He wanted so much for it all to be true. The Romantics had told him that the world makes no sense in modern times — the Modernists would later tell him it never had — but everyone told the German novelist Thomas Mann that the artist is the strong man who hammers out a heroic meaning for this world of weakness and disorder. And he wanted so much for it to be true.
He knew, of course, that it wasn’t. Mann’s stories contain some of the most scathing attacks on the “heroic artist” ever written, from the pretentious and self-satisfied novelist Gustave von Aschenbach in the 1911 novella Death in Venice (lured by the sensuous beauty of a Polish boy to linger in miasmatic Italy) to the cold, proud, and mad composer Adrian Leverkuhn in the 1948 novel Doctor Faustus (whose brilliant musical powers are heightened, corrupted, and at last destroyed by the syphilis that infects him just as the Nazis infect his German fatherland).
But this is perhaps our problem with Thomas Mann nowadays, and the explanation for why his reputation as a great, magisterial writer of traditional novels seems to have faded in recent years. Art in our time has been raised to such absurd moral heights — and yet simultaneously dropped to such absurd moral depths — that we do not seem to bother much anymore with the sort of ethical questions that gave Mann his great and serious purpose. The fading of Thomas Mann’s fiction from our literary view is a fading of artistic compunction, a fading of the notion that the writer must constantly subject the act of writing itself to the rigors of moral analysis.
When Mann died in Zurich in 1955 at the age of 80, few had any doubt that he had written for the ages. In the long working career granted to very few writers, he had stood in public view as an acknowledged master for more than 50 years — from the publication of his first major novel, the immensely popular Buddenbrooks in 1901, through The Magic Mountain in 1924 and the Nobel Prize that seemed to follow as its logical tribute five years later. He followed The Magic Mountain with the quartet of novels Joseph and His Brothers in the 1930s and early 40s, Doctor Faustus in 1947, and on to the Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, an early short story expanded into a novel in 1954.
Among general readers, who now, 40 years later, can bring to sharp focus a picture of the man? Or recall in sharp detail one of his novels’ characters? Mann is too strong a writer to blend easily into the cloud of unread, unregarded Edwardian worthies, but the edges of his memory seem to have blurred. Even his standard short works — Death in Venice or Tonio Kroger (a classic 1903 portrait of the artist as a young man) — seem to have fallen off college reading lists, and his lesser known novels — the 1909 Royal Highness, say, or 1951’s The Holy Sinner — have disappeared from easily available editions.
Perhaps John E. Wood’s new translation of The Magic Mountain (Alfred A. K nopf, 706 pages, $35) will help bring the novelist back into view. This, his gr eatest work, tells the story of Hans Castorp, a young German engineer who comes on a three-week visit to his cousin at a tuberculosis sanitarium in the mountai ns and stays for seven years. Castorp is “a bourgeois, a humanist, and a poet,” as the mountain-top seductress Clavdia Chauchat declares, “Germany all rolled i nto one, just as it should be!” Mann was very mu ch in charge of his fiction, and his deliberate literary compunction ensures that his novels all tend to be obvious fables, social allegories. The symbolic meaning of his characters was never far from his mind while he wrote, and he has — and had, even in his own lifetime — the reputation of clinical detachment from his characters.
Mann had in fact a general reputation for detachment from everything but his art. In a pair of extraordinary letters written during the First World War to his brother Heinrich and his publisher, he seems actually to praise (for providing him with a device with which to end The Magic Mountain) the war that was slaughtering millions and destroying the same high European culture that he needed to exist for his writing to have purpose. Mann’s greatest weakness as a writer was his difficulty in finding plots, and he ruthlessly annexed private events in his family’s lives for incidents in his stories and novels-deeply hurting his children, his brother, and his wife’s family, for his stature as a public figure in Germany inevitably led to speculation in the press about the originals for his characters.
