by Thomas Mann
“Not anythin’ to do, dear Frau Senator,” said Frau Schweigestill, one finger on her cheek, shaking her head, at sight of the half-sitting, half-lying figure. The same only too convincing sight met my eyes when I hurried over from Freising, having been informed by our landlady on the telephone. I took the wailing mother in my arms, a distressed and consolatory family friend; we stood beside the body together with Frau Schweigestill and Adrian. Dark blue spots of congested blood on Clarissa’s lovely hands and on her face indicated death by quick suffocation, the abrupt paralysis of the organs of breathing by a dose of cyanide large enough to kill a regiment. On the table, empty, the screws taken out of the bottom, was that bronze container, the book with the name Hippocrates in Greek letters, and the skull upon it.
There was a hasty pencilled note to her betrothed, with the words: “Je t’aime. Une fois je t’ai trompé, mais je t’aime.”
The young man came to the funeral, the arrangements for which fell to my lot. He was heart-broken—or rather he was desolé, which of course quite wrongly does not sound quite so serious, somehow a little more like a phrase. I would not cast doubt on the pain with which he cried out: “Ah, monsieur, I loved her enough to pardon her. Everything might have been well—and now—comme ca!”
Yes, “comme ca!” It really might all have been otherwise if he had not been such a son of his family and if Clarissa had had in him a more responsible support.
That night we wrote, Adrian, Frau Schweigestill, and I, while the Frau Senator in the deepest grief sat by the rigid husk of her child, the public announcement of the death. It had to be signed by Clarissa’s nearest relatives, and we were to give it an unmistakably palliating tone. We agreed on a formula which said that the deceased had died after grave and incurable affliction. This was read by the Munich dean on whom I called to get consent for the church service so intensely desired by the Frau Senator. I did not begin too diplomatically, for I naively admitted in confidence that Clarissa had preferred death to a life of dishonour. The man of God, a sturdy cleric of true Lutheran type, would not listen to me. Frankly, it took me some time to understand that on the one hand, indeed, the Church did not wish to see herself put on one side; but on the other she was not ready to give her parting blessing to a declared suicide, however honourable a one. In short, the sturdy cleric wanted nothing else than that I should tell him a lie. So then I came round with almost ridiculous promptness, described the event as incomprehensible; allowed that a mistake, a wrong bottle was quite possible, yes, probable. Whereupon the fat-head showed himself flattered by the weight we attached to the services of his firm and declared himself ready to conduct the funeral.
It took place in the Munich Waldfried cemetery, attended by the whole circle of friends of the Rodde family. Rudi Schwerdtfeger, Zink and Spengler, even Schildknapp, they were all there. The mourning was sincere, for everybody had been fond of poor, proud, pert Clarissa. Inez Institoris, in deepest black, represented her mother, who did not appear. The daughter received the condolences with dignity, her delicate neck stretched out. In this tragic outcome of her sister’s struggle I could not help seeing an ill omen for her own fate. And in speaking with her I got the impression that she rather envied than mourned for her sister. Her husband’s income was more and more reduced by the fall of the exchange, in some circles so desired and promoted. The bulwark of luxury, her protection against life, threatened to fail the frightened woman; it was already doubtful whether they could keep the expensive home on the English Garden. As for Rudi Schwerdtfeger, he had indeed paid Clarissa the last honours; but he left the cemetery as soon as he could after his condolences to the relatives. Adrian commented on their briefness and formality.
This was probably the first time Inez had seen her lover since he broke off their affair—I fear rather brutally, for to do it “nicely” was hardly possible in view of the desperation with which she clung to him. As she stood there beside her slender husband, at her sister’s grave, she was a forsaken woman, and in all likelihood desperately unhappy. But she had gathered round her a little group of women as a consolation and substitute, and they now stood with her, more for her sake than in Clarissa’s honour. To this close little circle, partnership, corporation, club, or what you will, belonged Natalie Knoterich as Inez’s nearest friend; also a divorced woman writer, a Rumanian-Siebenburgerin, author of various farces and mistress of a bohemian salon in Schwabing; the actress Rosa Zwitscher, a performer who frequently displayed great nervous intensity; and one or two other females whom it is unnecessary to describe, especially since I am not certain of their active membership in the group.
