by Thomas Mann
With the others in the room, aside from Frau Schweigestill, who was moving to and fro, was the woolly-haired Kunigunde Rosenstiel. On a visit she had been allowed to make she had learned to know the little lad and treasured him passionately in her melancholy heart. She had at that time, on her typewriter with the ampersand and on the letter-paper of her inelegant firm, written a long letter to Adrian in model German describing her feelings. Now, driving Meta Nackedey from the field, she had succeeded in relieving the Schweigestills and then Ursel Schneidewein in the care of the child; changed his ice-bag, rubbed him with spirit, tried to give him food and medicine, and at night unwillingly and seldom yielded to another her place by his bed.
The Schweigestills, Adrian, his family, Kunigunde, and I ate an almost silent meal in the Nikesaal together, one of the women rising very often to look to the patient. On Sunday morning I should have, hard as it was, to leave Pf eiff ering. I still had a whole stack of Latin unseens to correct for Monday. I parted from Adrian with soothing hopes on my lips, and the way he left me was better than the way he had received me the day before. With a sort of smile he spoke, in English, the words*
” ‘Then to the elements. Be free, and fare thou well!’ “
He turned quickly away.
Nepomuk Schneidewein, Echo, the child, Adrian’s last love, fell on sleep twelve hours later. His parents took the little coffin with them, back to their home.
CHAPTER XLVI
For nearly four weeks now I have entered nothing in these records; deterred in the first place by a sort of mental exhaustion caused by reliving the scenes described in the last chapter, and secondly by the events of today, now rushing headlong on each other’s heels. Foreseen as a logical sequence, and in a way longed for, they now after all excite an incredulous horror. Our unhappy nation, undermined by fear and dread, incapable of understanding, in dazed fatalism lets them pass over its head, and my spirit too, worn with old sorrow, weary with old wrong, is helplessly exposed to them as well.
Since the end of March—it is now the 25th of April in this year of destiny 1945—our resistance in the west has been visibly disintegrating. The papers, already half-unmuzzled, register the truth. Rumour, fed by enemy announcements on the radio and stories told by fugitives, knows no censorship, but carries the individual details of swiftly spreading catastrophe about the land, into regions not yet swallowed, not yet liberated by it, and even hither into my retreat. No hold any more: everybody surrenders, everybody runs away. Our shattered, battered cities fall like ripe plums. Darmstadt, Wurzburg, Frankfurt are gone; Mannheim and Cassell, even Miinster and Leipzig are in foreign hands. One day the English reached Bremen, the Americans were at the gates of Upper Franconia; Nuremberg, city of the national celebrations so uplifting to unenlightened hearts, Nuremberg surrendered. The great ones of the regime, who wallowed in power, riches, and wrong, now rage and kill themselves: justice is done.
Russian corps after taking Konigsberg and Vienna were free to force the Oder; they moved a million strong against the capital, lying in its rubble, already abandoned by all the government officials. Russian troops carried out with their heavy artillery the sentence long since inflicted from the air. They are now approaching the centre of Berlin. Last year the horrible man escaped with his life—by now surely only an insanely flaring and flickering existence—from the plot of desperate patriots trying to salvage the future of Germany and the last remnant of her material goods. Now he has commanded his soldiery to drown in a sea of blood the attack on Berlin and to shoot every officer who speaks of surrender. And the order has been in considerable measure obeyed. At the same time strange radio messages in German, no longer quite sane, rove the upper air; some of them commend the population to the benevolence of the conquerors, even including the secret police, who they say have been much slandered. Others are transmitted by a “freedom movement” christened Werwolf: a band of raving-mad lads who hide in the woods and break out nightly; they have already deserved well of the Fatherland by many a gallant murder of the invaders. The fantastic mingles with the horrible: up to the very end the crudely legendary, the grim deposit of saga in the soul of the nation, is invoked, with all its familiar echoes and reverberations.
A transatlantic general has forced the population of Weimar to file past the crematories of the neighbouring concentration-camp. He declared that these citizens—who had gone in apparent righteousness about their daily concerns and sought to know nothing, although the wind brought to their noses the stench of burning human flesh—he declared that they too were guilty of the abominations on which he forced them now to turn their eyes. Was that unjust? Let them look, I look with them. In spirit I let myself be shouldered in their dazed or shuddering ranks. Germany had become a thick-walled underground torture-chamber, converted into one by a profligate dictatorship vowed to nihilism from its beginnings on. Now the torture-chamber has been broken open, open lies our shame before the eyes of the world. Foreign commissions inspect those incredible photographs everywhere displayed, and tell their countrymen that what they have seen surpasses in horribleness anything the human imagination can conceive. I say our shame. For is it mere hypochondria to say to oneself that everything German, even the German mind and spirit, German thought, the German Word, is involved in this scandalous exposure and made subject to the same distrust? Is the sense of guilt quite morbid which makes one ask oneself the question how Germany, whatever her future manifestations, can ever presume to open her mouth in human affairs?
