by Thomas Mann
Here or there he might look, seize his pen, throw it down again, murmur: “Good, till tomorrow,” and turn back to me, the flush still on his brow. But I knew or feared that the “till tomorrow” would not be adhered to: that after I left he would sit down and work out what had so unsummoned flashed into his mind as we talked. Then he would take two luminol tablets to give his sleep the soundness which must compensate for its briefness. For next day he would begin again at daybreak. He quoted:
“Up, psalter and harp—I will be early up.”
He lived in fear that the state of illumination with which he was blest—or with which he was afflicted—might be untimely withdrawn. And in fact he did suffer a relapse. It was shortly before he got to the end, that frightful finis, which demanded all his courage and which, so far from being a romantic music of redemption, relentlessly confirms the theologically negative and pitiless character of the whole. It was, I say, just before he made port with those roaring brass passages, heavily scored and widely spaced out, which make one think of an open abyss wherein one must hopelessly sink. The relapse lasted for three weeks with pain and nausea, a condition in which, in his own words, he lost the memory of what it meant to compose, or even how it was done.
It passed. At the beginning of August 1919 he was working again; and before this month, with its many hot, sunny days, was over, his task was finished. The four and a half months which I gave as the period of production are reckoned up to the beginning of the relapse. Including the final working period, the sketch of the Apocalypse had taken him, in all, amazingly enough, six months to put on paper.
CHAPTER XXXIV (continued)
And now: is that all I have to say in his biography about this work of my departed friend: this work a thousandfold hated, thought of with shuddering and yet a hundredfold beloved and exalted? No, I still have much on my heart about it and about certain of its characteristics, which—of course with undeviating admiration—disturbed and depressed me, or, better put, absorbed my attention even while they disturbed my mind. But at the same time I had it in mind to connect those very qualities and characteristics with the abstract speculations to which I was exposed in the house of Herr Sextus Kridwiss and to which I referred on an earlier page. I am free to confess that the novel experiences of these Kridwiss evenings, combined with my participation in Adrian’s solitary work, were responsible for the mental strain of my life at that time and in the end for the loss of a good twelve pounds’ weight.
Kridwiss was an expert in the graphic arts and fine editions, collector of east-Asiatic coloured wood-carvings and ceramics, a field in which, invited by this or that cultural organization, he gave interesting and well-informed lectures in various cities of the Reich and even abroad. He was an ageless, rather dainty little gentleman, with a strong Rhenish-Hessian accent and uncommon intellectual liveliness. He seemed not to have connections of any opinion-forming kind so far as one could tell, but out of pure curiosity “listened in” at all the events of the day; and when this or that came to his ears he would describe it as “scho’ enorm wischtich.” The reception-room of his house in Martiusstrasse, Schwabing, was decorated with charming Chinese paintings in India ink and colour (from the Sung period!) and he made it a meeting-place for the leading or rather the initiate members of the intellectual life of Munich, as many of them as the good city harboured in her walls. Kridwiss arranged informal discussion evenings for gentlemen, intimate round-table sittings of not more than eight or ten personalities; one put in an appearance at about nine o’clock and with no great entertainment on the part of the host proceeded to free association and the exchange of ideas. Of course intellectual high tension was not unintermittedly sustained; the talk often slipped into comfortable everyday channels, since thanks to Kridwiss’s social tastes and obligations the level was rather uneven. For instance there took part in the sessions two members of the grand-ducal house of Hesse-Nassau, then studying in Munich, friendly young folk whom the host with a certain empressement called the beautiful princes. In their presence, if only because they were so much younger than the rest of us, we practised a certain reserve. I cannot say however that they disturbed us much. Often a more highbrow conversation went painlessly over their heads, while they smiled in modest silence or made suitably serious faces. More annoying for me personally was the presence of Dr. Chaim Breisacher, the lover of paradox, already known to the reader. I long ago admitted that I could not endure the man; but his penetration and keen scent appeared to be indispensable on these occasions. I was also irritated by the presence of Bullinger, the manufacturer; he was legitimated only by his high income tax, but he talked dogmatically on the loftiest cultural themes.
