samothrace ( discoverd in 1863 and
now at the Louvre in Paris )
23.18 Dark brown piano
23.19 Schweigestill : be silent / silence
23.20 Farm had once been a cloister : holy ground ? Abott of the Augustinian monks
The previous borders are from the dark melancholy
Romanticist type : a brooding artist, an aristocratic madwoman and a girl who
dies after abondoning her fatherless child…
23.21 The summer before last an artist fellow from Munchen
had rented space here… wanted to paint… Waldshuter Moor … ended up a little
mournful, all gray on gray… : Adolf
Hitler who was in Munich in 1913 ? or one of the German avantgarde like
Lovis Corinth, Vassily Kandinsky, Paul Klee or Franz Marc.
Hitler frequented the artists' cafes in Munich in the
unfulfilled hope that established artists might help him with his ambition to
become a painter.
From 1908 to 1913, Hitler tinted postcards and painted
houses for a living. He painted his first self-portrait in 1910 at the age of
21. Samuel Morgenstern, an Austrian businessman and a business partner of the
young Hitler in his Vienna period, bought many of the young Hitler's paintings.
According to Morgenstern, Hitler came to him for the first time in the
beginning of 1910s, either in 1911 or in 1912. When Hitler came to
Morgenstern's glazier store for the first time, he offered Morgenstern three of
his paintings. Morgenstern kept a database of his clientele, through which it
had been possible to locate the buyers of young Hitler's paintings.
23.22 Musicians are better than painters !
23.23 A crazy Baroness von Handschuchsheim lived once in the
Abott’s study,
Handschuscheim -> Handschue ( glove ) and heim ( home ). A marriage with the glove ?
A young lady of the best social circles came to the place to bring her baby to the world.
The girl, a daughter of a high ranking judge in Bayreuth, was made pregnant by her father’s driver. Baby has been given to the Gray sisters of Bamberg. The woman dies in Davos ( on the magic Mountain ) from consumption.
Handschuscheim -> Handschue ( glove ) and heim ( home ). A marriage with the glove ?
A young lady of the best social circles came to the place to bring her baby to the world.
The girl, a daughter of a high ranking judge in Bayreuth, was made pregnant by her father’s driver. Baby has been given to the Gray sisters of Bamberg. The woman dies in Davos ( on the magic Mountain ) from consumption.
23.24 in a letter to SZ, AL confesses that his work has come
to a standstill… + he is searching for a
place where he can bury himself away from the world…
23.25 Then AL leaves to Italy together with Rudiger
Schildknapp !
