by Thomas Mann
I see that it was ill-judged of me to try to set down all the trifling minutiae which were the harvest of my observant eye. They are not worth printing, the reader may easily find them puerile or be annoyed by what seems like idle and boring speculation. But he must consider that I am suppressing a hundred others that got caught as it were in the net of my perceptions, the perceptions of a sympathetic and benevolent friend; thanks to the calamity they added up to, I cannot so easily dismiss them from my mind. For years I watched the oncoming of a catastrophe, insignificant, it is true, in the light of world events; and I held my peace about what I saw and feared. Only to Adrian did I once speak, at the beginning, in Pfeiffering, although I had on the whole small inclination, always feeling a certain reluctance to discuss the love-affairs of our circle with him, who lived in monkish detachment from everything of the sort. Yet I did so: I told him in confidence that Inez Rodde, although about to engage herself to Institoris, was, so far as my observation went, hopelessly and fatally in love with Rudi Schwerdtfeger. We were sitting in the Abbot’s room, playing chess.
“That’s news!” he said. “You probably want me to miss my move and lose my castle.”
He smiled, shook his head, and added: “Poor soul!”
Then, as he considered his next play, with a pause between the sentences: “But that’s no joke for him.—He must see to it that he gets out of it whole.”
CHAPTER XXX
The first glowing August days of 1914 found me changing from one crowded train to another, waiting in stations swarming with people, their platforms piled with left-behind luggage, on a headlong journey from Freising to Naumburg in Thuringia, where as reserve vice-sergeant-major I was joining my regiment.
War had broken out. The fate that so long had brooded over Europe was upon us, it raged. In the guise of a disciplined execution of all the plans previously made and rehearsed, it raged through our cities and towns, as terror and exaltation, as the inevitable, as “destiny”; as awareness of power and readiness for sacrifice, in the heads and hearts of men. It may well be, I like to think so, that elsewhere, in both enemy and allied countries, this short cut of fate was felt more as a catastrophe and “grand malheur.” We in the field heard these words so often from the lips of Frenchwomen, who did have the war on their soil, in their homes and on their hearths: “Ah, monsieur, la guerre, quel grand malheur!” But in our Germany its effect was undeniably and preeminently enthusiasm, historic ardour, joy at being released from dull everyday, and from a world-stagnation that could go on no longer; as hope for the future, an appeal to duty and manhood, in short as a holiday for heroes. My Freising top-formers had hot heads and glowing eyes. Youthful thirst for adventure, impatience to be off, were naively mingled with satisfaction at an early release from school. They stormed the recruiting stations, and I was glad that they need not look down on me for a stay-at-home.
I would by no means deny that I fully shared in the popular exultation which I just sought to characterize, though its more extravagant ebullitions were foreign to my nature. My conscience, speaking generally, was not perfectly clear. Such a “mobilization” for war, however stern and grim a face it wears, must always have something about it like an unlicensed holiday; however unreservedly one’s duty, it seems a little like playing truant, like running away, like yielding to unbridled instinct. A settled man like me scarcely felt at ease in it all; and aside from personal and temperamental discomfort, I dimly felt a moral doubt: had we as a nation been so well-behaved up to now that this abandon, these transports, were legitimate? But now the moment had come for readiness to sacrifice and die; that carries one along over everything, it is so to speak the last word, after it there is no more to be said. If the war is felt more or less clearly as a general visitation, in which the individual, as well as the individual people, is ready to stand his man and atone with his blood for the weaknesses and sins of the time, including his own; if he thinks of himself as a sacrifice by which the old Adam is put away and from which in unity a new and higher life will be wrested, then our everyday morals are outbid by the abnormal and must be silent. Neither would I forget that then we went with relatively pure hearts and clean hands to war and did not think we had so behaved at home that a general and catastrophic blood-letting must needs be regarded as the inevitable logical consequence of our domestic doings. Thus it was five years ago, God help us, but not thirty! Justice and law, the habeas corpus, freedom and human dignity had been tolerably honoured in the land. Of course the sword-waving of that fundamentally unsoldierly play-actor, made for anything but war, who sat on the imperial throne was painful to the man of culture; moreover his attitude to the things of the mind was that of a retarded mentality. But his influence on them had exhausted itself in empty gestures of regulation. Culture had been free, she had stood at a respectable height; and though she had long been used to a complete absence of relations with the governing power, her younger representatives might see in a great national war, such as now broke out, a means of achieving a form of life in which state and culture might become one. In this we displayed the preoccupation with self which is peculiar to us: our naive egoism finds it unimportant, yes, takes it entirely for granted, that for the sake of our development (and we are always developing) the rest of the world, further on than ourselves and not at all possessed by the dynamic of catastrophe, must shed its blood. They take that ill of us, not quite unfairly; for ethically speaking, the only way a people can achieve a higher form of communal life is not by a foreign war, but by a civil one—even with bloodshed. The idea is repugnant to us; yet we thought nothing at all, on the contrary we found it glorious, that our national unification—and even so a partial, a compromise unification—cost three serious wars. We were already long since a great power, we were quite used to it, and it did not make us as happy as we had expected. The feeling that it had not made us more winning, that our relation to the world had rather worsened than improved, lay, unconfessed, deep in our hearts. A new breakthrough seemed due: we would become a dominating world power—but such a position was not to be achieved by means of mere moral “home-work.” War, then, and if needs must, war against everybody, to convince everybody and to win; that was our lot, our “sending” (the very word we use is Germanic, the idea pre-Christian, the whole concept a tragically mythological, musical-dramatic motif); that was what fate had willed, and we—only we!—enthusiastically responded and set forth. We were bursting with the consciousness that this was Germany’s century, that history was holding her hand out over us; that after Spain, France, England, it was our turn to put our stamp on the world and be its leader; that the twentieth century was ours; that now, at the end of the bourgeois epoch begun some hundred and twenty years before, the world was to renew itself in our sign, in the sign of a never up to the end quite defined military socialism.
