Thomas Mann, “Bilse and I” (1906): A Critical Introduction

Read the author's translation of "Bilse and I" here.

1) Context and Textual History

In October of 1905, a defamation trial that would have a lasting impact on the development of literary modernism took place in the sleepy German harbor town of Lübeck. A lawyer with the slightly preposterous name “Ritter aus Tondern” was suing his cousin, the regionalist writer Johannes Valentin Dose, claiming that Dose had maliciously portrayed him as an alcoholic and an adulterer in the 1904 novel The Milksop (Der Muttersohn).[1] Dose and his novel are now long forgotten, and so would be the trial (which Dose eventually lost on appeal), if it hadn’t been for an ambitious and ultimately misguided motion made by the writer’s defense attorney. Hoping to lend support to Dose’s contention that he had been guided by unconscious inspiration rather than conscious intent to slander, the attorney asked the court to summon as expert witnesses five other writers from the region who had similarly depicted living people in their novels. One of the proposed witnesses was a thirty-year-old rising star in the firmament of German letters, an author who had recently made a name for himself with a novel chronicling the nineteenth-century history of the very town in which the trial was taking place: Thomas Mann.[2]

The judge presiding over the trial dismissed the motion, but not before the lawyer representing the aggrieved party, a certain Enrico von Brocken, had recognized it as an important misstep on the part of the defense. For Mann’s Lübeck-novel Buddenbrooks (1901) enjoyed a rather scandalous reputation in northern Germany at the time. In it, Mann had drawn unflattering literary portraits of numerous real-life acquaintances, a fact that caused such an uproar that local book vendors began selling salacious “keys” explaining the various correspondences. The novel was thus poorly suited as a support for the defense in a slander trial, and in fact could have been taken as evidence for the opposite position. This, at any rate, was clearly what von Brocken tried to argue when he dropped Mann’s name into his closing argument, linking it, for good measure, to that of another author who had recently been convicted of slander in a highly publicized trial, a certain Lieutenant Fritz Oswald von Bilse.

Using the pseudonym “Fritz von der Kyrburg,” Bilse had published the novel The Little Garrison (Aus einer kleinen Garnison, 1903), in which he painted a highly unflattering portrait of military life in the small garrison town of Forbach in Lorraine. The work had caused tremendous outrage amongst the Wilhelmine military establishment, had immediately been banned, and had earned its author a dishonorable discharge and six months in prison. Unassuaged by what he regarded as an overly lenient sentence, Kaiser Wilhelm had then personally intervened and forced several of the judges who had presided over the trial to take an early retirement.[3] To tarnish Buddenbrooks as a “Bilse-novel,” as von Brocken did in his closing argument, thus represented a remarkably incendiary accusation.

Perhaps for this reason, news of the Dose trial quickly made its way to the local press in Munich, where Thomas Mann had been living for more than a decade. He could have easily ignored the proceedings, given that they concerned a civil trial involving a novel and an author that almost nobody had previously heard of in Bavaria. But Mann found himself at a turning point in his life in the closing months of 1905. He had arrived in Munich as a mere teenager eleven years earlier, at the high point of the so-called “Schwabing bohème.” His early stories betrayed the influence of this movement and took the tensions between artistic and bourgeois forms of life as their theme. These works appeared in little magazines and were mostly reviewed in them as well. But by the early twentieth century, Mann had made up his mind that he did not want to be an artist who lived apart from mainstream society. When Buddenbrooks was published, he meticulously orchestrated the novel’s reception in the mass-market press, while his carefully cultivated connections to the publishing house of S. Fischer ensured that his future works would be prominently displayed in the shop windows of the best Munich bookstores.[4] This move towards respectability involved changes to his personal life as well. Mann was the son of a Lübeck senator whose sudden death had left the family in a financially precarious state. He was also gay. These qualities might have been viewed as assets had Mann tried to turn himself into a bohemian, but they did nothing to advance his quest to become a socially respected artist. He consequently set out to find a suitable marriage prospect and struck gold in 1904, when he won the attention of the beautiful Katia Pringsheim, the granddaughter of the pioneering German feminist Hedwig Dohm and daughter of the mathematician Alfred Pringsheim, who was one of Munich’s wealthiest society hosts. When news of von Brocken’s accusations reached him in November of 1905, Mann had been married for less than half a year.

