[An American educator and critic, Hatfield is the author of numerous books on German literature and has served as editor of the Germanic Review. In the following excerpt, he discusses theme, structure, and style in Tonio Kröger.]

Tonlo Kroger is Mann's most lyrical story. As a direct apologia, it is warmer in tone than the earlier stories. Mann is closer to autobiography here than ever before, and sympathy with Tonio, and a pity approaching self-pity, are not restrained.

Tonio Kröger is a writer of great talents, though he finds production a slow, unrelenting torment. But it is primarily the basic condition of his existence from which he suffers: he is doubly isolated. He has escaped from the world of his paternal tradition, but he is no more at home among the Bohemians of Munich than he had been among the burghers, and the latter he had at least respected. Either to resolve his dilemma, or at least to find a means of making it bearable and fruitful, is the "problem" of Tonio's existence. He himself prefers to put it more grandiloquently, in terms of the eternal and irreconcilable conflict between "spirit" and "life."

In part, no doubt, Tonio is the victim of his own ideology. The "spirit" (including of course art and the intellect) is conceived of as dead, while "life" is utterly bourgeois and banal. Once one has escaped from the fascination of Mann's language, one realises that his great antithesis is after all only a very arbitrary one. But to Tonio this extreme dualism reveals the essence of the universe; it is small wonder that he finds his existence "a bit hard," as he says with studied understatement. If one accepts the assumption that "the artist" is necessarily and eternally cut off from all vitality and human warmth, then the masochistic analogies Tonio draws between the artist and the outcast or the eunuch are sound. "And if I, I all alone, had achieved the Nine Symphonies, The World as Will and Idea and the 'Last Judgment,' you would be eternally right in laughing at me," he exclaims (in thought) to a blonde young lady. Any "normal" person is superior to Beethoven, Schopenhauer, and Michelangelo—this is the "treason of the intellectuals" with a vengeance. Coming from Tonio, the sentiment is understandable, and it is a tribute to Mann's skill that one does not immediately realise its enormous absurdity. But even Tonio cannot really believe it.

To turn from these abstractions to the work itself: Tonio Kruger is clearly and symmetrically constructed. The first pages develop Tonio's sense of isolation and inferiority, largely by the vivid account of his unreciprocated feelings for Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm, the exemplars of the seductive beauty of normality. (They are blond, he is not; this note is heard again and again.) The growing consciousness of his gifts as a writer only cuts him off the more from the world of "life." He flees from this milieu, though he never completely rejects it psychologically; he is plagued by the sense of apostasy from the traditions of his father. Lisaveta Ivanovna, his confidante, makes him recognise his true position for the first time. He is a bourgeois after all, but a "lost burgher," a "Bohemian with a bad conscience." This insight, strategically placed in the centre of the novella, is its turning point. In search of further self-knowledge, Tonio returns to the North. After an ironic interlude in his native city he experiences, in Denmark, what Joyce would have called an epiphany. Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm return, not in person but as types; again he is overwhelmed by their beauty and unproblematic self-sufficiency. But by now he has come to accept his own position: it is precisely his frustrated love for the Nordic-normal-bourgeois which gives him the inner tension that makes him creative. Henceforth he will try neither to identify himself with the Bohemian nor to seduce the burgher into the realm of art. He will stand between, a sympathetic if ironic mediator. In a letter to Lisaveta which forms the ending of the story, he draws the balance of his existence:

I gaze into an unborn and shadowy world, which needs to be given order and form; I see a throng of shadows of human figures, who beckon to me that I weave spells to redeem them: tragic and ridiculous figures, and those that are both at the same time—and to these last I am much devoted. But my deepest and most secret love belongs to the blond and blue-eyed, the clear, vital ones, the happy, lovable, and commonplace.

Do not find fault with this love, Lisaveta; it is good and fruitful. There is a longing in it and melancholy envy and the least trace of scorn and a complete, chaste bliss.

These last lines of Tonio Krbger remind one of the magnificent ending of A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. Mann's lyrical novella occupies a place in his development similar to that of Joyce's pedagogical novel within his work. Both Tonio and Stephen Dedalus come to accept the role of the artist; each has a sense of mission; each gives a programmatic statement of his ambitions. Yet in Dedalus' words:

Welcome, 0 life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.

there is a fanfare of trumpets, a determination which makes one aware of a certain softness and sentimentality in Mann's protagonist. Tonio, no doubt, would have found such youthful exuberance naive. In his most positive affirmation an elegiac note remains. The strength, the sense of activity of Joyce's passage lie beyond the grasp of Mann's gentler and somewhat narcissistic hero. In Gustave von Aschenbach he was to portray an artist of more heroic stamp.

In Tonio Kröger, Mann uses the leitmotif more abundantly and in a more "musical" manner than in any previous work. It has among others a structural function: the whole action is held together by the motifs which bind a late passage to an early one. For example, as a boy Tonio expresses his pride in his family and his middle-class conscience in the words: "We are no gypsies in a green wagon"; when it recurs later, the phrase draws the whole passage associated with it back into close contact with what has gone before; and the entire novella gains in solidity. The sense of recognition and reminiscence is such that Tonio almost literally relives his own past. Repetition is not limited to words and phrases; that Hans and Inge or the dancing of the quadrille "recur" is a natural extension.

Above all, the motifs seem to have been chosen to produce nostalgia and loneliness, almost as if they had been borrowed from lyrics by Heine or Storm. Thus the wildflower in his father's buttonhole, and the "old walnut tree," always linked with a fountain and the sea. The effect of melancholy isolation is increased by weaving in references to Hamlet (whom the Germans generally romanticise), to Schiller's Don Carlos, and to a poem of Storm's. Mann once implied that Tonio KAger was the work most peculiarly his own, and its warm, personal, somehow youthful quality explains in part its vast popular appeal. It is, if the paradox is allowable, a sentimental masterpiece.