It is surely no accident that in periods of cultural and political decline—such as our own impoverished era—interest in the literature of decadence once again flares up. Décadence, often too innocently softened under the label fin de siècle, refers to a vague stretch of time between 1884 and 1914. It is marked by a fascination with various forms of decay, mannered aestheticism, delicate depths of feeling, and heightened sensitivity. A striking contemporary example—and, at the same time, a portent of our political present—is the figure of François in Michel Houellebecq’s novel Submission. Houellebecq’s protagonist is a weary literary scholar, who labors over a study of Joris-Karl Huysmans (1848–1907)—a call-back that may strike more delicate temperaments as a little too obvious.
Huysmans’s À Rebours (Against the Grain, 1884) not only encapsulated the essence of decadence but also helped inaugurate it. If Richard Wagner can be seen as the spiritual progenitor of the movement, Huysmans was its literary founder, and Thomas Mann its consummator and eventual transcender. But what, exactly, is decadence? A popular online encyclopedia defines the term as “a vague and disputed label for a variety of literary movements and individual works around the turn of the century, united in their decisive rejection of naturalism. Its general hallmark is a subjectivist-aestheticist worldview that leads to a deliberately anti-bourgeois, anti-moral, anti-realist, and anti-vital stance, perceived as over-refinement”.
Huysmans’s protagonist Jean des Esseintes epitomizes this attitude: an eccentric aristocrat who retreats into a hermetically sealed world of aesthetic self-staging and artificial sensory experiences to escape the banality of his age. In his Byzantine-oriental luxury villa, he surrounds himself with gilded and jewel-encrusted tortoises crawling majestically across his rooms while he indulges in elaborate culinary experiments and bizarre olfactory contraptions such as his “perfume organ”.
À Rebours was a milestone of literary modernism and remains one of the most influential novels in world literature, though it is seldom read in Germany. Des Esseintes’s unsavory passion for nutrient enemas casually illustrates the movement’s fascination with perversion—an impulse already evident in Wagner and one that runs throughout Mann’s work: from masochism in Little Herr Friedemann and sadism in Tobias Mindernickel, to pederasty in Death in Venice and necrophilia in his swan song, the late novella The Black Swan.
It has become all too common to present Thomas Mann in his later years as the great humanist, upright democrat, and staunch antifascist who, in his later years, even embraced socialist ideals. But this portrait of the virtuoso and grand master of decadence is so truncated—so banal—that it might itself be considered a symptom of decline. Mann’s son Golo thought his father hopelessly naïve in politics, essentially apolitical. It may have been sheer historical accident—namely, the particularly crude and philistine form German fascism took—that kept the author of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man from sharing the fascist sympathies of his Italian contemporary, Gabriele D’Annunzio (whose stance was itself ambivalent).
It has become common to present Thomas Mann as the great humanist, upright democrat, and staunch antifascist who even embraced socialist ideals. But this portrait of the virtuoso and grand master of decadence is so banal that it might itself be considered a symptom of decline.
Another popular narrative casts the Mann brothers as literary opposites. Yet the matter is more complex than enthusiasts of littérature engagée would like to admit: Heinrich Mann, author of the much-lauded Man of Straw, also began as a writer of decadence. His Professor Unrat, later adapted into the 1930 film The Blue Angel that launched Marlene Dietrich’s career, is steeped in typical decadent motifs: the tension between life and art, sensual obsession, fascination with self-destruction, and attraction to the forbidden.
Thomas Mann is, apart from Kafka, the only modern German author who has achieved something like Goethe’s stature in world literature. His oeuvre—notably Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, the Joseph tetralogy, Doctor Faustus—combines universal thematic scope with stylistic virtuosity and formal mastery, while at the same time being curiously monothematic. His protagonist never really changes: always a young man whose sensitivity, fragile constitution, and refined character collide with crude reality—for instance with the over-healthy common sense and blond robustness of Hans and Inge in the autobiographical novella Tonio Kröger, which Kafka is said to have considered Mann’s finest work. Sometimes this clash ends well, sometimes badly, sometimes tragically, sometimes comically. The protagonist is always an artist or at least an artistic character. Just as Wagner’s Flying Dutchman, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin have been called “artist operas”, Mann’s novels could with equal justice be called “artist novels”. That, too, is no accident: Mann felt a unique kinship with Wagner, the unrivaled founding father of decadence.
