Citation

Sokolova EV. Voprosy Literatury 2021; (6): 13-26.

Copyright

(Copyright © 2021)

DOI

10.31425/0042-8795-2020-6-12-26

PMID

unavailable

Abstract

Written during his American 'exile' and depicting an alternative story of the prophet Moses, T. Mann's little studied novella The Tables of the Law [Das Gesetz] (1943) is compared with S. Freud's Moses and Monotheism [Der Mann Moses und die monotheistische Religion] (1939), his last work completed before his death. The author traces a number of significant parallels: in particular, Moses's origins in the highest classes of Egyptian society. Mann sees the figure of Moses in The Tables of the Law as one of the purest and most vivid embodiments of creative principles, going back to his own period of 'playing Goethe.' Moses is yet another of his powerful, harmonious and optimistic characters from the 1930s-1940s (Joseph in the four-part novel Joseph and His Brothers [Joseph und seine Brüder] or Goethe in Lotte in Weimar), with roots in the majestic Dutchman Peeperkorn from The Magic Mountain [Der Zauberberg] (1924). Instead of engaging in a direct polemic with corresponding ideological dogmata, the two books written by the giants of German-speaking culture in Nazi times reveal a profound examination of not fully recognized and therefore still dangerous sources of Nazi ideology on the mythological level -- in mankind's collective unconscious. © 2020, E. V. Sokolova

Language: ru

Keywords

German literature in exile; German literature of the 20th c; S. Freud; T. Mann; The image of Moses in literature; The Tables of the Law by T. Mann