The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

  Inspired by some casual remark, the debate turned to more concrete subjects, moving quickly with the growing interest and participation of all through a series of issues: corporal punishment, cremation, torture, and the death penalty. It was Ferdinand Wehsal who brought up the subject of flogging, and one could read the excitement on his face, or so Hans Castorp thought. It was not surprising that Herr Settembrini, invoking the dignity of man in sterling words, spoke out against the brutal practice, both from a pedagogic and juridical point of view; nor was it any more surprising, though perhaps it was astounding simply because of the gloomy brazenness of his words, that Naphta spoke out in favor of the bastinado. According to him, it was absurd to jabber on about the dignity of man in this instance, for our true dignity was based in the Spirit and not the flesh, and since the human soul was only too inclined to suck its entire love of life from the body, the administration of pain to the body was a highly commendable means by which to spoil the soul’s desire for sensual pleasure and, as it were, drive it back out of the body and into the spiritual realm, thereby restoring the latter’s dominion. How foolish to object that there was something particularly ignominious about blows administered as corporal punishment. Saint Elizabeth had been disciplined by her father confessor, Konrad von Marburg, until he drew blood, “transporting her soul,” as legend put it, “to the third choir of angels,” and she had herself laid the rod to an old woman who was too sleepy to make her confession. Would anyone venture in all earnestness to declare as barbaric and inhumane the self-flagellation practiced among members of certain orders and sects, and in general by people of more profound capacities, in order that they might strengthen their own spiritual principles? Nations that considered themselves genteel may have abolished corporal punishment, but the belief that its abolition was a mark of true progress was only the more comic for being so unshakable.

  Well, in any case, Hans Castorp remarked, it was absolutely certain that within the polarity of body and mind, the body doubtless embodied—ha ha—embodied the evil, devilish principle, because the body was part of nature, naturally—naturally part of nature, that wasn’t bad, either—and nature, in contradistinction to the mind, to reason, was doubtless evil—mystically evil, one might say, if one dared employ a little of one’s education and knowledge. And having once established that point of view, it was only logical, then, to treat the body accordingly, to bestow upon it certain disciplinary methods, which, if one dared take another risk, might likewise be called mystically evil. Perhaps, if Herr Settembrini had had a Saint Elizabeth at his side back then, when the infirmities of his body had prevented him from attending the convention for progress in Barcelona, why then . . .

  They all laughed, and before the humanist could fly off the handle, Hans Castorp quickly told about a thrashing he had once received—a punishment still administered sometimes in the lower grades of his high school, where there had been riding crops in every room; and although social disparities had prevented teachers from laying a hand on him, he had once been thrashed by a bigger classmate, a lout of a fellow, who had applied the supple switch to his thighs and calves, right through his thin stockings, and it had hurt something awful, he would never forget, it had been beastly, almost mystical, and to his shame he had heaved great sobs and hot tears of rage and agony had flowed—and here Hans Castorp begged Herr Wehsal’s pardon for using the obscure word “Wehsal” for “agony.” He had also read that even the strongest cutthroats, when they were flogged in prison, blubbered like children.

  And while Herr Settembrini hid his face in both hands—revealing very shabby leather gloves—Naphta asked in a chill, statesmanlike voice how else intractable criminals should be handled if not with stocks and cudgels, which were very stylish furnishings for a prison in any case. A humane prison was a half-measure, an aesthetic compromise, and although Herr Settembrini was a master of beautiful rhetoric, he understood nothing about aesthetics. And as for pedagogics, the conception of human dignity that sought to ban corporal punishment had its roots, to hear Naphta tell it, in the liberal individualism of the era of bourgeois humanism, in the Enlightenment’s absolutism of the ego, which was about to atrophy and be replaced by a wave of newer, less namby-pamby social concepts, ideas of submission and obedience, of bridles and bonds, and since such things were not to be had without holy cruelty, flogging would thus be regarded with quite a different eye.

  “Yes, like watching someone flog a dead horse into obedience,” Settembrini scoffed; to which Naphta replied that since for our sin God had visited our bodies with the gruesome ignominy of rot and decay, there was no indignity in the same body’s receiving an occasional beating—which immediately brought them to the topic of cremation.

