20. Doctor Faustus - chapter XXII - part 2 + Ackerman on music

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[continued from p190]

My tendency is to skip much of the talk about Adrian’s music, except where it connects to important things to come (or where, as here, it also reminds me quite vividly of one of the annoying writers covered in the previous blog)

[Zeitblom] “You are thinking of Beethoven.”

“Of him and of the technical principle through which a dominating subjectivity got hold of the musical organization; I mean the development, or working out. The development itself had been a small part of the sonata, a modest republic of subjective illumination and dynamic. With Beethoven it becomes universal, becomes the centre of the whole form, which, even where it is supposed to remain conventional, is absorbed by the subjective and is newly created in freedom. The form of variations, something archaic, a residuum, becomes a means by which to infuse new life into form. The principle of development plus variation technique extends over the whole sonata. It does that in Brahms, as thematic working-out, even more radically. Take him as an example of how subjectivity turns into objectivity. In him music abstains from all conventional flourishes, formulas, and residua and so to speak creates the unity of the work anew at every moment, out of freedom. But precisely on that account freedom becomes the principle of an all-round economy that leaves in music nothing casual, and develops the utmost diversity while adhering to the identical material. Where there is nothing unthematic left, nothing which could not show itself to derive from the same basic material, there one can no longer speak of a ‘free style!”

This is starting to remind me of someone from my previous blog, who is it? Raymond Roussel! Here is a quote from James Miller’s book, quoted in my blog, about Roussel,

The invention of new language-games was something of a mania with Roussel, who elaborated his extraordinary and often sinister fantasies with the deadpan humor, and mock-scientific attention to detail, of a Rube Goldberg... Roussel submitted himself to a variety of arbitrary but rigorous rules for composing his poems and novels. Obsessed with puns, he liked to build narratives around homophonic structures: words and entire sentences that sounded identical, yet had completely different meanings...

p191 “And not of the ‘strict style’ in the old sense, either!”

“Old or new, I will tell you what I understand by ‘strict style.’ I mean the complete integration of all musical dimensions, their neutrality toward each other due to complete organization.”

“Do you see a way to do that?”

“Do you know,” he countered, “when I came nearest to the ‘strict style’?”

I waited. He spoke so low as to be hard to hear, and between his teeth, as he used to when he had headache.

“Once in the Brentano cycle,” he said, “in, ‘O lieb Madel.’ That song is entirely derived from a fundamental figure, a series of interchangeable intervals, the five notes B, E, A, E, E-flat, and the horizontal melody and the vertical harmony are determined and controlled by it, in so far as that is possible with a basic motif of so few notes. [This is where he wrote Esmeralda’s name into the score.] It is like a word, a key word, stamped on everything in the song, which it would like to determine entirely. But it is too short a word and is itself not flexible enough. The tonal space it affords is too limited. One would have to go on from here and make larger words out of the twelve letters, as it were, of the tempered semitone alphabet. Words of twelve letters, certain combinations and interrelations of the twelve semitones, series of notes from which a piece and all the movements of a work must strictly derive. Every note of the whole composition, both melody and harmony, would have to show its relation to this fixed fundamental series. Not one might recur until the other notes have sounded. Not one might appear which did not fulfill its function in the whole structure. There would no longer be a free note. That is what I would call ‘strict composition.’”

“A striking thought,” said I. “Rational organization through and through, one might indeed call it. You would gain an extraordinary unity and congruity, a sort of astronomical regularity and legality would be obtained thereby. But when I picture it to myself, it seems to me that the unchanged recurrence of such a succession of intervals, even when used in different parts of the texture, and in rhythmic variations, would result in a probably unavoidable serious musical impoverishment and stagnation.”

p192 “Probably,” he answered, with a smile which showed that he had been prepared for this reservation...

“And it is not so simple either. One must incorporate into the system all possible techniques of variation, including those decried as artificial; that is, the means which once helped the ‘development’ to win its hold over the sonata... In addition to being a fundamental series it [the twelve-note word] could find application in this way, that every one of its intervals is replaced by its inversion. Again, one could begin the figure with its last note and finish it on its first, and then invert this figure as well... A composition can also use two or more series as basic material, as in the double and triple fugue. The decisive factor is that every note, without exception, has significance and function according to its place in the basic series or its derivatives. That would guarantee what I call the indifference to harmony and melody.”