Let us call them the sinister possibilities of human nature in general that here come to light. German human beings, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of them it is, who have perpetrated what humanity shudders at; and all that is German now stands forth as an abomination and a warning. How will it be to belong to a land whose history witnesses this hideous default; a land self-maddened, psychologically burnt-out, which quite understandably despairs of governing itself and thinks it for the best that it become a colony of foreign powers; a nation that will have to live shut in like the ghetto Jews, because a frightfully swollen hatred round all its borders will not permit it to emerge; a nation that cannot show its face outside?
Curses, curses on the corrupters of an originally decent species of human being, law-abiding, only too docile, only all too willingly living on theory, who thus went to school to Evil! How good it is to curse—or rather how good it would be, if only the cursing came from a free and unobstructed heart! We are present at the last gasp of a blood state which, as Luther put it, “took on its shoulders” immeasurable crimes; which roared and bellowed to the ravished and reeling masses proclamations cancelling all human rights; which set up its gaudy banners for youth to march under, and they marched, with proud tread and flashing eyes, in pure and ardent faith. But a patriotism which would assert that a blood state like that was so forced, so foreign to our national character that it could not take root among us: such a patriotism would seem to me more high-minded than realistic. For was this government, in word and deed, anything but the distorted, vulgarized, besmirched symbol of a state of mind, a notion of world affairs which we must recognize as both genuine and characteristic? Indeed, must not the Christian and humane man shrink as he sees it stamped upon the features of our greatest, the mightiest embodiments of our essential Germanness? I ask—and should I not? Ah, it is no longer in question that this beaten people now standing wild-eyed in face of the void stand there just because they have failed, failed horribly in their last and uttermost attempt to find the political form suited to their particular needs.
* * *
Yet how strangely the times, these very times in which I write, are linked with the period that forms the frame of this biography! For the last years of my hero’s rational existence, the two years 1929 and 1930, after the shipwreck of his marriage plans, the loss of his friend, the snatching away of the marvellous child—those years were part and parcel of the mounting and spreading harms which then overwhelmed the country and now are bei
ng blotted out in blood and flames.
And for Adrian Leverkühn they were years of immense and highly stimulated, one is tempted to say monstrous creative activity, which made even the sympathetic onlooker giddy. One could not help feeling that it was by way of being a compensation and atonement for the loss of human happiness and mutual love which had befallen him. I spoke of two years, but that is incorrect, since only a part of each, the second half of one and some months of the other, sufficed to produce the whole composition, his last and in a somewhat historical sense his utmost work: the symphonic cantata The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus, the plan of which, as I have already explained, goes back to before the advent of little Nepomuk Schneidewein in Pfeiffering. To it I will now devote my poor powers.
But first I must not fail to shed some light upon the personal condition of its creator, a man now forty-four years old; to speak of his appearance and way of life as they then seemed to my always anxious and observant eye. What I should first set down is the fact—I have mentioned it earlier in these pages—that his looks, which, so long as he was smooth-shaven, had shown such a likeness to his mother, had of late considerably altered. The change was due to a dark growth of beard, mixed with grey, a sort of chin-beard, with the addition of a drooping little strip of moustache. Though much heavier on the chin, it did not leave the cheeks free; but even on the chin it was heavier at the sides than in the middle, and thus was not like an imperial. One bore with the unfamiliarity resulting from the partial covering of the features, because it was this beard—and perhaps a growing tendency he had to carry his head on one side—that gave his countenance something spiritualized and suffering, even Christlike. I could not help loving this expression, and felt that my sympathy with it was justified in that obviously it did not indicate weakness but went with an almost excessive energy and an unexceptionable state of health, which my friend could not enough celebrate. He dwelt on it in the somewhat retarded, sometimes hesitant, sometimes slightly monotonous manner of speech which I had lately noted in him and which I liked to explain as a sign of productive absorption, of self-control and poise in the midst of a distracting whirl of ideas. The irksome physical conditions that had victimized him so long, the catarrh or the stomach, the throat trouble, the tormenting attacks of headache were all gone, his day was his own, and freedom to work in it. He himself declared his health to be perfect, magnificent; and one could read in his eyes the creative energy with which he daily arose to his task. It filled me with pride, yet again it made me fearful of relapses. His eyes, in his former state half overhung by the drooping lids, were now almost exaggeratedly wide open, and above the iris one saw a strip of white. That might perhaps alarm me, the more because there was about the widened gaze a fixity—or shall I say it was a stare?—the nature of which I puzzled over until it occurred to me that it depended on the unvarying size of the not quite round, rather irregularly lengthened pupils, as though they remained unaffected by any alteration in the lighting.
