Henrik Ibsen's Master Builder and Thomas Mann's Death 1N Venice

Home , Ghosts (play), When We Dead Awaken

DAVID BRONSEN THE ARTIST AGAINST HIMSELF: HENRIK IBSEN'S MASTER BUILDER AND THOMAS MANN'S DEATH 1N VENICE

When Henrik Ibsen's drama The Master Builder was published in 1892, almost simultaneously with its English, French and German translations, it was welcomed by the critics with close to universal acclaim as a work of great literary merit. Despite its positive reception, however, it was greeted with widespread bafflement regarding its meaning. In the words of a contem- porary, "'While one person sees Solness as Ibsen himself, another sees him as Bjornson, a third as a symbol of the right- wing party, a fourth as a symbol of the left and its leader, a fifth sees Solness as a symbol of Man rising in rebellion against God; a sixth sees the play as a conflict between youth and the older generation.' Some sought to identify Solness with Bismarck, while the Saturday Review in London decided that he was meant as a portrait of Mr. Gladstone, and that the play was full of references to the Irish question. ''1 It is significant, in view of this general lack of comprehension, that Thomas Mann, who first read the play a year after its publi- cation at eighteen years of age, immediately grasped its meaning and wrote a critique of it in which he described Solness' fate as a statement of the failure of aestheticism as an exclusive orientation to life. ~ Two decades later, in 1912, Thomas Mann published his novella, Death in Venice, a major work dealing with a similar theme.

1 Michael Meyer, ed., When We Dead Awaken and Three Other Plays (Garden City, New York: Doubleday & Company, Inc., 1960), p. 128. Klaus SchriSter, Thomas Mann (Reinbek bei Hamburg; Rowohlt Tasehenbuchverlag, 1964), p. 31.

21" 324 DAVID BRONSEN

A number of signs point to Mann's having felt a special affini- ty for Ibsen: he taught himself Norwegian in order to be able to read Ibsen in the original; he wrote an essay on him, comparing him to Wagner; and in the collection of novellas that he published in 1904 under the title Tristan, he chose four lines of verse by Ibsen as an epigraph: Living means fighting within you The ghosts of dark powers. Writing is putting on trial Your inmost self. On the basis of its content, this poem could very well have been written by Mann himself, and it is a further indication of the close interplay of life and art for both Ibsen and Mann that the position of the words "living" and "writing" can be reversed and still have the poem apply in an illuminating manner to both writers. Seven years later Mann felt impelled to express in prose what the poem had said more succinctly: "Writing has always seemed to me a product and an expression of internal problems, of being both here and there, of the affirmative and the negative, of being of two minds, of the disturbing richness of inner conflicts, of antitheses and contradictions. Why bother to write at all, if one is not bent on coping intellectually and morally with a problematic self? ''3 It is apparent that Ibsen and Mann were literally kinsmen who were engaged for at least a good part of their lives in defining themselves through literary oeuvres that found their central orientation in dealing with their inner being. The leads that both authors offer explicitly, namely the strug- gle with the problematic self in literature and life, lend themselves to a comparative analysis of the drama, The Master Builder, and the novella, Death in Venice. The theme these two works have in common, that of the artist who is pulled back and

From the introduction to Betrachtunyen eines Unpolitischen (Frank- furt am Main; S. Fischer Verlag, 1956), (originally published in 1919) p. 12. The translation is mine.