Colm Tóibín’s novel about Thomas Mann: “The Magician”. Review. – Culture

The pale man had been seated at the table between two other authors in such a way that the reading could also have been a meeting, there were also enough experts there. Ireland was the guest country of the Frankfurt Book Fair then, about thirty years ago, and three young authors were asked to extend the claim of the small country on the edge of Europe, which had won so many Nobel literature prizes in the past, into the present. Colm Tóibín read a passage from his first work “The South” in the Literaturhaus, which surprised many who had expected a backdrop of green hills and sun-bleached Spanish valleys. After all, the text is about an Irish woman, and the chapter ends with the woman having to watch from a distance as a jeep in which her husband is sitting crashes on a steep street. Because she happened to be handed a pair of binoculars, she suspected her little son – behind a window – shortly before the crash.

After that, the reading was as good as over. Most of the audience had cried, and the other authors on the podium spoke hoarsely, their Irish accent sounding rotten. An audience that includes literary agents, critics and other professionals is sensitive. Sacrificing a child to the act – one has reservations about that. But Colm Tóibín writes that such an accident inevitably has an effect and that the story mainly reflects the mother’s horror, which remains fixed for all time in the distance between the lenses of binoculars and the car windows.

Colm Tóibín followed up “The South” with books about Irish judges in distress, about abortion, homosexuals, artists, widows. He has crossed the border with Northern Ireland and has even created a film with “Brooklyn” in which the young Eilis lands in the Irish diaspora of New York as the vanguard of current economic refugees. Tóibín then became world famous with “The Master”, a disturbingly quiet, concentrated tale in which the American author Henry James is seen setting himself up in English country life.

The long past reading in the Frankfurter Literaturhaus is now so present because in Colm Tóibín’s most recent novel, which is now being published under the title “The Magician”, just such a reading is portrayed: Thomas Mann, the main character of the book, is surrounded by him Family a chapter from “Doctor Faustus” before, the “most humanly touching passage of his novel”, so he thinks. “When the little boy was dead, Thomas had done what he had to do. He put the manuscript sheets aside. Nobody spoke a word. Finally Golo switched on the lamp next to him and stretched with a low groan. Klaus Pringsheim had his hands crossed and his eyes fixed on the floor. His son sat pale next to him. Erika stared into space. Katia sat there in silence. ” You all know what the reader suspects: Thomas Mann used the charming little Frido, the youngest member of the family, as a role model for the dead child.

Colm Tóibín said in a recent interview that the idea of ​​writing a novel about Thomas Mann had been with him for many years. But only when he was asked for an essay on three newly published biographies about the German Nobel Prize winner did he take up the project again. Its title “The Magician” refers to a nickname given by Katia and Thomas Mann’s six children to their father, who entertained them at the dining table with magic tricks. “You old magician”, the adult daughter Erika will call him shortly before his death, in all ambiguity – because the father is not a real magician, but someone who contributes tricks to entertainment instead of actually talking to his children.

Just because the family room becomes the stage for this novel with this dining table, there is a tremendous amount to tell on more than 550 pages. Colm Tóibín obviously does not want to rely on this German literary family being familiar to his readers. So he has to start with the Lübeck merchant’s son “Thomas”, whose talent in the shadow of his brother Heinrich has not been noticed for a long time. He learns to hide his literary side as well as his unexperienced homosexuality behind grandiose appearances.

Seldom does a door open without some celebrity entering

The rise to a celebrated author, the marriage to Katia Pringsheim, who comes from a cultured Jewish family in Munich, all of this is hastily told. Obviously, more than three biographies are the source of this book, especially German readers know how much paper these men left behind. While Colm Tóibín otherwise confidently selects, paints and invents, he now seems almost helpless, noting much more than telling it – change of location, novels, famous acquaintance, revolution and war, entangled family relationships and homoerotic experiences. Seldom does a door open without some celebrity entering. And if it is a stranger, then it comes quickly to, furtive, sexual intercourse.

