Letters from Vienna #124
The Origins of Thomas Mann’s Magic Mountain
The Role of the Artist in the World
The Diaries of Thomas Mann provide an invaluable nexus between literature and politics. On the one hand one can follow Mann’s intellectual and artistic development, on the other: one can trace his reaction to the political developments in Germany itself.
The period between 1918 and 1924 is not without relevance today and those particular years provide us with an explanation for why Germany is the way it is.
On the 11th of September 1918 Thomas Mann wrote that he was going to devote more time to the “Zauberberg” (“The Magic Mountain”), which he was finally to complete in 1924, and whose theme he defined as: “die Todesromantik plus Lebensja” (the romance of death plus the affirmation of life).
This theme is echoed in the dramatic dialectic between the character of Naphta, a Jewish, Jesuit, Hegelian Marxist (inspired by Georg Lukács), who ultimately commits suicide, and the humanist and tolerant man of letters Settembrini, with whom Mann, although highly critical, clearly identified.
It is surely no coincidence that the question of how to value life and whether to affirm or negate it (quasi Nietzsche contra Schopenhauer) played such a central role in the work of many authors of the period, most notably Joyce, Proust and Musil. The fact that they took a microscope to the world, in a manner recommended by Tolstoy, is perhaps more significant than any of their formal “innovations”, although these also are not without interest today. All four authors sought to intensify life at a time of mass extinction. Those who survived the war, one must remember, were confronted with a fresh assault.[1] The problem of mass death is one we are currently confronted with and it would be wise and prudent on our part to consider the ramifications of the Genocide by Jab.[2]
Again, and again Mann revised the beginning and had difficulty, in such a time of tumult, to maintain a degree of equanimity and inner peace, which was needed for the work.
On the 5th of October he noted: “It’s a bit hard that it now depends on the wisdom of a Quaker (President Wilson) whether Germany gets a peace that doesn’t inoculate its blood with immortal indignation against the way the world is going. In the interests of the German spirit and of keeping alive its opposition to democratic civilisation, this would almost be desirable. However, this is not economical and, in this respect, not very selfish. My point of view is that the world triumph of democratic civilisation in the political sphere is a fact, and that consequently, when it comes to the preservation of the German spirit, the separation of intellectual and national life from political life, the complete indifference of the one to the other is to be recommended. The tendency of my “Reflections” (“Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man”[3]) is directed against the amalgamation of both areas, against the “politicization” of Germany in the sense of the absolute, also intellectual, domination of the victorious democratic-civilizational principle in Germany.”
Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man
In order to fully understand “The Magic Mountain” its first necessary to study the “Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man”, which was published in the autumn of 1918.
Tobias Boes writes: ““Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man” is first and foremost an attempt to outline a conception of the modern writer that might be placed in conscious opposition to that offered by Zola and Heinrich (Mann). On a personal level, the book is also a sustained attack on the hated brother. Going in a more general direction, it is furthermore a polemical attempt to contrast German and French national characters. But the personal and the general are really two sides of the same coin: attacks undertaken not as much for their own sake as in an attempt to bolster Mann’s own representative strivings.”
““Reflections” is the only place in Mann’s entire oeuvre in which he offers an (albeit brief) analysis of Zola’s intervention in the Dreyfus affair, confessing that he did not want “Dreyfus to be condemned and then acquitted for political reasons—for the acquittal of an innocent person for political reasons is no less repulsive than his conviction on the same basis”. The logic underlying this conclusion is hair-raising, but the assumption that judicial decisions should be based on deliberations about justice, not political expediency, is clearly sound. Zola would, of course, have agreed with this rather elementary point. But the two men part ways over the question whether it should be the task of the writer to pursue political causes in an attempt to restore justice in situations where it was abrogated. Mann clearly thought not.”
“What then was to be the task of the representative writer? One answer that Mann gives in “Reflections” is that it is to steer away from the corrosive influence of partisan politics, and instead to try to remain impartial by making the best case for both sides on any given issue. This strategy Mann calls “aestheticism,” though he is careful to differentiate himself from the l’art- pour-l’art understanding of that term by insisting that he does not mean “dying in beauty or always having figures of speech such as ‘wine leaves in the hair’ on one’s tongue…”
“…Indeed, Mann’s greatest literary achievement of the 1920s, The Magic Mountain, is perhaps better read as a continuation of some of the main arguments of Reflections than as a recantation of them. Back in 1916, shortly after he had set aside the manuscript for his novel, Mann had argued that the most characteristically “German” of all literary forms, the bildungsroman, could nowadays only be appropriated as parody. But in writing Reflections, he found that this was not necessarily true. The character of the Italian humanist Ludovico Settembrini, who appears as a vaguely Satanic tempter figure in the early sections of The Magic Mountain, was now reshaped into a spitting image of “civilization’s man of letters.” Just as importantly, he was given an intellectual antagonist in the form of Leo Naphta, who manages to combine characteristics of an ultramontane Catholic, a Communist, and a fascist demagogue all in one complex personality.”
