The tricky thing with satire is drawing it out to fill a decent-sized novel. Heinrich Mann pulls it off with Man of Straw. Diederich Hessling is the ultimate New Man of turn-of-the-century provincial Germany, obsessed with the Kaiser, with being a Kaiser in his home, work and personal life. Mann's first achievement is to make Diederich his hero (so many lesser satirists make the object of their dislike a secondary character). The second is to humanize him. We see what made Diederich a New Man: his childhood, sickly and frightened of everything; his awkward time at University in Berlin where he ultimately finds his place with the Neo Teutons whom he imagines will take over Germany; his army service, which he loves but which is cut short by ill-health.
In practice it is only Diederich who makes a success of Neo Teutonism. Other members he encounters in later life are failures, oddballs. Diedrich returns to Netzig to take over his father's paper factory. He does the round of the great and good of the town. Among them is his hero, Herr Buck. a man involved in everything and universally admired. His is the position Diederich aspires to. But Buck is a social reformer - a liberal by modern standards - and Diederich a royalist ultra-conservative. His son, Wolfgang, whom Diederich befriended in Berlin, is ever so slightly decadent.
Diederich's progress is neither easy nor straightfroward. He calls out Old Buck's son-in-law, Lauer, for derogatory comments about the Kaiser. This is a criminal offence. Diederich is the chief witness for the prosecution. Wolfgang Buck leads the defence. Diederich panics and tries to wriggle out of the situation. But he can't. Mann shows him writhing in the witness box, struggling to find an answer to Wolfgang's cross examination. And in the pit of despair he finds a crumb of courage and responds. To his amazement Lauer is convicted and imprisoned. Deiderich has won.
The business is losing money. Diederich in his pomp and ambition has overstretched himself. He tries to cheat his suppliers and finds an unlikely ally in his machinist, the social democrat union man, Napoleon Fischer. They become partners in fraud and politics. Diederich joins the town council. Fishcher ultimately makes it all the way to the Reichstag.
And alongside all this we have Diederich's personal life. He has let a girl down in Berlin. He wins the local hieress Guste from Wolfgang by starting a rumour that they are half-brother and sister, which perhaps they are. He cheats one of his sisters, Magda, of her inheritance, but protects his other sister, Emma, when she is let down.
There are three tremendous episodes of pure farce in Man of Straw which anchor the theme. The first, at the end of Chapter One, is in 1892 when Diederich is a student in Berlin and comes across a huge crowd of the unemployed protesting in Unter Den Linden. The Kaiser comes to face them down. He does not address them, he certainly doesn't give them the bread and work they demand. He simply appears, on horseback, with his entourage. He simply shows himself and the protestors are silenced. Diederich is one of the cheering throng who run after the imperial retinue. He finds himself in the park, on a bridle path. He finds himself facing the Kaiser himself. Diederich falls into a puddle. The Kaiser laughs.
On honeymoon with Guste in Switzerland, Diederich spots the Kaiser again. This time he follows him all the way to Rome where he keeps a sort of personal guard outside the Kaiser's hotel. And finally, after the unveiling of the statue of the first Kaiser, Wilhelm I, in Netzig - Diederich's personal project, which has cost millions to achieve - turns into a total waterlogged disaster, Diedrich turns up at the Buck house and watches from the corridor outside Old Buck's sickroom as his first, fallen hero, the Kaiser of Netzig, dies.
The best and most challenging novel I have read so far in 2024.
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