Ominous Parallels

by Leonard Peikoff

  Mann, a disciple of Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner, began his career as a German chauvinist-authoritarian, explicitly opposed to reason and to the values of Western civilization. Gradually, however, he made his peace with the Republic and became a convert to democratic socialism (he went into exile when Hitler took power).

  The essence of the republican Mann’s approach to philosophy and to art is eloquently revealed in The Magic Moun. tain, the major philosophical novel to come out of Weimar Germany. According to one observer, the book, published in 1924, “has important symptomatic meaning for Weimar”; according to another, it “may justly be called the saga of the Weimar Republic.”2 These statements are true, though in a different sense than their authors intended. The Magic Mountain is an important symptom—of a uniquely twentieth-century condition.

  Set in a TB sanatorium in the Alps during the period just before World War I, the novel details seven years’ worth of the inner experiences (thoughts, feelings, memories, sensations) of Hans Castorp, a tubercular engineer, presented as a simple, average youth who wishes to discover the meaning of life.

  Hans Castorp is an average youth, as such might be conceived by Schopenhauer in a necrophiliac mood. There is nothing distinctive about Castorp, except a penchant for lengthy abstract discussions, and a hypnotic fascination with suffering, disease, and death (his eyes, for instance, glitter with excitement when he hears the coughing of a tubercular patient). “. . . I insist,” he says early in the novel, “that a dying man is above any chap that is going about and laughing and earning his living and eating his three meals a day.”

  The major event in Castorp’s life at the sanatorium consists in his falling in love with a young woman, Claudia, who attracts him for a number of reasons—among them, the fact that she is diseased; that her eyes and voice remind Castorp of a boy to whom he had been attracted years earlier in school; and that she slams doors, an act “as intimately bound up with her very being and its state of disease as time is bound up with the motion of bodies in space.” After much hesitation and soul-searching, Castorp declares his love to Claudia in pages of (untranslated) French; he explains to her that speaking in French prevents his statements from being fully real to him, thus permitting his declaration to retain the quality of a mere dream. Nothing comes of his dreamlike avowal. The next day Claudia departs from the sanatorium (she later returns as the mistress of a diseased old man and then departs again). Castorp is left, however, with “his keep-sake, his treasure,” which he carries about with him and often presses to his lips: an X ray of her lungs.3

  At the end Castorp descends from the mountaintop to fight in the war. We are not told his fate.

  These few events (along with a grab bag of Castorp’s random experiences) are scattered across hundreds of pages; they are buried under mountains of obsessively detailed trivia (accounts of the weather, the scenery, the meals, the doctors, the entertainments, the treatment of the various patients, etc.), and of similarly detailed conversations and narrative tracts on an assortment of purportedly intellectual subjects (life, nature, physiology, love, art, time, etc.).

  During the conversations, two men, presented as the spokesmen of opposite schools of philosophy, fight to win Castorp’s intellectual allegiance. One is the “corrosively ugly” Naphta, the defender of death, a passionate, virtually maniacal champion of pain, illness, sacrifice, religious mysticism, the Inquisition, and the dictatorship of the proletariat. The other—presented as the defender of life, health, science, man, happiness, and liberal republicanism—is the freethinker Settembrini.

  It has often been said that Settembrini dramatizes Mann’s sympathy for the Republic, and that this character, more than any other in the literature of the period, represents the best of the German republican spirit.

  Settembrini is described by Mann as having the curling mustache, shabby dress, and general appearance of an Italian “organ-grinder”; the intellectual manner of a posturing “windbag”; and the occupational interests of an unworldly simpleton (to alleviate human misery, e.g., he is working on an “encyclopaedia of suffering”). A self-proclaimed champion of human dignity, Settembrini interrupts a recitation from Latin verse to “smile at and ogle most killingly” a passing village girl, whom he succeeds in embarrassing. An avowed champion of human brotherhood, he has one dominant emotion, mockery; he loves to laugh at the foibles, real or imagined, of others, a practice he defends by warmly endorsing malice, which is, he says, “reason’s keenest dart against the powers of darkness and ugliness.” An avowed champion of this world, he admires the “great Plotinus” for having been ashamed to have a body, and delivers several tirades against physical nature, which he calls a “stupid and evil” power because of its ability to frustrate the intellect (an ability allegedly evidenced in such phenomena as disease and earthquakes). An avowed champion of peace and freedom, he urges Castorp at the novel’s end: “Go, then [to the war], it is your blood that calls, go and fight bravely. More than that can no man.”4

