[In the following essay, Fickert elucidates autobiographical aspects of Mann's Death in Venice.]

Thomas Mann himself characterized Der Tod in Venedig (written 1911-1912) as a many faceted work and emphasized the fact that this multiplicity of aspects had been compressed into a crystal of rare clarity. He described the composition of the novella in this fashion: “Hier schoß im eigentlichen kristallinischen Sinn des Wortes, vieles zusammen, ein Gebilde zu zeitigen, daß im Lichte mancher Facette spielend, in vielfachen Beziehungen schwebend, den Blick dessen, der sein Werden tätig überwachte, wohl zum Träumen bringen konnte.”¹ Appropriately, the figure of speech Mann chose to depict the success of his effort to combine the many motifs of Der Tod in Venedig was taken from Goethe, for Goethe's life and writings played a considerable part in establishing the concepts which underlie the narrative. Indeed, Mann insisted—after an initial reluctance to discuss the manner in which the story had come into being²—that he had originally been inspired to “toss off” (rasch zu erledigen[d]) an interpolation for the adventures of Felix Krull which in fictional guise would decry Goethe's pitiful attempt in his old age to win the favors of a pretty young woman (Ulrike von Levetzow). Since the projected novel, constituting the autobiography of Felix Krull, represented basically a parody of the literary confessions of remarkable men, including prominently Goethe in Dichtung und Wahrheit, the autobiographical nature of the incidental narrative Mann had in mind and its relationship to a fictional format were foreordained. Ironically, the confrontation between life and art prefigured in this literary situation was duplicated in actuality when Mann together with his wife and his brother Heinrich took a brief vacation trip to (then) southern Austria and Italy, which included a stay in Venice. During this excursion events occurred which led Mann to abandon his plan to retell the story of Goethe's frustrated endeavor to win Ulrike's love as part of the parody evoked by the tale of Felix Krull; instead, during his travels, he had found in an actual set of circumstances the basis for an independent and much profounder literary work.

Mann later expressed his wonderment at the amount of material which his personal life had presented to him as an author on the occasion of his journey to Venice. In writing Der Tod in Venedig, he revealed subsequently, he had had to invent almost nothing; he stated: “Der Wanderer am Münchener Nordfriedhof, das düstere Polesaner Schiff, der greise Geck, der verdächtige Gondolier, Tadzio und die Seinen, die durch Gepäckverwechslung mißglückte Abreise, die Cholera, der ehrliche Clerc im Reisebureau, der bösartige Bänkelsänger, oder was sonst anzuführen wäre—… alles war gegeben.”³ Although this list of actual encounters practically comprises a plot summary, Mann has provided a fictional format for the autobiographical references in Der Tod in Venedig and thus evolved a symbolic representation of reality in which its truth or essence could be revealed.⁴ This study has as its object the exploration of the two levels between which the novella is held suspended—the real world of perception and the world of the imagination—and the literary devices—primarily the interplay between author, narrator, and protagonist—which create the tension in the story in lieu of a plot.

The first sentence in Der Tod in Venedig indicates the presence of three participants: author, narrator, and protagonist. Thomas Mann's particular contribution at this point is his choice of a name for his protagonist. It patently has a variety of symbolic implications. According to Mann himself, “Gustav” refers to Gustav Mahler, whose friendship he cherished and whose genius he revered—at the time the world had only recently been apprised of his early death.⁵ But the musical talents of this Gustav are matched by the literary gifts of another Gustav[e]—Flaubert, whom Mann admired equally and to an extent wished to emulate. Another message Mann can reasonably have expected a part of the name of his protagonist to convey is the significance of the “von,” a sign of Aschenbach's newly achieved ennoblement. His contribution to the cultural well-being of his country and his fellow citizens has thereby been acknowledged and has placed him on a par with those who keep the nation itself secure, as references to the artist's soldierly life in the story attest. “Aschenbach” likewise affords more than one interpretation; a classic instance of the use of oxymoron, “ashen brook” puts forth the theme of the artist's dichotomous nature and tragic fate. An echo of the name of the greatest of Germany's medieval poets and epic writers Wolfram von Eschenbach also resounds in the family name of Mann's protagonist. Further factual material presented in this opening statement implies that an informant other than the author is the storyteller; the lack of the first person pronoun singular precludes identifying the protagonist as the source for this elucidation. Although the facts of time and place might have been supplied by an uninvolved or neutral observer, who can retreat quickly from the scene in order to allow the protagonist's point of view to predominate in the story, the narrator in Der Tod in Venedig at once interjects his own opinion; he characterizes the year as one “das unserem Kontinent monatelang eine so gefahrdrohende Miene zeigte.”⁶ The professorial stance (cf. Zeitblom's in Doktor Faustus) which this remark brings to light might only very loosely be associated with Thomas Mann and not at all with Aschenbach. It indicates that the author has created a character to represent the vantage point from which he regards the events and persons of the narrative. The distinctiveness of this reporter has been definitely established by Dorrit Cohn in a carefully reasoned essay “The Second Author of Der Tod in Venedig.” Although Mann's narrator⁷ does not participate in the story's events himself, he makes of himself an “unreliable” observer, since he interjects a biased, generally moralistic point of view into his account. At the very beginning in relaying necessary bits of information he conveys his own sense of the dismal nature of the times.

