by Thomas Mann
They took place more frequently than we shared them. For I need hardly say that Adrian was no very zealous participant and his membership was more a matter of form than or punctual performance of activities. Out of courtesy and to show his good will towards the organization, he had let himself be persuaded; but under various pretexts, mostly on account of his headaches, he stopped away this or that time from the gatherings which took the place of the student “beer evenings.” Even after a year or more he had got so little upon the “frere et cochon” footing with the seventy members that he did not manage to call them all by their right names or address them “in the singular.” But he was respected among them. The shouts that greeted him when, I must almost say on rare occasions, he appeared at a session in the smoke-filled private room in Mutze’s tavern, did contain a little fun at the expense of his supposed misanthropy; but they expressed genuine pleasure as well. For the group esteemed the part he played in their theological and philosophical debates, to which, without leading them, he would often throw in a remark and give an interesting turn. They were particularly pleased with his musical gift, which was useful because he could accompany the customary glee’s better than the others who tried it, with more animation and a fuller tone. Also he would oblige the assembly with a solo, a toccata of Bach, a movement of Beethoven or Schumann, at the instance of the leader, Baworinski, a tall dark lean person, with drooping lids and mouth puckered as though to whistle. Sometimes Adrian would even sit down unasked in the society’s room at the piano, whose dull flat tone was strongly reminiscent of the inadequate instrument on which Wendell Kretschmar had imparted his knowledge to us in the hall of the Common Weal, and lose himself in free, experimental play. This especially happened before the beginning of a sitting, whilst the company were gathering. He had a way, I shall never forget it, of coming in, casually greeting the company, and then, sometimes without taking off his hat and coat, his face drawn with concentration, going straight to the piano, as though that alone were his goal. With a strong attack, bringing out the transition notes, with lifted brows, he would try chords, preparations, and resolutions which he may have excogitated on the way. But this rushing at the piano as though for refuge: it looked as though the place and its occupants frightened him; as though he sought shelter—actually within himself—from a bewildering strangeness into which he had come.
Then if he went on playing, dwelling on a fixed idea, changing and loosely shaping it, some one of those standing round, perhaps little Probst, a typical student, blond, with half-long, oily hair, would ask: “What is that?”
“Nothing,” answered the player, with a short shake of the head, more like the gesture with which one shakes off a fly.
“How can it be nothing,” the other answered back, “since you are playing it?”
“He is improvising,” explained the tall Baworinski sensibly.
“Improvising!” cried Probst, honestly startled, and peered with his pale blue eyes at Adrian’s forehead as though he expected it to be glowing with fever.
Everybody burst out laughing, Adrian as well, letting his closed hands rest on the keyboard and bowing his head over them.
“Oh, Probst, what an ass you are!” said Baworinski. “He is making up, can’t you understand? He just thought of that this very minute.”
“How can he think up so many notes right and left at once,” Probst defended himself, “and how can he say ‘It is nothing’ of something he is actually playing? One surely cannot play what is not?”
“Oh, yes,” said Baworinski mildly. “One can play what does not yet exist.”
I can still hear a certain Deutschlin, Konrad Deutschlin, a robust fellow with hair hanging in strings on his forehead, adding: “And everything was once nothing, my good Probst, and then became something.”
“I can assure you,” said Adrian, “that it really was nothing, in every sense of the word.”
He had been bent over with laughter, but now he lifted his head and you could see by his face that it was no easy matter; that he felt exposed. I recall that there now ensued a lengthy discussion on the creative element, led by Deutschlin and by no means uninteresting. The limitations were debated, which this conception had to tolerate, by virtue of culture, tradition, imitation, convention, pattern. Finally the human and creative element was theologically recognized, as a far, reflected splendour of divinely existent power; as an echo of the first almighty summons to being, and the productive inspiration as in any case coming from above.
Moreover, and quite in passing, it was pleasant to me that I too, admitted from the profane faculty, could contribute when asked to the entertainment with my viol d’amore. For music was important in this circle, if only in a certain way, rather vaguely and as it were on principle: it was thought of as an art coming from God, one had to have “relations” with it, romantic and devout, like one’s relations with nature. Music, nature, and joyous worship, these were closely related and prescribed ideas in the Winfried. When I referred to “sons of the Muses,” the phrase, which to some perhaps would seem hardly suitable for students of theology, none the less found its justification in this combination of feeling, in the free and relaxed spirit, the clear-eyed contemplation of the beautiful, which characterized these tours into the heart of nature, to which I now return.
Two or three times in the course of our four terms at Halle they were undertaken in corpore, and Baworinski summoned up all the seventy members of Winfried. Adrian and I never joined these mass enterprises. But single groups, more intimately connected, also made similar excursions and these we repeatedly joined, in company with a few of the better sort. There was our leader himself; the sturdy Deutschlin; then a certain Dungersheim, Carl von Teutleben, and some others, named respectively Hubmeyer, Matthaeus Arzt, and Schappeler. I recall their names and to some extent their faces; it were superfluous to describe them.