The cement that bound them together was—as the reader is already prepared to hear—morphine. It was an extremely strong bond; for the confraternity not only helped each other out with their unhealthy partnership in the drug that was their bliss and bane; but also on the moral side there exists a sad yet tender mutual respect and solidarity among the slaves of the craving. In this case the sinners were also held together by a definite philosophy or motto originating with Inez Institoris and subscribed to by all the five or six friends. Inez, that is, espoused the view—I have on occasion heard it from her lips—that pain is an indignity, that it is shameful to suffer. But quite aside from that concrete and particular humiliation from physical or emotional suffering, life in and for itself, mere existence, animal existence, was an ignoble fetter and unworthy burden, and it was nothing less than noble and high-minded, it was an exercise of a human right, it was intellectually justifiable to slough off the burden, so to speak, to win freedom, ease, an as it were bodiless well-being by providing the physical with the blessed stuff which purveyed such emancipation from suffering.
That such a philosophy took in its stride the physically ruinous consequences of the self-indulgent habit, belonged obviously to its nobility, and probably it was the consciousness of their common early ruin that stimulated the companions to such tenderness, yes, to being tenderly in love with each other. Not without repulsion did I observe their raptures, the lighting up of their glances, their gushing embraces and kisses when they met in society. Yet I confess my private impatience with this dispensation—confess it with a certain surprise, since I do not at all care for myself in the role of carping pharisee. It may be the sentimental disingenuousness to which the vice leads, or is always immanent in it, that causes my unconquerable distaste. Moreover I took amiss the reckless indifference to her children which Inez displayed as this evil habit grew on her; it stamped as false all her pretended devotion to her coddled little white-skinned darlings. In short, the woman had become deeply offensive to me after I knew and saw what she let herself in for. She perfectly saw that I had given her up, and repaid the perception with a smile which in its hysterical malice reminded me of that other smile on her face when for two hours on end she had assumed my human sympathy with her love and her lust.
Indeed, she had small ground to be cheerful; for the way she debased herself was a sorry sight. Probably she took over-doses, which did not increase her animation but reduced her to a state in which she could not appear in public. Mme Zwitscher acted more brilliantly by the help of the drug, and it actually heightened Natalie Knoterich’s charm. But it happened repeatedly to poor Inez that she came half-dazed to the table and sat with glazed eyes and nodding head with her eldest daughter and her worried and petty little husband, at the still well-kept-up board sparkling with silver and glass. But one admission I will make: Inez, as we know, committed a few years later a capital crime, which aroused general horror and put an end to her bourgeois existence. I shuddered at the awful deed; at the same time, in memory of my old friendship, I felt almost, nay, I felt definitely proud that in all her sunken state she found the strength, the furious energy to commit it.
CHAPTER XXXVI
O Germany, thou art undone! And I am mindful of thy hopes. Those hopes, I mean, which you aroused (it may even be that you did not share them) after your former relatively mild collapse and the abdication
of the Empire. The world then placed on you certain hopes; and you seemed—aside from that reckless, utterly crazy, desperate, and hysterical “inflation” of your own misery, the giddy heavenward climb of the exchange—that aside, you seemed for some years to be about to justify, to some extent, those hopes.
