by Thomas Mann
The last number was the overture to the Meistersinger, played with breadth and elan. The crashing applause, loud enough anyhow, rose still higher as Ferdinand Edschmidt motioned to the orchestra to stand up, and put out his hand gratefully to his Konzertmeister. By then I was already in the aisle, intent on my overcoat, which was handed out before there was a crowd round the garde-robe. I intended to walk for at least a part of my way home; that is, to my stop in Schwabing. But in front of the building I met a gentleman of the Kridwiss group, the Diirer expert, Professor Gilgen Holzschuher, who had also been at the concert. He involved me in a conversation which began with a criticism of the evening’s program: this combination of Berlioz and Wagner, of foreign virtuosity and German mastery, was tasteless, and also it only ill concealed a political tendency. All too much it looked like pacifism and German-French rapprochement; this Edschmidt was known to be a republican and nationally unreliable. The thought had spoilt his whole evening. Unfortunately, everything today was politics, there was no longer any intellectual clarity. To restore it we must above all have at the head of our great orchestras men of unquestionably German views.
I did not tell him that it was he himself who was making politics of everything, and that the word “German” is today by no means synonymous with intellectual clarity, being, as it is, a party cry. I only suggested that a great deal of virtuosity, foreign or not, was after all a component of Wagner’s internationally so well-tolerated art—and then charitably distracted his mind by speaking of an article on problems of proportion in Gothic architecture, which he had recently written for the periodical Art and Artists. The politenesses I expressed about it rendered him quite happy, pliable and unpolitical; I utilized this bettered mood to bid him goodbye and turn right as he turned left in front of the hall.
I went by way of the upper Turkenstrasse, reached the Ludwigstrasse, and walked along the silent Monumental-Chaussce (asphalted now, years ago), on the left side, in the direction of the Siegestor. The evening was cloudy and very mild, and my overcoat began to feel oppressive, so I stopped at the Theresienstrasse halt to pick up a tram to Schwabing. I don’t know why it took so long for one to come, but there are always many blocks in the traffic. At last number ten appeared, quite conveniently for me; I can still see and hear it approaching from the Feldherrnhalle. These Munich trams, painted in the Bavarian light-blue, are heavily built and either for that reason or some characteristic of the subsoil make considerable noise. Electric sparks flashed under the wheels of the vehicle and even more on top of the contact with the pole, where they sent out hissing showers of cold flame.
The car stopped, I got on in front and went inside. Close to the sliding door was an empty seat, obviously just vacated. The tram was full, two gentlemen stood clinging to straps at the rear door. Most of the passengers were home-goers from the concert. Among them, in the middle of the opposite bench, sat Schwerdtfeger, with his violin-case between his knees. Under his overcoat he wore a white cache-nez over his dress tie, but as usual was bareheaded. Of course he had seen me come in, but he avoided my eye. He looked young and charming, with his unruly waving blond locks, his colour heightened by his recent honourable exertions; by contrast the blue eyes seemed a little swollen. But even that became him, as did the curling lips that could whistle in so masterly a fashion. I am not a quick observer, only by degrees was I aware of other people I knew. I exchanged a greeting with Dr. Kranich, who sat on Schwerdtfeger’s side of the tram, at some distance from him, near the rear door. Bending forward by chance, I was aware to my surprise of Inez Institoris, on the same bench with myself, several seats away, towards the middle of the tram, diagonally opposite to Rudi Schwerdtfeger. I say to my surprise, for certainly this was not her way home. But a few seats farther on I saw her friend Frau Binder-Majurescu, who lived far out in Schwabing, beyond the “Grossen Wirt,” so I assumed that Inez was going to drink tea with her.
But now I could see why Schwerdtfeger kept his head mostly turned to the right so that I saw only his rather too blunt profile. I was not the only person he wanted to ignore: the man whom he must regard as Adrian’s alter ego. I reproached him mentally: why did he have to take just this particular tram? It was probably an unjust reproach, for he had not necessarily got in at the same time with Inez. She might have got in later, as I had, or if it had been the other way he could hardly have rushed out again at sight of her.
