SOURCE: "Thomas Mann's Tonio Kröger: A Critical Reconsideration," in Revue Des Langues Vivantes, Vol. 27, 1961, pp. 232-40.

Furst is an Austrian-born American educator and critic who has written a number of studies on Romanticism. In the following essay, she suggests that reader sentiment has interfered with proper critical assessment of Tonio Kröger.

'Von allem, was ich schrieb, meinem Herzen am nachsten': this is how Thomas Mann described Tonio Kröger nearly thirty years after its publication. He added too, that this Novelle was 'noch immer von jungen Leuten geliebt'. The words which Mann used to describe the reaction to Tonio KrIger, 'meinem Herzen am nilchsten' and 'geliebt', are highly significant, implying as they do not merely popularity, but a strong emotional response on the part of the reader, as well as an emotional involvement of the author. Another thirty years have now elapsed and today as yet...