“Standing between these figures is the protagonist Hans Castorp, who lends a sympathetic ear to both, but pledges allegiance to neither, and instead draws his own conclusions. The Magic Mountain offers a powerful example of what Reflections calls an “aesthetic” point of view, for it is not just Hans Castorp who profits from the exposure to Naphta and Settembrini. By accompanying Castorp on his intellectual path, the reader is exposed to the multiple conflicting ideologies of the interwar period as well. And like Castorp, the reader will learn how to critically evaluate them all, without being forced (or even invited) to take sides.”[4]
At the time Thomas Mann was working on “The Magic Mountain” a plot was being hatched which helped detach Germany from Russia:
The Rapallo Treaty
“Rathenau’s preferred option was by no means to deal with the Soviet Union. He had made repeated pleas and proposals to the British and other Allied governments, initially in his capacity as German economic reconstruction minister after Versailles, to allow the German economy to get back on its feet so that German export earnings could begin to pay the Versailles war reparations burden. Again, and again, his pleas were rejected. Adding insult to injury, the British government in 1921 imposed a prohibitive 26 per cent tariff on all German imports, further obstructing German efforts to work out a realistic debt repayment process.”
“Faced with this Anglo-French fist under his nose, Rathenau, scion of a noted German engineering family and former chairman of the large AEG electrical company, determined to develop a strategy of allowing German industry to rebuild itself through development of heavy industry exports to Soviet Russia…”
“The really alarming aspect of the Rapallo Treaty, for certain influential circles in London, was the implications of its provisions. A major infusion of German machinery and equipment, steel and other technology was to be sold to Russia for the rebuilding and expansion of her Baku oilfields.”
“In return, Germany established a network of jointly owned German–Soviet oil and gasoline distribution centers in Germany to market the Soviet oil under the firm DEROP, the Deutsch–Russische Petroleumgesellschaft. This had the added advantage of allowing Germany to get out from under the iron grip of British and American oil interests, which had had a total monopoly on German petroleum sales since Versailles. Rathenau never refused the London Ultimatum reparations demands. But he insisted on a practical means of realizing those demands.”
“The response to Rapallo was not long in arriving. Within two days of its formal announcement, on April 18 at Genoa, the German delegation was presented with an Allied note of protest that Germany had negotiated the Russian accord ‘behind the backs’ of the Reparations Committee.”
“Then, on June 22, 1922, little more than two months after the Rapallo Treaty had been made public, Walther Rathenau was assassinated while leaving his home in the Berlin Grünewald. Two right-wing extremists, later identified as members of a pro-monarchist ‘Organization C,’ were charged with the murder, and it was portrayed as part of the growing wave of extremism and anti-Semitism. But reports circulated in Germany pointing to ‘foreign interests,’ and some said Britain, or British interests, stood behind the two hitmen. In any event, the most prominent statesman and architect of Rapallo was gone, and the nation was shaken to the roots.”[5]
For all Thomas Mann’s wishes to stay aloof from politics events took a turn which eventually drove him out of the country. The sad truth is that nobody is an island, which is why each and every one must seek to prevent (by all peaceful means possible) the current drift toward Fascism through digital currencies, digital IDs, mask mandates, lockdowns and “vaccine mandates”.
[1] https://vaccineimpact.com/2018/did-military-experimental-vaccine-in-1918-kill-50-100-million-people-blamed-as-spanish-flu/
[2] https://www.bitchute.com/video/nLE5cba9O0Vm/?fbclid=IwAR3EJsKu22z1mhZ6y8aKzNxclpyqU1JrcfsvfsAnSxHiQlozlXMo5V7lgrI
[3] https://ghdi.ghi-dc.org/sub_document.cfm?document_id=946
[4] pp.35-37 Thomas Mann’s War, Tobias Boes
[5] pp.68-70 A Century of War, William F. Engdahl