183. TMM - Danse Macabre

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The Magic Mountain 

Chapter 5 continued

Danse Macabre

I’ve been looking forward to this section. Let’s see what Mann tells us about death and dying here.

The Austrian horseman demonstrates a desperate fear of death through his financially ruinous call for oxygen. This is neither honorable nor spiritual.

Young Leila is quite childish, which is not unreasonable but also fails to hint at any Dostoevskean moral improvement by the confrontation with death.

Fritz Rotbein, the businessman who speaks of the European flower business and considers his own rib resection (as I would) as a doubtful business proposition.

And now for what I think may be the coup de gras for poor Hans,


P362 Behrens: 
 “...You did a proper bit of courting there at the end -- got in just under the wire, didn’t you? [they are fumigating Leila’s room after her death] I like that about you -- taking on my little lung-whistlers in their cages, seeing as you’re in relatively robust health yourself. A nice trait. No, no -- you cannot deny it, it’s a very pretty trait in your character. Would you like me to introduce you to some patients now and then? I’ve plenty other caged finches here -- that’s if you’re still interested. For instance I’m just about to look in on ‘Lady Overblown.’ Do you want to come along?...”
...

P365 ... He [a doctor in Zurich] had overblown her! [Pneumothorax]... The upshot was that she had come back up here in an overblown state, with constriction of the heart and shortness of breath -- ha! Hee hee hee -- and Behrens had sworn like a trooper and sent her straight to bed. Because she was now seriously ill... Ha ha ha -- look at his face, what a funny face! And pointing a finger at Hans Castorp, she laughed so hard at the face he was making that her forehead began to turn purple... “You are literally hovering between life and death,” he [Behrens] had shouted... What a bear he was -- ha ha ha...

It was not clear why the director’s comments had sent her into gales of laughter. Was it because he had “turned the air blue” and she did not really believe him -- or that she did believe him, as she surely must, but found her state of “hovering between life and death” too funny for words?... [Hans Castorp] sent her flowers all the same -- but never saw the gleeful Frau Zimmermann again... For after being kept under oxygen for several days, she had died in the arms of her husband, who had been called to her bedside by telegram. “A jumbo-size goose,” the director had volunteered in summary when he told Hans Castorp the news.
...

P367 ...Lauro [Tous-les-deux’s surviving son] turned out to be an astonishingly pretty young man with glowing eyes... but he carried on in such a dramatic, boastful way that the visitors -- Hans Castorp no less than Joachim Ziemssen -- were both happy to close the patient’s door behind them again... pretty Lauro had gushed on and on in surging, clanking, and unbearably high-flown French phrases about how he intended to die a hero’s death, comme heros, a l’espagnol, just like his brother, de meme que son fier jeune frere, Fernando, who likewise had died a Spanish hero. And he went on like that -- speaking with broad gestures, ripping back his shirt to expose his yellow chest to the fatal blow -- until a coughing fit stifled his rodomontade, bringing delicate, rusty-colored froth to his lips and giving the cousins an excuse to withdraw on tiptoe.

P368 They said nothing further about their visit with Lauro, and even in the quiet of their own rooms, they refrained from judging his behavior. They both enjoyed, however, their visits with Anton Karlovitch Ferge from Saint Petersburg, a fellow with a huge good-natured moustache and a protruding Adam’s apple that somehow seemed equally good-natured; he lay there in his bed, recovering very slowly and with great difficulty from an attempted pneumothorax, which, Herr Ferge said, had come within an inch of costing him his life. It had been a severe shock to his system, a pleural shock... 

I’ve included this introduction because we will see more of Herr Ferge, but he is really not part of this examination of people’s reaction to death, so I won’t include any more. I do like Ferge. He tells interesting stories about his prior life in Russia as a traveling fire-insurance salesman and is insistent that he never speaks about “higher things” but only sticks to the facts. 
...

