The Magic Mountain: Chapter 2

Chapter 2 of The Magic Mountain is very short and contains only two sections, but it is quite important as it provides a basic background for the young Hans Castorp, letting us know precisely who he is and how his values and attitudes were formed.

The Baptismal Bowl / Grandfather in His Two Forms

As a child, Hans Castorp is no stranger to death: by the age of seven both his mother and father have died. (There is that magic number seven again!) After his father’s death, young Hans goes to live with his aged grandfather, a conservative old political man who has retained all of the values of the past, even down to his clothing. As a matter of fact the "true grandfather," in Hans’ mind, is not the old man himself, but a portrait of him in ancient ritual costume that hangs in the parlor.

Senator Hans Lorenz Castorp thus represents the conservatism and implied dignity of young Hans’ traditional German bourgeois background. This is precisely the background that the book’s author, Thomas Mann, was born into, and the relationship that the writer had with his cultural inheritance is quite complex.

Thomas Mann’s first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), an epic, three-generational story of the gradual decline of a German mercantile family, is essentially a reflection of Mann’s own historical background. In that novel, it can be argued, excessive dedication to "traditional" values at the expense of changing historical times and human needs leads, inevitably, to tragic downfall. Yet, as we shall see, Mann did not wholly reject the values and traditions of the past, nor did he embrace new and radical change.

However, for Hans Castorp, this inundation of the past into a young boy’s uncritical perspective helps to shape him into a basically simple inheritor of "average" German middle-class values. Allegorically, it transforms Hans into a representation of the traditional social, moral and political picture of German itself as it was in the first quarter of the 20th century.

The chief image of this first section is the old family baptismal bowl, which Hans loves for his grandfather to show him after dinners. It was from this ornate golden vessel that Hans himself was baptized as a baby, along with this father and grandfather. A silver tray on which it rests is even older, and inscriptions bearing the names and dates of the baptisms of Hans’ forbears go back seven generations - all the way back to 1650. We have a solid and rich symbol of the great age of traditional Christian bourgeois values that have been symbolically poured upon the boy’s head. Hans loves to hear hear his old grandfather talk about the bowl, at the sound of which "religious feelings got mixed up with a sense of death and history," giving the boy a warm feeling of pleasure.

Hans Castorp’s old grandfather and the baptismal bowl serve to satisfy a function of reassuring stability in what must be seen as a fragmented and uncertain childhood. They would send a "familiar feeling" over the boy:

. . . a strange, half-dreamy, half-scary sense of standing there and yet being tugged away at the same time, a kind of fluctuating permanence, that meant both a return to something, and a dizzying, everlasting sameness . . .

There is, therefore, aside from comfort, also a sense of awe at staring into the past, and this awe is all connected vaguely with vague sensations of religion and death.

I is interesting, and I think a little strange, that The Magic Mountain does not deal directly with the subject of religion at all, at least in the conventional sense. And I think the reason may have to do with the German bourgeois treatment of religion and religious matters with a kind of formal punctiliousness that one can describe as "pious," though hardly "spiritual" in any profound sense. "Religion" for Hans Castorp seems to be translated almost completely into a sense of "solemnity" or even "sentimentality." Perhaps this shallow sense of religious sensibility is how Mann saw faith as embodied in the typical German psyche of the period. At any rate, any spiritual experiences that will be had on the magic mountain will have a much broader source and implication than any simple German Protestant tradition.

Death, as well, seems to represent a kind of sentimentalized sense of solemn dignity for Hans. When his grandfather dies, this is the the third funeral that he will have attended in his young life, and with a child’s innocence, he duly notes the formal, sombre nature of people’s response to death and the dead.

Indeed, at his grandfather’s death, the old man’s corpse is actually displayed wearing the ancient costume that he is depicted in within the formal portrait of him, and which Hans even considers "his true grandfather."

The idea of death, of course, is one of the great themes of the novel, and it is important to note how young Hans Castorp develops his feelings and attitudes towards the subject in his youth, as he will carry this same basic perspective with him up to the magic mountain, where it will be challenged many times over.

As noted before, this boy is quite familiar with death at a very young age. And Mann is very careful to point out that Hans not only a "sympathy" with death, but notes that his perception of the phenomenon is quite noticeably split into two contradictory aspects or attitudes:

. . . there was something religious, gripping, and sadly beautiful, which was to say, spiritual about death and at the same time something that was the direct opposite, something very material, physical, which one could not really describe as beautiful, or gripping, or religious, or even as sad.

