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p504 It is finished. An old man, bent, well-nigh broken by the horrors of the times in which he wrote and those which were the burden of his writing, looks with dubious satisfaction on the high stack of teeming paper which is the work of his industry, the product of these years filled to running over with past memories and present events. A task has been mastered, for which by nature I was not the man, to which I was not born, but rather called by love and loyalty -- and by my status as eyewitness. What these can accomplish, what devotion can do, that has been done -- I must needs be content.
When I began writing down these memories, the biography of Adrian Leverkuhn, there existed with reference to its author as much as to the art of its subject not the faintest prospect of its publication. But now that the monstrous national perversion which then gripped the Continent, and more than the Continent, in its grip, has celebrated its orgies down to the bitter end; now that its prime movers have had themselves poisoned by their physicians, drenched with petrol and set on fire, that nothing of them might remain -- now, I say, it might be possible to think of the publication of my labour of love. But those evil men willed that Germany be destroyed down to the ground; and one dares not hope it could very soon be capable of any sort of cultural activity, even the printing of a book. In actual fact I have sometimes pondered ways and means of sending these pages to America, in order that they might first be laid before the public in an English translation. To me it seems as though this might not run quite counter to the wishes of my departed friend, True, there comes the thought of the essentially foreign impression my book must make in the cultural climate and coupled with the dismaying prospect that its translation into English must turn out, at least in some all too radically German parts, to be an impossibility. [It was first published in the German language but in Sweden, and almost immediately after in an English translation (by an English translator it seems) by Alfred A. Knopf.]
What I further foresee is the feeling of emptiness which will be my lot when after a brief report on the closing scenes of the great composer’s life I shall have rendered my account and drawn it to a close. The work of it, harrowing and consuming as it has been, I shall miss. As the regular performance of a task it kept me busy and filled the years which would have been still harder to bear in idleness. I now look about me for an activity which could in future replace it... It is true, the barriers that eleven years ago kept me from practicing my profession have now fallen to the guns of history. Germany is free, in so far as one may apply the word to a land prostrate and proscribed. It may be that soon nothing will stand in the way of my return to my teaching... Shall I once more impress upon the hearts of my top-form pupils in the humanities the cultural ideas in which reverence for the deities of the depths blends with the civilized cult of Olympic reason and clarity, to make for a unity in uprightness? But ah, I fear that in this savage decade a generation of youth has grown up which understands my language as little as I theirs. I fear the youth of my land has become too strange to me for me to be their teacher still. And more: Germany herself, the unhappy nation, is strange to me, utterly strange and that because, convinced of her awful end, I drew back from her sins and hid from them in my seclusion. Must I not ask myself whether or not I did right? And again: did I actually do it? I have clung to one man, one suffering, significant human being, clung unto death; and I have depicted his life, which never ceased to fill me with love and grief. To me it seems as though this loyalty might atone for my having fled in horror from my country’s guilt.
A great deal of Mann here. He never did return to live in Germany. And, coming to the end of a mere six months of blogging about books, I can relate to what he says about wrapping up a project like this. I look forward with eagerness and apprehension to the break in this blogging I am about to make.
p509 At the open grave in the little Oberweiler churchyard stood with me, besides the relatives, Jeanette Scheurl, Rudiger Schildknapp, Kunigunde Rosenstiel, [in late August early September 1940 Germany?] and Meta Nackedey; also a stranger, a veiled unknown, who disappeared as the first clods fell on the coffin.
p510 Germany, the hectic on her cheek, was reeling then at the height of her dissolute triumphs, about to gain the whole world by virtue of the one pact she was minded to keep, which she had signed with her blood. Today, clung round by demons, a hand over one eye, with the other staring into horrors, down she flings from despair to despair. [Image from the Durer woodcut] When will she reach the bottom of the abyss? When, out of uttermost helplessness -- a miracle beyond the power of belief -- will the light of hope dawn? A lonely man folds his hands and speaks: “God be merciful to thy poor soul, my friend, my Fatherland!”
I've already posed the question about curtailing the war... would it have been a good thing to have assassinated Hitler so that all this would not have run its course? But there is an even more painful and profound question: If you could go all the way back to the early Weimar years and tweak things so that Hitler would never have risen to power because German was so pleased with their shiny new republic... would you wish for that? Your first thought is of all the bad that you could thus prevent, but then you begin to think of all the good and great that would have to go away with the bad.
Certainly from the point of view of Story -- to mention again my notion of God as Novelist -- this would be a boring choice.
As I hinted above, I am now going to take a break from daily blogging. I suspect I will start posting again in a few weeks... or possibly at the beginning of April -- April Fool's Day would be appropriate. When I return I suspect I will have a few more things to say about Doctor Faustus before moving on to Goethe's Faust. Get ready for the Acid Test.
P.S. I am reviewing this in mid June of 2015 while the news is full of the Charleston Shooting where a white supremacist killed nine African Americans during a church service. Here's a quote from a BBC article, "One survivor recalled him saying: 'You all rape women and you're taking over our country.'" And then he shot and killed six women and three men. Most of them were middle-aged or elderly. Several were pastors and otherwise civic leaders.
