At the Prophet's by Thomas Mann

Name: At the Prophet's
Author: Thomas Mann

At the home of Daniel, a self-styled prophet, a small circle of guests gathers on Good Friday evening in a shabby attic flat on the outskirts of a great city. Invitations marked with an eagle clutching a sword summoned them to hear Daniel's proclamations read aloud. Among the arrivals are a Polish artist and his companion, a lyric poet and his wife, a spiritualist who is also a retired cavalry captain, a philosopher with the look of a kangaroo, and a short-story writer in formal dress who knows none of the others and resolves to behave with modest deference throughout the evening. The guests climb the stairs past the dwellings of ordinary tradespeople until they reach the top, where candlelight marks Daniel's door. A dumb boy in a blue suit admits them, lighting their way in silence. Daniel's sister, Maria Josefa, greets each guest at the door; she explains that Daniel himself is absent but will follow the reading in spirit, and that a disciple arriving from Switzerland will read the proclamations in his place. The room is elaborately furnished with candles, an altar-like shrine with a painted holy figure, a chalk drawing of Napoleon, a photograph of Daniel himself, a crucifix, a seven-branched candlestick, wine and cake, death-masks, a rusty sword, and portraits of Luther, Nietzsche, Moltke, Alexander the Sixth, Robespierre, and Savonarola. Maria Josefa remarks to the short-story writer that "all this has been lived." More guests arrive, including a draughtsman, a limping woman devoted to "erotics," an unmarried mother of noble birth, an elderly authoress, and a deformed musician. A wealthy, fashionable lady then arrives from the other side of the city, drawn by curiosity and a taste for the unconventional. She greets the short-story writer, who is a frequent guest at her house, and they speak of her absent daughter, Sonia, whom the writer reveres as a model of cultivated perfection; he learns Sonia is unwell and asks that his greetings be conveyed to her, resolving to send her flowers. The disciple from Switzerland arrives abruptly, a short, ugly, intense young man, and begins reading Daniel's proclamations from behind a gilded column. For an hour and more he declaims a feverish mixture of sermons, visions, and military-style decrees in which the speaker, styling himself "Christus imperator maximus," claims supremacy over Buddha, Alexander, Napoleon, and Jesus, demands absolute obedience from death-devoted followers, and alternates blasphemy with hosanna in visions of conquering and redeeming the world. The guests react variously—rapt, overwhelmed, abstracted—while the short-story writer struggles with a stiff back and a passing craving for a sandwich. Around half past ten the disciple finishes with a final cry surrendering the world to his soldiers to be plundered, then departs as abruptly as he came. The guests sit motionless a moment, then rise and leave, each pressing Maria Josefa's hand at the door. The dumb boy lights them down and out into the street, where the wealthy lady's carriage waits. The short-story writer escorts her to it, and they exchange a few words weighing whether Daniel is a genius or lacks some essential human feeling. He again asks her to greet Sonia, savoring the chance to speak her name familiarly, and she agrees with a smile before departing. Left alone, he resolves to go eat supper heartily, feeling himself, as ever, possessed of a certain relationship to life.

By Thomas Mann · First published 1904 · Genre: Psychological Fiction, Social Satire, Philosophical Fiction · 3,752 words

First lines

There are strange places, strange minds, strange regions of the spirit, lofty and poverty-stricken. Along the peripheries of the big cities, where the streetlights grow scarcer and the policemen walk in couples, you must climb the stairs in the houses until you cannot go any higher, climb into the attics under slanting roofs, where pale young geniuses, criminals of dreams, sit brooding with folded arms; climb into cheap and imposingly decorated studios, where lonely, rebel artists, consumed from within, hungry yet proud, contend with their latest and wildest ideals in clouds of cigarette smoke. Here is the end of things, here is ice, purity, and nothingness. Here no contract is valid, no concession, no consideration, no measure, and no value. Here the air has grown so thin, so chaste, that the miasmata of life can no longer thrive. Here stubbornness reigns, the uttermost logical conclusion, the ego upon its desperate throne, freedom, madness, and death.

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At the Prophet's is listed on Textopian as a short story by Thomas Mann, dated 1904 CE.

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Work type: Short story
Author: Thomas Mann
Date: 1904 CE
Language: English
Genres: Psychological Fiction, Social Satire, Philosophical Fiction, Literary Modernism, Religious/Spiritual Fiction
Length: 3,752 words
Structure: 1 section, 44 paragraphs
Reading fit: Standard (8th-9th Grade)

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Genres

Psychological Fiction — The narrative extensively explores the inner consciousness and observations of the short-story writer, detailing his thoughts, anxieties, and emotional reactions to the gathering and other characters.
Social Satire — Mann employs ironic observation of various social types—the rich lady, the bohemian artists, the spiritualist cavalry captain—revealing pretension and the performative nature of intellectual and artistic circles.
Philosophical Fiction — The work explores fundamental questions about genius, madness, the nature of the ego, spirituality, and what constitutes a worthwhile human pursuit through both the proclamations and the narrator's reflections.
Literary Modernism — The narrative employs characteristic modernist techniques including interior monologue, fragmented consciousness, symbolic imagery, and an ambiguous, non-linear exploration of meaning rather than conventional plot.