Research on Thomas Mann consistently accords him the status of Germany’s national author which he did not assert for himself until his later years. This paper challenges that dominant tendency by focusing on Mann’s early works, and in particular on how they reveal the resentments which were produced by German unification – not simply in the provinces in general, but in the once mighty Free and Hanseatic Cities specifically. One obvious symptom of these localized resentments is the failure to acknowledge the new imperial capital in more than the most intermittent and fleeting references, let alone the failure to ever elevate Berlin to the central theme of the narrative. If the capital is even mentioned, then usually in questionable collocations, which are identifiable not only in ‹Buddenbrooks›, but even more so in ‹Der kleine Herr Friedemann›, a Novelle which can be read as an allegory of the newly established power relations in German domestic politics – an allegory which is developed with a level of detail that extends to the birth dates attributable to the male protagonist and the female deuteragonist.
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Elsaghe, Yahya: Zentrum und Peripherie in Thomas Manns Novelle vom ‹Kleinen Herrn Friedemann›. <http://www.germanistik.ch/publikation.php? id=Thomas_Manns_Novelle_vom_Kleinen_Herrn_Fri
edemann> (Publiziert März 2013)
oder
Elsaghe, Yahya: Zentrum und Peripherie in Thomas Manns Novelle vom ‹Kleinen Herrn Friedemann›. In: Michael Stolz, Laurent Cassagnau, Daniel Meyer und Nathalie Schnitzer (Hg.): Germanistik in der Schweiz (GiS) Zeitschrift der Schweizerischen Akademischen Gesellschaft für Germanistik. Heft 10/2013. Bern: germanistik.ch 2013, S.329-336