I am talking about a rigidness to some extent internal, one needed to be a very much concerned observer to perceive it. There was another, more obvious and striking manifestation of an opposite kind, noticed by our dear Joanette Scheurl, who mentioned it to me after a visit. She need not have, of course. This was the recent habit, for instance when he was thinking, of moving his eyeballs rapidly to and fro rather far, from one side to the other, rolling them, as we say. Some people might be startled by it. If I myself found it easy—and it seems to me I did find it so—to lay such habits, eccentric enough if you like, to the enormous strain he was under; yet privately I was relieved to think that except for myself scarcely anyone saw him, and that precisely because I feared outsiders might be alarmed. In practice, any sort of social intercourse with the city was now excluded. Invitations were declined by the faithful landlady on the telephone, or even remained unanswered. Short trips on errands were given up, the last one having been made to buy toys for the dead child. Clothes that had been worn to evening parties and on public occasions hung unused in his wardrobe, his dress was the simplest everyday. Not a dressing-gown, for he never used one, even in the mornings, only when he got up in the night and sat an hour or two in his chair. But a loose coat like a pea-jacket, closed to the throat so that he needed no tie, worn with some odd pair of checked trousers, loose and unpressed: such was at this time his habitual garb. He wore it out of doors too, for the regular, indispensable long walks he took to get the air into his lungs. One might have spoken of an unkemptness in his appearance if his natural distinction had not, on intellectual grounds, belied the statement.
For whom, indeed, should he have taken pains? He saw Jeanette Scheurl, with whom he went through certain seventeenth-century music she had brought with her (I remember a chaconne of Jacopo Melani which literally anticipates a passage in Tristan). From time to time he saw Rüdiger Schildknapp, the like-eyed, with whom he laughed. I could not refrain from thinking desolately that only the like eyes were left, the black and the blue ones having disappeared… He saw, lastly, me, when I went to spend the week-end. And that was all. Moreover, there were few hours in which he could wish for society, for not excepting Sunday (which he had never “kept holy”) he worked eight hours a day, with an intermission for an afternoon rest in a darkened room. So that on my visits to Pfeiffering I was left very much to myself. As though I regretted it! I was near him, near the source of the beloved work, beloved through all my sufferings and shudderings. For a decade and a half now it has been a buried, forbidden treasure, whose resurrection may come about through the destructive liberation we now endure. There were years in which we children of the dungeon dreamed of a hymn of exultation, a Fidelio, a Ninth Symphony, to celebrate the dawn of a freed Germany-freed by herself. Now only this can avail us, only this will be sung from our very souls: the Lamentation of the son of hell, the lament of men and Cod, issuing from the subjective, but always broadening out and as it were laying hold on the Cosmos; the most frightful lament ever set up on this earth.
Woe, woe! A De Profundis, which in my zeal and love I am bound to call matchless. Yet has it not—from the point of view of creative art and musical history as well as that of individual fulfilment—a jubilant, a highly triumphant bearing upon this awe-inspiring faculty of compensation and redress? Does it not mean the “breakthrough,” of which we so often talked when we were considering the destiny of art, its state and hour? We spoke of it as a problem, a paradoxical possibility: the recovery, I would not say the reconstitution—and yet for the sake of exactness I will say it—of expressivism, of the highest and profoundest claim of feeling to a stage of intellectuality and formal strictness, which must be arrived at in order that we may experience a reversal of this calculated coldness and its conversion into a voice expressive of the soul and a warmth and sincerity of creature confidence. Is that not the “breakthrough”?
I put in the form of a question what is nothing more than the description of a condition that has its explanation in the thing itself as well as in its artistic and formal aspect. The Lamentation, that is—and what we have here is an abiding, inexhaustibly accentuated lament of the most painfully Ecce-homo kind—the Lamentation is expression itself; one may state boldly that all expressivism is really lament; just as music, so soon as it is conscious of itself as expression at the beginning of its modern history, becomes lament and “lasciatemi morire” the lament of Ariadne, to the softly echoing plaintive song of nymphs. It does not lack significance that the Faust cantata is stylistically so strongly and unmistakably linked with the seventeenth century and Monteverdi, whose music—again not without significance—favoured the echo-effect, sometimes to the point of being a mannerism. The echo, the giving back of the human voice as nature-sound, and the revelation of it as nature-sound, is essentially a lament: Nature’s melancholy “Alas!” in view of man, her effort to utter his solitary state. Conversely, the lament of the nymphs on its side is related to the echo. In Leverkühn’s last and loftiest creation, echo, favourite de
vice of the baroque, is employed with unspeakably mournful effect.
A lament of such gigantic dimensions is, I say, of necessity an expressive work, a work of expression, and therewith it is a work of liberation; just as the earlier music, to which it links itself across the centuries, sought to be a liberation of expression. Only that the dialectic process-by which, at the stage of development that this work occupies, is consummated by the change from the strictest constraint to the free language of feeling, the birth of freedom from bondage—the dialectic process appears as endlessly more complicated in its logic, endlessly more miraculous and amazing than at the time of the madrigaksts. Here I will remind the reader of a conversation I had with Adrian on a long-ago day, the day of his sister’s wedding at Buchel, as we walked round the Cow Trough. He developed for me—under pressure of a headache—his idea of the “strict style,” derived from the way in which, as in the lied “O lieb Madel, wie schlecht bist du” melody and harmony are determined by the permutation of a fundamental five-note motif, the symbolic letters h, e, a, e, e-flat. He showed me the “magic square” of a style of technique which yet developed the extreme of variety out of identical material and in which there is no longer anything unthematic, anything that could not prove itself to be a variation of an ever constant element. This style, this technique, he said, admitted no note, not one, which did not fulfil its thematic function in the whole structure—there was no longer any free note.
