Thomas Mann, “Bilse and I” (1906)

Translated by Tobias Boes.
Read his critical introduction here.

The other day I was much abused in Lübeck, my hometown. My novel Buddenbrooks became the subject of a long and heated debate in a trial concerning the freedom of the press that was reminiscent of the Bilse affair.[1] It was a noisy matter, the particulars of which need not concern us very much. My novel has become an integral part of every public outrage about art, because its characters are partially based on living people, and because I gave life to various memories of both an honorable and a scurrilous nature that I had of people and circumstances back home. In this case, the prosecutor repeatedly chastised both me and my tale, and in his concluding remarks he expressly named Buddenbrooks as an example for a new and scandalous literary genre he called “Bilse-novels.”

All this was said in open court and had enough of an impact that news of these words reached me, along with the name of the one who had said them. I will repeat this name here; it should be mentioned. At least once in his life the man should find himself mentioned in a major newspaper, and I plan to be the one responsible for it. His name is “von Brocken.”[2] Von Brocken said, “I do not shy away from claiming loudly and openly that Thomas Mann, too, wrote his book in the manner of Bilse, and that Buddenbrooks is a ‘Bilse-novel.’ I will provide evidence for this assertion!” He pulled himself up tall as he said this.

Let us not be upset with him. We shall be reasonable and put ourselves in his place. This man spends his days as a lawyer in a medium-sized harbor town; he leads a barren, impoverished, and totally unnoticed existence, and so of course he would give anything to draw some attention to himself. Please note, dear reader, the desperate and provocative note in von Brocken’s words. To write a novel “in the manner of Bilse” evidently means to compile all manner of trash and personal indiscretions into a novel, with the intention of making a lot of money off of a scandal. It is possible that this interpretation does a grave injustice to honest old Bilse, but it is indisputably what von Brocken meant. Should I accept this? What if I sued him, and challenged him to a forensic duel that would be covered by all of the papers? . . . I am serious. I suspect that this excellent legal scholar secretly hoped I would take it upon myself to drag someone who can’t even tell the difference between me and Bilse to court. Unfortunately, these fecund dreams will not bear fruit. I’ll dedicate these amicable lines to him—and that is all that I can do. The only other thing, perhaps, is to save his honor by expressing my firm conviction that he meant what he said, and that he spoke according to his own heart and conviction.

He believes that the literary genre which he calls “Bilse-novels” is a product of our wicked days, and that he has discovered and named it. The degree of education that he has managed to obtain does not allow him to know that a dubious kind of literature—a Bilse-literature, if you want—has always existed next to true literature and has from time to time reached an especially opulent bloom whose flowers, though of no artistic value, are nevertheless not without art historical interest and preserve the aura of scandal long after everything that is personally compromising about them has withered away. He does not know that the herbs of which we are talking here[3] appear rather tame when compared to the poisonous blossoms cultivated by the gossipers and memoirists of the eighteenth century. He believes that Herr Bilse is the father of all scandals and that I am his spiritual brother. That’s how he sees me, God help him! He does not doubt that the only reason why my literary efforts attracted any attention was that I created some amateur portraits of Lübeck burgher-types in my novel Buddenbrooks, an action which, so he believes, filled German audiences from the Meuse to the Neman with lascivious glee.[4] He sees no difference between me and the dashing soldier who has given us the epic of the Little Garrison, and he would not be able to see one even if he wanted to. “I’ll take on the cause!” he said and pulled himself up tall in his militant simplicity. Let’s leave him in that pose.

* * *

Of course, business continues as usual. One devotes oneself to the things one needs to do, dreams one’s dreams, writes one’s letters, reads something good, and ceases to think about von Brocken. And nevertheless: “Bilse and I.” I can’t get his sweet little word “and” out of my mind, so reminiscent of Tristan and Isolde.[5] It occupies my thoughts, takes on a general character, and develops into a problem. How was it made, this “and”? How was it possible that an artistry of some seriousness and passion was simply equated with the being and doing of an incompetent shyster, who has poured what little bit of subaltern spite he was able to muster into incorrect German? Please do not believe that it is pointless to ask this, or that the question need not concern you and me! I know people who today refer to von Brocken as a poor devil, but who tomorrow might be perfectly willing to shout out: “Bilse! Libeler! A highly disreputable character!” when they see me. It will happen as soon as I show the least bit of ruthlessness towards them in my artistic treatment of some experience. . .

My opinions about these things are and will continue to be a matter of the heart to me, and therefore I decided, while taking a walk one evening, to turn them into an article for the Munich Latest News, so that as many people as possible might be able to read them.[6] For, if many people read them, then there is a good chance that they will also be read by those whom they actually concern. This might be of general use, it might serve to enlighten, to sooth and reconcile in advance, it might prevent misunderstandings… But are you willing to keep listening to me a little longer? Ten minutes, perhaps?