I must confess further that really I could feel no proper liking to any of the table-round, nor extend to any one of them a feeling of genuine confidence. Helmut Institoris was also a guest, and him I except, since I had friendly relations with him through his wife; yet even here the associations evoked were painful ones, though on other grounds. But one might ask what I could have against Dr. Unruhe, Egon Unruhe, a philosophic palaeozoologist who in his writings brilliantly combined a profound knowledge of geological periods and fossilization with the interpretation and scientific verification of our store of primitive sagas. In this theory, a sublimated Darwinism if you like, everything there became true and real, though a sophisticated humanity had long since ceased to believe it. Yes, whence my distrust of this learned and conscientiously intellectual man? Whence the same distrust of Professor Georg Vogler, the literary historian, who had written a much esteemed history of German literature from the point of view of racial origins, wherein an author is discussed and evaluated not as writer and comprehensively trained mind, but as the genuine blood-and-soil product of his real, concrete, specific corner of the Reich, engendering him and by him engendered. All that was very worthy, strong-minded, fit and proper, and critically worth thinking about. The art-critic and Durer scholar Professor Gilgen Holzschuher, another guest, was not acceptable to me either, on grounds similarly hard to justify; and the same was true without reservation of the poet Daniel zur Hohe who was often present. He was a lean man of thirty in a black clericlike habit closed to the throat, with a profile like a bird of prey and a hammering delivery, as for instance: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, not so bad, oh certainly, one may say so!” nervously and continuously tapping the floor the while with the balls of his feet. He loved to cross his arms on his chest or thrust one hand Napoleon—like in his coat, and his poet dreams dealt with a world subjected by sanguinary campaigns to the pure spirit, by it held in terror and high discipline, as he had described it in his work, I believe his only one, the Proclamations. It had appeared before the war, printed on hand-made paper, a lyrical and rhetorical outburst of riotous terrorism, to which one had to concede considerable verbal power. The signatory to these proclamations was an entity named Christus Imperator Maximus, a commanding energumen who levied troops prepared to die for the subjection of the globe. He promulgated messages like Orders of the Day, stipulated abandonedly ruthless conditions, proclaimed poverty and chastity, and could not do enough in the hammering, fist-pounding line to exact unquestioned and unlimited obedience. “Soldiers!” the poem ended, “I deliver to you to plunder—the World!”
All this was “beautiful” and mightily acclaimed as such; “beautiful” in a cruelly and absolutely beautyous way, in the impudently detached, flippant, and irresponsible style poets permit themselves: it was, in fact, the tallest aesthetic misdemeanour I have ever come across. Helmut Institoris, of course, was sympathetic; but indeed both author and work had enjoyed a measure of serious respect from the public, and my antipathy was not quite so sure of itself, because I was conscious of my general irritation with the whole Kridwiss circle and the pretensions of its cultural position, of which my intellectual conscience forced me to take account.
I will try, in as small space as possible, to sketch the essential of these experiences, which our host rightly found “enormously impo
rtant” and which Daniel zur Hohe accompanied with his stereotyped “Oh yes, yes, yes, not so bad, yes, certainly, one may say so,” even when it did not exactly go so far as the plundering of the world by the tough and dedicated soldiery of Christus Imperator Maximus. That was, of course, only symbolic poesy, whereas the interest of the conferences lay in surveys of sociological actualities, analyses of the present and the future, which even so had something in common with the ascetic and “beautiful” nightmares of Daniel’s fantasy. I have called attention above, quite apart from these evenings, to the disturbance and destruction of apparently fixed values of life brought about by the war, especially in the conquered countries, which were thus in a psychological sense further on than the others. Very strongly felt and objectively confirmed was the enormous loss of value which the individual had sustained, the ruthlessness which made life today stride away over the single person and precipitate itself as a general indifference to the sufferings and destruction of human beings. This carelessness, this indifference to the individual fate, might appear to be the result of the four years’ carnival of blood just behind us; but appearances were deceptive. As in many another respect here too the war only completed, defined, and drastically put in practice a process that had been on the way long before and had made itself the basis of a new feeling about life. This was not a matter for praise or blame, rather of objective perception and statement. However, the least passionate recognition of the actual, just out of sheer pleasure in recognition, always contains some shade of approbation; so why should one not accompany such objective perceptions of the time with a many-sided, yes, all-embracing critique of the bourgeois tradition? By the bourgeois tradition I mean the values of culture, enlightenment, humanity, in short of such dreams as the uplifting of the people through scientific civilization. They who practised this critique were men of education, culture, science. They did it, indeed, smiling; with a blitheness and intellectual complacency which lent the thing a special, pungent, disquieting, or even slightly perverse charm. It is probably superfluous to state that not for a moment did they recognize the form of government which we got as a result of defeat, the freedom that fell in our laps, in a word the democratic republic, as anything to be taken seriously as the legitimized frame of the new situation. With one accord they treated it as ephemeral, as meaningless from the start, yes, as a bad joke to be dismissed with a shrug.
