The Thomas Mann Group discussion

This thread is to post and discuss historical and cultural context related to vThe Magic Mountain.

Copying a post by Karen in the Thread for General Secondary Reading, with one of the books she suggests.



I'm slowly working my way through a history of the German Empire, this is after all the world that Mann was born into.

Die nervöse Großmacht: Aufstieg und Untergang des deutschen Kaiserreichs 1871-1918

I hope to get further than the first few pages before we really start.

http://books.google.com/books?id=8pb2...

Haven't read the book itself, but looks interesting and probably relevant: The Weimar Moment: Liberalism, Political Theology, and Law by Leonard V. Kaplan

See specifically: Chapter 20: "The Ideological Struggle for the German Soul in Thomas Mann's Magic Mountain" by Gabriel Ricci.

May be easier to read at page 444 here: http://www.scribd.com/doc/101616949/T...

Thanks, Kal, I got a bit distracted .....

I'm reading Weimar Germany by Eric Weitz (now available in ebook). There are a few pages on MM. When I reach these sections I'll post here, if its interesting. It's a non-academic book so I should get through it quickly.

Also meantioned is A People Betrayled by Alfred Döblin and translated by John E. Woods. Sadly this series appears to be out of print. So its off to the used bookstore for that one.

Excerpt from Weimar Germany by Eric D. Weitz.

This excerpt is about ten pages long and contains spoilers. Magic Mountain is talked about extensively - sorta.

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(view spoiler)[That was Weimar culture: the restless questioning of what it means to live in modern times, the search for new forms of expression suitable to the cacophony of modern life, and the belief in the possibilities of the future. Our guides into this world of culture will be a mere handful of the great writers, artists, and composers who flourished in the 1920s and early 1930s, and whose work we still read, view, and hear with deep engagement and appreciation: Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Kurt Weill, Siegfried Kracauer, Martin Heidegger, and Hannah Höch.
________

In the 1920s Thomas Mann was already a very famous man. His first novel, Buddenbrooks, the semiautobiographical chronicle of three generations of a great merchant family, had been published to acclaim in 1901. On 10 December 1929, he would be awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Mann’s novels and stories probed the psychological demands exacted by the refined and ordered life that he so prized and that characterized the bourgeois world from which he came. A life of order and rectitude was a fragile thing. Emotions and desires threatened constantly to burst the constraints that allowed business and art to flourish and the family, that centerpiece of bourgeois order, to maintain its status. In Buddenbrooks, Toni, after months of agonizing, agrees to marry the unattractive and somewhat dull businessman who will supposedly add his wealth and experience to the Buddenbrooks family. With flourish, she finally signs her name in the cherished family book, which records the marriages over generations. Toni has sacrificed herself for the family—but every sacrifice has its costs, and this one fails even to deliver on its promise. Toni’s husband turns out to be a charlatan, and he helps drag down the firm and family. In Death in Venice, Gustav von Aschenbach travels to his beloved city only to find a pall of disease and decay. He has long sublimated his sexual desires into his art. In Venice, his longings for the lithe and handsome young boy Tadzio, though unconsummated, destroy the order he had so carefully constructed in his life. His shattered personal order mirrors the epidemic disaster spreading over the city.

As with individuals, so with societies. Society was also a fragile thing, always threatened by the instincts of men and women. Only the most concerted effort, the most heroic struggles to contain the desires for pleasure and death, made society possible—a theme also developed by Sigmund Freud in Civilization and Its Discontents.4Always, in individuals and societies, a war raged between the artistic, sensual, and erotic sentiments and the no less powerful claims for order and responsibility. For Mann personally, this was a conflict between north and south, between the great merchant city of Lübeck and artistic, sensual Munich and Italy; between his Protestant father, a bourgeois to the core, and his Catholic mother, born in Brazil of German and Spanish parentage; between duty and responsibility, art and licentiousness; between man and woman, or, more accurately, manly instincts and womanly instincts, since Mann constantly struggled with his own homoerotic desires; and, ultimately, between aestheticism and asceticism.

