"Presenting Poems Differently:" Poetical Body-Theatre in Luebeck, December '85

Abstract

The Baltic seaport of Luebeck is remembered by students of German literature as the birthplace of Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Hemrich, the elder brother, is best known in English-speaking countries as the author of Professor Unrat, the novel from which, with significant changes, the film, The Blue Angel, was adapted. The novels of Thomas Mann, on the other hand, are more familiar in their own right to English readers, their availability in paperback ensured by Mann's status as a twentieth-century master of prose fiction who is mentioned by critics in the same breath as Proust and Joyce. Forty years after the first impact of The Blue Angel, Thomas Mann's fame outside Germany, too, was enlarged by a film adaptation: that of his novella, Death in Venice.