  Settembrini applauded it. One could in fact remedy that ignominy, he said gaily. Both out of idealism, and for practical reasons, humankind was about to provide the remedy. And he explained that he was assisting in preparations for an international congress on cremation, which in all probability would be held in Sweden. Working from previous experience in the field, they were planning to construct a model crematorium and hall of urns, and the hope was that it would encourage further far-reaching developments. What a moldy, obsolete practice burial was! Cities were expanding; so-called memorial parks were being forced out to the periphery—wasting space and driving up the price of land. And what a disillusioning effect the necessary use of modern vehicles had on the funeral procession. Herr Settembrini had all sorts of apt, sensible remarks to make on the subject. He joked about the figure cut by a widower bent low with grief and making his daily pilgrimage to the graveside of his dear departed wife to converse with her there. To engage in such idyllic practices, a man had to have an amazing surplus of one of life’s most precious commodities: time. Not to mention the way the hustle and bustle in modern large cemeteries would spoil any atavistic sentimentality. The destruction of the body by fire—what a neat, hygienic, dignified, and indeed heroic idea that was in comparison with letting it decompose miserably on its own and be assimilated by lower forms of life. Yes, and even emotional needs—the human desire for immortality—did better by this new method. For what were lost in the flames were the body’s more mutable components, which even in life were burned up in the body’s metabolism; but those components that participated least in life’s steady flow and that accompanied human beings through their adult life almost without change, proved to be the most fireproof; they formed the ashes, and by collecting them, the survivors kept what was immortal about the deceased.

  “Very nice,” Naphta said—oh, that was very, very pretty. The ashes as the immortal part of man.

  Ah, but of course Naphta would like nothing better than for humankind to retain its irrational attitude toward biological fact; of course he would defend the primitive religious level on which death was a terror wrapped in horrors most mysterious and so prevent the phenomenon from being viewed with the clear eye of reason. What barbarism! The fear of death came from epochs of lowest human culture, when violent death was the rule, and the terror rightly associated in man’s emotions with a violent death had been wedded to the idea of death itself for ages now. But more and more, thanks to the development of hygienics and the consolidation of personal security, natural death was becoming the norm; and for the modern workingman the thought of eternal rest after having exhausted one’s energies in labor was not at all horrible, but rather perfectly normal and desirable. No, death was neither a terror nor a mystery, it was an unambiguous, reasonable, physiologically necessary, and welcome phenomenon, and to dwell on the thought of it longer than was seemly was to rob life itself. Which was why the model crematorium and its hall of urns, the “Hall of Death” as such, had been planned with an adjoining “Hall of Life,” where architecture, painting, sculpture, music, and poetry would be united, so that the mind of the survivor might be directed away from the experience of death, from dull mourning and idle laments, toward the good things of life.

  “And as quickly as possi
ble,” Naphta scoffed. “Mustn’t let him overdo the rites of death in an unseemly fashion; mustn’t let him get carried away thinking about the simple fact of death—without which, of course, there would be no such thing as architecture, painting, sculpture, music, or poetry.”

  “He deserts to the colors,” Hans Castorp said dreamily.

  “Your statement is incoherent, my good engineer,” Settembrini said in reply, “yet its reprehensibility still shines through. The experience of death must ultimately be the experience of life, or else it is only a wraith.”

  “Are they going to decorate their ‘Hall of Life’ with obscene symbols, like the ones found on many ancient sarcophagi?” Hans Castorp asked in all seriousness.

  There was sure to be a fat feast for the senses, Naphta declared. In oils and marble, the body would be celebrated in classicistic taste—the sinful body, which they rescued from decay, although that should come as no surprise, since it was those same tender feelings about the body that prevented even physical chastisement nowadays.

  It was at this point that Herr Wehsal introduced the topic of torture—one could read the excitement on his face. Interrogation under torture, what did the gentlemen think of that? When traveling on business in towns that were historic centers of civilization, he, Ferdinand, had always enjoyed visiting those secluded places where that sort of probing of the conscience had once been practiced. He knew the torture chambers in Nuremberg and Regensburg, had examined them closely for educational purposes. For the sake of the soul, people had certainly subjected the body to less than tender treatment, in oh-so-many ingenious ways. There had not even been screams. The pear had been shoved into the open mouth, the famous pear, not a very tasty fruit, to be sure—and then silence had reigned as they went about their business.

  “Porcheria,” Settembrini muttered.

  All due regard for their pear and silent business—but in Ferge’s opinion, no one had ever come up with anything more vile than the exploration of the pleura.

  That had been done for his own good!

  And in a case where an impenitent soul had violated the law, temporary merciless procedures were no less justifiable. Besides, torture had been a rational step forward.

  Naphta was truly no longer in his right mind.

  Oh, yes he was, very much so. As a belletrist, Herr Settembrini apparently did not have an overview of the history of medieval law at his immediate command. That history had in fact been one of the progressive application of human reason, by which, on the basis of purely rational concerns, God had gradually been removed from the administration of justice. Trial by ordeal had been abandoned, because over time it became apparent that might was victorious even when it was not in the right. People of Herr Settembrini’s sort, the doubters and critics, had observed this fact and seen to it that the old naive form of justice was replaced by the Inquisition, which no longer depended on God’s intervening on behalf of truth, but was aimed at obtaining the truth through the confession of the accused. No sentence without a confession. One had only to listen to commonfolk even nowadays, the instinct ran deep: no matter how strong the links in the chain of proof, a sentence was considered illegitimate if there was no confession. And how did one obtain it? How did one find the truth beyond all suspicion, beyond all circumstantial evidence? How did one look into the heart and mind of a man who dissembled and denied? If the Spirit was willfully malicious, one had no recourse but to turn to the body, which one could get hold of. Reason dictated the use of torture as the means to obtain that indispensable confession. But the person who had demanded and initiated the process that led to confession—that had been Herr Settembrini. It was he who had originated torture.

