by Thomas Mann
I was never present at these lesson-hours and know only by hearsay about them; but I can easily imagine that the behaviour of my young Adrian must sometimes have been a little hard on a preceptor himself young, and accustomed to drive his learning with whip and spurs into dull and puzzled or rebellious heads. “If you know it all already,” I once heard him say to the boy, “then I can go home.” Of course it was not true that the pupil “knew it all already.” But his manner did suggest the thought, simply because here was a case of that swift, strangely sovereign and anticipatory grasp and assimilation, as sure as easy, which soon dried up the master’s praise, for he felt that such a head meant a danger to the modesty of the heart and betrayed it easily to arrogance. From the alphabet to syntax and grammar, from the progression of numbers and the first rules to the rule of three and simple sums in proportion, from the memorizing of little poems (and there was no memorizing, the verses were straightway and with the utmost precision grasped and possessed) to the written setting down of his own train of thought on themes out of the geography—it was always the same: Adrian gave it his ear, then turned round with an air that seemed to say: “Yes, good, so much is clear, all right, go on!” To the pedagogic temperament there is something revolting about that. Certainly the young schoolmaster was tempted again and again to cry: “What is the matter with you? Take some pains!” But why, when obviously there was no need to take pains?
As I said, I was never present at the lessons; but I am compelled to conclude that my friend received the scientific data purveyed by Kerr Michelson fundamentally with the same mien, so hard to characterize, with which under the lime tree he had accepted the fact that if a horizontal melody of nine bars is divided into three sections of three bars each, they will still produce a harmonically fitting texture. His teacher knew some Latin; he instructed Adrian in it and then announced that the lad—he was now ten years old—was ready if not for the fifth, then certainly for the fourth form. His work was done.
Thus Adrian left his parents’ house at Easter 1895 and came to town to attend our Boniface gymnasium, the school of the Brethren of the Common Life. His uncle, Nikolaus Leverkühn, his father’s brother, a respected citizen of Kaisersaschern, declared himself ready to receive the lad into his house.
CHAPTER VI
And as for Kaisersaschern, my native town on the Saale, the stranger should be informed that it lies somewhat south of Halle, towards Thuringia. I had almost said it lay, for long absence has made it slip from me into the past. Yet its towers rise as ever on the same spot, and I would not know whether its architectural profile has suffered so far from the assaults of the air war. In view of its historic charm that would be in the highest degree regrettable. I can add this quite calmly, since I share with no small part of our population, even those hardest hit and homeless, the feeling that we are only getting what we gave, and even if we must suffer more frightfully than we have sinned, we shall only hear in our ears that he who sows the wind must reap the whirlwind.
Neither Halle itself, the industrial town, nor Leipzig, the city of Bach the cantor of St. Thomas, nor Weimar, nor even Dessau nor Magdeburg is far distant; but Kaisersaschern is a junction, and with its twenty-seven thousand inhabitants entirely self-sufficient; feeling itself like every German town a centre of culture, with its own historical dignity and importance. It is supported by several industries: factories and mills for the production of machinery, leather goods, fabrics, arms, chemicals, and so on. Its museum, besides a roomful of crude instruments of torture, contains a very estimable library of twenty-five thousand volumes and five thousand manuscripts, among the latter two books of magic charms in alliterative verse; they are considered by some scholars to be older than those in Merseburg. The charms are perfectly harmless: nothing worse than a little rain—conjuring, in the dialect of Fulda. The town was a bishopric in the tenth century, and again from the beginning of the twelfth to the fourteenth. It has a castle, and a cathedral church where you may see the tomb of Kaiser Otto III, son of Adelheid and husband of Theophano, who called himself Emperor of the Romans, also Saxonicus; the latter not because he wanted to be a Saxon but in the sense on which Scipio called himself Africanus, because he had conquered the Saxons. He was driven out of his beloved Rome and died in misery in the year 1002; his remains were brought to Germany and buried in the cathedral in Kaisersaschern—not at all what he would have relished himself, for he was a prize specimen of German self-contempt and had been all his life ashamed of being German.
As for the town—which I refer to by choice in the past tense, since after all I am speaking of the Kaisersaschern of our youth—there is this to be said of it, that in atmosphere as well as in outward appearance it had kept a distinctly mediaeval air. The old churches, the faithfully preserved dwelling-houses and warehouses, buildings with exposed and jutting upper storey; the round towers in the wall, with their peaked roofs; the tree-studded squares with cobblestones; the Town Hall of mixed Gothic and Renaissance architecture, with a bell-tower on the high roof, loggias underneath, and two other pointed towers forming bays and continuing the facade down to the ground—all these gave a sense of continuity with the past. More, even, the place seemed to wear on its brow that famous formula of timelessness, the scholastic nunc stans. Its individual character, which was the same as three hundred, nine hundred years ago, asserted itself against the stream of time passing over it, constantly making changes in many things, while others, decisive for the picture, were preserved out of piety; that is to say, out of a pious defiance of time and also out of pride in them, for the sake of their value and their memories.