“A magic square,” I said. “But do you hope to have people hear all that?”

[A reminder of the concept of visual music from an earlier chapter, the way music appears to the eye on the page] ... If by ‘hearing’ you understand the precise realization in detail of the means by which the highest and strictest order is achieved... no, that way one would not hear it. But this order one will or would hear, and the perception of it would afford an unknown aesthetic satisfaction.”

“Very remarkable,” said I. “The way you describe the thing, it comes to a sort of composing before composition. The whole disposition and organization of the material would have to be ready when the actual work should begin, and all one asks is: which is the actual work? For this preparation of the material is done by variation, and the creative element in variation, which one might call the actual composition, would be transferred back to the material itself -- together with the freedom of the composer. When he went to work, he would no longer be free.”

p193 “Bound by a self-imposed compulsion to order, hence free.”[Roussel]

“Well, of course the dialectic of freedom is unfathomable. But he could scarcely be called a free inventor of his harmony. Would not the making of chords be left to chance and accident?”

“Say, rather, to the context. The polyphonic dignity of every chord-forming note would be guaranteed by the constellation. The historical events -- the emancipation of dissonance from its resolution, its becoming ‘absolute’ as it appears already in some passages of the later Wagner -- would warrant any combination of notes which can justify itself before the system.”

“And if the constellation produced the banal: consonance, common-chord harmonics, the worn-out, the diminished seventh?” [so I was right about increasing dissonance in music back in the last blog]

“That would be a rejuvenation of the worn-out by the constellation.”

“I see there is a restorative element in your Utopia. It is very radical, but it relaxes the prohibition which after all already hung over consonance. The return to the ancient forms of variation is a similar sign.”

“More interesting phenomena,” he responded, “probably always have this double face of past and future, probably are always progressive and regressive in one. They display the equivocalness of life itself.”

“Is that not a generalization?”

“Of what?”

“Of our domestic experiences as a nation?”

“Oh, let us not be indiscreet! Or flatter ourselves either. All I want to say is that our objections -- if they are meant as objections -- would not count against the fulfillment of the old, the ever repeated demand to take hold and make order, and to resolve the magic essence of music into human reason.”

“You want to put me on my honour as a humanist,” said I.“Human reason! And besides, excuse me; ‘constellation’ is your every other word. But surely it belongs more to astrology. The rationalism you call for has a good deal of superstition about it -- of belief in the incomprehensibility and vaguely daemonc, the kind of thing we have in games of chance, fortune-telling with cards, and shaking dice. Contrary to what you say, your system seems to me more calculated to dissolve human reason in magic.”

p194 He carried his closed hand to his brow.

“Reason and magic,” said he, “may meet and become one in that which one calls wisdom, initiation; in belief in the stars, in numbers. . . .”

I did not go on, as I saw that he was in pain...

We spoke little on the rest of the way home, I recall that we paused by the Cow Trough [a pond]...

“Cold,” said Adrian, motioning with his head; “much too cold to bathe. -- Cold,” he repeated a moment later, this time with a definite shiver, and turned away.

SZ [AL?] seeks to combine the archaic with the revolutionary within the strictest possible form. First mentions of a 12-tone system. To learn more about Schönberg’s 12-tone system, go Here or Here. [Or you could check out Vi Hart's Twelve Tones video Here.]

-Dartmouth guide to Dr. Faustus

Ackerman on music

[From A Natural History of the Senses] p203 ...From the outset, our brains and nervous systems have led us to prefer certain intervals between sounds. Our instruments have evolved from a deep inner delight in music, but one that has boundaries. Much of what we hear strikes us as dissonance or as noise, and what falls within a certain range we find sweet, intellectually satisfying, and mellifluous...

