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Let me make clear here that it is Zeitblom, or I suppose Mann, who suddenly changes his normal structure and breaks his XXXIV chapter into three sections each with its own chapter page -- XXXIV (conclusion) is still to come. I don’t know why.
p362 ...Kridwiss was an expert in the graphic arts and fine editions, collector of east-Asiatic coloured wood-carvings and ceramics... He was an ageless, rather dainty little gentleman, with a strong Rhenish-Hessian accent and uncommon intellectual liveliness. He seemed not to have connections of any opinion-forming kind so far as one could tell, but out of sheer curiosity “listened in” at all the events of the day; and when this or that came to his ears he would describe it as “scho‘ enorm wischtich.” [?] The reception-room of his house in Martiusstrasse, Schwabing, was decorated with charming Chinese paintings in India ink and colour (from the Sung period!) and he made it a meeting place for the leading or rather the intimate members of the intellectual life of Munich, as many of them as the good city harboured in her walls. Kridwiss arranged informal discussion evenings for gentlemen, intimate round-table sittings at about nine o’clock and with no great entertainment on the part of the host proceeding to free association and the exchange of ideas... thanks to Kridwiss’s social tastes and obligations the level was rather uneven. For instance there took part in the sessions two members of the grand-ducal house of Hesse-Nassau, then studying in Munich, friendly young folk whom the host with a certain empressement [alacrity?] called the beautiful princes... More annoying for me personally was the presence of Dr. Chaim Breisacher, the lover of paradox, already known to the reader. I long ago admitted that I could not endure the man; but his penetration and keen scent appeared to be indispensable on these occasions. I was also irritated by the presence of Bullinger, the manufacturer; he was legitimated only by his high income tax, but he talked dogmatically on the loftiest cultural themes.
p363 I must confess further that really I could feel no proper liking to any of the table-round, nor extend to any one of them a feeling of general confidence. Helmut Institoris was also a guest, and him I except, since I had friendly relations with him through his wife... But one might ask what I could have against Dr. Unruhe, Egon Unruhe, a philosophic palaeozoologist who in his writings brilliantly combined a profound knowledge of geological periods and fossilization with the interpretation and scientific verification of our store of primitive sagas. In this theory, a sublimated Darwinism if you like, everything there became true and real, though a sophisticated humanity had long since ceased to believe it. Yes, whence my distrust of this learned and conscientiously intellectual man? Whence the same distrust of Professor Georg Vogler, the literary historian, who had written a much esteemed history of German literature from the point of view of racial origins, wherein an author is discussed and evaluated not as writer and comprehensively trained mind, but as the genuine blood-and-soil product of his real, concrete, specific corner of the Reich, engendering him and by him engendered. All that was very worthy, strong-minded, fit and proper, and critically worth thinking about. The art-critic and Durer scholar Professor Gilgen Holzschuher, another guest, was not acceptable to me either, on grounds similarly hard to justify; and the same was true without reservation of the poet Daniel Zur Hohe who was often present. He was a lean man of thirty in a black clericlike habit closed to the throat, with a profile like a bird of prey and a hammering delivery, as for instance: “Yes, yes, yes, yes, not so bad, oh certainly, one may say so!” nervously and continuously tapping the floor the while with the balls of his feet. He loved to cross his arms on his chest or thrust one hand Napoleonlike in his coat, and his poet dreams dealt with a world subjected by sanguinary campaigns to the pure spirit, by it held in terror and high discipline, as he had described it in his work, I believe his only one, the Proclamations. It had appeared before the war, printed on hand-made paper, a lyrical and rhetorical outburst of riotous terrorism, to which one had to concede considerable verbal power. The signatory of these proclamations was an entity named Christus Imperator Maximus, a commanding energumen who levied troops prepared to die for the subjection of the globe. He promulgated messages like Orders of the Day, stipulated abandonedly ruthless conditions, proclaimed poverty and chastity, and could not do enough in the hammering, fist-pounding line to exact unquestioned and unlimited obedience. “Solders!” the poem ended, “I deliver to you to plunder -- the World!”
