Besprechungen / Reviews H EINRICH D ETERING and S TEPHAN S TACHORSKI (E DS .): Thomas Mann: Neue Wege der Forschung. Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 2008. 240 pp. € 39,90. The opening of Thomas Mann’s diaries in 1975 and the later publication of his notebooks engendered dramatic changes in interpretations of the author’s life and works. The thirteen essays selected by Heinrich Detering and Stephan Stachorski, written and first published between 1977 and 2005 by renowned Thomas Mann scholars from Europe and the United States, reflect these changes. Readers are invited to look at Mann’s works in view of this illuminating biographical information, including his secret homosexual desires, from intertextual, anthropological and psychological perspectives, and in terms of Mann’s relationship to German politics and history. The editors faced two challenges: first, to provide an exemplary, yet comprehensive overview of new directions in scholarship, and second, to select scholarship that broadly covers Mann’s extensive and multifaceted œuvre. The first essay, «‹Doktor Faustus›: Die radikale Autobiographie» by Eckhard Heftrich, introduces Mann’s passion for ambiguities and a (self-)critical understanding of art and the artist’s existence. In Heftrich’s analysis Doktor Faustus stands out as Mann’s most radical work since it reveals the roots of his intellectual and artistic existence, exemplified by the influence of Nietzsche and Wagner. It is a self-critical «Selbstgericht» (29) about his own uncompromising striving for artistic greatness, his fear of sterility after Buddenbrooks, his arrogant distance from the bourgeois humanistic world. However, behind the self-condemning story of the artist and Faust-figure Adrian Leverkühn looms the novel’s fascination for the cold artist who merits love and empathy. A similar ambiguity toward the creative outsider is also noted in Hans Wysling’s account of narcissism in Mann’s works. Mainly drawing from Mann’s last novel Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, Wysling highlights the tensions between self-love and self-hate, the outsider’s simultaneous rejection of a banal world and deep sympathy for it, and the suffering from extraordinary existence and celebration of alienating difference - tensions which, we should note, can be traced back to the very beginnings of Mann’s writings. With Karl Werner Böhm’s groundbreaking interpretation of masks, used by Mann to write about stigmatized desire, the editors acknowledge the centrality of repressed homosexuality in Mann’s works. Böhm’s essay on Der Zauberberg engages in a meticulous discussion of the relationship between Hans Castorp and Madame Chauchat as a mask for a homosexual relationship, and as an expression of Mann’s yearning for and rejection of stigmatized desires. According to Böhm, repressed (homo)sexuality provides the subtext of the first part of Der Zauberberg, whereas rejection of homosexuality and interest in bisexuality are underlying themes in the novel’s second part. Persuasively, Böhm links the problematization of Castorp’s masculinity to Mann’s rejection of a manly, militaristic world and anti-feminism in his Betrachtungen, a signal of Mann’s turning toward democracy in the early 1920s. The impact of homoerotic desires upon Mann’s writings is also addressed in Elisabeth Galvan’s nuanced reading of Mann’s only drama Fiorenza which she bases on Mann’s notebooks, published for the first time in 1991/ 92. 96 Besprechungen / Reviews In their anthropological and psychoanalytical approaches to the Joseph-tetralogy the essays by Jan Assmann and Manfred Dierks invite further discussions of the perplexing complexity of this magnum opus. Assmann explores Mann’s interest in the metahistorical role of myths, his understanding of individual existence as anchored in vertical time and in timeless mythological patterns that give life meaning, orientation and connectivity. Dierks’s contribution accentuates Mann’s use of European projections of Egypt as the world of death, decadent eros (homosexuality) and decline, and relates Mann’s ancient Egyptian world, dominated by conservative values, racism and nationalism, to his condemnation of Nazi Germany. Questions about Mann’s anti-Semitism are raised by Ruth Klüger and Yahya Elsaghe. Mann’s positive portrayal of Jewish characters in the Joseph-tetralogy is, as examined by Klüger, substantially a self-centered reflection of Mann’s own exile existence. Whereas she examines Mann’s love-hate relationship to Jews and shows that Mann’s works are peppered with anti-Semitic clichées, Elsaghe takes a less accusatory stance. He argues that Jews represent predominantly outsiderness and difference in Mann’s works, and that their negative portrayals divulge the author’s rejection of his own artistic existence. The volume devotes three essays to Mann’s non-fictional works. Using Mann’s essay on Anna Karenina as an example, Horst-Jürgen Gerigk shows that Mann’s interest in «exoteric hermeneutics» (152) rather than poetological, esoteric dimensions resulted in grave misinterpretations of other authors’ works. Bernd Hamacher makes a convincing case for a new understanding of Mann’s political essays and speeches as poetologically significant. Mann’s BBC speeches are not only a «wirkungsvolles Offenbarungsmedium im apokalyptischen Kampf» (172) against the Nazis, but also a new, alternative poetic communication for the exiled writer, who had lost his German home and readers. A new understanding of Mann’s speech on Nietzsche from 1924 is offered by Hermann Kurzke. He explores affinities between Nietzsche’s refutation of Wagner and Mann’s own «Selbstüberwindung» (217) in which he rejects German Romanticism and death, and distances himself from his conservative position in Betrachtungen in order to affirm democracy in the early 1920s. The notion that Thomas Mann’s fiction contains layers of complexity and depth that challenge each generation to find new meaning and relevance is reflected in T.J. Reed’s masterful essay on Death in Venice and Hans Vaget’s wide-ranging research on Doktor Faustus. In his «tour d’horizon» over 50 years of scholarship on the «bewegendste literarische Monument des Nachdenkens über Deutschland, seine kulturelle Identität und Geschichte» (197) Vaget focuses particularly on the long-overdue revision of Adorno’s contribution to the musical history in the novel. Thomas Mann: Neue Wege der Forschung is advertised as a representative survey of innovative research and new methods of textual analysis that enhance our understanding of Mann’s œuvre. This collection of essays fulfills this promise and therefore must be recommended. Readers might be disappointed that discusssions on Buddenbrooks, Betrachtungen and the recently published diaries are absent. However, these exclusions cannot be faulted considering the sheer volume of Mann’s works and the editors’ excellent bibliography that invites readers to continue their investigations into the seemingly fathomless dimensions of this timeless author’s œuvre. University of Wyoming Hannelore Mundt