178. TMM - Chapter 4 - Progress and humanism

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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.



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63. The Periodic Table - chapter 11 - Cerium

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March 31, 2015

p139 At a distance of thirty years I find it difficult to reconstruct the sort of human being that corresponded, in November 1944, to my name or, better, to my number: 174517. I must have by then overcome the most terrible crisis, the crisis of having become part of Lager system, and I must have developed a strange callousness if I then managed not only to survive but also to think, to register the world around me, and even to perform rather delicate work, in an environment infected by the daily presence of death and at the same time brought to a frenzy by the approach of the Russian liberators, who by now were only eighty kilometers away. Desperation and hope alternated at a rate that would have destroyed almost any normal person in an hour.

p140 We were not normal because we were hungry. Our hunger at that time had nothing in common with the well-known (and not completely disagreeable) sensation of someone who has missed a meal and is certain that the next meal will not be missed: it was a need, a lack, a yearning that had accompanied us now for a year, had struck deep, permanent roots in us, lived in our cells, and conditioned our behavior. To eat, to get something to eat, was our prime stimulus, behind which, at a great distance, followed all other problems of survival, and even farther away the memories of home and the very fear of death.

I was a chemist in a chemical plant, in a chemical laboratory (this too has been narrated), and I stole in order to eat. If you do not begin as a child, learning how to steal is not easy; it had taken me several months before I could repress the moral commandments and acquire the necessary techniques, and at a certain point I realized (with a flash of laughter and a pinch of satisfied ambition) that I was reliving -- me, a respectable little university graduate -- the involuntary-evolution of a famous respectable dog, a Victorian, Darwinian dog who is deported and becomes a thief in order to live in his Klondike Lager -- the great Buck of The Call of the Wild. I stole like him and like the foxes: at every favorable opportunity but with sly cunning and without exposing myself. I stole everything except the bread of my companions.

[His problem is that most of the substances that he could steal in the lab are liquids] ...This is the great problem of packaging, which every experienced chemist knows: and it was well known to God Almighty, who solved it brilliantly, as he is wont to, with cellular membranes, eggshells, the multiple peel of oranges, and our own skins, because after all we too are liquids. Now, at that time, there did not exist polyethylene, which would have suited me perfectly since it is flexible, light, and splendidly impermeable: but it is also a bit too incorruptible, and not by chance God Almighty himself, although he is a master of polymerization, abstained from patenting it: He does not like incorruptible things. [See Doctor Faustus]

[With all this in mind he has to limit himself to items that were]

p141 ...solid, not perishable, not cumbersome, and above all new. It had to be of high unitary value, that is not voluminous, because we were often searched at the camp’s entrance after work; and it should finally be useful to or desired by at least one of the social categories that composed the Lager’s complicated universe.

...

[Levy finds some iron-cerium rods and managed to get them into the camp where he consults with his friend, Alberto. Levi is skeptical of the value of these rods] p142 Alberto reproached me. For him renunciation, pessimism discouragement were abominable and culpable: he did not accept the concentration camp universe, he rejected it both instinctively and with his reason, and he did not let himself be tainted by it. He was a man of good and strong will, and miraculously he had remained free, and his words and his acts were free: he had not bowed his head, he had not bent his back. A gesture of his, a word, a smile had a liberating virtue, they were a rip in the rigid fabric of the Lager, and all those who had contact with him felt this, even those who did not understand his language. I believe that nobody, in that place, was loved as much as he was.

p143 He reproached me: you should never be disheartened, because it is harmful and therefore immoral, almost indecent. I had stolen the cerium: good, now it’s a matter of launching it. He would take care of it, he would turn it into a novelty, an article of high commercial value. Prometheus had been foolish to bestow fire on men instead of selling it to them: he would have made money, placated Jove, and avoided all that trouble with the vulture.

I love this twist on the story of Prometheus. It is also quintessentially “Jewish” or, at least, bourgeois -- and for many of these authors (Ford Madox Ford, leaps to mind) those two things seem to be almost the same thing. Of course the world of the camps would also be a world of “trade” as are all human environments. People who reject trade on principle (Marxists and Religious people for the most part) usually, to the extent that they are successful in imposing their beliefs, often create new (black or underground) markets as a side-effect. And then even the true-believers often fall victim to temptation and greed through the operation of these markets.

It’s also worth noting that Alberto here (a man of trade, apparently, though we know little else about him) voices (see bold text above) an anti-nihilist philosophy not unlike that of Sartre. But unlike Foucault, Alberto asserts both his humanity and his freedom. A child of the haute bourgeoisie, and with the lessons of the Holocaust just behind him, Foucault embraced a far more pessimistic philosophy and view of the world than did someone actually living in Auschwitz.

