Tristan E-Book

Thomas Mann

• Herausgeber: Lebooks Editora
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Serie: Thomas Mann Essential
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 76

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026

Beschreibung

Tristan by Thomas Mann is a short novella that explores the tension between artistic sensitivity and ordinary life. The story takes place in a quiet sanatorium, where patients seek rest and recovery, and where the refined but eccentric writer Detlev Spinell becomes fascinated by Gabriele Klöterjahn, a delicate young woman married to a healthy and practical businessman. Spinell represents the world of art, introspection, and aesthetic refinement, while Gabriele's husband embodies vitality, simplicity, and bourgeois normality. The writer encourages Gabriele to revive her musical talent and emotional sensitivity, leading to a performance of a piece by Wagner that awakens deep and troubling feelings within her. This moment of artistic intensity contrasts sharply with the practical concerns of everyday life. The novella reflects Thomas Mann's recurring theme of the opposition between life and art. Spinell's aesthetic idealism appears both seductive and destructive, suggesting that artistic exaltation may come at the expense of health and stability. The sanatorium setting reinforces this tension, as it becomes a symbolic space between vitality and decline. Compact yet rich in symbolism, Tristan is both a psychological portrait and an ironic commentary on the role of the artist. The work anticipates many of Mann's later themes, particularly the conflict between disciplined bourgeois existence and the dangerous allure of artistic and emotional excess.  

Leseprobe

Thomas Mann

TRISTAN

Contents

INTRODUCTION

TRISTAN

INTRODUCTION

Thomas Mann

1875 – 1955

Thomas Mann was a German writer and essayist, considered one of the greatest authors of twentieth-century literature. In 1929 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His work is characterized by profound psychological analysis, a strong philosophical dimension, and reflection on the conflicts between art, society, and the individual.

Childhood and Education

Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck, Germany, into a prosperous bourgeois family. After his father’s death, he moved with his family to Munich, where he began to devote himself to writing and journalism. From a young age, he showed interest in literature, music, and philosophy, elements that would shape his entire body of work.

Works and Themes

Among his most famous works are “Buddenbrooks”, the novel that brought him international recognition, “The Magic Mountain”, “Death in Venice”, and “Doctor Faustus”. In his books Mann explores themes such as the decline of the bourgeoisie, the conflict between spirit and practical life, the relationship between art and illness, and the moral crisis of modern man.

His writing combines intellectual rigor and psychological depth, expressed in an elegant and often symbolic style. Mann’s characters are frequently divided between discipline and passion, rationality and creative impulse.

Influence and Legacy

Thomas Mann had an enormous influence on twentieth-century European literature. His works are studied for their thematic complexity and for their ability to represent the cultural and political tensions of his time. During the Nazi regime he lived in exile and became an important voice against totalitarianism.

Thomas Mann died in Zurich in 1955.

His work remains a fundamental reference point of the modern novel and one of the highest expressions of twentieth-century European narrative.

About the work

Tristan by Thomas Mann is a short novella that explores the tension between artistic sensitivity and ordinary life. The story takes place in a quiet sanatorium, where patients seek rest and recovery, and where the refined but eccentric writer Detlev Spinell becomes fascinated by Gabriele Klöterjahn, a delicate young woman married to a healthy and practical businessman.

Spinell represents the world of art, introspection, and aesthetic refinement, while Gabriele’s husband embodies vitality, simplicity, and bourgeois normality. The writer encourages Gabriele to revive her musical talent and emotional sensitivity, leading to a performance of a piece by Wagner that awakens deep and troubling feelings within her. This moment of artistic intensity contrasts sharply with the practical concerns of everyday life.

The novella reflects Thomas Mann’s recurring theme of the opposition between life and art. Spinell’s aesthetic idealism appears both seductive and destructive, suggesting that artistic exaltation may come at the expense of health and stability. The sanatorium setting reinforces this tension, as it becomes a symbolic space between vitality and decline.

Compact yet rich in symbolism, Tristan is both a psychological portrait and an ironic commentary on the role of the artist. The work anticipates many of Mann’s later themes, particularly the conflict between disciplined bourgeois existence and the dangerous allure of artistic and emotional excess.

TRISTAN

Einfried, the sanatorium. A long, white, rectilinear building with a side wing, set in a spacious garden pleasingly equipped with grottoes, bowers, and little bark pavilions. Behind its slate roofs the mountains tower heavenwards, evergreen, massy, cleft with wooded ravines.

