Volume 22, Number 10 · June 12, 1975
The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie
By Robert Craft
Thomas Mann Symposium
by Claude Hill chairman
Rutgers University
Katia Mann: Unwritten Memoirs
by Katia Mann, edited by Elizabeth von Plessen, by Michael Mann
Knopf, 192 pp., $7.95
The Hesse/Mann Letters: The Correspondence of Herman Hesse and Thomas Mann, 1910-1955
edited by Anni Carlsson, by Volker Michels, translated by Ralph Manheim
Harper & Row, 256 pp., $10.00
Mythology and Humanism: The Correspondence of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerényi
translated by Alexander Gelley
Cornell University Press, 231 pp., $12.50
An Exceptional Friendship: The Correspondence of Thomas Mann and Erich Kahler
translated by Richard Winston, by Clara Winston
Cornell University Press, 195 pp., $12.50
At Rutgers University's comprehensive symposium commemorating the centenary of Thomas Mann, Hans Wysling, director of the Mann archives in Zürich, estimated that the novelist had written some 25,000 letters. Wysling attributed this epistolic prodigality to a variety of factors: the practical one of Mann's exile; his impeccable courtesy, even when conscious of being importuned to write letters for collectors; the substitution of letter writing for conversation; the constant need for literary exercise; the belief that his letters were a medium for his role as spokesman for the age—though, at the same time, the written communication also enabled him to maintain distance and to preserve what others thought of as his aloofness. Above all, according to Wysling, Mann regarded letter writing as a means to self-analysis, even to a 'merciless examination' of himself. Yet one of the peculiarities of Thomas Mann is that the failure to see and understand his own character, as evidenced in the letters, could exist side by side with the powers of observation and analysis exhibited in his fiction.
Review, 3713 words
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