* * *

One thing is certain: if one were to apply Lieutenant Bilse’s name to all novels in which an author, guided by nothing else than artistic concerns, has portrayed living people of his acquaintance, then one would have to put together entire libraries, including some of the most immortal works of world literature ever written. I don’t have enough room to include all the examples that I could name; I would have to cull from all of literary history. But think only of Ivan Turgenev, or even of Goethe—they gave offense as well. After he published Werther, Goethe found it difficult to calm the compromised originals of Lotte and her husband. Turgenev caused outrage when he portrayed the Russian landowners, whose hospitality he had enjoyed, with the careless hand of a master in his Sportsman’s Sketches. And it is surely no coincidence that anyone who turns to the past in search of strong and authentic poets, people who derived inspiration from things that actually happened rather than from their “inventions,” will turn up the biggest and most excellent names; by contrast, searching through literary history for great “inventors” only yields mediocrities.

It seems certain that a gift for invention, even if it is of a poetic nature, can nevertheless not be called an essential precondition for the vocation of the writer. To go even further: it would appear that frequently it is a gift of secondary importance, which our greatest writers looked down upon with disdain, and which they easily could do without. Turgenev, in his postscript to Fathers and Sons calmly explains: “Since I wasn’t blessed with the gift of inventiveness, I always required a certain ground on which I could move freely and securely. . . . As far as Basaroff is concerned, I derived his main outline from a young doctor who lives in the provinces.” I don’t hear a lot of regret in these lines. On the contrary, they seem to express a sort of pride, and I’m reminded of a conversation about book titles that I had the other day with a young German author of some repute. He finished by saying: “You know, if you think about it, all titles, except those comprised of proper nouns, are sensationalist trash.” That was very good. The same line of argument would also lead you to declare all “invention” as sensationalist trash.

For after all, isn’t it essentially all the same whether a writer takes history, legends, old stories, or living reality as the “basis” of his art? And if this is so, what did Schiller or Wagner ever invent? Hardly a character, hardly an action. And, to name the most astounding example of poetic talent the world has ever seen, Shakespeare: no doubt he possessed a talent for invention, just like he possessed a talent for everything else, but it is even more certain that he did not value it very highly and rarely used it. Did he ever invent one of his plots? Not even the ornate intrigues of his comedies were dreamt up by him. He copied ancient plays and Italian novellas—and by the way, my dear incensed reader, he also created portraits of his contemporaries, though admittedly he did so in a completely different way than my colleague who wrote about Forbach.[7] For example, he portrayed a fat man of his acquaintance whose name was, so I am told, Mr. Chettle—and by so doing created John Falstaff. He preferred perceiving things over conceiving them. He dug up naïve little tales that seemed to him suitable to serve as allegories and as sensuous means to dress up an experience or idea. His obedience to the stories that he found, the humility with which he preserved trivialities are astonishing and moving; indeed, they would seem unfree and childish if we couldn’t explain them away as a form of consummate contempt for the matter at hand. They are the contempt of a writer who doesn’t care for the subject, for the mummery of a tale, and who treasures only its soul, or better yet: the process of ensoulment.

Ensoulment . . . there we have it, the beautiful word! It is not the gift of invention, but rather of ensoulment that makes the writer. No matter whether he fills an outworn tale or a piece of living reality with his breath and inner being, it is the process of ensoulment, of penetration and saturation by a writer’s own essence, that turns a subject matter into an artistic property, which nobody else may touch. It is obvious that this must lead to conflicts with respectable reality, which thinks very highly of itself and does not in the least desire to be compromised by artistic ensoulment. But reality overestimates the degree to which it remains reality for the writer who has appropriated it–especially in those cases in which the two are separated by space and time. When I began to write Buddenbrooks, I sat in Rome, Via Torre Argentina trentaquattro, three flights up.[8] Lübeck wasn’t very real to me, believe me! In fact, I wasn’t truly convinced of its existence. Along with its inhabitants it wasn’t much more than a dream to me, a scurrilous and yet venerable dream that had dreamt ages ago and that had therefore become my property. I spent three years writing that book, in ardor and devotion. And was then profoundly surprised when I heard that it had caused scandal and bad blood back in Lübeck. What was the relationship between the actual Lübeck of today and the work that I had constructed in three years of labor? Stupidity. . . When I turn a thing into a sentence, what does the sentence still owe to the thing? Philistinism. . . But that is the way it is, and not only in those cases where years and latitudes separate the original from the work. The reality that the writer harnesses for his purposes may well be his daily world, may consist of the people who are closest to him and whom he loves the most; he may remain slavishly subservient to every detail dictated by reality, and may eagerly appropriate every characteristic of it for his work: nevertheless there will remain for him–and that’s the way it should be for the entire world!– a gaping difference between reality and his constructions–the essential difference that forever separates the real world from that of art.

