Transnationalism and Artist Biofictions

This chapter examines biofiction through the lens of transnationalism, exploring how it is used to critically engage with national discourses and the long-established practice of writing artists’ lives in the framework of the nation-state. Focusing on German biofiction – both from and about the 1930s and 1940s–, it illustrates the rise and development of biofiction as a paradigmatic mode for deconstructing national categories. Four biographical novels are discussed: Symphonie Pathétique: ein Tschaikowsky-Roman (1935; Pathetic Symphony, 1948), by German author Klaus Mann; Der Tod des Vergil (The Death of Virgil, 1945), by Austrian author Hermann Broch; Benjamin’s Crossing (1996), by American author Jay Parini; and Les derniers jours de Stefan Zweig (2010; The Last Days of Stefan Zweig, 2013), by French author Laurent Seksik. Looking into the narrative structures and styles of these novels, this chapter shows biofiction’s capacity for inspecting national categories and grasping the transnational. Given the genre’s creative freedom and its characteristic focus on protagonists’ inner lives, it is highly effective at illuminating the complexity of multiple forms of belonging. The very same affordances make biographical fiction very suitable as a powerful vehicle for imagining transnational and cosmopolitan communities. Finally, artist biofictions in particular can work as a performative literary practice of bonding and transporting. Engaging with the form and style of their subject’s final years, the authors under scrutiny here not only re-assess their subject’s artistic legacy in light of contemporary times, they also take it across the borders of nations and continents.