Beschreibung:

Mann, Thomas IMPORTANT SERIES OF C. 90 EARLY AUTOGRAPH LETTERS AND POSTCARDS, TO OTTO GRAUTOFF, ABOUT BUDDENBROOKS, INCLUDING ELEVEN UNPUBLISHED ITEMS, WITH POEMS AND TRANSCRIPTIONS about his writing, reporting his commission from the publishers Fischer to write a long prose work, specifying the mid-nineteenth-century milieu to be treated in Buddenbrooks, its length and plans to finish it, AND FINALLY GIVING GRAUTOFF A LONG ANALYSIS OF ITS GERMANIC AND WAGNERIAN NATURE, discussing Goethe (with quotations of "Alles Vergängliche", from Faust), Shakespeare (Hamlet and Romeo and Juliet), Wagner (Tristan und Isolde), Turgenev, Nietzsche, his brother Hermann, Balzac, Dehmel, Fontane and many other writers, the publishers Fischer, the journals Simplicissimus and Neue Deutsche Rundschau, and reporting his travels in Italy, mainly Rome during the years 1895 to 1897; the collection also includes two autograph poems by Mann, 'Weihnacht' ("O festlich Sternenzelt!"), and, in a letter of 1898, the apparently newly-composed poem 'Nur Eins' ("Wir, denen Gott den trüben Sinn gegeben"), together with a transcription from the love duet in Tristan und Isolde ("Bricht mein Blick sich..."), and from Romeo and Juliet ("Komm, Nacht...Verhülle mit dem schwarzen Mantel mir"), poems by August von Platen and others 92 items, c.260 pages in all, mainly 8vo, autograph address panels to the postcards, some on Mann's printed stationery, with a few unpublished greetings cards, mainly 1894-1901, together with letters to Erna Grautoff and Karl Federn, mainly Munich and Rome and a few items from Naples, Unterach, Riva del Garda, Dresden, Bad Tölz, Oberammergau and Paris, September 1894-7 July 1925, about twelve letters incomplete (mostly undated letters of c.1895-1896), the first two letters with sections cut away, occasional dust-marking and splitting at folds, each letter carefully annotated in pencil by the Austrian National Library (July 1938) and some also with editorial dating (c.1975)