The interplay between narrator and author comes to the fore almost immediately in the matter of Aschenbach's encounter with a stranger while out on a stroll in Munich. Although the storyteller gives a detailed description of the rather exotic-looking man, he fails to keep it in mind when he subsequently depicts a series of strangers provided by Mann with marked similar features; these likenesses which turn realistically conceived figures into symbols elude Mann's “second author”s (the term is the invention of Franz Stanzel, introduced in his book Die typischen Erzählsituationen im Roman [1955]), even though he has just begun his tale by mentioning the “gefahrdrohende Miene” of the year. He also proceeds to take the reader into Aschenbach's mind, where the sight of the foreigner has produced the desire to travel and with it the picture of a jungle landscape, rife with danger. This exposition of the protagonist's thinking, introduced with the words “er war gewahr”—later more frequently by er “dachte”—suggests a rudimentary form of the interior monologue. The protagonist's nonchalance at this juncture in the face of this ill-boding vision is aligned with the narrator's lack of insight; the latter closes the episode with the report of Aschenbach's unconcern (which he shares): “Mit einem Kopfschütteln nahm Aschenbach seine Promenade an den Zäunen der Grabsteinmetzereien wieder auf” (p. 10) Sanity—a realistic view of the world—is restored after Aschenbach's first encounter with unbridled fantasy. In order to account for the abruptness of Aschenbach's decision to travel, the narrator points to the intensity of the labors the protagonist is called upon to perform by his ego and “the European soul” and undertakes another excursion into his mind (“so dachte er”). On this occasion Aschenbach analyses his need for self-discipline and the exercise of his will and the concomitant need to relax, even if only briefly.

At the beginning of the novella's second section in its first part, the words “der Autor” occur, and Aschenbach's genius, tentatively established by a brief discussion of his works, becomes that of Thomas Mann. Aschenbach's literary output consists of Mann's unfinished projects and far-reaching ambitions as an author. An appended sketch of Aschenbach's life likewise has but a thin veneer of fiction; it reiterates in large part autobiographical details pertaining to Mann's life and proposes in sum: “die Vermählung dienstlich nüchterner Gewissenhaftigkeit mit dunkleren feurigeren Impulsen ließ einen Künstler und diesen besonderen Künstler erstehen” (p. 13). These passages pertain in a most personal way to Mann's raison d'être as a writer and justify his creating a tale about the mysterious death in Venice of a gifted author. In Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, book of self-justification in the form of reflections on his life and art, produced during the First World War soon after Der Tod in Venedig, Mann sought to explain openly and clearly why he had chosen to take up the themes of the artist against the bourgeoisie and the intellect (Geist) against the unexamined life (Leben). “In Wahrheit ist die Kunst,” he theorizes in this book of Lebensanschauungen, “nur ein Mittel, mein Leben ethisch zu erfüllen, dafür spricht schon mein autobiographischer Hang, der ethischen Ursprungs ist …”⁸ The writer with a bad conscience who had revealed himself in “Tonio Kröger” thus plays a part, but a much more sophisticated one, in Der Tod in Venedig. In writing to Felix Bertaux, Mann once proposed that a parallel existed between the two works, since both dealt with the same subject, Der Tod in Venedig, however, on a higher plane (letter from München on March 1, 1923).