This "material, physical" aspect of death, "almost indecent in its base physicality," is represented by the "waxy" appearance of his grandfather’s corpse, the fact that it was "just stuff." Hans even notes that the floral arrangements, which could be seen as richly symbolic, as they are used to try to cover up the actual stench of decay.

This "dual nature" of death - its spiritual and physical aspects, so to speak - will be an ongoing motif and subject for much discussion and contemplation throughout the course of the novel. Mann recognizes that it is very important for Hans to have semi-developed perspective on the subject before his sojourn to the magic mountain, and I believe that one can be fairly certain that the author found this strange yet simplistic view to be predominant among his countrymen.

At the Tienappels’ / Hans Castorp’s Moral State

After his grandfather’s death, Hans is taken in by his great-uncle Consul Tienappel, the owner of a prosperous importing firm in Hamburg, along with his two sons. Hans is raised and schooled in the height of upper-middle-class style, fashion and responsibility. He learns to love to live well, and as his great-uncle informs him that as his inheritance would not support the lifestyle he enjoys, that he must, at adulthood, find some position of work. Although Hans does not particularly enjoy work, he respects it (it is, as the narrator describes, "the absolute of the age"), but is unsure of what to do after he finishes school. Since he had always liked looking at ships as a boy - and had once even painted a water-color of one - it is suggested by a family friend that he train as an engineer and come to work for his firm designing them. This situation seems quite satisfactory to Hans, and so he finishes his education, and with help from his talent in mathematics, he passes his final exams with relative ease.

Being by nature slightly anemic, however, Hans had tired himself during the exertion of his studies, and the family doctor strongly suggests that he spend a few weeks in the alps before he begins his life’s labor. This is a happy coincidence, as Han’s cousin, Joachim Ziemssen is currently under care at the Berghof sanitorium, and he can keep the young man company while on vacation.

Thus, in just a few pages, we are completely brought up to date, and the story may resume where we left it off after the first chapter. Very little is said about Hans and his life growing up, precisely because there is so very little to say. Mann is extremely careful to present us with a typical, unremarkable (though quite pleasant) young man who is quite simply the consummate product of his environment. "Hans Castorp was an honest, unadulterated product of the local soil, superbly at home in it." In short, he is "mediocre." Actually, however, the narrator insists, he should not be called "mediocre," precisely because he himself was aware that he was "lacking" in some fundamental aspect.

"A human being lives out not only his personal life as an individual, but also, consciously or subconsciously, the lives of his epoch and his contemporaries." This statement makes it unambiguously clear that the reader is meant to take Hans Castorp, the "hero" of the novel, as a paradigmatic representative of his entire age, race and class. In short, Hans Castorp is bourgeois, early 20th century Germany, and the choices he faces will ultimately be identical to the ones than Mann’s own nation must grapple with. Hence, the Magic Mountain is clearly meant to be seen, right from the beginning, as existing on an allegorical level - one might even say a mythic level.

Thomas Mann and Joseph Campbell
 - Part 1

 

The great American mythologist, writer and educator Joseph John Campbell (1904-1987) claimed that he was assisted in forming the foundations of his theories through his youthful readings of modernist European literature, particularly the works of James Joyce and Thomas Mann. In Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Campbell saw the progression of Hans Castorp’s education to be a methodical structuring of the stages of rites and initiations through which a human being must pass during his or her life, as enacted through ritual in more traditional societies. In short, Campbell viewed the task that Mann had set for himself to be no less than a spiritual guide to lead his native Germany - and indeed, the entire civilization of Western Europe - to a higher level of consciousness and a deeper level of experience as it exited the bombastic destruction of the First World War.

If this analysis holds good, the author has indeed taken a bold and audacious step in constructing this highly complex and difficult novel. Nevertheless, Campbell, a student both of the history of mythology as well as Western literature, was convinced that in the modern world that the artist would take the traditional place of the shaman or the religious mystic in founding new myths, rituals and codes for his or her society, that it was the artist’s destiny and responsibility to lead modern humanity on its next stage of development as it left the old traditions behind and embarked fully on the scientific and secular age.