  The humanist begged the other gentlemen not to believe it. That was a diabolical joke. If it had all happened the way Herr Naphta claimed, if reason had indeed been the inventor of something so ghastly, that would only prove how bitter was reason’s need of assistance and enlightenment, how little cause admirers of natural instinct had for fearing the world could get too reasonable. Except, of course, that the previous speaker had been very much mistaken. Such a perversion of justice could not be attributed to reason, because the real cause had been a belief in hell. You needed only to look around in museums and torture chambers: those pincers, racks, screws, and branding irons were obviously the products of a deluded childish fantasy, created out of the pious desire to imitate what went on in the otherworld’s chambers of everlasting torment. They had apparently believed, moreover, that they were actually helping the malefactor. They had assumed his poor soul was struggling to confess and that the flesh, as the principle of evil, stood opposed to its better intentions. They had truly thought they were doing him a favor by breaking his body with torture. The madness of ascetics.

  And had the ancient Romans suffered from the same madness?

  The Romans? Ma che!

  Why, they had also used torture as part of the judicial process.

  Logical stalemate. Hans Castorp attempted to help them over it—as if it were his job—by imperiously taking over the conversation and tossing in the issue of the death penalty. Torture had been abolished, although examining magistrates still had ways of softening up the accused, but the death penalty seemed to be immortal, there was no doing without it. The most civilized nations clung to it. The French system of deportation had been very unsuccessful. One simply did not know what should be done with certain subhuman creatures except behead them.

  Those were not “subhuman creatures,” Herr Settembrini informed him. They were human beings like the engineer, like himself—although weak-willed victims of an imperfect society. And he told them about a hardened criminal, a mass murderer, the sort of man prosecutors loved to portray in their closing arguments as a “brute” and a “beast in human form.” The man had covered the walls of his cell with verses. And they hadn’t been bad verses, either—much better than those occasionally penned by prosecutors.

  That might cast a rather strange light on art, Naphta reposted, but was in no way remarkable otherwise.

  Hans Castorp said he had expected Herr Naphta would know how to react in defense of executions. Naphta, he continued, was certainly just as much a revolutionary as Herr Settembrini, but in a defensive, reactionary sense—he was a revolutionary of reaction.

  The world, Herr Settembrini said with a self-assured smile, would glide right past the revolution of inhuman reaction and move on to its real agenda. Herr Naphta would rather impugn art than admit it could make a human being of even the worst reprobate. Youth in search of light would never be won over by that kind of fanaticism. An international league whose goal was the abolition of capital punishment had just been formed in all civilized countries. Herr Settembrini had the honor of being a member. The venue for its first convention had not yet been chosen, but humankind could be certain that the speakers whom it would hear there would come armed with arguments. And he supplied those arguments himself, including both the ever-present possibility of a false verdict, whereby justice itself was executed, and the hope of rehabilitation, which ought never to be abandoned. And quoting the biblical verse “Vengeance is mine,” he pointed out that the state, if its purpose was ennoblement and not coercion, should not repay evil with evil, and went on to repudiate the concept of “punishment,” after first having refuted that of “guilt,” basing his argument on scientific determinism.

  Whereupon “youth in search of light” was forced to watch as Naphta took each argument, one after the other, and wrung its neck. He ridiculed the philanthropist’s reluctance to shed blood, his reverence for life, claimed that such a reverence for life belonged to only the most banal rubbers-and-umbrellas bourgeois periods, but that the moment history took a more passionate turn, the moment a single idea, something that transcended mere “security,” was at work, something suprapersonal, something greater than the individual—and since that alone was a state worthy of mankind, it was, on a higher plane, the normal state of affairs—at that moment, then,
individual life would always be sacrificed without further ado to that higher idea, and not only that, but individuals would also unhesitatingly and gladly risk their own lives for it. His good adversary’s philanthropy, he said, was aimed at robbing life of all its difficult and deadly serious aspects; its goal was the castration of life, and the same went for the determinism of its so-called science. The truth was, however, that determinism could never abolish the concept of guilt—indeed it could only add to its terrible gravity.

  Not bad. So he was demanding that society’s unlucky victims should feel terribly guilty and enter the bloody arena out of personal conviction, was that it?

  Exactly. The criminal was as imbued with guilt as he was with self. For he was what he was, and was neither able nor willing to be anything else—and that was his guilt. Herr Naphta removed guilt and merit from the empirical world to the metaphysical. Our deeds, our actions were predetermined, of course, that was not where our freedom lay—but in being. Man was as he wanted to be, and would never cease to want to be until his extermination. “For the life of him” he had gladly slain others, and so it was not too high a price to exact life from him. Let him die then, for he had satisfied the deepest lust of his heart.