To return to the topic of “ensoulment,” it is nothing other than a poetic process that we might also call the subjective expansion of a representation of reality. It is well-known that every true writer identifies to a certain degree with his creations. All characters in a literary work, even if they are placed in opposition to one another, are emanations of the one who created them, and Goethe lives in both Antonio and Tasso, just as Turgenev lives in both Basaroff and Pável Petróvich.[9] This kind of identity, however, is also present, at least in traces, in those instances where the reader doesn’t perceive it, and where it would seem as if the writer had been filled by nothing but scorn and derision when he created one of his creatures. Isn’t Shylock the Jew a repulsive and dreadful being, whom Shakespeare condemns to be battered and crushed underfoot to universal acclaim? Nevertheless, there is more than one moment at which we sense a deep and terrible solidarity between Shakespeare and Shylock. . . it is at this moment that one has to grasp that there is no such thing as objective understanding in the realm of art, only intuitive understanding. The objective elements of art, those things that can be appropriated and sensationalized, are confined to the picturesque: to portraits, gestures, and externalities that present themselves as characteristics and as sensuous symbols, such as Shylock’s Judaism, Othello’s blackness, and Falstaff’s obesity. Everything else—and that’s almost everything—is subjective, is intuition and lyricism, and belongs to the knowing and capacious soul of the artist. Even if we are dealing only with a portrait, a representation—how could it not be that that which I called a subjective expansion of reality should rob the process of everything arbitrary and usurpative? Doesn’t the inner fusion of the writer with his model rob the insult of its sting?

On the contrary. Consider for a moment the following case. I once wrote a book that took Ibsen’s words “To write is to sit in judgment over oneself” as a motto.[10] In it, I created the character of a modern writer, a satirical figure that I deployed to “sit in judgment” over a regrettable part of myself: my aestheticism, this desiccated artificiality which I regard as the danger of all dangers. I gave this figure the appearance of an author of my acquaintance, a man of exquisite but bookish talent.[11] This portrait was strange and entirely characteristic of him. I further characterized him through his intellect and weakness, his fanatical striving for beauty, as well as through a certain kind of impoverishment in the most human things; I elevated him into a type, a walking symbol, and made him go to the dogs most ignominiously when he encountered the comically virile brutality of a Hanseatic merchant, the husband of the same woman with whom the writer had had a sublime tryst while living in a sanatorium. I chastised myself through this character; please make a note of it. But how did the author react? The other? The one whom I had taken as a model for my figure, and with whom I had inwardly identified? He behaved with dignity. He came to me in order to emphatically shake my hand–which seemed to me a disconcerting sign, for after all, was such a silent and ceremonious assertion really necessary given the honest and open nature of my work, through which I had mercilessly exposed myself to attack? Indeed it wasn’t, for the author did not succeed in maintaining his posture. He had attempted to play up his tolerance, but he wasn’t tolerant. In vain did he try to deceive himself and me about his true feelings. He struggled and lost. Soon after, he sent me a poison-pen letter from afar. And now, so I am told, he dislikes everything that I write.

What does this prove? It reveals in the most astounding and painful manner that human danger lies in things that would seem to be conciliatory and essentially poetic: subjective expansion and the use of a portrait for higher purposes. If I had portrayed the author how he truly is, without any typification and exaggeration, in a manner that was individualistic, realistic, objective, and boring, I would probably have remained his friend. But since I filled in his portrait with interventions of my own, I became his enemy.

That’s it. And I’m stating it because I firmly believe that evil and unspoken things are redeemed and turned right by being spoken out loud. What scandalizes people is being able to identify someone. Employing the aforementioned fealty to the details of what has been given to him, a writer appropriates external appearances that permit the world to say: this is him, and that is her. Subsequently he ensouls and expands this portrait with other things that belong only to him, using it to illustrate a problem that is perhaps completely alien to it; actions and circumstances result from this that have nothing to do with the original model. But because of the external resemblances, people think they have a right to regard everything else as “true,” anecdotal, and embellished, as gossip and sensationalized chit chat. That’s how scandals start.