This was not only a mighty task, believed Campbell, but it was absolutely necessary for the survival and growth of humankind. Mythology, according to Campbell, was not something that the human race should and will outgrow. It is, rather absolutely fundamental to the health and well-being of the species itself. Without myths, rituals and transcendent codes of behavior, Campbell believed that modern society would crumble, as it had demonstrated itself capable of during World War I. His theories were then exponentially verified by that same society attempting to erect the artificially created secular myths that proliferated to bring about the mind-boggling devastation of World War II.

What kind of mythology did the modern artist seek to erect to help advance his or her culture to survive and grow? This is a very broad question and something that Campbell never ceased asking about in his work. But when he first encountered the works - first of Joyce, then of Mann - in the 1920s, he became convinced that these writers were attempting to mine the rich past through the density of the confusing present day in order to unearth new forms of expression for the eternal verities of humankind. And if Campbell was even partly correct in his assessment of the role played by art in the development of cultural mythology - and he spent decades compiling evidence of that fact throughout all cultures and ages - then the role of the artist is a very important and critical one indeed.

I thought that this would be an excellent opportunity to bring in Joseph Campbell’s voice, not only so that we could look at his extraordinarily insightful and stimulating theories, but also specifically that we could look at what he had to say about Thomas Mann himself, in the hopes that he would throw some much-needed light on some of the themes going on in The Magic Mountain.

I would, therefore, like to present here a section from one of Campbell’s books. It comes from the fourth volume of his great tetrology The Masks of God, subtitled: Creative Mythology. In Part Two: "The Waste Land," Chapter 6, entitled "The Balance" includes several sections on Mann’s life and career, and on The Magic Mountain in particular. To get a better idea of the individual who wrote this extraordinary novel, I think it is both fascinating and informative to read about both the aesthetic and political theories of this giant of modern literature. To that effect, I would like to present the section entitled "The Individual and the State."

Thomas Mann, unlike his great contemporary, James Joyce, was very concerned with political and social affairs. He lived in times of great turbulence and change, and he altered his convictions several times during the course of history in his long life in the challenging first half of the twentieth century. Campbell, I believe, gives us some remarkable insight about the man and his world and allows us to place much of what is contained in The Magic Mountain into a much broader context, where we can begin to interpret its elusive messages with more depth and clarity.

The Individual and the State
by Joseph Campbell

 

Among the most important of those authors of the first half of the present century who, together with James Joyce, transformed the naturalistic nineteenth-century society novel into a secular vehicle of mythological wisdom and symbolic initiations, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was perhaps the most ardently aware of the social and pedagogical relevance, and consequent responsibilities, of his profession. Contrary to the way of Joyce, whose point of conscience was to remain from first to last the artist, with the absolutely impartial binocular vision of an Olympian - nonparticipant as partisan, omniparticipant as viewer and mover - Thomas Mann, throughout his long, productive career was always seriously engaged, either covertly or explicitly, in delivering a sociological, political - and, in his later years, mystagogic - message.

Now I do not wish to compare him in this point to such a socialistic tub-thumper as Bernard Shaw, who himself declared that the very long prefaces to his plays were as much to his purpose as the plays themselves; however, it is a fact that as an essayist, elucidating the philosophical and sociological backgrounds and implications of his own artistic achievements, Thomas Mann is hardly matched in the history of letters. The essays, which are numerous and as sedulously composed as the fictional works themselves, are among the most illuminating and important treatments we possess of the relationships of modern literature to those spheres of experience and symbolic communication that in the past were the province of myth alone. And in relation to the study of mythology itself - its sources, meanings, and moral implications for today - there have been no more sophisticated elucidations.

For it is simply a fact (as I have already remarked in my Prologue to the first volume of this tetrology) that poets and artists, who are dealing every day of their lives with the feeling- as well as thought-values of their own imageries of communication, are endowed with a developed organ for the understanding of myth that is too often lacking in the merely learned, he may be a more dependable guide to the nuclear themes of a given mythic complex, and a much more profound interpreter of their relevance to life, than even the most respected of its specialized academic elucidators. And finally, since Mann, as I have just said, was concerned not simply with the universal psychological and metaphysical implications of his mythological symbols, but also with their practical, moral and political application, he was compelled, during the long and stately course of his career in a period of catastrophic changes in the character of European culture, to commit his art and sympathies first to one extreme, then to the other, of the social-political spectrum, until in the end he found himself in such a whirlabout of reversals that the magnificent ship of his art began to crack and to leak Hermetic water at the seams. Thus the careful student of his interpretations is provided not only with readings of equal perspicacity from more than one point of view, but also what my grandmother would have called "a good object lesson" in the mercurial nature of mythological universals. And in addition, since Mann knew exactly what he was doing - shutting first one eye, then the other - there is in that a further lesson for the student of morality, as well as a corollary, touching the discipline of the parallax, for the student of binocular vision.

