34. Doctor Faustus - chapters XXXII-III

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[Inez Rodde marries Professor Dr. Helmut Institoris. Clarissa Rodde leaves Munich to pursue her stage career. And, with an empty nest, Frau Senator Rodde moves to Pfeiffering and establishes herself in a building across the courtyard from Adrian.

We learn rather a lot about Inez establishing herself in full blown, south German bourgeois respectability... except for her lover on the side (Rudi Schwerdtfeger) and a Spanish-exotic friend, Frau Natalie Knoterich with a weakness for morphine. She even presents her husband with daughters -- that he even fathered. Zeitblom becomes the confidant of both Rudi and Inez, which is tricky since Inez needs to be reassured of her grip on Rudi while Rudi feels trapped in an indiscretion he never wanted (once again, it is Inez who seduces Rudi). Poor Serenus is indeed having a nasty Great War.

And that is chapter XXXII

Chapter XXXIII

p336 The time of which I write was for us Germans an era of national collapse, of capitulation, of uprisings due to exhaustion, of helpless surrender into the hands of strangers. The time in which I write, which must serve me to set down these recollections here in my silence and solitude, this time has a horrible swollen belly, it carries in its womb a national catastrophe compared with which the defeat in those earlier days seems a moderate misfortune, the sensible liquidation of an unsuccessful enterprise. Even an ignominious issue remains something other and more normal than the judgement that now hangs over us, such as once fell on Sodom and Gomorrah; such as the first time we had not after all invoked.

That it approaches, that it long since became inevitable: of that I cannot believe anybody still cherishes the smallest doubt... it becomes sheer horror, so it seems to me, when everybody knows and everybody is bound to silence, while we read the truth from each other in eyes that stare or else shun a meeting.

...The invasion of France, long recognized as a possibility, has come, a technical and military feat of the first, or rather of an altogether unique order, prepared with the fullest deliberation, in which we could less prevent the enemy since we did not dare concentrate our defense at the single point of landing, being uncertain whether or not to regard it as one among many further attacks at points we could not guess. [The Brits played Hitler like a violin] Vain and fatal were our hesitations... for days now a battle has been raging for the Norman city of Caen -- a struggle which probably, if our fears see truly, is already the opening of the way to the French capital, [as near as I can tell, no one (despite what Montgomery said later) planned the strategy that sucked all the German armored strength into a battle for Caen and freed the American 3rd Army to flank, surround, and, combined with Commonwealth and Polish forces, destroy the German army in France] that Paris to which in the New Order the role of European Luna Park and house of mirth was assigned, and where now, scarcely held in check by the combined strength of the German and French police, resistance is boldly raising its head.

p337 [A review of reverses on the Italian and Eastern Fronts with a mention of the V-1 attacks on England] No stopping them? My soul, think not of it! Do not venture to measure what it would mean if in this our uniquely frightful extremity the dam should break, as it is on the point of doing, and there were no more hold against the boundless hatred that we have fanned to flame among peoples round us! True, by the destruction of our cities from the air, Germany has long since become a theatre of war; but it still remains for it to become so in the most actual sense, a sense that we cannot and may not conceive. Our propaganda even has a strange way of warning the foe against the wounding of our soil, the sacred German soil, as against a horrible crime. . . . The sacred German soil! As though there were anything still sacred about it, as though it were not long since deconsecrate over and over again, through uncounted crimes against law and justice and morally and de facto laid open to judgement and enforcement! Let it come! Nothing more remains to hope, to wish, to will. The cry for peace with the Anglo-Saxon, the offer to continue alone the war against the Sarmatic flood, the demand that some part of the condition of unconditional surrender be remitted, in other words that they treat with us -- but with whom? All that is nothing but eye-wash: the demand of a regime which will not understand, even today seems not to understand, that its staff is broken, that it must disappear, laden with the curse of having made itself, us, Germany, the Reich, I go further and say all that is German, intolerable to the world.

