The artist at the turn of the century as a “burgher who’s gone astray“: Munich’s Modernist Movement in search of its identity in the early stories of Thomas Mann

The turn of the 20th century was affected by the process of modernization: new areas of production emerged which coincided with deepening financial crises. This especially affected the nature of the bourgeois life at the time, and caused unique social and cultural transformation. This profound changing process resulted in the questioning of the basic elements that had made up the bourgeois society. In effect, the period ended with the “burgher” trying to illuminate his own nature and to redefine himself. This situation has also been referred to as “the identity crisis of the individual citizen”, which can be seen as a major topic in the literary works published from 1870 to 1914. The early stories of Thomas Mann examine the issues arising from these identity crises, particularly regarding the new bourgeois man. In this context, importantly, Mann mostly concentrated on the lives and problems of artists. His novella  Gladius Dei (1902) includes these important themes, such as confrontations of burghers, extraordinary artworks, and by that, it also reveals a tragic situation of an artist. The artist, who is part of bourgeois life himself, is trying to transcend his everyday life through art, and in so doing, aims to get rid of the banalities of social life. However, at the time, the artist as a member of the bourgeois society was also inevitably involved in the process of decadence, which society was going through. Against this background, this article analyzes  Gladius Dei with the intention of showing the situation in Munich’s modernist movement in the fin-de-siecle. In the context described above – starting from the contradictory position of the artist – the major aim of this study is to show that  Gladius Dei can be seen as an implicit criticism of the modernist circles of Munich.