Beim Propheten Portrait und Ideologie in Thomas Manns Frühwerk

Abstract

"At the Prophet's" is known to contain two portraits of importance from the realm of literary history. Among the – intertextually significant – "twelve people" that make up the catalogue of figures the author has inserted a self-portraitwith which he alienates himself from the Bohemiens of Schwabingen in every respect: by profession, by social status, hygienically, physically, in his morals and above all in his sexual identity as male. Furthermore, a female portrait emerges that has always been identified as Franziska zu Reventlow. In an attempt to transgress such positivist identifications this literary portrait is here to be confronted with the historical person by an analysis of difference. The distances between the portrait and the 'original' seem to result from the sexual identity of the author, which his self-portrait focusses on. They can be described as reactions and reprisals of the patriarchal order, which Reventlow's multiple self-concepts must have provoked so severely.