Ironic Out of Love: The Novels of Thomas Mann

This book gives new readings of Mann's novels that show how his obsessive subject--the artist-as-Thomas Mann--became a key to central developments of Western Culture: e.g., to the clash of principles that ended in World War I, to the psychic origins and permanent truth of the Jewish God-story, to the disturbing connection between the Nazis and the greatest of German artists, including Mann himself.The author shows how Mann's famous irony emerges not from nihilism but from a relish for human beings in their idea-defying complexity, and how this relish keeps his richly philosophic novels alive--and delightful--as fiction.