A Man Who Is Not a Dog: Thomas Mann and the Question of the Jew, the Human and the Animal

Abstract

In this study I confront the work of Thomas Mann with the Jewish question in order to examine the relationship between literary (human) agency and the inferior margins that enable it: those creatures who do not share the language of (the European and civilized) man. Through a reading of several of Mann’s narratives that concern the relationship between human beings and animals as well as texts by Jewish authors, Kafka in German and Agnon in Hebrew, I seek to shed light on the concept of ‘animality,’ a term that implies continuity between the human and the animal, thereby laying bare man’s political precariousness and fragility and aligning the human with the creature by exposing the body. Based on my reading of Mann’s figuration of the dog in the early story “Tobias Mindernickel” (1898), the novella Herr und Hund (1917), and his Jewish mythical depiction of the biblical Joseph as a dog in Joseph und seine Brüder (1933–1943), I argue that Mann’s humanism is limited in that it guards against the mimetic alignment of man with other creatures by portraying the (often muted) creaturely object of the literary depiction as an inferior – albeit frequently admirable – being. By contrasting Mann’s treatment of this question with Jewish literature’s complete immersion in the animal, I suggest how descriptive speech identifies orientalism as a form of descriptive knowledge, thus clarifying as well the process whereby the modern European nation-state was consolidated by its invisible margins. The article thus suggests that literary description is a means to differentiate and gain agency by adhering to language’s elevated and hierarchical terms.