Mann was a follower of Nietzsche, whose works he had read voraciously, and a Freudian before he had ever read Freud. But in contrast to Nietzsche’s unruly politics and Freud’s liberalism, the keen attentiveness to the conflict between eros and order turned Mann into a political conservative. During the war years he wrote Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, which he published in 1918. It is perhaps the least subtle, least compelling of his major works. Mann’s conservative instincts found full expression here, as he gave complete support to the kaiser and the war effort. Some of the passages read like war propaganda issued by the General Staff, or the standard musings of right-wing ideologues. As his recent biographer, Hermann Kurzke, writes, war gave Mann (no less than so many others, one might add) a sense of purpose, and also freed him from a psychological and creative crisis. He could identify with those most manly of pursuits, war and violence, putting to rest, at least momentarily, his worries over his homoeroticism. Through his identification with the national cause and the attack on his liberal brother Heinrich, he would find, so he hoped, the great acclaim he desired and would become, in effect, the poet laureate of the nation. Indeed, war enabled Mann to join those polar tendencies, north and south, responsibility and passion, manliness and womanliness. Now the responsible thing to do was to be passionate about the nation at war.

It was definitely not Thomas Mann’s finest moment. But Mann was among those Germans who had come of age in the prewar era and were conservative by upbringing, intellect, and instinct, and then recognized in the 1920s the need to come to terms with mass society and the democratic era. They were labeled Vernunftrepublikaner (republicans by reason), and if not quite democrats at heart, they nonetheless gave the republic powerful intellectual support. On 15 October 1922, Mann delivered a remarkable speech that signaled the great distance he had traveled since Reflections of an Unpolitical Man.7The occasion was a homage to the great playwright Gerhart Hauptmann on his sixtieth birthday, and the audience consisted largely of conservatively inclined students. It was a curious talk. Mann drew on an unlikely pair, the great German romantic Novalis and the American poet Walt Whitman, to make his case in support of democracy and the republic.8 These two romantic artists, Mann argued, had a similar approach to life—they sought to conserve the best of the past but understood that in the modern age a republic afforded men the opportunity for development. Without using the word, Mann invoked the German tradition of Bildung, the belief in self-cultivation that would come through engagement with great works of culture. Bildung had become the fashionable ideology of the German middle and upper classes, but by the turn into the twentieth century had also become laced with snobbishness and an air of self-satisfaction.9 Mann sought to return to the true meaning of Bildung as education and cultivation, which Wilhelm von Humboldt had articulated in the early nineteenth century.

(hide spoiler)]

Excerpt from Weimar Germany by Eric D. Weitz.

*** The Magic Mountain section starts in the third paragraph. ****


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(view spoiler)[Only in the republic, Mann suggested, could men truly achieve Bildung. In the lavish language to which he was prone, peppered with extensive quotations from Novalis and Whitman, Mann had the courage not to spare his conservative audience his sharpest criticisms. The monarchy of old had fallen prey to an aggressive militarism wrapped in the mantle of the spirituality of the state, to a Nietzschean flight into pure power, which so many students had blindly followed. Only the republic now embodied the true meaning of the state, the true opportunity for human development, and that great ideal, Humanity. Mann endowed the republic with spiritual significance: in the republic, Germans, collectively and individually, would be able to develop their inner potential. The republic was the great medium, the synthesizer of the individual and the collective, the singular and the universal, the German and the European, Enlightenment and romanticism, and the very expression of Humanity. It was also an object of eroticism, of the tight bonds among men who gave it their devotion, and thereby created something great, a force of life over the force of death, even when the state sent its men to war.

