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p299 The first glowing August days of 1914 found me changing from one crowded train to another, waiting in stations swarming with people, their platforms piled with left-behind luggage, on a head-long journey from Freising to Naumburg in Thuringia, where as reserve vice-sergeant-major I was joining my regiment.
War had broken out. The fate that had so long brooded over Europe was upon us, it raged. In the guise of a disciplined execution of all the plans previously made and rehearsed, it raged through our cities and towns, as terror and exaltation, as the inevitable, as “destiny”; as awareness of power and readiness for sacrifice, in the heads and hearts of men. It may well be, I like to think so, that elsewhere, in both enemy and allied countries, this short cut to a fate was felt more as catastrophe and “grand mal-heur.” We in the field heard these words so often from the lips of Frenchwomen, who did have the war on their soil, in their homes and on their hearths: “Ah, monsieur, la guerre, quel grand mal-heur!” [war, what a great misfortune] But in our Germany its effect was undeniably and preeminently enthusiasm, historic ardour, joy at being released from dull everyday, and from a world-stagnation that could go on no longer; as hope for the future, an appeal to duty and manhood, in short a holiday for heroes. My Freising top-formers had hot heads and glowing eyes. Youthful thirst for adventure, impatience to be off, were naively mingled with satisfaction at an early release from school. They stormed the recruiting stations, and I was glad that they need not look down on me for a stay-at-home.
I would by no means deny that I fully shared in the popular exaltation which I sought to characterize, though its more extravagant ebullitions were foreign to my nature. [This part sounds autobiographical, aside from the serving in the military aspect] My conscience, speaking generally, was not perfectly clear. Such a “mobilization” for war, however stern and grim a face it wears, must always have something about it like an unlicensed holiday; however unreservedly one’s duty, it seems a little like playing truant, like running away, like yielding to unbridled instinct. A settled man like me scarcely felt at ease in it all; and aside from personal and temperamental discomfort, I dimly felt a moral doubt: had we as a nation been so well-behaved up to now that this abandon, these transports, were legitimate? But now the moment had come for readiness to sacrifice and die; that carried one along over everything, it is so to speak the last word, after it there is no more to be said. If the war is felt more or less clearly as a general visitation, in which the individual, as well as the individual people, is ready to stand his man and atone with his blood for the weaknesses and sins of the time, including his own; if he thinks of himself as a sacrifice by which the old Adam is put away and from which in unity a new and higher life will be wrested, then our everyday morals are outbid by the abnormal and must be silent. Neither would I forget that then we went with relatively pure hearts and clean hands to war and did not think we had so behaved at home that a general and catastrophic blood-letting must needs be regarded as the inevitable logical consequence of our domestic doings. Thus it was five years ago, God help us, but not thirty! [That is a confusing sentence. I think he means that they marched off with clean hands 30 years ago, in 1914, but not five years ago, in 1939.] Justice and law, the habeas corpus, freedom and human dignity had been tolerably honoured in the land. Of course the sword-waving of that fundamentally unsoldierly play-actor, made for anything but war, who sat on the imperial throne was painful to the man of culture; moreover his attitude to the things of the mind was that of a retarded mentality. But his influence on them had exhausted itself in empty gestures of regulation. [I would say there is a good deal of denial here] Culture had been free, she had stood at a respectable height; and though she had long been used to a complete absence of relations with the governing power, her younger representatives might see in a great national war, such as now broke out, a means of achieving a form of life in which state and culture might become one. In this we displayed the preoccupation with self which is peculiar to us: our naive egoism finds it unimportant, yes, takes it entirely for granted, that for the sake of our development (and we are always developing) the rest of the world, further on than ourselves and not at all possessed by the dynamic of catastrophe, must shed its blood. They take that ill of us, not quite unfairly; for ethically speaking, the only way a people can achieve a higher form of communal life is not by a foreign war, but by a civil one -- even with bloodshed. The idea is repugnant to us; yet we thought nothing at all, on the contrary we found it glorious, that our national unification -- and even so a partial, a compromise unification -- cost three serious wars. We were already long since a great power, we were quite used to it, and it did not make us happy as we had expected. The feeling that it had not made us more winning, that our relation to the world had rather worsened than improved, lay, unconfessed, deep in our hearts. A new breakthrough seemed due: we would become a dominating world power -- but such a position was not to be achieved by means of mere moral “home-work.” War, then, and if needs must, war against everybody, to convince everybody and to win; that was our lot, our “sending” (the very word we use is Germanic, the idea pre-Christian, the whole concept a tragically mythological, musical-dramatic motif); that was what fate had willed, and we -- only we! -- enthusiastically responded and set forth. We were bustling with the consciousness that this was Germany’s century, that history was holding her hand out over us; that after Spain, France, England, it was our turn to put our stamp on the world and be its leader; that the twentieth century was ours; that now, at the end of the bourgeois epoch begun some hundred and twenty years before [1794? The French Revolution?], the world was to renew itself in our sign, in the sign of a never up to the end quite defined military socialism.