This much of the scene itself. But something still hung on the air from the spiritual constitution of the men of the last decades of the fifteenth century: a morbid excitement, a metaphysical epidemic latent since the last years of the Middle Ages. This was a practical, rational modern town.—Yet no, it was not modern, it was old; and age is past as presentness, a past merely overlaid with presentness. Rash it may be to say so, but here one could imagine strange things: as for instance a movement for a children’s crusade might break out; a St. Vitus’s dance; some wandering lunatic with communistic visions, preaching a bonfire of the vanities; miracles of the Cross, fantastic and mystical folk-movements-things like these, one felt, might easily come to pass. Of course they did not—how should they? The police, acting in agreement with the times and the regulations, would not have allowed them. And yet what all in our time have the police not allowed—again in agreement with the times, which might readily, by degrees, allow just such things to happen again now? Our time itself tends, secretly—or rather anything but secretly; indeed, quite consciously, with a strangely complacent consciousness, which makes one doubt the genuineness and simplicity of life itself and which may perhaps evoke an entirely false, unblest historicity—it tends, I say, to return to those earlier epochs; it enthusiastically re-enacts symbolic deeds of sinister significance, deeds that strike in the face the spirit of the modern age, such, for instance, as the burning of the books and other things of which I prefer not to speak.
The stamp of old-world, underground neurosis which I have been describing, the mark and psychological temper of such a town, betrays itself in Kaisersaschern by the many “originals,” eccentrics, and harmlessly half-mad folk who live within its walls and, like the old buildings, belong to the picture. The pendant to them is formed by the children, the “young ‘uns,” who pursue the poor creatures, mock them, and then in superstitious panic run away. A certain sort of “old woman” used always in certain epochs without more ado to be suspected of witchcraft, simply because she looked “queer,” though her appearance may well have been, in the first place, nothing but the result of the suspicion against her, which then gradually justified itself till it resembled the popular fancy: small, grey, bent, with a spiteful face, rheumy eyes, hooked nose, thin lips, a threatening crook. Probably she owned cats, an owl, a talking bird. Kaisersaschern harboured more than one such specimen; the mo
st popular, most teased and feared was Cellar-Lise, so called because she lived in a basement in Little Brassfounder’s Alley—an old woman whose figure had so assimilated itself to popular prejudice that even the most unaffected could feel an archaic shudder at meeting her, especially when the children were after her and she was putting them to flight by spitting curses. Of course, quite definitely there was nothing wrong with her at all.
Here let me be bold enough to express an opinion born of the experiences of our own time. To a friend of enlightenment the word and conception “the folk” has always something anachronistic and alarming about it; he knows that you need only tell a crowd they are “the folk” to stir them up to all sorts of reactionary evil. What all has not happened before our eyes—or just not quite before our eyes—in the name of “the folk,” though it could never have happened in the name of God or humanity or the law! But it is the fact that actually the folk remain the folk, at least in a certain stratum of its being, the archaic; and people from Little Brassfounder’s Alley and round about, people who voted the Social-Democratic ticket at the polls, are at the same time capable of seeing something daemonic in the poverty of a little old woman who cannot afford a lodging above-ground. They will clutch their children to them when she approaches, to save them from the evil eye. And if such an old soul should have to burn again today, by no means an impossible prospect, were even a few things different, “the folk” would stand and gape behind the barriers erected by the Mayor, but they would probably not rebel.—I speak of the folk; but this old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.
To return to those oddities of Kaisersaschern: there was a man of indefinite age who, if suddenly called to on the street, had a compulsion to execute a sort of twitching dance with his legs drawn up. His face was both ugly and sad, but as though he were begging pardon, he would smile at the urchins bawling at his heels. Then there was a woman named Mathilde Spiegel, dressed in the fashion of a bygone time: she wore a train trimmed with ruffles, and a fladus—a ridiculous corruption of the French flute douce, originally meaning flattery, but here used for a curious coiffure with curls and ornaments. She wore rouge too, but was not immoral, being far too witless; she merely rambled through the streets with her nose in the air, accompanied by pug dogs with satin saddle-cloths. A small rentier was another such freak; he had a bulbous purple nose, and a big seal ring on his forefinger. His real name was Schnalle, but he was called Tootle-oo, because he had a habit of adding this senseless chirrup to everything he said. He liked to go to the railway station, and when a freight train pulled out would lift his finger and warn the man sitting on the roof of the last car: “Don’t fall off, don’t fall off, tootle-oo!”
