by Thomas Mann
They were walking about the room together in light converse one evening, when suddenly the elderly prophet sprang upon Behrs’s shoulder. He probably jumped down again at once; but for a second he actually perched up there, like a grey-bearded kobold—it gives one an uncanny feeling!
In the case of Goethe, Mann records, among other things, his sensitiveness to weather conditions:
It was due to his almost exaggerated sense-endowment; and became positively occult when that night in his chamber in Weimar he felt the earthquake in Messina. Animals have a nervous equipment that enables them to feel such events when they occur and even beforehand. The animal in us transcends; and all transcendence is animal. The highly irritable sense-equipment of a man who is nature’s familiar goes beyond the bounds of the actual senses, and issues in the supra-sensual, in natural mysticism. With Goethe the divine animal is frankly and proudly justified of itself in all spheres of activity, even the sexual. His mood was sometimes priapic—a thing which of course does not happen with Tolstoy.
Mann contrasts this earthy self-possession with the spiritual ‘shadow-world’ of Dostoevsky (‘exaggeratedly true’) and with Schiller, another ‘son of thought’. Schiller’s essay, ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ was described by Mann as ‘the greatest of all German essays’. In it Schiller distinguishes between the ‘naive’ poet who has the plastic energy simply to make a world (Shakespeare, Homer), and the ‘sentimental’ poet who can only find a world through his own sensibility and reflections. Mann puts Schiller with Dostoevsky:
. . . the conflict between contemplation and ecstatic vision, is neither new nor old, it is eternal. And it finds complete expression in, on the one side, Goethe and Tolstoy, and on the other Schiller and Dostoevsky. And to all eternity the truth, power, calm and humility of nature will be in conflict with the disproportionate, fevered and dogmatic presumption of spirit.
During the war Thomas opposed himself and Heinrich as ‘nature’ and Geist (an untranslatable and essential German word that appears sometimes as ‘mind’ and sometimes, as above, as ‘spirit’. In this essay the oppositions are more subtle, but related. Goethe’s reasonable respect for French culture is given credit. But Mann’s attempt to present the ‘Antaeus’ aspect of Tolstoy and Goethe is surely related to what he hoped to present in Peeperkorn, who exceeds both Settembrini and Naphta, to whom the educated Hans Castorp pays respect. Like Castorp himself, Peeperkorn differs from Mann’s usual heroes in being neither intellectual, articulate nor artistic. Like Tolstoy, according to Mann, but not like Goethe, Peeperkorn understands and has an affinity with the Oriental and the Asian. Tolstoy’s ‘tremendous Orientalism found intellectual expression in this mockery and denial of European progress’. Goethe ‘beyond a doubt hated and despised Asia and has more affiliation with the humanity of Western Europe, which has given the mold to our civilization, than with the shapeless and savage human nature of Half-Asia’. Symbolically both Clavdia and Peeperkorn are related to that shapeless and savage half-Asia, out of which Dionysus advanced on classical Greece, and the cholera crept on in Death in Venice. It is interesting that in another essay, ‘Freud and the Future’, Mann uses Europe’s geographical relation to Asia in a metaphor to describe the spatial relations of Sigmund Freud’s map of the psyche. Europe is the ego, Asia is the id.
As for the ego itself, its situation is pathetic, well-nigh alarming. It is an alert prominent and enlightened little part of the id much as Europe is a small and lively province of the greater Asia.
Although Peeperkorn is not an artist, he was partly based, at least physically, on Gerhard Hauptmann, which later became an embarrassment, and may have inhibited Mann’s presentation of him. He should be above all a living presence. He is in fact only the idea of a living presence.
It is perhaps worth remarking that Hans Castorp’s curious pursuit his contemplative moments which he refers to from childhood on as ‘regieren’—reigning, governing—are also related to the instinctive animal well-being Mann admires in Goethe and Tolstoy. (It has been persuasively suggested that there is a sly reference to masturbation, the fleshly egoistic pursuit par excellence.) At such moments Castorp is wiser and sounder than the frenzied beings around him.