Mann’s earliest schematic formulation of the contrasting terms of the problem that he continued to revolve in his mind to the end of his days was presented in a very early short story entitled "Tristan" (1902), which like his later masterpiece, The Magic Mountain (1924), had for its setting a tuberculosis sanatorium, and for its theme the counterplay and dialogue, in that setting, of the will to freedom and peace against the will to life - twenty years before Sigmund Freud’s Beyond the Pleasure Principle. As its date reveals, at the time of the publication of this short story, in which an astonishing number of those themes were announced that in the later novel were to be developed and expanded to the magnitude of a symphony in honor of the Lord-and-Lady Hermes-Aphrodite of the left-hand way to illumination, the author was but twenty-seven years old. His novel Buddenbrooks (1902) had already won renown; and two more short works, "Tonio Kröger" (1903) and the play Fiorenza (1904), were immediately to follow. Those were the critical years of his career, during which his fundamental philosophical stance was being established on a base principally of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, with a touch, as well, of Dostoevsky and Tolstoy. The principal texts around which his cogitations revolved, besides Goethe’s Faust and Wagner’s operas, were Nietzsche’s Birth of Tragedy and Schopenhauer’s speculative essay "On an Apparent Intention in the Fate of the Individual." These works brought his thinking to focus almost compulsively on the enigma of death and renewal, on the psychological factors contributing to both personal and social disintegration, and on those contrary factors that might be counted on to withstand, or even overcome, the processes of dissolution and death. In a letter "On Marriage," sent to Count Hermann Keyserling in the late nineteen-twenties, Mann declared: "For me the concepts of death and individualism have always coalesced . . . and the concept of life, on the other hand, has united with those of duty, service, social ties, and even worth." However, things were not really quite as simple as that in his mind. For in the course of his long career the various elements of these opposed combinations occasionally separated from their fellows and changed sides. The series of cultural shocks delivered by the cataclysms of his century (during the rapid sequence of which the nation and folk of his first concern, which in his earliest order of alignment had represented duty and service to life, became to him the symbol of ultimate evil) left him finally with no ground on earth on which to stand. In terms of the basic philosophic position that he had made his own by 1902, this should not have greatly surprised or unsettled him. However, he had also in those critical years given his heart, as he declared in his novella "Tonio Kröger," to the normal, usual, fair, and living, happy, and commonplace human beings of this world, and not even the power of his disengaged, sophisticated artist eye and mind could accept with equanimity what they had done.

"I stand between two worlds," his hero, Tonio, had written to a young Russian intellectual, Lisabeta, in that work.
I am at home in neither, and I suffer in consequence. You artists call me a bourgeois, and the bourgeois try to arrest me . . . I don’t know which makes me feel worse. The bourgeois are stupid; but you adorers of the beautiful, who call me phlegmatic and without aspirations, you ought to realize that there is a way of being an artist that goes so deep and is so much a matter of origins and destinies that no longing seems to it sweeter and more worth knowing than longing after the bliss of the commonplace.

I admire those proud, cold beings who adventure upon the paths of great and daemonic beauty and despise "mankind"; but I do not envy them. For if anything is capable of making a poet of a literary man, it is my bourgeois love of the human, the living and usual. It is the source of all warmth, goodness, and humor; I even almost think it is itself that love of which it stands written that one may speak with the tongues of men and of angels and yet having it not be as sounding brass and tinkling silver . . .

Do not chide this love, Lisabeta; it is good and fruitful. There is longing in it, and a gentle envy; a touch of contempt and no little innocent bliss.

