Thomas Mann towers intimidatingly over the twentieth century’s literary landscape, not least because “the icy marble of his reputation” was a project he pursued “more doggedly” than even the page per day he turned out with all the stereotypical orderliness of a German. Whatever the metaphysical weight of Doctor Faustus may be, “his stock declines, along with that of European high culture in general.” So says Damion Searls in his translator’s introduction to New Selected Stories by Thomas Mann.
One “tactic” by which the great writer’s work might be excavated from the tomb of “a Dead White Man describing in Deadly, Whitely, Manly fashion the Dead White Man Experience” would be to accentuate his Blackness. Before Mann fled the Führer and expatriated to the United States, the Nazi newspaper Der Angriff punished him for just this: “We must demand, terms as strong as possible, that this scribbling mix of Indian, Negro, Moor, and the devil knows what else no longer be allowed to call himself a ‘German’ writer.” Although Mann’s exile is typically attributed to his “Jewishness” (his wife Katia is Jewish), as Searls shows, the author’s mother, Júlia da Silva Bruhns, came from an ethnic admixture of “Portuguese, Indigenous, and Black.” She was raised by an enslaved Mozambican named Anna. And for the Nazis this “impure” heritage equaled anathema.
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