JOSEPH DUPLEX The Anthropology of Thomas Mann, Vol. 1, in: Forum für Literaturanthropologie, LIT Verlag, Berlin–Münster–Zurich 2023 Forum für Literaturanthropologie, LIT Verlag Berlin 2022 722 pages | ISBN: 978-3-86924-242-2
Volume 1: Main Text The biblical story of Joseph is one of the key texts of early twentieth-century philosophical anthropology. Like the Apollonian, Dionysian and Orphic, the Josephic describes a myth-based modal category of literary thought and writing about the divided human being, for which Thomas Mann's monumental novel tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers provides one of the most extensive examples. The level of abstraction in the Joseph story as a symbolic form of humanity emerged early from the theological and, later, above all literary cultures of commentary and reception surrounding the narrative. In Thomas Mann, however, it acquires a far-reaching exegetical autonomy: an anthropology of the literary in its own right. Joseph becomes the condition of all narratable events and an indispensable foundation of human nature and culture in the essence and principle of Josephic thought.
Literality is a natural human reflex; literature as an art form is immanent to humanity and therefore, phenomenologically, anthropological. One might also say that the human being in his or her entirety is above all a formulation of what he or she was, is, and might be. This subjunctive constitution of human nature as formulated possibility compels human beings toward literality as a means of distinguishing a condition that would otherwise remain existentially inaccessible within their own blind spot. Two further scholarly interests of literary anthropology accompany this general literary constitution of the human being: on the one hand, the human being as a thematic component of literature, and on the other, literature as a component of human education and formation. These three fundamental aspects of the anthropological in and through literature aim at defining the intra-individual interaction of the human being. This is a specification that regards the inter-individual norm of reference as a secondary cultural-anthropological dynamic and therefore not, as such, part of literary anthropology. Human beings exert a cultural effect through the aggregate impact of the increasing reception of their products: where views become opinion, reception becomes habit, and reading produces distinction. Culture is therefore always an aggregate phenomenon of the human environment and is only secondarily related to the individual human being. Literary anthropology accordingly concentrates on the scholarly question of human literary products, not on the study of the cultural and social dynamics that result from them. Following this definition, the Forum für Literaturanthropologie seeks to create and foster a space for scholarly commentary devoted to this reflex toward literality inherent in human beings in general.
JOSEPH DUPLEX The Anthropology of Thomas Mann, Vol. 2, in: Forum für Literaturanthropologie, LIT Verlag, Berlin–Münster–Zurich 2023 Forum für Literaturanthropologie, LIT Verlag Berlin 2022 546 pages | ISBN: 978-3-86924-242-2
Volume 2: Notes and Indexes The index volume contains an extensive commentary and indexes that contextualise the reading through the sources of Thomas Mann's library, his paratextual writings, and the fields of biblical studies, intellectual history, and literary criticism. The commentary focuses on source research, the linguistic, theological, and intellectual-historical differentiation of the source material, and, beyond this, a far-reaching evaluation of Thomas Mann's own demonstrable traces of reading in the surviving holdings of the Thomas Mann Library.
On the Linguistic Nature of God The Image and Images of Eckhart in Thomas Mann's Joseph Novels in: Meister-Eckhart-Jahrbuch 9, Kohlhammer 2015
Thomas Mann's novel tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers — written between 1925 and 1943 and published from 1933 onward, with an interruption from 1936 to 1939 occasioned by the novel Lotte in Weimar — is exceptional within twentieth-century literature by virtue of its sheer scale alone. Faced with the almost biblically extensive textual corpus of the tetralogy, literary scholarship encounters the fundamental challenge that interpretation based purely on immanent textual analysis appears largely impossible and, moreover, inevitably loses substance and credibility to the extent that it distances itself from the author's diaries, correspondence, and other surviving commentaries by him and those around him as standards of evidence and orientation. This methodological dependence of scholarship on the author's literary artefacts ultimately underpins all positive source criticism. Yet it can take account of only a small portion of the sources Thomas Mann actually used. This fragmentarily narrowed literary understanding of the Joseph novels, focused at best benevolently by Thomas Mann himself, can quickly obscure source research's view of Mann's literarily personified 'inclination toward the association of ideas': the intellectual association of philosophical, theological, anthropological, or political connotations that, while textually bound, can be reconstructed scholarly only from a comprehensive historical view spanning the turn of the century through the interwar period, 'for only against [their] background do the motifs begin to become visible and speak.' Between this historically conditioned intellectual world and the surviving written record lies literary language itself, whose interdisciplinary reception analysis within a psychology of literature must take account of the fact that most sources of the Joseph novels later identified by Thomas Mann scholarship, for example through verbatim quotations, were never named by Mann himself or explicitly connected by him with his work.