P370 ...From time to time they also visited Teddy, the boy from the Fridericianum, an elegant, refined, blond fourteen year-old, who had a private nurse and wore white silk tie-string pajamas. He was an orphan, but rich, as he himself admitted... on days when he was feeling better he would sometimes leave his bed for an hour, put on a handsome, sporty outfit, and join the social whirl downstairs. The ladies liked to tease him, and he enjoyed listening to their conversations... Then he would go lie down again. And So Teddy idled his time away, elegantly, making it clear that he expected nothing more of life than this.

Frau von Mallinckrodt sounds like Anna K, but worse, and without Anna's good qualities. Also, Mann has a fondness for extreme German names like Mallinckrodt. Doctor Faustus is filled with them.

P371 In room number 50 lay Frau Mallinckrodt -- Natalie was her first name. She had black eyes and wore golden earrings; a flirt who loved her finery, she was nevertheless a perfect Job, a Lazarus in a female body, whom God had visited with every sort of affliction. Her organism seemed to be so inundated by toxins that she was ravaged by numerous illnesses, sometimes alternately, sometimes all at once... In short, the woman’s life was a horror. She was all alone in the world, too, having left her husband and children -- as she freely admitted to the cousins -- for another man (still half a boy), only to be left in turn by her lover. She now had no home, although she was not penniless -- her former husband saw to that... Well aware that she was a faithless and sinful woman, she bore all the plagues of job with amazing patience and poise, with a fiery female’s elemental powers of resistance, she triumphed over the misery of her dark-skinned body, even turning a white gauze bandage, which she was forced to wear wrapped around her head for some awful reason, into a becoming piece of attire. She was constantly changing her jewelry... With golden rings dangling at her ears, she quickly told the cousins what had happened to her: about the respectable, but boring husband, her equally respectable and boring children, who had turned out just like their father and whom she had never especially warmed to, and about the half-grown boy with whom she had run off and whose poetic displays of affection she praised at length...

P372 ...The poetic adolescent’s delicacy only served to spur... [Hans] to take the opposite course, to find occasion for paying frequent visits to unhappy Frau von Mallinckrodt and for performing little nursing services that required no special training... He performed these little services when he would drop by on his way to the dinning hall or after a walk, telling Joachim to go on ahead... and each time he felt his whole being expand with a joy rooted in a sense of helpfulness and quiet importance, but intermingled with a certain jaunty delight in the spotless Christian impression his good deeds made -- an impression so devout, caring, and praiseworthy, in fact, that no serious objections whatever could be raised against it, either from the military or a humanistic-pedagogic standpoint.

Again, we have a not very spiritual response to serious disease by a not at all spiritual woman. One could certainly understand this Natalie throwing herself under a train, while Anna -- besides being a more interesting person -- still had so much more going for her. Though I guess it’s actually more accurate to say that it was Leo Tolstoy who threw Anna under the train. 

And I can’t help thinking that Mann, in this section, is really throwing Tolstoy and Dostoevsky under a sort of train. 


P373 We have not yet mentioned Karen Karstedt, although Hans Castorp and Joachim took special interest in her. She was one of Behren’s private outpatients, and the director had commended her to the cousin’s charity. She had been up here four years now, was penniless herself and dependent on skinflint relatives... She lived in an inexpensive boardinghouse in Dorf -- nineteen years old, a slip of a thing, with smooth oily hair, eyes that shyly tried to hide a glint that matched the hectic flush of her cheeks, and a distinctively husky but sympathetic voice. She coughed almost incessantly and had bandages on all her fingers, the result of open sores from the toxins in her body.
...
Lengthy description of an outing the three take to see a skating event in Dorf and bobsled races. And there’s a description of attending the “Bioscope Theater”, an early cinema. There they run into Frau Stohr who ends up attempting “to get to the bottom of the relationship of these three young people”,

p378 ...It was true, after all, that for Hans Castorp the relationship with poor Karen was a kind of substitute, a vaguely useful device -- but that was true of all his other charitable enterprises as well. Yet these pious works were, at the same time, an end in themselves, and the satisfaction he found in... seeing poor Karen clap her hands with joy and gratitude... was not only of a vicarious and relative kind, but also genuine and immediate. It arose from an intellectual tradition diametrically opposed to the one represented  by Herr Settembrini’s pedagogy, but all the same one quite worthy of the designation “placet experiri” -- or so it seemed to Hans Castorp.