True, the fantastic improprieties of that period, a deliberate attempt to make faces at the rest of the world, were really not unlike what we have seen since 1933 and of course since 1939. On a smaller scale they too were monstrously incredible and exaggerated; the scene displayed the same vicious san-culottism. But the debauch on ‘change, the bombast of despair did one day come to an end; the face of our economic life lost its distorted, insane grimace and assumed a look of returning sanity. An epoch of psychological convalescence seemed to be dawning. There was some hope for Germany of social progress in peace and freedom; of adult and forward-looking effort; of a voluntary adaptation of our thoughts and feelings to those of the normal world. Despite all her inherent weakness and self-hatred, this was beyond a doubt the meaning and the hope of the German republic—again, the hope I mean is the one she awakened in the world outside. It was an attempt, a not utterly and entirely hopeless attempt (the second since the failure of Bismarck and his unification performance) to normalize Germany in the sense of Europeanizing or “democratizing” it, of making it part of the social life of peoples. Who will deny that much honest belief in the possibility of this process was alive in the other countries? Who will dispute the existence of a hopeful movement, plain to see on every hand among us Germans, save in this or that unregenerate spot—for instance typically in our good city of Munich?
I am speaking of the twenties of the twentieth century, in particular of course of their second half, which quite seriously witnessed nothing less than a shift of the cultural centre from France to Germany. It is a telling fact that, as I mentioned earlier, the first performance of Adrian Leverkühn’s apocalyptic oratorio took place in Germany—or more precisely its first complete performance. The scene was Frankfurt, always one of the most friendly and free-minded cities in the Reich. Even so, it did not come about without angry opposition, bitter reproaches and outcries against the piece as a mockery of art, an expression of nihilism, a crime against music, in short, to use the current and fashionable condemnation, as a specimen of cultural Bolshevism. But the work, and the audacity which presented it, found intelligent and eloquent defenders: about the year 1927 courageous friendliness to the outer world and the cause of freedom was at its height, as an offset to the nationalistic-Wagnerian-romantic forces of reaction, at home particularly in Munich. It was certainly an element of our public life in the first half of the decade. I am thinking of cultural events like the Music Festival in Weimar in 1920 and the first one at Donaueschingen in the following year. On both occasions, unfortunately in the absence of the composer, some works of Leverkühn were given, together with those of other artists representative of the new intellectual and musical attitude. The audience was by no means unreceptive; I might say that they were, in the field of art, republican-minded. In Weimar the Cosmic Symphony was conducted by Bruno Walter with a particularly sure rhythmical sense. At the festival in Baden, in cooperation with Hans Platner’s famous marionette theatre, they gave all five pieces of the Gesta Romanorum—an experience ravishing the feelings to and fro between pious emotion and laughter as never before.
But I would also recall the share which German artists and friends of art had in the founding of the International Society for Contemporary Music, in 1922, and the performances by the society two years later in Prague, when choral and instrumental portions of Adrian’s Apocalypsis cum figuris were given before a public including famous guests from all the lands of music. The composition had already appeared in print, not, like Leverkühn’s earlier work, published by Schott in Mainz but by the “Universal Editions” in Vienna, whose youthful editor Dr. Edelmann was scarcely thirty years old but already played an influential part in the musical life of central Europe. One day Edelmann bobbed up unexpectedly in Pfeiffering, in fact even before the Apocalypse was finished (it was in the weeks of interruption through the attack of illness) to offer the guest of the Schweigestills his service as editor and publisher. The visit was supposed to be in connection with an article on Adrian’s work, which had recently appeared in the advanced radical Vienna musical magazine Anbruch, from the pen of the Hungarian musicologist and culture-philosopher Desiderius Feher. Feher had expressed himself with great warmth about the high intellectual level and religious content of the music; its pride and despair, its diabolic cleverness, amounting to afflatus; he invoked the attention of the world of culture, with ardour increased by the writer’s confessed chagrin at not having himself discovered this most interesting and thrilling phenomenon. He had, as he put it, needed to be guided from outside, from above, from a sphere higher than all learning, the sphere of love and faith, in a word the eternal feminine. In short the article, which mingled the analytical with the lyrical in a way congenial to its theme, gave one a glimpse, even though in very vague outline, of a female figure who was its real inspirer: a sensitive woman, wise and well-informed, actively at work for her faith. But as Dr. Edelmann’s visit had turned out to be prompted by the Vienna publication, one might say that indirectly it too was an effect of that fine and scrupulous love and energy in the background.