In his earlier short story "Tristan," the side of prosperous, buoyant life is represented by a lusty, rather peasant-like red-faced big-businessman, Herr Klöterjahn by name, of the firm A.C. Klöterjahn and Co., who arrived at the sanatorium Einfried only to deposit there - with care and tender concern - his exquisitely fragile young wife, who, since giving birth with extreme difficulty to their vigorously blooming baby boy, had been afflicted with a tracheal condition dangerously close to consumption. She had been ordered to Einfried by her doctor to find rest, repose from all agitation, release from duties for a while, and the very best medical attention. While on the other side, the cause of art, beauty, intellect, and the spirit was represented by an odd unsocial little person with very large feet, Detlev Spinell, in his early thirties, yet graying already at the temples, and known to the wits of the sanatorium as the moldy infant. He had once composed a short novel, now in print in a large volume, every single letter of the jacket of which had the look of a Gothic cathedral; and he kept this on a table in his room, where he spent the days writing letters. He was at Einfried, he would say, not for for the cure, but because of the Empire style of the furniture; and on beholding any sudden sight of beauty - two matching colors, mountains tinged by a sunset - "How beautiful!" he would exclaim in a paroxysm of sensibility, pitching his head to one side, lifting his shoulders, spreading out his hands, and distending lips and nostrils. "God! just look! how beautiful!" he would cry and then fling his arms about the neck of any person, male or female, at hand.

Well, to make an elegant short story very short indeed: To everbody’s amazement, for he had never sought company before, this gift of the spirit to Einfried became, as soon as he beheld her, the solicitous humble servant of the lovely Frau Klöterjahn’s exquisite beauty. Then he did two things: he flattered her refinement as too spiritual for this coarse world and for the husband whose coarse name ill befitted her; then he induced her to play again the piano, as she had played it in her childhood, when her father had played the violin. "But the doctors have expressly forbidden it," she said. "They are not here," he answered: "we are free . . . Dear Madam, if you are afraid of doing yourself injury, then let the beauty be dead and still that might have come into being from the touch of your fingers . . ."

She played. And it went from Chopin’s Nocturnes to Wagner’s Tristan: Oh, the boundless, inexhaustible joy of that union eternal beyond the bounds of time, et cetera . . . Two days later there was blood on her handkerchief, and not long thereafter Klöterjahn was summoned to what proved to be her last hours. Spinell wrote him a letter: a personally insulting of his hate-filled case against life; and the sturdy man of the world, in reply, simply walked into the author’s room and told him to his face what he was: an impotent clown, a coward, and a sneak, scared sick of reality, and with beauty on his tongue that was nothing more than hypocrisy and a fool’s grudge against life.

The radical opposition of the two hemispheres of experience and value represented in this story, on one hand by the man of business, healthy and socially at ease in his world of aggressive, unselfcritical, lusty life, and on the other by Spinell in his favorite sanatorium, with its pleasant grounds and gardens, rambling walks, grottoes, bowers, and little rustic pavilions, is matched in the medieval legend by the contrast of the courtly world of King Mark, with its uncritically accepted and forced customs of both courtesy and religious faith, and, on the other hand, the couple in the wilderness and its timeless grotto. There is an oriental analogy also intended; one suggested by the works of Schopenhauer and their reflection in Wagner’s theme: namely of the contrast recognized in India between the two worlds, on the one hand of life in the context of society, bound to the wheel of ignorance, suffering, rebirth, old age, and death, and on the other of life in the forest, in the penitential groves, striving by all means to achieve release from the senseless round. However, in India, in neither of these situations does the problem of individuality arise. For in the social sphere one obeys - one is compelled to obey - the ritual laws and disciplines of one’s caste, without resistance, without question, whereas in the penitential groves the aim is not to realize individuality but to erase it, to eliminate absolutely and forever whatever taint or trace of ego, personal will, and individuality may yet remain to one, even after a lifetime - yes, innumerable lifetimes - of the socially enforced, impersonal disciplines of caste.

In our modern European West, on the other hand, largely as a result of the forthright intransigency of a sufficient number of actually great, courageous individuals, the principle of individuality and an appreciation of the worth of individuality have won through - at least for the present. So that, properly, the forest must have here an altogether different sense from that assigned to it in any Indian code. "I will not serve that in which I no longer believe," declared Joyce’s hero, Stephen Dedalus, "whether it call itself my home, my fatherland or my church; and I will try to express myself in some mode of life or art as freely as I can and as wholly as I can, using for my defence the only arms I allow myself to use - silence, exile, and cunning." That has a very different ring from self-erasure. And so there is a new problem to be faced here: one that for the West and for the coming history and character of civilization is to be decisive, either as solved and integrated socially in our institutions, or as lost - beneath the rising waves of Asia. For it has been in Europe and in the European sphere alone (which includes, for now at least, North America), that this problem of the radical dissociation and collision of individual and group values has emerged as the critical challenge of a maturing humanistic civilization.
But the difficulties posed are great. Chiefly they derive from the fact that the values of both of the opposed hemispheres, the individual and the social, are positive; hence by all the laws both of physics and biology, mutually repellent. That is to say, the partisans of each banner view the values of the other side merely as negative to their own and therefore, in every attempt either to attack or to achieve concord, succeed only in dealing with their own negative projections, giving battle to their own shadows on the walls of their own closed minds - which presents a fine circus of clowns for the laughter of the gods, but for mankind, with increasing danger, a turba philosophorum that is being reflected not in a sealed retort but in the carnage of exploded cities.