The thirty-year-old author thus had a lot to lose, especially since his long-running tendency to include satirical attacks on real-world figures in his writings had already earned him powerful enemies. There was Arthur Holitscher, for example, the editor of the little magazine Simplicissimus, which had published many of Mann’s early stories in the closing years of the nineteenth century. Shortly after the success of Buddenbrooks launched him into an entirely different literary orbit, Mann had satirized his one-time benefactor as the burned-out scribbler Detlev Spinell in the novella Tristan (1903). Then there was the critic Alfred Kerr, who had been Mann’s main rival for the affections of Katia Pringsheim, and whom Mann had treated in somewhat dismissive fashion in a short piece he wrote for the journal Critique of Criticism (Kritik der Kritik) just a few weeks before the Dose trial. (Kerr would get his revenge the following year, when he penned a scorching review of Mann’s play Fiorenza). And perhaps most importantly, there were the author’s new in-laws, the Pringsheims, who had incurred his wrath by the snobbish way in which they had treated him while he was wooing their daughter. Mann sought vengeance by painting a thinly-disguised anti-Semitic portrait of the family in his short story “Blood of the Walsungs” (“Wälsungenblut”), which was scheduled to be published in early 1906. An intervention by Katia’s twin brother Klaus convinced Mann to withdraw his manuscript at the very last moment, but excerpts from the page proofs still made their way to the public and kicked Munich’s rumor mills into high gear.[5]

Mann thus had a number of good reasons to proactively intervene when news of the trial in Lübeck reached him. It was high time for him to explain why he so frequently made use of real-life models in his fiction, and to write a defense of his art that would shield it not only from accusations of character assassination, but also from association with inconsequential writers like Bilse. He took a preliminary stab at this task in November 1905 by publishing short statements in two different newspapers.[6] Just a few months later he completed his manifesto “Bilse and I” (“Bilse und Ich”), which appeared in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten of February 15/16, 1906 and was reprinted as a short brochure later that year.[7] “Bilse and I” has been called the “central document of [Thomas Mann’s] poetic theory” by a leading contemporary scholar and can indeed, also be seen as a central document of the early modernist movement.[8]

2) Analysis

Thomas Mann’s eagerness to clarify his position as a writer during the early years of the twentieth century can be detected not only in the content, but also in the style of “Bilse and I.” The text possesses a polemical directness that is almost entirely absent in Mann’s later works, when he could rest secure in the knowledge of his representative status. The opening paragraphs especially, in which he addresses von Brocken directly, are brutally funny. At the same time, Mann brings all the hallmarks of his elevated style to bear on his polemic: difficult vocabulary, loanwords from other languages, wide-ranging references to Western cultural history, and a syntax characterized by extreme hypotaxis. The second sentence of the essay, for example, consists of no fewer than 129 words in the original German—a torrent of words that is impossible to replicate in idiomatic English. Mann is showing us the world of difference that separates his literary style from that of an “incompetent shyster” like Bilse, who “[pours] what little bit of subaltern spite he [is] able to muster into incorrect German.” At the same time, he leaves no doubt about the fact that his elegant prose is hardened for battle in the arena provided by the modern press. To be a writer of substance in the twentieth century, so Mann suggests, does not mean to keep above the fray, but rather to be able to intervene in it with devastating force.

The substance of the essay reaffirms this basic premise. Mann quickly dispatches with the very argument that Dose had made the central pillar of his defense in the Lübeck trial, namely that similarities with living people should be excused in modern literature as evidence of subconscious influence. Instead, he proudly affirms that he acted deliberately when he turned acquaintances into raw material for the characters in Buddenbrooks (and, we might add silently, in “Tristan” and in “Wälsungenblut”). For to quote the central lines from “Bilse and I”: “Anyone who turns to the past in search of . . . poets who derived inspiration from things that actually happened . . . will turn up the biggest and most excellent names; by contrast, searching through literary history for great ‘inventors’ will only yield mediocrities.”

This, as more than one prior reader of “Bilse and I” has observed, is a somewhat specious claim.[9] A vivid imagination has always been as valuable a tool for the creation of great art as a keen eye and a gift for synthesis. Or to put this in the language of the manifesto: the ability to “conceive” is surely as necessary for aesthetic production as the ability to “perceive.” Mann is less interested in making categorical distinctions, however, than in inverting hierarchies. For him, the artistic process is set into motion by the encounter between the artist and the surrounding world—a world, crucially, that is experienced not only directly but also through the interventions of various media. Mann illustrates this with the example of Shakespeare, who modeled Falstaff on a real-life acquaintance, but created many another play based on stories he found in old books, heard recounted, or saw performed on the stage. Only after this initial encounter with the surrounding world does the process of artistic elaboration begin.