P379 [The three are walking again after breakfast,] ...A cemetery was visible about a quarter of the way up its [Dorfberg’s?] slope: the town cemetery, surrounded by a wall, presumably commanding a lovely view...  which made it an obvious goal for a walk. And the three of them did hike up there one beautiful morning... The cousins, one with a brick-red face, the other tanned bronze, walked along without overcoats, which would only have been burdensome in the glaring sun -- young Ziemssen wearing sport clothes and rubber galoshes, Hans Castorp dressed much the same, though in long trousers, since he was not the sort who gave much thought to his physique. It was between the beginning and the middle of February of a new year. Yes, the last number in the date had indeed changed since Hans Castorp’s arrival up here...

P380 And so the trio also walked to the cemetery on Dorfberg one day -- this excursion, too, is recorded here for the sake of rendering a full account... Karen Karstedt did not indulge in self-deception about even the final stages of her illness; she knew only too well how things stood and what the necrosis in her fingertips meant. She knew, moreover, that her skinflint relatives would hardly want to hear anything about the expense of transporting her home after her demise and that she would be allotted a modest plot up above for a final resting place. And so one might very well conclude that, as a goal for an excursion, [Hans had suggested it] it was more morally fitting than many others -- the movie theater or the start of the bobsled run, for instance...

P381 ...Standing there in the snow beside the little stone gate to the cemetery, they took in the view and then entered, swinging aside the unlocked wrought-iron grill hinged to the stone.

...The silence, the solitude, the serenity of the place seemed both deep and secret, in many senses of those words...

...As for the inscriptions, the names came from every corner of the earth, were written in English, Russian or other Slavic languages, in German, Portuguese, and many more tongues. The dates, however, had their own delicate individuality -- on the whole these life spans had been strikingly short, the difference in years between birth and demise averaging little more than twenty. The field was populated almost exclusively by youth rather than virtue, by unsettled folk who had found their way here from all over the world and had returned now for good and all to the horizontal form of existence. 

This is also suggestive of all the Great War cemeteries soon to dot Europe. Both the short lifespans and the widespread origins. And weren’t they gathered there at least in part because of the toxins in their bodies politic? If not in their own bodies.

Where have I heard it said about suicide that at some point the question is not, “Why should you kill yourself?” but rather “Why not?” (Perhaps this was that book about Michel Foucault.) Perhaps we should look at the Great War the same way, the question finally was “Why not go off to war?” America, strangely, was really the only nation that failed to see the logic behind that question in 1914.

Since this book is, too a large extent, also about the Great War, it’s worth asking now, a century later, if the Pax Americana is indeed coming to an end after almost seventy years, if this isn’t at least in part because the public -- and this time it’s the American public as well -- is starting to ask itself, “Why not go off to war and death?” 



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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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33. Doctor Faustus - chapter XXXI

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p310 “You go there instead of me,” Adrian had said. And we did not get to Paris. Shall I confess that, privately and apart from the historical point of view, I felt a deep, intimately personal shame? Weeks long we had sent home terse, affectedly laconic dispatches, dressing our triumphs in cold matter-of-fact. Liege had long since fallen, we had won the battle for Lorraine. In accordance with the fixed master-plan we had swung with five armies across the Meuse, had taken Brussels, Namur, Carried the day at Charleroi and Longwy, won a second series of battles at Sedan, Rethel, Saint-Quentin, [all the usual suspects. See Here for my comments on this area in the last blog] and occupied Reims. We advanced as though on wings. It was just as we had dreamed: by the favour of the god of war, at destiny’s nod, we were born as on pinions. To gaze without flinching on the flames we kindled, could not help kindling, was incumbent upon our manhood, it was the supreme challenge to our heroic courage. I can still see vividly the picture of a gaunt Gaulish wife, standing on a height round which our battery was moving; at its foot a village lay shattered and smoking. “I am the last!” she cried, with a gesture of tragic power, such as is given to no German woman to make. “Je suis la derniere!” Raising her fists, she hurled her curses down on our heads, repeating three times: “Mechants! Mechants! Mechants!” [wicked, vicious]