Somewhere about midway between the dates of his letter to Count Keyserling on marriage and his youthful composition of "Tristan," Thomas Mann, during the years of the First World War, was revolving, from one viewpoint to another, his thoughts on the counterplay of opposites that at that time was represented to him by the contending ideals of Germany and the Western Allies. And as he had already made things a little difficult for himself by associating individualism with death and submission to the social order with life, so now he added to his philosophical stress by linking radicalism with individualism and conservatism with duty, associating the latter with German culture and the former with the French Revolution, English economic materialism, international class socialism, and the ideas of a money-based luxury civilization. He made a great many statements in his book that he later came to regret, and retracted. However, it is the work out of which The Magic Mountain came: a fearless, really extraordinary work of self-scrutiny and analysis, a night-book of lightning flashes bursting from dark impenetrable clouds; as it is to be read as a diary of such confusion as anyone of good will, condemned by destiny to settle his own mind with respect to the values at stake in a modern war of mighty nations, of which his own was one, might, if he had the courage to do so, force himself to write. The work, first published 1919, and then, abridged, in 1922, bore the title Reflections of a Non-Political Man, and in the following brief selection lets the reader know why.

Politics I hate, and the belief in politics, because it makes people arrogant, doctrinaire, harsh, and inhuman. I do not believe in the formulae of the anthill, the human beehive; do not believe in the republique democratique, sociale et uninverselle; do not believe that mankind was made for what is being called "happiness," or that it even wants this "happiness," - do not believe in "belief," but rather in despair, because it is this that clears the way to deliverance; I believe in humility and work - work on oneself, and the highest, noblest, sternest, and most joyous form of such work seems to me to be art."

In those days Mann identified this kind of work on oneself, humility, integrity, with what he termed at that time the "aristocratic principle," exemplified in Europe pre-eminently, in his view, by the culture ideal and discipline of the Germans, in contrast not only to the highly emotional class revolution of the French with its "Marseillaise" and guillotine, but also to the cold-blooded, utilitarian, economic materialism of the Anglo-Saxon Industrial Revolution, while Marxism he described as but "a fusion of French revolutionary thought and English political economy." "You party politicians," he could at that time write, quoting Strindberg, "are like one-eyed cats. Some of you see only with the left eye, others only with the right, and for that reason you can never see stereoscopically, but only one-sidedly and flat." And again, still quoting the Swedish author: "As a poet, one has a right to play with ideas, to experiment with standpoints, but not bind oneself to anything: for freedom is the life breath of the poet." And the real good of humanity, as he then believed, was served in art, not in manifestoes; for the curse of politics, mass politics, so-called democratic politics, derived from its reduction of all life, art itself, and religion as well, to politics, the marketplace, newspaper thinking. "No experience," he wrote, "is more likely to put politics out of mind, more thoroughly prove it irrelevant, and better teach how to forget it, than the experience, through art, of what is everlasting in man. And at a time when world political events of truly fearful force are involving all that is in us of individual human worth in sympathetic participation, overwhelming it and bearing it away - precisely at such a time it is fitting to stand firm against the megalomaniacs of politics, in defense, namely, of the truth that the essential thing in life, the true humanity of life, never is even touched by political means." "Man is not only a social, but a metaphysical being. In other words, he is not merely a social individual, but also a personality. Consequently, it is wrong to confuse what is above the individual in us with society, to translate it completely into sociology. Doing that, one leaves the metaphysical aspect of the person, what is truly above the individual, out of account; for it is in the personality, not the mass, that the actual subordinated principle is to be found."