Mann refers to this process of elaboration as “ensoulment” (Beseelung). The term derives from the influential Aesthetic Theory that Friedrich Theodor Vischer, a follower of Hegel, published in 1846; the critic Gertrud Rösch has also drawn connections to the theories of “poetic realism,” the peculiarly German version of the realist movement, which preached that it was the task of the writer to artistically elevate the bare facts of mundane existence.[10] Such glances backwards towards the nineteenth-century largely miss the point, however, for Mann deploys the notion of ensoulment in an entirely modern fashion. He defines the term as the “subjective expansion of a representation of reality” (emphasis in original), and therefore as a process by which characters or literary topoi become “emanations of the one who created them.” This definition is still entirely compatible with Vischer’s aesthetics, but we become aware that something strange is afoot when Mann uses the “deep and terrible solidarity between Shakespeare and Shylock” to illustrate his point. Of all the author-character pairings he might have chosen to illustrate a process of “subjective expansion,” this is surely one of the most loaded!

Mann doubles down on his argument, however, when in the very next paragraph he invokes Ibsen’s dictum that “to write is to sit in judgment over oneself” to summarize his view of the artistic process. True artists, on this view, do not set out to ennoble their materials, as the Romantics might have argued. Nor, indeed, do they strive to offer accurate depictions of things as they really are, as the realists would have claimed. Their quest, rather, is inward-facing. They draw on real-world experiences, and on depictions of real-life acquaintances, primarily to externalize and critically judge conflicts that are to be found deep within themselves.

Mann remains vague about what these conflicts might be over which the artist sits in judgment. His most fully developed example comes in the form of a revisionist account of the composition of Tristan in which he frames the character of Detlev Spinell as an indictment of “my aestheticism, this desiccated artificiality which I regard as the danger of all dangers.” In the same context, he also speaks of a “certain kind of impoverishment in the most human things.” Mental factors are at play, in other words, and “Bilse and I” can on one level be seen as an early affirmation of modernist literature’s well-known psychological turn. But the aestheticism and proclivity towards artificiality that Mann describes could just as easily be framed as a problem of intellectual and generational history. Arthur Holitscher, the colleague whose physical appearance Mann appropriated for Tristan, might rightly have protested that it was cold comfort to learn that his former friend had really meant to skewer only himself through his portrait of the incompetent scribbler Spinell. How was anybody supposed to pick up on this if the problems that the story thematizes are so general that they might be said to afflict any of Mann’s contemporaries? This blend of psychological and cultural analysis would remain a hallmark of Mann’s fiction throughout his career and culminate in his later masterwork Doctor Faustus, a novel that thematizes both the process of modern artistic creation and the malaise of an entire generation of intellectuals born during the last two decades of the nineteenth century.

It is still not clear from any of this, however, why the turn to real-world materials rather than to artistic invention, to “perception” rather than to “conception” would have to be necessary. Even if no actual harm towards the subjects who find themselves unwittingly portrayed is intended, doesn’t it nevertheless reveal a certain “hostility against reality” (emphasis in original) as Mann himself acknowledges in the closing pages of his essay? He fends off this charge by once again turning inwards and talking about the mind of the modern writer. Artists, he claims, are individuals with such a “refinement and alertness of the sensory apparatus” that “every experience becomes suffering.” They draw upon their real-world experiences because the only way in which they can blunt this pain is by making it the raw material for their art. This process of appeasement happens not by sublimation, but rather through a process of critical reflection and through what Mann, following Friedrich Nietzsche, calls the struggle for “insight” (Erkenntnis). Casual readers, when confronted with a novel like Buddenbrooks, may thus see in it merely a salacious roman-à-clef similar to the products of a man like Fritz Oswald Bilse. In reality, the resemblances to living people are beside the point. They are merely the launching-off point for an analysis of wider-ranging spiritual and intellectual problems that the artist, in contemplating his past interactions with these people, has discovered within himself and his environment.