Following upon Mann's exposition of his proclivity as a writer to dichotomies in the novella, the storyteller takes occasion to comment on the same topic in general terms: “Die Menschen wissen nicht warum sie einem Kunstwerk Ruhm bereiten,” he philosophizes (p. 15). In actuality, he conjectures, people appreciate great literature because they seem to fathom the struggle which produced it: “Aschenbach hatte es einmal an wenig sichtbarer Stelle unmittelbar ausgesprochen, daß beinah alles Große, was dastehe, als ein Trotzdem dastehe, trotz Kummer und Qual, Armut, Verlassenheit, Körperschwäche, Laster, Leidenschaft und tausend Hemmnissen zustande gekommen sei” (p. 15), the narrator reports. He adds that this drive to persevere (in a sense, the will to live) was precisely the essence of Aschenbach's life and the key to his work. Der Tod in Venedig thereafter becomes an account of the artist's precipitous plunge into the morass of moral decay and consequently death. As is his custom in introducing a new element in his story, the narrator begins this section with a question: “Aber moralische Entschlossenheit jenseits des Wissens, der auflösenden und hemmenden Erkenntnis—bedeutet sie nicht wiederum eine Vereinfachung, eine sittliche Vereinfältigung der Welt und der Seele und also auch ein Erstarken zum Bösen, Verbotenen, zum sittlich Unmöglichen?” (p. 17).

The answer to this question comes initially in the form of an episode which takes place on a ship on which Aschenbach journeys to the south. Mann has acknowledged that the shipboard encounter in the story occurred, more or less, one is to assume, as his storyteller describes it. Aschenbach is appalled by the sight of an old man made up to look much younger than he is, who is enjoying the company of a group of genuinely young men—the suspicion that he at least is a homosexual is not far from the narrator's mind. At this point neither Aschenbach nor his amanuensis is aware of the foreshadowing his author has imparted as his imaginative contribution to the autobiographical information being given. It must be mentioned that even the presentation of exclusively factual biographical material cannot avoid being suffused with the aura of hindsight and fail to be reflection on a past event, that is, an interpretation of it. Mann's fashioning of a symbolic subtext, depicting the problematic nature of creativity reinforces the truth (realism) of his story by being consonant with its general tenor and, at the same time, provides a profounder truth of its own. Mann has taken pains elsewhere to state the reason for his preoccupation with the theme of the artist's dilemma; he avers: “So behaupte ich nicht, ein Meister oder auch nur ein Künstler zu sein, sondern nur, daß ich von Künstler und Meistertum Einiges weiß.”⁹

As is the narrator's wont, he introduces the next episode, the arrival in Venice, by posing a question: “Wer hätte nicht einen flüchtigen Schauder, eine geheime Scheu und Beklommenheit zu bekämpfen gehabt, wenn es zum ersten Mal oder nach langer Entwöhnung galt, eine venezianische Gondel zu besteigen?” (p. 25). interspersed in the narrative in one of its rare instances of dialogue are glimpses of Aschenbach's state of mind; pointedly the phrase “er dachte” recurs. At this time the story concerns itself with the misadventure of the mysterious gondolier. Mann has patently turned this not unusually eccentric “taxi driver” into the ferryman Charon. With this strange encounter the protagonist, symbolizing the artist whose fate it is to fall victim to his innate fallibility, takes another step in the direction of inevitable doom. At the moment, however, Aschenbach is able to shrug off his uneasiness; “Aschenbach zuckte die Achseln” (p. 28), the narrator writes, recording the same gesture with which the protagonist had dismissed the appearance of the stranger at the cemetery gates. Then Aschenbach's true nemesis manifests itself in the person of a handsome youth, a guest, together with his mother and his sisters, at the hotel on the beach where the writer is staying. Finding the perfection he has sought to attain in his art in the physical form of an adolescent boy, Aschenbach is charmed and fascinated by this congruence between the real and the ideal. His first encounter with Tadzio, as he comes to believe the youthful Apollo (more specifically, perhaps, Hermes) is called, is fraught with symbolic and autobiographical significance. The pertinence of the motif to Mann's life has a two-fold aspect. Once again in truth, the author had observed such a handsome young stranger during his visit to Venice.¹⁰ But just as importantly in an autobiographical frame of reference, the first meeting—at a distance—of Aschenbach and Tadzio resembles that of Mann and his wife-to-be Katia Pringsheim to an appreciable degree. In one of his letters to her he describes the effect her appearance in his life had had on him: “Merkwürdigerweise ist es immer der Kaimsaal. wo ich sie sehe—was daher kommt, daß ich Sie früher dort oft durchs Opernglas beobachtete, bevor wir uns kannten. Ich sehe Sie links vorne hereinkommen, mit Ihrer Mutter und Ihren Brüdern, sehe … Ihr schwarzes Haar, die Perlenblässe Ihres Gesichtes darunter, Ihre Miene mit der Sie verbergen wollen, daß Sie die Blicke der Leute auf sich fühlen—es ist nicht zu sagen, wie vollkommen und wunderbar im Einzelnen ich Sie sehe …”¹¹ Because in reality Mann's experience of love in Venice was ambiguous, consisting of both a forbidden emotion and the recollection of one which afforded him happiness, his transformation of this transitory state of confusion into the fiction of an obsession with tragic results was a significant accomplishment. In developing the theme of a fatal attraction, not at all incidentally echoing Platen's cry of despair: “Wer die Schönheit angeschaut mit Augen, Ist dem Tode schon anheimgegeben,”¹² he was expressing not only a personal malaise but also the general malaise of artists, due to the haunting suspicion that their creative fervor emanates from an aberration in their physical being.

