by Thomas Mann
We knew nothing precise about what was occupying him, now that that music of the cosmos had appeared in print from Schott’s Sons in Mainz, under the same arrangements as the Brentano songs. Actually it was the suite of dramatic grotesques, whose themes, so we heard, he had taken from the old history and anecdote book, the Gesta Romanorum. He was trying these, without yet knowing whether anything would come of it or if he would continue. In any case, the characters were not to be men but puppets (hence the Kleist). As for the Marvels of the Universe, there was to have been a foreign performance of that solemn and arrogant work had not the war brought the plan to nothing. We had spoken of it at table. The Lübeck performances of Love’s Labour’s Lost, even unsuccessful as they had proved, together with the mere existence of the Brentano cycle, had made some impression, and Adrian’s name had begun in the inner circles of the art to have a certain esoteric and tentative fame—even this hardly at all in Germany and decidedly not in Munich. But there were other, more perceptive regions. A few weeks earlier he had had a letter from a Monsieur Monteux, director of the Russian ballet in Paris, former member of the Colonne orchestra, wherein this experimentally-minded director had announced his intention of producing the Marvels of the Universe, together with some orchestral parts of Love’s Labour’s Lost as a concert pure and simple. He had in mind the Theatre des Champs-Elysees for the performance, and invited Adrian to come to Paris, probably in order to rehearse and conduct his own works. We had not asked our friend whether he would, under favourable conditions, accept. In any case, the circumstances were now such that there could be no further talk of it.
I still see myself walking up and down the carpet and boards of the old wainscoted room, with its overpowering chandelier, its wall cupboards with their wrought-iron hinges, the flat leather cushions on the corner bench, and the deep embrasures of the windows; walking up and down and holding forth at large about Germany; more for myself and certainly more for Schildknapp than for Adrian, from whom I expected no interest. Used to teaching and to talking, and, when I get warmed up, no bad talker, I do not dislike listening to myself and take a certain pleasure in my command over words. Not without lively gesture I challenged Rüdiger to set down what I said to the wartime journalism which so annoyed him. Surely one might be permitted a little psychological participation in the national and even touching traits which our otherwise multiform German character was evincing in this historic hour. In the last analysis, what we were dealing with was the psychology of the breakthrough.
“In a nation like ours,” I set forth, “the psychological is always the primary and actually motivating; the political action is of the second order of importance: reflex, expression, instrument. What the breakthrough to world power, to which fate summons us, means at bottom, is the breakthrough to the world—out of an isolation of which we are painfully conscious, and which no vigorous reticulation into world economy has been able to break down since the founding of the Reich. The bitter thing is that the practical manifestation is an outbreak of war, though its true interpretation is longing, a thirst for unification.”
“God bless your studies,” I heard Adrian say here in a low voice, with a half-laugh. He had not even glanced up from his notes as he quoted the old student tag.
I remained standing and looked at him; he paid no heed. “You mean,” I retorted, “that I am talking nonsense?”
“Pardon,” he hastily returned. “I lapsed into student lingo, because your oratio reminded me so much of our straw-threshing disputes of anno so-and-so-what were the fellows’ names? I notice I begin to forget them” (he was twenty-nine at the time). “Deutschmeyer? Dungersleben?”
“You mean the redoubtable Deutschlin,” I said; “and there was one called Dungersheim. A Hubmeyer and Teutleben there were too. You have never had a memory for names. They were good, serious chaps.”
“Certainly, of course. And look here, there was a Schappeler, and a socialist named Arzt. What do you say now? You did not even belong to their faculty. But today I seem to hear them when I hear you. Straw-threshing—by which I only mean once a student, always a student. Academic life keeps one young and critical.”
“You did belong to their faculty,” said I, “and yet you were at bottom more a guest than I. Of course, Adri. I was only a student, and you may well be right, I am one still. But so much the better if the academic keeps one young, if it preserves loyalty to the spirit, to free thought, to the higher interpretation of the crude event—“
“Are we talking about loyalty?” he asked. “I understood that Kaisersaschern would like to become a world capital. That is not very loyal.”
“Get along with you,” I cried, “you understood nothing of the sort and you understand very well what I meant about the German breakthrough to the world.”