p208 There are still many questions to be answered about music and emotion. In his fascinating book on music theory, The Language of Music; Deryck Cooke, for example, offers a musical vocabulary, spelling out the emotional effects a composer knows he can create with certain sounds. But why is this so? Do we tend to respond to a minor seventh with “mournfulness” and to a major seventh with “violent longing” and to a minor second with “spiritless anguish” because we’ve formed the habit of responding to those sounds in that way, or is it something more intrinsic in our makeup? Listen to Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, and you’ll hear pent-up, soaring, frustrated emotion of an intensity that may drive you to distraction. Yearning overflows the music like the meniscus on a too-full glass of wine, and this is how Wagner himself described the work:

. . . a tale of endless yearning, longing, the bliss and wretchedness of love; world, power, fame, honour, chivalry, loyalty, and friendship all blown away like an insubstantial dream; one thing alone left living -- longing, longing, unquenchable, a yearning, a hunger, an anguish forever renewing itself; one sole redemption -- death, surcease, a sleep without awakening.

... When he wrote the “Gloria” [in the Missa Solemnis], Beethoven underwent a volcanic, shriek-to-the-heavens joy, but instead of dancing around in delight, he “felt the need to convert it into a permanent, stored-up, transportable, and reproducible form of energy,” as Cooke describes it, “a musical shout for joy, as it were, that all the world might hear, and still hear over and over again after he was dead and gone.” The notes he jotted down “only ever were and only ever will be a command from Beethoven to blow his eternal shout for joy, together with a set of instructions . . . exactly how to do so.” When we proclaim that artists live on in their work, we’re usually referring to the emotional steppingstones that lead through their lives, their disembodied moods and obsessions, but most of all their senses. Beethoven may be dead, but his sense of life at that moment lives in his score at this moment, at any moment...


p211 A single chord is a calling card and, at that, a mighty simple chord, based on universally shared mathematics. This is an old idea, going back to the Greeks and the music of the spheres. There has always been a connection between music and mathematics, which is why scientists have often been inordinately fond of music, especially of composers such as Bach. The composer Borodin was first and mainly a scientist, who discovered a method for combining fluorine and carbon atoms to produce new compounds. We’re indebted to his inspiration for Teflon, Freon, and a variety of aerosols [written before “aerosols” was a term requiring ambiguous comment]. His hobby was composing music... Some West German physicists are studying the relationship between musical composition and the mathematics of fractals [and a time before the reunification of Germany]. Why is music mathematical? Because, as Pythagoras of Samos discovered in the fifth century B.C., notes can be precisely measured along a vibrating string [another reminder of string theory], and the intervals between notes expressed as ratios... This revelation, that mathematics was secretly determining the beauty of music, must have seemed just one more indisputable proof to the mathematically minded Greeks that the universe was an orderly, logical, knowable structure... 

p213 ... For the past 2,500 years or so, Western music has been obsessed with one polyphonic arrangement of tones, but there are many other arrangements, each as profoundly meaningful as the next and yet incomprehensible to outsiders... According to the composer Felix Mendelssohn. Words are arbitrary. There’s no direct link between them and the emotions they represent. Instead, they lasso an idea of emotion and drag it into view for a moment. We need words to corral how we feel and think; they allow us to reveal our inner lives to one another, as well as to exchange goods and services. But music is a controlled outcry from the quarry of emotions all humans share. Though most foreign words must be translated to be understood, we instinctively understand whimpering, crying, shrieking, joy, cooing, sighing, and the rest of our caravan of cries and calls... What sort of response can a few notes of music awaken? Awe, rage, wonder, restlessness, defeat, stoicism, love, patriotism. . . .


p215 Of course, there is an odd sense in which music can’t really be heard at all. Much of musical composition is tonal problem solving on a very complex scale, an effort undertaken entirely in the mind of the composer. Not only is the orchestra not necessary for that creative feat of legerdemain, it most likely will produce an inferior version of the music the composer imagines. How could Beethoven write the Ninth Symphony so brilliantly when he was deaf, people wonder. The answer is that it wasn’t necessary for Beethoven to “hear” the music. Not as sound, anyway. He heard it flawlessly and much more intimately in his mind. Everyone touched by a piece of music hears it differently. The composer hears it perfectly in the resonant chambers of his imagination. The general audience hears it emotionally, without understanding its craft. Other composers hear it with an insider’s knowledge of form, structure, history, and incunabula. The members of an orchestra -- arranged according to instrument -- hear it boomingly, from “inside,” but not as a balanced work...