Social media has called my attention to the fact that all the flags at the South Carolina State House are flying at half-staff, except for the Confederate flag. What is especially disheartening here is that the Confederacy suffered nearly the same fate as Nazi Germany. It was (brutally) occupied and many of its major cities were destroyed. Instead of people reconsidering their beliefs, we ended up with the KKK. The "spirit" of the Confederate losers is still admired -- one odd but compelling example of this is the cult favorite TV show Firefly. That "spirit" is scarily similar to the "German" spirit Mann laments above.
A little bonus, here's a lovely photo of a Glasswing.
[Now it is August 2016 and I have been rereading this blog. I'm still in the early chapters and found this passage, actually from A Natural History of the Senses by Diane Ackerman, that I think really must be repeated again here at the end.
"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."
From the perspective of the end of WW2, it sounds to me like Wagner could be describing the German spirit that lead to the war and that, perhaps, wasn't entirely displeased by the outcome.]
National Socialism
I admit I am a bit shocked that Mann never gave me an opening to talk about National Socialism. These artists and their allegories! The Magic Mountain was so full of talk about socialism as the alternative to the bourgeois order that I just assumed we would ease into a discussion of how socialism morphed into national socialism. He’s left me to do my research on German national socialism on my own... if I get around to it.
But, thanks to The Magic Mountain, I have already researched Benito Mussolini and his is a fascinating -- and very relevant -- story. Relevant to this work or to The Magic Mountain? I hear you ask. Well, it doesn’t really belong in a book that ends with the start of the Great War, so it’s going to go here.
I started researching Mussolini to see if he was possibly a model for the character Settembrini. Before the war Mussolini was a good socialist in a family in which his father was a socialist and his mother a devout Catholic. But when the Great War started, good socialists all over Europe were confronted with the choice between their nationalistic and internationalistic allegiances. Mussolini went with nationalism and added that to his socialist beliefs to form a new political blend. Instead of being focused on class struggle, national socialism was focused on the nation. The people were the worker ants in the service to the glory of -- not God or wealth -- but the state.
Fascism is for the only liberty which can be a serious thing, the liberty of the state and of the individual in the state. Therefore for the fascist, everything is in the state, and no human or spiritual thing exists, or has any sort of value, outside the state. In this sense fascism is totalitarian, and the fascist state which is the synthesis and unity of every value, interprets, develops and strengthens the entire life of the people.
—Benito Mussolini, Giovanni Gentile, Doctrine of Fascism (1932)
As Mussolini realized, this gave him leeway to negotiate agreements of understanding with the nobles, the Church, and even the middle-class -- provided they all would sublimate their personal interests to those of the nation. I must confess that I don’t know (because what little I do know about conditions in the early years is colored by the war and the alliance with Hitler) that this would not have been a pretty ideal scheme if it hadn’t been for the foreign policy implications. There is much to be said for a government that makes the trains run on time while also giving its citizens a purpose greater than themselves.
The problem with nationalism, as opposed to internationalism, is that there is inevitable conflict with other nations. If your purpose is the greatness and glory of your people, this glory is likely to be achieved at the expense of other nations with whom you have disputes or from whom you can gain something of value. Even making the trains run on time only requires a humiliatingly modest degree of sacrifice on the part of eager (young) citizens. War, on the other hand, takes your breath away. Would anyone really have cared that much about the Italian Fascists if they had left Africa and the Balkan’s alone? I am reminded that, at the beginning of Sword of Honour by Evelyn Waugh, the English protagonist is living in Italy and is not at all unhappy with the politics there. He returns to Britain, not to preserve the glory of middle-class parliamentary democracy and capitalism, but, because he is an Englishman.
National socialism, to place it in good German terms, is the natural synthesis of the dialectic represented in The Magic Mountain by the opposing views of Settembrini and Naphtha. Again, I’m surprised Mann did not delve into this, but perhaps, living then in Southern California, he avoided this topic here just as he avoided being at all clear on so many topics that would be sensitive to Germans while living in Bavaria and writing The Magic Mountain.
History
All this talk about the Reformation, the Hollenzolern dynasty in the 19th and early 20th centuries, the (essentially democratic) national socialism of the 20s to 40s, all this has got me thinking of history in general. What is odd, given what is represented in Doctor Faustus by the city name Kaisersaschern is that the origin of the bourgeois world order is so firmly and essentially linked with the Reformation, in particular the Calvinist branch of Protestantism. It was the Dutch (or, as Fernand Braudel would have it, the Jewish influence on the Dutch) that really got the capitalistic-bourgeois ball rolling. The Dutch, and the Puritans, acted in the interest of their faith, but also, to a very large extent, in the interest of trade. Europeans began to wage war -- against each other and against indigenous peoples all over the world not so much for dynastic reasons, as was most often the case in Europe, but to win economic advantages for their middle-classes. This continued at an even higher level when the heart of capitalism shifted to London. The Opium Wars in China may be the most dramatic example of this tendency.
The importance of religion alone, even during the 30 Years War, is hard to measure because it was so often blended with dynastic concerns. When a “country” changes religion by decree of a prince, as so often was the case in northern Europe and even in England, It is hard to see in that a sign of popular religious fervor. And by the 19th century, nationalism had begun to supplant religion as the motive for wars. The unification of Germany makes no sense in religious terms. But even then there continued to be a strong dynastic element as best exemplified in the case of the Unification of Italy under the House of Savoy (when Savoy itself (for the most part just Chambéry) and Nice were seeded to France in return for help in unifying the rest of Italy).
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