Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers in the context of the German exile novel

Data for study for the paper is Thomas Mann's tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers finished in the American exile in 1943. T. Mann's work is considered to belong to different genres, namely myth novel, historical novel, anti-totalitarian Bildungsroman. In the paper it is compared with the main examples of German exile novel created by exile writers E.M. Remarque, L. Feuchtwanger, K. Mann. The exile novel is a genre where space organization plays an extraordinary important role. Two main kinds of space worldview presented in Joseph novels are considered in the article. The bearers of the first one are Jacob and his relatives and the bearers of the second one are Egyptians. The sacred centre of Jacob's world is the Luz hill, and Canaan is considered to be a sacral territory. Secular territories are located around it. As for Egypt, it is outskirts having the same axiological meaning as the underworld. Egyptians' worldview is an axiological inverse of Jacob's one because they accept Egypt as a sacral territory and Canaan as a barbarian country. The authors of the German exile novel also simulate two worldviews which are axiologically opposite. The author refers to them as "Nazi space" and "exile space" because their bearers are Nazi characters and emigrant characters respectively. Yuri Lot-man offered such a criterion for constructing the typology of literary characters as their relation to space. Using this criterion in studying the German exile novel enables to define Nazi and emigrant characters as bearers of opposite worldviews and to analyze the situation of choice appearing in every emigrant's life. Emigrants can either accept the axiology of the exile space where the central zone is a "dark" world and outskirt is a sacral rational territory or suffer from being far from their motherland. Emigrant characters from the first group start a new life in one of the outskirt countries while characters from the second group mostly die. A similar self-determination act must be held by Th. Mann's Joseph who accepts Egypt as "his" country and sacral territory. Joseph's moving to outskirt is shown as a symbolic death and a new birth; the same can be found in E.M. Remarque's, L. Feuchtwanger's and K. Mann's exile novels. That is why Th. Mann's Joseph can be defined as an emigrant character and Joseph and His Brothers as belonging to the genre periphery of the German exile novel. The tetralogy novels are not thematically related to the events of the 1930s-1940s. But they were a reaction to these events, being created as a "humanistic project". Though Th. Mann used an Old Testament plot he documented the emigrant view in his work, a bearer of which he also was.

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