You will, I hope, appreciate why I’ve quoted this here, but I also have to say something critical about what Ackerman says. As true as this passage undoubtedly is, it is not the whole truth. As with art in general, the composer’s understanding of the music he is creating is not the only valid way of understanding that creation... especially over time. The resonant emotions may possibly remain the same, but the effect or interpretation of those emotions are likely to change. Would a perceptive German listener have heard Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde the same way in 1947, when Doctor Faustus was published, as when it was originally performed? Music, and also the German spirit Wagner mined, had changed over the decades.

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19. Doctor Faustus - chapter XXII - part 1

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[The wedding of Adrian’s sister, Ursula, is celebrated back in Buchel, his home town. The future children of this couple are mentioned including the youngest, Nepomuk by name, who we are told will feature in our story at the end.] p186 Adrian and I took a walk that afternoon to the Cow Trough and up Mount Zion. We needed to talk over the text of Love’s Labour’s Lost, which I had undertaken [translation into German] and about which we had already had much discussion and correspondence...

He was visibly glad to get away from the wedding party and out of doors. The cloud over his eyes showed that he was suffering from headache. It had been odd, in church and at the table, to see the same sign in his father too... [funny that Mann gets the inherited nature of this right while jumping on the syphilitic-Nietzsche bandwagon. Of course that does work well for his plot purpose here while also reinforcing his own beliefs about disease and art.]

p186 ...He spoke particularly of the favourable impression that Ursel’s betrothed, now her husband, had made upon him.

“Good eyes,” he said. “Good stock, a sound, clean, honest man. He could court her, look at her to desire her, covet her as a Christian wife, as we theologians say with justified pride at swindling the Devil out of the carnal concomitant and making a sacrament of it, the sacrament of Christian marriage. Very droll, really, this turning the natural and sinful into the sacrosanct just by putting in the word Christian -- by which it is not fundamentally altered. But one has to admit that the domestication of sex, which is evil by nature, into Christian marriage was a clever makeshift.”

p187 “I do not like,” I replied, “to have you make over the natural to evil. Humanism, old and new, considers that an aspersion on the sources of life.”

“My dear chap, there is not much there to asperse.”

“One ends, I said undeterred, “by denying the works of God; one becomes the advocate of nothing. Who believes in the Devil, already belongs to him.”

He gave his short laugh.

“You never understand a joke. I spoke as a theologian and so necessarily like a theologian.” ...

“And they twain shall be one flesh,” he began again: “Is it not a curious blessing? Pastor Schroder, thank God, spared himself that quotation. In the presence of the bridal pair it is rather painful to hear. But it is only too well meant, and precisely what I mean by domestication. Obviously the element of sin, of sensuality, of evil lust altogether, is conjured away out of marriage -- for lust is certainly only in flesh of two different kinds, not in one, and that they are to be one flesh is accordingly soothing but nonsensical. On the other hand, one cannot wonder enough that one flesh has lust for another; it is a phenomenon -- well, yes, the entirely exceptional phenomenon of love. Of course, love and sensuality are not to be separated. One best absolves love from the reproach of sensuality by identifying the love element in sensuality itself. The lust after strange flesh means a conquest of previously existing resistances, based on the strangeness of I and You, your own and the other person’s. The flesh -- to keep the Christian terminology -- is normally inoffensive to itself only. With another’s it will have nothing to do. Now, if all at once the strange flesh become the object of desire and lust, then the relation of the I and the You is altered in a way for which sensuality is only an empty word. No, one cannot get along without the concept of love, even when ostensibly there is nothing spiritual in play. Every sensual act means tenderness, it is a give and take of desire, happiness through making happy, a manifestation of love. ‘One flesh’ have lovers never been; and the prescription would drive love along with lust out of marriage.” [If Adrian wooed his Esmeralda in this wise I hope she charged him extra.]

p188 I was peculiarly upset and bewildered by his words and took care not to look at him... he had never come out of himself like this, and it seemed to me that there was something explicit and unlike him about the way he spoke, a kind of tactlessness too, against himself and also against his auditor... Yet with the sense of it I was entirely in sympathy.