We looked the other way. We had to win, and ours was the hard trade of triumph. That I felt wretched enough myself sitting my horse, plagued with coughing and the racking pain in my limbs due to nights under canvas, actually afforded me a certain consolation.

Yet many more villages we shot up, still borne on victory’s pinions. Then came the incomprehensible, the apparently senseless thing: the order to retreat. How should we have understood it? We belonged to the army group Hausen, south of Chalons-sur-Marne, streaming on to Paris, as the von Kluck group were doing at other points. We were ignorant that somewhere, after a five-day battle, the French [Wow, he really isn’t going to give the “Old Contemptibles” credit for anything. The BEF played a crucial role in this counterattack.] had crushed von Bulow’s right wing -- reason enough for the anxious cautiousness of a supreme commander [Helmuth von Moltke the Younger] who had been elevated to his rank on account of his uncle, to order a general withdrawal. We passed some of the villages that we had left smoking in our rear, and the hill where the tragic woman had stood. She was not there.

As Alfred Graf von Schlieffen had feared, his Schlieffen Plan (Aufmarsch I) for the “rapid” isolation and defeat of France, had been compromised after he left the scene. Here is, possibly, all you really need to know about the Great War on the Western Front:

...A favourite of the Emperor was Helmuth von Moltke the Younger, who became Chief of Staff after Schlieffen retired.

Moltke went on to devise Aufmarsch II Ost, a variant upon Schlieffen's Aufmarsch Ost designed for an isolated Russo-German war. Schlieffen seems to have tried to impress upon Moltke that an offensive strategy against France could only work in the event of an isolated Franco-German war, as German forces would otherwise be too weak to implement it.[12] Knowing this, Moltke still attempted to apply the offensive strategy of Aufmarsch I West to the two-front war Germany faced in 1914 and Schlieffen's defensive plan Aufmarsch II West. With too few troops to cross west of Paris, let alone attempt a crossing of the Seine, Moltke's campaign failed to breach the French 'second defensive sector' and his troops were pushed back in the Battle of the Marne.[13]

-Wiki

So, as with the Japanese in the Pacific War, there was really no viable German plan to win the war against France in 1914. In both cases the military simply implemented the best plan they had, despite their lack of faith in an ability to win. Hitler would do much the same thing when he attacked the Soviet Union, since the one thing he was sure of was that the Soviets would be more difficult to defeat if he delayed. It is amazing how many wars are started by people who don’t even have confidence that they can win.

Being incorrigible, I couldn't help doing a little research on this "army group Hausen" Zeitblom speaks of. Hausen actually commanded the 3rd Army. The Imperial German Army did not group armies into "Army Groups" until 1915. Eventually there would be four Army Groups on both the Western and Eastern fronts. Here's a quote from Wiki about 3rd Army:

Upon the mobilization Max von Hausen (Saxon War Minister) was given command of the 3rd Army which mainly consisted of Saxons. The army participated in the Battle of the Frontiers, mainly in the battles of Dinant and Charleroi and the army were responsible for the destruction of Reims in September 1914. After the Second Army's retreat after the First Battle of the Marne, Von Hausen saw his own flank exposed and ordered a retreat. Upon the stabilization of the front on the river Aisne, Von Hausen was relieved of his command and replaced by General Karl von Einem.

