Soul of the Age (49 page)

It's a pity that you couldn't accept Knecht's
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sacrificial death. Do you think his story would be more valuable if it had lasted another ten or twenty years? The call that draws him away from Castalia and into the world is a call from his conscience, but it's also a call from death. And how great for him, to have encountered such a short, beautiful death so soon after his breakthrough.[ … ]

TO FELIX LÜTZKENDORF

May 1950

Your letter has been lying around here unanswered for over a month. It would be easy to find some excuse for this delay, but I feel I should respond with something other than a polite formality. Twenty or twenty-five years ago, you wrote a dissertation about me, the best one at that time, in which you paid particular attention to the origins and affiliations of my religious and Asian concerns. Your grasp of the issues was well above average, and when the stormy period beginning in 1933 was over, you often contacted me; we exchanged letters, and I, like an old child, was still living under the blithe illusion that you understood me and took me seriously.

Your letter partly destroyed this illusion, and moreover—I'm just realizing this right now—also created the inner resistance that made it so difficult for me to respond.

You wanted my permission to film one of my books. I was disappointed by the way you responded when I had to say no.

You write that I'm “utterly unwilling to get involved in any way in such a diabolic activity as film,” as if I were some old pastor or ascetic type who is convinced that the film would jeopardize “the morality of the people.”

By now you may have had second thoughts about this, but I would nevertheless like to correct your rather naïve understanding of my ideas about film.

I do not regard film as a “diabolic activity,” and have no objection to its competing against literature and books. I admire and treasure certain films that reflect a high level of artistic taste and are imbued with worthwhile convictions. And I have no qualms when I see productive, talented people with a literary background, such as yourself, turning to film. Indeed, I think film can create opportunities for strong talents and allow them to be truly creative, and thus ensure they don't end up in some other art form as mere dilettantes. There are more than enough talented people who would make the most of the opportunity to invest their energy in creating suspense, awakening interest and empathy in all of life's peaks and depths, bringing about interesting and typical situations and combinations—talented people with an intense imagination who are admirably curious about the utter variousness of life and, in some cases, possess an acute moral sensibility—i.e., a strong sense of responsibility for the tens of thousands of souls whom they affect. Besides, it's not merely possible. There are enough real cases to prove that the author of a good script can also be a genuine artist.

But there is a big difference between a film conceived by a writer and a film that appropriates and exploits an existing work of literature for its own ends. The former is a genuine, legitimate achievement; the latter is a theft or, somewhat euphemistically, a borrowing. A work of literature relies on literary effects, in other words on language alone, and ought never be regarded merely as “material” to be exploited through the techniques of another art form. That's degrading, barbarous.

You're certainly right about the potential impact of film. It can reach, satisfy, influence countless thousands of hungry souls who are avid for art, without being open to literature in print. But if you make a film out of
Crime and Punishment, Madame Bovary, Green Henry,
or any other work of literature, even if you go about the task with a lot of taste, skill, and even an extremely strong sense of moral responsibility, you merely destroy its utterly unique, most intimate meaning, and replace it with the equivalent of an Esperanto translation. We are left with a sentimental memory or a moral. The heart of the work is gone, and so is its inimitable otherness.

What has vanished is the old but still vibrant element of culture that is inherent in every verbal work of art.

One could compare somebody filming a literary work with a literary illustrator, and argue that some illustrators are more brilliant than the works they illustrate. Maybe, but that only makes the second-rate illustrations seem all the more disturbing.

It is certainly possible, probable even, that life in the near future will be such that film will acquire almost all the tasks once assumed by literature. There may well come a time when virtually nobody will be capable of reading books. Even in that case, I would still oppose the filming of my books, and wouldn't have any difficulty resisting the lure of fame or money. The more endangered literature and language become, the more I cherish and value them.

Oh, what long letters! I'm really tired now. This shall have to suffice.

TO HIS SON BRUNO

May 1950

I enjoyed your letter, thanks. But I'm sorry to hear you're copying out
Krisis.
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If it weren't so occasional, a piece limited to a specific phase in life, I would gladly have given it to you, but this was something I wanted to spare you. It was only published once, in a small edition. The
Collected Poems
contains only verse that transcends confessional horizons and seems to me worth preserving.