p364 All this was “beautiful” and mightily acclaimed as such; “beautiful” in a cruelly and absolutely beauty-ous way, in the impudently detached, flippant, and irresponsible style poets permit themselves: it was, in fact, the tallest aesthetic misdemeanour I have ever come across. Helmut Institoris, of course, was sympathetic; but indeed both author and work had enjoyed a measure of serious respect from the public, and my antipathy was not quite so sure of itself, because I was conscious of my general irritation with the whole Kridwiss circle and the pretensions of its cultural position, of which my intellectual conscience forced me to take account.
I will try, in as small space as possible, to sketch the essential of these experiences, which our host rightly found “enormously important” [and I will try to edit this to the very bone.] ...the interest of the conferences lay in surveys of sociological actualities, analyses of the present and the future, which even so had something in common with the ascetic and “beautiful” nightmares of Daniel’s Fantasy. I have called attention above, quite apart from these evenings, to the disturbance and destruction of apparently fixed values of life brought about by the war, especially in the conquered countries, which were thus in a psychological sense further on than the others. [I must note here that the subjective sense expressed here of Germany being a “conquered” country seems to be at odds with the feeling, expressed by the brothers Tietjens in Parade’s End, that Germany had essentially got off the hook at the end of the Great War -- that the failure to pursue the war into Germany itself left the German people unpunished and thus set the stage for the 2nd World War. I’ve never quite understood what more the Tietjens (or Ford Madox Ford) expected to achieve by marching into a country that had already agreed to give up both the war and the form of government that had shaped European events for a century] Very strongly felt and objectively confirmed was the enormous loss of value which the individual had sustained, the ruthlessness which made life today stride away over the single person and precipitate itself as a general indifference to the sufferings and destruction of human beings. This carelessness, this indifference to the individual fate, might appear to be the result of the four years’ carnival of blood just behind us; but appearances were deceptive. As in many another respect here too the war only completed, defined, and drastically put in practice a process that had been on the way long before and had made itself the basis of a new feeling about life. This was not a matter for praise or blame, rather an objective perception and statement. However, the least passionate recognition of the actual, just out of sheer pleasure in recognition, always contains some shade of approbation; so why should one not accompany such objective perceptions of the time with a many-sided, yes, all-embracing critique of the bourgeois tradition? By the bourgeois tradition I mean the values of culture, enlightenment, humanity, in short of such dreams as the uplifting of the people through scientific civilization. They who practiced this critique were men of education, culture, science. They did it, indeed, smiling; with a blitheness and intellectual complacency which lent the thing a special, pungent, disquieting, or even perverse charm. It is probably superfluous to state that not for a moment did they recognize the form of the government which we got as a result of defeat, the freedom that fell in our laps, in a word the democratic republic, as anything to be taken seriously as the legitimized frame of the new situation. With one accord they treated it as ephemeral, as meaningless from the start, yes, as a bad joke to be dismissed with a shrug.
p365 They cited de Tocqueville, who had said that out of revolution as out of a common source two streams issued, the one leading men to free arrangements, the other to absolute power. In the free arrangements none of the gentlemen conversationalists at Kridwiss’s any longer believe, since the very concept was self-contradictory: freedom by the act of assertion being driven to limit the freedom of its antagonist and thus to stultify itself and its own principles. Such was in fact its ultimate fate, though oftener the prepossession about “human rights” was thrown overboard at the start. And this was far more likely than that we would let ourselves in today for the dialectical process which turned freedom into the dictatorship of its party. In the end it all came down to dictatorship, to force, for with the demolition of the traditional national and social forms through the French Revolution an epoch had dawned which, consciously or not, confessedly or not, steered its course toward despotic tyranny over the masses; and they, reduced to one uniform level, atomized, out of touch, were as powerless as the single individual.