Successfully repulsing the French Champagne-Marne offensive from February–March and September–November 1915 respectively...

-Source

So then I looked up 3rd Army and it seems to have consisted of units from the parts of Germany that were last to fall under Prussian control: Bavaria, Westphalia, Hesse, and Thuringia.

p311 The wings were trustless. It should not have been. It had not been a war to be won in one swift onslaught. We did not understand the frantic jubilation of the world over the result of the battle of the Marne; over the fact that the short war on which our salvation hung had turned into a long one, which we could not stand. Our defeat was now only a matter of time, and of cost to the foe. We could have laid our weapons down and forced our leaders to an immediate peace, if only we had understood. But even among them probably only one here and there dared to think of it. After all, they had scarcely realized that the age of localized war had gone by and that every campaign to which we felt ourselves driven must end in a world conflagration. In such a one the advantages of the inner line [and of the Prussian railroad monopoly], the fanatical devotion of the troops, the high state of preparedness, and a firmly based, strong authoritarian state had held out the chance of a lightning triumph. If this failed -- and it stood written that it must fail -- then, whatever we might still for years accomplish, we were lost in principle and before we began: this time, next time, always.

I buy his account of German psychology but not that the German leaders and people could not have know. European history back to the 18th (even the 16th and 17th) centuries had repeatedly demonstrated the impossibility of a continental power, no matter how superior, dominating the whole of Europe for more than an instant. The more successful any such power was, the more enemies they provoked both within their sphere of control and on their ever expanding periphery. Neither the Hapsburg's, Louis XIV, nor Napoleon were ever really on the verge of ultimate victory. They were only more dangerously extended and usually bankrupt as well.

We did not know. Slowly the truth tortured its way into us; while the war, a rotting, decaying, misery-creating war, though from time to time flaring up in flattering, deceiving successes, this war, of which I too had said it must not last long, lasted four years. Shall I here and now go into details of that long-drawn-out giving way and giving up, the wearing out of our powers and our equipment, the shabbiness and shortages of life, the undernourishment, the loss of morale from the deprivations, the lapses into dishonesty and the gross luxury of the profiteer? I might be censured for recklessly overstepping the limits of my purpose, which is personal and biographical... [Zeitblom is sent home after suffering from Typhus. Lice borne typhus was also the scourge of the SS work camps around Munich during the 2nd World War.

Final visual presentation of music: Beethoven, Symphony 9, 4th movement, Ode to Joy

Around this time Adrian gains two female fans Meta Nackedey and Kunigunde Rosenstiel, both around 30 years of age. Kunigunde, a Jewess, was also “A capable business woman...” to wit a manufacturer of sausage-cases.]

p315 ...At the time I returned to civil life he was greatly given to the habit [rolling and smoking cigarettes]; and my impression was that he practiced it not so much for the sake of the Gesta, [Gesta means "deeds" and there are dozens of documents that include this word but he's referring to the Gesta Romanorum] though this was ostensibly the case, as it was because he was trying to put the Gesta behind him and be ready for new demands upon his genius. On his horizon, I am sure of it, there was always rising -- probably since the outbreak of war, for a power of divination like his must have recognized therein a deep cleft and discontinuity, the opening of a new period of history, crowded with tumult and disruptions, agonies and wild vicissitudes -- on the horizon of his creative life, I say, there was already rising the “Apocalypsis cum figuris,” the work which was to give this life such a dizzying upward surge. Until then, so at least I see the process, he was employing the waiting-time with the brilliant marionette fantasies.