But he could also be very funny: “My books,” he once observed, “are full of fun and music, and I am essentially a humorist.” The Magic Mountain was begun, Mann said in later years, as a sort of comic companion to Death in Venice: a short and lightly fictionalized account of a visit he made to a sanitarium, during which a slight flu was diagnosed as tuberculosis requiring an extended and expensive stay. But the novel grew and grew in his hands, taking 10 years and 700 pages to reach its conclusion in Hans Castorp’s departure from the sanitarium to fight in the war. Along the way, it became a book about many things: a young man’s initiation into life and love, the scientific pretense of medicine in treating a disease it didn’t understand, the desperate gaiety of social life in a hospital for the dying, the strange and almost timeless passage of time as experienced by those withdrawn from the “real” world, and (according to an interpretation of the novel by the American poet Howard Nemerov, singled out for praise by Mann himself) the universal quest for the grail of self-knowledge.
Despite its enormous ambitions, however, The Magic Mountain both holds together and remains comic throughout its 51 chapters. Indeed, though Mann resented interpretations of the novel as a satire, the energy of the humor is what unifies The Magic Mountain and drives it forward to its serious purpose. Wood’s new version of the novel enlivens what was deadened in the old Helen Lowe-Porter translation: the surprising wit and style, the sheer verve and joy in writing with which Mann unfolds his fable of European culture immediately before 1914. Even the highly symbolic characters, the Jewish- Jesuit reactionary Naphta and the Italian humanist revolutionary Settembrini, seem almost real people. Wood decided wrongly, I believe, to translate the extended French conversation of the famous Walpurgis Night seduction scene, for much of the humor and sexual charge in the encounter with Madame Chauchat over a hard, thin lead pencil depends upon the French within the German: $ IParler francais, Hans Castorp sighs, c’est parler sans parler. (“To speak French is to speak without speaking.”) But with his general success at capturing the humor of The Magic Mountain, Wood has given a new chance at life in English to what may be the last great traditional novel to attempt in a serious way to express the unity of European culture.
Perhaps the clearest way to get at the serious purpose of The Magic Mountain is to remember that all great novels take place at the same location: at the intersection of culture and narrative, at “the dark and bloody crossroads” (in Matthew Arnold’s much-quoted phrase) where the battle over culture’s self-understanding gets fought out. Born in 1875 — to the generation of German-language writers that included his own brother Heinrich, Franz Kafka, Robert Musil, and Hermann Hesse — Mann faced all the same problems of culture and narrative that drove his contemporaries to make the Modernist turn into absurdity, irony, and self-reference. He had “the gifts, but not the naivety, of a Balzac or a Dickens,” Hermann Hesse wrote in a perceptive 1901 review of Buddenbrooks. But Mann refused for the most part to become a Modernist in his fiction and sought instead the old-fashioned power of the artist to speak the moral truth about man and culture.
“Humanism is humiliated or dead,” he wrote in the early 1930s. “Consequence: We must establish it again.” Thomas Mann represents for us, I think, the last: the last true believer in high culture, the last heroic humanist, the last great writer to pledge his faith to the traditional novel — if only it be pursued with enough stern perseverance, enough single-minded conviction, enough scrupulous compunction.
And yet as Donald Prater’s widely acclaimed new biography, Thomas Mann: A Life (Oxford University Press, 554 pages, $ 35), reminds us — high culture, for all its greatness in Germany, did not prevent the slaughter of World War I, the decadence of Weimar, and the horror of the Nazis. For a brief period after World War II, it was the fashion for American and British pundits to mutter dark generalities about the “German soul” and sketch intellectual genealogies that claimed nearly every historic German artist or thinker as a father of Hitler. Thanks in part to the love many Jewish refugees kept for high German culture, the fashion mercifully passed quickly. (Among the most often accused, Hegel, Wagner, and Nietzsche seem to have recovered completely, though Heidegger has once again come under a shadow in recent years.)
Only in the most attenuated sense did German high culture cause Germany’s national sins in the 20th century — but the fact nonetheless remains that it could not stop them. Mann may represent the last good German, the last humanistic German, the last high German of the line of Goethe, Beethoven, and Kant: “Where I am, there is Germany,” he declared upon his arrival in America as a refugee from the Nazis, and though some laughed at the grandiosity of the statement, many thought it obviously true. But he represents as well the inability of everything that was best in Germany to resist the triumph of everything that was worst.