By defining the task of the artist in this way, Mann was also eating away at the boundaries between the “poet” and the “man-of-letters” (Literat) that had held in German culture for much of the nineteenth-century. Poets were allowed the inward turn that Mann here describes as the task of the writer, but not the judgmental attitude that he aligns with it. “Men-of-letters” (journalists, critics, feuilletonists), on the other hand, were allowed to pronounce judgments but only as long as they confined themselves to external social reality. Mann increasingly did not believe this to be a tenable opposition. In modern media societies, so he realized, in which novels and plays ultimately were cultural commodities to be judged and sold in the public sphere, writers were really not so different from their journalistic brethren, and they were certainly dependent on them. His squabbles with Alfred Kerr, for example, can ultimately be seen as an expression of a “narcissism of minor differences,” of two men trying to stake their claim in adjacent areas of the literary field: the one a writer flirting with criticism, the other a critic aiming to turn this hitherto underappreciated genre into a form of art.

Over the next ten years, Mann would relitigate this conflict over and over again, eventually forging from it a modern writer personality—serious, composed, but also in touch with the day-to-day happenings of the literary field, acquainted both with the smell of newspaper ink and with that of gilded leather bindings. This personality came into full bloom in the Weimar years and received important modifications during the period of his exile. It would have a profound impact on how we would come to perceive the social role of the writer in the twentieth-century and found an early pathbreaking expression in the pages of “Bilse and I.”[11]

3) Reception and Contemporary Relevance

“Bilse and I” stands at the beginning of a roughly decade-long process of self-reflection and artistic rationalization on the part of Thomas Mann that culminated with the publication of Death in Venice in 1912. Soon after that came the First World War, and with it, Mann’s assumption of the role of the representative German writer, of national culture incarnate. Around the same time, Mann’s artistic process took a decided turn towards the mythopoetic. The great fictions of the second half of his career are no longer rooted in personal experiences (though they are always still informed by them), but rather in revisions of previous epic creations, whether the Old Testament, the Faust chapbook, an Indian legend, or a collection of medieval tales. Under the influence of this turn, “Bilse and I” was largely forgotten, except by academic critics. In the English-speaking world, of course, there was nothing to forget, since the little manifesto had never been translated in the first place.

The twenty-first century obsession with autofiction, however, has made many of the central questions raised by this text newly relevant. Autofiction, too, proceeds from real-world materials yet submits these to a process of artistic “ennoblement.” And authors of contemporary autofictions have often had to answer—both privately and publicly—many of the same questions that afflicted Thomas Mann when he wrote his manifesto: “what do I owe to the people whom I am depicting in my art?” “How I can prevent salacious readings of my text?” “What do I when other media or other institutions get a hold of my work and interact with it in unforeseen ways?”

This parallelism was illustrated in exceptionally clear fashion in 2003, in the form of another defamation trial involving the German-Jewish writer Maxim Biller (born 1960) and his autofictional novel Esra, which depicts the doomed love affair between a Jewish man named Adam and his Turkish-German lover Esra, transparently modeled on Biller’s own former partner Ayşe Romay. Romay and her mother, depicted in the novel as an alcoholic, took Biller to court and ultimately won their case, forcing his publisher to remove the novel from circulation and pulp all remaining copies. The parallel is made especially interesting by the fact that Biller, in chapter 4 of this novel, refers directly to the scandal that surrounded the publication of Buddenbrooks, the same scandal alluded to in the Dose trial. Biller’s protagonist, himself a writer, there describes Esra’s fear of seeing herself depicted as a literary character, comparing her to the citizens of early twentieth-century Lübeck in the process. He thus explicitly addresses the central ethical and aesthetic concern that connects the autofictional method to “Bilse and I.”[12] Biller’s invocation of Mann in anticipation of the trial that eventually hit him is mirrored by another reference to Buddenbrooks found in a post-factor commentary on it written by Biller’s colleague Daniel Kehlmann, who expressed regret in the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung about the fact that the German state “must prohibit Biller from doing what Proust and Mann were allowed to do.”[13]

In the twenty years that have passed since the Biller trial, autofiction has only become more mainstream, and can now rightly be called the dominant sub-genre of high literary prose fiction of our age. Risen, too, has our awareness of the complex gradations between fact and fiction that result as narratives are recast across media and reframed by institutions of various kinds—but also, it seems, our willingness to take insult, including at seeming slights occasioned by fictional works. “Bilse and I” is therefore a text whose relevance to our own times in only likely to increase in the future.[14]