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Updated: May 11, 2025
A white door-plate was fastened to the door, and on it could be read in black letters: People's Library. People's Library? thought Tonio Kröger, for it seemed to him that neither the people nor literature had any business here. He knocked on the door, heard "Come in," and obeyed. With gloomy curiosity he looked in upon a most unseemly alteration.
His father's mother had died, the head of the family, and not long afterward his father, the tall, meditative, carefully dressed gentleman with the wild flower in his buttonhole, had followed her in death. The big Kröger house together with its honorable history was for sale, and the firm went out of business.
And he led Tonio Kröger with gestures of invitation toward the back part of the vestibule. There the owner of the hotel was indeed standing. Tonio Kröger knew him by sight from his youth. He was short, fat, and bow-legged. His cropped side-whiskers had grown white; but he still wore a Tuxedo of wide cut and in addition a small green-embroidered velvet cap. Nor was he alone.
Closed in by the neighboring houses which its gable overtopped, it stood there gray and forbidding as for these three hundred years past, and Tonio Kröger read the pious legend that was above the door in half effaced letters. Then he drew a deep breath and went in.
Our hearts look very different from what he dreams, with his 'warm heart' and 'honest enthusiasm. I have seen artists surrounded by adoring women and shouting youths, whereas I knew about them ... One constantly has the most peculiar experiences with regard to the origin, the co-phenomena, and the conditions of artistry ..." "In others, Tonio Kröger excuse me or not only in others?"
After all, we aren't gipsies in a green wagon, but decent folks, Consul Krögers, the Kröger family" ... And not infrequently he would think: "Well, why am I so peculiar and at outs with everything, at loggerheads with my teachers and a stranger among the boys? Look at them, the good pupils and those of honest mediocrity.
Now the little orchestra opened up with a march: the muffled sounds came up in steady rhythm: they were opening the dance with a polonaise. Tonio Kröger sat still awhile and listened. But when he heard the march-time change to a waltz, he got up and glided noiselessly out of his room.
All at once the whole throng broke into mad and exuberant motion. The sets had broken up, and the dancers shot around jumping and gliding: the quadrille was ending with a galop. The couples flew past Tonio Kröger to the furious beat of the music, chasséing, hurrying, overtaking each other, with quick, breathless laughter.
"That's not wurst, that's schinken," remarked another, and this was the only contribution which either they or the tutor made to the conversation; for otherwise they sat in silence and drank hot water. Tonio Kröger would have desired no other sort of company at table.
The garden lay waste, but the old walnut-tree stood in its place, heavily creaking and rustling in the wind. And Tonio Kröger let his eyes rove back upon the book he held in his hands, a distinguished poetic work that he knew well.
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