In his new biography, Prater takes on a difficult task in convincing us both that Mann’s mostly forgotten political writings deserve serious attention and that Mann was a closet supporter of leftist causes. Vague predictions of eventual European union and an unfocused wish for a reunited Germany after World War II were more common among non-Communist intellectuals than Prater seems to realize, and they reflect no special prescience on Mann’s part. During the early years of the Cold War, the elderly novelist undoubtedly said some mildly silly things about “finding a middle ground” between Communism and capitalism, but any attempt to depict him as a lover of socialism is doomed to failure.
In his political writings, Mann seems, in fact, that weakest and most delicate of all things: the non-religious social conservative, digging in his heels at each new cultural decline and crying, “Enough!” — all the while trying to explain the last decline. Mann had some religious grounding, and Protestantism plays a significant role in Doctor Faustus as the novelist seeks to express with religion (and especially religious music) the world from which Germany, in the person of the fictional composer Leverkuhn, fell away.
But for the most part, Mann sought in the preservation of high Enlightenment culture the religion he lacked — and as it slipped away, he felt himself, like Germany, more and more adrift. “Germanness is freedom, education, universality, and love — that they don’t know this, does not alter it,” he had Goethe declare in a fictional dialogue, The Beloved Returns.
His early conservatism, manifesting itself in support for the Kaiser and the 1914 German war effort, gave way in the 1920s to support for the Weimar Republic. After Mann expressed his encouragement for an “immoral” play written by his son, one German newspaper carried the satirical advertisement: “For sale by Thomas Mann, very cheap: a well-preserved conservative philosophy . . . and a father’s cane, scarcely used, exchange possible for a Jacobin’s cap in good condition.” But in truth Mann never ceased to fight for each new status quo as a defense against still worse changes. In one sense, his stand against the Nazis deserves great praise — as a non-Jew he could, like Heidegger, have stood in well with the new movement anxious for the prestige of famous supporters. But in another sense, his rejection of Nazisin was almost an inadvertent consequence of his constant rejection of every change in German society.
Even in his fiction, Mann always tends to speak of times past and social worlds long dead. Felix Krull — in which a con-man turns out to be (as all con-men must be) a strongly conservative supporter of a stratified society — is a delicious parody, but it is at last a parody of a 19th-century European world that had disappeared long before Mann came to write of it.
The Magic Mountain, the novel that explained the intellectual causes lead ing Europe to World War I, was finished only in 1924. Buddenbrooks, Death in: Venice, and Tonio Kroger all have deeply nostalgic resonances. Only in th e biblical and Egyptian fantasies of the Joseph novels is Mann set free fro m his desperate desire that things not change. The good, dull narrator of Doc tor Faustus, writing in Germany at the end of World War II, applauds the defe at of the Nazis, but the story he narrates is a story from the past set among t wo German social worlds — the rural peasants and the urban artists — that the Nazis and t he war swept away.
Prater gives a well-written, accessible, and lively account of the novelist’s long life as a celebrated writer. He notices the influence of the family history of suicide — two of Mann’s sisters, a sister-in-law, and two of his children — while properly refusing to make it a catchall explanation of Mann’s difficult personality. He shows us Mann’s private life, the original incidents and personalities Mann turned into fiction, and, best of all, he shows us Mann’s 50 years as a public man: quoted in the press on every and any topic of passing interest, but maintaining under difficult circumstances the integrity that led him at the peak of his fame to accept exile rather than Nazism. He shows us as well the self-conscious and melancholy sense of being the last — the last high German, the last Enlightenment figure, the last writer of artistic compunction-with which Mann always lived. His life work, Mann told one biographer, is “nothing more than a rapid recapitulation of the myth of the Western world and its cultural heritage before . . . the final curtain falls.”
Though Mann’s political judgments were often naive (“The Nazis as a party I hold to be a mischief that will soon pass,” he told an interviewer in 1930), his diagnoses of the deep causes of Germany’s diseases were often correct, and he fought those diseases heart and soul. His cultural fights were always lost, however, even as he gained personal fame for fighting them.
The chance exists that Mann’s fiction offers art a way back from the abyss of Modernism, and Wood’s new translation of The Magic Mountain and Prater’s biography may help in that endeavor. But for the reunified Germany that has already begun to dominate the European Union, Mann provides, I think, no believable way back from the shame of the Nazis to the glories of what was German high culture. Those glories are gone forever.
J. Bottum is associate editor of First Things.
