Royal Highness

by Thomas Mann

  First Vintage Books Edition, October 1983

  Copyright 1939 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  Copyright renewed 1967 by Frau Thomas Mann and Fraulein Erika Mann

  Translation copyright renewed 1967 by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc.

  All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. Published in the United States by Random House, Inc., New York, and simultaneously in Canada by Random House of Canada Limited, Toronto. Published in the United States by Alfred A. Knopf, Inc. in 1939. Originally published as Königliche Hoheit; Copyright 1909 by S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin.

  Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data

  Mann, Thomas, 1875–1955.

  Royal highness.

  Translation of: Königliche Hoheit.

  Reprint. Originally published: New York:

  A.A. Knopf, 1939.

  I. Title.

  PT2625.A44K62 1983 833′.912 83-5921

  eISBN: 978-0-307-82895-8

  v3.1

  Dear Alfred,

  The appearance of a new English edition of Royal Highness merits a new preface. It is no more than fitting that it should take the form of a letter to you, my American publisher, for it was your idea to revive this well-nigh forgotten little book. Moreover, I can thus seize the occasion to express publicly, once and for all, the gratitude I have so long and so deeply felt for all you have done for me and my work in the great country now beginning to be my home. I can bear witness to an author-publisher friendship long since interwoven with our more personal relations and decisive, I feel, for the effective reception of my works.

  Our relation is, in fact, like that happy one—now, alas, dissolved by death—between myself and the great S. Fischer of Berlin. You, I know, admired his genius as a publisher, and chose him as your model when you founded your own house. Now you have taken his place, just as in the past few years my American public has replaced the German one snatched from me by evil and fatal political chance. It is an unnatural situation, yet a fact, that my books, all of them very German productions indeed, are today scarcely existent in their original form and language, and lead, in translation, an uprooted and necessarily somewhat foreshortened life. If anything could console me for this forced and futile situation—aside from my certain conviction that it cannot last—it is the cordial sympathy of the American educated public. That public stepped, as it were, into the breach; with a generosity and benevolence—strengthened and deepened by a highly intelligent literary critique—most happily and touchingly displayed in their reception of Mrs. Lowe-Porter’s admirable translations of Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and the Joseph novels. And now, my dear Alfred, you would solicit their interest afresh, this time for Royal Highness.

  It seems as though I were to be a three-novel man—the three I just named. But there is a fourth, of a smaller format, less imposing, less epic than the others—this little story of a prince. It was written in the blithe days of my youth; it is blithe in itself. Yet from the first its melancholy fate has been to be oddly overshadowed, almost, I might say, neglected. Sometimes I have really felt sorry for the creature. The same love, pains, and patience went to its shaping as to that of its more admired brothers; yet it remained an outsider. Things on which I spent much less time, long short stories like Disorder and Early Sorrow and Mario and the Magician, are much better known. Yet this little comedy in the form of a novel (always, since the hour it was conceived, bearing the ironic and symbolical title Royal Highness), was despite its conventional façade a parody; it had to do with moral and even political problems, and was far from being insensitive to the spirit of the times.