It was good, of course, to have an intellectual of Mann’s stature on the side of the republic. But one may well ask whether it was such a great service to foist onto the democracy of the 1920s the complex of ideas that conservatives in the nineteenth century had so lovingly applied to the Prussian and (after 1871) German state. Could any democracy, any republic, live up to Mann’s lofty spiritual and erotic claims? That very basic task of any democratic state, to reconcile diverse interests, lay beneath Mann’s concerns. He took the conservative German idiom of a Kulturstaat coupled with his own homo-eroticism and applied it to Weimar, which must have struck many of his listeners as bizarre. Yet such was the magic of his intellect and erudition, drawing effortlessly on the classics of the German tradition as well as on Whitman, that he was able to carry along some of his listeners—at the least, the vocal expressions of opposition and dismay faded as his speech continued to unfold (and he must have spoken for a good two hours, to judge by the written text).

The war and postwar eras also provided Mann with the fertile basis to expound on the theme of decay. Buddenbrooks portrayed the rise and decline of a great merchant family in Lübeck. The cataclysm of the war with its millions of dead and the upheavals of the postwar era gave Mann a powerful impetus to think about decay on an even grander scale, not only that of a family or of German society, but of Western civilization itself. In 1925, he published The Magic Mountain, his greatest novel since Buddenbrooks and one of the classics of twentieth-century literature. It was instantly recognized as a masterpiece. Hans Jonas recalled that “everyone” in his Zionist and his academic-philosophical circles “of course read [the novel] … and could on any occasion quote or make references [to it], which were immediately understood.”

In The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp visits his cousin, Joachim Ziemisch, in a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps populated by an array of patients suffering from tuberculosis and other diseases. The cold, refined air of the mountains and the watchful care of Hofrat Dr. Behrens provide their only chances for recovery. Dr. Behrens immediately notices that Hans, too, suffers from an ailment, and the three-week visit turns into a seven-year sojourn during which Hans, through a variety of interlocutors, contemplates the meaning of life and death. Our rather hapless protagonist bounces from one grand aspiration to another, from one set of beliefs to another. An engineer by training, at various times he expresses the ambition to be a pastor or painter, at other times a physician. He enthuses over the military bearing of his ill-fated cousin yet can never summon up the disciplined Joachim’s stoic countenance in the face of death. Hans suffers the tongue-lashings of others like a little boy or wounded dog, head bowed and comments inarticulate. For endless months he watches the woman with whom he is infatuated, Clawdia Chauchat, she “with the Kirghiz eyes,” unable to rally the courage to approach her. For unending pages, Mann, with his masterly sensibility, depicts the glances exchanged between them, the slightest movement of their hands and mouths, yet both Clawdia and Hans remain in their own worlds, without any words exchanged between them, until carnival and alcohol loosen Hans’s restraint. But by then it is almost too late—Clawdia is leaving the next day (though she will return).

Hans moves among three men who represent the divergent strands of Western civilization. Each of them is, of course, ill. Why else would they while their time away on the magic mountain? Ludovico Settembrini is the great humanist who never tires of expounding upon the grand ideas of liberty and progress. His grandfather had belonged to the Carbonari, the conspiratorial Italian nationalist groups of the early nineteenth century; his father, also a humanist as well as a soldier in the Risorgimento, the movement that led to Italian unification in 1871. Settembrini tries to bring “Engineer,” as he so often calls Hans, to the side of liberalism, to the ideas of the south, of Italy, of passion for liberty and belief in progress, of certainty about the greatness of man, versus the Teutonic penchant for order and discipline, though Settembrini is enough of a European, not just an Italian, to recognize the virtues of the German ideals. Yet there is an arid quality to Settembrini’s rhetoric, filled as it is with quotations from obscure humanists of the sixteenth century and references to the grand achievements of the past. Liberalism’s realm of action had been narrowed over the generations, from the activism of Settembrini’s father and grandfather to his own penning of obscure encyclopedia articles and discussions among a few men in the rarefied atmosphere of the Alps. Settembrini’s humanism, it seems, is an archaic remnant of the nineteenth century.