Is this the way it has to be? Can we not reach an agreement about this? Are my thoughts on this matter so out of the ordinary? Even as a child the public habit to sniff out personal details when confronted by an absolute achievement enraged me. I doodled a bit, I sketched figures onto paper with my pencil, and they seemed beautiful to me. But when I showed them to people in the hopes of earning praise for my artistry, they asked: “Who is that supposed to be?” “It isn’t supposed to be anybody!” I shouted, and almost began to cry. “It’s a person, as you can see, a drawing that I made, consisting of outlines, for heaven’s sake. . .” Things haven’t changed. People still inquire: “Who is that supposed to be?”

One has asked me in all seriousness what I would do if a talented friend of mine went and made me the talk of the town by writing a brilliant novella in which a character who resembles me in every little detail commits this and that mean thing. Surely I would slap my talented friend? No, I would certainly not do that. As a matter of fact, my response would depend. And not just on the literary talent of my friend. I’m not enough of an aesthete to excuse everything simply because someone has a beautiful style. I won’t deny that there are written perfidies, but if I knew my friend to possess talent in a high and serious sense, and if had reason to regard him, based on his prior work, as not just a talented artist but also as a writer seeks to improve himself whenever he writes, and for whom this achievement too was an act of self-discipline and self-liberation – in that case I would tell him: “I’m a little surprised that of all possible models you chose me for your villain. But no matter. I am, among other things, probably also a villain. Well done, by the way! You should come visit me soon, my dear, so that I can show you my latest books.”

. . .This is the moment in which to talk about something else that in my opinion and experience not infrequently contributes to the confusion of writer and reality. It is the notion that writers harbor hostility against reality, a notion occasioned by the ruthlessness of their observational insight and the critical concision of their mode of expression. The reason for this is the following.

There is a school of thought in Europe—the German lyricist of insight Friedrich Nietzsche created it—that has accustomed us to combine the concept of the artist with that of the one who strives for insight. In this school, the border between art and criticism is much vaguer than it used to be. It encompasses critics who have a thoroughly poetic temperament, and poets who cultivate an entirely critical mindset and style. This sort of poetic criticism, however, with its seeming objectivity and detachment of view, the coldness and acuity of its telling phrases, gives rise to this semblance of hostility.

The artist of this sort—and it is perhaps not a bad sort—wants to perceive and arrange: perceive deeply and arrange beautifully. The patient and proud manner in which he endures the pains that are inseparable from both of these things is what morally consecrates his life. Do people know about these pains? Perhaps they know that every act of artistic arrangement, creation, and production means pain, battle and birthing pangs; they should know it, and they shouldn’t whine when an artist on account of these struggles occasionally ignores the human and social scruples that oppose his work. But do they also know that insight—the kind of artistic insight that is commonly called “observation”—hurts as well? Observation as a form of passion in both senses of the term, of martyrdom, heroism—who knows about that? Compassion would be more appropriate than roars of fury. . . The other day I heard a writer say: “Look at me! I don’t look particularly lively, do I? Old and tense and tired is more like it. Well, to talk about ‘observation’: it would be possible to imagine a person who is naturally credulous, well-meaning, and a little bit sentimental, and who is completely ground down and annihilated by the strains of clear-sighted observation. . . Blessed be the malicious! As for me, I’ll continue to lose weight. . .”[12]

This writer seemed to me to express in a melancholic yet funny way what I mean: first, the discord between artistry and humanity, which can lead to the most violent internal and external conflicts. The gaze that one fixes upon inner and outer things in one’s capacity as an artist is different from the ordinary human one: it is both colder and more passionate. As a human being you may be good, tolerant, loving, positive, you may have an entirely uncritical disposition that causes you to embrace all phenomena—but as an artist you are forced by the demon to “observe” with lightning speed and painful maliciousness, to perceive every detail that is characteristic in a literary sense or that typifies in a significant way, opens perspectives onto race, social character, or psychology, to ruthlessly note these things as if you had no human relationship to that which you see—and your “work” brings all of this to the light of day. And in those cases in which the work offers a portrait, the artistic utilization of a familiar reality, the complaint may be heard: “So that’s the way he saw us? So coldly and mockingly? With eyes so devoid of love?” Oh please, be silent! And try to find within you a little respect for something that is stricter, deeper, and more severe than that which your weak nature calls “love”!