Adrian had learned through Schildknapp of the old book that passes for the source of most of the romantic myths of the Middle Ages. It is a translation from the Latin of the oldest Christian collection of fairy-tales and legends. I am quite willing to give Adrian’s favourite with the like-coloured eyes due credit for the suggestion. They had read it together in the evenings and it appealed to Adrian’s sense of the ridiculous, his craving to laugh, yes, to laugh until he cried...  [Adrian by this point is the focus of attention for two females and two other males (Rudolf (Schwerdtfeger) and Rudiger (Schildknapp). No, that’s not confusing.) ... poor Zeitblom! This is even harder than Hans with Peeperkorn]

I am of opinion that the Gesta -- in their historical uninstructedness, pious Christian didacticism, and moral naivete, with their eccentric casuistry of parricide, adultery, and complicated incest; their undocumented Roman emperors, with daughters whom they fantastically guarded and then offered for sale under the most hair-splitting conditions -- it is not to be denied, I say, that all these fables, presented in a solemn Latinizing and indescribably naive style of translation, concerning knights in pilgrimage to the Promised Land, wanton wives, artful procuresses, clerics given to the black arts, do have an extraordinarily diverting effect. They were in the highest degree calculated to stimulate Adrian’s penchant for parody, and the thought of dramatizing them musically in condensed form for the puppet theatre occupied him from the day he made their acquaintance. [Yet another tale of a virtuous wife tricked into adultery. Followed by a description of one of these puppet theatre creations of Adrian’s “Of the Birth of the Holy Pope Gregory” which outdoes Oedipus in that brother and sister conceive a son who then goes on to, without knowing it, marry his mother (a Queen) before eventually becoming Pope. This all ends when the mother... “departs for Rome to confess to the Holy Father, who, as he receives her confession, recognizes her and says: “O my sweet mother, sister, and wife, O my friend! The Devil thought to lead us to hell, but the greater power of God has prevented him.”].

p320 Those were enjoyable and stimulating evenings when he played for us [from the Gesta] -- that is, to me, Schildknapp, and very likely Rudi Schwerdtfeger [Rudi Sch. and Rudi Sch.], who persisted in being present now and then -- on the old square piano in the deep-windowed room with the Nike, the latest-written parts of his amazing scores, in which the harmonically most dominating, the rhythmically labyrinthine was applied to the simplest material, and again a sort of musical children’s trumpet style to the most extraordinary. The meeting of the Queen with the holy man whom she had borne to her brother, and whom she had embraced as spouse, charmed tears from us such as had never filled our eyes, uniquely mingling of laughter and fantastic sensibility. Schwerdtfeger, in abandoned familiarily, availed himself of the licence of the moment: with a “You’ve done it magnificently!” embraced Adrian and pressed him to his heart. I saw Rudiger’s mouth, always a bitter one, give a wry twist and could not myself resist murmuring: “Enough!” and putting out my hand to quench the unquenchable and restrain the unrestrained. [What German men did in an age before football on TV... or gay porn.]

Rudolf may have had some trouble in following the conversation that ensued after the private performance in the Abbot’s room [the “parlor” of Adrian’s living quarters]. We spoke of the union of the advanced with the popular, the closing of the gulf between art and accessibility, high and low, as once in a certain sense it had been brought together by the romantic movement, literary and musical. But after that had followed a new and deeper cleavage and alienation between the good and the easy, the worth-while and the entertaining, the advanced and the generally enjoyable, which had become the destiny of art. Was it sentimentality to say that music -- and she stood for them all -- demanded with growing consciousness to step out of her dignified isolation, to find common ground without becoming common, and to speak a language which even the musically untaught could understand, as it understood the Wolf’s Glen [surprise, another deal with a devil. Interestingly, this is also what Hitler called two of his headquarters in Belgium and France] and the Jungfernkranz and Wagner? Anyhow, sentimentality was not the means to this end, but instead and much sooner irony, mockery; which, clearing the air, made an opposing party against the romantic, against pathos and prophecy, sound-intoxication and literature and a bond with the objective and elemental -- that is, with the rediscovery of music itself as an organization of time. A most precarious start. For how near did not lie the false primitive, and thus the romantic again! To remain on the height of intellect; to resolve into the matter-of-course the most exclusive production of European musical development, so that everybody could grasp the new; to make themselves its master, applying it unconcernedly as free building material and making tradition felt, recoined into the opposite of the epigonal; to make technique, however high it had climbed, entirely unimportant, and all the arts of counterpoint and instrumentation to disappear and melt together to an effect of simplicity very far from simplicity, an intellectually winged simplicity -- that seemed to be the object and the craving of art.