The monosyllabic passages that deal with writing are particularly disappointing in this “strict, hidden place where a topic was slowly lured to light in a seemingly alchemical process”. That Thomas Mann subordinated his daily routine to his work is almost anecdotal, including the obvious connections between the author’s biography and his works, starting with Hanno from “Buddenbrooks”. The insecure young Thomas, who meets the twins Katia and Klaus Pringsheim in their parents’ salon, immediately begins to think “what could be done in a story with twins who had to split up because one of them got married”. The author can then report execution just one paragraph further, not only because the wedding is looming: “He called the novella, Wälsungenblut” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/. “

The network of relationships in this family also remains pale, the characterizations and conversations are wooden, almost funny. Colm Tóibín, who speaks openly about his own homosexuality in public, can dissolve family relationships and their hidden power constellations in almost natural-looking dialogues. But where reports are reported too quickly, there is no room for the unsaid or the concealed. One wishes that Tóibín had the courage to try the trick from his books “Mary’s Testament” and “House of Names” again. The latter took up the Elektra myth, but assigned the chapters to the individual characters, whose insides colored the brutal parricides, the civil war and the betrayal. Even more radical was “Mary’s Testament”, an interpretation of the Gospel from the point of view of the Blessed Mother, who, as a simple, sincere woman, is awake to everything lying and the appropriations of her beloved son, for whose afterlife she shows little sympathy.

The eternally hesitant novelist becomes one who takes the floor

Colm Tóibín’s current novel, on the other hand, can hardly hold the many storylines together. “In his mind he recapitulates how things are currently with the individual members of the family”, says the chapter “Sweden 1939” https://www.sueddeutsche.de/kultur/. “Elisabeth was safe in Princeton and waited for hers Wedding; Klaus was still in New York, trying to find money for his magazine, and the other children were looked after: Michael and his fiancée Gret had visas for America; he hoped to get visas for Monika and her husband as well As soon as he got back, he would set about getting the necessary papers for Golo, as well as for Heinrich and for Nelly, who Heinrich had meanwhile married, so that they could leave France, Katia’s parents after they were their house and hers Had lost paintings, their precious ceramics and all their money, finally in Zurich and out of danger. ” This is compression in the style of Wikipedia.

But at this point the book turns over. And the portrayal of the wartime that Thomas Mann spends with his wife between Pacific Palisades, Washington, Los Angeles and – as a popular speaker – many other US metropolises, ends the report as a moving novel. The world-famous but eternally hesitant novelist becomes one who takes the floor. While in conversation with his son Klaus, given the pictures of the destruction of his hometown Lübeck, he still wishes, “I would have your certainty (…) And I don’t know what to say and I don’t know what to feel.”

He soon understood the task that fell to him as a “nobler form of propaganda”. This forces him to take a position: “What he actually wanted to say, he thought, was perhaps too complex to be relevant in this time of simple polarities. He repeatedly emphasized that all Germans were guilty, but he wanted to point out that German culture and the German language carried the germ of National Socialism in them, but also the germ of a new democracy that could now be realized, a thoroughly German democracy. “

Open detailed view

These last, the dense, multi-layered chapters devour motifs such as migration, propaganda, war, political dependency, opinion-making, activism, persecution and spying, while Thomas Mann, as the most famous author of his time, can be stylized as the voice of democracy, the conscience of a world, who still wins the war against Hitler. Is this Thomas still “the magician” as whom daughter Erika now addresses him with a mixture of respect and irony? Or is Thomas not in an even more ambiguous role, as “ambassador of himself”, as Colm Tóibín describes him at one point?

These last chapters keep pointing out that writers are soft, permeable characters. Not only because Thomas Mann wishes at one point that he could merge with the poet through his work as Goethe’s biographer and, at another time, plans to distribute his own character between the two opponents in “Doctor Faustus”. Thomas himself is surprised that in the end only one person is like him, even becoming a “doppelganger”: “Both, author and fictional narrator, looked anxiously into the future, at a time when Germany would be destroyed and ready to be rebuilt , a time when a book like this nascent book might have a place in the world. “

This “doppelganger” is of a different quality than the child, the boy, the child, who are repeatedly sacrificed in this novel by Thomas Mann. And one hopes that the politically alert, clairvoyant, highly sensitive Thomas Mann, who settles in Switzerland at the end of the novel, is not just a product of Colm Tóibín, one of the most alert, clairvoyant, highly sensitive authors of our time.