I would like a watercolor of yours for Marulla's birthday in November; it can cost 200 francs, which I'm enclosing right away, since I'm getting rather forgetful. You, of course, have time enough until the fall.[ … ]

The most important event here recently was a session eight days ago with the heirs of my old publisher, S. Fischer: Dr. Bermann and his wife (Fischer's daughter). Since the newspapers often report on these matters in a distorted manner, I would like to give you a brief account of the story.

My friend Suhrkamp joined the publishers shortly before the beginning of the Hitler period, while dear Papa S. Fischer was still alive, first as editor of
Die Neue Rundschau
and then increasingly as a member of the managerial team at the publishers. Fischer père died shortly after Hitler appeared on the scene; his son-in-law then took over the press, which was owned by his wife. That only worked out for a few years. The Bermanns were Jews and had to emigrate. Suhrkamp subsequently took over as director of the press, with the idea of keeping it going, perhaps until the day when Hitlerism was finally over. From that point on, Suhrkamp ran the press. The owners lived at first in Vienna, then in Stockholm, and finally in America. They published a number of books abroad that were banned in Hitler Germany, especially those of Thomas Mann, but the overseas firm never really flourished. Around 1938, Suhrkamp, in Berlin, was forced to buy the firm, since the Nazis would no longer tolerate the existence of such a large enterprise with Jewish owners. He contacted the Bermanns, who requested the normal price for the firm, and since nobody wanted to pay that much for it under the prevailing circumstances, Suhrkamp, who had no fortune of his own, tried to round up two or three rich investors willing to take the risk, and he did indeed find them. They bought and paid for the press in the normal manner, and Suhrkamp stayed on as director. Around 1939, Suhrkamp was forced to drop S. Fischer from the firm's name; it subsequently became the Suhrkamp Verlag, formerly S. Fischer. Suhrkamp, who had been very fond of the elder Fischer and utterly loathed the Nazis, fought continuously from then on to save the firm from the Nazis, always with the intention of returning it to the Fischer family after the fall of Hitler. Although he succeeded in preserving the firm, he had to endure some cruel suffering: prison, concentration camp and severe mistreatment, a death sentence (by chance, never carried out). And it became clear, after Hitler was finished and the Bermanns returned, that they had gone on living in style all those years and still were, in fact. When they eventually discovered they weren't getting along with Suhrkamp, they tried to get rid of him under conditions I considered indecent and intolerable. So a decision was made to separate the two firms: Bermann changes the name of his press back to S. Fischer Verlag, and Suhrkamp, after he leaves, sets up his own press. Chief among the older and famous authors remaining with Fischer were Thomas Mann, Werfel, Stefan Zweig, etc.; Suhrkamp retains the authors he himself had brought in.

Then there were some authors—such as myself—who belonged to the house under the old Fischer but had worked exclusively with Suhrkamp for many years, and the Bermanns struggled to get me to return to their Fischer press. But I felt that this tough battle, in which Suhrkamp revealed his decency and chivalrousness,
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was demeaning, and have announced that I plan to continue with Suhrkamp rather than Bermann-Fischer.

That's the situation. We have reached a decision, but for the past six months the whole affair has been a great source of worry and torment. And, of course, Suhrkamp has no money and is experiencing great difficulties because of the critical condition of the entire German book trade.[ … ]

TO THOMAS MANN

[
On the occasion of his 75th birthday
]

June 1950

It is quite a while since I first got to know you. We met in a hotel in Munich, at the invitation of our publisher, S. Fischer. Your first novellas and
Buddenbrooks
had already appeared, as had my
Peter Camenzind;
both of us were still bachelors then, and people were expecting great things from us. Of course, we weren't all that similar in other respects; one could tell this by our clothes and footwear, and our first meeting—in the course of which I asked you whether you weren't by any chance related to the author of the three novels about the Duchess of Assy
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—came about by chance or literary curiosity and hardly seemed to prefigure our future friendship and comradeship.