We must be more astute. This speech, about the necessity of being astute, was not new between us; Alberto had often made it to me, and before him others in the free world, and still many others repeated it to me later, an infinite number of times down to today, with a modest result; indeed, with the paradoxical result of developing in me a dangerous tendency of symbiosis with a truly astute person, who obtained (or felt he obtained) temporal or spiritual advantages from his companionship with me. Alberto was an ideal symbiont, because he refrained from being astute at my expense. I did not know, but he did... that in the plant there was a clandestine industry of cigarette lighters: unknown craftsmen, at spare moments, made them for important persons and civilian workers. Now flints are needed for lighters, and they had to be of a certain size: we had to thin down the rods I had...

...

...According to Alberto, the price of a lighter flint was equivalent to a ration of bread, that is, one day of life... [and they could make 120 flints] two months of life for me and two for Alberto, and in two months the Russians would have arrived and liberated us; and finally cerium would have liberated us, an element about which I knew nothing, save for that single practical application, and that it belonged to the equivocal and heretical rare-earth group family [Promethium is another rare-earth element], and that... it was not named after its discoverer; instead it celebrates (great modesty of the chemist of past times!) the asteroid Ceres, since the metal and the star were discovered in the same year, 1801; [not quite true -- see notes below] and this was perhaps an affectionate-ironic homage to alchemical couplings: just as the Sun was gold and Mars iron, so Ceres must be cerium.

...

One always hesitates to judge foolhardy actions, [in this case scraping the rods to reduce them in size -- creating sparks -- while concealed under blankets on a bed of shavings at night] whether one’s own or those of others, after they have proven to be successful: perhaps therefore they were not foolhardy enough? Or perhaps it is true that there exists a God who protects children, fools, and drunks? [Let’s not think too hard about that one in this particular situation] Or perhaps again these actions have more weight and more warmth than those innumerable other actions that have ended badly, and one tells them more willingly? But we did not ask ourselves such questions: the Lager had given us a crazy familiarity with danger and death, and risking the noose to eat more seemed to us a logical, indeed an obvious choice.

...

p146 We worked for three nights: nothing happened, nobody noticed our activity, nor did the blanket or pallet catch fire, and this is how we won the bread which kept us alive until the arrival of the Russians and how we comforted each other in the trust and friendship which united us.  

Levi tells the story of his liberation elsewhere. Alberto was moved with a large portion of the prisoners to Buchenwald and Mauthausen and disappeared somewhere along the way.

He doesn’t mention it here, but Levi was saved in the end because he contracted scarlet fever and was too ill to move when the SS evacuated the camp. Thus he survived the Resistenza because he was Jewish and he survived the Holocaust because he was ill at just the right moment. “So it goes,” as Kurt Vonnegut might say.

Cerium (Ce 58)  

“Commercial applications of cerium are numerous. They include catalysts, additives to fuel to reduce emissions and to glass and enamels to change their color. Cerium oxide is an important component of glass polishing powders and phosphors used in screens and fluorescent lamps. It is also used in the "flint" (actually ferrocerium) of lighters.”

...

“Cerium metal is highly pyrophoric, meaning that when it is ground or scratched, the resulting shavings catch fire.[9]”

...

“Cerium was discovered in Bastnäs in Sweden by Jöns Jakob Berzelius and Wilhelm Hisinger, and independently in Germany by Martin Heinrich Klaproth, both in 1803.[17] Cerium was named by Berzelius after the dwarf planet Ceres, discovered two years earlier (1801).[12] As originally isolated, cerium was in the form of its oxide, and was named ceria, a term that is still used. The metal itself was too electropositive to be isolated by then-current smelting technology, a characteristic of rare earth metals in general. After the development of electrochemistry by Humphry Davy five years later, the earths soon yielded the metals they contained. Ceria, as isolated in 1803, contained all of the lanthanides present in the cerite ore from Bastnäs, Sweden, and thus only contained about 45% of what is now known to be pure ceria. It was not until Carl Gustaf Mosander succeeded in removing lanthana and "didymia" in the late 1830s, that ceria was obtained pure. Wilhelm Hisinger was a wealthy mine owner and amateur scientist, and sponsor of Berzelius. He owned or controlled the mine at Bastnäs, and had been trying for years to find out the composition of the abundant heavy gangue rock (the "Tungsten of Bastnäs"), now known as cerite, that he had in his mine.[12] Mosander and his family lived for many years in the same house as Berzelius, and Mosander was undoubtedly persuaded by Berzelius to investigate ceria further.[18]” -Wiki

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