XXIX
In the final months before the outbreak of the First World War, Inez Rodde is courted by Dr. Helmut Institoris, an art historian who is the very epitome of a certain kind of post-Nietzschean intellectual, more devoted to concepts such as “life” and “beauty” than to questions of morality. Although Inez has a very different personality, and although she is secretly in love with Rudi Schwerdtfeger, she nevertheless encourages Institoris in his courtship, seeing in him a refuge from what she perceives as the “uprooted” (302/416) life her mother has bequeathed upon her
Time of composition: August 21–September 22, 1945. Time of narration: After April 1944. Narrated time: 1913–1914.
| Twenty-two years have now passed | Woods silently corrects an error on Mann’s part; German editions have “twenty-four years.” |
| Both strove in different directions | Clarissa and Inez stand symptomatically for the fate of a generation for whom the fixed bourgeois certainties of the nineteenth century have become hollow. Both fail to find meaningful alternatives, and both pay for this with their lives. |
| “How strong and beautiful life is!” | In Mann’s notebooks, he ascribes the same line to “a dreadful type of man cultivated by Nietzsche.” |
| Dr. Institoris was […] man of the Renaissance | The contrast between Institoris and Inez is modeled on a recurring theme in Nietzsche, which finds expression, for example, in the opposition between “blond beasts” and “ascetic priests” in On the Genealogy of Morals (1887). |
| | A probable reference to the thought of Arthur Schopenhauer. |
| precarious balance between vitality and infirmity | Z. here is summarizing a lifelong artistic preoccupation of TM’s that helps explain why the author was drawn to the depiction of disease over and over again throughout his career. |
| | A Munich artist’s association and social club, named after a fictional musical instrument. |
| | Latin: “full of hope”; in German, an idiomatic expression meaning “waiting in the wings.” |