Now as then Dr. Leander directs the establishment. He wears a two-pronged black beard as curly and wiry as horsehair stuffing; his spectcle-lenses are thick, and glitter; he has the look of a man whom science has cooled and hardened and filled with silent, forbearing pessimism. And with this beard, these lenses, this look, and in his short, reserved, preoccupied way, he holds his patients in his spell: holds those sufferers who, too weak to be laws unto themselves, put themselves into his hands that his severity may be a shield unto them.

As for Fräulein von Osterloh, hers it is to preside with unwearying zeal over the housekeeping. Ah, what activity! How she plies, now here, now there, now upstairs, now down, from one end of the building to the other! She is queen in kitchen and storerooms, she mounts the shelves of the linen-presses, she marshals the domestic staff; she ordains the bill of fare, to the end that the table shall be economical, hygienic, attractive, appetizing, and all these in the highest degree; she keeps house diligently, furiously; and her exceeding capacity conceals a constant reproach to the world of men, to no one of whom has it yet occurred to lead her to the altar. But ever on her cheeks there glows, in two round, carmine spots, the unquenchable hope of one day becoming Frau Dr. Leander.

Ozone, and stirless, stirless air! Einfried, whatever Dr. Leander's rivals and detractors may choose to say about it, can be most warmly recommended for lung patients. And not only these, but patients of all sorts, gentlemen, ladies, even children, come to stop here. Dr. Leander's skill is challenged in many different fields. Sufferers from gastric disorders come, like Frau Magistrate Spatz-she has ear trouble into the bargain-people with defective hearts, paralytics, rheumatics, nervous sufferers of all kinds and degrees. A diabetic general here consumes his daily bread amid continual grumblings. There are several gentlemen with gaunt, fleshless faces who fling their legs about in that uncontrollable way that bodes no good. There is an elderly lady, a Frau Pastor Hählenrauch, who has brought fourteen children into the world and is now incapable of a single thought, yet has not thereby attained to any peace of mind, but must go roving spectrelike all day long up and down through the house, on the arm of her private attendant, as she has been doing this year past.

Sometimes a death takes place among the "severe cases," those who lie in their chambers, never appearing at meals or in the reception-rooms. When this happens no one knows of it, not even the person sleeping next door. In the silence of the night the waxen guest is put away and life at Einfried goes tranquilly on, with its massage, its electric treatment, douches, baths; with its exercises, its steaming and inhaling, in rooms especially equipped with all the triumphs of modern therapeutic.

Yes, a deal happens hereabouts-the institution is in a flourishing way. When new guests arrive, at the entrance to the side wing, the porter sounds the great gong; when these are departures, Dr. Leander, together with Fräulein von Osterloh, conducts the traveller in due form to the waiting carriage. All sorts and kinds of people have received hospitality at Einfried. Even an author is here stealing time from God Almighty-a queer sort of man, with a name like some kind of mineral or precious stone.

Lastly there is, besides Dr. Leander, another physician, who takes care of the slight cases and the hopeless ones. But he bears the name of Muffler and is not worth mentioning.

At the beginning of January a business man named Klöterjahnof the firm of A. C. Klöterjahn & Co.-brought his wife to Emfried. The porter rang the gong, and Fräulein von Osterloh received the guests from a distance in the drawing-room on the ground floor, which, like nearly all the fine old mansion, was furnished in wonderfully pure Empire style. Dr. Leander appeared straightway. He made his best bow, and a preliminary conversation ensued, for the better information of both sides.

Beyond the windows lay the wintry garden, the flowerbeds covered with straw, the grottoes snowed under, the little temples forlorn. Two porters were dragging in the guests' trunks from the carriage drawn up before the wrought-iron gate-for there was no drive up to the house.

"Be careful, Gabriele, doucement, doucement, my angel, keep your mouth closed," Herr Klöterjahn had said as he led his wife through the garden; and nobody could look at her without tenderheartedly echoing the caution-though, to be sure, Herr Klöterjahn might quite as well have uttered it all in his own language.

The coachman who had driven the pair from the station to the sanatorium was an uncouth man, and insensitive; yet he sat with his tongue between his teeth as the husband lifted down his wife. The very horses, steaming in the frosty air, seemed to follow the procedure with their eyeballs rolled back in their heads out of sheer concern for so much tenderness and fragile charm.

The young wife's trouble was her trachea; it was expressly so set down in the letter Herr Klöterjahn had sent from the shores of the Baltic to announce their impending arrival to the director of Einfried-the trachea, and not the lungs, thank God! But it is a question whether, if it had been the lungs, the new patient could have looked any more pure and ethereal, any remoter from the concerns of this world, than she did now as she leaned back pale and weary in her chaste white-enamelled arm-chair, beside her robust husband, and listened to the conversation.