p338 ...As for the background of my actual narrative, up to the point whither I have brought it, I have characterized it at the beginning of this chapter in the phrase “into the hands of strangers.” “It is frightening to fall into the hands of strangers” : this sentence and the bitter truth of it I thought through and suffered through, often, in those days of collapse and surrender. For as a German, despite a universalistic shading which my relation to the world takes on through my Catholic tradition, I cherish a lively feeling for the national type, the characteristic life-idiom of my country, so to speak, its idea, the way it asserts itself as a facet of the human, against other no doubt equally justifiable variations of the same, and can so assert itself only by a certain outward manifestation, sustained by a nation standing erect on its feet. The unexampled horror of a decisive military defeat overwhelms this idea, physically refutes it, by imposing an ideology foreign to it -- and in the first instance bound up with words, with the way we express ourselves. Handed over utterly into the power of this foreign ideology, one feels with all one’s being that just because it is foreign it bodes no good. The beaten French tasted this awful experience in 1870, when their negotiators, seeking to soften the conditions of the victors, priced very high the renown, “la gloire,” ensuing from the entry of our troops into Paris. But the German statesmen answered them that the word gloire or any equivalent for it did not occur in our vocabulary. They talked about it in hushed voices, in the French Chamber. Anxiously they tried to comprehend what it meant to surrender at discretion to a foe whose conceptions did not embrace the idea of gloire.

I’m not sure I understand this. Honor was certainly a German as well as a French virtue. And both the Germans and French had suffered, repeatedly, in their honor during the ebb and flow of the Napoleonic Wars. Jena and Auerstadt were a devastating blow to the Prussian self-esteem while both 1814 and 1815 saw victorious enemy armies -- lots of them -- marching through Paris.

p339 Often and often I thought of it, when the Jacobin-Puritan [??] virtue jargon, which four years long had disputed the war propaganda of the “agreed peace,” [??] became the current language of victory. I saw it confirmed that it is only a step from capitulation to pure abdication and the suggestion to the conqueror that he would please take over the conduct of the defeated country according to his own ideas, since for its own part it did not know what to do. Such impulses France knew, forty-seven years before, [1871] and they were not strange to us now. Still they are rejected. The defeated must continue somehow to be responsible for themselves; outside leading-strings are there only for the purpose of preventing Revolution which fills the vacuum after the departure of the old authority from going to extremes and endangering the bourgeois order of things for the victors. Thus in 1918 the continuation of the blockade after we laid down our arms in the west served to control the German Revolution, to keep it on bourgeois-democratic rails and prevent it from degenerating into the Russian proletarian. Thus bourgeois imperialism, crowned with the laurels of victory, could not do enough to warn against “anarchy”; not firmly enough reject all dealing with workmen’s and soldier’s councils and bodies of that kind, not clearly enough protest that only with a settled Germany could peace be signed and only such would get enough to eat.  

What we had for a government followed this paternal lead, held with the National Assembly against dictatorship of the proletariat and meekly waved away the advances of the Soviets, even when they concerned grain-deliveries. Not to my entire satisfaction, I may add. As a moderate man and son of culture I have indeed a natural horror of radical revolution and the dictatorship of the lower classes, which I find it hard, owing to my tradition, to envisage otherwise than in the image of anarchy and mob rule -- in short, of the destruction of culture. But when I recall the grotesque anecdote about the two saviours of European civilization, the German and the Italian, both of them in the pay of finance capital, walking together through the Uffizi Gallery in Florence, where they certainly did not belong, and one of them saying to the other that all these “glorious art treasures” would have been destroyed by Bolshevism if heaven had not prevented it by raising them up -- when I recall all this, then my notions about classes and masses take on another colour, and the dictatorship of the proletariat begins to seem to me, a German burgher, an ideal situation compared with the now possible one of the dictatorship of the scum of the earth. Bolshevism to my knowledge has never destroyed any works of art. That was far more within the sphere of activity of those who assert that they are protecting us from it. There did not lack much for their zeal in destroying the things of the spirit -- a zeal that is entirely foreign to the masses -- to have made sacrifice of the works of the hero of these pages, Adrian Leverkuhn. For there is no doubt that their triumph and the historical sanction to regulate this world according to their beastly will would have destroyed his life-work and his immortality.

p340 Twenty-six years ago [1918] it was revulsion against the self-righteous blandishments of the rhetorical burgher and “son of the revolution,” which proved stronger in my heart than the fear of disorder, and made me want just what he did not: that my conquered country should turn towards its brother in tribulation, towards Russia. I was ready to put up with the social revolution -- yes, to agree to it -- which would arise from such comradery. The Russian Revolution shook me. There was no doubt in my mind of the historical superiority of its principles over those of the powers which set their foot on our necks.