“Well roared, lion!” I said, as lightly as possible. “That is what I call standing up to it! No, you have nothing to do with the Devil. You do know that you have spoken much more as a humanist than as a theologian?”

“Let us say a psychologist,” he responded. “A neutral position. But they are, I think, the most truth-loving people.”...

[Zeitblom then informs Adrian that he intends to marry his Helene. Though, of course, first he has to introduce the concept of Helene, since he has never mentioned her before. Here’s something that would be tricky to capture on film; after bandying some humorous lines from Shakespeare,] ...”If you knew the girl and the spirit of our bond, then you would know that there is no need to fear for my peace of mind, but that on the contrary everything is directed towards the foundation of love and tranquility, a fixed and undisturbed happiness.”

“I do not doubt it,” said he, “and doubt not of its success.”

A moment he seemed tempted to press my hand, but desisted. There came a pause in the talk, then as we walked home it turned to our all-important topic, the opera, and the scene in the fourth act, [when the messenger gives love letters to the wrong ladies with dire and humorous consequences] with the text of which we had been joking, and which was among those I definitely wanted to leave out...

And here we must take a break from Doctor Faustus to review Love’s Labour’s Lost. As with Salome, this Shakespeare play was obviously not picked at random. Here is some of what Wiki has to say about this early comedy -- or you can go Here for a more complete summary:

Love's Labour's Lost is one of William Shakespeare's early comedies, believed to have been written in the mid-1590s for a performance at the Inns of Court before Queen Elizabeth I. It follows the King of Navarre and his three companions as they attempt to forswear the company of women for three years of study and fasting, and their subsequent infatuation with the Princess of Aquitaine and her ladies. In an untraditional ending for a comedy, the play closes with the death of the Princess's father, and all weddings are delayed for a year. The play draws on themes of masculine love and desire, reckoning and rationalization, and reality versus fantasy.

-Wiki

Ferdinand, the King of Navarre and his three noble companions, the lords Berowne, Dumaine, and Longaville, take an oath not to give in to the company of women. They devote themselves to three years of study and fasting; Berowne agrees somewhat more hesitantly than the others...

The King ultimately chastises the lords for breaking the oath, but Berowne reveals that the King is likewise in love with the Princess. Jaquenetta and Costard enter with Berowne's letter and accuse him of treason. Berowne confesses to breaking the oath, explaining that the only study worthy of mankind is that of love, and he and the other men collectively decide to relinquish the vow...

-Wiki

It has never been among Shakespeare's most popular plays, likely because its pedantic humor and linguistic density are extremely demanding of contemporary theatregoers. The satirical allusions of Navarre's court are likewise inaccessible, "having been principally directed to fashions of language that have long passed away, and [are] consequently little understood, rather than in any great deficiency of invention."

-Wiki

Masculine desire structures the play and helps to shape its action. The men's sexual appetite manifests in their desire for fame and honour; the notion of women as dangerous to masculinity and intellect is established early on. The King and his Lords' desires for their idealized women are deferred, confused, and ridiculed throughout the play. As the play comes to a close, their desire is deferred yet again, resulting in an increased exaltation of the women.

Critic Mark Breitenberg commented that the use of idealistic poetry, popularized by Petrarch, effectively becomes the textualized form of the male gaze. In describing and idealizing the ladies, the King and his Lords exercise a form of control over women they love. Don Armado also represents masculine desire through his relentless pursuit of Jacquenetta. The theme of desire is heightened by the concern of increasing female sexuality throughout the Renaissance period and the subsequent threat of cuckoldry. Politics of love, marriage, and power are equally forceful in shaping the thread of masculine desire that drives the plot.