But his great antagonist, the Jesuit Leo Naphta, is even more of a relic. Naphta, of Jewish background, no less erudite than Settembrini, asserts the certainty of belief and the glories of medieval Christendom. He advocates the order the church imposes on society, the quietude of the beatific life, and the rigors of torture when necessary to defend Christendom. “Faith is the vehicle of understanding,” he says; “the intellect is secondary.”11 Settembrini counters with the active life of accomplishment, of reason and labor and ever-advancing progress. Hans listens raptly as Naphta and Settembrini argue for hours on end. He is alternately captivated and repulsed by each of them.

Hans’s third great interlocutor arrives rather late in the novel. He is a blustery, forceful figure, a Dutch colonial planter, Mynheer Peeperkorn, who has made a fortune overseas. He is physically large and rhetorically inarticulate, the very opposite of both Settembrini and Naphta, a powerful presence who is used to having his way. He is “die Persönlichkeit”—the grand personage—as Hans so often refers to him. Hans is again captivated, this time by the man of action who has made his way in the world and has accumulated great wealth and a penchant for issuing orders to those in his midst. In a night of indulgence, Peeperkorn gathers around him a dozen or more fellow patients and, through will and force, engages them in the dissipations of card playing, rich foods, and substantial quantities of alcohol. Half the sanatorium has a hangover the next day, thanks to the large appetite of “die Persönlichkeit.” Yet he, too, is ill, and—what is worse, from Hans’s viewpoint—he arrives at the Berghof with Clawdia. They are “travel companions,” in the quaint terminology of the prewar era.
(hide spoiler)]

Excerpt from Weimar Germany by Eric D. Weitz.

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(view spoiler)[Common people, “the masses,” rarely appear in Mann’s literature. When they do, they are shadowy figures, a driver or servant, who enable the lives and troubles of the protagonists to proceed, or they are anonymous crowds, captivated by the guile of a circus performer or a more sinister manipulator, as in the story “Mario and the Magician” or the Dr. Faustus trilogy. Mann is consumed with the travails of his own class, the Bildungsbürgertum, the educated middle class, that group so esteemed in modern German history. It is an elite, to be sure, defined by Besitz und Bildung, property and education, yet always confronted by the specter of the mass. In The Magic Mountain, Hans whiles away his seven years, careful about his expenditures yet able to meet the no doubt costly fees of the Berghof through the dividends he collects from his inheritance. Besitz und Bildung go along with a certain reserve and distance, a formality of relationships even among family members. Only upon his reckless departure from the Berghof—and the reader has a foreboding that he will return—does Joachim actually address his cousin by his first name, by “Hans,” although they use the informal “you,” du, with one another. On the same carnival- and alcohol-infused evening when he finally speaks to Clawdia, Hans addresses Settembrini with the informal “you,” and the great humanist is not pleased. Indeed, Hans’s breach of the bounds of respectability unleashes a tirade from Settembrini. Cultivated society, civilization itself, requires a certain formality and distance.

For people to use informal pronouns or first names when they have no real reason to do so is a repulsively barbaric practice, a slovenly game, a way of playing with the givens of civilization and human progress, against both of which it is directed—shamelessly, insolently directed. Please, do not presume in calling you “my lad,” I was addressing you in that fashion. I was merely quoting a passage from the masterpiece of your national literature. I was speaking poetically, as it were.

Du might be the appropriate term among the masses—indeed, the labor movement consciously adopted it as a sign of egalitarianism and comradeship among its members. It was not appropriate for those who are the bearers of culture, and they must resist the blandishments of mass society through appropriate formality.