p301 This picture, not to call it an idea, possess all our heads, companionably side by side with another: the belief that we were forced into war, that sacred necessity called us to take our weapons -- those well-polished weapons whose readiness and excellence always induced a secret temptation to test them. [Now doesn't that bring to mind the First Persian Gulf War] Then there was the fear of being overrun from all sides, from which fate only our enormous strength protected us, our power of carrying the war straightway into other lands. [And there is the psychology that still seems to determine policy in Russia] Attack and defense were the same, in our case: together they made up the feeling of a providence, a calling, a great hour, a sacred necessity. The peoples beyond our borders might consider us disturbers of the peace if they chose, enemies of life and not to be borne with; but we had the means to knock the world on the head until it changed its mind and came not only to admire but to love us.
Let nobody think I am being jocose. There is no occasion for that, first because I can by no means pretend to have excluded myself from the general emotion. I genuinely shared it, [still could be Mann here] even though my normal staid professorial attitude would have held me aloof from any loud manifestation, or even have caused in me some slight protest, a subconscious misgiving at thinking and feeling what everybody else thought and felt. People of my sort have doubts whether every man’s thoughts are the right ones. [I would have said "everyman's"] And still, it is a great pleasure to the superior individual, just once -- and where should one find this once, if not here and now? -- to lose himself altogether in the general.
That he is being so specific here about things he was so vague about in The Magic Mountain sent me to Wiki and I discovered, to my surprise, that I've never before read that entry. I confirmed that he was still residing in Munich when he wrote The Magic Mountain but was far away in Pacific Palisades, California when he wrote this. Since I lived in SoCal for three years (in the San Fernando Valley), the name Pacific Palisades has very specific connotations for me. For one thing, this is where Charles and Ray Eames built their famous Case Study House No. 8. Here are some Wiki quotes:
...other novels included Lotte in Weimar (1939), in which Mann returned to the world of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774); Doktor Faustus (1947), the story of composer Adrian Leverkühn and the corruption of German culture in the years before and during World War II ...
Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his bisexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912).[6] Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) uncovered the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio (2001) describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had stayed at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Lido of Venice with his wife and brother, when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław (Władzio) Moes, a 10-year-old Polish boy (see also "The Real Tadzio" on the Death in Venice page)...
Throughout his Dostoyevsky essay, he finds parallels between the Russian and the sufferings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Speaking of Nietzsche, he says: "his personal feelings initiate him into those of the criminal ... in general all creative originality, all artist nature in the broadest sense of the word, does the same. It was the French painter and sculptor Degas who said that an artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime."[9] Nietzsche's influence on Mann runs deep in his work, especially in Nietzsche's views on decay and the proposed fundamental connection between sickness and creativity. Mann held that disease is not to be regarded as wholly negative. In his essay on Dostoyevsky we find: "but after all and above all it depends on who is diseased, who mad, who epileptic or paralytic: an average dull-witted man, in whose illness any intellectual or cultural aspect is non-existent; or a Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky. In their case something comes out in illness that is more important and conductive to life and growth than any medical guaranteed health or sanity... in other words: certain conquests made by the soul and the mind are impossible without disease, madness, crime of the spirit."[10]
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p302 ...It was soothing to know that the members of the royal family [I believe this would have been the Bavarian royal family], who had left for headquarters, would have competent chiefs of staff at their side and could commit no royal ineptnesses. Under those circumstances they were loudly cheered on their way. I saw regiments, with nosegays tied to their rifle-barrels, marching out of barrack gates, accompanied by women with handkerchiefs to their faces, while civilian crowds quickly gathered and shouted godspeed...
