Doctor Faustus

by Thomas Mann

  “Oh, come!” from several voices. But: “He is right,” Matthaeus Arzt declared roundly. The others called him the Socialist, because the social was his passion. He was a Christian Socialist and often quoted Goethe’s saying that Christianity was a political revolution which, having failed, became a moral one. Political, he said now, it must again become, that is to say social: that was the true and only means for the disciplining of the religious element, now in danger of a degeneration which Leverkühn had not so badly described. Religious socialism, religiosity linked with the social, that was it; for everything depended on finding the right link, and the theonomic sanction must be united with the social, bound up with the God-given task of social fulfilment. “Believe me,” he said, “it all depends on the development of a responsible industrial population, an international nation of industry, which some day can form a right and genuine European economic society. In it all shaping impulses will lie, they lie in the germ even now, not merely for the technical achievement of a new economic organization, not only to result in a thorough sanitation of the natural relations of fife, but also to found new political orders.”

  I repeat the ideas of these young people as they were uttered, in their own terminology, a sort of learned lingo, quite unaware how pompous they sounded, flinging about the stilted and pretentious phrases with artless virtuosity and self-satisfaction. “Natural relations of life,”

  “theonomic sanctions,” such were their preciosities. Certainly they could have put it all more simply, but then it would not have been their scientific-theological jargon. With gusto they propounded the “problem of being,” talked about “the sphere of the divine,” “the political sphere,” or “the academic sphere”; about the “structural principle,” “condition of dialectic tension,” “existential correspondences,” and so on. Deutschlin, with his hands clasped behind his head, now put the “problem of being” in the sense of the genetic origin of Arzt’s economic society. That was nothing but economic common sense, and nothing but this could ever be represented in the economic society. “But we must be clear on this point, Matthaeus,” said he, “that the social ideal of an economic social organization comes from autonomous thinking in its nature enlightening, in short from a rationalism which is still by no means grasped by the mighty forces either above or below the rational. You believe you can develop a just order out of the pure insight and reason of man, equating the just and the socially useful, and you think that out of it new political forms will come. But the economic sphere is quite different from the political, and from economic expediency to historically related political consciousness there is no direct transition. I don’t see why you fail to recognize that. Political organization refers to the State, a kind and degree of control not conditioned by usefulness; wherein other qualities are represented than those known to representatives of enterprises and secretaries of unions; for instance, honour and dignity. For such qualities, my dear chap, the inhabitants of the economic sphere do not contribute the necessary existential correspondences.”

  “Ach, Deutschlin, what are you talking about?” said Arzt. “As modern sociologists we very well know that the State too is conditioned by utilitarian functions. There is the administration of justice and the preservation of order. And then after all we live in an economic age, the economic is simply the historical character of this time, and honour and dignity do not help the State one jot, if it does not of itself have a grasp of the economic situation and know how to direct it.”

  Deutschlin admitted that. But he denied that useful functions were the essential objects and raisons d’etre of the State. The legitimacy of the State resided, he said, in its elevation, its sovereignty, which thus existed independent of the valuations of individuals, because it—very much in contrast to the shufflings of the Contrat Social—was there before the individual. The supra-individual associations had, that is, just as much original existence as the individual human beings, and an economist, for just that reason, could understand nothing of the State, because he understood nothing of its transcendental foundation.

  To which Teutleben added:

  “I am of course not without sympathy for the socio-religious combination that Arzt is speaking for, it is anyhow better than none at all, and Matthaeus is only too right when he says that everything depends on finding the right combination. But to be right, to be at once political and religious, it must be of the people, and what I ask myself is: can a new nationality rise out of an economic society? Look at the Ruhr: there you have your assembly centres of men, yet no new national cells. Travel in the local train from Leuna to Halle. You will see workmen sitting together, who can talk very well about tariffs; but from their conversation it does not appear that they have drawn any national strength from their common activity. In economics the. nakedly finite rules more and more.”

  “But the national is finite too,” somebody else said, it was either Hubmeyer or Schappeler, I don’t know which. “As theologians we must not admit that the folk is anything eternal. Capacity for enthusiasm is very fine and a need for faith very natural to youth; but it is a temptation too, and one must look very hard at the new groupings, which today, when liberalism is dying off, are everywhere being presented, to see whether they have genuine substance, and whether the thing creating the bond is itself something real or perhaps only the product of, let us say, structural romanticism, which creates for itself ideological connections in a nominalistic not to say fictionalistic way. I think, or rather I am afraid, that the deified national State and the State regarded as a Utopia are just such nominalistic structures; and the recognition of them, let us say the recognition of Germany, has something not binding about it because it has nothing to do with personal substance and qualitative content. Nothing is asked about that, and when one says ‘Germany’ and declares that to be his connecting link, he does not need to validate it at all. He will be asked by nobody, not even by himself, how much Germanism he in fact and in a personal—that is, in a qualitative sense—represents and realizes; or how far he is in a position to serve the assertion of a German form of life in the world. It is that which I call nominalism, or rather the fetish of names, which in my opinion is the ideological worship of idols.”

