O SÚDITO

O Súdito, de Heinrich Mann, enquanto busca tratar acerca das relações da sociedade alemã com o construto imperial, evidenciando por meio da autoridade excessiva e da moralidade seletiva e de aparência uma “representação satírica do poder”, também apresenta em seu percurso literário outros elementos que compõem o conjunto dessa sociedade, como os preceitos culturais e religiosos que a regem. Mediante tal pressuposto, o presente trabalho objetiva explorar a qualidade antissemita enraizada na cultura alemã pré-nazista, tomando como base a sociedade exposta na obra em questão, por meio de análise documental. Para tanto, em um primeiro momento, será feita breve exposição – a partir de revisão bibliográfica – do autor e da obra, dando espaço, finalmente, para uma análise acerca da religiosidade e antissemitismo presente na narrativa. Mediante tal análise, foi possível observar que o antissemitismo é representado na obra como característica cultural da Alemanha pré-nazista e, além disso, como um elemento característico de uma positiva expressão de religiosidade, sendo herança do construto religioso que havia muito se formara.

An Absent Text of a Civilised Literary Man

In this paper the author tries to answer the question of what factors caused the great German author Thomas Mann to accept the official goals of World War I by focusing on his Reflections of a Non-political Man. It also discusses Thomas Mann’s disagreements with his brother Heinrich Mann and his polemics with the ideas specific to the mainstream liberal thinking. Additionally, the article considers the context of the Polish reception of Thomas Mann. The author also discusses the problem of the topicality of the writer‘s attitude.

O Anjo Azul: do fim do Expressionismo à influência da Paramount – um filme de Josef von Sternberg

“The success of the film will depend on the naked thighs of Miss Dietrich”. This was the answer that Heinrich Mann gave to Emil Jannings, when he asked the novelist if he had liked his performance. Made in 1930 and directed by Josef von Sternberg, The Blue Angel will always be remembered in the history of cinema as the movie in which the myth of Marlene Dietrich was born. However, its merits go well beyond this fact. The Blue Angel is the prototype of a hybrid film, made in Germany by an Austrian settled in America since he was a young boy, having been influenced not only by the American studio production, but also by the German Expressionism, through Max Reinhardt. A director whose cinema Nöel Simsolo compares to tapestry, in which all the elements are always necessary and important, with the supremacy of the décor because everything that appears on the screen becomes it. More than a motion picture that marks the end of an era, that of the German silent cinema, or the German Expressionism, more than a ‘foreign’ production of Paramount, The Blue Angel is above all a film by Josef von Sternberg, a point of arrival and a point of departure for all the marvels to come.

Il Vate e il suo doppio ironico

In Germany, beginning from the last decade of XIX century, the fame of Gabriele d’Annunzio grew increasingly thanks to a continue flow of translations, which made him one of the most celebrated writers of the Jahrhundertwende in the country of Goethe. Among the German admirers of the ‘Vate’ there were poets and novelists such as Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Heinrich Mann. On the contrary, Thomas Mann’s appreciation of d’Annunzio was problematic: he disliked his aestheticism, his superficial Nietzschean Übermensch cult and moreover his far too refined, turgidly baroque prose. Nevertheless, he read attentively his colleague’s narratives – albeit using German translations, unlikely George and his senior brother Heinrich –, and undoubtedly made allusions – often in a deeply ironical sense – to d’Annunzio’s Triumph of Death in his novel Tristan. This essay reconstructs the cultural context of the relation between Mann and d’Annunzio, and offers a detailed comparison of selected passages and/or fragments from both works aimed at analysing the nature of Mann’s borrowings from the Italian writer, in order to show the ‘dialectical’ character of such a procedure.