p303 ...I remained in the field a bare year, till the Argonne battles of 1915, and was shipped home, with the Cross I had earned only by putting up with discomforts and by catching a typhus infection.
p304 [From a farewell dinner at Adrian’s rooms] ...A few books lay on the table: a little volume of Kleist, with the book-mark at the essay on marionettes; ["The essay interprets the Fall from Paradise as the acquisition of consciousness and posits a theoretically possible 'breakthrough'
return to a state of grace. -Dartmouth Guide I have a feeling what is here translated as "breakthrough" is very close to what was translated as "limit-experience" in the Foucault book I covered in my prior blog.] the indispensable volume on Shakespeare sonnets and another book with some of the plays -- Twelfth Night I think, Much Ado about Nothing, and I believe Two Gentlemen of Verona... We were all so comfortable together that he might even take a pencil and enter a clarinet or horn figure somewhere if he thought well of it.
p305 We knew nothing precise about what was occupying him, now that that music of the cosmos had appeared in print from Schott’s Sons in Mainz... Actually it was the suite of dramatic grotesques, whose themes, so we heard, he had taken from the old history and anecdote book, the Gesta Romanorum... [short and interesting, the link I mean] In any case, the characters were not to be men but puppets (hence the Kleist)...
p306 [Zeitblom, the only one in favor of the war, paces the room lecturing to his friends] “In a nation like ours,” I set forth, “the psychological is always the primary and actually motivating; the political action is of the second order of importance: reflex, expression, instrument. What the break-through to world power, to which fate summons us, means at bottom, is the break-through to the world -- out of an isolation of which we are painfully conscious, and which no vigorous reticulation into world economy has been able to break down since the founding of the Reich. The bitter thing is that the practical manifestation is an outbreak of war, though its true interpretation is longing, a thirst for unification.”
“God bless your studies,” I heard Adrian say here in a low voice, with a half-laugh. [Is this similar to the Southern phrase “Well bless your heart”?] He had not even glanced up from his notes as he quoted the old student tag.
I remained standing and looked at him; he paid no heed. “You mean,” I retorted, “that I am talking nonsense?”
“Pardon,” he hastily returned. “I lapsed into student lingo, because your oratio reminded me so much of our straw-threshing disputes of anno so-and-so -- what were the fellows’ names? ...
p307 [Zeitblom] “...you understand very well what I meant about the German break-through to the world.”
“It would not help much if I did understand, for at present, anyway [after the world reaction to the German violation of Belgian neutrality], the crude event will just make our shut-inness and shut-offness more complete, however far your military swarm into Europe. You see: I cannot go to Paris [his Marvels of the Universe was to have been performed in Paris but was cancelled at the outbreak of war], you go there instead of me. Good too! Between ourselves, I would not have gone anyhow. You help me out of an embarrassment -- ”
“This war will be short,” I said in a suppressed voice, for his words affected me painfully. “It cannot last long. We pay for the swift break-though with a wrong, an acknowledged one, which we declare ourselves ready to make good. We must take it on ourselves. . . .”
“And will know how to carry it with dignity,” he broke in. “Germany has broad shoulders. And who denies that a real break-through is worth what the tame world calls a crime? I hope you don’t suppose that I think small of the idea which it pleases you to chew over, in your straw. There is at bottom only one problem in the world, and this is its name. How does one break through? How does one get into the open? How does one burst the cocoon and become a butterfly? The whole situation is dominated by the question. Here too,” said he, and twitched the little red marker in the volume of Kleist on the table -- “here too it treats of the break-through, in the capital essay on marionettes, and it is called straight out ‘the last chapter of the history of the world.’ But it is talking only about the aesthetic, charm, free grace, which actually is reserved to the automaton and the god; that is, to the unconscious or an endless consciousness, whereas every reflection lying between nothing and infinity kills grace. The consciousness must, this writer thinks, have gone through an infinity in order that grace find itself again therein; and Adam must eat a second time from the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence.”