But then the writer seemed to me to touch upon a second matter, namely the painful sensibility of all observation, which manifests and expresses itself in the “critical concision” that I called the source of all misunderstanding just now. For please do not believe that the refinement and alertness of the sensory apparatus could come about in any degree without a simultaneous increase in the capacity to feel pain. This capacity for pain reaches such a degree that every experience becomes suffering. The only weapon that the irritable artist possesses in his attempt to react to these sensations and experiences, the only thing that allows him to fend them off in a beautiful fashion is his capacity for expression, and thus his ability to name them; this expressive reaction, which may be called (employing a good amount of psychological radicalism) the sublime revenge that the artist exerts upon his experiences, will be all the more forceful the more refined the irritability was that was stimulated by the perceptions. This is the origin of that cold and uncompromising exactitude of reference, this the taut bow from which the sharp, fletched word flies, the word that buzzes through the air and hits its mark and comes to a quivering rest in the bullseye. And isn’t the harsh bow just as much an Apollonian tool as the sweet lyre?[13] Nothing is less artistic than the erroneous belief that coldness and passion are mutually exclusive! Nothing indicates greater misunderstanding than the attempt to deduce malice and hostility in a human sense from a critical concision of expression!

It’s pointless. We should linger a moment over this astounding fact: a felicitous expression will always seem hateful. A well-turned phrase does harm. Let me give a small but instructive example. A magazine conducted a survey and included me amongst the recipients. The assignment was to give one’s opinion about modern criticism. Well, so that’s what I did. I expressed my belief that artists are hardly worthy of that name if they consider criticism of the higher sort to be contrary to their nature. I confessed my wholehearted admiration for the type of modern critic whom I have described in these lines, and I mentioned by way of an example a certain writer whom I greatly admire as a humorous stylist and as a representative of the new impressionist criticism.[14] I said: “Doctor X has given me much profound amusement, and so it would be deeply ungrateful of me to publicly speak out against him.” What happened next? I was given reason to believe that the critic in question was mortally insulted by my talk of “profound amusement,” that he suspected me of mockery and is now my archenemy. And why? Because of my precision. If I had used some kind of cliché and had talked about “true elevation” or “exquisite pleasure,” he would have remained well-disposed towards me, but since I aimed for a precise description of the effect that he had had, he became angry. He doesn’t want to be an entertainer; he wants to be taken seriously. But a “profound” amusement is very serious indeed, or so I would think. It seemed to me that in the entire realm of language there was no better combination of words to describe the effect of his entertaining analyses, and of his occasionally clownish manner, than “profound” and “amusement.” No matter, my choice of words wounded him. Simply because they were good and hit their mark. There is no other explanation.

That’s how you make enemies. And there are more serious examples. Consider in this context the strange case of Maximilian Harden.[15] This critic of public life, who has certainly been touched by the muses, could have spared himself an infinite amount of hatred, odious trials, and the hardships of military imprisonment if only his instinct to call things by their true name hadn’t been so violently stimulated by reality, and if he had managed to weaken the impact of his words, to remain smart at the expense of artistic precision. But the true lover of words would sooner make the entire world his enemy than sacrifice even a single nuance. To state it again: the true artist, the one who doesn’t only put half of his soul into his work, but who is entirely, by vocation and by passion, an artist—he will derive such moral satisfaction from the pain he feels in the process of perception and arrangement that it will elevate him above all sensitivities and scandals of the world. There is nothing less hypocritical, nothing of more profound origin than the enthusiastic indignation with which he rises up when reality in its crass self-love dares to lay hand on the work he accomplished in solitude. How now? All that suffering should have been in vain? So much is lost in it! So much is experienced and suffered that is never given artistic shape! But that which won a form and a life of its own, the work that an artist created with great pain—now he should not be able to reveal it, it shouldn’t be allowed to bring him fame? That’s ambition talking. That’s how ambition justifies itself.

* * *

Bilse and I. . . there is some sort of difference between us, people will have to admit that, and perhaps it is a similar difference as the one between impudence and freedom. But when I talk about freedom, I mean that kind of inner independence, liberty, and loneliness that is a precondition for every new and original achievement. It doesn’t preclude warm human connections, but the dignity and sovereignty of the artist depend upon it, while demands to be considerate and show bourgeois tact exert no power over it. Today there is much talk about “unconditional” science. Should we refuse to also grant unconditionality to the beautiful science, the gay science of art? A poet and thinker once said that “an artist who does not expose his whole being is a useless slave.”[16] Those words are eternally true. But how can I expose my whole being without simultaneously also exposing the world, which exists only as my representation? My representation, my experience, my dream, my pain? I’m not talking about you, never ever, be sure of that; I’m talking only about me, about me. . .

—Read this! Memorize it! It is a missive, a little manifesto. Don’t always ask: who is it supposed to be? I’m still drawing little figures, consisting of outlines only, and they do not represent anyone except myself. Don’t always say: that’s me, and that’s him. They are only artistic expressions that were occasioned by you. Don’t disturb the artist’s freedom with gossip and insult, for it is only freedom that permits him to do what you love and praise; without it, he would be a useless slave.