by Thomas Mann
Yes, Monsignor Hinterpfortner is right: we are lost. In other words, the war is lost; but that means more than a lost campaign, it means in very truth that we are lost: our character, our cause, our hope, our history. It is all up with Germany, it will be all up with her. She is marked down for collapse, economic, political, moral spiritual, in short all-embracing, unparalleled, final collapse. I suppose I have not wished for it, this that threatens, for it is madness and despair. I suppose I have not wished for it, because my pity is too deep, my grief and sympathy are with this unhappy nation, when I think of the exaltation and blind ardour of its uprising, the breaking-out, the breaking-up, the breaking-down; the purifying and fresh start, the national new birth of ten years ago, that seemingly religious intoxication—which then betrayed itself to any intelligent person for what it was by its crudity, vulgarity, gangsterism, sadism, degradation, filthiness—ah, how unmistakably it bore within itself the seeds of this whole war! My heart contracts painfully at the thought of that enormous investment of faith, zeal, lofty historic emotion; all this we made, all this is now puffed away in a bankruptcy without compare. No, surely I did not want it, and yet—I have been driven to want it, I wish for it today and will welcome it, out of hatred for the outrageous contempt of reason, the vicious violation of the truth, the cheap, filthy backstairs mythology, the criminal degradation and confusion of standards; the abuse, corruption, and blackmail of all that was good, genuine, trusting, and trustworthy in our old Germany. For liars and lickspittles mixed us a poison draught and took away our senses. We drank—for we Germans perennially yearn for intoxication—and under its spell, through years of deluded high living, we committed a superfluity of shameful deeds, which must now be paid for. With what? I have already used the word, together with the word “despair” I wrote it. I will not repeat it: not twice could I control my horror or my trembling fingers to set it down again.
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Asterisks too are a refreshment for the eye and mind of the reader. One does not always need the greater articulation of a Roman numeral, and I could scarcely give the character of a main section to the above excursus into a present outside of Adrian Leverkühn’s life and work. No, asterisks will serve capitally to give proportion to my page; and below them I will round out this section with some further information about Adrian’s Leipzig years, though I realize that as a chapter it makes an impression of heterogeneous elements—as though it were not enough that I did not succeed better with what came before. I have reread it all: Adrian’s dramatic wishes and plans, his earliest songs, the painful gaze that he had acquired during our separation; the intellectual fascinations of Shakespearean comedy, Leverkühn’s emphasis on foreign songs and his own shy cosmopolitanism; then the bohemian Cafe Central club, winding up with the portrait of Rüdiger Schildknapp, given in perhaps unjustifiable detail. And I quite properly ask myself whether such uneven material can actually make up a single chapter. But let me remember that from the first I had to reproach myself for the absence of a controlled and regular structure in my work. My excuse is always the same: my subject is too close to me. What is lacking is distance, contrast, mere differentiation between the material and the hand that shapes it. Have I not said more than once that the life I am treating of was nearer to me, dearer, more moving than my own? And being so near, so moving, and so intimate, it is not mere “material” but a person, and that does not lend itself to artistic treatment. Far be it from me to deny the seriousness of art; but when it becomes serious, then one rejects art and is not capable of it. I can only repeat that paragraphs and asterisks are in this book merely a concession to the eyes of the reader, and that I, if I had my way, would write down the whole in one burst and one breath, without any division, yes, without paragraphing or intermissions. I simply have not the courage to submit such an insensate text to the eyes of the reading public.
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Having spent a year with Adrian in Leipzig, I know how he lived during the other three of his stay there; his manner of life being so regular and conservative that I found it rigid and sometimes even depressing. Not for nothing, in that first letter, had he expressed his sympathy for Chopin’s lack of adventurous spirit, his “not wanting to know.” He too wanted to know nothing, see nothing, actually experience nothing, at least not in any obvious, exterior sense of the word. He was not out for change, new sense impressions, distraction, recreation. As for the last, he liked to make fun of people who are constantly having “a little change,” constantly getting brown and strong—and nobody knew for what. “Relaxation,” he said, “is for those to whom it does no good.” He was not interested in travel for the sake of sightseeing or “culture.” He scorned the delight of the eye, and sensitive as his hearing was, just so little had he ever felt urged to train his sight in the forms of plastic art. The distinction between eye-men and ear-men he considered indefeasibly valid and correct and counted himself definitely among the latter. As for me, I have never thought such a distinction could be followed through thick and thin, and in his case I never quite believed in the unwillingness and reluctance of the eye. To be sure, Goethe too says that music is something inborn and native, requiring no great nourishment from outside and no experience drawn from life. But after all there is the inner vision, the perception, which is something different and comprehends more than mere seeing. And more than that, it is profoundly contradictory that a man should have, as Leverkühn did, some feeling for the human eye, which after all speaks only to the eye, and yet refuse to perceive the outer world through that organ. I need only mention the names of Marie Godeau, Rudi Schwerdtfeger, and Nepomuk Schneidewein to bring home to myself Adrian’s receptivity, yes, weakness, for the magic of the eye, the black and the blue. Of course I am quite clear that I am doing wrong to bombard the reader with unfamiliar names when the actual appearance of their owners in these pages is still far off; it is a barefaced blunder which may well make one question the freedom of the will. What, indeed, is free will? I am quite aware that I have put down under a compulsion these too empty, too early names.
