Doctor Faustus

by Thomas Mann

  So much as a taste of Breisacher’s highly conservative exegesis. It was as amusing as it was repulsive. He could not say enough to display the genuine cult of the real and by no means abstractly universal, hence also not “almighty” and “all-present” God of the people as a magic technique, a manipulation of dynamic forces, physically not without its risks, in which mishaps might easily occur, catastrophic short circuits due to mistakes and failures. The sons of Aaron had died because they had brought on “strange fire.” That was an instance of a technical mischance, the consequence of an error. Somebody named Uzza had laid hands on the chest, the so-called ark of the covenant, as it threatened to slip when it was being transported by wagon, and he fell dead on the spot. That too was a transcendental dynamic discharge, occurring through negligence—the negligence, indeed, of King David, who was too fond of playing the harp, and had no real understanding of’things any more; for he had the ark conveyed as the Philistines did, by wagon instead of on bearing—poles according to the well-founded prescript of the Pentateuch. David, indeed, was quite as ignorant of origins and quite as besotted, not to say brutalized, as Solomon his son. He was too ignorant, for instance, to realize the dynamic dangers of a general census of the population; and by instituting one had brought about a serious biological misfortune, an epidemic with high mortality; a reaction of the metaphysical powers of the people, which might have been foreseen. For a genuine folk simply could not stand such a mechanizing registration, the dissolution by enumeration of the dynamic whole into similar individuals…

  It merely gratified Breisacher when a lady interposed and said she had not known that a census was such a sin.

  “Sin?” he responded, in an exaggeratedly questioning tone. No, in the genuine religion of a genuine folk such colourless theological conceptions as sin and punishment never occurred, in their merely ethical causal connection. What we had here was the causality of error, a working accident. Religion and ethics represented the decline of religion. All morality was “a purely intellectual” misunderstanding of the ritual. Was there anything more god-forsaken than the “purely intellectual”? It had remained for the characterless world-religion, out of “prayer”—sit venia verbo—to make a begging appeal for mercy, an “O Lord,”

  “God have mercy,” a “Help” and “Give” and “Be so good.” Our so-called prayer… “Pardon!” said von Riedesel, this time with real emphasis. “Quite right, of course, but ‘Head bare at prayer was always my—“

  “Prayer,” finished Dr. Breisacher relentlessly, “is the vulgarized and rationalistically watered-down late form of something very vital, active and strong: the magic invocation, the coercion of God.”

  I really felt sorry for the Baron. Here was his aristocratic conservatism outbid by the frightfully clever playing of atavistic cards; by a radical conservatism that no longer had anything aristocratic about it, but rather something revolutionary; something more disrupting than any liberalism, and yet, as though in mockery, possessing a laudable conservative appeal. All that must bewilder the very depths of his soul. I imagined it giving him a sleepless night, but my sympathy may have been exaggerated. Certainly not everything that Breisacher said was correct. One could easily have disputed him and pointed out that the spirited condemnation of the sacrifice is not found first of all in the prophets but in the Pentateuch itself; for it is Moses who bluntly declares that the sacrifice is secondary and lays all the emphasis on obedience to God and the keeping of His commandments. But a sensitive man does not like to disturb another; it is unpleasant to break in on a train of thought with logical or historical objections; even in the anti-intellectual such a man respects and spares the intellectual. Today we see, of course, that it was the mistake of our civilization to have practised all too magnanimously this respect and forbearance. For we found after all that the opposite side met us with sheer impudence and the most determined intolerance.

  I was already thinking of all these things when at the beginning of this work I made an exception to my general profession of friendliness towards the Jewish people, confessing that I had run across some pretty annoying specimens, and the name of the scholar Breisacher slipped prematurely from my pen. Yet can one quarrel with the Jewish spirit when its quick hearing and receptivity for the coming thing, the new, persists also in the most extraordinary situations, where the avant-garde coincides with the reactionary? In any case, it was at the Schlaginhaufens’, and through this very Breisacher, that I first came in touch with the new world of anti-humanity, of which my easy-going soul till then had known nothing at all.