Wasn't that really what Bataille and Foucault and the rest were attempting to do, "eat a second time from the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence?"
p308 “How glad I am,” I put in, “that you have just read that! It is gloriously thought, and you are quite right to bring it into conversation with the break-through. But do not say that it is speaking only of aesthetics, do not say only! One does wrong to see in aesthetics a separate and narrow field of the humane. It is much more than that, it is at bottom everything, it attracts or repels, the poet attaches to the word ‘grace’ the very widest possible meaning. Aesthetic release or the lack of it is a matter of one’s fate, dealing out happiness or unhappiness, companionship or hopeless if proud isolation on earth. And one does not need to be a philologian to know that what is odious is also what is hated. Craving to break through from bondage, to cease being sealed up in the odious -- tell me that I am straw-threshing again; but I feel, I have always felt and will assert against strongly held opposition, that this German is kat exochen, profoundly German, the very definition of Germanism, of a psychology threatened with envelopment, the poison of isolation, provincial boorishness, neurosis, implicit Satanism. . . .”
Kleist? Marionettes? I almost let it slip past but why would Mann throw in something so odd if there were no point to it.
Heinrich von Kleist is another of those interesting literary/philosophical figures from the turn of the 19th century. A contemporary and acquaintance of Goethe. It is worth reading the entire Wiki entry on him, but I will give you the most important bits:
According to the Encyclopædia Britannica Eleventh Edition, "Kleist's whole life was filled by a restless striving after ideal and illusory happiness, and this is largely reflected in his work. He was by far the most important North German dramatist of the Romantic movement, and no other of the Romanticists approaches him in the energy with which he expresses patriotic indignation."[2]
...
A Romantic by context, predilection, and temperament, Kleist subverted clichéd ideas of Romantic longing and themes of nature and innocence and irony, instead taking up subjective emotion and contextual paradox to show individuals in moments of crises and doubt, with both tragic and comic outcomes, but as often as not his dramatic and narrative situations end without resolution.
Seen as a precursor to Henrik Ibsen and modern drama because of his attention to the real and detailed causes of characters’ emotional crises, he was also understood as a nationalist poet in the German context of the early twentieth century, and was appropriated by Nazi scholars and critics as a kind of proto-Nazi author. To this day, many scholars see his play Die Hermannsschlacht ("The Battle of the Teutoburg Forest", 1808) as prefiguring the subordination of the individual to the service of the Volk (nation) that became a principle of fascist ideology in the twentieth century. Kleist criticism of the last generation has repudiated nationalist criticism and concentrated instead mainly on psychological, structural and post-structural, philosophical, and narratological modes of reading...
...
Kleist employs the example of the French Revolution as the climactic event of the Enlightenment era whereby man broke free from his dark and feudal chains in favor of liberty, equality, fraternity. It is not that easy though for Kleist. Man cannot simply guide himself into the future with a rational mind as his primary tool. Therefore, Kleist strongly advocates for the usefulness of reflection ex post facto or after the fact.[8] In doing so, man will be able to mold his collective consciousness in a manner conducive to the principles of free will. By reflecting after the fact, man will avoid the seemingly detestable inhibitions offered in rational thought. In other words, the will to power has "its splendid source in the feelings," and thus, man must overcome his "struggle with Fate" with a balanced mixture of wisdom and passion.[8]
The metaphysical theory in and behind Kleist's first essay is that consciousness, man's ability to reflect, is the expression of a fall out of nature's harmony, which may either lead to dysfunction, when the flow of feelings is interrupted or blocked by thought, or to the stimulation of ideas, when the flow of feelings is cooperating or struggling with thought. A state of total harmony, however, cannot be reached. Only in total harmony of thought and feeling life and consciousness would come to be identical through the total insight of the mind, an idea elaborated and ironically presented in Kleist's second essay "The Puppet Theatre" or "On the Marionette Theater" (Über das Marionettentheater (de)).
