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The End of a Schoolyard Tyrant: Power, Homoeroticism, and Language in Heinrich Mann's “Abdankung”
Author(s) -
Ilett Darren
Publication year - 2011
Publication title -
the german quarterly
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.11
H-Index - 10
eISSN - 1756-1183
pISSN - 0016-8831
DOI - 10.1111/j.1756-1183.2011.00110.x
Subject(s) - novella , narcissism , depiction , power (physics) , aestheticism , solipsism , ambivalence , aesthetics , literature , sociology , psychoanalysis , art , philosophy , psychology , epistemology , physics , quantum mechanics
A lesser‐known representative of the school genre common around 1900, Heinrich Mann's novella “Abdankung” concerns the nexus of adolescence, power, and desire, and thus resembles such canonical works as Wedekind's Frühlings Erwachen and Musil's Törleß . The present study examines how Mann questions the foundation of domination, only then to demonstrate its implacability. Whereas previous receptionlargely overlooks the significance of the text's homoeroticism, I propose instead that the ambivalence of same‐sex desire—the wavering between its utopian promise of equality and threat of the narcissistic exclusion of difference—provides a framework in which Mann explores the limitations of social and aesthetic transgression. Through its depiction of the isolation of the tyrant, the narcissism of the homosexual, and the solipsism of the aesthete, “Abdankung” suggests that the coupling of power, desire, and imagination helped set the conditions leading up to the cataclysm of World War I.