The Weimar Triangle (26 page)

So that was that. I now have no choice but to speculate on the subject without having had a chance to put a direct question to him. But before going out on a limb I must say something about my attitude toward Thomas Mann. Many of my left-wing friends take a jaundiced view of his politics, which, however ambivalent, qualified and oscillating, must be labelled conservative. In early 1918 he published a book of reflections
— Reflections of an Unpolitical Man —
in which he supported the war Germany was waging against shallow liberal civilizations in the name of German
Kultur.
It was a book-length argument with his left-wing brother, Heinrich, also a novelist. But in 1921 Thomas Mann came out in favour of the Republic. Since then he has repeatedly declared that there had merely been a change of emphasis and that, in any case, it was not he who had changed but the world. Whatever my friends
—
and I, for that matter
—
think of his politics, I consider him a unique storyteller and a perceptive and profound analyst of ideas in the twentieth century.

So what about his attitude toward Strauss’s operas? At first glance one key would be the comment we have
—
that to Mann the music of the
Rosenkavalier
sounded heavy and ponderous in relation to the text. A second glance would reveal a deeper explanation. Since Strauss is indisputably the most successful composer of German operas in the twentieth century, he must be compared to his predecessor, Richard Wagner. In Mann’s view, the two should not be mentioned in the same breath. Quite apart from the relative quality of the music, which was hard to articulate in words, Wagner, as an artist, innovator and thinker, had a depth, significance and consistent seriousness entirely lacking in Strauss. Wagner was a giant, Strauss
—
to Mann
—
an immensely gifted but superficial, facile, hollow and tasteless opportunist.

This brings me to
The Magic Mountain
, a subject entirely relevant to this discussion of composers. Mann consciously approached his novel as though he was writing a symphony, with elaborate counterpoint and Wagnerian
Leitmotifs
that he described as “the magic formula that works both ways, that links the past with the future and the future with the past.” We can assume, even if he never said so himself, that he would regard
The Magic Mountain
as a model of what a work of art should be.

I happen to agree with his judgement.

It began as a short story. In 1912 Mann’s wife was suffering from a lung complaint, not a serious one. But it was considered necessary for her to spend six months at a high-altitude tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos in the Swiss Alps. He visited her there for three weeks, in the spring. After ten days, one afternoon, sitting on the balcony in damp weather, he caught a troublesome bronchitis. He consulted the doctors
—
nowhere were they more available. It was considered he had a “moist spot” in the lung and was advised to stay for six months. If he had followed the advice, the experience would have changed the course of his life as it did that of Hans Castorp, the ordinary young engineer of good family from Hamburg who became the central figure of
The Magic Mountain
and who had received the same diagnosis and stayed for seven years, having arrived there for no reason other than to visit his cousin.

Instead of following the advice, however, Mann wrote
The Magic Mountain —
two thick volumes
—
which took him, off and on, twelve years. He had begun it in 1912, but during the war put it aside while writing the
Reflections of an Unpolitical Man.

Very soon after he had arrived at the sanatorium, the mixture of death and lightheadedess he observed struck him as a suitable background for a humorous companion piece to his novella
Death in Venice.
It would be about the same length.

Thomas Mann is most at ease when he can split the world into opposites and then mediate between them. This ambivalence enables him to accept and reject, to love and hate, at the same time. From it he derives the ironical detachment that characterizes his art and enables him to stand back from his characters and look at them with dry amusement. The most important of his opposites is spirit and nature. By intensifying the conflict between man’s spirit and his nature, disease “may recommend itself,” he says, as a “highly dignified human phenomenon.” Is man not more noble, he asks, the more estranged he is from nature, that is, the more diseased he is? When, in
Death in Venice,
an epidemic threatens Gustav Aschenbach, he secretly welcomes it and disregards the many warnings he receives. Similarly, Hans Castorp is soon drawn into the community of the sick and is strangely reluctant to make an effort to regain his health. Moreover, in the selfindulgent luxury of the enchanted mountain, he soon loses his sense of time
—
time and its relation to music form one of the many themes of the novel
—
and his sense of reality generally. What matters to those down in the valley becomes more and more remote. Talk and ideas dominate him.

Once he started, Mann soon discovered that he was writing a pedagogical novel, a
Bildungsroman
, like Goethe’s
Wilhelm Meister
, a novel of initiation. To friends he wrote that it was actually a parody of a
Bildungsroman
and that he was trying to present death as a comic figure.

The new experience of the power of ideas was overwhelming for Castorp. He became the target of an increasingly bitter battle for his soul between the engaging, loquacious, progressive Italian humanist Lodovico Settembrini and the unprepossessing, witty, acid-tongued, sardonic half-Jewish Jesuit Leo Naphta, a radical reactionary with a razor-sharp mind. For Naphta, liberalism was a dangerous illusion. The disputations between the two had been foreshadowed in Mann’s
Reflections,
but had he not got his self-analysis
—
brought about by the war
—
off his chest in that book, the Settembrini-Naphta dialogues would no doubt have been overburdened with topical references to the war and would have culminated in arguments for and against the Weimar Republic. For that reason, the two antagonists could concentrate on timeless universals.

