Heinrich mann man of straw
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Translated from German by Ernest Boyd / Daniel Theissen
Heinrich Mann’s The Loyal Subject (variously translated as Man of Straw or The Patrioteer) was dismissed by his brother Thomas as “heinous aestheticism”, so I’m in good company. Not that I’m commenting on aestheticism, just on what a slog these 320 pages were. I was so disappointed because I quite enjoyed the first two chapters which described Diederich Hessling’s childhood and student days as a Neo-Teuton in the Germany of the late 1800s. They establish him as a hypocritical opportunistic nationalistic coward (a harsh but fair assessment). Thereafter, he returns back to the fictional small town of Netzig and takes over the running of the family paper factory, gets involved in local politics, strikes up a two-faced pact with the social democrats, and somehow (i.e more by good fortune than by business acumen or political astuteness) manages to destroy all competitors to emerge as the most influential man in town.
Hessl
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Man of Straw by Heinrich Mann
“Only when he himself received punishment did he feel really big and sure of his position. He hardly ever resisted evil.”
For German Literature Month 2011, I meant to read Heinrich Mann’s wonderful novel Man of Straw (Der Untertan) along with some other books , so now for the Second Annual German Literature Month, hosted by Caroline and Lizzy, it was time to finish what inom started–not just as a point of pride but also because I had throughly enjoyed Heinrich Mann’s The Blue Angel. Plus I’d seen the fantastic film utgåva Man of Straw, The Kaiser’s Lackey, so inom more or less knew the plot. The biggest obstacle to the book was my lack of knowledge of the politics of the time; the names of various political parties are bandied around, so I needed a little background reading along the way to bolster my understanding. There are also a great number of characters in the small fictional town o
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Heinrich Mann, Der Untertan [Man of Straw]
Heinrich Mann’s novel
Der Untertan[
The Loyal Subject, 1918] is considered among the few great satirical novels in early twentieth-century German literature and Heinrich Mann’s most important novel. Published after the end of the First World War, it offers a polemical depiction of the early years in the reign of Kaiser Wilhelm II toward the end of the nineteenth century. The novel follows the rise to fame and fortune of the young middle-class industrialist Diederich Hessling in the fictional Prussian provincial town of Netzig. His success is due to his unscrupulous opportunism, particularly his ability to exploit the newly emerging value system in 1890s Imperial Germany: a mixture of authoritarianism, militarism, imperialism, and ruthless capitalism.
The first two chapters outline
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