178. TMM - Chapter 4 - Progress and humanism

Jump to Introduction & Chronology
Jump back to Previous: TMM - Chap. 3 to 4  

The Magic Mountain 

Chapter 4 continued

Hippe
And another overture. Another “little phrase” that will be repeated. 

Analysis
Mann is having a lot of fun with Dr Krokowski.  

This is an interesting subject -- love/sex and illness -- when we’ve so recently been talking about the value, intellectual or otherwise, of illness. If one must be ill to be truly intellectual or holy, then apparently one must repress one’s sexuality.There are some jokes at the expense of the Catholic priesthood here that I will let slide.

Also, isn’t it a little odd that “bourgeois forces” are an integral part of this mechanism that leads to holiness and artistic creativity? 


Table Talk
Really wonderful how Mann demonstrates, in Hans, manifestations not unlike what Dr K was just lecturing about. How his interest in Madame Chauchat is revealed in his tremor. 


Growing Anxiety
P170 - Hans’s crush here is so much like a school crush. School could almost have been designed with romance in mind. College and high school are bad enough, but grade school, where you spend the entire day with the same small group of students is in some ways the worst.

P183 - 1830 in Paris, July Revolution again. I forget what an effect it had. On Goethe as he was ending Faust; for Dostoevsky at the beginning of The Brothers Karamazov; and now here for Mann. 

P185 - [Settembrini] ...There was no doubt which of these two forces [Asiatic (tyranny, superstition, the law of obduracy) and European (freedom, knowledge, the law of ferment, change and progress)] would gain the victory -- that of enlightenment, or reasoned advancement toward perfection. Because human progress was always gathering up new nations in the course of its brilliant advance, conquering new continents -- indeed all of Europe itself -- and had even started to press on into Asia. Yet there was much to be done before total victory... But that day would come, [when monarchies and religions would at last collapse in the more backward European nations] Settembrini said, smiling delicately beneath his mustache -- it would come, if not on the feet of doves, then on the pinions of eagles, and would burst as the dawn of universal brotherhood under the emblem of reason, science, and justice; it would bring about a new Holy Alliance of bourgeois democracies, the shining antithesis of that thrice-infamous alliance of princes and ministers whom Grandfather Giuseppe had declared his personal enemies -- in a word, the Republic of the World. But to achieve this goal, it was necessary above all to strike at the Asiatic principle of bondage and obduracy at its vital center, at the very nerve of resistance -- in Vienna. One must deal a fatal blow to Austria and crush her, first to avenge past wrongs and second to open the way for the rule of justice and happiness on earth. 

This is interesting. (Hans doesn’t care for it, by the way.) Since I just left off a history of Europe just at the point where the Habsburg cancer had metastasized all over Europe, I feel a deep sympathy for Settembrini’s position here. While for him Vienna primarily represents the oppressor of Lombardy-Venetia, and to a less emotional degree the oppressor of the Slavs and other nations of the Balkans and eastern Europe, for me they represent the absolute worst of the dynastic system that even now continues to rule in parts of Europe, like Britain. Pirenne’s little rant against Charles V, as ruler of Spain, is an excellent expression of the problems inherent in this system of rule.

That said, it’s hard to see what even Crown Prince Rudolf could have done had he inherited the empire instead of shooting himself at Mayerling. With the Ottomans to the south and the Romanovs to the east and the troublesome House of Hohenzollern to the north, I’m not sure what even a philosopher king could have done with that situation. How many good years were there between the fall of the House of Habsburg and WW2 and then the Cold War? Were people really better off? Was nationalism a panacea? 

If you give Gavrilo Princip credit for ending the Habsburg reign, has that actually improved people’s lives? Granted, this means imagining an alternative timeline in which The Great War never happens, which quickly gets too difficult to even attempt. Someone has put together a very convincing argument in favor of Canada’s relationship with Britain as opposed to our, American, revolutionary relationship. I found it very difficult to argue against -- which is unusual for me. Nationalism is a great reason to kill people, but beyond that it’s hard to see any real benefits.

Now I’m remembering a similarly convincing argument for Persian governance over Hellenic “freedom” in BCE Greece. Would Europe have been better off in a Continental Habsburg Empire? Would the world have been better off? That's even harder to imagine than a Habsburg Empire in Central and Southeast Europe surviving far into the 20th century... or beyond. 

Nationalism is such an odd concept anyway, take the German Empire in the Great War, which lies in the near future for our characters here. “Germany” was hammered together through a series of wars in which the Prussians compelled the cooperation of a variety of states that, while speaking some version of the German language, had no particular interest in the “Nation” being created. And the same was true in the past for France and England -- though in England the smaller nations didn’t even speak the same language. Actually that’s true for parts of France as well.

But to get back to Settembrini -- and Mann -- we are intended to see here the bourgeois/socialist ideal of a border-less world-state based on science and reason. But, and this is a huge but, we are reading this after 1924 (the year it was published), which is just after 1922 when Mussolini and the Fascist party came to power in Italy. There is more than a little in common between Settembrini and pre-war Mussolini. I don't know that Mussolini was a model for the character, but he could have been. Both were socialists with nationalistic tendencies. It is not hard to imagine Settembrini making the same choices Mussolini made during the war. The road to national socialism was paved with good intentions. 