The neighbourhood of Halle is a sandy plain, admittedly without charm. But a train conveys you in a few hours up the Saale into lovely Thuringia, and there, mostly at Naumburg or Apolda (the region where Adrian’s mother was born), we left the train and set out with rucksacks and capes, on shanks’s mare, in all-day marches, eating in village inns or sometimes camping at the edge of a wood and spending the night in the hayloft of a peasant’s yard, waking in the grey dawn to wash and refresh ourselves at the long trough of a running spring. Such an interim form of living, the entry of city folk, brain workers, into the primitive countryside and back to mother earth, with the knowledge, after all, that we must—or might—soon return to our usual and “natural” sphere of middle-class comfort: such voluntary screwing down and simplification has easily, almost necessarily something artificial, patronizing, dilettante about it; of this we were humorously aware, and knew too that it was the cause of the good-natured, teasing grin with which many a peasant measured us on our request for his hayloft. But the kindly permission we got was due to our youth; for youth, one may say, makes the only proper bridge between the bourgeois and the state of nature; it is a pre-bourgeois state from which all student romance derives, the truly romantic period of life. To this formula the ever intellectually lively Deutschlin reduced the subject when we discussed it in our loft before falling asleep, by the wan light of the stable lantern in the corner. We dealt with the matter of our present mode of existence; and Deutschlin protested that it was poor taste for youth to explain youth: a form of life that discusses and examines itself thereby dissolves as form, and only direct and unconscious being has true existence.
The statement was denied, Hubmeyer and Schappeler contradicted it and Teutleben too demurred. It might be still finer, they ironically said, if only age were to judge youth and youth could only be the subject of outside observation, as though it had no share of objective mind. But it had, when it concerned itself too, and must be allowed to speak as youth about youth. There was something that one called a feeling of life, which came near to being consciousness of self, and if it were true that thereby the form of
life was abrogated, then there was no sense of life possible at all. Mere dull unconscious being, ichthyosaurus-being, was no good, and today one must consciously not be wanting, one must assert one’s specific form of life with an articulate feeling of self. It had taken a long time for youth to be so recognized.
“But the recognition has come more from pedagogy, that is from the old, Adrian was heard to say, “rather than from youth itself. It found itself one day presented, by an era that also talks about the century of the child and has invented the emancipation of woman, all in all a very compliant era, with the attribute of an independent form of life; of course it eagerly agreed.”
“No, Leverkühn,” said Hubmeyer and Schappeler, and the others supported them. He was wrong, they said, at least for the most part. It had been the feeling of life in youth itself that by dint of becoming conscious had asserted itself against the world, whether or no the latter had not been quite undecided for recognition.
“Not in the least,” said Adrian. “Not at all undecided. I suppose one only needed to say to the era: ‘I have this and this sense of life,’ and the era just made it a low bow. Youth knocked on an open door.” Moreover there was nothing to say against it, provided youth and its time understood each other.
“Why are you so supercilious, Leverkühn? Don’t you find it good that today youth gets its rights in bourgeois society and that the values peculiar to the period of development are recognized?”
“Oh, certainly,” said Adrian. “But I started, you started—that is, we started—with the idea—“
He was interrupted by a burst of laughter. I think it was Matthaeus Arzt who said: “That was perfect, Leverkühn. You led up to a climax. First you leave us out altogether, then you leave yourself out, then you manage to say ‘we,’ but you obviously find it very difficult, you hard-boiled individualist! ‘
Adrian rejected the epithet. It was quite false, he said, he was no individualist, he entirely accepted the community.
“Theoretically, perhaps,” answered Arzt, “and condescendingly, with Adrian Leverkühn excepted. He talks of youth condescendingly too, as though he were not young himself; as though he were incapable of including himself and fitting in; as far as humility goes he knows very little about it.”
“But we were not talking about humility,” Adrian parried, “rather, on the contrary, of a conscious sense of life.” Deutschlin suggested that they should let Adrian finish what he had to say.
“That was all,” said the latter. “We started with the idea that youth has closer relations with nature than the mature man in a bourgeois society—something like woman, to whom also has been ascribed, compared with man, a greater nearness to nature. But I cannot follow. I do not find that youth stands on a particularly intimate footing with nature. Rather its attitude towards her is shy and reserved, actually strange. The human being comes to terms with his own natural side only with the years and only slowly gets accommodated to it. It is precisely youth, I mean more highly developed youth, that is more likely to shrink or be scornful, to display hostility. What do we mean by nature? Woods, meadows, mountains, trees, lakes, beauty of scenery? For all that, in my opinion, youth has much less of an eye than has the older, more tranquil man. The young one is by no means so disposed to see and enjoy nature. His eye is directed inwards, mentally conditioned, disinclined to the senses, in my opinion.”
“Quod demonstramus,” said somebody, very likely Dungersheim—“we wanderers lying here in our straw, marching through the forests of Thuringia to Eisenach and the Wartburg.”
