Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren erster Teil

Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren erster Teil, a picaresque comic novel by Th. Mann published in 1954. It was long in Mann's mind but remained unfinished at his death in 1955. The opening chapters were published in 1922 as an independent work: Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Buch der Kindheit. Devoid of moral sense and showing in his boyhood astonishing gifts of simulation and dissimulation, Felix Krull is able to induce in himself the symptoms of illness and so evades conscription. He enters hotel service as a pageboy, is a willing partner in ecstatic and surprising erotic escapades in the hotel, steals jewellery, and leads a double life as the servant and the served. The most conspicuous episode in this phase of his career is his affaire with Mme Houpflé (Diane Philibert). He lives for a time on immoral earnings, and is later willingly persuaded to masquerade as the Marquis de Venosta, who pays handsomely for this substitution. He is on his way to Lisbon when he meets in the train the learned and voluble Professor Kuckuck, who introduces Felix (who goes by the name Armand) to his wife and daughter, who both succumb to the young man's charms. The unfinished book is in the first person and purports to be written from prison.

Though the whole sequence of adventures is treated with sovereign irony and with humour, the book affords a severely critical survey of the world in which Felix prospers so well merely through good looks, good acting, and alert quickwittedness. It is a continuation of the theme of the immorality of the artist in Mann's work, for in his own way Krull is an outstanding artist. (Film version by K. Hoffmann, 1957.)