We were passing the university, and the conductor, in his felt boots, was standing in front of me to take my ten pfennige and give me my ticket, when the incredible thing happened—at first, like everything entirely unexpected, quite incomprehensible. There was a burst of shooting: sharp, abrupt, shattering detonations, one after the other, three, four, five, with furious, deafening rapidity. Over there Schwerdtfeger, his violin-case still in his hands, sank first against the shoulder and then into the lap of the lady next to him on his right, who for her part, the one on his left as well, leaned away from him in horror, while a general commotion ensued in the vehicle, more like flight and shrieking panic than any activity showing presence of mind. Out in front the driver, God knows why, kept up a ceaseless clamour like mad on the bell, perhaps to summon the police. Of course there were none within hearing. There was an almost dangerous surging to and fro inside the tram, which had come to a stop. Many passengers were pushing to get out, while others, curious or anxious to do something, squeezed in from the platforms. The two gentlemen who had been standing in the gangway had like me flung themselves on Inez—of course far too late. We did not need to “wrest” the revolver from her, she had let it fall, or rather cast it from her in the direction of her victim. Her face was white as paper, with sharply defined, bright-red spots on the cheekbones. She had her eyes shut and an insane smile was on her pursed-up mouth.
They held her by the arms, and I rushed over to Rudolf, who had been stretched out on the now empty bench. On the other side, bleeding, in a fainting-fit, lay the lady upon whom he had fallen. She had received a glancing wound in the arm, which turned out not to be serious.
Several people were standing by Rudolf, among them Dr. Kranich, holding his hand.
“What a horrible, senseless, irrational deed!” said he, pale in the face, but in his clear, scholarly, well-articulated, short-winded way of speaking. He said “hor-r-r-ible,” as actors often pronounce it. He added that he had never more regretted not being a doctor instead of only a numismatist; and actually at that moment the knowledge of coins did seem to me the most futile of the branches of science, more futile even than philology, a position by no means easy to sustain. In fact there was no doctor present, not among all those concert-goers, though doctors are usually music-lovers, so many of them being Jews. I bent over Rudolf. He gave signs of life, but was frightfully injured. There was a bleeding wound under one eye. Other bullets had, it turned out, gone into the throat, the lungs, and the coronary arteries. He lifted his head and tried to say something; but bubbles of blood welled out between his lips, whose gentle fullness seemed all at once so touching to me; his eyes rolled and his head fell back with a thud on the bench.
I cannot express the mournful pity which almost overcame me. I felt that in a way I had always loved him and I must confess that my sympathy for him was far stronger than for her, the unhappy creature who by suffering and by pain-deadening, demoralizing vice had been worked up to the revolting deed. I made myself known as a close friend of both parties and advised that the wounded man be carried over into the university, where the janitor could telephone for the police and an ambulance, and where, to my knowledge, there was a small first-aid station. I arranged that they should bring the author of the crime thither as well.
All this was done. A studious, spectacled young man had with my help lifted poor Rudolf from the tram, behind which, by now, two or three more had come to a stop. Out of one of these hurried up a doctor with an instrument-case and directed, rather superfluously, the work of carrying Rudolf in. A reporter came too, asking questions. The memory s
till tortures me of the trouble we had to rouse the janitor from his basement quarters. The doctor, a youngish man, who introduced himself to everybody, tried to administer first aid to the now unconscious victim after we had laid him on a sofa. The ambulance came with surprising quickness. Rudolf died, as the doctor after examination indicated to me was unfortunately probable, on the way to the hospital.
As for me I attached myself to the later arriving police and their now convulsively sobbing charge, to make known her connections and bespeak her admission into the psychiatric clinic. But this, for the present night, was not permitted.
It struck midnight from the church when I left the office and, looking about for an auto, set out to perform the painful duty that still remained to me. I felt bound to go to Prinzregentenstrasse, to inform the little husband, as gently as might be, of what had happened. I got a chance of a car just when it was no longer worth while. I found the house-door barred, but the light went on when I rang and Institoris himself came down—to find me instead of his wife at the door. He had a way of snapping his mouth open for air and drawing his lower lip across his teeth.
