(De)constructing Nationalism: Understanding Irony in Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912), Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925), and Mario und der Zauberer (1929)

ABSTRACT In the background of the European era of nationalism, Thomas Mann’s Der Tod in Venedig (1912), Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925), and Mario und der Zauberer (1929) reveal the authority of narrative in the discursive construction of identity. By analysing the interrelation of Mann’s characteristic irony and productions of discourses of racialization, this essay draws attention to the constructed nature of German national identity. This identity is revealed to be underpinned by colonial tropes of difference which simultaneously structure internal European hierarchies. Yet, far from simply affirming a naturalistic or fixed hierarchy of cultural authority, irony at a narrative level elucidates how norms are both socially and textually constructed, and, by extension, unstable. In this way, troubling the distinction between cultural truths and social fictions, this essay explores the way in which the works problematize to what extent norms are, in fact, normative.