But before we could become friends and comrades—one of the most agreeable and unproblematic friendships of my later years—many things had to happen, of which we hadn't an inkling during that pleasant hour in Munich; each of us had to follow a difficult and often dark path, from the illusory comfort of a national community through isolation and ostracization into the clean and rather cold air of world citizenship, which looks quite different in your case from mine, but nonetheless binds us a lot more solidly and reliably than the things we had in common in those days, when we were moral and political innocents.

We are old-timers now, and few of our associates from those days are still living. And you are celebrating your seventy-fifth birthday, and I am celebrating along with you: I'm grateful for everything that you have written, for everything that you have thought and endured, grateful also for your prose, which is as intelligent as it is enchanting, as uncompromising as it is playful, grateful also for the wellspring of your life's work, the great fund of love, warmth and the dedication, all of which your former compatriots shamefully failed to acknowledge. I am grateful, too, for your fidelity toward your language, your honesty and warmth of conviction, and I hope these qualities will endure as a legacy beyond our lifetime and constitute part of a new morality in world politics, a world conscience, which we are now watching with concern and hope, as it makes its first childlike attempts to walk.

Dear Thomas Mann, stay with us for a long time. I speak gratefully to you, not as the emissary of a nation, but as a loner whose real fatherland, like yours, is still being created.

TO PROFESSOR KARL SCHMID

[
Sils Maria, August 3, 1950
]

[ … ] I don't attach terribly much importance to the decision by the Swabians to reclaim me as one of their own. In the town council of Calw, my little hometown, in 1914 or 1915, somebody proposed naming a street after me or making some such gesture of recognition. But the majority voted against the motion, and when a newspaper campaign was unleashed against me for having made a few statements, which were quite innocuous, if less than wildly enthusiastic about the war, people started to see me as a reptile reared at Germany's bosom, and the people of Calw were very glad they had averted a terrible disgrace. The situation in Constance was even more comical. They named some new street Hesse-Way, because I had lived there by the lake for some seven years, and the name remained on the sign until 1933. By then it had become intolerable, so they repainted the sign, replacing my name with that of my erstwhile friend Finckh. And then in 1945, when Hitler was gone, they scratched out Finckh's name and painted mine back on there. Who but the devil could take these namings and unnamings seriously!

I would have liked Switzerland to accept me as one of her own; as a child, I was a Swiss citizen, had lived there again, uninterruptedly, since 1912, reacquiring citizenship in 1924, and my opposition to the dictatorships in the neighboring countries was more vigorous than that of a thousand native Swiss. But over the years I have realized that I'm not Swiss either and do not fit into any fatherland.[ … ]

TO KARL DETTINGER

Sils Maria
[
August 8, 1950
]

Your kind letter has had to wait a few days. I was ill, but it was read to me on a good day, the first time I was allowed up for a bit. I was lying on a chaise longue on the sunny terrace by my room, had just eaten breakfast and listened to a small quantity of mail, so I was attentive to your letter and grateful for it. I greatly enjoyed your special gift, the lines by the missionary brother from that little hut of yours on the Hohenstaufen.
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Although you say your question (the nature of the “faith” that I find in Thomas Mann and myself) is purely rhetorical, it does call for a short answer. In spite of a considerable degree of resignation and skepticism, he and I share certain beliefs, which have, of course, no bearing on theology. Neither of us believes that there are sovereign and “higher” powers, independent of the human will, capable of intervening in human affairs, but we do believe most people possess a fund of decency, which is impossible to quantify. We also believe, to some extent, that it's possible to awaken and strengthen these modest virtues in our readers. We're not alone in this. Mann's eldest daughter, Erika, has written a wonderful essay on the moral aspect of the contemporary global situation.
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His youngest daughter—the one who experienced the “early” sorrow in the famous novella
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—is married to Borgese,
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the anti-fascist writer and scholar, who wrote the classic account of Mussolini and his huge swindle. She herself is president of an international federation set up to prepare for a future world government. It's not a question of how much they can achieve in practical terms. These are very talented and determined people who have emancipated themselves completely from all nationalist feeling, have also experienced emigration and homelessness, and are now devoting their lives to the cause of peace and rationality. They actively resist all temptations and programs proposed by parties and fronts, as I myself once did in a different environment, after having been awakened and enlightened by the first war.