Bluebeard's Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann

Description

Over the last twenty years, critical discussion of Thomas Mann has highlighted the role of his homosexuality for his creative work. This not only is presented as a dynamic underlying Mann's creative work, but also is the supposed reason for the theme of guilt and redemption that grew ever stronger in Mann's fiction. Michael Maar mounts a devastating forensic challenge to this consensus: Mann was remarkably open about his sexual orientation, which he saw as no reason for guilt. But sexuality in Mann's work is inextricably bound up with an eruption of violence. Maar pursues this trail through Mann's writings and traces its origins back to Mann's second visit to Italy, during which the Devil appeared to him in Palestrina. Something happened to the twenty-one-year-old Thomas Mann in Naples that marked him for life with a burdensome sense of guilt...but what exactly was it?

Michael Maar is one of Germany's leading literary critics. Formerly a visiting professor at Stanford University, he is a member of the Bavarian Academy of Fine Arts and the German Academy for Language and Literature.

Michael Maar is an acute analyst and elegant stylist. He has brought out how disturbed and disturbing a writer Thomas Mann can appear again when read with such close and ingenious attention. -- T.J. Reed * Times Literary Supplement * Germany's most gifted literary critic of the younger generation. -- Perry Anderson * London Review of Books * Maar is a fine literary sleuth. -- John Banville, Man Booker Prize Winner 2005