“Oh, what is it?” he said. “It is you? How is she coming?… Has something—?”
I said almost nothing on the stairs. Above in the living-room, where I had heard Inez’s distressing confessions, I told him, after a few words of preparation, what had happened and what I had been witness to. He had been standing, and after I had done he sat down suddenly in one of the basket-chairs. But after that he displayed the self-control of a man who has lived a long time in an oppressive and threatening atmosphere.
“So then,” said he, “it came like that.” And it was clear that his dread had concerned chiefly the manner in which the inevitable tragedy would be consummated.
“I will go to her,” he declared, and stood up again. “I hope they will let me speak to her there” (he meant in the police cells).
I could not give him much hope for tonight. But he said in a shaken voice that he thought it was his duty to try; flung on his coat and hastened off.
Alone in the room, with Inez’s bust, distinguished and sinister, looking down from its pedestal, my thoughts went thither where it will be believed they had in the last hour often and constantly gone. One more painful announcement it seemed to me had to be made. But a strange rigidity that seized on my limbs and even the muscles of my face prevented me from lifting the receiver and asking to be connected with Pfeiffering. No, that is not quite true, I did lift it, I held it dangling in my hand and heard the muffled voice, as from the depths of the sea, of the Fraulein at the other end. But a realization born of my already morbid exhaustion that I was about to disturb quite uselessly the nocturnal peace of the Schweigestill household, that it was not necessary to tell Adrian now, that I should only in a way be making myself ridiculous, checked my intention and I put the receiver down.
CHAPTER XLIII
My tale is hastening to its end—like all else today. Everything rushes and presses on, the world stands in the sign of the end—at least it does for us Germans. Our “thousand-year” history, refuted, reduced ad absurdum, weighed in the balance and found unblest, turns out to be a road leading nowhere, or rather into despair, an unexampled bankruptcy, a descensus Averno lighted by the dance of roaring flames. If it be true, as we say in Germany, that every way to the right goal must also be right in each of its parts, then it will be agreed that the way that led to this sinful issue—I use the word in its strictest, most religious sense—was everywhere wrong and fatal, at every single one of its turns, however bitter it may be for love to consent to such logic. To recognize because we must our infamy is not the same thing as to deny our love. I, a simple German man and scholar, have loved much that is German. My life, insignificant but capable of fascination and devotion, has been dedicated to my love for a great German man and artist. It was always a love full of fear and dread, yet eternally faithful to this German whose inscrutable guiltiness and awful end had no power to affect my feeling for him—such love it may be as is only a reflection of the everlasting mercy.
Awaiting the final collapse, beyond which the mind refuses its office, I have withdrawn within my Freising hermitage and shun the sight of our horribly punished Munich: the fallen statues, the gaping eyeholes in the facades, which both disguise the yawning void behind them and advertise it by the growing piles of rubble on the pavements. My heart contracts in pity for the reckless folly of my own sons, who, like the masses of the people, trusted, exulted, struggled, and sacrificed and now long since are reduced, with millions of their like, to staring at the bitter fruit of disillusion as it mellows into decay and final utter despair. To me, who could not believe in their belief or share their hopes, they will be brought no nearer by the present agony of their souls. They will still lay it to my charge—as though things would have turned out differently had I dreamed with them their insane dream. God help them! I am alone with my old Helene, who cares for my physical part, and to whom sometimes I read aloud from my pages such portions as suit her simplicity. In the midst of ruin all my thoughts are addressed to the completion of this work.