p321 It was mostly Adrian who talked, only slightly seconded by us. Excited by the playing, he spoke with flushed cheeks and hot eyes, slightly feverish; not in a steady stream but more as just throwing out remarks, yet with so much animation that I felt I had never seen him, either in mine or in Rudiger’s presence, so eloquently taken out of himself. Schildknapp had given expression to his disbelief in the deromanticizing of music. Music was after all too deeply and essentially bound up with the romantic ever to reject it without serious natural damage to itself. To which Adrian:

“I will gladly agree with you, if you mean by romantic a warmth of feeling which music in the service of technical intellectuality today rejects. It is probably self-denial. But what we called the purification of the complicated into the simple is at bottom the same as the winning back of the vital and the power of feeling. If it were possible -- whoever succeeded in -- how would you say it?” he turned to me and then answered himself: “-- the break-through from intellectual coldness into a touch-and-go world of new feeling, him one should call the saviour of art. Redemption,” he went on, with a nervous shoulder-shrug, “a romantic word, and a harmonic writer’s word, shop talk for the cadence-blissfulness of harmonic music. Isn’t it amazing that music for a long time considered herself a means of release, whereas she herself, like all the arts, needed to be redeemed from a pompous isolation, which was the fruit of the culture-emancipation, the elevation of culture as a substitute for religion -- from being alone with an elite of culture, called the public, which soon will no longer be, which even now no longer is, so that soon art will be entirely alone, alone to die, unless she were to find her way to the folk, that is, to say it unromantically, to human beings?”

p322 He said and asked that all in one breath in a lowered, conversational tone, but with a concealed tremor which one understood only when he finished.

“The whole temper of art, believe me, will change, and withal into the blither and more modest; it is inevitable, and it is a good thing. Much melancholy ambition will fall away from her, and a new innocence, yes, harmlessness will be hers. The future will see in her, she herself will once more see in herself, the servant of a community which will comprise far more than ‘education’ and will not have culture but will perhaps be a culture. We can only with difficulty imagine such a thing; and yet it will be, and be the natural thing: an art without anguish, psychologically healthy, not solemn, unsadly confining, an art per du with humanity. . . .”

Pop culture? Or cult music?

He broke off, and we all three sat silent and shaken. [Possibly imagining the Grammys of the future] It is painful and heart-stirring at once to hear talk of isolation from the community, remoteness from trust. With all my emotion I was yet in my deepest soul unsatisfied with his utterance, directly dissatisfied with him. What he had said did not fit with him, his pride, his arrogance if you like, which I loved, and to which art has a right. Art is mind, and mind does not at all need to feel itself obligated to the community, to society -- it may not, in my view, for the sake of its freedom, its nobility. An art that “goes in unto” the folk, which makes her own the needs of the crowd, of the little man, of small minds, arrives at wretchedness, and to make it her duty is the worst small-mindedness, and the murder of mind and spirit. And it is my conviction that mind, in its most audacious, unrestrained advance and researches, can, however unsuited to the masses, be certain in some indirect way to serve man -- in the long run men.

Doubtless that was also the natural opinion of Adrian. But it pleased him to deny it, and I was very much mistaken if I looked at that as a contradiction of his arrogance. More likely it was an effort to condescend, springing from the same arrogance. If only there had not been that trembling in his voice when he spoke of the need of art to be redeemed, of art being per du with humanity! That was feeling: despite everything it tempted me to give his hand a stolen pressure. But I did not do so; instead I kept an eye on Rudi Schwerdtfeger lest he again be moved to embrace him. [Settle down, girls]

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