[healty-back]

Good God, woman! You didn't go to a gr?mmar school? Whatever next?

Seriously, I only use the word "bourgeois" to take the piss, but I too would define myself as "middle-class" and did indeed go to a state grammar school (albeit one aping the public school ethos) myself. But I believe in a society where the lower classes (I say!) can rise. My own parents furnish an interesting instance: my mother was born in a patrician bourgeois household, with y'r actual cook and servants; whilst my father came from the household of a coal miner. Diametric opposites.

You mention Mann's sexuality. I think it was, as I said earlier, a question of like father, like son. And I suspect that the fact that the diaries for a number of key years in Thomas' life were destroyed by the author suggests that maybe daddy was a bit too fond of Klaus, who did, after all, end up committing suicide. But among the steamy, unhealthy, incestuous atmosphere that must have informed the Mann household, our patrician chappie did manage, by dint of regular hours, get a lot of works of genius published. Was Katja Pringsheim the downtrodden, docile, loyal wife of feminist clich?, or did she manage to carve out a niche of her own, for herself and the kids? Because in those days, richer people did have servants (home-helps, as we would call them nowadays), so surely women like Katja were not mere baby-making machines.

More later; my post-prandial nap commences.