Confessions of Felix Krull
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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"The terraced garden was liberally adorned with earthenware gnomes, mushrooms, and all kinds of lifelike animals; on a pedestal stood a mirrored glass sphere, which distorted faces most comically; there were also an aeolian harp, several grottoes, and a fountain whose streams made an ingenious figure in the air, while silver goldfish swam in its basin . . . Over the outside door was an ingenious mechanism, activated by air pressure as the door closed, which played with a pleasing tinkle the opening bars of Strauss’s "Freuet Euch des Lebens"."--Confessions of Felix Krull (1954) by Thomas Mann, epigraph to Kitsch: The World of Bad Taste (1968) by Gillo Dorfles |
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Confessions of Felix Krull is an unfinished 1954 novel by the German author Thomas Mann.
Synopsis
It is a parody of Goethe's autobiography Poetry and Truth, particularly in its pompous tone. The original title is Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren, erster Teil, translated a year later in English as Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years.
Mann planned the novel since 1905, being inspired by the Romanian con artist Georges Manolescu's autobiographies Fürst der Diebe (A Prince of Thieves) and Gescheitert (Failed). Originally the character of Felix Krull appeared in a short story written in 1911. The story was not published until 1936, in the book Stories of Three Decades, along with 23 other stories written between 1896 and 1929, the year in which he was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. Much later, Mann expanded the story and managed to finish and publish part one of the Confessions of Felix Krull but due to his death in 1955, the saga of Felix, the morally flexible and irresistible conman remains unfinished.
A spoken word adaptation of chapters 1, 2, 3 and 5 from the first book (dem Buch der Kindheit) of Felix Krull performed by O.E. Hasse, was included as a companion disk to the 1965 Teldec (Telefunken-Decca) release of Schwere Stunde (performed by Thomas Mann).
Film adaptation
The book was adapted into a film in 1957, with a screenplay by Erika Mann and Robert Thoeren, directed by Kurt Hoffmann, and starring Horst Buchholz as Krull alongside Liselotte Pulver.
A television miniseries was directed in 1981 by Bernhard Sinkel, starring John Moulder-Brown.
References
- Luis Montiel. Told by a myth : Thomas Mann’s Felix Krull. Culture & History Digital Journal 2(2), December 2013, e029, eISSN 2253-797X Template:DOI
- Ernest Schonfield (2008) Art and its uses in Thomas Mann's Felix Krull
- Schwarz, Egon (2004) Felix Krull in Lehnert, Herbert and Wessell, Eva (2004) A companion to the works of Thomas Mann pp. 257–269
- Mann, Thomas and Amann, Paul (1960) Letters to Paul Amann, 1915-1952