Thomas Mann saw himself as one in a line of German artists—the line ran from Goethe through Nietzsche and Wagner. The Magic Mountain as Bildungsroman is aware of Wilhelm Meister, whose hero progresses from travelling theatre to medical researches. In many ways the most passionate and exciting parts of The Magic Mountain are those chapters in which Hans Castorp acquires knowledge of anatomy and physiology, the composition of the cells of the body, the forms of the bones and the nerves. Here again, we touch the original idea of the novel as one sympathetic to the idea of death. Goethe was an anatomical researcher Mann in the essay describes the moment when Goethe saw ‘a broken sheepskull on the Lido and had that morphological insight into the development of all the bones of the skull out of the vertebrae which shed such important illumination upon the metamorphosis of the animal body’. (It is possible that if Goethe had not been an anatomist and morphologist, George Eliot would not have invented the interlocking form and subject matter of Middlemarch.) Mann contrasts Goethe’s organic sympathy with living matter with Tolstoy’s deep interest in death:
Tolstoy’s poetic genius for questioning death is the pendant to Goethe’s intuition in the field of natural science, and sympathy with the organic is at the bottom of both. Death is a very sensual, very physical business; and it would be hard to say whether Tolstoy was so interested in death because he was so much and so sensually interested in the body, and in nature as the life of the body, or whether it was the other way about. In any case, in his fixation with death, love comes into play too . . .
This provides a way of seeing the wonderful chapter, entitled simply ‘Research’, in which Hans Castorp, inside the mountain, looks at the primal tissues of life and death—and the way in which the organic comes out of the inorganic, death and decay are interwoven with life, procreation and energy. In a conventional novel, there would be something ridiculous in the transformation of all this strenuous attempt at information and analysis into an erotic vision of Clavdia Chauchat. But to read it only in that way is to underestimate it. Castorp is educated. His vision of Clavdia is complex. He will carry not her photo, but an image of an x-ray of her skeleton and interior organs.
*
There is a way in which it is possible to read this thousand-page tour de force as though it were a conventional realistic novel—though readers who set out to do so uncritically risk bafflement and disappointment. The narrative tone of voice is bland and slightly jocular—a tale-teller’s voice, distancing the reader from involvement with the characters. The narrator is showing the civilized reader around the curiosities of a menagerie. Novel-readers expect certain emotional satisfactions love and liking, drama and tension, insights into the motivation and drives of characters. At first, and at second glance these things are deficient in this story. The most powerful emotion, apparently, is Hans Castorp’s growing erotic obsession with Madame Chauchat, which is not love, but the repressed excitement that swarms in boarding schools and other closed communities. It is associated by Castorp with his earlier repressed passion for Pribislav Hippe. (And is thus also associated with the love of death, since Hippe means scythe.) Clavdia Chauchat is an erotic presence or absence—rather than a character in any real sense. Castorp’s erotic speech to her, derived from his anatomical researches and Walt Whitman’s ‘I sing the Body Electric’ is bizarre and even farcical—part of the grotesquerie of the Walpurgisnacht. He grows up, yes, but it is not what readers looking for ‘relationships’ will find satisfactory. Even Settembrini and Naphta are less than characters because they so fully fill their function of being European types, southern anarchist, northern German-Jewish mystic, and their clothes and possessions are precisely constructed to sharpen the edges of their representative functions.
Nevertheless, I think, we persist i
n trying to read this story as a novel, and not simply as an allegory. This is partly at least because Mann always raises his structures of meaning on a foundation of the real, the solid, the banal, the observable. The sanatorium, its menus, its doors and windows, its relation to the valley and the village, the blankets and the chaises-longues and the social conventions are very precisely observed—as are the details of the phases of consumption, the medical paraphernalia, the paintings of Behrens and the séances of the psychoanalyst Dr. Krokowski. When Hans Castorp sees the x-ray of his hand, and realizes that he is seeing his death, understands for the first time that he will die, this is a moment of pure realism which immediately takes its place in a symbolic structure.