On that same evening and in an erotically charged encounter, Hans also uses du with Clawdia Chauchat. She claims (coquettishly?) to be offended by his familiarity, which also challenges the sexual order that cultivated society demands. Yet Clawdia’s husband is somewhere “beyond the Caucasus,” nowhere to be seen, and he allows his wife her liberties. Her very exoticism and the allure of her“Kirghiz eyes,” arouse Hans sexually, and he finally declares his love for her. Yet at his grand, decisive moment, he is still a somewhat pathetic character. She strokes his hair comfortingly, but it is as much a maternal as a sexual act. She parries his declaration of love and refers admiringly to his cousin. She finally leaves with a flourish, just as she always enters with a flourish, waving “Adieu” to the hapless Hans.
But perhaps, just perhaps, she invites him to her room, since she reminds him, softly, looking over her shoulder, to return the pencil he had borrowed from her.13 The du of familiarity is also the du of the masses, and both threaten the ordered world of bourgeois society. Hans and Clawdia will eventually reunite, once she returns with Peeperkorn. But it is an ill-starred affair, finally destroyed by the shadow of Peeperkorn’s suicide, who, for all his powers, is felled by his illness and by the knowledge of his companion’s lack of love for him.

Hans Castorp is the middling embodiment of the bourgeois class, not as lost as Robert Musil’s “man without qualities,” yet, well, middling—intelligent, but not overly so; longing for great achievements, yet indecisive; ill, but not very seriously; mildly questioning, yet also quite self-satisfied. He takes easily to the languid pace of life in the sanatorium—the regular meals, five a day no less; the mandated, twice daily “lying cures,” when the patients lie out in the cold air, wrapped in blankets, offering themselves to the thin, fresh air of the Alps; the periodic lectures, concerts, and excursions: all in a world where no one works, except for the staff of the Berghof. Like the other patients, Hans loses all sense of time: the weeks turn into months, the months into years, all punctuated by periodic obsessions that never last long—painting, anatomical studies, stargazing, skiing, the gramophone.

Yet what is one to make of it all? Did modern times signify only decay? Was there no way out of the crisis of civilization? Mann’s tone in The Magic Mountain is, as ever, ironic and pessimistic and laced with strains of nostalgia for the safe, comfortable bourgeois world of the nineteenth century, so different from the conflict-strewn Weimar Republic of the 1920s and early 1930s. There are also moments of striking humor that relieve the despair that runs through so much of his novel. Yet for all that, for all the emotional and erotic tension of his writing, Mann was also a hardheaded realist who knew, especially after the cataclysms of World War I, that there was no road back to the simple optimism of Settembrini or to the religious mysticism of Naphta, not even to the hard-charging moneymaking of Peeperkorn. At the very end, Hans Castorp descends from the magic mountain to go off to war. So many of his companions die of their illness; he will most likely die in the battle for the nation, a cause that Mann had first supported so fervently but by the mid-1920s had come to view with greater distance.

Hans will die in war, but he had, earlier in the novel, chosen life. Off alone on a reckless skiing venture, he is caught in a snowstorm that suddenly swirls up around him. His vision is blinded, his sense of direction thrown awry. Finally he encounters a hut whose overhang provides at least some shelter. In a state of delirium, he dreams of a loving, peaceful place, bathed in sunlight as children play on the shore and young beauties, male and female, mount horses and dance in circles. His mind also conjures up a countervision of child-devouring monsters, a medieval scene of plague, pestilence, and warfare. Hans is about to give up his struggle and succumb to the harsh elements of the mountains and, symbolically, to the despairing side of his dream. A slice of blue sky breaks through the swirling storm and arouses Hans from his delirium. It seems like hours to him, but, in fact, only minutes have passed. The good weather jolts him back to his vision of sunbathed love and peace. “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts.” He mounts the snow and finds his way back to the Berghof: he has chosen life.

