Choreographies of (Dis)order: Dance and Same-Sex Desire in Thomas Mann’s Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925) and Klaus Mann’s Der fromme Tanz (1926)

Abstract

ABSTRACT The year 1925 marks both the publication of Thomas Mann’s novella Unordnung und frühes Leid and the debut of his son Klaus as a novelist with the writing of Der fromme Tanz (published in 1926), two texts deeply concerned with the disruption of normative orders. Drawing on contemporary Weimar debates around new choreographic practices and (homo)sexuality, this article develops a comparative reading of the two texts, exploring the way in which they use dance as an intergenerational site for the re-articulation of sexual codes. Inspired by Nietzschean philosophy, images of choreographic order and disorder, in particular, become the literary means through which father and son negotiate their own, contrasting relationship with same-sex desire.