Tag Archives: German literature

RKS Literature: Doctors as Empty Headed? (Thomas Mann)

“Indeed, the doctor’s calling is not different from any other: its practitioners are for the most part ordinary empty-headed folk, ready to see what is not there and to deny the obvious. Any untrained person, if he loves and has knowledge of the flesh, is their superior and in the mysteries of art can leadContinue reading “RKS Literature: Doctors as Empty Headed? (Thomas Mann)”

RKS Literature: School as Prison (Thomas Mann)

“I am only able to live when my mind and my fancy are completely free; and this it is that memory of my years in prison actually less hateful to me than those of the ostensibly more honourable bond of slavery and fear which chafed my sensitive boyish soul when I was forced to attendContinue reading “RKS Literature: School as Prison (Thomas Mann)”

RKS Literature: Making a Proper Toilette (Thomas Mann)

“The preparation, the lavish equipment for what should have been the serious business of life used up all his energy. How much mental effort had been expended simply in making the proper toilette. How much time and attention went to his supplies of cigarettes, soaps, and perfumes; how much occasion for making up his mindContinue reading “RKS Literature: Making a Proper Toilette (Thomas Mann)”

RKS Literature: The Tribal Laws of Dogs; (Thomas Mann)

“ My old familiar Bashan was a stranger to me, I found it impossible to enter his feelings or behaviour or understand the tribal laws that governed them. Certainly, the meeting in the open of two dogs, strangers to each other, is one of the most painful, thrilling, and pregnant of all conceivable encounters: itContinue reading “RKS Literature: The Tribal Laws of Dogs; (Thomas Mann)”

RKS Literature: A Dog and His Absolute Master: (Thomas Mann)

It is a deep-lying patriarchal instinct in the dog that leads him-at least in the more manly, outdoor breeds-to recognize and honour in the man of then house and the head of the family his absolute master and overlord, protector of the hearth: and to find in relation of vassalage to him the basis andContinue reading “RKS Literature: A Dog and His Absolute Master: (Thomas Mann)”

RKS Literature: History Professors Not Liking History! (Thomas Mann)

“He knows that history professors do not love history because it is something that comes to pass, but only because it is something that has come to pass: that they hate a revolution like the present one because they feel it lawless, incoherent, irrelevant- in a word unhistoric: that their hearts belong to the coherent,Continue reading “RKS Literature: History Professors Not Liking History! (Thomas Mann)”

RKS Literature: The Misleading Moment (Thomas Mann)

“For a human being tends to believe that the mood of the moment, be it troubled or blithe, peaceful or stormy, is the true, native, and permanent tenor of his existence: and in particular he likes to exalt every happy chance into an inviolable rule and to regard it as the benign order of hisContinue reading “RKS Literature: The Misleading Moment (Thomas Mann)”

RKS Literature: The Northern vs. Southern Temperament (Thomas Mann)

“My father, you know, had the temperament of the north; solid, reflective, puritanically correct, with a tendency to melancholia. My mother, of indeterminate foreign blood, was beautiful, sensuous, naïve, passionate, and careless at once, and, I think, irregular by instinct. The mixture was no doubt extraordinary and bore with it extraordinary dangers. The issue ofContinue reading “RKS Literature: The Northern vs. Southern Temperament (Thomas Mann)”

RKS Literature: A Spirit of the Times? (Thomas Mann/Death in Venice)

“And after all, what kind could be truer to the spirit of the times? Gustave Aschenbach was the poet-spokesman of all those who labour at the edge of exhaustion; of the overburdened, of those who are already worn out but still hold themselves upright; of all our modern moralizers of accomplishment, with stunted growth andContinue reading “RKS Literature: A Spirit of the Times? (Thomas Mann/Death in Venice)”

RKS Literature: The Duel and Manhood

“The duel my friend, is not just any ‘arrangement’. It is the final arrangement, a return to the primal state of nature, only slightly moderated by certain chivalrous, but purely superficial rules. The essence of the situation remains what it has been since the beginning, a physical struggle, and it is each man’s duty, howeverContinue reading “RKS Literature: The Duel and Manhood”