  It came immediately after Buddenbrooks, which succeeded so happily with the great German reading public—and that was its misfortune. It was pronounced too light, both in itself and by comparison; too light with reference to the German demand for weight and seriousness in a book; too light with reference to the author himself. It was a novel of high life, with a happy ending, almost suitable for a serial in a magazine; it told, in dignified journalese, the tale of a little princeling and how he became a benedict and a benefactor to his people. And it was a “come-down” after the humour and pessimism of the Buddenbrook saga. The author had not lived up to the justifiable expectations aroused by his first work. But what does the public—and not only the German public—expect of a writer who has won their favour? Nothing else than that he should keep on doing the same thing over and over. I have no doubt I should have best satisfied my German middle-class readers by writing more and more Buddenbrookses all the rest of my life. But that was just what I could not do; it did not satisfy my own demands on myself. To be ever eager for new things (novarum rerum cupidus), that, it always seemed to me, an artist was bound in honour to do. I was feeling after new things, I had been doing so in the stories I wrote after Buddenbrooks; in Royal Highness I was continuing along the same path. For this as I saw it was my problem as an artist: how to take the serious and weighty naturalism I had inherited from the nineteenth century and faithfully practised, and loosen and lighten, heighten and brighten it into a work of art which should be intellectual and symbolical, a transparency for ideas to shine through. In this sense Royal Highness was a step in advance, even though in actual scope and significance this single work could not compare with Buddenbrooks. The misunderstanding between author and reader is often due to the fact that the reader thinks of a book as an absolute, as a product standing by itself, and judges it accordingly; whereas the author regards it as a stage of progress, a pen trial, a connecting link, a preliminary canter, a means to an end. So whatever the intrinsic value of Royal Highness, it occupies in the life of its author its own proper and peculiar place; he is fain to hope that the pleasure it gives the reader may be enlarged by the author’s testimony that without it neither The Magic Mountain nor Joseph and His Brothers could have been written.

  In general, I confess, I think all criticism should have this biographical flavour, as a necessary human element. And criticism of Royal Highness can dispense with it even less than usual. The novel is the work of a young married man. The personal and human experiences of those early years entirely condition its treatment of that favourite theme of my youth, the theme of the artist as isolated and “different.” It plays with the Tonio Kröger antithesis between art and life, and resolves it by harmonizing happiness and discipline. Its subject-matter lends itself to allusiveness: it analyses the life led by royalty as a formal, unreal existence, lifted above actualities; in a word, the existence of the artist. The resolution of the royal complex is brought about by a fairy-tale, comedy love-affair; it leads to marriage and to the solution of certain problems in political economy as well. But even so, it exhibits a rejection of empty and melancholy formalism in favour of life and companionship, which is not without symbolic meaning and shows some sensitiveness to coming events.

  The novel dates from 1905, its atmosphere is the German Empire of that time, its narrative has certain attributes of the Wilhelmine setting. The figure of Minister von Knobelsdorff, the man of the world with the cynical wrinkles round his eyes, is an attempt in little to portray the agile and airy Prince von Bülow. Then there is the famous shrunken arm. It is not used as a psychological motif, more as a moral symbol, a rather touching inhibition increasing the difficulties of a formal and heroic readiness for service, which, indeed, is more reminiscent of Andersen’s Little Tin Soldier than of Wilhelm’s baroque posturings. Any mention of the Reich would have lacked literary tact. Even to refer to Berlin would have jarred; it would have disturbed and broken the charmed circle of the little fairy-tale. But the monarchy was not only the atmosphere of the book; it was also, quite precisely, its subject, treated, if only allegorically, as a form of existence. And this wa
s at the moment when the monarchy was at its height.

  True, it took quite a while to disappear. Nobody, least of all the author of Royal Highness, dreamed of its approaching fall. And yet the dynastic idea is treated with an ironic sympathy which might suggest its ripeness for decay. Is literature a swan-song? No, rather it is a prophecy, though not in direct and explicit form. The artist’s nature prevents him from being in the very least the servant and harbinger of new things, even when his words betray his unconscious intuition of the future. What happens is rather that the old and the new intersect in him; they play upon him and with him, and this play is his work, a dialectical product, almost always, of old and new, wherein his sympathy, yes, his love, is conservative and faces the old, and only the artist’s sensitive responsiveness hints at the new. On its appearance thirty years ago Royal Highness was a portent, and the fact did not escape the knowing ones. It was a sign of that crisis of individualism which has since become a commonplace in the public consciousness; a sign of that surrender by the intellect of the individual point of view in favour of the communal, the social, the democratic, yes, the political, at the will of the times. But save in that respect, one might call the book a perfect orgy of individualism; the characters are a set of aristocratic monstrosities, assembled with the most loving care. It could not have been more complete or varied had the artist drawn his figures with the deliberate and defiant intention of glorifying the past—as indeed, in part, as opposed to the main plan of the book, he really had.

