Musil contra Mann

A particularly nasty dig from Musil's notebooks

Just a taster for my longer analysis of the complex relationship between Musil and Thomas Mann (coming soon):

“A propos Thomas Mann, one could object that he reminds one of a boy who played with himself and then later becomes the father of a family. The knowledge of immorality and its overcoming by a healthy human being, this immorality in Thomas Mann—now rendered harmless, but nevertheless rememembered with a wink of his eye—can only (almost) have its source in this. And what does his problem child Castorp do all that time up on the Magic Mountain? Masturbate, of course! But Mann takes the sexual organs off his characters as if they were plaster sculptures.”