D.Can you call her “Mrs. Walter Jens” again when you say goodbye? Let’s do it and count on her generosity, lack of squeamishness and humor one last time so that she won’t be offended. Inge Jens, Puttfarcken born in Hamburg, who has now died at the age of 94 in her adopted city of Tübingen – “peacefully” as it is called – was a long and, according to all that is known, fulfilled married life the woman of an eminent scholar; but it was also important in itself.
“Mrs. Thomas Mann. The life of Katharina Pringsheim ”(2003): This is the name of the portrait of a woman, written together with Walter and still valid today, in which, one may assume, she reflected herself and probably recognized herself a little. The traditional title refers to a world from which she herself still came and in which nobody thought anything when women even disappeared by name behind the men or (self-deprecatingly, self-confidently) stepped back behind them. It had nothing to do with hiding. Anyone who might not have been able to experience Inge Jens in her sociable, open Tübingen house, but at one of the Lübeck Thomas Mann conferences, was dealing with an absolutely unpretentious, heartwarming lady, with whom any bias was out of place. She accepted the Thomas Mann Medal, which was more than overdue for the publication and annotation of the diaries and which she was awarded there in 1995, with Fontane sobriety.
One can read this as her magnum opus; a task that fell to her after Peter de Mendelssohn’s sudden death and that she carried on and on with a persistence, thorough, and imperturbability that is difficult to get a grasp of. Thanks to this first-rate philological act, Thomas Mann’s last eleven years, from 1944 to 1955, his everyday life, his thoughts and feelings are as familiar to us as a writer’s life can be – in writing. Dealing with this central massif in German-language prose literature was not only the best preparation for the Katia study, which would probably have been impossible without thorough knowledge of the diary, but also had long roots and was linked to the correspondence between Thomas Mann and Ernst Bertram which it had already published in 1960, an indispensable tool for researchers to this day.
There was talk of fearlessness. Inge Jens, who wrote a doctoral thesis on the novella art of Expressionism and worked for the radio in addition to writing, also showed courage in non-academic life, most spectacularly around thirty years ago during the Gulf War, when the Jens American couple Took in deserters and went to court for them. She worked well into old age, when she was not spared the death of her son Tilman. From her “Incomplete Memoirs” (2009), based in some respects on Katia Mann’s “Unwritten Memoirs”, one can learn what she summed up this fall: “Just do it, don’t talk about it.” Memorable and Always personally authenticated, she enriched the euthanasia debate with the report “Slow Disappearance” (2016) on Walter’s dementia. She was so confident in the light of these own, depressing experiences to correct her formerly libertarian attitude towards it. Inge Jens rendered outstanding services to the intellectual life of the post-war period.
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