Tonio Kröger Mario und der Zauberer

This volume summarizes two contrasting narratives by Thomas Mann: Tonio Kroeger , a "prose ballad" from 1903, which "seized" the "intellectual and radical youth, who admittedly did not yet mean radicalism politically at that time", as "in accordance with it", and Mario and the Magician from 1930, "a story that plays strongly into the political, which is inwardly occupied with the psychology of fascism - and that of freedom, its doctrine of will, which puts it so much at a disadvantage against the robust will of the opponent". This provides an opportunity to deal with the phenomenon of literature in an exemplary manner and to recognize that it is not the external action but the approach, development and implementation of a theme - in Thomas Mann's work almost always characterized by personal distance and above all by skeptical irony - that are decisive criteria for its interpretation.