-Wiki

We are about to get knee deep in a discussion of music, so I’m going to take a short break and note that Mann has created an ideal intellectual situation with the two main characters, as they share the same foundation for their thought. Even more than with Renne and Kukiro and Paloma (in The Elegance of the Hedgehog), they speak the same language.
And, just to buy myself a little more time before I wade into the music: it occurs to me that while Mann is comparing the political and artistic realities of the early 20th century, you could do the same with military art. The Prussian army was a model of organization and conservative excellence that proved itself as sterile -- as out of ideas -- as the other major militaries when faced with the bloodbath of the Great War. And yet, out of that conflict came a new hint of what would follow. A new kind of freedom represented by Blitzkrieg tactics. I have written about (here) the slow development of armored warfare following the Great War, but one aspect of this process was that military men were suddenly cut free from doctrine and forced to find new tactics and principles (though I would argue they could have saved themselves a lot of bother by simply recreating the mature cavalry of the Napoleonic period with vehicles powered by gas replacing horses and mules.)

[to be continued]

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18. Doctor Faustus - chapter XX- XXI

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p160 ...he [Adrian] began to talk about the Church modes and the Ptolemaic or “natural” system, whose six different modes were reduced by the tempered, i.e. the false system to two, major and minor; and about superiority in modulation of the “pure” scale over the tempered one. This he called a compromise for home use, as also the tempered piano was a thing precisely for domestic consumption, a transient peace-pact, not a hundred and fifty years old, which had brought to pass all sorts of considerable things, oh, very considerable, but about which we should not imagine that everything was settled for eternity. He expressed great pleasure over the fact that it was an astronomer and mathematician named Ptolemy, a man from Upper Egypt, living in Alexandria, who had established the best of all known scales, the natural or right one. That proved again, he said, the relation between music and astronomy, as it had been shown already by Pythagoras’ cosmic theory of harmony...

[Speaking of the fourth movement of Beethoven’s Op. 132] ...Only it is vexatious, if you don’t want to call it gratifying, that in music, at least in this music, there are things for which one cannot scare up, out of the whole rich realm of language, do what you like, any properly characterizing epithet or combination of epithets. I have been tormenting myself over that these days: you cannot find any adequate term for the spirit, the attitude, the behaviour of this theme. For there is a lot of behaviour there. Tragic? Bold? Defiant, emphatic, full of elan, the height of nobility? None of them is good. And ‘glorious’ is of course only throwing in your hand. You finally land at the objective direction, the name: Allegro appassionato [fast, lively, with passion]. That is the best after all.”

I confess I quoted that last paragraph because it reminded me of what I said about music being like smell in being impossible to describe... though, in truth,  Mann was going someplace else.

Almost the whole of the remainder of this chapter is taken up with the vivid and altogether excellent description of a new character, Rudiger Schildknapp -- and I want to quote almost all of it. I haven’t repeated any of the character description so far because I don’t think it usually makes much of a difference and I usually don’t pay much attention anyway... but this is so vivid. Not only can I see the man but I know what to expect from him. A classic character.

Unfortunately, the description is also very long and I’m going to skip it for now.

chapter XXI

[Talk of the current state of the World War in Europe. In this case a revival of the U-boat offensive in the Atlantic] p172 ...We owe this success to a new torpedo of fabulous properties which German technicians have succeeded in constructing, and I cannot repress a certain satisfaction over our ever alert spirit of invention, our national gift of not being swerved aside by however many set-backs. It stands wholly and entirely at the service of the regime which brought us into this war, laid the Continent literally at our feet and replaced the intellectual’s dream of a European Germany with the upsetting, rather brittle reality, intolerable, so it seems to the rest of the world, of a German Europe. But my involuntary satisfaction gives way to the thought that such incidental triumphs as the new sinkings or the splendid commando feat of snatching the fallen dictator of Italy from his prison can only serve to arouse false hopes and lengthen out a war which in the view of any reasonable and sensible man can no longer be won...