Adrian’s journey to Graz, which did not occur for the journey’s sake, was one interruption in the even flow of his life. Another was the excursion with Schildknapp to the sea, the fruit of which one can claim to be that one-movement symphonic tone-poem. The third exception, related to the second, was a journey to Basel, which he made in company with his teacher Kretschmar to attend the performances of sacred music of the baroque period, which the Basel Chamber Choir gave in St. Martin’s Church. Kretschmar was to play the organ. They gave Monteverdi’s Magnificat, some organ studies by Frescobaldi, an oratorio by Carissimi, and a cantata by Buxtehude. This “musica riservata” made a strong impression on Adrian, as a music of emotion, which in a rebound from the constructivism of the Netherlanders treated the Bible word with astonishing human freedom, with a declamatory expressiveness, and clothed it in a boldly descriptive instrumental garb. The impression it made was very strong and lasting. He wrote and spoke much to me about this outburst of modernity in Monteverdi’s musical devices; he spent much time, in the Leipzig library, and practised Carissimi’s Jephtha and the Psalms of David by Schütz. Who could fail to recognize in the quasi-ecclesiastical music of his later years, the Apocalypse and the Faustus, the stylistic influence of this madrigalism? Always dominant in him was a will to go to extremes of expression; together with the intellectual passion for austere order, the linear style of the Netherlands composers. In other words, heat and cold prevail alongside each other in his work; sometimes in moments of the greatest genius they play into each other, the espressivo takes hold of the strict counterpoint, the objective blushes with feeling. One gets the impression of a glowing mould; this, like nothing else, has brought home to me the idea of the daemonic.
As for the connection between Adrian’s first journey to Switzerland and the earlier one to Sylt, it had come about thus: that little mountain land, culturally so active and unhampered, had and has a Society of Musicians, a Tonkuns
tler Verein, which holds regular orchestral practices, the so-called lectures d’orchestre. A jury of authorities, that is, permits young aspirants to present their compositions, which are then given a try-out by one of the symphony orchestras of the country and its conductor, the public being excluded and only professionals admitted. Thus the young composer has an opportunity to hear his creation, to get experience and have his imagination instructed by the reality of sound. Such a try-out was held in Geneva at almost the same time with the Basel concert, by the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, and Wendell Kretschmar had succeeded through his connections in having Adrian’s Meerleuchten—by exception the work of a young German—put on the program. For Adrian it was a complete surprise: Kretschmar had amused himself by keeping him in the dark. He still knew nothing when he went with his teacher from Basel to Geneva for the trial performance, and there sounded under Herr Ansermet’s baton his “root treatment,” that piece of darkly sparkling impressionism which he himself did not take seriously, had not taken seriously even when he wrote it. Of course while it was being performed he sat on pins and needles. To know himself being identified by the audience with an achievement which he himself has got beyond and which for him means only a trifling with something not taken in earnest: that must be for the artist a grotesque torment. Thank God, signs of applause or displeasure were forbidden at these performances. Privately he received words of praise or blame, exception was taken, shortcomings pointed out in French and German; he said nothing, either way, and anyhow he agreed with no one. A week or ten days he remained with Kretschmar in Geneva, Basel and Zurich and came into brief contact with musical circles there. They will not have had much joy of him, nor even known how to take him, at least in so far as they set store by inoffensiveness, expansiveness, friendly responsiveness. Individuals here and there might have been touched by his shyness and understood the solitude that wrapped him, the difficulties of his life—indeed, I know that such was the case and I find it illuminating. In my experience there is in Switzerland much feeling for suffering, much understanding of it, which, more than in other places of advanced culture, for instance intellectual Paris, is bound up with the old civic life of the towns. Here was a hidden point of contact. On the other hand, the introverted Swiss mistrust of the Reich-German met here a special case of German mistrust of the “world”—strange as it may seem to apply the word “world” to the tight little neighbouring country by way of contrasting it with the broad and mighty German Reich with its immense cities. But the comparison has indisputable justice on its side. Switzerland, neutral, many-tongued, affected by French influence, open to western airs, is actually, despite its small size, far more “world,” far more European territory than the political colossus on the north, where the word “international” has long been a reproach, and a smug provincialism has made the air spoilt and stuffy. I have already spoken of Adrian’s inner cosmopolitanism. But German citizenship of the world was always something different from worldliness; and my friend was just the soul to be made uneasy by the “world,” and feel himself outside of it. A few days earlier than Kretschmar he returned to Leipzig, certainly a world-minded city, yet one where the world is present more as a guest than at home; that city where people talk so outlandishly-and where first desire had touched his pride. That experience was profound, it was shattering; he had not expected it from the world, and I think it did much to estrange him from it. It is indeed quite false, and nothing but German provincial conceitedness, to deny depth to the world. But the depth is a world-depth; and it is a destiny, like another, which one must accept as such, to be born to the provincial—and thus so much the more uncanny—depth of Germany.