[Settembrini continues about his father:] ...what was humanism? Love of humankind, nothing more, and so it, too, was political, it, too, was a rebellion against everything that had soiled and degraded the ideal of humanity. Humanism had been accused of exaggerating the importance of form; but it cultivated beautiful form purely for the sake of the dignity of man -- in brilliant antithesis to the Middle Ages, which had sunk not only into misanthropy and superstition, but also into ignominious formlessness. From the very first, his father had fought for the cause of humanity, for earthly interests, for freedom of thought and the pursuit of happiness, and had firmly believed that we can leave heaven to the birds. Prometheus! He had been the first humanist and was identical with Satana, whom Carducci had apostrophized in his hymn...  

I’ve never bothered to look into this Satana, strangely, but now I have and found THIS. Here’s my understanding: I think by “Satana” Carducci means, not the Devil or even Mephisto, but the opposite of Christ -- the anti-christ, as it were. (But not the “Antichrist.”) This is why Settembrini can toast to him while at the same time worrying about giving the Devil an inch. And while I’m at it, his invocation of Prometheus is one of the reasons I love this author.  
...

P188 ...And he spoke now about the “Word,” about the cult of the Word, about eloquence, which he called the triumph of humanity. Because the Word was the glory of humankind, and it alone gave dignity to life...  

I originally skipped this passage, but I kept thinking about it because it is language, or the choice of words, that often most attracts me to either prose or poetry. (Again, "Knoxville: Summer of 1915," by James Agee comes to mind.) But what’s interesting here is that you can also say what Settembrini said against music against beautiful language. Ugly ideas can be expressed in moving words. Beauty is not truth, truth is not always beauty. 

P189 Young Hans Castorp found all this well worth listening to... he listened to him politely and attentively and tried to be fair, compensating for or suppressing feelings that he felt rising in opposition to his mentor’s opinions and characterizations. For it cannot be denied that opposition was stirring in his soul -- both the sort that had always been there naturally from the start and the sort that arose specifically from the present situation, partly from indirect observation, partly from personal experience among the people up here.

What a piece of work is a man, and how easily conscience betrays him. He listens to the voice of duty -- and what he hears is the license of passion... With the best of intentions he tested the man’s views on reason, the world republic, and beautiful style -- and was prepared to be influenced by them. And each time, he found it all the more permissible afterwards to let his thoughts and dreams run free in another direction, in the opposite direction... And what or who stood on the opposing side of patriotism, the dignity of man, and beautiful literature -- the side toward which Hans Castorp believed he should direct his thoughts and deeds? There stood . . . Clavdia Chauchat... 


The Thermometer

P190 This scene with Hans calculating his cousins bill for a year but including cigars and suits is so clever. Hans almost reminds me of Adrian Mole here in his obvious obliviousness.

P215 - I wish there were some way of knowing how much of this about the air being “good for illness”, about creating “a revolution in the body,” about the “intoxicating effects” of “soluble toxins” is true, or at least what was believed at the time; and how much is invention of the novelist? It sounds plausible enough, but then again Mann’s wife spent a fair amount of time at a place like this and they never noticed she wasn’t tubercular at all. And if this scene is a close approximation of what Mann himself was told on his visit, which wouldn’t surprise me at all, then his Hofrat Behrens was dead on. Though fleeing to the Flatlands doesn’t seem to have caused Mann any permanent damage. 

I’m trying to think of another case were the treatment has the potential of making the condition worse, or of bringing it on. I’m sure there must be something similar.  

And this brings to a close our hero's visit to the Magic Mountain. From here on he will be a resident, not a visitor.



Jump to Next: TMM - 179. Taking a break, health 

51. Doctor Faustus - Epilogue + National Socialism + History

Jump to Introduction + Chronology

Jump back to Previous: Doctor Faustus - chapter XLVII

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.

Adrian spends three months in a “hospital for nervous diseases” in Munich. It is only when he is sent away from there with a bleak prognosis that Elsbeth Leverkuhn, Adrian’s mother, is informed of what has happened. She comes down to Pfeiffering to fetch him back to Buchel and the family farm where he passes,  in a more or less childlike state, the remaining ten years of his life in her care. Zeitblom learns of Adrian's death on 25 August 1940. (The Battle of France ends June 1940; the Battle of Britain starts July 1940 and runs into October.) And if you are wondering what became of Frau von Tolna, the Hungarian noblewoman who so briefly darkened these pages, here is the description of Adrian’s funeral:

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.

The similarity to the thinking of the virulent anti-Semites in Austria and Germany leading up to WW2 is striking. I've never understood how people become so obsessed about a group of people they perceive as different, whether Black, Jewish, or Gay. There are so many groups of people on the planet that I wish were not, but I really don't spend much of my time thinking about them.

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).

Jump to Next: The Periodic Table - chapter 1