...I may say that the times are not precisely favourable to the steady pursuance of such a work as this. And, moreover, just during the Munich disorders and executions, [I had never heard of The White Rose. The detail I find most striking, in these days of Islamic State atrocities, is that the six leaders were beheaded by the Gestapo.] I got an influenza with fever and chills, which for ten days confined me to my bed and necessarily affected for some time the physical and mental powers of a man now sixty years old. It is no wonder that spring and summer have passed into autumn, and now autumn is now well advanced, since I committed to paper the first lines of this narrative. Meanwhile we have experienced the destruction of our noble cities from the air, a destruction that would cry to heaven if we who suffer were not ourselves laden with guilt. As it is, the cry is smothered in our throats; like King Claudius’s prayer, it can “never to heaven go.” There is outcry over these crimes against culture, crimes that we ourselves invoked; how strange it sounds in the mouths of those who trod the boards of history as the heralds and bringers of a world-rejuvenating barbarism, reveling in atrocity. Several times the shattering, headlong destruction has come breath-takingly near my retreat. The frightful bombardment of the city of Durer and Willibald Pirkheimer [Nuremberg] was no remote event; and when the last judgement fell on Munich too, I sat pallid, shaking like the walls, the doors, and the windowpanes in my study -- and with trembling hand wrote on at this story of a life. For my hand trembles in any case, on account of my subject; it cannot much matter to me that it trembles a little more due to terror from without.

[Talk of reverses on the Eastern Front] p173 ...With profound consternation we read of the landing of American and Canadian troops [an odd way of putting it. There was one Canadian Infantry Division and one Canadian Tank Brigade but also five British Divisions plus three more British Brigades] on the southeast coast of Sicily, the fall of Syracuse, Catania, Messina, Taormina. We learned, with a mixture of terror and envy -- pierced by the knowledge that we ourselves were not capable of it, in either a good or a bad sense -- how a country whose mental state still permitted it to draw the foregone conclusion from a succession of scandalous defeats and losses relieved itself of its great man, in order somewhat later to submit to unconditional surrender. That is what the world demands of us too, but to consent to it our most desperate situation would still be much too holy and dear. Yes, we are an utterly different people; we deny and reject the foregone conclusion; we are a people of mightily tragic soul, and our love belongs to fate -- to any fate, if only it be one, even destruction kindling heaven with the crimson flames of the death of the gods!

By this time (after September 1943) the war was going badly for both the Germans and the Japanese, while the American and Soviet war machines were still just starting to build momentum. Any sane person could see how this was going to end, and yet human psychology is such that the worst of the fighting -- no matter how pointless -- was still to come. Logically there was no point to it, but would it have been better for the war to have ended with Germany comparatively undamaged and the Japanese home islands essentially untouched? Could one wish that those who had sown the wind, would not reap the whirlwind -- even if it meant the saving of thousands or tens of thousands of Allied lives?

When the United States invaded Iraq in 2003 a generation (at least) of regional conflict was "baked in the cake," as the saying goes. Similarly, the Götterdämmerung which befell the world -- but especially Germany and Imperial Japan -- in 1944 and 1945 seems to have been an inevitable result of decisions made in the 1930s. In both cases the "true believers" only regretted that the "flames of the death of the gods" ended when it did. Admiral Matome Ugaki responded to the preservation of what was left of Japanese culture -- the consequence of the Imperial surrender -- by flying out to sea and crashing his plane into the waves. I don't believe it is widely known that many Kamikaze pilots likewise chose a symbolic death to actually attacking the enemy. The important thing was to sacrifice your life in a glorious way.

It is worth noting that, at the very end in Berlin, the last defenders of Hitler's Führerbunker were the few survivors of the French "Charlemagne" Waffen SS division. This isn't quite the same thing as these men expected to be (and in fact often were) executed when captured.

p174 [Of the collapse of the Dnieper defensive line] ...For it belongs in the realm of the fantastic, it offends against all order and expectation that Germany itself should become the theatre of one of Germany’s wars. Twenty-five years ago at the very last moment we escaped that fate. But now our increasingly tragic and heroic psychology seems to prevent us from quitting a lost cause before the unthinkable becomes fact... [Reverses in Italy and rumors of action in France]