Although Thomas Mann records that he drew on 'mysticism, Meister Eckehart and the Cherubinic Wanderer' in the Joseph novels, Meister Eckhart, his Christian philosophy and exegetical singularity, and the theological thinking associated with them constitute one of the comparatively little named and attested intellectual sources of Thomas Mann. By contrast, Meister Eckhart is mentioned by name throughout Mann's oeuvre between 1923 and 1954. In their four different spellings — (a) 'Eckhart', (b) 'Ekkehart', (c) 'Ekhardus', and (d) 'Eckehart' — these references provide the philological thread for reconstructing Thomas Mann's image of Meister Eckhart historically from the thought of the turn of the century and for describing the Eckhart-inspired imagery of the Joseph novels as an anthropological theology of language diversified by intellectual history.
In Search of Divine Aesthetics The Passacaglia BWV 582 between Hell and Heaven AVM 2012
Johann Sebastian Bach's Passacaglia BWV 582 is a unique masterpiece in the history of music. In this brilliantly written, carefully researched book, richly supplemented with visual material, the author offers an analysis of the work in a degree of detail not previously attempted and places the Passacaglia in an entirely new historical, musicological, and intellectual-historical context closely connected with the history of the Tenth Sunday after Trinity. The destruction of Jerusalem in the year 70 and the destruction of Magdeburg in 1631 during the Thirty Years' War tell a story of hell and the expectation of salvation, of longing for God and the cruel reality of a destructive thirty-year war in the heart of Germany. The author's clarity and rigour of argument and evidence cast an entirely new light on this early work by Bach.
In Search of the Music behind the Score Drywa Transcribes Sibelius Timbres N°6 Amsterdam 2009
A composer whose work is no longer heard, or, worse, whose work is heard in only one particular way, disappears beneath the ideas of the generations that follow him, no longer able to alter the perspective from which his work is perceived. For anyone who loves Western classical music, one work is essential: Sibelius' symphonic poem about his native country, Finlandia. Not only as a composition, but also as an indispensable element for anyone seeking to understand Sibelius (1865–1957), an undertaking that every musician who wishes to perform his music must pursue. One might even say that this understanding depends on recognising how Finlandia and the great symphony of Sibelius' life story are connected with one another.
In a small, seemingly negligible corner of this symphony of a life lies a colourful detail: Jean Sibelius was an organist. His friend, the Finnish painter Akseli Gallen-Kallela, had an organ in his studio on which Sibelius often improvised. The two artists were undoubtedly united by the same idea: the symphony of their nation's freedom and of the culture of the people who lived within that nation.
It is the responsibility of the performing musician to do justice to the identity of a composition, particularly when, as I shall do, performing transcriptions of orchestral works on the organ. That is precisely why this little-known aspect of Sibelius matters: he wrote several works for organ, making it somewhat easier to understand how he wanted the instrument to sound. Consider, for example, his Trauermusik (Op. 113) or Die Musiken (Op. 113). Of particular interest in this context is the fact that Sibelius explicitly approved the organ transcription of Finlandia (Op. 26), made by Herbert Austin Fricker (1868–1943). At the time, Fricker was a well-known composer, organist and conductor in England and America. Taken together, it is therefore by no means an untenable idea to create organ transcriptions of Sibelius' symphonies and symphonic poems.
Author: Gottfried Thore Drywa TIMBRES music journal (6/2009) ORGELPARK Amsterdam.