The Apocalypsis cum figuris, that great and piercing prophecy of the end, was performed at Frankfurt on the Main in February 1926, about a year after the frightful events that I chronicled in my last chapter. It may have been due in part to the disheartenment they left in their wake that Adrian could not bring himself to break through his usual retirement and be present at the performance, a highly sensational event, also one accompanied by much malicious abuse and shallow ridicule. He never heard the work, one of the two chief monuments of his proud and austere life; but after all he used to say about “hearing” I do not feel entitled to lament the fact. Besides myself, who took care to be free for the occasion, from our circle of acquaintances there was present only our dear Jeanette Scheurl, who despite her narrow means made the journey to Frankfurt and reported on the performance to her friend at Pfeiffering, in her very individual mixed French and Bavarian dialect. Adrian especially prized this peasant-aristocrat, her presence had a beneficial and soothing effect on him, like a sort of guardian spirit. Actually I have seen him sitting hand in hand with her in a corner of the Abbot’s room, silent and as it were in safe-keeping. This hand-in-hand was not like him, it was a change which I saw with emotion, even with pleasure, but yet not quite without anxiety.
More than ever too, at that time, he liked to have Rüdiger Schildknapp with him. True, the like-eyed one was chary as ever of his presence, but when our shabby gentleman did appear he was ready for one of those long walks across country which Adrian loved, especially when he was unable to work; for Rüdiger seasoned his idleness with bitter and grotesque humour. Poor as a church-mouse, he had at that time much trouble with his neglected and decayed teeth and talked about nothing but dishonest dentists who pretended to treat him out of friendship but then suddenly presented impossible bills. He railed about conditions of payment, which he had neglected to observe, and then had been compelled to find another man, well knowing that he never could or would satisfy him—and more of the same. They had tortured him by pressing a considerable bridge on roots which had been left in and shortly began to loosen under the weight, so that the grisly prospect, the removal of the artificial structure, was imminent, and the consequence would be more bills which he could not pay. “It is all going to pieces,” he announced in hollow tones; but had no objection when Adrian laughed till he cried at all this misery. Indeed it seemed Rüdiger could look down on it himself and bent double with schoolboy laughter.
This gallows humour of his made his company just the right thing for our recluse. I am unfortunately without talent in that line, but I did what I could to encourage the mostly recalcitrant Rüdiger to visit Pfeiffering. Adrian’s life during this whole year was idle and void. He fell victim to a dearth of ideas, his mental stagnation tormented, depressed, and alarmed him, as his letters showed; indeed he put forward his condition as the chief ground for his r
efusal to go to Frankfurt. It was impossible for him to think about things he had already done while in a state of incapacity to do better. The past was only tolerable if one felt above it, instead of having to stare stupidly at it aware of one’s present impotence. Fallow and hollow, he called his state: a dog’s life, a vie vegetale, without past or future, root or fruit, an idyll too idle for words. The one saving grace was that he could rail at it. Actually he could pray for a war, a revolution, any external convulsion just to shock him out of his torpor. Of composition he had literally not the smallest conception, not the faintest memory of how it was done; he confidently believed that he would never write another note. “May hell have pity on me!”
“Pray for my poor soul!” such expressions repeated themselves in the letters. They filled me with gloom, yet on the other hand could even. raise my spirits, as I reflected that after all only the youthful playmate and nobody else in the world could be the recipient of such confidences.
In my replies I tried to console him by pointing out how hard it is for human beings to think beyond their immediate situation. It is a matter of feeling and not of reason: prone to consider the present their abiding lot, they are incapable, so to speak, of seeing round the corner—and that probably applies more to bad situations than to good ones. Adrian’s low morale was easily explainable by the cruel disappointments he had lately suffered. And I was weak and “poetical” enough to compare the fallow ground of his mind with the “winter-resting earth,” in whose womb life, preparing new shoots, worked secretly on. I felt myself that the image was inapplicable to the extremes of Adrian’s nature, his swing between penitential paralysis and compensating creative release. The stagnation of his impulse to create was accompanied though not caused by a new low-water mark in his physical state: severe attacks of migraine confined him to darkness; catarrh of the stomach, bronchial tubes, and throat attacked him by turns, particularly during the winter of 1926, and would of itself have been enough to prevent the trip to Frankfurt. It did in fact prevent another journey which humanly speaking was still more immediate and urgent, but categorically forbidden by his doctor.