  CHAPTER XXIX

  The Munich carnival season, that period between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday, was celebrated by common consent with dance and mirth, with flaming cheeks and flashing eyes, and with all sorts of public and private entertainments. The carnival of 1914, in which I, the still youthful academy professor from Freising, alone or in company with Adrian, took part, has remained in my memory, a vivid or rather a portentous image. It was indeed the last carnival before the beginning of the four-year war which has now been telescoped with the horrors of today into one historical epoch; the last one before the so-called “first World War,” which put an end for ever to the idyl of aesthetic guilelessness in the city on the Isar and its dionysiac easy-goingness—if I may put it like that. And it was also the time in which certain individual destinies in our circle of acquaintance unfolded before my eyes, and, almost unheeded outside our circle, led up to naked catastrophe. I go into it in these pages because what happened did to some extent touch the life and destiny of my hero, Adrian Leverkühn; yes, in one of them, to my actual knowledge, he was involved and active in an obscure and fatal way.

  I am not referring to the case of Clarissa Rodde, the proud and flippant blonde who toyed with the macabre. She still lived among us, in her mother’s house, and shared in the carnival gaieties. Soon afterwards, however, she prepared to leave town and fill an engagement as jeune premiere in the provinces, which her teacher, who played father parts at the Hoftheater, had got for her. The engagement proved a failure; and her teacher, a man of experience named Seiler, must be absolved from all responsibility for it. He had written a letter one day to the Frau Senator saying that his pupil was extraordinarily intelligent and full of enthusiasm, but that she had not enough natural gift for a successful career on the stage. She lacked, he said, the first requisite of all dramatic art, the instinct of the play-actor—what one calls theatre blood; and in all conscience he felt constrained to. advise against her continuing. This had led to a crise de nerves, an outburst of despair on Clarissa’s part, which went to the mother’s heart, and Seiler had been asked to terminate the training and use his connections to get her a start as a beginner.

  It is now twenty-four years since Clarissa’s lamentable destiny fulfilled itself, as I shall relate in its proper place in my story. Here I have in mind what happened to her delicate and suffering sister Inez, who cultivated the past and its regrets—and to poor Rudi Schwerdtfeger, of whom I thought with horror when I mentioned just now, almost involuntarily, the share of the recluse Adrian Leverkühn in these events. The reader is already used to my anticipations and will not interpret them as muddle-headed-ness and disregard of literary conventions. The truth is simply that I fix my eye in advance with fear and dread, yes, with horror on certain things which I shall sooner or later have to tell; they stand before me and weigh me down, and I try to distribute their weight by referring to them beforehand, of course not comprehensibly to anybody but myself. I let them a little way out of the bag and hope by this means to make the telling more tolerable to myself, to take out the sting and mitigate the distress. So much in excuse of a “faulty” technique of narration and in explanation of my difficulties. I scarcely need to say that Adrian was remote from the beginnings of the events I shall speak of here, being aware of them only to a certain extent and that only through me, who had much more social curiosity or shall I say human sympathy.

  As I mentioned ear
lier, neither of the two Rodde sisters, Clarissa and Inez, got on particularly well with their mother, the Frau Senator, and they not seldom betrayed that the informal, slightly lax and bohemian air of her salon, the uprooted existence, upholstered though it was with the remnants of upper-middle-class elegance, got on their nerves. They strained away from the hybrid milieu, but in different directions. The proud Clarissa reached outwards towards a definite career as an actress, for which, as her master had finally been forced to say, she lacked a real calling. While, on the other hand, the refined and pensive Inez, who was at bottom afraid of life, yearned back to the refuge, the psychological security of an assured bourgeois position, the route to which was marriage, for love if possible, but in God’s name even without love. Inez walked this road, of course with the cordial approval of her mother, and came to grief, as her sister did on hers. It turned out tragically enough that this solution was not the right one: that neither for Inez personally, nor for her circumstances in view of the times she lived in, this upsetting and undermining social epoch, did it hold out any hope of satisfaction.