” ‘In my opinion,’ you always say,” another voice interjected. “You probably mean: ‘in my experience.’ “
“You were just reproaching me,” retorted Adrian, “for speaking condescendingly about youth and not including myself. Now all of a sudden you tell me I am making myself stand for it.”
“Leverkühn,” Deutschlin commented, “has his own thoughts about youth; but obviously he too regards it as a specific form of life, which must be respected as such; and that is the decisive factor. I only spoke against youth’s discussion of itself in so far as that disintegrates the immediacy of life. But as consciousness of self it also strengthens life, and in this sense—I mean also to this extentI call it good. The idea of youth is a prescriptive right and prerogative of our people, the German people; the others scarcely know it; youth as consciousness of self is as good as unknown to them. They wonder at the conscious bearing of German youth, to which the elder sections of the population give their assent, and even at their unbourgeois dress. Let them! German youth, precisely as youth, represents the spirit of the people itself, the German spirit, which is young and filled with the future: unripe, if you like, but what does unripe mean? German deeds were always done out of a certain mighty immaturity, and not for nothing are we the people of the Reformation. That too was a work of immaturity. Mature, that was the Florentine citizen of the Renaissance, who before he went to church said to his wife: “Well, let us now make our bow to popular error!” But Luther was unripe enough, enough of the people, of the German people, to bring in the new, the purified faith. Where would the world be if maturity were the last word? We shall in our unripeness vouchsafe it still some renewal, some revolution.”
After these words of Deutschlin we were silent for a while. Obviously there in the darkness each young man turned over in his mind the feelings of personal and national youthfulness, mingling as one. The phrase “mighty immaturity” had certainly a flattering ring for the most.
“If I only knew,” I can hear Adrian say, breaking the silence, “how it is we are so unripe, so young as you say we are, I mean as a people. After all, we have come as far as the others, and perhaps it is only our history, the fact that we were a bit late getting together and building up a common consciousness, which deludes us into a notion of our uncommon youthfulness.”
“But it is probably something else,” responded Deutschlin. “Youth in the ultimate sense has nothing to do with political history, nothing to do with history at all. It is a metaphysical endowment, an essential factor, a structure, a conditioning. Have you never heard of German Becoming, of German Wandering, of the endless migratings of the German soul? Even foreigners know our word ‘Wanderlust.’ If you like, the German is the eternal student, the eternal searcher, among the peoples of the earth—“
“And his revolutions,” Adrian interpolated, with his short laugh, “are the puppet-shows of world history.”
“Very witty, Leverkühn. But yet I am surprised that your Protestantism allows you to be so witty. It is possible, if necessary, to take more seriously what I mean by youth. To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life; it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare—where others lack the courage—to plunge again into the elemental. Youthful courage, that is the spirit of dying and becoming, the knowledge of death and rebirth.”
“Is that so German?” asked Adrian. “Rebirth was once called renascimento and went on in Italy. And ‘back to nature,’ that was first prescribed in French.”
“The first was a cultural renewal,” answered Deutschlin, “the second a sentimental pastoral play.”
“Out of the pastoral play,” persisted Adrian, “came the French Revolution, and Luther’s Reformation was only an offshoot and ethical bypath of the Renaissance, its application to the field of religion.”
“The field of religion, there you are. And religion is always something besides archaeological revival and an unheaval in social criticism. Religiosity, that is perhaps youth itself, it is the directness, the courage and depth of the personal life, the will and the power, the natural and daemonic side of being, as it has come into our consciousness again through Kierkegaard, to experience it in full vitality and to live through it.”
“Do you consider the feeling for religion a distinctively German gift?” asked Adrian.
“In the sense I mean, as soulful youth, as sponta
neity, as faith, and Dureresque knighthood between Death and Devil—certainly.”
“And France, the land of cathedrals, whose head was the All-Christian King, and which produced theologians like Bossuet and Pascal?”
“That was long ago. For centuries France has been marked out by history as the European power with the anti-Christian mission. Of Germany the opposite is true, and that you would feel and know, Leverkühn, if you were not Adrian Leverkühn—in other words, too cool to be young, too clever to be religious. With cleverness one may go a long way in the Church, but scarcely in religion.”
“Many thanks, Deutschlin,” laughed Adrian. “In good old German words, as Ehrenfried Kumpf would say, you have given it to me straight, without any mealy-mouthing. I have a feeling that I shan’t go very far in the Church either; but one thing is certain, that I should not have become a theologian without her. I know of course that it is the most talented among you, those who have read Kierkegaard, who place truth, even ethical truth, entirely in the subjective, and reject with horror everything that savours of herd existence. Cut I cannot go with you in your radicalism—which certainly will not long persist, as it is a student licence—I cannot go with you in your separation, after Kierkegaard, of Church and Christianity. I see in the Church, even as she is today, secularized and reduced to the bourgeois, a citadel of order, an institution for objective disciplining, canalizing, banking-up of the religious life, which without her would fall victim to subjectivist demoralization, to a chaos of divine and daemonic powers, to a world of fantastic uncanniness, an ocean of daemony. To separate Church and religion means to give up separating the religious from madness.”