Karen Blixen - Isak Dinesen home

Question 99: 'The Angelic Avengers' and Thomas Mann?

Q.  I am interested in The Angelic Avengers by Karen Blixen (Pierre Andrézel). A note in the book I had the pleasure to read said it was somehow inspired by a true story, but gave no details. Do you have any idea of the real names of the characters involved and their occupations?

Pennhallow reminded me of Mario, Thomas Mann’s magician. As a matter of fact, both of them share with the Nazis or Fascists a perverse nature. They are agressive and cold manipulators, with no concern for their victims. They aim at humiliation and death.

And the incestuous link between Pennhallow and his sister reminds me of the film The Damned (1969) by Luchino Visconti. (The director’s main inspirations are clearly Mann’s Buddenbrooks [1901] for the whole structure, and Hamlet for the last, incestuous, part). I believe the supreme abomination of incest remains twisted in the psychotic structures, and artists like Visconti or Blixen felt it, and revealed it.

 A.   The characters and story in the novel that you ask about are pure fiction. However, The Angelic Avengers is often said to be an allegory about the Nazi occupation of Denmark. Robert Langbaum, in interviewing her, says, "Isak Dinesen intimated to me that she had some such allegorical intention as this."

You may very well be right, that Karen Blixen was secretly inspired for this story by the work of Thomas Mann (1875-1955). It would be characteristic of her to develop a story based on Mann's work, especially under the condition of the Nazi occupation of Denmark. (All of Karen Blixen' stories show elements of inspiration from previous works of literature.)

Dorothy Canfield's essay introducing Isak Dinesen's first work, Seven Gothic Tales, compares the style to many writers, but says nothing about Thomas Mann. However, Robert Langbaum, in Isak Dinesen's Art: The Gayety of Vision, spends a long time talking about Thomas Mann's influence on her work--although not in connection with The Angelic Avengers. Langbaum, who has read thoroughly the works of both authors, is eloquent on the subject.

Here are Karen Blixen's comments about the novel in a 1956 interview with Eugene Walter:


--Much of your work seems to belong to the last century. For instance, The Angelic Avengers.

--(Laughing): Oh, that's my illegitimate child! During the German occupation of Denmark I thought I should go mad with boredom and dullness. I wanted so to be amused, to amuse myself, and besides I was short of money, so I went to my publisher in Copenhagen and said, Look here, will you give me an advance on a novel and send me a stenographer to dictate it to? They said they would, and she appeared, and I started dictating. I had no idea at all of what the story would be about when I began. I added a little every day, improvising. It was very baffling to the poor stenographer. . . . I'd start one day by saying, 'Then Mr. So-and-so entered the room,' and the stenographer would cry out, 'Oh dear, but he can't! He died yesterday in Chapter Seventeen.' No I prefer to keep The Angelic Avengers my secret. [She tried to release it under a pseudonym, but the truth was soon discovered.]