  This muck of contradictions and pretentiousness signifies, in the author’s opinion, a definite school of philosophy. Mann presents Settembrini, stressedly, as the man of reason and the representative of the era of Enlightenment.

  The contest between Naphta and Settembrini for Castorp’s soul is resolved not by their interminable arguments or by any existential event, but by a dream which Castorp chances to have, involving an idyllic community of beautiful youths (supposed to represent life), and a temple in which bloody witches dismember a child with their bare hands (death). With no explanations offered, Castorp suddenly intuits the an- swer to his dilemmas. Unrestricted death-worship, he decides, is wrong, and so is unrestricted life-worship. The truth is the middle of the road, a golden mean as it were between Naphta and Settembrini, “between recklessness and reason . . . between mystic community and windy individualism.” “Man,” Castorp thinks, “is master of contradictions, they exist through him, and so he is grander than they. Grander than death, too grand for it.... Grander than life, too grand for it. . . .” “The recklessness of death,” he decides, is inherent in life, but one must award sovereignty in one’s thoughts and actions to life—so long as one always remembers to “keep faith with death in [one’s] heart....” Settembrini, he decides, is too rational. “It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death. Only love, not reason, gives sweet thoughts.”5

  As the caliber of these statements indicates, Mann, despite the abundance of abstract talk in the book, does not take ideas seriously.

  In the sequence on Pieter Peeperkorn, he all but says so openly. Peeperkorn is an old Dutchman described as self-indulgent, nonintellectual, and almost completely inarticulate. It is, he tells Castorp, “our sacred duty to feel.... For feeling, young man, is godlike.” This incoherent creature is presented by Mann as a stammering, often farcical figure and at the same time as a majestic presence, who wins Castorp’s admiration, completely overshadowing “pedagogues” like Naphta and Settembrini, because he has a power transcending “the realm of the Great Confusion” (i.e., intellectual debates). “[S]omehow or other,” Castorp tells Settembrini, “he has the right to laugh at us all....” He is, Castorp concludes, an example of “the mystery of personality, something above either cleverness or stupidity. . . .”6

  Thomas Mann, the major philosophical novelist of Weimar Germany, is no thinker. The out-of-focus flow of non-events in the book is matched only by the similar flow of non-thoughts, i.e., of pseudogeneralities purporting to have cosmic significance and amounting only to a high-school bull session with delusions of grandeur.

  The key to the meaning of The Magic Mountain is that it has no meaning: it commits itself to nothing, neither idea nor value. Mann’s method is to present his characters, however “scientific” or maniacal or depraved or pedestrian, with a tolerant detachment overlaid with a furtive mockery; the method is not open satire, but a genteel “irony,” a timid, well-mannered sneer directed at man, at aspiration, at ideas, any ideas, includi
ng even the idea that ideas are useless. Beneath the surface—beneath the murky half-hints, the numbing details, the indecipherable symbols (which posturing literati have a field day pretending to decode)—the book is a vacuum, which says nothing and stands for nothing.

  Except by implication. Implicit in its approach and style—in its well-bred decadence, its sly flirtation with death and disease, its “ironic” cynicism, its logorrheic emptiness, its weary, muted disdain for all viewpoints—is a viewpoint broadcast to the book’s readers: the futility of man, of human effort, of human intelligence. To a country and in a decade swept by hysteria, perishing from uncertainty, torn by political crisis, financial collapse, violence in the streets, and terror of the future—to that country, in that decade, its leading philosophical novelist offered as his contribution to sanity and freedom the smiling assurance that there are no answers, no absolutes, no values, no hope.