Since then history has taught me to regard with other eyes our conquerors of that day, who will shortly conquer us again in alliance with the revolution of the East. It is true that certain strata of bourgeois democracy seemed and seem today ripe for what I termed the dictatorship of the scum: willing to make common cause with it to linger out their privileges. Still, leaders have arisen, who like myself, who am a son of humanism, saw in this dictatorship the ultimate that can or may be laid upon humanity and moved their world to a life-and-death struggle against it. Not enough can these men be thanked, and it shows that the democracy of the western lands, in all the anachronistic state of their institutions through the passage of time, all the rigidity of their conceptions of freedom in resisting the new and inevitable, is after all essentially in the line of human progress, of goodwill to the improvement of society and its renewal, alteration, rejuvenation; it shows that western democracy is after all capable, by its own nature, of a transition into conditions more justified of life.

All this by the way. What I want to recall here in this biography is the loss of authority of the monarchic military state, so long the form and habit of our life; it was far advanced as defeat approached and now with defeat it is complete. Its collapse and abdication result in a situation of permanent hunger and want, progressive depreciation of the currency, progressive laxity and loose speculation, a certain regrettable and unearned dispensing of civilian freedom from the restrain, the degeneration of a national structure so long held together by discipline into debating groups of masterless citizens. Such a very gratifying sight that is not, and no deduction can be made from the word “painful” when I use it here to characterize the impressions I got as a purely passive observer from the gatherings of certain “Councils of Intellectual Workers” then springing up in Munich hotels. If I were a novel writer, I could make out of my tortured recollections a most lively picture of such a futile and flagitious assemblage. There was a writer of belles-lettres, who spoke, not without charm, even with a sybaritic and dimpling relish, on the theme of “Revolution and Love of Humanity,” and unloosed a free discussion -- all too free, diffuse, and confused -- by such misbegotten types as only see the light at moments like this: lunatics, dreamers, clowns, flibbertigibbets and fly-by-nights, plotters and small-time philosophers [that could be Foucault over in the corner]. There were speeches for and against love of human kind, for and against the authorities, for and against the people. A little girl spoke a piece, a common soldier was with difficulty prevented from reading to the end a manuscript that began “Dear citizens and citizenesses!” and would doubtless have gone on the whole night, an angry student launched an embittered invective against all the previous speakers, without vouchsafing to the assemblage a single positive expression of opinion -- and so on...

[At this time Adrian is going through a particularly bad period of ill health, or of sea-maid pains. In fact Adrian here goes into disturbing detail about the sea-maid which forces us to recall the offer Mephisto once made to him in passing. We are to see Adrian’s pains as reflecting the condition of the nation. Rudolf confides to Adrian (of all people) about his unwanted intimacy with Inez while continuing to beg for his violin concerto that he desires Adrian to write just for him.]

I resisted commenting on the political science above, but now is perhaps the time -- though I’m still waiting for a better opportunity to talk about national socialism.

The political state of Germany at the conclusion of the Great War involves the discussion (from the previous blog) of the Optimistic vs Pessimistic views of Man as a political creature, which dates back to the French Revolution (and as I’ve made clear before, I come down on the Burkian conservative side). Today we live in a world littered with failed states (Somalia, Iraq, Afghanistan, Yemen, Libya). People keep forgetting this, but it is the responsibility of the victor to leave some form of order behind. In the historical norm of conquest, this was a given -- though there are of course problems with occupation and conquest as well.

The German Reich was a strange beast: a particularly antiquated dynasty (the Habsburgs were even worse than the Hohenzollerns) mated with a particularly lively bourgeoisie. Almost a century of Darwinian migrations had resulted in a population especially passive and willing to be lead. And then the patriarchal figure of the Kaiser was removed and they were left to their own devices.

When the Japanese Shogunate fell late in the 19th century, traditional Japanese regional powers reasserted themselves and a new order was quickly established. I’m not aware of any German tendency to reassert regional power after 1918. Nationalism seems to have been a done deal by that time. The presence of France and the United States at the table (speaking figuratively) that determined the fate of Germany and Austria probably ruled out the substitution of another royal house to rule nations seemingly content, to that point, with that political arrangement. A good Burkian would have suggested that policy as the least disturbing to the previous order -- and I’m sure the British government must have wished for it even if they were not so bold as to argue for it. That the British Royal family (now Windsor, but still Hanoverian by blood) had some ideas, maybe even some relatives in the wings willing to step into the Kaiser’s shoes, I also don’t doubt. Now there’s a historical “What if?” to ponder. But, alas, this was a democratic age... except for all the times when it wasn’t.

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