Joseph and his brothers

In 1926, Thomas Mann embarked on a very bold “thought experiment.” He decided to create a cycle of novels based on the biblical legend of Joseph of Egypt – “Joseph and His Brothers.” This tetralogy of novels, which Thomas Mann considered his best work, is the most extensive text in the writer’s work. Perhaps, first of all, it was this work of Mann that the eminent playwright Bertolt Brecht was referring to when he declared with an ironic smile: “I have always loved his short stories.” Thomas Mann expanded and retold the story of Joseph, for which he used all the modern literary means at his disposal – “from the arsenal of ideas to the technique of narration.” Most importantly, the German writer, who fled his homeland during the heyday of Hitler's Nazi regime, looked into the bottomless "well" of the "past" and gave his compatriots, poisoned by the poison of anti-Semitism, a new reading of the biblical story related to the ancient Jewish tradition. That is why Mann was especially credited with having "thrown the myth of fascism out of hand" with this work: after all, he opposed the fascist myth invented for the masses of delusional ideas of racial superiority with a novel written about the "spiritual world of the Jews." Perhaps this was largely responsible for the unconditional recognition of Thomas Mann's merits in Israel after World War II. In the 1930s and 1940s, during one of the most tragic periods in European history, the Old Testament legends revived in Mani's novel served as a kind of temporal bridge between the immemorial past and the future for subsequent generations of readers; according to the author himself, in the text “interest in typical, eternal, ever-repeating, timeless events, in a word, mythological stories, comes to the fore”. Here, all the mythologies of the world: Jewish, Babylonian, Egyptian, or Greek – are “rolled up into one motley scroll”. Thus, the modern reader finds himself familiar with the archaic myth as the original pattern and form of life, a scheme beyond time, and a formula established by the ancients.