As was likely in a pedagogical novel, the inexperienced Castorp was also introduced to the theory and practice of love. The lady entrusted with this task was the exotic French-Russian Madame Clawdia Chauchat, who had the attractive high cheekbones of a Tatar princess. The consummation of their passion took place after the inebriated celebration of carnival. Even the doctor-in-charge wore a funny hat. In the spirit of carnival, the love making was conducted in French, like a mask, to suspend the sense of responsibility, Castorp said, which he had only when he spoke his own language. The picture of Madame Chauchat’s X-ray, which she gave to him as a present, triggered in him ecstatic raptures. The morning after, she left for her home on the other side of the Ural mountains, because, so she said, the doctors could not help her any more. However, she returns later in the novel, on the arm of the white-haired, harddrinking Mynheer Peeperkorn, an immensely rich Dutchman who has trouble finishing a sentence and is the very incarnation of virile vitality. At the very end of the novel he takes poison.

Nowhere does the life-death opposition appear more dramatically than in “Snow,” the climactic chapter toward the end of the book. On a solitary skiing expedition begun when the sun was shining Castorp is caught in an unexpected, violent snowstorm, loses his way, eventually finds shelter in an abandoned shed and falls asleep. His dream is a death-experience, described at great length in extraordinary detail. Castorp wakes up, having finally conquered his sympathy with death in the name of life, goodness and love.

Thomas Mann never intended the novel to describe the world as it was, or as it is. It is more abstract than concrete, more like a leisurely, evocative piece of music than a work of literary realism, in spite of the rich abundance of memorable and believable characters and innumerable and often amusing details.

It ended not in a redeeming C-major chord but slowly faded out as we heard
—
since the time is 1914
—
the rumbling of distant thunder.

Finale

W
alter Grossmann was a gaunt man whose hand at his first meeting with Jay on Monday trembled slightly and who looked as though he needed a good night’s sleep. But he made an effort to put on a brave face as he confided to Jay that the timing of his visit could not have been more opportune. He said that, as a matter of fact, in view of their smooth cooperation in the matter of the Polish bicycle factory a few years ago, he and his remaining partners had been thinking of contacting the Bank of Ontario, of whose unusually robust financial stability they were well informed.

Jay assured him he would convey this message to his superiors immediately. At his second meeting the following Thursday he was able to request Herr Grossmann to put forward a specific plan, including a
tour d’horizon
of the bank’s operations in eastern Europe, as a basis of discussion. Jay went as far as to say that he was confident such a plan would be well received in Toronto. He would be happy to stay in Frankfurt to conduct the negotiations with him and his partners on behalf of his bank as long as necessary.

In the sporting goods store in Bockenheim where the flamboyant Romanian Cella Lubescu sold tennis equipment, the football department was run by young Stefan Jordan, the grandson of Doctor Reinhold Jordan, a class mate of Teddy Adorno’s who had died eight years earlier. Throughout Adorno’s stay in the United States, until his return to Europe in 1949, they had exchanged letters
—
during the war via friends in Switzerland. At that time Doctor Jordan was the chief surgeon at the Municipal Hospital. Adorno was a celebrity in Frankfurt and Stefan was interested in his grandfather’s correspondence with him.

Cella and Stefan were good friends. When Cella mentioned Hans Kielmann’s search for information about Hermann Geisel, Stefan thought that must be the man whom Adorno had occasionally mentioned in his letters.

One of the last communications Doctor Jordan received from Adorno before his return to Frankfurt was a letter written a week after Hanni’s death:

The death of Hanni Geisel last week was a severe blow. I saw a good deal of her, off and on, in the last few years and was always enlivened by her positive outlook on the world. Thomas Mann said of her that she had an “intelligent heart,” one of his many oddly mannered expressions. But I think I know what he meant. Also, I admired her intuitive understanding of music. I believe at one time she was quite a respectable violinist.

I had known her and her husband quite well when I was a graduate student and incipient music critic in the nineteen-twenties and was often invited to their Saturday déjeuners, where I met a lot of bright people. The ones who were not so bright I have forgotten. But these occasions were particularly memorable because the man who influenced me most at the time, the journalist and film historian Erwin Herzberg, was a frequent guest. A few years later I saw a great deal of him in the United States. I am sure you know that he made his name on the international scene with his book From Fritz Lang to Leni Riefenstahl, which he wrote in New York.

In the summer of 1927, during the International Exhibition of Music, there was a great deal of frowning and shaking of heads over Hanni Geisel’s open love affair with Erwin, which went on for several weeks. In this, as in so many other respects, the Geisels were truly modern — just as they unreservedly espoused the cause of modern music, some of which they liked, some which left them puzzled. The idea of an open marriage between two people — usually members of the intelligentsia — who were devoted to each other, was then quite new in Frankfurt. Of course this kind of arrangement worked particularly well if the third party — this “Hausfreund,” this “friend of the house” — was a member of the same social set, and if great care was taken that no children would be hurt. My guess is that the concept has survived the Nazi period and the war, and probably even spread to the non-intelligentsia — but you would know more about that than I.

If I were a novelist I would invent the dialogue that must have taken place between them along the following lines:

“It’s happened again,” Hanni confided to her husband when the first symptoms appeared. “You know, the Kurt Simonsky inflammation.”

Kurt Simonsky was a previous lover.

“Do you want another vacation?” Hermann asked. “On the same terms as last time?”

“That would be nice, Hermann. Yes, please.”

“Application granted.”

And he gave her a loving kiss on the forehead.