Kaleidoscopically written. Thomas Mann's 'Gerda' as a Poetological Phenomenon between Library and Joseph in Egypt
Dissertation project by Martina Schönbächler
By means of a comparison of Thomas Mann's real and virtual library as well as the material and immaterial traces of reading to be found in it, the study offers a practical contribution to authorial library research in literary studies, a poetological observation of Mann's texts and an analysis of the content of a pattern of gendering.
It finds its corpus of investigation, on the one hand, in Thomas Mann's real and virtual library, which extends beyond the material holdings of the estate library, and, on the other hand, in the entirety of his textual estate, from marginalia to printed works. While the intertextuality and interdiscursivity of Mann's texts materialise in the annotated pages of the physical book collection, the diachrony of Mann's overall text reveals its poetology. A conception of authorship emerges in Text and Library that aligns itself between the two extremes of Romantic genius aesthetics and authorless intertextuality.
Based on a sign-theoretical premise, the study examines the transfer of linguistic material and narrative elements as well as the discursive set pieces that are transported from these textual elements from text to text - from the library into Mann's early narratives and via his factual texts into the first exile novel Joseph in Egypt (1936). On the basis of various hypotexts (examples are Joseph von Eichendroff's Das Marmorbild and Leopold von Sacher-Masoch's Venus im Pelz), a complex of textual components ('Gerda') can be identified in Mann's early stories, which appears again and again in a similar way in Mann's texts; likewise the narrative of passion breaking in, which is observed in research discourse under the keyword of the 'Heimsuchung'.
The novel Joseph in Egypt recodes these early established patterns - 'Gerda' and the 'visitation' - in the field of gender polarisation on the basis of the novella Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1897). Joseph in Egypt thus makes a twofold offer for the embodiment of the 'German' by means of the first 'visitation' of a female character: Potiphar's wife Mut-em-enet and the Goethe incarnation Joseph. Sexuated female and male respectively, a fascist new and an old idea of Germany familiar from earlier texts can thus be clearly cast negatively and positively respectively. Insofar as it propagates an androgynous idea of ideal humanity, the novel thus creates a simultaneously inclusive overall image of Germany that allows identification with the idea of the German, which was endangered during the period of German fascism, to be restored.
The dissertation was written in cooperation with the Thomas Mann Archive as part of the SNF research project "Productive Reading. Thomas Mann's Estate Library" at the Chair of Literature and Cultural Studies at ETH Zurich.