Thomas Mann Died Fifty Years Ago Today

Today’s taz reports on the activity commemorating Thomas Mann, who died on this day in 1955. Perhaps the most notable event actually occurred last week when Walter Kempowski received the Thomas Mann Prize.

But my interest today is not so much in the official celebration, but rather personal reflections. And so I made a brief search of the blogosphere for commentary and found some interesting posts in Italian and Spanish, surprisingly little in German and English.  But for German readers, I cannot recommend highly enough this powerful and highly personal (pdf) essay Dead Mann Walking by Hella Streicher – a writer (Paperback Fighter) in Bremen.

German language is no longer taught in American high schools: for most Americans it is a dead language, like Latin, taught in a few language departments at big universities.  But at one time, German was taught in many of the best elemetary schools, along with French (the best and the brightest preferred German, naturally). In my school near Chicago, the best juinoir high school students could choose between German and Russian (I chose both), and my 7th grade German teacher was a good-natured plump matron from Pforzheim. We were 11 years old, and for some reason she thought is was vitally important that we read Tonio Kröger .  It is impossible to imagine that something like that would ever happen today in the United States: Thomas Mann would be considered "too difficult", "too mature" for anyone but the most advance high school or college students.  And it was not easy for us 11-year-old kids: we struggled with the text and groaned as our teacher forced us to read each passage out loud. But our teacher persisted – bless her – and slowly the elegance and beauty of the sentences began to sink in, and the story of Tonio, the outsider whose love is rejected by the "insiders" Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm, struck a chord in me.  Thus began my lifelong love of literature and the German language.  If only today I could reach back across the years and thank that simple, stubborn teacher for her incredible gift.