The discussions about gender and sexuality at the turn of the 19th to the 20th century are experiencing an unprecedented flourishing across all sectors of society: politics, journalism, science (and pseudoscience), philosophy, visual arts, and literature, on a pan-European level.
Especially in the arts, these concerns – an early version of "gender trouble" (Butler), which as a theoretical concept appears close to our own Millennium – form one of the central cores of the then-emerging, multifaceted modernist movement.
Thomas Mann – a writer with a seismographic sense for the events of every historical era he encountered throughout his long literary journey – could not remain unaffected by this climate.
The two short stories from his early period, presented here in their first Greek translation, delve into issues of gender, highlighting the unparalleled literary features that he would later expand upon in his major works: masterfully solid and enjoyable narration combined with intertextual 'play', minimalism, irony, humor, and subversion.
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