Ironice verheiratet? Thomas Manns frühe Novelle Der Wille zum Glück als eine narrative Konkretisierung von Nietzsches Zur Genealogie der Moral

In the summer of 1896 the journal Simplicissimus published in three instalments the novella Der Wille zum Glück. Thomas Mann had written the text only a few months earlier, after a trip to Italy together with his brother Heinrich. It tells the life-story of a critically ill artist, who is kept alive by the desire to be united with his loved one – by his ‘will to happiness’ –, until his desire is fulfilled. Mann’s writing at this moment of time stood under the intellectual constellation of Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche. As far as Nietzsche is concerned, researchers have restricted themselves to punctual references: the title, the formula “pathos of distance”, animal imagery. Aim of this article is to demonstrate that the novella documents an in-depth and systematic reception of the third chapter of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morality. It turns out that the artist is not an example of the fluidity of the will, but rather represents an atypical variant of the ascetic priest, who in Nietzsche’s philosophy functionalizes suffering in order to obtain power. The narrative materialization of Nietzsche’s architext activates a form of irony that was new to the young Mann and only becomes visible for the informed reader: intertextual irony, which reveals behind the tragic appearance of the novella an entirely different comical dimension