  The message reached its audience. The book was a literary sensation, selling tens of thousands of copies in its first year alone.

  Thomas Mann, says Laqueur, was “one of the main pillars of the Republic.”7 If so, anyone could bring the structure crashing down with a single boot.

  There were other modern writers in Weimar Germany, each in his own way indicative of the period’s trend. The works of this group, which generally reflect the influence of Marx or Freud or James Joyce, are characteristically plotless and structureless. The more avant-garde authors (prominent among the Expressionists in the theater) feature grotesque juxtapositions of deliberately unintelligible events; typically, however, the Weimar moderns, like Thomas Mann, simply discard “stories” as such. Serious literature, these writers held, must transcend “materialism”; its proper subject is not man in action, not man using his mind to pursue values in the world, but man’s introspective life, his soul, his feelings (particularly, his fears, his doubts, his alienation, his inner helplessness). “As in the plastic arts,” observes Myers, “German literary naturalism does not hold its form very long but soon pours over into the province of symbolism in which the author stresses mood, states of soul and other kinds of feeling wherein intellect as such plays a relatively minor role.”8

  Another example of this development is the leading poet of the period, Rainer Maria Rilke, a Christian mystic widely admired by conservatives and modernists alike. The conservatives, such as the rightist youth groups, praised Rilke as “a unique figure who had conquered and discredited the intellectuality that had dominated the West for a millennium.” The modernists at times went even further; the novelist Stefan Zweig, for instance, extolled Rilke’s later (virtually unintelligible) work as a form of communion not with human beings but “with the other, with the beyond of things and feelings.”9

  Still another such communer, a leading writer of the time, was Hermann Hesse (later a favorite of New Left college students in America), whose novels shrug off the external world, burrow into the subconscious as viewed through the lens of such theories as Jungian analysis, and reveal the message of salvation through Indian mysticism.

  As to the state of man cut off from the intellect, reduced to mood and Jung and “the beyond,” Franz Kafka (little known in Germany during his lifetime) was presenting it eloquently. He, too, was immortalizing the “spirit of Weimar,” by offering nightmare projections of nameless ciphers paralyzed by a sinister, unknowable reality.

  On the whole the academic institutions, strongholds of Prussianism and tradition, were not part of “Weimar culture.” Many influential theorists in the humanities and the sciences, however, were part of it. (Although some of these men taught in German universities, most were associated with private groups or institutes, or worked in nearby Switzerland or Austria.)

  In academic philosophy, amid a variety of routine movements unknown to the public, one development stands out as both self-consciously new and fairly popular (especially among college students): the Existentialism of Martin Heidegger. whose major work, Sein und Zeit, appeared in 1927. Existence, Heidegger declared to his enthusiastic young following, is unintelligible, reason is invalid, and man is a helpless “Dasein”; he is a creature engulfed by “das Nichts” (nothingness), in terror of the supreme fact of his life: death, and doomed by nature to “angst,” “care,” estrangement, futility.

  The novelty of this viewpoint lies, primarily, not in its content—Heidegger traces his root premises back to Kant—but in its blatancy and form (or rather formlessness). Contrary to the major line of nineteenth-century German philosophers, Heidegger does not attempt to offer an objective defense of his ideas; he rejects the traditional demand for logical argument, definition, integration, system-building. As a result, his works, brimming with disdain for the external world (and with unintelligible passages), have been praised by admirers as the intellectual counterpart of modern painting. Heidegger, it is sometimes said, exemplifies “non-representational thinking.”

  As to human action, according to Heidegger, it must be unreasoned, feeling-dictated, willful. On May 27, 1933, he practiced this idea on a grand scale: in a formal, voluntary proclamation, he declared to the country that the age of science and of academic freedom was over, and that hereafter it was the duty of intellectuals to think in the service of the Nazi state.

  Heidegger’s philosophy dispensed with God and religion. Many Weimar modernists, however, sought to preserve religious feeling by reconceiving it in appropriately contemporary terms. To define the latter was the special task of the period’s avant-garde theologians (among them, Karl Barth, Emil Brunner, Paul Tillich, Martin Buber).