This picture, not to call it an idea, possessed all our heads, companionably side by side with another: the belief that we were forced into war, that sacred necessity called us to take our weapons—those well-polished weapons whose readiness and excellence always induced a secret temptation to test them. Then there was the fear of being overrun from all sides, from which fate only our enormous strength protected us, our power of carrying the war straightway into other lands. Attack and defence were the same, in our case: together they made up the feeling of a providence, a calling, a great hour, a sacred necessity. The peoples beyond our borders might consider us disturbers of the peace if they chose, enemies of life and not to be borne with; but we had the means to knock the world on the head until it changed its mind and came not only to admire but to love us.
Let nobody think I am being jocose. There is no occasion for that, first of all because I can by no means pretend to have excluded myself from the general emotion. I genuinely shared it, even though my normal staid professorial attitude would have held me aloof from any loud manifestation, or even have caused in me some slight protest, a subconscious misgiving at thinking and feeling what everybo
dy else thought and felt. People of my sort have doubts whether every man’s thoughts are the right ones. And still, it is a great pleasure to the superior individual, just once—and where should one find this once, if not here and now?—to lose himself altogether in the general.
I stopped two days in Munich to make my farewells in various quarters and supply some details of my equipment. The city was seething. There was a religious solemnity in the air, as well as cases of panic, rage, and dread; as for instance when the wild rumour sprang up that the water supply was poisoned, or a Serbian spy was supposed to have been discovered in the crowd. In order not to be taken for one and cut down by mistake, Dr. Breisacher, whom I met on the Ludwigstrasse, had decorated his coat with numerous little red, white, and black rosettes and flags. The state of war, the passing of the supreme authority from the civil to the military, and to a General Staff issuing proclamations, was accepted with mingled confidence and apprehension. It was soothing to know that the members of the royal family, who as commanders had left for headquarters, would have competent chiefs of staff at their side and could commit no royal ineptnesses. Under those circumstances they were loudly cheered on their way. I saw regiments, with nosegays tied to their rifle-barrels, marching out of barrack gates, accompanied by women with handkerchiefs to their faces, while civilian crowds quickly gathered and shouted godspeed, and the peasant lads promoted to heroship smiled back, proud, stupid, and shy. I saw a very young officer, in marching kit, standing on the back platform of a tram, faced to the rear, staring before him and into himself, obviously busy with thoughts of his own young life; then he pulled himself together and with a hasty smile looked round to see if anyone had noticed.
Again I was glad to feel that my situation was the same as his and that I need not remain behind those who were marching to protect their land. At least in the beginning I was the only one of our circle to go. The country was strong enough in man-power to afford to be particular, to consider cultural interests, to admit to much unfitness and to hurl to the front only the perfectly sound of our youth and manhood. In nearly all the men of our group there turned out to be some kind of weakness, something we had scarcely known, but it now procured their exemption. Knoterich, the Sugambian, was slightly tubercular. Zink, the artist, suffered from asthmatic attacks like whooping-cough and used to withdraw from society to get rid of them; his friend Baptist Spengler was ailing, as we know, everywhere by turns. Bullinger the business man was still young, but it appeared that as an industrialist he was indispensable. The Zapfenstosser orchestra was too important a feature of the city’s artistic life for its members, among them Rudi Schwerdtfeger, not to be exempted from the service. Anyhow the occasion served to inform us, to our mov mentary surprise, that Rudi, in his earlier life, had had an operation that cost him one of his kidneys. He lived, we suddenly heard, with only one. That was quite enough, it appeared, and the ladies soon forgot all about it.
