The sun ThaT WinTer day stood above the narrow town as no more than a pale reflection of itself, dull and milky behind the layers of clouds. In the gabled streets it was wet and wind blew round the corners, and now and again something like soft hailstones fell, neither ice nor snow.
School was over for the day. Hordes of youngsters released from its precinct streamed across the cobbled courtyard and out through the latticed gate and went their separate ways, rushing off to right and left. The older boys had a dignified way of holding their packs of books high against their left shoulder, while with their right arms they steered their way against the wind towards lunch; the little ones set off merrily at such a trot that the icy mish- mash sprayed everywhere and
The Essentials of Knowledge clattered in their sealskin satchels. But then it happened that all of them tore off their caps and respectfully lowered their eyes at the sight of a senior master, with his hat and his beard like a cross between Wotan and Jupiter, coming their way…
‘Are you coming, Hans? You’re taking ages.’ Tonio Kröger had been waiting a long time on the embankment; he smiled as he walked over to his friend, who was coming out of the gate, chatting with other schoolmates and about to go off with them…‘What do you mean?’ he asked, and looked at Tonio… ‘Ah yes, that’s right! Just a bit further.’
Tonio fell silent, and his eyes lost their shine. Had Hans for- gotten, was he just remembering again now that that they had intended to go for a walk this afternoon? Since they agreed it he himself had been looking forward to it, to the exclusion of all else! ‘See you then,’ said Hans Hansen to his other companions. ‘I’ll walk on a bit with Kröger.’ And the two turned left as the
others veered right.
Hans and Tonio had time to go for a walk after school, because both belonged to households that only took their midday meal at four o’clock. Their fathers were important businessmen who held public positions and had a great deal of power in the town. To the Hansens had belonged for generations the extensive timber yards down by the river, where huge mechanical saws carved up the tree trunks with a great deal of whooshing and hissing. But then Tonio was the son of Consul Kröger, and you could see sacks of grain bearing the broad black family imprint being delivered along the streets every day; and the big old house of his ances- tors was the most imposing in the whole town…The two friends were forever having to take off their caps because of their wide circles of acquaintance, and many people were first to greet the fourteen-year-olds…
Both had hung their schoolbags over their shoulders, and both were warmly and suitably dressed: Hans in a mariner’s short reefer jacket, with the broad blue collar of his sailor suit standing out over the shoulders and back, and Tonio in a grey belted overcoat. Hans wore a Danish sailor’s cap with short ribbons, and a chunk of his pale blond hair spilt out from beneath it. He was extremely pretty and finely made, broad in the shoulders and narrow in the hips, with prominent steel-blue eyes that took a sharp view of the world. But beneath Tonio’s round fur cap the eyes that looked out from his angular southern face, with its swarthier complexion, were dark and delicately shaded. The eyelids were heavy, and Tonio’s glance was dreamy and a bit shy… His mouth and chin were unusually soft and smooth. He walked along casually and unevenly, whereas Hans, with his slender legs in black stockings, marched elastically and keeping perfect time…
Tonio didn’t speak. He felt downright hurt. Pulling his rather slanting brows together, and rounding his lips as if to whistle, he stared with his head to one side into the distance. This look and gesture were characteristic of him.
All of a sudden Hans thrust his arm under Tonio’s and as he did so cast him a sideways glance, for he understood very well what the matter was. And, while Tonio stayed silent for the next few steps, he fell into a mood that made him seem very vulnerable. ‘Actually I didn’t forget, Tonio,’ said Hans, and looked out ahead on to the pavement, ‘I just thought it was probably not going to come to much today, because it’s so wet and windy. But I don’t mind that at all and I find it terrific that you waited for me anyway. I was already thinking you’d gone home and it made me cross…’
Everything inside Tonio began to dance and sing when he heard those words.
‘Right, so we’ll walk along the ramparts,’ he said with emotion in his voice. ‘By way of the Mühlenwall and the Holstenwall, and that way I’ll see you home, Hans… I can make my own way back to mine, that’s no trouble; and next time you can accompany me.’ In fact he had no great faith in what Hans had said, and felt distinctly that the latter set only half as much store by their walks together as he did. But still he could see that Hans regretted having forgotten, and had taken it upon himself to make things better.