And there are two characters in the novel who are characters almost despite the nature of the story. One is Castorp himself, and the other is Joachim. Joachim is the silent and obedient Good Soldier. The Thomas Mann of the Unpolitical Reflections claimed military honor and steadfast obedience as peculiarly German virtues. Joachim is one of those opaque characters we learn to love from outside. His attempt to evade the Magic Mountain, and his defeated return and death are appalling and moving. He believes in war—‘War is necessary. Without war the world would soon go to rot, as Moltke said.’ When his spirit is summoned in the séance, it is through Gounod’s song for Valentin, Gretchen’s honorable soldier brother in Faust, who is murdered in a duel. Joachim is genuinely sick, a patient patient, unlike Castorp, who may be merely indulging curiosity or a need for speculative inactivity. Joachim’s death comes before the onset of war, and the grisly appearance of his spirit foreshadows it.
Castorp himself began as the hero of a comic satyr-play, and has an essential element of the buffoon which persists. He is also an innocent. He is embarrassing—Mann the novelist makes his readers squirm with Joachim at Castorp’s imperceptive remarks to the sick patients around him, who are so careful of each other’s feelings. But he learns, and the amount he learns—and the way in which what he learns is not through the feelings but through the exercise of the mind—is both surprising and satisfying. If Joachim’s military fortitude is one German virtue, Castorp’s final connection to music is another.
He returns to the land of the living and is last seen struggling through the Flanders mud singing Schubert’s Lindenbaum. The tree in the song is one of those leitmotifs that cannot be reduced to a simple symbol with a definable meaning. Castorp uses the new invention of the gramophone to turn the Berghof into another microcosm and gathering of ghosts, hearing music by unseen singers from all over the world—‘in America, in Milan, in Vienna, in St Petersburg’. He listens to the drama of Aida and Carmen, and ends up with the irreducible simplicity of the Lindenbaum.
Let us put it this way: an object created by the human spirit and intellect, which means a significant object, is ‘significant’ in that it points beyond itself, is an expression and exponent of a more universal spirit and intellect, of a whole world of feelings and ideas that have found a more or less perfect image of themselves in that object by which the degree of its significance is then measured . . .
Does anyone believe that our ordinary hero, after a certain number of years of hermetic and pedagogic enhancement, had penetrated deeply enough into the life of the intellect and the spirit for him to be conscious of the ‘significance’ of this object and of his love for it? We assert, we recount, that he had.
And the love Castorp is able to feel for the song, the narrator asserts, is the love for death—born out of the depths of his nation’s emotions. The combination of irony and genuine sympathy with which Mann explores Castorp’s understanding of his lyric passion, and implies the forthcoming national consequences of this lyrical compulsion, are very complex and far too long to quote.
Mann saw Wagner as the German national genius after Goethe, and his novels have the ambition to resemble the musical gesamtkunstwerk, although composed only of words on paper. Mann composes language throughout his long text, playing with etymologies and metaphors, changing the key of motifs from farce to terror. Another reading experience that happens—at least for me—with this novel, is analogous to the realization that there is no ‘love’ and no ‘characters’—which leads to a reassessment of everything there is. In the same way we try to read the novel at a normal speed. It is long, we must hurry. That hurry makes it seem intolerably slow and overloaded. And then, as we begin to notice linguistic subtleties on the microscopic scale the reading, as it slows down, comes to life and acquires a different sort of speed. Serious, virtuoso play with words begins to stand out. The patterns made with the idea of mercury, for instance. Mercury is the measure of fever in the thermometer. Mercury, the messenger of the gods, was also the psychopomp, who led the living safely through the world of the dead, and led the dead to their new abodes. Mercury is Hermes, and Hermes Trismegistus was the occult author of the Egyptian books of the dead. Hermetic knowledge is knowledge of hidden mysteries. The Berghof is hermetically sealed from the weather and time outside its domain. And the stolid Hans Castorp has a wonderful set of remarks on the hermetically sealed jars in the larders of his Flatland home, where the fruits of summer are preserved for winter eating. The mythic symbols are held down to earth by the solid jars.
In the same way, perhaps, Castorp’s calling of civil engineer—an earthly pursuit, tied to daily life—is changed by Settembrini’s habit of addressing him as ‘Ingenieur’, and Joachim’s sense that he is a ‘Civilian’, into a complex cultural object. The word ‘Ingenieur’ goes with genies, genius, ingenious thought. ‘Zivil’ goes with Civilization, as well as with Civilian, and takes its place in the oppositions between Culture and Civilization which were fought out in the wartime essays.