...
In a simulated dialogue, Kleist has one of the interlocutors comment that marionettes possess a grace humans do not, a view which contradicts all aesthetic concepts of the past. Our consciousness and capacity for reflection cause us to doubt ourselves or become self-conscious, and prevent us from acting with the singlemindedness and purity of an animal or a puppet.[citation needed] And yet, consciousness is the effect of eating from the tree of knowledge, and we cannot escape it, as long as we are barred from Eden. The interlocutor suggests that the only way out of this dilemma would be to go all the way through, because the garden of Eden could possibly be open on the other side: if we continue to become more intelligent, wiser, and more self-aware, we may eventually be able to carry out the actions we choose, with the same confidence and harmony as a marionette dancing on the strings of a puppeteer.[citation needed] Consciousness creates a split in our nature, rendering us neither animals nor gods. The ultimate development of humankind would be to bring these two parts of ourselves into harmony and no longer suffer doubt or internal conflict.[citation needed]The ending of the essay might seem hopeful, but it leaves the question open as to whether this kind of perfection will ever be possible. It is difficult to determine Kleist's intentions or personal view, because the two interlocutors in the dialogue are obviously presented in an ironic way. Rather than a serious proposal of Kleist's ideas it seems more like an ironic play on the vain ideals of classicism and romanticism.[citation needed]
This essay also shows Fichte's influence on Kleist. Similar to Kleist, Fichte had emphasised man's ability and necessity to develop his mind in infinity, without ever being able to reach identity with the absolute, because the individual's existence just hangs on the difference.
Without Kleist saying this expressedly, works of art, such as his own, may offer an artificial image of this ideal, though this is in itself wrenched out from the same sinful state of insufficiency and rupture that it wants to transcend.
Kleist's philosophy is the ironic rebuff of all theories of human perfection, whether this perfection is projected in a golden age at the beginníng (Hölderlin, Novalis), in the present (Hegel), or in the future (as the philosophers of the enlightenment and still Marx would have seen it). His essays show man, like the literary works, torn apart by conflicting forces and held together on the surface only by illusions, like that of real love (if this was not the worst of all illusions). Jeronimo, for example, in Kleist's The Earthquake in Chile, is presented as emotionally and socially repressed and incapable of self-control, but still clinging to religious ideas and hopes. At the end of a process marked by chance, luck and coincidence, and driven by greed, hatred and the lust for power, embodied in a repressive social order, the human being that at the beginning had been standing between execution and suicide, is murdered by a mob of brutalized maniacs who mistake their hatred for religious feelings.
The ending of this novella could be used to describe Kleist's concept of life as well as his philosophy and aesthetics, expressed in the ironic style which fits the content: "And sometimes ... it almost seemed to him, that he ought to be happy."
So back, yet again, to individuation, to Prometheus or the Snake, and the Fall or the Spark. And I noticed this in the entry about Fichte:
The name Naumburg meant nothing to me, but for Mann and probably many Germans it held a particular meaning. I also have to say I'm disappointed that Wikipedia missed an opportunity to say "the brothers Schlegel", though actually naming them is more informative.
And here’s another oldie but goodie: Synesthesia. As I was wrapping up this chapter I was also wrapping up A Natural History of the Senses. I’ve already included some favorite lines from the very end, but here’s what came just before that. This, I now recall, was my introduction to the concept of synesthesia and it is well worth reviewing, but there is even more which I hope the juxtaposition with Kleist will make clear.