As with individuals, so with societies. Life was a complicated thing, threatened constantly by the pulls of desire and death. Order and stability were ephemeral achievements. Hans, the next morning, cannot so clearly remember the devotion to life and love that came to him in the snow. Mann’s great novel captured, in complex and beautiful prose, those grand conflicts faced by his protagonist that were also the conflicts of Weimar modernity: between progress and tradition, order and desire, formality and hierarchy and the leveling tendencies of mass society. There are no easy answers, Mann tells us, and certainly no way back to the prewar world. He overcame great inner turmoil to arrive at his position in support of the republic. Even later, for all his anti-Nazi sentiments, it would take long deliberations and the strong pressure of his children, especially Erika and Klaus, before he threw caution to the winds to become the great antagonist of the Nazis. But like Hans in the snow, he did choose life.
________

(hide spoiler)]

Green Troll wrote: "I'm reading Weimar Germany by Eric Weitz (now available in ebook). There are a few pages on MM. When I reach these sections I'll post here, if its interesting. It's a non-academic book so I should ..."

Thank you very much for these, GT. I will keep them in mind and read later on... I also have the book but for other members these will come in very handy. Thanks again.

Nice resource for the Weimar Republic for those interested. I used the primary sources page because it has pictures to art and other stuff.

http://weimar.facinghistory.org/conte...

Although this Master's Thesis primarily covers Sanitariums in the United States, the author provides an extensive history of the European Sanitariums, especially those in the Swiss Alps. Very much worth a look.

Title: The rise and fall of the tuberculosis sanitarium in response to the white plague
Authors: Grahn, Anya E.
Advisor: Wolner, Edward W.
Date of Object: 2012-05-05
Abstract: American tuberculosis sanitarium architecture developed largely from trends set by European health spas and sanitarium design. The first American tuberculosis sanitariums largely resembled European health spas and resorts and catered to rich clientele. The spread of the White Plague, however, urged American states to develop sanitarium institutions that could provide for all classes. These first sanitariums melded nineteenth century resort architecture with radial prison designs and Kirkbride insane asylums to create large hospital complexes devoted exclusively to tuberculosis treatment and research. By the 1920s and 1930s, the European modernist movement had created modern tuberculosis sanitariums that inspired American sanitarium design. Despite the important role these institutions played in curing consumptives and limiting the spread of the White Plague, the increased use of drug therapy made sanitariums obsolete by the 1970s. Today, many of these sanitariums have been abandoned, demolished, or rehabilitated for new uses.
CardCat URL: http://liblink.bsu.edu/uhtbin/catkey/...

A brief history of tuberculosis: http://www.news-medical.net/health/Hi...

I watched a very interesting episode of PBS American Experience today, titled "The Forgotten Plague". It brought back the reading of TMM vividly to mind and many of our discussions. The many photos also brought to life the balcony scenes -- being all wrapped up while taking the air. I do recommend it to those in the US as it is currently airing.

When does this come on, Sue? I saw it in the TV listings but of course forgot to make a note of it.

Diane wrote: "When does this come on, Sue? I saw it in the TV listings but of course forgot to make a note of it."

It's first run was last Tuesday but I watched it on my dvr. I'll bet it's on at some point this weekend or over the coming week. I believe they keep the shows on line for a time too.

I found it. They will rerun the first episode at 4:00 a.m. Sunday morning, too early for me! DVR's are a lifesaver.
So I can watch it at a decent time tomorrow. And I can record future episodes. Thanks for the reminder, Sue.

I think there is only the one episode on this subject though American Experience is a series.

I watched this episode tonight. I was hoping they would reference "The Magic Mountain", but it was mostly U.S. based sanitoriums, although they did give European doctors and treatments a lot of credit. But the only thing that really halted this disease was the discovery of antibiotics. A very well-done documentary. Thanks, Sue.

One thing I enjoyed seeing was the people bundled up for the open air treatments. That really resounded for me after the descriptions in TMM. Also the arbitrary nature of recovery vs death.

A lot of things in The Magic Mountain were touched upon here, as the closed society of the sanitoriums. with the clicques and gossip, and the bodies being taken out thru the hallways.

Yes, it made the story of TMM more real for me.