  “Good, Hubmeyer,” said Deutschlin. “All you say is quite right, and in any case I admit that your criticism has brought us closer to the problem. I disagreed with Matthaeus Arzt because the domination of the utilitarian principle in the economic field does not suit me; but I entirely agree with him that the theonomic sanction in itself, that is to say the religious in general, has something formalistic and unobjective about it. It needs some kind of down-to-earth, empirical content or application or confirmation, some practice in obedience to God. And so now Arzt has chosen socialism and Carl Teutleben nationalism. These are the two between which we have today to choose. I deny that there is an outbidding of ideologies, since today nobody is beguiled by the empty word ‘freedom.’ There are in fact just these two possibilities, of religious submission and religious realization: the social and the national. But as ill luck will have it, both of them have their drawbacks and dangers, and very serious ones. Hubmeyer has expressed himself very tellingly on a certain nominalistic hollowness and personal lack of substance so frequently evident in the acceptance of the national; and, generally speaking, one should add that it is futile to fling oneself into the arms of a reinvigorating objectivism if it means nothing for the actual shaping of one’s personal life but is only valid for solemn occasions, among which indeed I count the intoxication of sacrificial death. To a genuine sacrifice two valuations and qualitative ingredients belong: that of the thing and that of the sacrifice… But we have cases where the personal substance, let us say, was very rich in Germanness and quite involuntarily objectivated itself also as sacrifice; yet where acknowledgment of the folk-bond not only utterly failed, but there was even a permanent and violent negation of it, so that the tragic sacrifice consisted precisely in the conflict between being and con
fession… So much for tonight about the national sanction. As for the social, the hitch is that when everything in the economic field is regulated in the best possible manner, the problem of the meaning and fulfilment of existence and a worthy conduct of life is left open, just as open as it is today. Some day we shall have universal economic administration of the world, the complete victory of collectivism. Good; the relative insecurity of man due to the catastrophic social character of the capitalistic system will have disappeared; that is, there will have vanished from human life the last memory of risk and loss—and with it the intellectual problem. One asks oneself why then, continue to live… “

  “Would you like to retain the capitalist system, Deutschlin,” asked Arzt—“because it keeps alive the memory of the insecurity of human life?”

  “No, I would not, my dear Arzt,” answered Deutschlin with some heat. “Still, I may be allowed to indicate the tragic antinomies of which life is full.”

  “One doesn’t need to have them pointed out,” sighed Dungersheim. “It is certainly a desperate situation, and the religious man asks himself whether the world really is the single work of a benevolent God and not rather a combined effort, I will not say with whom.”

  “What I should like to know,” remarked von Teutleben, “is whether the young of other nations lie about like us, plaguing themselves with problems and antinomies.”

  “Hardly,” answered Deutschlin contemptuously. “They have a much easier and more comfortable time intellectually.”

  “The Russian revolutionary youth,” Arzt asserted, “should be excepted. There, if I am not mistaken, there is a tireless discursive argumentation and a cursed lot of dialectic tension.”

  “The Russians,” said Deutschlin sententiously, “have profundity but no form. And in the west they have form but no profundity. Only we Germans have both.”

  “Well, if that is not a nationalistic sanction!” laughed Hubmeyer.

  “It is merely the sanction of an idea,” Deutschlin asserted. “It is the demand of which I speak. Our obligation is exceptional, certainly not the average, for that we have already attained. What is and what ought to be—there is a bigger gulf between them with us than with others, simply because the ‘ought to be,’ the standard, is so high.”

  “In all that,” Dungersheim warned us, “we probably ought not to consider the national, but rather to regard the complex of problems as bound up with the existence of modern man. But it is the case, that since the direct faith in being has been lost, which in earlier times was the result of being fixed in a pre-existent universal order of things, I mean the ritually permeated regulations which had a certain definite bearing on the revealed truth… that since the decline of faith and the rise of modern society our relations with men and things have become endlessly complicated and refracted, there is nothing left but problems and uncertainties, so that the design for truth threatens to end in resignation and despair. The search rising from disintegration, for the beginnings of new forces of order, is general; though one may also agree that it is particularly serious and urgent among us Germans, and that the others do not suffer so from historical destiny, either because they are stronger or because they are duller—“

  “Duller,” pronounced von Teutleben.

  “That is what you say, Teutleben. But if we count to our honour as a nation our sharp awareness of the historical and psychological complex of problems, and identify with the German character the endeavour after new universal regulation, we are already on the point of prescribing for ourselves a myth of doubtful genuineness and not doubtful arrogance: namely, the national, with its structural romanticism of the warrior type, which is nothing but natural paganism with Christian trimmings and identifies Christus as ‘Lord of the heavenly hosts.’ But that is a position decisively threatened from the side of the demons… “

  “Well, and?” asked Deutschlin. “Daemonic powers stand beside the order-making qualities in any vital movement.”

  “Let us call things by their names,” demanded Schappeler—or it might have been Hubmeyer. “The daemonic, the German word for that is the instincts. And that is just it: today even, along with the instincts, propaganda is made for claims to all sorts of sanctions, and that one too, I mean, it takes them in and trims up the old idealism with the psychology of instinct, so that there arises the dazzling impression of a thicker density of reality. But just on that account the bid can be pure swindle.”