I see in this the rationalization of the rump of the German intelligentsia following a century of Darwinian selection. People who either identified with, or who had given in to and refused to fight against, the dynastic/nationalistic aims of the Prussian dynasty.
p366 ...No one will be surprised that, in the conversations of this avant-garde of culture and critiques, a book which had appeared seven years before the war, “Reflexions sur la violence” by Sorel, played an important part. [It's worth following that link to Wiki, but here is an interesting little quote:
One of Sorel's most controversial statements claimed that violence could save the world from barbarism.[3] He equates violence with life, creativity, and virtue.[4]
A major contention argued by Sorel in the book is on the importance of myths as "expressions of will to act".[5] He supports the creation of an economic system run by and for the interests of producers rather than consumers.[6]
That last point about creating an economic system according to the interests of producers is worth thinking about, since our current global consumer oriented economy is responsible for so much that is wrong with the world today.] The author’s relentless prognostication of war and anarchy, his characterization of Europe as the war-breeding soil, his theory that the peoples of our continent can unite only in the one idea, that of making war -- all justified its public in calling it the book of the day. But even more trenchant and telling was its perception and statement of the fact that in this age of the masses parliamentary discussion must prove entirely inadequate for the shaping of political decisions; that in its stead the masses would have in the future to be provided with mythical fictions, devised like primitive battle-cries, to release and activate political energies. This was in fact the crass and inflaming prophecy of the book; that popular myths or rather those proper for the masses would become the vehicle of political action; fables, insane visions, chimaeras, which needed to have nothing to do with truth or reason or science in order to be creative, to determine the course of life and history, and thus to prove themselves dynamic realities. [Well... I would say that Sorel's point was that this is the way things had always been. This is like accusing Machiavelli of inventing what we now term the Machiavellian -- he was simply describing how the Borgias and Bismarcks of the past had always operated.] Not for nothing, of course, did the book bear its alarming title; for it dealt with violence as the triumphant antithesis of truth. It made plain that the fate of truth was bound up with the fate of the individual, yes, identical with it: being for both truth and the individual a cheapening, a devaluation. It opened a mocking abyss between truth and power, truth and life, truth and the community. It showed by implication that precedence belonged far more to the community; that truth had the community as its goal, and that whoever would share in the community must be prepared to scrap considerable elements of truth and science and line up for the sacrificium intellectus.
I wish I didn’t think this applies as well to 2015. Islamic State, Boko Haram, even the Tea Party would seem to be contemporary manifestations of these ideas. I really need to read Sorel.
p367 And now imagine (here is the “clear picture” I promised to give) [my pledge to edit this “to the bone” is by now flushed down the toilet] how these gentlemen, scientists themselves, scholars and teachers... revelled in a situation which for me had about it so much that was terrifying, and which they regarded as either already in full swing or inevitably on the way. They amused themselves by imagining a legal process in which one of these mass myths was up for discussion in the service of the political drive for the undermining of the bourgeois social order. Its protagonists had to defend themselves against the charge of lying and falsification; but the plaintiff and defendant did not so much attack each other as in the most laughable way miss each other’s points. [I’m thinking global climate change here] The fantastic thing was the mighty apparatus of scientific witness which was invoked -- quite futilely -- to prove that humbug was humbug and a scandalous affront to truth. [Or possibly gun control] For the dynamic, historical creative fiction, the so-called lie and falsification, in other words the community-forming belief, was simply inaccessible to this line of attack. Science strove, on the plane of decent, objective truth, to confute the dynamic lie; but arguments on that plane could only seem irrelevant to the champions of the dynamic, who merely smiled a superior smile, Science, truth -- good God! ... They could scarcely contain their mirth at the desperate campaign waged by reason and criticism against wholly untouchable, wholly invulnerable beliefs... [Obama Care would work here as well] A jurisprudence that wished to rest on popular feeling and not to isolate itself from the community could not venture to espouse the point of view of theoretic, anti-communal, so-called truth; it had to prove itself modern as well as patriotic, patriotic in the most modern sense, by respecting the fruitful falsum, [lie?] acquitting its apostles, and dismissing science with a flea in its ear...
