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Tristan. Sechs Novellen …

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First edition, first printing of Thomas Mann’s third book, a collection of stories including his principal early novella Tonio Kröger, critical to Mann’s development of the figure of the artist and of the Doppelgänger as well as representations of queer desire, an important forerunner to Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice).

Written when Mann (1875–1955) was twenty-five and rooted in his own experience as a schoolboy, Tonio Kröger follows the life of the eponymous young artist from his school days into adulthood, his representation of Kröger’s feelings for his classmate, Hans Hansen, later forming the basis of his representations of queer desire in Der Tod in Venedig, a ‘scene where lover and beloved are profoundly different, and attraction can only work through estrangement’, a type of relationship which acted as a ‘scene of perpetual recurrence for Mann’ (Webber).

‘The subject of [Kröger’s] first love … is given a name which famously fails to match itself, the exotic Tonio jarring against the claims of the patronymic. Thus the pattern is set: the subject as non-self-identical, out of kilter, and the object as confirmed in his German, bourgeois, and masculine identity’ (ibid.). As well as Tonio Kröger, Mann’s Sechs Novellen also comprises Der Weg zum Friedenhof; Tristan (set in a sanatorium and much inspired by Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde); Der Kleiderschrank; Luischen; and Gladius Dei.

The Berlin-based German–Jewish publisher Simon Fischer had published Mann’s debut novel, Der kleine Herr Friedemann, as part of the Collection Fischer, and in 1901 published his first novel, Buddenbrooks, testimonials for both of which are included in the printer’s advertisements here.

Bürgin 1, 3; Wilpert/Gühring 4. See Webber, ‘Mann’s Man’s World: Gender and Sexuality’, in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann (2001), pp. 64–83.