“It would not help much if I did understand, for at present, anyhow, the crude event will just make our shut-inness and shut-offness more complete, however far your military swarm into Europe. You see: I cannot go to Paris, you go there instead of me. Good too! Between ourselves, I would not have gone anyhow. You help me out of an embarrassment—“
“The war will be short,” I said in a suppressed voice, for his words affected me painfully. “It cannot last long. We pay for the swift breakthrough with a wrong, an acknowledged one, which we declare ourselves ready to make good. We must take it on ourselves… “
“And will know how to carry it with dignity,” he broke in. “Germany has broad shoulders. And who denies that a real breakthrough is worth what the tame world calls a crime? I hope you don’t suppose that I think small of the idea which it pleases you to chew over, in your straw. There is at bottom only one problem in the world, and this is its name. How does one break through? How does one get into the open? How does one burst the cocoon and become a butterfly? The whole situation is dominated by the question. Here too,” said he, and twitched the little red marker in the volume of Kleist on the table—“here too it treats of the breakthrough, in the capital essay on marionettes, and it is called straight out ‘the last chapter of the history of the world.’ But it is talking only about the aesthetic, charm, free grace, which actually is reserved to the automaton and the god; that is, to the unconscious or an endless consciousness, whereas every reflection lying between nothing and infinity kills grace. The consciousness must, this writer thinks, have gone through an infinity in order that grace find itself again therein; and Adam must eat a second time from the tree of knowledge in order to fall back into the state of innocence.”
“How glad I am,” I put in, “that you have just read that! It is gloriously thought, and you are quite right to bring it into connection with the breakthrough. But do not say that it is speaking only of aesthetics, do not say only! One does wrong to see in aesthetics a separate and narrow field of the humane. It is much more than that, it is at bottom everything, it attracts or repels, the poet attaches to the word ‘grace’ the very widest possible meaning. Aesthetic release or the lack of it is a matter of one’s fate, dealing out happiness or unhappiness, companionship or hopeless if proud isolation on earth. And one does not need to be a philologian to know that what is odious is also what is hated. Craving to break through from bondage, to cease being sealed up in the odious—tell me that I am straw-threshing again; but I feel, I have always felt and will assert against strongly held opposition, that this German is kat exochen, profoundly German, the very definition of Germanism, of a psychology threatened with envelopment, the poison of isolation, provincial boorishness, neurosis, implicit Satanism… “
I broke off. He eyed me, and I believe the colour left his cheeks. The look he cast on me was the look, the familiar one that made me almost equally unhappy, no matter whether myself or another was its object: wordless, veiled, coldly remote to the point of offensiveness, followed by the smile with closed lips and sneeringly dilating nostrils—and then the turning away. He moved away from the table, not toward Schildknapp, but to the window niche, where he had hung a saint’s pict
ure on the panelling. Rüdiger talked away. In his opinion, he said, I was to be congratulated on going straight into the field, and actually on horseback. One should ride into the field or else not go at all. And he patted the neck of an imaginary nag. We laughed, and our parting when I left for the train was easy and cheerful. Good that it was not sentimental, it would have seemed tasteless. But Adrian’s look I carried with me to war—perhaps it was that, and not the typhus infection from lice, which brought me home so soon, back to his side.
CHAPTER XXXI
“You go there instead of me,” Adrian had said. And we did not get to Paris. Shall I confess that, privately and apart from the historical point of view, I felt a deep, intimately personal shame? Weeks long we had sent home terse, affectedly laconic dispatches, dressing our triumphs in cold matter-of-fact. Liege had long since fallen, we had won the battle for Lorraine. In accordance with the fixed master-plan we had swung with five armies across the Meuse, had taken Brussels, Namur, carried the day at Charleroi and Longwy, won a second series of battles at Sedan, Rethel, Saint-Quentin, and occupied Reims. We advanced as though on wings. It was just as we had dreamed: by the favour of the god of war, at destiny’s nod, we were borne as on pinions. To gaze without flinching at the flames we kindled, could not help kindling, was incumbent upon our manhood, it was the supreme challenge to our heroic courage. I can still see vividly the picture of a gaunt Gaulish wife, standing on a height round which our battery was moving; at its foot a village lay shattered and smoking. “I am the last!” she cried, with a gesture of tragic power, such as is given to no German woman to make. “Je suis la derniere!” Raising her fists, she hurled her curses down on our heads, repeating three times: “Mechants! Mechants! Mechants!”