Admittedly, he has in mind here situations closer to what George Orwell was describing in 1984, but I still think there is similarity with contemporary issues. And the application to Islamic State and Boko Haram and the like is pretty exact. Also, this clearly relates to Sorel's critical view of science which I really don't understand except that it may be related to what Zeitblom said earlier about how a good scientific understanding of the universe just makes people feel small and unimportant. I would have said that that was a view one could hold in the 19th century but not in the 21st, but Boko Haram would disagree.
p368 It was an old-new world of revolutionary reaction, in which the values bound up with the idea of the individual -- shall we say truth, freedom, law, reason? -- were entirely rejected and shorn of power, or else had taken on a meaning quite different from that given them for centuries. Wrenched away from the washed-out theoretic, based on the relative and pumped full of fresh blood, they were referred to the far higher court of violence, authority, the dictatorship of belief -- not, let me say, in a reactionary, anachronistic way as of yesterday or the day before, but so that it was like the most novel setting back of humanity into medievally theocratic conditions and situations. That was as little reactionary as though one were to describe as regression the track round a sphere, which of course leads back to where it started. There it was: progress and reaction, the old and the new, the past and the future became one; the Political Right more and more coincided with the Left. [That both Fascists and socialists claimed Sorel certainly supports this view.] That thought was free, that research worked without assumptions: these were conceptions which, far from representing progress, belonged to a superseded and uninteresting world. Freedom was given to thought that it might justify force; just as seven hundred years ago reason had been free to discuss faith and demonstrate dogma; for that she was there, and for that today thinking was there, or would be there tomorrow... To make oneself clear as to what was coming and to get rid of the silly fear of it one need only remind oneself that the absoluteness of definite premises and sacrosanct conditions had never been a hindrance to fancy and individual boldness of thought. On the contrary: precisely because from the very first medieval man had received a closed intellectual frame from the Church as something absolute and taken for granted, he had been far more imaginative than the burgher of the individualist age; he had been able to surrender himself far more freely and sure-footedly to his personal fantasy.
p369 ...They wore the air of disinterested observers, an as “enorm wischtisch” [?] they fixed their eyes on the general readiness, already far advanced, to drop out of hand our so-called cultural conquests for the sake of a simplification regarded as inevitable and timely. One might, if one chose, describe it as deliberate rebarbarization. Was I to trust my ears? But now I had to laugh, yet at the same time was amazed when the gentlemen at this point came upon the subject of dental medicine and quite objectively began to talk about Adrian’s and my symbolic musical critique of the dead tooth... about the growing tendency of dentists to pull out forthwith all teeth with dead nerves; since it had been concluded -- after a long, painstaking, and refined development in the nineteenth-century technique of root treatment -- that they were to be regarded as infections foreign bodies. Observe -- it was Dr. Breisacher who acutely pointed this out, and met with general agreement -- that the hygienic point of view therein represented must be considered, in a way, as a rationalization of the fundamental tendency to let things drop, to give up, to get away, to simplify. For in a matter of hygiene it was quite in place to suspect an ideological basis. There was no doubt that in the future, after we had begun to practice a large-scale elimination of the unfit, the diseased and the weak-minded, we would justify the policy by similar hygienic arguments for the purification of society and the race. Whereas in reality -- none of those present denied, but on the contrary rather emphasized the fact -- that the real reason lay far deeper down, in the renunciation of all the humane softness of the bourgeois epoch; in an instinctive self-preparation of humanity for harsh and sinister times which mocked our humans ideals; for an age of over-all wars and revolutions which would probably take us back far behind the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages; in a return to the dark age before it arose after the collapse of the classic culture. . . .
That clearly sets the stage for Germany in the 1930s but also, again, for our world of 21st century Islamic Fundamentalism.
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