  But the sympathy he felt for these various “special cases” is of a strange kind—it is hopeless, it inclines to satire, even to caricature. They are of every sort, these cases, down to the individualism of sheer insanity, as portrayed in the over-bred and unbalanced collie dog and the equally unbalanced Countess. I still enjoy the moralizing little jokes that come in here and there; as, for instance, that the Countess’s aberrations are the result of “letting herself go” when she can no longer bear it to hold out against the “hard and stern” attitude of Klaus Heinrich. The book has a light-hearted attitude towards mental aberration: that, it seems to say, might happen to anyone! For a “high-life novel with a happy ending,” it has a disconcerting way of referring to the border-line in whose seductive proximity all individualism dwells, being saved only by the steadfastness of the constant tin soldier from overstepping the boundary.

  On the whole, the contradiction between sympathy and intention which dominates this odd little book is at bottom the expression of a wish for appeasement and reconciliation between two one-sided principles, the individual and the social, by dint of harmonizing them in the human. Royal Highness, written by the man of thirty, only continues what the same man at twenty began dreaming and writing of, in Tonio Kröger, with his ironic and sentimental formula about the “joys of the ordinary.” It is also an essay in preparation for the dialectic orchestration of The Magic Mountain, that long-drawn-out dialogue between “life” and “sympathy with death” wherein the man of fifty gave shape to the eternal debate on man, his state and place in the universe, on a basis grown broader with the years. In the Joseph novels the sixty-year-old man has been striving, in three epic attacks, to garner the riches of the three elements of his own personal culture, German, European, and human. And now, looking back, he assures himself that even this humorous little interlude about the princeling and his bride is an organic part of his life task; yes, that in his present effort to lend aid by direct political writing, he is only doing in later life the same thing he began when he was young.

  I felt it due, my dear Alfred, to your present enterprise and all your kindness to add to my gratitude for this new edition a few words of explanation to the reader on the more inward significance of this “new” work, which is today as old as I was when I wrote it. Let these few lines go with the little book on its way! It would be sad for you and for me were I to be alone in my gratitude for your undertaking.

  Thomas Mann

  Noordwijk aan Zee, Holland

  July 1939

  PRELUDE

  THE scene is the Albrechtstrasse, the main artery of the capital, which runs from Albrechtsplatz and the Old Schloss to the barracks of the Fusiliers of the Guard. The time is noon on an ordinary week-day; the season of the year does not matter. The weather is fair to moderate. It is not raining, but the sky is not clear; it is a uniform light grey, uninteresting and sombre, and the street lies in a dull and sober light which robs it of all mystery, all individuality. There is a moderate amount of traffic, without much noise and crowd, corresponding to the not over-busy character of the town. Tram-cars glide past, a cab or two rolls by, along the pavement stroll a few residents, colourless folk, passers-by, the public—“people.”

  Two officers, their hands in the slanting pockets of their grey great-coats, approach each other; a general and a lieutenant. The general is coming from the Schloss, the lieutenant from the direction of the barracks. The lieutenant is quite young, a mere stripling, little more than a child. He has narrow shoulders, dark hair, and the wide cheek-bones so common in this part of the world, blue rather tired-looking eyes, and a boyish face with a kind but reserved expression. The general has snow-white hair, is tall and broad-shouldered, altogether a commanding figure. His eyebrows look like cotton-wool, and his moustache hangs right down over his mouth and chin. He walks with slow deliberation, his sword rattles on the asphalt, his plume flutters in the wind, and at every step he takes the big red lapel of his coat flaps slowly up and down.

  And so these two draw near each other. Can this rencontre lead to any complication? Impossible. Every observer can foresee the course this meeting will naturally take. We have on one side and the other age and youth, authority and obedience, years of services and docile apprenticeship—a mighty hierarchical gulf, rules and prescriptions, separate the two. Natural organization, take thy course! And, instead, what happens? Instead, the following surprising, painful, delightful, and topsy-turvy scene occurs.

