Before the problems with “Krull,” Mann had given up on several other stories he had wanted to write and the things he completed did not have the luster of his youthful productions. The career of the former twenty-five-year-old prodigy who had produced the best-selling hit Buddenbrooks (1901), now in his mid-thirties, seemed to be in a pronounced valley. This crisis was just the most recent in a series of unsatisfying, frustrating, or downright failed projects. This turned out to be only the first of several interruptions of writing a text that remained fragmentary in the end. He was uncertain as to where next to take the narrative. Not only was he so physically and mentally exhausted that he felt like checking into a sanatorium, but he was also at a critical stage in the composition. I n the spring of 1911, when he was working on his story of the confidence man Felix Krull, Thomas Mann found himself in severe artistic difficulties.
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