We looked the other way. We had to win, and ours was the hard trade of triumph. That I felt wretched enough myself sitting my horse, plagued with coughing and the racking pain in my limbs due to wet nights under canvas, actually afforded me a certain consolation.
Yet many more villages we shot up, still borne on victory’s pinions. Then came the incomprehensible, the apparently senseless thing: the order to retreat. How should we have understood it? We belonged to the army group Hausen, south of Chalons-sur-Marne, streaming on to Paris, as the von Kluck group were doing at other points. We were ignorant that somewhere, after a five-day battle, the French had crushed von Billow’s right wing-reason enough for the anxious cautiousness of a supreme commander who had been elevated to his rank on account of his uncle, to order a general withdrawal. We passed some of the villages that we had left smoking in our rear, and the hill where the tragic woman had stood. She was not there.
The wings were trustless. It should not have been. It had not been a war to be won in one swift onslaught. But as little as those at home did we understand what that meant. We did not understand the frantic jubilation of the world over the result of the battle of the Marne; over the fact that the short war on which our salvation hung had turned into a long one, which we could not stand. Our defeat was now only a matter of time, and of cost to the foe. We could have laid our weapons down and forced our leaders to an immediate peace, if only we had understood. But even among them probably only one here and there dared to think of it. After all, they had scarcely realized that the age of localized war had gone by and that every campaign to which we felt ourselves driven must end in a world conflagration. In such a one the advantage of the inner line, the fanatical devotion of the troops, the high state of preparedness, and a firmly based, strong authoritarian state had held out the chance of a lightning triumph. If this failed—and it stood written that it must fail—then, whatever we might still for years accomplish, we were lost in principle and before we began: this time, next time, always.
We did not know. Slowly the truth tortured its way into us; while the war, a rotting, decaying, misery-creating war, though from time to time flaring up in flattering, deceiving successes, this war, of which I too had said it must not last long, lasted four years. Shall I here and now go into details of that long-drawn-out giving way and giving up, the wearing out of our powers and our equipment, the shabbiness and shortages of life, the undernourishment, the loss of morale from the deprivations, the lapses into dishonesty and the gross luxury of the profiteer? I might well be censured for recklessly overstepping the limits of my purpose, which is personal and biographical. I lived through it all from the beginning to the bitter end in the hinterland, as a man on furlough and at length mustered out, given back to his teaching profession at Freising. For before Arras, during the second period of struggle for that fortified place, which lasted from the beginning of May until far on in July of 1915, the delousing measures were obviously inadequate; an infection took me for weeks to the isolation barracks, then for another month to a convalescent home for the sick and wounded in Taunus. At last I no longer resisted the idea that I had fufilled my duty to my fatherland and would do better to serve in my old place the cause of education.
That I did, and might once more be husband and father in the frugal home, whose walls and their too familiar contents, spared perhaps for destruction by future bombing, today still form the frame of my retired and impoverished life. It should be said once more, certainly not in any boastful sense, but as a mere statement, that I led my own life, without precisely neglecting it, only as it were as an aside, with half my attention, with my left hand; that my real concern and anxiety were centered upon the existence or my childhood friend, to be back in whose nearness made me so rejoice—if the word I use can describe the slight chill, the shiver of dread, the painful lack of response which were my portion from him in the increasingly productive isolation of his life. “To have an eye on him,” to watch over his extraordinary and puzzling course, always seemed to mine its real and pressing task. It made up its true content, and thus it is I speak of the emptiness of my present days.