And there are memorable events that wait hundreds of pages for their narrative metamorphosis and completion. When we first meet Hans Castorp he is impressed by the living, and then by the dead, presence of his grandfather. He is impressed also by the ‘lovely austere richness’ of the scent of the tuberoses which have been placed over the coffin to cover other, more embarrassing and unpleasant odors. This episode is transfigured when Castorp’s uncle, coming up the mountain to reclaim his nephew for the ‘real’ world of business, is driven away by Behrens, the superintendant. Uncle James makes the mistake of asking Behrens how the body decomposes and he receives a vivid account of the bursting of the guts, and the process of ‘stinking yourself out’—after which you become innocuous, dry and elegant. The magic mountain has its own grim realism.
This is one of those works that changed the shape and possibilities of European literature. It is a masterwork, unlike any other. It is also, if we learn to read it on its own terms, a delight, comic and profound, a new form of language, a new way of seeing.
A. S. Byatt
SELECT BIBLIOGRAPHY
WORKS BY THOMAS MANN
There are two good German editions of Mann: the East German Aufbau Verlag edition in twelve volumes (Berlin, 1956), long out of print; and the more complete Stockholmer Ausgabe, published by S. Fischer Verlag, in twenty volumes (Frankfurt am Main, 1965). For dates of first publication, see the chronology.
Most English editions of Mann date from his lifetime, when the author made Mrs Helen Lowe-Porter the exclusively copyrighted translator of almost all his works. Over the past thirty years, and especially within the last decade, new editions of Mann’s earlier works have appeared, most notably the four principal novels, Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers and Doctor Faustus, translated by John E. Woods. The works listed below, with dates of first publication in English, are still in print:
Royal Highness, 1916
A Man and his Dog, 1923
Buddenbrooks, 1924
The Magic Mountain, 1927
Death in Venice, Tristan, Tonio Kröger, 1928
Disorder and Early Sorrow, 1929
Mario and the Magician, 1930
A Sketch of my Life, 1930
Joseph and his Brothers, 1934–44
&nbs
p; Lotte in Weimar, 1940
The Transposed Heads, 1941
Essays of Three Decades, 1947
(includes ‘Goethe and Tolstoy’ and ‘Freud and the Future’)
Doctor Faustus, 1948
The Holy Sinner, 1951
The Black Swan, 1954
Confessions of Felix Krull, 1955
Last Essays, 1959
Stories of a Lifetime, Vols I and II, 1961
Letters to Paul Amann, 1961
The Letters of Thomas Mann, Vols I and II, 1970
Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1983
Thomas Mann Diaries, 1918–1939, edited by Hermann Kesten, translated by Richard and Clara Winston (André Deutsch, 1983). Fragmentary but still eloquent testament of Mann’s inner life.
Thomas Mann: Pro and Contra Wagner, translated by Allan Blunden, introduction by Erich Heller (Faber & Faber, 1985). Documents the lifelong obsession of an imperfect Wagnerite.
GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
BLACKBOURN, DAVID and EVANS, RICHARD J., eds, The German Bourgeoisie, Routledge, 1991. Historical essays on Mann’s milieu.
BRUFORD, W. H., The German Tradition of Self-Cultivation. ‘Bildung’ from Humboldt to Thomas Mann, Cambridge University Press, 1975. Chapters on The Magic Mountain and ‘The Conversion of an Unpolitical Man’ by a great scholar.
CARNEGY, PATRICK, Faust as Musician: A Study of Thomas Mann’s Novel ‘Doctor Faustus’, Chatto & Windus and New Directions, 1973. Subtle investigation of Mann and music by a leading opera critic and producer.
DE MENDELSSOHN, PETER, Der Zauberer. Das Leben des deutschen Schriftstellers Thomas Mann, Frankfurt, 1975. The standard German biography.
GRAY, R. D., The German Tradition in Literature 1871–1945, Cambridge University Press, 1965. A highly critical account of Mann’s contemporaries and their ideas.