Only indirectly? I am not quite sure. I think it possible that the young musician and man of business may have received direct stimulation, suggestion, and instruction from that sphere, and I am strengthened in my guess by the fact that he knew more than the rather mystery-making article had allowed itself to tell. He knew the name and mentioned it—not at once, not as accepted fact, but in the course of the conversation, towards the end. In the beginning he had almost been refused admission; then, when he had managed to get himself received, he had asked Leverkühn to tell him about his present work and he heard about the oratorio. Was that for the first time? I doubt it. Adrian was suffering almost to the point of collapse; but in the end was prevailed upon to play, in the Nike room, considerable portions from the manuscript, whereupon Dr. Edelmann secured it on the spot for the “Editions.” The contract came from the Bayerischer Hof in Munich next day. But before he left he had asked Adrian, using the Viennese mode of address modelled on the French: “Meister, do you know” (I think he even said “Does Meister know”) “Frau von Tolna?”
I am about to do something that would, in a novel, break all the canons: I mean to introduce into the narrative an invisible character. This invisible figure is Frau von Tolna and I cannot set her before the reader’s eye or give the smallest idea of her outward appearance, for I have not seen her and never had a description of her, since no one I know ever saw her either. I leave it an open question whether Dr. Edelmann himself, or only that associate editor of the Anbruch who was a countryman of hers, could boast of her acquaintance. As for Adrian, he answered in the negative the question put by the Viennese. He did not know the lady, he said; but he did not, in his turn, ask who she was, nor did Edelmann give any explanation of his question, other than merely by saying: “At all events, you have” (or “Meister has”) “no warmer admirer than she.”
Obviously he regarded the negative reply as the conditioned and guarded truth that it was. Adrian could answer as he did because his relation to the Hungarian noblewoman lacked any personal contact; I may add that by mutual consent it was always to lack it, to the end. It is another matter that for a long time they had carried on a correspondence, in which she showed herself the shrewdest and most initiate connoisseur of his work, the most devoted friend, confidante, and counsellor, unconditionally and unfailingly at his service; while on his side he went to the furthest limits of communicativeness and confidingness of which a solitary soul like his is capable. We know of those other needy, yearning female beings who by selfless devotion won a modest niche in the life-history of this certainly immortal genius. Here now is a third, of quite different mould, no
t only equalling in disinterestedness those other simpler souls, but even excelling them in the ascetic renunciation of any direct approach, the inviolable observance of his privacy, the aloofness, the restraint, the persistent invisibility. None of this, of course, was due to shyness or awkwardness, for this was a woman of the world, who to the hermit of Pfeiffering did really represent the world: the world as he loved it, needed it, and so far as he could stand it; the world at a distance, keeping itself removed out of tact and good sense.
I set down here what I know of this extraordinary being. Mme de Tolna was the wealthy widow of a dissipated nobleman, who however had not died of his excesses but in a racing accident. She was left childless, the owner of a palace in Budapest, a vast estate a few hours south of the capital, near Stuhlweissenburg, between the Plattensee and the Danube, and besides these a castellated villa on the same lake, Balaton. The estate, with its splendid, comfortably modernized eighteenth-century manor-house, comprised enormous wheat-growing tracts and extensive sugar-beet plantations, the harvests being manufactured in refining works on the property itself. None of these residences—palatial town house, manorial estate, or summer villa—did the owner occupy for long at a time. Mostly, one may say almost always, she was travelling, leaving her homes, to which she obviously did not cling, from which restlessness or painful memories drove her away, to the care of managers and major-domos. She lived in Paris, Naples, Egypt, the Engadine, attended from place to place by a lady’s maid, a male official something like a courier and quartermaster, and a body-physician for her sole service, which made one suspect that she was in delicate health.