So far, so good. No one who has ever understood or experienced anything either of art or of life - anything, that is to say, beyond the sphere of sociology - would have very much to say against all that. However, the author, in addition, had involved himself in this book (in spite of its nonpolitical title) in a political commitment to the idea and cause of German culture, against what he conceived to be the revolutionary internationalism of the bourgeois (French, English, and incidentally American) democracies. Moreover, by 1930, having made that first mistake, he had gone on to the logical second. He had abandoned his earlier distinction between the personal and social spheres and had aligned himself with the latter, in the currently fashionable way of Marxist socialism - even to the point of identifying Marxism, in a manner that was also fashionable at that time, with the progressive ideals of bourgeois liberalism and democracy. But this identification he had already made in his nonpolitical "Reflections"; so that he was now simply shifting allegiance from one pole of his own dichotomy to the other. And to make matters even more confusing, both for himself and for those still striving to admire him, he refused to concede that in turning from the one side of his ledger to the other, he had left the values of the first behind. What he had been calling the "spiritual values" of the "aristocratic principle" - i.e. (as he understood them) the personally responsible, dutiful, form-conserving humanistic ideals of a worthy people’s national heritage - he now simply transferred to the workers’ class revolution, reducing even the existence of God (in orthodox Levantine-Marxist style) to a social occasion:
"The human race dwells on earth in communities," he announced in a talk on "Culture and Socialism," published in the same volume, called The Challenge of the Day (1930), in which the letter to Count Keyserling "On Marriage" appears; "and there is no sort of individual realization or direct relationship to God, to which some form of association - of sociability - does not correspond. The religious ‘I’ become corporative in the parish." [That is the Judas kiss.] "The cultural ‘I’ celebrates its festival in the form and name of the community - which is a word which bears in Germany strong religious and aristocratic associations, setting the holiness of its idea of social life all together apart from the concept of society of the democracies . . . German socialism, the invention of a Jewish social theorist trained in Western Europe, has always been felt by German cultural piety to be alien to the land and contrary to the national heritage, indeed sheer devilry, and has been accordingly despised" - and now comes the crucial gambit and the timely transfer of values:

and with full right; for it does indeed represent the dissolution of the idea of a national culture and community, in the name of an idea of social classes to which that of the nation and community is opposed. However, the fact of the situation is, that this process of dissolution has already progressed to such a degree that the complex of German cultural ideas signified by the terms "nation" and "community" can be today dismissed as mere romanticism; and life itself, with all its meaning for the present and for the future is now, without doubt, on the side of socialism . . . For although the spiritual significance of individualistic idealism derived originally from its connection with the idea of a cultural heritage, whereas the socialistic class concept has never denied its purely economic origin, the latter nevertheless entertains today far friendlier relations with the sphere of the spirit that does its romantically nationalistic middle-class antagonist, the conservatism of which has clearly, for all to see, lost touch and sympathy with the living spirit and its present-day demands.

The author had spoken on other occasions of the discrepancy, which others have also remarked, between the nobility and wisdom of the greatest men of our times and the lag in the public domain of law and international affairs, and he recurs now to this theme, to advance and settle his argument.

I have recently spoken elsewhere, of the unhealthy and dangerous tension that has developed in our world between the state of knowledge already attained and spiritually assimilated by those who represent the summits of our humanity and the material actualities of our present; pointing also to the dangers in this tension. The socialistic class, the working class, shows an unquestionably better and more vital will to overcome this shameful and dangerous discrepancy than does its cultural adversary, whether it be in matters of legislation, the rationalization of public affairs, the international conception of Europe, or what you will. It is indeed true that the socialistic class concept, in contrast to the idea of a national culture, is in its economic theory antagonistic to spiritual values; nevertheless in practice it favors them, and that, as things stand today, is what really counts.

Within a decade of this talk, the world’s supreme model of the economically based but spiritually disposed socialistic class-state joined hands with the nationally based, unspiritual socialistic state, to invade, dismember, and share Poland, and so began the Second World War. Thomas Mann, in due time, took flight, not to socialistic Russia but, by way of nonparticipant Switzerland, first to Princeton, then to Hollywood, whence, from the distant shores of the Pacific, a few hours before Pearl Harbor, he sent off the following radio broadcast to the German people:

German listeners, he who speaks to you today was fortunate enough to do something for the intellectual reputation of Germany in the course of his long life. I am grateful for this, but I have no right to pride myself for it, as it was destiny and did not lie in my hand.
No artist accomplishes his work in order to increase the glory of his country. The source of productivity is individual conscience. You Germans are not allowed to thank me for my work, even if you desired to do so. So be it. It was accomplished not for your sake but from innermost need.