It may be that these grotesque memories are unworthy of inclusion here—I am inclined to believe it. Yet all these figures were, in a way, public institutions, uncommonly characteristic of the psychological picture of my native town, Adrian’s setting till he went to the university, for nine years of his young life. I spent them at his side, for though by age I was two forms beyond him, we kept together, apart from our respective class-mates, during the recesses in the walled courtyard, and also met each other in the afternoons, in our little studies: either he came over to the shop or I went to him in the house of his uncle at Parochialstrasse 15, where the mezzanine storey was occupied by the well-known Leverkühn musical-instruments firm.
CHAPTER VII
It was a quiet spot, removed from the business section of Kaisersaschern, the Market Street, or Gritsellers’ Row: a tiny street without a pavement, near the Cathedral; Nikolaus Leverkühn’s house stood out as the most imposing one in it. It had three storeys, not counting the lofts of the separate roof, which was built out in bays; and in the sixteenth century it had been the dwelling-house of an ancestor of the present owner. It had five windows in the first storey above the entrance door and only four, with blinds, in the second, where, instead of in the first, the family living-rooms lay. Outside, the foundation storey was un-whitewashed and unadorned; only above it did the ornamental woodwork begin. Even the stairs widened only after the beginning of the mezzanine, which lay rather high above the stone entry, so that visitors and buyers—many of these came from abroad, from Halle and even Leipzig—had not too easy a climb to the goal of their hopes, the instrument warehouse. But as I mean to show forthwith, it was certainly worth a steep climb.
Nikolaus, a widower—his wife died young—had up to Adrian’s coming lived alone in the house with an oldestablished housekeeper, Frau Butze, a maid, and a young Italian from Brescia, named Luca Cimabue (he did actually bear the family name of the thirteenth-century painter of Madonnas), who was his assistant and pupil at the trade of violin-making; for Uncle Leverkühn also made violins. He was a man with untidy ash-coloured hair hanging loose about his beardless, sympathetically moulded face; prominent cheekbones, a hooked, rather drooping nose, a large, expressive mouth, and brown eyes with good-heartedness and concern as well as shrewdness in their gaze. At home one always saw him in a wrinkled fustian smock closed to the throat. I think it pleased the childless man to receive a young kinsman in his far too spacious house. Also I have heard that he let his brother in Buchel pay the school fees, but took nothing himself for board and lodging. Altogether he treated Adrian, on whom he kept an indefinitely expectant eye, like his own son, and greatly enjoyed having this family addition to his table, which for so long had had round it only the abovementioned Frau Butze and, in patriarchal fashion, Luca, his apprentice.
That this young Italian, a friendly youth speaking a pleasantly broken German, had found his way to Kaisersaschern and to Adrian’s uncle, when he surely must have had opportunity at home to improve himself in his trade, was perhaps surprising, but indicated the extent of Nikolaus Leverkühn’s business connections, not only with German centres of instrument-making, like Mainz, Braunschweig, Leipzig, Barmen, but also with foreign firms in London, Lyons, Bologna, even New York. He drew his symphonic merchandise from all quarters and had a reputation for a stockin-trade not only first-class as to quality but also gratifyingly complete and not easily obtainable elsewhere. Thus there only needed to be anywhere in the kingdom a Bach festival in prospect, for whose performance in classic style an oboe d’amore was needed, the deeper oboe long since disappeared from the orchestra, for the old house in Parochialstrasse to receive a visit from a client, a musician who wanted to play safe and could try out the elegiac instrument on the spot.
