Thomas Mann The Blood of the Walsungs

The Blood of the Walsungs is one of Thomas Mann 's early stories and it shows - way over the top in its portrayal of a completely crazy German bourgeois family in which the brother and sister Siegfried and Siegelund act out the incestuous relation of their namesakes from die walkire. It's not strange enough that they do so but I think it would have been a better story if Mann didn't have them attend a performance of the opera -- it made the parallels in their relationship too apparent. It was as if he had the courage to write about incest in 1905 but had to cloak his story in allegory to make it more acceptable. Interesting how he could be overt about the sexuality but oblique about the anti-Semitism - there are hints that the family is jewish but Mann cannot say so directly, not sure why. If he had this would have been an example of decadent art that the nazis would have siezed upon and exploited toward their evil ends.

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