A MAN AND HIS DOG

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.