The warerooms in the mezzanine often resounded with such rehearsals, the voices running through the octaves in the most varied colours. The whole place afforded a splendid, I might say a culturally enchanting and alluring sight, stimulating the aural imagination till it effervesced. Excepting the piano, which Adrian’s foster-father gave over to that special industry, everything was here spread out: all that sounds and sings, that twangs and crashes, hums and rumbles and roars—even the keyboard instruments, in the form of the celesta, the lovely Glockenklavier, were always represented. There hung behind glass, or lay bedded in receptacles which like mummy cases were made in the shape of their occupants, the charming violins, varnished some yellower and some browner, their slender bows with silver wire round the nut fixed into the lid of the case; Italian ones, the pure, beautiful shapes of which would tell the connoisseur that they came from Cremona; also Tirolese, Dutch, Saxon, Mittenwald fiddles, and some from Leverkühn’s own workshop. The melodious cello, which owes its perfect form to Antonio Stradivari, was there in rows; likewise its predecessor, the six-stringed viola da gamba, in older works still honoured next to it; the viola and that other cousin of the fiddle, the viola alta, were always to be found, as well as my own viola d’amore, on whose seven strings I have all my life enjoyed performing. My instrument came from the Parochialstrasse, a present from my parents at my
confirmation.
There were several specimens of the violone, the giant fiddle, the unwieldy double-bass, capable of majestic recitative, whose pizzicato is more sonorous than the stroke of the kettle-drum, and whose harmonics are a veiled magic of almost unbelievable quality. And there was also more than one of its opposite number among the woodwind instruments, the contra-bassoon, sixteen-foot likewise—in other words, sounding an octave lower than the notes indicate—mightily strengthening the basses, built in twice the dimensions of its smaller brother the humorous bassoon, to which I give that name because it is a bass instrument without proper bass strength, oddly weak in sound, bleating, burlesque. How pretty it was, though, with its curved mouthpiece, shining in the decoration of its keys and levers! What a charming sight altogether, this host of shawms in their highly developed stage of technical perfection, challenging the passion of the virtuoso in all of their forms: as bucolic oboe, as cor Anglais well versed in tragic ways; the many-keyed clarinet, which can sound so ghostly in the deep chalumeau register but higher up can gleam in silvery blossoming harmony, as basset horn and bass clarinet.
All of these, in their velvet beds, offered themselves in Uncle Leverkühn’s stock; also the transverse flute, in various systems and varied execution, made of beechwood, granadilla, or ebony, with ivory head-pieces, or else entirely of silver; next their shrill relative the piccolo, which in the orchestral tutti piercingly holds the treble, dancing in the music of the will-o’-the-wisp and the fire-magic. And now the shimmering chorus of the brasses, from the trim trumpet, visible symbol of the clear call, the sprightly song, the melting cantilena, through that darling of the romantics, the voluted valve-horn, the slender and powerful trombone, and the cornet-a-pistons, to the weighty bass tuba. Rare museum pieces such as a pair of beautifully curved bronze lurer turned right and left, like steer-horns, were also to be found in Leverkühn’s warehouse. But in a boy’s eyes, as I see it again in retrospect, most gay and glorious of all was the comprehensive display of percussion instruments—just because the things that one had found under the Christmas tree, the toys and dream—possessions of childhood, now turned up in this dignified grown-up display. The side drum, how different it looked here from the ephemeral painted thing of wood, parchment, and twine we thumped on as six-year-olds! It was not meant to hang round your neck. The lower membrane was stretched with gut strings; it was screwed fast for orchestral use, in conveniently slanting position, on a metal trivet, and the wooden sticks, also much nicer than ours, stuck invitingly into rings at the sides. There was the glockenspiel; we had had a childhood version of it, on which we practised Kommt ein Vogel geflogen. Here, in an elegant locked case, lying in pairs on cross-bars and free to swing, were the metal plates, so meticulously tuned, with the delicate little steel hammers belonging to them and kept in the lined lid of the case. The xylophone, which seems made to conjure up a vision of a dance of skeletons—here it was with its numerous wooden bars, arranged in the chromatic scale. There was the giant studded cylinder of the bass drum, with a felt-covered stick to beat it; and the copper kettle-drum, sixteen of which Berlioz still included in his orchestra. He did not know the pedal drum as represented here, which the drummer can with his hand easily adapt to a change of key. How well I remember the pranks we practised on it, Adrian and I—no, it was probably only I—making the sticks roll on the membrane while the good Luca tuned it up and down, so that a thudding and thumping in the strangest glissando ensued. And then there were the extraordinary cymbals, which only the Turks and the Chinese know how to make, because they have preserved the secret of hammering molten bronze. The performer, after clashing them, holds up their inner sides in triumph towards the audience. The reverberating gong, the tambourine beloved of the gypsies, the triangle with its open end, sounding brightly under the steel stick; the cymbals of today, the hollow castanets clacking in the hand. Consider all this splendid feast of sound, with the golden, gorgeous structure of the Erard pedal harp towering above it—and how easy it is to feel the fascination that Uncle’s warehouse had for us, this silent paradise, which yet in hundreds of forms heralded sweetest harmony!