  At this time there approached her a certain Dr. Helmut Institoris, instructor in aesthetics and the history of art at the Technical Institute in Munich, where he lectured on esthetic theory and the history of Renaissance architecture and handed round photographs in class. He had good prospects of being called one day to the university, of becoming professor, member of the Academy and so on; especially when he, a bachelor from a solid Würzburg family, in expectancy of a good inheritance, should have enhanced his dignity by setting up a household of his own where he could gather society about him. He went courting, and he did not worry about the financial situation of the girl he courted. On the contrary, he belonged to those men who prefer in marriage to have all the economic power in their hands and to have their wives dependent on them.

  Such an attitude does not speak for conscious strength. And Institoris was in fact not a strong man; one realized it in the aesthetic admiration he showed for everything bursting with exuberant vitality. He was blond and dolichocephalic, rather small and very good form, with smooth hair, parted and slightly oiled. A blond moustache drooped over his mouth, and behind the gold-rimmed glasses the blue eyes wore a gentle, high-minded expression, which made it hard to understand—or perhaps precisely did make one understand—that he respected and revered brute force, but of course only when it was beautiful. He belonged to a type bred in those decades—the kind of man who, as Baptist Spengler once aptly put it, “when consumption glows in his cheeks, keeps on shrieking: ‘How stark and beautiful is life!’ “

  Well, Institoris did not shriek, on the contrary he spoke rather softly, with a lisp, even when he celebrated the Italian Renaissance as a time that “reeked of blood and beauty.” He was not consumptive, had at most, like nearly everybody, been slightly tubercular in his youth. But he was delicate and nervous, suffered from his sympathetic nerve, in his solar plexus, from which so many anxieties and early fears of death proceed, and was an habitue of a sanatorium for the wealthy in Meran. Surely he promised himself—and his doctors promised him—an improvement in his health resulting from the regularity of a comfortable married life.

  In the winter of 1913-14 he approached our Inez Rodde in a way that made one guess it would end in an engagement. However, the affair dragged on for some time, into the early years of the war: doubt and conscience-searching on both sides probably induced a long and careful testing, to see whether they were truly born for each other. But when one saw the “pair” together in the Frau Senator’s salon, to which Institoris had correctly sought an introduction, or in public places, often sitting apart and talking, it was just this question which seemed to be at issue between them, whether directly or not, and the friendly observer, seeing something like a trial engagement in the offing, involuntarily discussed the subject too within himself.

  That it was Inez upon whom Helmut had cast his eye might surprise one at first, but one understood it better in the end. She was no Renaissance female—anything but that, in her temperamental sensitiveness, with her veiled glance, full of melancholy and distinction; her head drooping on the slender, extended stalk and the little pursed-up mouth that seemed to indicate a feeble and fluctuating love of mischief. But on the other hand, the wooer would not have known how to cope with his own ideal either; his masculine superiority would have been found sorely wanting—one only needed to imagine him paired with a full and rounded nature like the Orlanda’s to smile and be convinced. And Inez was by no means without feminine charm; it was understandable that a man on the look-out might have fallen in love with her heavy hair, her little dimpling hands, her aristocratic air of setting store by herself. She might be what he needed. Her circumstances attracted him: namely, her patrician origin, on which she laid stress, though it was slightly breathed upon by her present transplanted state; the faint suggestion that she had come down in the world, and thus threatened no superiority. Indeed, he might cherish the thought that in making her his he would be raising and rehabilitating her. A widowed mother, half-impoverished, a little pleasure-seeking; a sister who was going on the stage; a circle more or less bohemian: these were connections which did not, in combination with his own dignity, displease him, especially since socially he lost nothing by them, did not endanger his career, and might be sure that Inez, correctly and amply supplied by the Frau Senator with a dowry of linen, perhaps even silver, would make a model housewife and hostess.

