About this ebook
Tonio Kröger grows up in a Baltic merchant town, the son of a respectable grain merchant and a dark-haired, music-loving mother from the far south. At fourteen he loves Hans Hansen, a fair, blue-eyed boy who would rather talk about horses than read Schiller. At sixteen he loses his heart to merry Ingeborg Holm at a dancing class where he makes a fool of himself. Years later he is a celebrated author in Munich, clever and cold. In a long, dazzling conversation with his painter friend Lisaveta Ivanovna he argues that art demands distance from life, until she answers him with a verdict he cannot shake off. Then he travels north, to the town he left and on to a seaside hotel on the Danish coast, where a dance in the hotel hall brings back everything he gave up.
Mann wrote the novella in his mid-twenties and published it two years after Buddenbrooks. He drew it closely from his own life: Lübeck, his father’s firm, the boy he loved at school. In the short autobiography he wrote after receiving the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature, he reported that Tonio Kröger and Death in Venice were considered his finest work in the form. The question at its heart, what it costs to be an artist and what life is given up for art, runs through everything he wrote afterward.
Kaede Hozumi’s new translation works directly from the German and keeps Mann’s recurring phrases, the leitmotifs that hold the story together, word for word wherever he repeats them. It includes a translator’s afterword on Mann’s life, the people behind the characters and the novella’s place in his work, and notes on the books, places and allusions a reader may not know.