Adrian kept without changing during the whole four and a half years he spent in Leipzig Ms two-room quarters in Pererstrasse near the Collegium Beatae Virginis, where he had again pinned the magic square above his cottage piano. He attended lectures in philosophy and the history of music; read and excerpted in the library and brought Kretschmar his exercises to be criticized: piano pieces, a “concerto” for string orchestra, and a quartet for flute, clarinet, basset horn, and bassoon. I mention the pieces which were known to me and are still extant, though never published. What Kretschmar did was to point out weak places, recommend corrections of tempo, the enlivening of a stiffish rhythm, the better articulation of a theme. He pointed out to him a middle part that came to nothing, a bass that did not move. He put his finger on a transition that was only a makeshift, not organic, and compromising the natural flow of the composition. Actually, he only told him what the artistic sense of the pupil might have said itself, or what it had already told him. A teacher is the personified conscience of the pupil, confirming him in his doubt, explaining his dissatisfactions, stimulating his urge to improve. But a pupil like Adrian at bottom needed no mentor or corrector at all. He deliberately brought to Kretschmar unfinished things in order to be told what he knew already, then to laugh at the artistic sense, the connoisseurship, of his teacher, which entirely coincided with his own: the understanding which is the actual agent of the work-idea-not the idea of a particular work but the idea of the opus itself, the objective and harmonic creation complete, the manager of its unified organic nature; which sticks the cracks together, stops up the holes, brings out that “natural flow” —which was not there in the first place and so is not natural at all, but a product of art—in short, only in retrospect and indirectly does this manager produce the impression of the spontaneous and organic. In a work there is much seeming and sham, one could go further and say that as “a work” it is seeming in and for itself. Its ambition is to make one believe that it is not made, but born, like Pallas Athene in full fig and embossed armour from Jupiter’s head. But that is a delusion. Never did a work come like that. It is work: art-work for appearance’s sake—and now the question is whether at the present stage of our consciousness, our knowledge, our sense of truth, this little game is still permissible, still intellectually possible, still to be taken seriously; whether the work as such, the construction, self-sufficing, harmonically complete in itself, still stands in any legitimate relation to the complete insecurity, problematic conditions, and lack of harmony of our social situation; whether all seeming, even the most beautiful, even precisely the beautiful, has not today become a lie.
One asks, I say, or rather I learned to ask myself, through my intercourse with Adrian, whose sharp-sightedness, or if I may invent a word, sharp-feelingness, in these matters was of extreme incorruptibility. Insights fundamentally remote from my own native easy-goingness he expressed in talk as casual apercus; and they pained me, not because of wounded feeling but on his account; they hurt, depressed, distressed me, because I saw in them dangerous aggravations of his nature, inhibitions hampering the development of his gifts. I have heard him say: “The work of art? It is a fraud. It is something the burgher wishes there still were. It is contrary to truth, contrary to serious art. Genuine and serious is only the very short, the highly consistent musical moment… “
How should that not have troubled me, when after all I knew that he himself aspired to a “work,” and was planning an opera!
Again, I have heard him say: “Pretence and play have the conscience of art against them today. Art would like to stop being pretence and play, it would like to become knowledge.”
But what ceases to conform to his definition, does that not cease to exist altogether? And how will art live as knowledge? I recalled what he had written from Halle to Kretschmar about the extension of the kingdom of the banal. Kretschmar had not allowed it to upset his belief in the calling of his pupil. But these later criticisms, levelled against pretence and play, in other words against form itself, seemed to indicate such an extension of the kingdom of the banal, of the no longer permissible, that it threatened to swallow up art itself. With deep concern I asked myself what strain and effort, intellectual tricks, by-wavs, and ironies would be necessary to save it, to reconquer it, and to arrive at a work which as a travesty of innocence co
nfessed to the state of knowledge from which it was to be won!
My poor friend had been instructed one day, or rather one night, from frightful lips, by an awful ally, in more detail on the subject I here touch upon. The document is extant, I will report on it in its proper place. It first illuminated and clarified the instinctive fears which Adrian’s remarks aroused in me. But what I called above the “travesty of innocence”: how often, from early on, did it strangely stand out in his work! That work contains, on a developed musical plane, against a background of the most extreme tensions, “banalities”—of course not in a sentimental sense nor in that of a buoyant complacency, but banalities rather in the sense of a technical primitivism, specimens of naivete or sham naivete which Meister Kretschmar, in so gifted a pupil, let pass with a smile. He did so, certainly, because he understood them not as first—degree naivetes, if I may so express myself, but as something the other side of the new and cheap: as audacities dressed in the garment of the primitive. The thirteen Brentano songs are also to be regarded in this light. To them, before I leave the subject, I must certainly devote a few words; they often affect one like at once a mockery and a glorification of the fundamental, a painfully reminiscent ironic treatment of tonality, of the tempered system, of traditional music itself.