In the rest of the novella Mann depicts the deadly effects of the fever of creativeness; allowing the narrator almost free reign in bringing the story to a close, he prepares the reader to accept the validity of the climactic event, the fiction of the author's death. The disapproving narrator indulges himself in describing minutely the profligate life, especially in its meaningless, of the idle rich at the resort hotel. He further distances himself from the superficiality of this kind of behavior by frequently using the impersonal pronoun “man”: e.g., “Man war nicht vor der Mutter zu Tisch gegangen, man hatte sie erwartet, sie ehrerbietig begrüßt und beim Eintritt in den Saal gebräuchliche Formen beobachtet” (p. 32); “man bedauerte, man quittierte seine Rechnungen” (p. 41). Even while he withdraws his initial admiration of and sympathy for the protagonist, the storyteller occupies himself more intensively with Aschenbach's thoughts. Characteristically identified by the introductory phrase “er dachte,” they replicate Mann's own preoccupation with the artist's dichotomous existence. Thus at one point Aschenbach declaims to himself: “Wer enträtselt Wesen und Gepräge des Künstlertums! Wer begreift die tiefe Instinktverschmelzung von Zucht und Zügellosigkeit, worin es beruht!” (p. 53). Subtlety the narrator's commentary in the form of questions has become a part of the protagonist's self-reflection in the form of exclamations; at the same time, Aschenbach's musings encompass the tenets of Mann's theory of the artist's precarious existence. These various strands are interwoven with great craftsmanship into the fabric of the fiction.

The story of Aschenbach's surrender to the lust of enjoying the sight of Tadzio's beauty and reveling in the illusion that the boy welcomes his attention molds the background for the narrator's presentation of a series of events in which Mann, together with his wife and brother, were actually involved during their stay in Venice. Saliently, they were confronted by the threat of a cholera epidemic—the literal aspect of the throes of death in Venice. The encounter with the clerk in the travel bureau who, contrary to the best interests of the concern, warns Aschenbach to hasten his departure from the stricken city happened in reality to Thomas Mann. A trunk misdirected in being transported out of Venice and thereby the cause of the delay of the Manns in leaving for healthier climes was in fact the property of Heinrich Mann, although it appears in the novella as the basis of an excuse for Aschenbach to risk the peril of remaining near Tadzio, whose family is as yet unaware of the accelerating momentum of the plague. In the episode of the roving actor-singers who entertain the guests at the hotel the sequence of actual events which appear as incidents in the fiction reaches a climax. One of the players performs a laughing song,¹³ evoking a fit of laughter in the audience. Aschenbach finds the entire situation repulsive (and assumes that Tadzio does, too) sensing that the clown is mocking himself and all other artists as well, particularly those like Aschenbach himself who consider art to be beyond the reach of frivolity.