I could go on to mention many a case of reluctance, protection, favoritism, in the circles that frequented the Schlaginhaufens and the ladies Scheurl near the Botanical Gardens: circles where there was a fundamental objection to this war, as there had been to the last one: memories of the Rhenish alliance, Francophile sentiments, Catholic dislike of Prussia, and so on. Jeanette Scheurl was unhappy to tears. She was in despair over the savage flaring-up of the antagonism between the two countries to which she belonged, and which in her opinion ought to complement each other, instead of fighting, “J’en ai assez jusqu’a la fin de mes jours” she said with angry sobs. Despite my dissimilar feelings I could but grant her a cultural sympathy.
To say goodbye to Adrian, whose personal detachment from the whole scene was the most understandable thing in the world to me, I went out to Pfeiffering, whence the son of the house, Gereon, had already departed with several horses for his base. I found Rüdiger Schildknapp there, for the present still free, spending a week-end with our friend. He had served in the marines and would be taken later, but after some months he was again released. It was not very different in my own case: let me say at once that I remained in the field a bare year, till the Argonne battles of 1915, and was shipped home, with the Cross I had earned only by putting up with discomforts and by catching a typhus infection.
So much by way of preface. Rüdiger’s judgment of the war was conditioned by his admiration for the English, as was Jeanette Scheurl’s by her French blood. The British declaration of war had gone home to him, his mood was unusually sombre. We should never in his opinion have challenged England by the treaty-breaking march into Belgium. France and Russia—well and good, one might take them on. But England? It was frightful folly. So then, inclined to an irritated realism, he saw in the war only filth, stench, horrible amputations, sexual licence, and lice and jeered his fill at the ideological journalism that turned an utter nuisance into a glorious event. Adrian did not gainsay him, and I, despite my deeper feelings, yet willingly conceded that there was some truth in what he said.
The three of us ate in the great Nike room that evening, and as Clementina Schweigestill moved to and fro quietly serving us, I asked news of how Adrian’s sister Ursula fared in Langensalza. Her marriage was of the happiest, it seemed; she had recovered very well from a weakness of the lungs, a slight apical catarrh, which she had got after three childbeds in quick succession, in 1911, 1912, and 1913. It was the Schneidewein offspring Rosa, Ezekiel, and Raimund who then saw the light. The period between these three and the next was a full decade; it would be ten years before the enchanting Nepomuk made his appearance.
During the meal and afterwards in the Abbot’s room there was much talk on political and moral subjects. We spoke of the legendary manifestation of the German national character, which was supposed to reveal itself at moments of historical crisis like this—I referred to it with a certain emotion, in order to offset a little the drastically empirical interpretation that Schildknapp considered the only possible one: Germany’s traditional role, the trespass against Belgium, which was so reminiscent of Frederick the Great’s attack upon formally neutral Saxony; the yell of outrage that went up from the world, and the speech of our philosophical Chancellor, with its ingeniously presented admission of guilt, its folk-proverb: “Necessity knows no law,” its plea to God in contempt of an old legal paper, in face of living necessity. It was due to Rüdiger that we ended by laughing; for he accepted my somewhat emotional representations and then turned into irresistible absurdity all this dignified regret, noble brutality, and respectable mischief-making by parodying the tall philosopher who had dressed up in poetic moralizations a strategic plan long since determined on. We might laugh, but there was no amusement in the virtuous roar that went up from a stunned world at this execution of a cut-and-dried plan of campaign, knowledge of which had long been public property. However, I saw that our host liked this line much better and was glad of the chance to laugh; so I willingly joined in, not without recalling what Plato had said of comedy and tragedy: how they grow on the same tree and a change of lighting suffices to make one into the other.
All together I did not allow my sympathy for Germany’s necessity, her moral isolation and public proscription, which, so it seemed to me, was only the expression of the general fear of her strength and advantage in preparedness (I did admit that we reckoned the strength and the advantage as a harsh consolation in our outlawed state)—all together, I say, I did not allow my patriotic emotion, which was so much harder to explain than that of the others, to be dampened by the cold water thrown on our national traits. Indeed, I gave it words, walking up and down the room, while Schildknapp in the deep easy-chair smoked his shag pipe, and Adrian stood, the most of the time, in front of his old-German work-table with the sunken centre and the reading-and writing-desk set on it. For oddly enough he wrote on a slanting surface, like Erasmus in Holbein’s portrait. A few books lay on the table: a little volume of Kleist, with the book-mark at the essay on marionettes; the indispensable volume of Shakespeare sonnets and another boo
k with some of the plays—Twelfth Night I think, Much Ado about Nothing, and I believe Two Gentlemen of Verona. His work in hand lay there too: sheets, drafts, beginnings, notes, sketches in various stages of incompletion; often only the top line of the violin part or the woodwind was filled out and quite below the progression of the bass, but between them simply white space, elsewhere the harmonic connection and the instrumental grouping were already made clear by the jotting down of the other orchestral parts. With his cigarette between his lips he would step up to the desk to look at his work, just as a chess-player measures on the chequered field the progress of a game, to which musical composition bears so suggestive a resemblance. We were all so comfortable together that he might even take a pencil and enter a clarinet or horn figure somewhere if he thought well of it.