Tobias Boes

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)

Translated by Tobias Boes. Read his critical introduction here. The other day I was much abused in Lübeck, my hometown. My novel Buddenbrooks became the subject of a long and heated debate in a trial concerning the freedom of the press that was reminiscent of the Bilse affair. [1] It was a noisy matter, the particulars of which need not concern us very much. My novel has become an integral part of every public outrage about art, because its characters are partially based on living people, and...