This resistance to the loss of dignity is the last manifestation of Aschenbach's sense of purpose—his Dichterwürde. The final phase of his degradation begins when he abandons not only his self-worth and being but also Tadzio and the members of his family to the likelihood that they will be stricken with cholera. In words which belong to the narrator and thus emphasize his (Aschenbach's) estrangement from the bourgeois world of sobriety and self-respect, the protagonist proclaims his own depravity: “Der Gedanke an Heimkehr, an Besonnenheit, Nüchternheit, Mühsal und Meisterschaft wiedert ihn in solchem Maße, daß sein Gesicht sich zum Ausdruck physischer Übelkeit verzerrte. ‘Man (N.B.) soll schweigen!’ flüsterte er heftig. Und: ‘Ich werde schweigen!’ … Was galt ihm noch Kunst und Tugend gegenüber den Vorteilen des Chaos? Er schwieg und blieb” (p. 73). At this point in the final pages of the novella, the author makes his presence felt by transcribing a dream Aschenbach has after he has given up all moral responsibility. The nature of its contents is such that the line of demarcation between author and protagonist is blurred. It is more the dream of the essayist and quasi-philosopher Thomas Mann than that of a cosmetically rejuvenated mature man doting on a good- looking adolescent boy. Mann's interest in the Nietzschean dichotomy of the Apollonian and the Dionysian elements in life plays a notable part in Aschenbach's fantasizing. The dreamer hears the approach of those who in drunken revelry celebrate der fremde Gott (in italics, p. 73), and, using, even under these circumstances, the favorite rhetorical device of the narrator, he asked himself a question which depicts the inner conflict in the mind of the protagonist: “Lockte [der tiefe, lockende Flötenton] nicht auch ihn, den widerstrebend Erlebenden, schamlos beharrlich zum Fest und Unmaß des äußersten Opfers? Groß war sein Abscheu, groß seine Furcht, redlich sein Wille, bis zuletzt das Seine zu schützen gegen den Fremden, den Feind des gefaßten und würdigen Geistes” (p. 74). The ensuing ritual of physical frenzy and perversion (“Und seine Seele kostete Unzucht und Raserei des Unterganges,” p. 75) connotes the victory of Leben over Geist and pictures the artist's vain struggle to maintain intellectual control over the physical force of his creativeness. At the end of the fantasy Aschenbach in Mann's stead faces the truth that art can only interpret life and not create it, that the artist can only truly express what he has experienced. Thus the various encounters Aschenbach has had on his way to Venice and afterwards—from that with the stranger at the cemetery gates in Munich to that with the singer of the mocking-laughter song, including his strangely distant yet passionate relationship with Tadzio—all have symbolized the fealty all artist's owe to life itself and the risk they must take in letting themselves become a votary of Dionysos.¹⁴ Mann himself once, many years after Der Tod in Venedig was written, summarized its symbolic subtext; in an autobiographical commentary “On Myself,” he wrote: “Der Künstler, dem Sinnlichen verhaftet, kann nicht wirklich würdig werden …”¹⁵ The particular prominence this novella has achieved, despite its rather esoteric “message,” was acquired because of the subtle interplay between its various elements—narrative, theme, symbolism, autobiography and fiction, as well as the interplay between narrator, protagonist, and author. The validity of the concept of art it undertakes to convey becomes compromised when Mann attempts to incorporate myths borrowed from cultural-historical literature. Peter Heller has pointed out the incongruities which result: “Unlike the insights gained from a rare depth and a still rarer clarity of introspection, Mann's metaphysical notions are eclectic, deceptive, and inconsistent, now too elusive to be defined, now too crude and simplistic to be taken at face value.”¹⁶ In the final episode which describes Aschenbach on the point of death from cholera, the same combination of narrative, interior monologue, and the element of myth which characterized the section about “his” dream prevails. The story of Aschenbach's unrequited love reaches its end since he realizes his last opportunity to revel in the sight of the boy's beauty has come—Tadzio's family, having become aware of the reign of death in Venice, is about to leave. Watching Tadzio in his last moments of play on the beach, Aschenbach seems to fall victim to the delirium which his illness has produced. The narrator first portrays the power of life over art in describing Tadzio's wrestling match with a sturdy friend. Thrown face-down in the sand, Tadzio lies defeated, scarcely able to breathe with the victor kneeling on his back. Released, he takes flight into the low-tide waters. Aschenbach, looking on, fantasizes: “Ihm war aber, als ob der bleiche und liebliche Psychgog dort draußen ihm lächle, ihm winke; als ob er, die Hand aus der Hüfte lösend, hinausdeute, voranschwebe ins Verheißungsvoll-Ungeheure. Und wie so oft machte er sich auf, ihm zu folgen” (p. 81 f.). Not only the phrase “das Verheißungsvoll-Ungeheure,” which in reality is the endless sea, but also the androgynous child leave the impression that Mann has Goethe in mind here as he did when he first proposed to write a story about the downfall of an artist. Tadzio, beckoning from afar, suggests Goethe's Euphorion and thus also Knabe Wagenlenker, namely the spirit of poetry, of all creative writing. It is this figure that Mann can follow in life as his fictional representation of himself as Aschenbach does in death.

