THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

– 47 –
When I argued earlier that the Gnostic myth is not really myth
in the naive sense, I must now make a similar argument about
Mann’s narrative. It also speaks the „language of the
beginning“, but it is a beginning that is always a „precreational
fall“. In many of Mann’s stories and all of his
novels the question of origin, of ancestry is of the greatest
importance as the symbolic expression of that fall, which says:
something happened before which split the world into two.
There are the mixed origins of Hanno Buddenbrook and Tonio
Kröger with their fathers of old Lübeck ancestries and their
exotic and artistic mothers, Hans Castorp’s two almost
mythical grandfathers, there are Joseph’s mythical ancestry
and the incestual union of the parents of Pope Gregory in The
Holy Sinner, or the happy bourgeois origins of the charmingly
narcissistic Krull. Mann’s protagonists recognize themselves
in the mirrors of their ancestry, in the mirror of the past and
the beginning. Joseph and Felix Krull gaze into their mirrors
with narcissistic self-love, others like Tonio Kröger and Hanno
Buddenbrook with a recognition of their own estrangement
from the world around them. This mythical Wiedererkennen,
this recognition of one’s Self in the past of one’s origins, this
is the pattern of Mann’s stories, and it lends itself only too
naturally to a mythical interpretation which Thomas Mann
found when he began his greatest parody, that of the story of
Joseph and the Book of Genesis.
Recognition, repetition, recurrence — these three structure
Thomas Mann’s novels. They are, at closer inspection, modes
of consciousness in which identity and difference move from
the instantaneous to the historical and the eternal. There must
be a connection between the view the soul has of itself and its
beginning, and the story will follow from this initial glance.
As Thomas Mann’s protagonists look into the mirrors of their