They cited de Tocqueville, who had said that out of revolution as out of a common source two streams issued, the one leading men to free arrangements, the other to absolute power. In the free arrangements none of the gentlemen conversationalists at Kridwiss’s any longer believed, since the very concept was self-contradictory: freedom by the act of assertion being driven to limit the freedom of its antagonist and thus to stultify itself and its own principles. Such was in fact its ultimate fate, though oftener the prepossession about “human rights” was thrown overboard at the start. And this was far more likely than that we would let ourselves in today for the dialectic process which turned freedom into the dictatorship of its party. In the end it all came down to dictatorship, to force, for with the demolition of the traditional national and social forms through the French Revolution an epoch had dawned which, consciously or not, confessedly or not, steered its course toward despotic tyranny over the masses; and they, reduced to one uniform level, atomized, out of touch, were as powerless as the single individual.
“Quite right, quite right. Oh, indeed yes, one may say so!” zur Hohe assured us, and pounded with his feet. Of course one may say so; only one might, for my taste, dealing with this description of a mounting barbarism, have said so with rather more fear and trembling and rather less blithe satisfaction. One was left with the hope that the complacency of these gentlemen had to do with their recognition of the state of things and not with the state of things in itself. Let me set down as clearly as I can a picture of this distressing good humour of theirs. No one will be surprised that, in the conversations of this avant-garde of culture and critique, a book which had appeared seven years before the war, “Reflexions sur la violence” by Sorel, played an important part. The author’s relentless prognostication of war and anarchy, his characterization of Europe as the war-breeding soil, his theory that the peoples of our continent can unite only in the one idea, that of making war—all justified its public in calling it the book of the day. But even more trenchant and telling was its perception and statement of the fact that in this age of the masses parliamentary discussion must prove entirely inadequate for the shaping of political decisions; that in its stead the masses would have in the future to be provided with mythical fictions, devised like primitive battle-cries, to release and activate political energies. This was in fact the crass and inflaming prophecy of the book: that popular myths or rather those proper for the masses would become the vehicle of political action; fables, insane visions, chi-maeras, which needed to have nothing to do with truth or reason or science in order to be creative, to determine the course of life and history, and thus to prove themselves dynamic realities. Not for nothing, of course, did the book bear its alarming title; for it dealt with violence as the triumphant antithesis of truth. It made plain that the fate of truth was bound up with the fate of the individual, yes, identical with it: being for both truth and the individual a cheapening, a devaluation. It opened a mocking abyss between truth and power, truth and life, truth and the community. It showed by implication that precedence belonged far more to the community; that truth had the community as its goal, and that whoever would share in the community must be prepared to scrap considerable elements of truth and science and line up for the sacrificium intellectus.