  At this point one can only say “and so on”; for it is time to put an end to the reproduction of that conversation—or of such conversations. In reality it had no end, it went on deep into the night, on and on, with “bipolar position” and “historically conscious analysis,” with “extra-temporal qualities,” “ontological naturalism,” “logical dialectic,”and “practical dialectic”: painstaking, shoreless, learned, tailing off into nothing—that is, into slumber, to which our leader Baworinski recommended us, for in the morning—as it already almost was—we should be due for an early start. That kind nature held sleep ready, to take up the conversation and rock it in forgetfulness, was a grateful circumstance, and Adrian, who had not spoken for a long time, gave it expression in a few words as we settled down.

  “Yes, good night, lucky we can say it. Discussions should always be held just before going to bed, your rear protected by sleep. How painful, after an intellectual conversation, to have to go about with your mind so stirred up.”

  “That is just an escapist psychology,” somebody grumbled—and then the first sounds of heavy breathing filled our loft with its announcement of relaxation and surrender to the vegetative state; of that a few hours sufficed to restore youth’s elasticity. For next day along with physical activity and the enjoyment of natural beauty, they would continue the usual theological and philosophical debates with almost interminable mutual instruction, opposition, challenge, and reply. It was the month of June, and the air was filled with the heavy scent of jasmine and elder-blossom from the gorges of the wooded heights that cross the Thuringian basin. Priceless it was to wander for days through the countryside, here almost free from industry, the well-favoured, fruitful land, with its friendly villages, in clusters of latticed buildings. Then coming out of the farming region into that of mostly grazing land, to follow the storied, beech-and pine-covered ridge road, the “Rennsteig,” which, with its view deep down into the Werra valley, stretches from the Frankenwald to Eisenach on the Horsel. It grew ever more beautiful, significant, romantic; and neither what Adrian had said about the reserve of youth in the face of nature, nor what about the desirability of being able to retire to slumber after intellectual discussion, seemed to have any cogency. Even to him it scarcely applied; for, except when his headaches made him silent, he contributed with animation to the daily talks; and if nature lured from him no very enthusiastic cries and he looked at it with a certain musing aloofness, I do not doubt that its pictures, rhythms, the melodies of its upper airs, penetrated deeper into his soul than into those of his companions. It has even happened that some passage of pure, free beauty standing out from the tense intellectuality of his work has later brought to my mind those days and the experiences we shared.

  Yes, they were stirring hours, days, and weeks. The refreshment of the out-of-doors life, and the oxygen in the air, the landscape, and the historical impressions, thrilled these young folk and raised their spirits to a plane where thought moved lavishly in free experimental flight as it will at that time of life. In later, more arid hours of an after-university professional career, even an intellectual one, there would be scarcely any such occasion. Often I looked at them during their theological and philosophical debates and pictured to myself that to some among them their Winfried period might in later years seem the finest time of their lives. I watched them and I watched Adrian, with the clear perception that it would not be so with him. I, as a non-theologian, was a guest among them; he, though a theologian, was even more of one. Why? I felt, not without a pang, the foreordained gulf between h
is existence and that of these striving and high-purposed youths. It was the difference of the life-curve between good, yes, excellent average, which was destined to return from that roving, seeking student life to its bourgeois courses, and the other, invisibly singled out, who would never forsake the hard route of the mind, would tread it, who knew whither, and whose gaze, whose attitude, never quite resolved in the fraternal, whose inhibitions in his personal relations made me and probably others aware that he himself divined this difference.

  By the beginning of his fourth semester I had indications that my friend was thinking of dropping his theological course, even before the first exams.

  CHAPTER XV

  Adrian’s relations with Wendell Kretschmar had never been broken off or weakened. The young “studiosus” of the divine science saw the musical mentor of his school-days in every vacation, when he came to Kaisersaschern; visited him and consulted him in the organist’s quarters in the Cathedral; met him at Uncle Leverkühn’s house, and persuaded the parents to invite him once or twice to Buchel for the week-end, where they took extended walks and also got Jonathan Leverkühn to show the guest Chladni’s sound-patterns and the devouring drop. Kretschmar stood very well with the host of Buchel, now getting on in years. His relations with Frau Elsbeth were more formal if by no means actually strained. Perhaps she was distressed by his stutter, which just for that reason got worse in her presence and in direct conversation with her. It was odd, after all. In Germany music enjoys that respect among the people which in France is given to literature; among us nobody is put off or embarrassed, uncomfortably impressed, or moved to disrespect or mockery by the fact that a man is a musician; so I am convinced that Elsbeth Leverkühn felt entire respect for Adrian’s elder friend, who, moreover, practised his activity as a salaried man in the service of the Church. Yet during the two and a half days which I once spent with him and Adrian at Buchel, I observed in her bearing towards the organist a certain reserve and restraint, held in check but not quite done away by her native friendliness. And he, as I said, responded with a worsening of his impediment amounting a few times almost to a calamity. It is hard to say whether it was that he felt her unease and mistrust or whatever it was, or because on his own side, spontaneously, he had definite inhibitions amounting to shyness and embarrassment in her presence.