In October 1774, he was attending the celebrated foundation-school at Pforta near Naumburg. This school is associated with the names of Novalis, August Wilhelm Schlegel, Friedrich Schlegel and Nietzsche. The spirit of the institution was semi-monastic and, while the education given was excellent in its way, it is doubtful whether there was enough social life and contact with the world for a pupil of Fichte's temperament and antecedents. Perhaps his education strengthened a tendency toward introspection and independence, characteristics which appear strongly in his doctrines and writings.[4]
And here’s another oldie but goodie: Synesthesia. As I was wrapping up this chapter I was also wrapping up A Natural History of the Senses. I’ve already included some favorite lines from the very end, but here’s what came just before that. This, I now recall, was my introduction to the concept of synesthesia and it is well worth reviewing, but there is even more which I hope the juxtaposition with Kleist will make clear.
Ackerman - Synesthesia
p289 ...Newborns ride on intermingling waves of sight, sound, touch, taste, and, especially, smell. As Daphne and Charles Mauer remind us in The World of the Newborn:
His world smells to him much as our world smells to us, but he does not perceive odors as coming through his nose alone. He hears odors, and sees odors, and feels them too. His world is a melee of pungent aromas -- and pungent sounds, and bitter-smelling sounds, and sweet-smelling sights , and sour-smelling pressures against the skin. If we could visit the newborn’s world, we would think ourselves inside a hallucinogenic perfumery.
...A cozy blur in the nursery vanishes into the rigorous categories of common sense. But for some people, that sensory blending never quits, and they taste baked beans whenever they hear the word “Francis,” as one woman reported, or see yellow on touching a matte surface, or smell the passage of time. The stimulation of one sense stimulates another: synesthesia is the technical name... A thick garment of perception is woven thread by overlapping thread...
p290 Daily life is a constant onslaught on one’s perceptions, and everyone experiences some intermingling of the senses... Those who experience intense synesthesia naturally on a regular basis are rare -- only about one in every five hundred thousand people -- and neurologist Richard Cytowic traces the phenomenon to the limbic system, the most primitive part of the brain, calling synesthetes “living cognitive fossils.” because they may be people whose limbic system is not entirely governed by the much more sophisticated (and more recently evolved) cortex. As he says, “synesthesia . . . may be a memory of how early mammals saw, heard, smelled, tasted, and touched.”
...Some of the most famous synesthetes have been artists. Composers Aleksandr Scriabin and Nikolai Rimski-Korsakov both freely associated colors with music when they wrote. To Rimski-Korsakov, C major was white; to Scriabin it was red. To Rimski-Korsakov, A major was rosy, to Scriabin it was green...
p291 Either writers have been especially graced with synesthesia, or they’ve been keener to describe it. Dr. Johnson once said that scarlet “represents nothing so much as the clangour of a trumpet.” Baudelaire took pride in his sensory Esperanto, and his sonnet on the correspondences between perfumes, colors, and sounds greatly influenced the synesthesia-loving Symbolist movement. Symbol comes from the Greek word symballein, “to throw together,” and, as The Columbia Dictionary of Modern European Literature explains, the Symbolists believed that “all arts are parallel translations of one fundamental mystery. Senses correspond to each other; a sound can be translated through a perfume and a perfume through a vision. . . . Haunted by these horizontal correspondences” and using suggestion rather than straightforward communication, they sought “the One hidden in Nature behind the Many,” Rimbaud, who assigned colors to each of the vowel sounds and once described A as a “black hairy corset of loud flies,” [there goes any wish I had to share this disorder (or lack of disorder)] claimed that the only way an artist can arrive at life’s truths is by experiencing “every form of love, of suffering, of madness,” to be prepared for by “a long immense planned disordering of all the senses.” The Symbolists, who were avid drug takers, delighted in the way hallucinogens intensified all their senses simultaneously...
p292 ...it’s odd to think of Nabokov, Faulkner, Virginia Woolf, Huysmans, Baudelaire, Joyce, Dylan Thomas and other notorious synesthetes as being more primitive than most people, but that may indeed be true. Great artists feel at home in the luminous spill of sensation, to which they add their own complex sensory Niagara. It would certainly have amused Nabokov to imagine himself closer than others to his mammalian ancestors, which he would no doubt have depicted in a fictional hall of mirrors with suave, prankish, Nabokovian finesse.
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