Notes

1. Quoted in Manfred Dierks, Studien zu Mythos und Psychologie bet Thomas Mann (Bern, München: Francke, 1972), p. 31. See also Mann's letter of March 12, 1913 to Philipp Witkop. “Es scheint, daß mir hier [im Tod in Venedig] einmal etwas vollkommen geglückt ist—ein glücklicher Zufall, wie sich versteht. Es stimmt einmal Alles [sic], es schließt zusammen, und der Kristall ist rein” (Dichter über ihre Dichtungen: Thomas Mann (I), ed. Hans Wysling, Marianne Fischer [N.p.: Ernst Hermian, 1975), p. 401.

2. See the letter to Elisabeth Zimmer, dated Sept. 6, 1915: “Ich habe die Komposition fast vergessen”; Dichter über ihre Dichtungen, I, 406.

3. Dichter über ihre Dichtungen: Thomas Mann, I, 434.

4. In his essay “Thomas Mann's Conception of the Creative Artist” in Critical Essays on Thomas Mann, ed. Inta M. Ezergailis (Boston: G. K. Hall, 1988), Peter Heller avers: “In his art [Mann] cannot dissemble. In his art he does what he is. For ‘art is truth—the truth about the artist’” (p. 169).

5. See the letter of March 18, 1921 to Wolfgang Born, Dichter über ihre Dichtungen: Thomas Mann, I, 418.

6. Thomas Mann, Der Tod in Venedig (Frankfurt am Main & Hamburg: Fischer, 1954; Fischer Bücherei 54), p. 7. Further references are to this edition and are given in the text.

7. Cohn points out that Mann himself distinguished between the author and the narrator, characterizing the latter as “an invented and shadowy observer”; see Dorrit Cohn, “The Second Author of Der Tod in Venedig” in Critical Essays on Thomas Mann, p. 125. Cohn posits that the kind of narrator chosen by Mann, the unreliable narrator, was the result of Mann's having read Die Wahlverwandtschaften, in which one is prominent, five times during the writing of his novella (p. 143n).

8. Quoted in Dichter über ihre Dichtungen: Thomas Mann, I, 407.

9. Ibid. It must be noted that a preeminently knowledgeable critic, Herbert Lehnert, has pointed out in Thomas Mann: Fiktion, Mythos, Religion (Stuttgart, etc.: W. Kohlhammer, 1965, zweite, veränderte Auflage, 1968) that “Selbstinterpretationen bedürften der kritischen Deutung” (p. 138) and thereby seems to confirm what another critic writing on the theme of truth in literature has asserted: “The truth of art is a limited truth”; see Albert Hofstadter, Truth and Art (New York & London: Columbia University Press, 1965), p. 210.

10. After Mann's death, the actual model for Tadzio came upon the then internationally celebrated story and placed himself in the circumstances extant at that time in Venice; therefore, he let it beknown that he was Wladyslaw Moes and that he thought he remembered being stared at by everybody including a ubiquitous “old man”; see Peter de Mendelssohn, Der Zauberer Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1975), I, 869 ff.

11. Quoted in Der Zauberer, p. 510. In regard to Aschenbach's worshiping Tadzio from afar, the symbolic value of his homoerotic passion becomes apparent, and the likelihood of an overt manifestation of it in the story becomes negligible.

12. In a speech at the Viennese PEN-Club in 1925 Mann himself used this quotation in reference to Der Tod in Venedig; see Dichter über ihre Dichtungen: Thomas Mann, I, 424 f.; see also p. 426.

13. The narrator suggests that it was a popular song, although in an obscure dialect; since Mann was a devotee of both Goethe and classical music, however, he must have been familiar with Moussorgsky's setting of Mephistopheles' ballad of the flea from Goethe's Faust, which features a refrain of laughter.

14. See Dierks, Studien zu Mythos und Psychologie bei Thomas Mann, p. 20: “[Die Reihe Gestalten] wären als Gegenkräfte des Apollonischen zu fassen—als Sendboten des Dionysos …”

15. Dichter über ihre Dichtungen: Thomas Mann, I, 439.

16. Peter Heller, “Thomas Mann's Conception of the Creative Writer” in Critical Essays on Thomas Mann, p. 173.