Trials and Tribulations

In Thomas Mann's famous short story of 1903 about the artist's problematic relation to bourgeois society, the aspiring young writer Tonio Krfiger, after an absence of thirteen years, returns to his hometown for a brief visit.There he is confronted by a policeman who, suspecting Kifiger to be a swindler wanted by the law, questions him about his identity and occupation.Kr6ger, although recognizing that this guardian of civic order is within his rights, is nevertheless reluctant to reveal who he is.Unable to provide the requisite identity papers, he finally shows the policeman proof-sheets of a story of his that is about to be published.The officer is not entirely convinced the young writer is not the wanted criminal, but in the end he lets the matter drop and allows Kr6iger to leave the country.This unsettling confrontation with a representative of the German state drives home to Kroger his social isolation, his uneasy existence between two seemingly incompatible worlds: that of his bohemian artist friends, who regard him as a bourgeois, and that of the bourgeois, who try to arrest him.It also reinforces his long-standing aversion to his hometown and his eagerness to return soon to his self-imposed exile in the more hospitable south.Tonio Kr6ger's situation is symbolic of that of many fin de sikcle German writers.As numerous scholars have noted, many late nineteenth and early twentieth century German literati shared three distinct but interrelated characteristics: an acute self-consciousness; a sense of alienation from bourgeois society; and an "unpolitical" withdrawal from the pressing social and political problems of the day.During the nineteenth century, but especially since Nietzsche, German writers became increasingly conscious of their existence as ,a distinct, semi-independent social group and were increasingly preoccupied with questions about the role of art in the modern world, the unique nature of

Ancient history · Censorship · Political science · European history and politics · History · Law

• Analyzing the History of Religious Crime

  David Nash•Journal of Social History•2007

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