TONIO KRÖGER
by Thomas Mann, 1903

Written in 1903 when he was 28 years old, "Tonio Kröger" is a self-portrait of Thomas Mann as an emerging artist. It is a miniature bildungsroman that traces elements in the making of the artist from the time he is 14 years old to the time when he is just past the age of 30. A classic study of the romantic conception of the artistic temperament as it had developed throughout the nineteenth century (in places Goethe's Werther and Byron come to mind), the story is perhaps the last gasp of these ideas before the fracture of modernism and world war.

Tonio Kröger, like Mann himself, is of a bourgeois family, son of a respected grain merchant; but as he is also the son of a Latin mother who is unconcerned about bourgeois values, he is at once split and somewhat alienated from his north German contemporaries. We first meet him at the age of 14, already an oddity at school, an outsider whose poetry is laughed at by boys and masters alike but who nonetheless feels a deep love for the blond, athletic Hans Hansen, unintellectual but full of an uncomplicated vivacity. The dark Kröger, all soul and mind, loves but is infinitely estranged from the northern blue-eyed simplicity of normal life.

At the age of 16 Kröger falls in love with Inge, the girl from the house opposite his parents' house, who is another incarnation of the blond, blue-eyed energy of the northern races. He is gradually cured of this obsession not by another personal love but by his developing artistic life. His father dies, his mother marries an artist from the south and drifts away into an unknown distance, the house is sold, the grain business is wound up. Kröger is alone, living primarily an inward existence; while others look out of windows, Kröger stands looking at a blind without realizing what he is doing, for his vision is "within."

He travels south to lands where art is traditionally more highly valued; he tries debauchery, but it palls. The central part of the story is taken up with a long explanation Kröger gives of himself to an artist friend in Munich. He realizes that he wants an audience of mindless "blue-eyed ones," and so he travels north again, though this is 13 years later and he is 30 years old. He revisits his old home, now a public library, and travels on to a Danish holiday resort by the Baltic. Here he recognizes Hans and Inge, presumably married, in a party of day tourists who come to a dance at the hotel where he is staying. He does not reveal himself, and the action of the story closes with his lying on his bed listening to "life's lulling, trivial waltz rhythm" coming faintly from below. In a coda, a letter to his friend in Munich, Kröger proclaims his double allegiance, both to the life of art and to his own bourgeois roots.

The novella, besides having a directly explanatory role as far as Mann's own life is concerned, summarizes a number of themes in his major novels. The struggle between art and other forms of life is the stuff of which his monumental Doctor Faustus is made, for instance, and time and again he would return to the figure of the suffering, sensitive soul, often an artist, and his attempts to strike a balance with the world. The themes are boldly handled. The soul of the artist, like the souls of all people, is divided between blond and dark, that is, between the cold light of the north and the passionate darkness of the south. At first this is an unbearable division; as a young man he feels "flung about" between "icy intellect and scorching sense," or, to put it more simply, the mind and the body. At first, too, it seems that the artist must belong irrevocably to the south and to the darkness, for the artist is obliged to dance while the Hanses and Inges sleep; the artist must suffer while the others exist in comfort.

This simple opposition has to be broken down, however. Kröger, even 13 years later, is jealous of Hans and Inge; he expresses a longing for "the average, unendowed, respectable human being," which is a force that has to be set against his earlier "surrender" to the "power of the word." He is a great artist, but he despises the trappings of artistic bohemia. The circle is squared in the final letter to Lisabeta: he realizes that although he is an artist he is a bourgeois artist and that his soul does not wish to reject the everyday but to use it (as Mann himself would do with such success in his own realist fiction). Above all, there is a virtue in the bourgeois world that is unknown to the cruel world of the artist (Kröger calls literature a "curse"), and that virtue is love. The poet is made of his surrender to the word, but he is also made of love—Mann actually quotes Saint Paul's famous definition of charity in this context. The feelings of love with which the story opened, although adolescent infatuations, now take on, as Kröger watches Hans and Inge and their uncomplicated joy, a deeper meaning. He is the lonely romantic artist, and he suffers and feels alienated; his parents and house are gone; he is neither of the north nor of the south; but he is the artist who has loved, and out of the endless connectivity of love he will forge his art.

This story is Mann's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man or even his Sons and Lovers or À la recherche du temps perdu. It balances "man's innate craving for the comfortable," which it does not condemn, with the torture and ecstasy of poetic creation, which it sees as a fate more than a gift.

—Lance St. John Butler