  The general, noticing the young lieutenant’s approach, alters his bearing in a surprising manner. He draws himself up, yet at the same time seems to get smaller. He tones down with a jerk, so to speak, the splendour of his appearance, stops the clatter of his sword, and, while his face assumes a cross and embarrassed expression, he obviously cannot make up his mind where to turn his eyes, and tries to conceal the fact by staring from under his cotton-wool eyebrows at the asphalt straight in front of him.

  The young lieutenant too betrays to the careful observer some slight embarrassment, which however, strange to say, he seems to succeed, better than the grey-haired general, in cloaking with a certain grace and self-command. The tension of his mouth is relaxed into a smile at once modest and genial, and his eyes are directed with a quiet and self-possessed calm, seemingly without an effort, over the general’s shoulder and beyond.

  By now they have come within three paces of each other. And, instead of the prescribed salute, the young lieutenant throws his head slightly back, at the same time draws his right hand—only his right, mark you—out of his coat-pocket and makes with this same white-gloved right hand a little encouraging and condescending movement, just opening the fingers with palm upwards, nothing more. But the general, who has awaited this sign with his arms to his sides, raises his hand to his helmet, steps aside, bows, making a half-circle as if to leave the pavement free, and deferentially greets the lieutenant with reddening cheeks and honest modest eyes. Thereupon the lieutenant, his hand to his cap, answers the respectful greeting of his superior officer—answers it with a look of child-like friendliness; answers it—and goes on his way.

  A miracle! A freak of fancy! He goes on his way. People look at him, but he looks at nobody, looks straight ahead through the crowd, with something of the air of a woman who knows that she is being looked at. People greet him; he returns the greeting, heartily and yet distantly. He seems not to walk very easily; it looks as if he were not much accustomed to the use of his legs, or as if the general attention he
excites bothers him, so irregular and hesitating is his gait; indeed, at times he seems to limp. A policeman springs to attention, a smart woman, coming out of a shop, smiles and curtseys. People turn round to look at him, nudge each other, stare at him, and softly whisper his name.…

  It is Klaus Heinrich, the younger brother of Albrecht II, and heir presumptive to the throne. There he goes, he is still in view. Known and yet a stranger, he moves among the crowd—people all around him, and yet as if alone. He goes on his lonely way and carries on his narrow shoulders the burden of his Highness!

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Prelude

  I. THE CONSTRICTION

  II. THE COUNTRY

  III. HINNERKE THE SHOEMAKER

  IV. DOCTOR UEBERBEIN

  V. ALBRECHT II

  VI. THE LOFTY CALLING

  VII. IMMA

  VIII. THE FULFILMENT

  IX. THE ROSE-BUSH

  A Note About the Author

  I

  THE CONSTRICTION

  ARTILLERY salvos were fired when the various new-fangled means of communication in the capital spread the news that the Grand Duchess Dorothea had given birth to a prince for the second time at Grimmburg. Seventy-two rounds resounded through the town and surrounding country, fired by the military in the walls of the “Citadel.” Directly afterwards the fire brigade also, not to be outdone, fired with the town saluteguns; but in their firing there were long pauses between each round, which caused much merriment among the populace.

  The Grimmburg looked down from the top of a woody hill on the picturesque little town of the same name, which mirrored its grey sloping roofs in the river which flowed past it. It could be reached from the capital in half an hour by a local railway which paid no dividends. There the castle stood, the proud creation of the Margrave Klaus Grimmbart, the founder of the reigning house in the dim mists of history, since then several times rejuvenated and repaired, fitted with the comforts of the changing times, always kept in a habitable state and held in peculiar honour as the ancestral seat of the ruling house, the cradle of the dynasty. For it was a rule and tradition of the house that all direct descendants of the Margrave, every child of the reigning couple, must be born there.