But there is one thing that has been done really for your sake, which has developed from social and not private conscience. With every day I am more and more certain that the time will come, and in fact, is already near at hand, when you will thank me for it and rate it higher than my stories and books. And this is, that I warned you, when it was not yet too late, against the depraved powers under whose yoke you are harnessed today and who lead you through innumerable misdeeds to incredible misery. I knew them. I knew that nothing but catastrophe and misery for Germany and for Europe would grow from their unspeakably base nature while the majority of you were seeing in them the forces of order, beauty, and national dignity - blinded as you were to a degree which today has unquestionably already become incredible to yourselves . . .

Collapse is near. Your troops in Russia lack doctors, nurses, medical supplies. In German hospitals the severely wounded, the old and feeble are killed with poison gas - in one single institution, two to three thousand, a German doctor has said . . . Comparable to the mass poisoning is the compulsory copulation where soldiers on leave are ordered to go like stud horses to the young German girls in order to produce sons of the State for the next war. Can a nation, can youth, sink lower? Can there be a greater blasphemy of humanity? . . . Three hundred thousand Serbs were killed by you Germans at the order of the villainous men who govern you, not during the war, but after the war had ended in that country. Unspeakable are the deeds against the Jews and the Poles. But you do not want to acknowledge the ever-growing gigantic hatred which one day, when the forces of your people finally weaken, is bound to engulf you all.

Yes, it is right to feel the horror of this day. And your leaders know it. They who led you to commit all those horrible deeds tell you that you are chained to them through these deeds and that you must stand by them to the end; otherwise hell will come over you. If you break with them you will still be able to be saved, to gain freedom and peace.
Thus, in the end as in the beginning, under pressure, heat, and horror sufficient to effect a fermentatio, the artist again became separate and rediscovered for himself in old age what both Schopenhauer and Nietzsche had taught him in his youth: that between the individual and the multitude, a man’s integrity and his society, the inward and the outer, categorical and contingent worlds of experience and commitment, there is indeed an opposition, as deep as to the ground of being. I have italicized the paragraph that makes this point. It has the ring, a bit, of Detlev Spinell. But in the following sentence we learn of something of which Spinell seems not to have known, namely, a distinction between private and social conscience: and this we now must recognize a posing a profound problem - the problem, I should say - that from the period of the early Tristan poets, when it first seriously emerged in our literature in terms of the tragic tension between minne and ere, love and honor, has remained unresolved in the West to the present.

Mann’s radio address was broadcast, as we have said, but a few hours before the Japanese dawn raid on Pearl Harbor. Soon the prophesied fire and brimstone were purging to rubble the culture-cities of Central Europe: Munich, Dresden, Frankfurt, Marburg, Cologne, Hamburg, Berlin. The monstrous empire of Hitler dissolved and the armies of Stalin’s no less monstrous slave state moved supreme across the European heartland, across half the European map. Within a decade, another Asian monster, its Chinese counterpart, was standing back to back with it, also breathing fire - a fire furnished to both, ironically, by the sciences of the West - while the Dutch, Belgian, French, and British world empires meanwhile went to pieces.; so that by 1950 a scientifically enforced Asiatization of world affairs was beginning to be evident, which, as far at least as the politics of the free individual are concerned, is the leading challenge of the present hour. The old Bronze Age world image of an absolutely inexorable, mathematical cosmology of which the social order is but an aspect (which, as we have seen, is at the base of both the Chinese and the Indian world views), now supplemented by an equally inexorable Marxian notion of the logic of history, and implemented in its inhumanity by a modern mechanical technology of equivalent impersonality, in the name of what Nietzsche with disdain prophesied as "the new idol, the State," bodes well, largely with American aid, to represent the future of man of the next millennium. For as Aldous Huxley stated in the 1946 Foreward to his Utopian novel Brave New World: "Without economic security, the love of servitude cannot possibly come into existence."

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But it was in the dozen years or so from 1912 to 1924 that Mann wrote The Magic Mountain. Here, he had not yet embraced socialism, nor had he been horrified by the extremes that a "national culture" could bring about. It is here that he sat, poised and contemplative, "between disasters," so to speak, and discourse with the Olympians on the ultimate virtues of life and death and the ideal values of the state. And that is where we will rejoin him, along with Hans Castorp, when we look at the extraordinary Chapter 3 of The Magic Mountain.

Coming soon!

- petey

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