Klaus Heinrich is born the second son of a Grand Duke, in a small German principality so reduced in fortune that its royal family maintains all the ceremony of monarchy over a treasury that is, in practice, nearly empty. He is also born with a withered left hand - a defect concealed from public view from his earliest infancy, and one that comes, over the years, to represent something larger: a life spent being watched, admired, and treated correctly by everyone around him, and genuinely known by almost no one.
When his fragile elder brother inherits the throne and cannot bear its public duties, Klaus Heinrich is called upon to perform them in his place - Royal Highness in appearance, entirely hollow in substance, representing a magnificence his country can no longer afford.
Then Imma Spoelmann arrives - daughter of an American industrialist of enormous wealth, brilliant, unsentimental, and entirely unimpressed by royal ceremony. She begins to teach the prince economics. She has no interest in what he represents. She is interested in who he actually is.
First published in 1909, Royal Highness is Thomas Mann's second novel - lighter, warmer, and more optimistic than the great tragic works that made him famous, and, in his own later estimation, essential to everything he wrote afterward. A fairy tale for grown readers: witty, tender, and quietly wise about the difference between the life we are given to perform and the life we actually want to live.
By Thomas Mann. Nobel Prize in Literature, 1929.