And now imagine (here is the “clear picture” I promised to give) how these gentlemen, scientists themselves, scholars and teachers—Vogler, Unruhe, Holzschuher, Institoris, and Breisacher as well-revelled in a situation which for me had about it so much that was terrifying, and which they regarded as either already in full swing or inevitably on the way. They amused themselves by imagining a legal process in which one of these mass myths was up for discussion in the service of the political drive for the undermining of the bourgeois social order. Its protagonists had to defend themselves against the charge of lying and falsification; but plaintiff and defendant did not so much attack each other as in the most laughable way miss each other’s points. The fantastic thing was the mighty apparatus of scientific witness which was invoked—quite futilely—to prove that humbug was humbug and a scandalous affront to truth. For the dynamic, historically creative fiction, the so-called lie and falsification, in other words the community-forming belief, was simply inaccessible to this line of attack. Science strove, on the plane of decent, objective truth, to confute the dynamic lie; but arguments on that plane could only seem irrelevant to the champions of the dynamic, who merely smiled a superior smile. Science, truth—good God! The dramatic expositions of the group were possessed by the spirit and the accent of that ejaculation. They could scarcely contain their mirth at the desperate campaign waged by reason and criticism against wholly untouchable, wholly invulnerable belief. And with their united powers they knew how to set science in a light of such comic impotence that even the “beautiful princes,” in their childlike way, were brilliantly entertained. The happy board did not hesitate to prescribe to justice, which had to say the last word and pronounce the judgment, the same self-abnegation which they themselves practised. A jurisprudence that wished to rest on popular feeling and not to isolate itself from the community could not venture to espouse the point of view of theoretic, anti-communal, so-called truth; it had to prove itself modern as well as patriotic, patriotic in the most modern sense, by respecting the fruitful falsum, acquitting its apostles, and dismissing science with a flea in its ear.
“Oh yes, yes, yes, certainly, one may say so” —thump, thump.
Although I felt sick at my stomach, I would not play the spoilsport; I showed no repugnance, but rather joined as well as I could in the general mirt
h; particularly since this did not necessarily mean agreement but only, at least provisionally, a smiling, gratified intellectual recognition of what was or was to be. I did once suggest that “if we wanted to be serious for a moment,” we might consider whether a thinking man, to whom the extremity of our situation lay very much at heart, would not perhaps do better to make truth and not the community his goal, since the latter would indirectly and in the long run be better served by truth, even the bitter truth, than by a train of thought which proposed to serve it at the expense of truth, but actually, by such denial, destroyed from within in the most unnatural way the basis of genuine community. Never in my life have I made a remark that fell more utterly and completely flat than this one. I admit that it was a tactless remark, unsuited to the prevailing intellectual climate, and permeated with an idealism of course well known, only too well known, well known to the point of being bad taste, and merely embarrassing to the new ideas. Much better was it for me to chime in with the others; to look at the new, to explore it, and instead of offering it futile and certainly boring opposition, to adapt my conceptions to the course of the discussion and in the frame of them to make myself a picture of the future and of a world even now, if unawares, in the throes of birth—and this no matter how I might be feeling in the pit of my stomach.
It was an old-new world of revolutionary reaction, in which the values bound up with the idea of the individual—shall we say truth, freedom, law, reason?—were entirely rejected and shorn of power, or else had taken on a meaning quite different from that given them for centuries. Wrenched away from the washed-out theoretic, based on the relative and pumped full of fresh blood, they were referred to the far higher court of violence, authority, the dictatorship of belief—not, let me say, in a reactionary, anachronistic way as of yesterday or the day before, but so that it was like the most novel setting back of humanity into medievally theocratic conditions and situations. That was as little reactionary as though one were to describe as regression the track round a sphere, which of course leads back to where it started. There it was: progress and reaction, the old and the new, the past and the future became one; the political Right more and more coincided with the Left. That thought was free, that research worked without assumptions: these were conceptions which, far from representing progress, belonged to a superseded and uninteresting world. Freedom was given to thought that it might justify force; just as seven hundred years ago reason had been free to discuss faith and demonstrate dogma; for that she was there, and for that today thinking was there, or would be there tomorrow. Research certainly had assumptions—of course it had! They were force, the authority of the community; and indeed they were so taken for granted as such that science never came upon the thought that perhaps it was not free. Subjectively, indeed, it was free, entirely so, within an objective restraint so native and incorporate that it was in no way felt as a fetter. To make oneself clear as to what was coming and to get rid of the silly fear of it one need only remind oneself that the absoluteness of definite premises and sacrosanct conditions had never been a hindrance to fancy and individual boldness of thought. On the contrary: precisely because from the very first mediaeval man had received a closed intellectual frame from the Church as something absolute and taken for granted, he had been far more imaginative than the burgher of the individualist age; he had been able to surrender himself far more freely and sure-footedly to his personal fantasy.