He wanted so much for it all to be true. The Romantics had told him that the world makes no sense in modern times — the Modernists would later tell him it never had — but everyone told the German novelist Thomas Mann that the artist is the strong man who hammers out a heroic meaning for this world of weakness and disorder. And he wanted so much for it to be true.

He knew, of course, that it wasn’t. Mann’s stories contain some of the most scathing attacks on the “heroic artist” ever written, from the pretentious and self-satisfied novelist Gustave von Aschenbach in the 1911 novella Death in Venice (lured by the sensuous beauty of a Polish boy to linger in miasmatic Italy) to the cold, proud, and mad composer Adrian Leverkuhn in the 1948 novel Doctor Faustus (whose brilliant musical powers are heightened, corrupted, and at last destroyed by the syphilis that infects him just as the Nazis infect his German fatherland).