The place he had elected as his home—“home” in that sense I have spoken of, assimilative and not altogether acceptable—was a relatively fortunate choice. During the years of approaching defeat and ever more gnawing stringency, he was, thank God, on the Schweigestill farm as tolerably cared for as one could wish, without knowledge or appreciation of the state of things, almost unaffected by the slowly corroding changes under which our blockaded and invested country suffered, even while militarily still on the offensive. He took everything as a matter of course, without any words, as something that proceeded from him and lay in his nature, whose power of inertia and fixation on the semper idem persisted in the face of outward circumstance. His simple dietary needs the Schweigestill household could always satisfy. More than that, and soon after my return from the field, he came under the care of two females who had approached him quite independently of each other and appointed themselves his devotees. These were the damsels Meta Nackedey and Kunigunde Rosenstiel: one a piano-teacher, the other an active partner in a factory for the production of sausages-cases. It is certainly remarkable: a budding reputation such as had begun to attach itself to Leverkühn’s name is unknown to the general, having its seat in the initiate sphere, on the heights of connoisseurship; from those heights the invitation to Paris had come. But at the same time it may also be reflected in humbler, lowlier regions, in the needy souls of poor creatures who stand out from the masses through some sensibility of loneliness and suffering dressed up as “higher aspirations”; and these may find their happiness in a worship still fittingly paid to the rarest values. That it is women, and unmarried ones, need not surprise us; for human resignation is certainly the source of a prophetic intuition, which is not the less estimable because its origins are humble. There was not the least question that the immediately personal here played a considerable role; indeed, it predominated over the intellectual values; which even so, in both cases, could only be grasped and estimated in vague outline, as a matter of feeling and intuition. I myself, speaking as one who early submitted his own head and heart to the phenomenon of Adrian’s cool and bafflingly self-contained ex
istence, have I the smallest right to mock at the fascination which his aloneness, the nonconformity of his life, exerted upon these women? The Nackedey was a scurrying, deprecating creature, some thirty years old, forever dissolving in blushes and modesty, who speaking or listening blinked spasmodically and appealingly behind the pince-nez she wore, nodding her head and wrinkling up her nose. She, one day, when Adrian was in the city, had found herself beside him on the front platform of a tram, and when she discovered it, had rushed in headless flight through the crowd to the rear platform. Then, having collected herself for a few minutes, she had gone back, to speak to him by name, to tell him, blushing and paling by turns, her own, to add something of her circumstances and to say that she held his music sacred—to all which he had listened and then thanked her. Upon this followed their acquaintance, which Meta had certainly not brought about in order to let it drop. She paid a visit of homage to Pfeiffering, with a bouquet; and cultivated it from then on, in free competition with the Rosenstiel, both sides spurred on by jealousy. The Rosenstiel had begun it differently.
She was a raw-boned Jewess, of about the same age as Nackedey, with thick, unmanageable woolly hair and brown eyes where timeless grief stood written for the daughter of Zion despoiled and her people as a forsaken hearth. A capable business woman in a not very refined line (for the manufacture of sausage-cases has something gross about it, certainly), she had the elegiac habit of beginning all her sentences with “ah.” Ah, yes! Ah, no! Ah, believe me! Ah, why not? Ah, I will go to Nuremburg tomorrow: she would say these things in a deep, harsh, desolate, complaining voice, and even when asked How are you? she would reply: “Ah, very well.” But it was not the same when she wrote, which she uncommonly liked to do. For not only was Kunigunde, as almost all Jews are, very musical, but also she had, though without any extensive reading, much purer and more fastidious relations with the German language than the national average, yes, than most of the learned. She had set in train the acquaintance with Adrian, which of her own motion she always called a friendship (indeed, in time it did become something like that), with an excellent letter, a long, well-turned protestation of devotion, in content not really extraordinary, but stylistically formed on the best models of an older, humanistic Germany. The recipient read it with a certain surprise, and on account of its literary quality it could not possibly be passed over in silence. She kept on writing to him at Pfeiffering, quite aside from her frequent visits: explicitly, not very objectively, in matter not further exciting, but in language very meticulous, clear and readable; not hand-written, moreover, but done on her business typewriter, with an ampersand for “and,” expressing a reverence which more nearly to define or justify she was either too shy or else incapable. It was just reverence, an instinctive reverence and devotion preserved loyally throughout many years; you simply had to respect such a capital person, quite aside from any other capacities she might have. I at least did so, and took pains to pay the same silent respect to the elusive Nackedey; whereas Adrian simply accepted the tributes and devotion of these followers of his with the utter heedlessness of his nature. And was my lot then so different from theirs? I can count it to my credit that I took pains to be benevolent towards them, while they, quite primitively, could not endure each other and when they met measured each other with narrowed eyes. In a certain sense I was of their guild and might have been justified in feeling irritation over this reduced and spinsterish reproduction of my own relation to Adrian.