And he was very far from rejecting this overture…
For the truth was that Tonio loved Hans Hansen and had already suffered a great deal because of him. The person most deeply in love is always the one who suffers more—is the one at a disadvantage—his fourteen-year-old soul had already taken in this hard and simple lesson; and he was made in such a way that he took good note of such experiences, it was as if he stored them up inside himself, and in a way it gave him pleasure, without its determining any personal course of action or delivering any practical results. It was also to do with the way he was made that such realizations were much more important and interesting to him than any lessons he had to learn at school. Indeed, much of the time spent in lessons under the Gothic vaults of the classroom he devoted to intensifying such emotions as far as they would go. He wanted really to come to grips with them. And this activity gave him the same sort of satisfaction as when he walked about his room playing the violin (for he played the violin) and, producing the notes as quietly as he could, let them mingle with the splashing of the fountain in the garden below, whose rhythmic sound reached up to him from beneath the branches of an old walnut tree…
The fountain, the old walnut tree, his violin and in the distance the sea, the Baltic sea, whose summer dreams he had the privilege of listening in on during the holidays; these were the things that he loved, the things he surrounded himself with, as it were, and in whose midst his inner life happened. The resonant names of those things could be used to good effect in poetry and frequently did find their way into poems Tonio Kröger set down.
That he possessed a book of poems he’d written himself had become known through his own fault and cost him dearly, among his schoolmates and also with the masters. For his part it struck the son of Consul Kröger that it would be stupid and common to take offence, and he despised the other boys, and the teachers too. Their bad manners offended him all the more. Through them he acquired an unusually penetrating insight into their personal weaknesses. On the other hand, he himself judged it indecent and actually inappropriate to write poetry, and had more or less to concede that all those who took exception and found it an alien activity were right. Only that didn’t make it possible for him to stop…
Since he made poor use of his time at home, and was slow and distracted in class, and the masters had a poor opinion of him, he kept bringing home the most pitiful reports. They made his father, a tall, immaculately dressed gentleman with thoughtful blue eyes, who always wore a poppy in his buttonhole, very angry and wor- ried. For Tonio’s mother, however, for his beautiful black-haired mother, whose name was Consuelo and who was so completely different from the other women in the town, because once upon a time his father had discovered her on his globetrotting down south and brought her back up here—for Consuelo what marks he got at school were fundamentally unimportant…
Tonio loved his dark and fiery mother, who played the piano and the mandolin, and it made him happy that she didn’t torment herself over his dubious position among his fellow human beings. On the other hand, he took the view that his father’s anger was more respectable and had more dignity to it, and although his father told him off, he was actually fully in agreement with him, while he found his mother’s cheerful indifference a bit out of order. Sometimes his thoughts ran roughly this way: it’s enough in itself that I am the way I am, absent-minded, self-willed and concerned with things that bother no one else, and I can’t and don’t want to change. Yet at the very least it’s appropriate that I get into serious trouble because of it. It’s perfectly in order that they punish me and don’t just pass over it with kisses and music. I mean we’re not gypsies in a green caravan, we’re respectable people, we belong to Consul Kröger, we’re the Kröger family… Not just now and then, actually quite often he also thought: why am I so peculiar and in conflict with everything, a disappointment to my teachers and strange among the other boys? I mean look at them, the boys who are good scholars and those who are solidly average. They don’t find the masters ridiculous, they don’t write poetry and they only think things that other people already think and which they can freely express out loud. How correct and in perfect agreement with everyone and everything they must feel! It must be good… So what is it about me, and what will become of me?
This way of reflecting upon himself and his relationship to life played an important role in Tonio’s love for Hans Hansen. He loved him in the first place because he was beautiful; but in the second place he loved him because in every facet of life he seemed to be his opposite and counterweight. Hans Hansen was an excellent scholar and also a good chap, who could ride, do gymnastics and swim heroically; he rejoiced in all-round popularity. The masters were almost fond of him, and called him by his first name and helped him in all sorts of ways; the boys were keen that he should think well of them, and in the street both men and women stopped him, grabbed hold of a lock of his pale blond hair sticking out from beneath the Danish seaman’s cap and said: ‘Good Morning, Hans Hansen, with that pretty hair of yours! Are you still top of the class? Say hello to your mother and father, my fine young man…’ That was how Hans Hansen was, and for as long as Tonio had known him he had only to see him to be filled with longing, longing mixed with an envy he could feel burning in his breast, where it had buried itself deeply. What’s it like to have such blue eyes, he thought, and to be so at ease with the world, happy, surrounded by companionship, what’s it like to be someone like you! Everything you do, always, is just what respectable people expect and admire. No sooner have you finished your homework than you have a riding lesson, or you work on something with a fretsaw, and even in the holidays, at the seaside, you’re always busy rowing and sailing and swimming, whereas I just lie in the sand doing nothing much, a bit lost, and stare out at the mysteriously changing patterns rushing across the face of the water. That’s why your eyes are so clear. How it would be to be like you! Just think! He didn’t try to become like Hans Hansen, and perhaps he didn’t even seriously wish it. But he desired so painfully to be loved by him. To be loved as he was. And he had his way of seeking that love. It was a slow, sincere way, wistful and full of devotion and melancholy; on the other hand it was melancholy than burned more deeply and all-consumingly in him than ever fierce passion did, despite what might have been expected from
his foreign appearance.
Copyright © 2026 by Thomas Mann. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
