Thursday, June 20, 2013

I summarize the Thomas Mann story "The Blood of the Walsungs"

Thomas Mann, “The Blood of the Walsungs,” 1905.  A story in two scenes.

Scene 1:  Lunch with the Aarenhold family, massively wealthy Polish Jews who have become assimilated Prussians, so assimilated that the oldest son has become an Erich von Stroheim-like Prussian officer, “a stunning tanned creature with curling lips and a killing scar” and the youngest son and daughter, nineteen year-old twins, are named after Richard Wagner characters.

The aestheticized manners and grandiose wealth of the characters are a sight to see:  “With careful, skinny hands Herr Aarenhold settled the pince-nez half-way down his nose and with a mistrustful air read the menu, three copies of which lay on the table,” for example.  They are at home.  I am going to institute this practice.  Hand-written menus at every meal for every guest.  This will be easy because they will only need one word: BEANS.  And I can reuse the menus every night.

A more ordinary German has had the bad luck (“[t]owards the end of the luncheon [his] eyes were red and he looked slightly deranged”) of becoming engaged to the daughter.  He apparently has not noticed that she and her brother “were always hand in hand, heedless that the hands of both inclined to moisture.”

Scene 2:  The twins, Siegmund and Sieglinde, are going to attend Die Walküre for the last time before her marriage.  He dresses, exchanging his “rose-tinted silk drawers and socks” for “black silk drawers, black silk socks, and heavy black silk garters with silver buckles.”  His sister joins him, and they make out (“They spent another minute on the chaise-lounge in mutual caresses”).

The next quarter or so of the story shows the twins at the opera.  Many pages present a detailed summary of the plot of the opera, focusing mostly on the twins Siegmund and Sieglinde who fall in love, discover that they are brother and sister, and behave in a manner that eventually produces the hero Siegfried:

Crouching on the bearskin they looked at each other in the white light, as they sang their duet of love.  Their bare arms touched each other’s as they held each other by the temples and gazed into each other’s eyes, and as they sang their mouths were very near…  In ravishment he stretched out his arms to her, his bride, she sank upon his breast – the curtain fell as the music swelled into a roaring, rushing, foaming whirlpool of passion – swirled and swirled and with one might throb stood still.

Rapturous applause.

Curiously, the “real” Siegmund has a white bearskin rug in his white room lit by “soft milky” light.

The twins return home, eat caviar sandwiches with red wine (“a combination offensive to good taste”), and copulate on the bearskin rug.  “Thus Mann has life imitate art” writes Peter Gay in Savage Reprisals (2002, p. 120) after his own summary of the story.

Gay is wrong.  Mann has art imitate art.  There is not a hint of life in any of this.

How I hated this story when I read it long ago; how it poisoned Mann.  On re-reading it, I have changed my mind, although without cleansing the story of its toxins – it is deliberately poisonous – but I will save the defense for the next post.

10 comments:

  1. Nowhere in the story does it say that they are Jewish. Nor is it important to the story whether they are or aren't.

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  2. "Long he looked at each mark of his race: the slightly drooping nose, the full lips that rested so softly on each other; the high cheek-bones, the thick black, curling hair that grew far down on the temples and parted so decidedly on one side; finally the eyes under the knit brows, those large black eyes that glowed like fire and had an expression of weary sufferance."

    and

    "She was still standing bent over, and made a little moue which brought out markedly the facial characteristics of her race."

    and the last sentence (of the final version, which Mann rewrote because his publisher had told him the story came across as antisemitic):

    "Oh," he said-and for a second the marks of his race stood out strong upon his face-"he ought to be grateful to us. His existence will be a little less trivial, from now on."

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  3. The original of that last sentence, in German: "„nun . . .,
    was wir mit ihm sein? Beganeft haben wir ihn, den Goy."

    beganeft is a Yiddish word, meaning to con or swindle.

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  4. Thanks so much! I have been out of the office, so to speak, and was thinking that I'd have to reread the dang story. I did not have those details fresh in mind. But I knew they were there.

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  5. The perverting of the Aryan myth is sort of central to the story. To imagine the twins as just two wacky German kids whose forbidden love can't be denied is to tell an entirely different tale.

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  6. Yes, "[n]or is it important" certainly got my attention. The story means one thing, or one set of things, with, and another thing or set of things without. Of course it is important.

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  7. Interesting comments, all.
    But the last line of the novella should be” that they have made life less trivial, less mundane “. Mann loved “ möndane” as anadjective and human condition. It gave him something to contrast.

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  8. "Blood of the Walsungs" certainly provides plenty of contrast.

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