  God, these men declared, cannot be reached by the outdated, nineteenth-century method, i.e., by the attempt at a “natural” or “scientific” theology. God, said Barth, is “wholly other”; He is discontinuous with nature, unknowable to the human intellect, alien to human morality. To know God (or acquire true virtue), therefore, man must abandon thought and humbly await the ineffable. On his own, without the benefit of mystical grace, these innovators stressed, man is lost, helpless, wretched; he is tormented by guilt and disfigured by sin—above all, by the sin of pride. “The theological problem,” writes Brunner, is “to deliver modern man ... from the illegitimate self-sufficiency of reason and the spirit of autonomy.” 10

  Avant-garde religion, in short, consists in ditching one’s mind, prostrating oneself in the muck, and screaming for mercy.

  This synthesis of Existentialism and the Dark Ages, which soon ruled “progressive theology” everywhere, did not reach the German public at the time. Its less academic equivalents, however, reflecting the same basic cause and the same spirit, did reach the public.

  Weimar Germany was awash with mystic and occult crazes of every kind, including medieval revivals, Orientalist sects, anthroposophy, theosophy, etc. It was also awash with the social concomitants of such crazes. “Certain cultural parallels [between Weimar Germany and America in 1970] are almost uncanny . . . .” observes Laqueur.

  The phenomenal revival of astrology and various quasi-religious cults, the great acclaim given to prophets of doom, the success of highly marketable Weltschmerz in literature and philosophy, the spread of pornography and the use of drugs, the appearance of charlatans of every possible description and the enthusiastic audiences welcoming them—all these are common to both periods. 11

  There were also movements which purported to speak to the Germans (and later to the Americans) in the name of science. The most widely known, fiercely denounced both by traditionalists and by Communists, was a movement whose world capital in the twenties was Berlin: the psychoanalysis of Sigmund Freud. (Freud’s students or admirers in Germany at the time included, among many others of similar prominence today, Karen Homey, Otto Fenichel, Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, Erik Erikson, and Wilhelm Reich.)

  In 1922, before a rapt Berlin audience, Freud introduced the theory which many of his followers regarded as the intellectual discovery of their era: his tripartite analysis of the human personality.

  According to this t
heory, the prime mover in human nature is an unperceivable entity with a will and purpose of its own, the unconscious—which is basically an “id,” i.e., a contradictory, amoral “it” seething with innate, bestial, primevally inherited, imperiously insistent cravings or “instincts.” In deadly combat with this element is man’s conscience or “superego,” which consists essentially, not of reasoned moral convictions, but of primitive, illogical, largely unconscious taboos or categorical imperatives, representing the mores of the child’s parents (and ultimately of society), whose random injunctions every individual unquestioningly “introjects” and cowers before. Caught in the middle between these forces—between a psychopathic hippie screaming: satisfaction now! and a jungle chieftain intoning: tribal obedience! —sentenced by nature to ineradicable conflict, guilt, anxiety, and neurosis is man, i.e., man’s mind, his reason or “ego,” the faculty which is able to grasp reality, and which exists primarily to mediate between the clashing demands of the psyche’s two irrational masters.

  As this theory makes eloquently clear, Freud’s view of reason is fundamentally Kantian. Both men hold that human thought is ultimately governed, not by a man’s awareness of external fact, but by inner mental elements independent of such fact. Both see the basic task of the mind not as perception, but as creation, the creation of a subjective world in compliance with the requirements of innate (or “introjected”) mental structures. Whereas Kant, however, draws on the concepts of eighteenth-century Enlightenment philosophy to define his “categories” (and strives to defend them as inherent in “pure reason”), Freud derives his key structures from nineteenth-century romanticist philosophy (and flaunts their antirational character). The theory of the “id” is the voluntarist insistence on the primacy of “will.” The theory of the “superego” is the Hegelian insistence that the individual, including his moral ideas, is a mere fragment of the group.