  Thus things looked to me, as seen from Dr. Institoris’s side. If I tried to look at him with the girl’s eyes, the thing ceased to be plausible. I could not, even using all my imagination, ascribe to the man, unimpressive as he was, absorbed in himself, refined indeed, with an excellent education, but physically anything but commanding (he even had a tripping gait), any appeal for the other sex; whereas I felt that Inez, with all her maiden reserve and austerity, needed such an appeal. Added to this was the contrast between the philosophical views, the theoretic posture towards life, assumed by the two—which might be considered diametrical and exemplary. It was, to put it briefly, the antithesis between aesthetics and ethics, which in fact largely dominated the cultural dialectics of the time and was to some extent embodied in these two young people: the conflict between a doctrinaire glorification of “life” in its splendid unthinkingness, and the pessimistic reverence for suffering, with its depth and wisdom. One may say that at its creative source this contrast had formed a personal unity and only through time fell out and strove against itself. Dr. Institoris was in the very marrow of his bones a man of the Renaissance—one feels like commenting “Good God!”—and Inez Rodde quite explicitly a child of pessimistic mofalism. For a world that “reeked of blood and beauty” she had no use at all, and as for “life” she was seeking shelter from it in a strictly orthodox, modish, economically well-upholstered marriage, which should protect her from all possible blows of fate. It was ironic that the man—the manikin—who seemed desirous to offer her this shelter raved about beautiful ruthlessness and Italian poisoners.

  I doubt that they, when they were alone, discussed any controversies of world-wide bearing. They talked of things nearer at hand and simply tried to see how it would be to be engaged. Philosophical discussion as a social diversion belonged more to the larger group; and I do remember several occasions when we were all sitting together, perhaps round an alcove table in a ballroom, and the views of the two clashed in conversation. Institoris might assert that only human beings with strong and brutal instincts could create great works; and Inez would protest, contending that it had often been highly Christian characters, bowed down by conscience, refined by suffering, their view of life marked by melancholy, from whom had come great things in art. Such antitheses I found idle and ephemeral; they seemed to do no justice to actual fact, the seldom happy and certainly always precarious balance of vitality and infirmity which genius obviously is. But in this discussion one side represented that which it was, namely sickliness, the other t
hat which it worshipped, namely strength; and both must be allowed to have their voice.

  Once, I recall, as we sat together (the Knoterichs, Zink and Spengler, Schildknapp and his publisher Radbruch were also of the party) the friendly difference arose not between the lovers, as one tended to call them, but amusingly enough between Institoris and Rudi Schwerdtfeger, who was sitting with us, very charming in his huntsman’s costume. I no longer clearly remember the discussion; anyhow the disagreement arose from a quite innocent remark of Schwerdtfeger’s, about which he had surely thought little or nothing. It was about “merit,” so much I know; something fought for, achieved, accomplished by willpower and self-conquest, and Rudolf, who praised the occurrence warmly, and called it deserving, could not in the least understand what Institoris meant by denying any value to it and refusing to recognize any virtue that had to sweat for it to that extent. From the point of view of beauty, he said, it was not the will but the gift that was to be praised; it alone could be called meritorious. Effort was plebeian; aristocratic and therefore alone meritorious was solely what happened out of instinct, involuntarily and with ease. Now, the good Rudi was no hero or conqueror, and had never in his life done anything that did not come easy to him, as for instance his capital violin-playing. But what the other said did go against the grain with him, and although he dimly felt that the subject had something “higher” about it, out of his own reach, he would not let himself be talked down. He looked Institoris in the face, his lip curled angrily, and his blue eyes bored into the other’s, first the right and then the left, by turns.

  “After all, that is just nonsense,” he said, but in a contained, rather subdued voice, betraying that he did not feel so sure of his argument. “Merit is merit, and a gift isn’t a merit. You are always talking about beauty, doctor; but after all it is beautiful when somebody triumphs over himself and does something better than nature gave him to do. What do you say, Inez?” he turned appealingly to her with his question, in perfect innocence, for he had no idea of the fundamentally opposed nature of her views and Helmut’s.