10. Doctor Faustus chapter XIV - part 1

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p111 Mystic numbers are not much in my line; I had been concerned to see that they fascinated Adrian, whose interest in them had been a long time clearly though silently in evidence. But I feel a certain involuntary approval of the fact that the number thirteen, so generally considered unlucky, stands at the head of the foregoing chapter. I am almost tempted to think that there is more than chance at work here... I would willingly have given the unlucky numeral to the whole corpus of memories of our student years at Halle; for as I said before, the air of that town, the theological air, did not suit me, and my guest visits to Adrian’s courses were a sacrifice which, with mixed feelings, I made to our friendship.

...I did it of my own free will, only out of the imperative desire to hear what he heard, know what he learned, to “keep track” of him -- for that always seemed to me highly necessary, though at the same time futile. A peculiarly painful combination that: necessity and futility. I was clear in my own mind that this was a life which one might indeed watch over, but not change, not influence; and my urge to keep a constant eye on my friend, not to stir from his side, had about it something like premonition of the fact that it would one day be my task to set down an account of the impressions that moulded his early life...

[The Christian Society Winfried, which Adrian just barely belonged to, is introduced along with its key members, to which I will assign colors to make the conversations that follow easier to follow: Baworinski, Konrad Deutschlin, Dungersheim, Hubmeyer, Matthaeus Arzt, Schappeler, Teutleben.]

p114 ...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 feelings, 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...

The neighborhood of Halle is a sandy plain, admittedly without charm. But a train conveys you in a few hours up the Saale into lovely Thuringia, [see also here] 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 shank’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 Deutchlin reduced the subject when we discussed it in our loft before falling asleep, by the wan light of the stable lantern in the corner...

It occurs to me here that, from this point of view, the bourgeois are doubly removed from nature. First there's the separation resulting from "the fall" or from Prometheus's "gift." But then, on top of that, while the peasant and the lord have a "natural" relationship and place in nature, the bourgeois exists outside that "sphere" (you'll get that joke next post) and is in fact antithetical to it.

p116 ...[Adrian] “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.”

p117 ... [Deutschlin] “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 [“the folk,” again], 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 delude us into a notion of our uncommon youthfulness.”

A Brief History of Germany

After suffering humiliation at the hands of Napoleon and the French in 1806, Prussia had come out of the Napoleonic Wars as the strongest military power on the continent. But in 1848 the Kingdom of Prussia still ranked second to Austria in the German Confederation. In 1866 the fight for dominance within German lands was won by Prussia when Austria, Bavaria, Württemberg, Saxony, and Hanover were defeated in battle. The United Kingdom (Victoria, of the House of Hanover) refused to get involved in the defense of Hanover. I mention this to remind us that this was not about nation states so much as about the German Houses of Hohenzollern (the Prussians), Habsburg (the Austrians), and Hanover. (Also, the defense of Hanover had been central to British foreign policy since the reign of George I.) Prussia took control of Hanover, Hesse-Kassel, Nassau, and Frankfurt along with full control of Schleswig-Holstein. The 21 states north of the Main River now formed the North German Confederation under Prussia.

After the Franco-Prussian War in 1870, Baden, Württemberg and Bavaria joined the North German Confederation to form a German Empire. Wilhelm Friedrich Ludwig of the House of Hohenzollern was proclaimed German Emperor on 18 January 1871 at Versailles. The franchise, in Prussia proper, was severely limited, meaning the most populous areas of Germany were conservative if not reactionary (after 1918 these same areas would become a stronghold of the left when industrial workers were finally given the vote.)

Meanwhile the Revolutions of 1848 in Germany lead to large scale emigration,

The middle-class elements [in Germany] were committed to liberal principles, while the working class sought radical improvements to their working and living conditions. As the middle class and working class components of the Revolution split, the conservative aristocracy defeated it. Liberals were forced into exile to escape political persecution, where they became known as Forty-Eighters. Many immigrated to the United States, settling from Wisconsin to Texas.

-Source

Over 5 million Germans immigrated to the United States alone during the nineteenth century (source). I am particularly aware of this particular diaspora since I am a result of it (along with the diaspora of Scots which continued into the 19th century). It is relatively easy to see how this influx of largely educated, middle-class Germans shaped the development of the United States, but it is harder to know for sure how it affected Germany. Still, it is hard to imagine that this filtering of the German people didn’t in some way shape the weltanschauung of the people of the newly unified German Empire. Would the descendants of the "Forty-Eighters" -- had they still remained in Germany -- have bought the bill of goods Hitler was selling in the 1930's? Alas, hypothetical questions have no answer.

At least these thoughts run through my mind as I read the debates of these young German students from around 1904.

(Here's an insight into the German mind: Somewhere I ran into a description of a very complex and very German recycling system in Zurich. My understand, apparently not entirely accurate, was that the citizen had to buy bags for each type of waste to be recycled. The way I imagined this working was similar to the way you get paper rolls for coins at the bank to "recycle" your loose change (something I also do) -- there would be separate bags for paper, aluminum, tin, and different numbered plastics. I was smitten. I've been trying to convince my local waste company to do something similar if only on a volunteer basis. I could return bags full of perfectly sorted (and cleaned) waste to go directly to the people who process each waste stream. The problem with this scheme is that it involves additional waste (the bags) and there isn't currently a market for many of the plastics.)

p118 “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 migrations 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, Leverkuhn. 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.”

This makes me wonder to what extent, if any, the German “Youth” of the period saw themselves as the Darwinian remnant left behind after their more liberal countrymen fled the Imperial “Unification” of the German states. There is really no mention of regional identity so far, except for the Medieval air we are meant to imagine around Kaisersaschern and Halle. At the start of the Great War the German army, like the British, was raised by region with units representing not the nation as a whole but Hamburg or Württemberg. Strictly speaking they did not all belong to the same army but fought under the direction of the Prussian King and German Emperor.

Also, doesn't much of this sound like it could almost apply to the (self-satisfied) middle-class American youth of the 1960s? And I say that as a member of that age cohort.

“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 [upheaval?] 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.”

Hard not to translate this into contemporary Islamist psychology. And even more that passage about “dying and becoming” a little earlier.

“Do you consider the feeling for religion a distinctively German gift?” asked Adrian.

“In the sense I mean, as soulful youth, as spontaneity, 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?”

p119 “That was long ago. For centuries France has been marked out by history as the European power with the anti-Christian mission [could this be a reflection of France’s non-support of the Hapsburg war against the Ottoman Empire?]. Of Germany the opposite is true, and that you would feel and know, Leverkuhn, if you were not Adrian Leverkuhn -- 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...”

“...I cannot go with you in your radicalism -- which certainly will not long persist, as it is a student license -- 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.”

“Oh, come!” from several voices. But...

[to be continued]

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