Author: Thomas Mann
Year: 1955 (1919)
Publisher: Fischer Bücherei
Language: German
It is no
secret that I have a soft spot for Thomas Mann. Beyond being merely a stellar
writer, I find him to be a keen observer of humankind, and his books reveal as
much about the details of the age he lived in as about the people and the
interactions that shaped it. While deeply rooted in the intellectual and
historical currents of his time, Mann’s writing spans from the decline of the
bourgeoisie to the rise and demise of fascism. But more than that, it spans
from the height of realism to the birth of existentialism making him one of the
foremost chroniclers of modernism.
“Herr und
Hund” (“A Man and His Dog”), published in 1918, occupies a unique and often
underappreciated niche in the author’s vast life work. Unlike his monumental
works such as “Buddenbrooks”, “Herr und Hund” is a slender narrative that captures
the relationship between a writer and his beloved dog, a mixed-breed named
Bauschan. On the surface, this book does nothing else. It is a matter-of-fact
account of Bauschan; his fur, his personality, his habits, his preferences, and
how he ended up with the author in the first place. Yet, something must have
prompted Thomas Mann, which by the time of writing this was already an
established and respected writer, to write a detailed account of his canine
companion.
I submit
that to understand “Herr und Hund”, one must first consider the personal and
historical circumstances surrounding its creation. The book was written during
a tumultuous period in Mann’s life. The First World War had shattered the
European order, and Mann, like many intellectuals of his time, was grappling
with the implications of modernity, nationalism, and the role of the artist in
a fractured world. While at first allowing himself to be swept up in the
nationalist fervour that led up to the war, Mann’s enthusiasm soon faded and as
the war dragged on and his worldview disintegrated, he gradually descended into
a personal identity crisis; as a German and as a human being.
His refuge,
it is easy to imagine, was his faithful dog Bauschan. Although Thomas Mann had
already made a name for himself as a writer of great symbolic and philosophical
depth (see review of “Death in Venice” from April 2019) and convoluted sense of
humour at the time, “Herr und Hund” comes across as a work of radical sincerity,
a moment where Mann sets aside his usual layers of scrutiny and intellectualism
to focus on the immediate, tangible, and familiar: the dog, the whole dog, and
nothing but the dog.
“Im
Folgenden ist ausschließlich von meinem Hunde Bauschan die Rede /…/ weder
werden höhere Probleme der Sittlichkeit darin aufgeworfen noch bedeutende
Charaktere zergliedert, geschweige denn, daß die gesellschaftliche Frage ihrer
Lösung nähergeführt würde.”
The result
is a book that feels like listening to a man talking for hours at length about
his dog while showing and endless stream of snapshots of it in different
contexts. This is Baushan when he sleeps, this is Baushan when he eats, this is
Baushan from the from the front, this is Baushan from the back. The reader is
the well-meaning interlocutor, patiently listening to the man go on, because they
know that the speaker needs this. Thomas Mann needed to invest his attention into
something he could grasp; something he could explain. And more than one hundred
years after its first publication, we can still today act as Thomas Mann’s
therapists by letting him bore us with his altogether mundane and average dog.
His umbilical cord to the womb of sanity.
This, at
last, is what in my mind makes this book so unique. Contrary to the many other
works of fiction where animals play a key role, the dog in Mann’s book is not
merely the main character. The book is not about the dog’s life. It is not
about any challenge or journey of the dog. It is not about the happiness or the
misery of the dog. It is purely and simply about the actual dog. “Das Tier an
sich”, as Immanuel Kant might have put it. And maybe, by allowing Mann to tell
us every last detail about his dog, we get to know the man better than we could
have via any other manifesto, autobiography, or confession.
