Reading Order
Tonio Kröger Reading Order
Tonio Kröger (1903) by Thomas Mann is the novella that established his reputation and the one he returned to most often as a key to his work. Tonio is the son of a prosperous North German merchant father and a beautiful dark-haired Southern European mother — half bourgeois, half artist — and the novella follows him from his adolescent loves for the blond, blue-eyed, beautiful Hans and Inge (both hopelessly bourgeois, both incapable of the suffering that makes art) through his adult life as an artist in Munich and his journey North to Denmark, where he looks through a window at people dancing and feels simultaneously outside (because he is an artist) and loving (because his father was a bourgeois). The novella is Mann's most direct statement of his central theme: the relationship between art and life, between the outsider consciousness that makes art and the normal, unreflective life that art envies. Tonio's conclusion — 'I love life' — is the most important sentence in Mann's work.
Where to start
Tonio Kröger (1903) — the complete novella in the H.T. Lowe-Porter or the David Luke translation. Best Mann reading order: Tonio Kröger → Death in Venice → Buddenbrooks → The Magic Mountain → Doctor Faustus.
Complete Tonio Kröger Book List
- 1Buy
Tonio Kröger
Thomas Mann·1903·The complete novella — Tonio, Hans, Inge, and the artist's relationship to the bourgeois world he has lost but still loves. The key to Mann's work; the David Luke translation (Penguin) is highly regarded - 2Buy
Death in Venice
Thomas Mann·1912·The companion — Gustav von Aschenbach and Tadzio in Venice. The companion investigation of the same theme: the artist's relationship to beauty and the bourgeois life he has disciplined himself away from; but where Tonio's conclusion is loving, Aschenbach's is catastrophic - 3Buy
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann·1901·The companion novel — the decline of the Buddenbrook merchant family. The companion investigation of the relationship between bourgeois life and artistic consciousness from the perspective of the family rather than the individual: the Buddenbrook decline is the social version of Tonio's personal predicament - 4Buy
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann·1924·The companion — Hans Castorp at the sanatorium. The companion investigation of the same theme on a much larger scale: Hans Castorp is Tonio's unconscious companion — the simple bourgeois young man who is drawn into the realm of the extraordinary and educated out of his simple confidence - 5Buy
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
James Joyce·1916·Joyce's companion Bildungsroman — Stephen Dedalus's artistic development. The companion investigation of the artist's separation from his origins: both Tonio and Stephen are young men who leave the world that formed them (bourgeois Lübeck; Catholic Dublin) to become artists, and both are organized around the question of what must be sacrificed - 6Buy
The Sorrows of Young Werther
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe·1774·Goethe's companion — Werther's fatal passion for the unattainable Lotte. The companion in the German tradition of the artist's love for the beautiful bourgeois person who cannot understand him: Tonio's loves for Hans and Inge are the ironic, twentieth-century version of Werther's passion - 7Buy
Steppenwolf
Hermann Hesse·1927·Hesse's companion — Harry Haller between the world of the spirit and the world of the senses. The companion investigation of the same outsider consciousness: Harry Haller and Tonio Kröger are companion figures — both artists who are simultaneously drawn to and excluded from the bourgeois world they observe through windows - 8Buy
The Artist as Craftsman
Herbert Read·1943·Read's companion essay on the artist's relationship to the world of work. The companion as the theoretical complement to Tonio's narrative: what is the relationship between the artist's special consciousness and the ordinary life that art is supposed to illuminate?
Tonio Kröger — Frequently Asked Questions
What is Tonio Kröger about?
Tonio Kröger is about the predicament of the artist who is born between two worlds: the bourgeois world of his merchant father (orderly, healthy, simple) and the artistic world of his mother (dark, beautiful, passionate, Southern). Tonio loves the blonde, blue-eyed Hans and Inge — bourgeois people who are incapable of the suffering that makes art — with a love that is inseparable from his envy of their simplicity. As an adult artist, he understands that his art comes from precisely the consciousness that excludes him from the life he loves; and the novella is his investigation of whether this is a tragedy or a gift. His conclusion — 'I love life' — is Mann's answer: the artist's relationship to the bourgeois world is not contempt or exile but a particular and complicated love, and it is this love that makes art possible.
Is Tonio Kröger autobiographical?
Tonio Kröger is significantly autobiographical. Thomas Mann grew up in Lübeck, the son of a prosperous North German merchant (Senator Heinrich Mann) and a Brazilian-born mother of Portuguese descent (Julia da Silva Bruhns) — exactly the combination that Tonio represents. Mann's own adolescent loves (including what is generally understood to be his love for a schoolmate named Armin Martens, who is the original of Hans Hansen) and his sense of himself as an outsider in his own family and city are directly reflected in the novella. Mann's brother Heinrich became a more flamboyant and political writer; Mann's own relationship to the bourgeois world he came from was always the ambivalent, loving one that he gives to Tonio. He returned to the story repeatedly throughout his life as a description of his fundamental situation as an artist.
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