As T. J. Reed has remarked, Thomas Mann never seems to have experienced the language crisis characteristic of the early development of many German writers at the turn of the century. Hofmannsthal's 'Chandos Letter', Rilke's Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge, and Kafka's Description of a Struggle are paradigmatic moments of a general malaise concerning the function and authenticity of poetic language at the turn of the century that seem to have passed over Mann completely. From his earliest novellas to his 'breakthrough' novel Buddenbrooks, from Tonio Kröger to the great novellas and novels that followed it for more than half a century, Mann seems always already himself, the sovereign master of a voice and narrative manner whose relation to the empirical world of facts, people and events is never seriously in question. Nevertheless, in one short, almost didactic story of 1896 entitled 'Disillusionment' (viii, 62-8), Mann gestures towards a discrepancy between words and things that is indicative of a larger metaphysical concern. Set against the 'magnificently theatrical façade' of San Marco in Venice, the story consists of an older man's bitter monologue to an unnamed narrator about how 'life' has always disappointed him because it has never lived up to its linguistic description. Precisely because of his sensitivity to language, to the 'big words' of the poets, 'life' appears to him as a shadow that feebly limps behind his linguistically charged imagination. In earliest childhood he experienced a great fire that destroyed his house and almost killed his family; but while it was raging, a 'vague presentiment' of something much more terrible and terrifying made the actual fire appear to him 'dull', devoid of excitement, a pale simulacrum of the picture ('Vorstellung') in his mind. This has been true of everything in a long life of travel and experience: the real world of things and facts, of 'Tatsächlichkeiten', leaves him profoundly bored and unmoved.