...we are lost. In other words, the war is lost; but that means more than a lost campaign, it means in very truth that we are lost; our character, our cause, our hope, our history. It is all up with Germany, it will be all up with her. She is marked down for collapse, economic, political, moral, spiritual, in short all-embracing, unparalleled, final collapse. I suppose I have not wished for it, this that threatens, for it is madness and despair. I suppose I have not wished for it, because my pity is too deep, my grief and sympathy are with this unhappy nation, when I think of the exaltation and blind ardour of its uprising, the breaking-out, the breaking-up, the breaking-down; the purifying and fresh start, the national new birth of ten years ago, that seemingly religious intoxication -- which then betrayed itself to any intelligent person for what it was by its crudity, vulgarity, gangsterism, sadism, degradation, filthiness -- ah, how unmistakably it bore within itself the seeds of this whole war! My heart contracts painfully at the thought of that enormous investment of faith, zeal, lofty historic emotion; all this we made, all this is now puffed away in a bankruptcy without compare. No, surely I did not want it, and yet -- I have been driven to want it, I wish for it today and will welcome it, out of hatred for the outrageous contempt of reason, the vicious violation of the truth, the cheap, filthy backstairs mythology, the criminal degradation and confusion of standards; the abuse, corruption, and blackmail of all that was good, genuine, trusting, and trustworthy in our old Germany. For liars and lickspittles mixed us a poison draught and took away our senses. We drank -- for we Germans perennially yearn for intoxication -- and under its spell, through years of deluded high living, we committed a superfluity of shameful deeds, which must now be paid for. With what? I have already used the word, together with the word “despair” I wrote it [madness?]. I will not repeat it: not twice could I control my horror of my trembling fingers to set it down again.

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p175... I have re-read it all [the chapter to here]; Adrian’s dramatic wishes and plans, his earliest songs, the painful gaze that he had acquired during our separation; the intellectual fascinations of Shakespearean comedy, Leverkuhn’s emphasis on foreign songs and his own shy cosmopolitanism; then the bohemian Cafe Central club, winding up with the portrait of Rudiger Schildknapp, given in perhaps unjustifiable detail. And I quite properly ask myself whether such uneven material can actually make up a single chapter... I can only repeat that paragraphs and asterisks [as above] are in this book merely a concession to the eyes of the reader, and that I, if I had my way, would write down the whole in one burst and one breath, without divisions, yes, without paragraphing or intermissions. I simply have not the courage to submit such an insensate text to the eyes of the reading public.

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p176 ...Not for nothing, in that first letter, had he expressed his sympathy for Chopin’s lack of adventurous spirit, his “not wanting to know.” He too wanted to know nothing, see nothing, actually experience nothing, at least not in any obvious, exterior sense of the word. He was not out for change, new sense impressions, distraction, recreation. As for the last, he liked to make fun of people who are constantly having “a little change,” constantly getting brown and strong -- nobody knew for what. “Relaxation,” he said, “is for those to whom it does no good.” He was not interested in travel for the sake of sightseeing or “culture.” He scorned the delight of the eye, and sensitive as his hearing was, just so little had he ever felt urge to train his sight in the forms of plastic art. The distinction between eye-men and ear-men he considered indefeasibly valid and correct and counted himself definitely among the latter. As for me, I have never thought such a distinction could be followed through thick and thin, and in his case I never quite believed in the unwillingness and reluctance of the eye. To be sure, Goethe too says that music is something inborn and native, requiring no great nourishment from outside and no experience drawn from life. But after all there is the inner vision, the perception, which is something different and comprehends more than mere seeing...

p181 ...I have heard him say:

“The work of art? It is a fraud. It is something the burgher wishes there still were. It is contrary to truth, contrary to serious art. Genuine and serious is only the very short, the highly consistent musical movement. . . .”

How should that not have troubled me, when after all I knew that he himself aspired to a “work,” and was planning an opera!

Again I have heard him say: “Pretense and play have the conscience of art against them today. Art would like to stop being pretense and play, it would like to become knowledge.”

But what ceases to conform to his definition, does that not cease to exist altogether? And how will art live as knowledge? I recalled what he had written from Halle to Kretschmar about the extension of the kingdom of the banal... these later criticisms, leveled against pretense and play, in other words against form itself, seemed to indicate such an extension of the kingdom of the banal, of the no longer permissible, that it threatened to swallow up art itself. With deep concern I asked myself what strain and effort, intellectual tricks, by-ways, and ironies would be necessary to save it, to reconquer it, and to arrive at a work which as a travesty of innocence confessed to the state of knowledge from which it was to be won!

My poor friend had been instructed one day, or rather one night, from frightful lips, by an awful ally [hint], in more detail on the subject here touched upon...

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