|
Thomas Mann
|
|
|
Thomas Mann
German author
born June 6, 1875, Lübeck, Ger.
died Aug. 12, 1955, near Zürich, Switz.
Main
German novelist and essayist whose early novels—Buddenbrooks (1900), Der
Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), and Der Zauberberg (1924; The
Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
Early literary endeavours
Mann’s father died in 1891, and Mann moved to Munich, a centre of art
and literature, where he lived until 1933. After perfunctory work in an
insurance office and on the editorial staff of Simplicissimus, a
satirical weekly, he devoted himself to writing, as his elder brother
Heinrich had already done. His early tales, collected as Der kleine Herr
Friedemann (1898), reflect the aestheticism of the 1890s but are given
depth by the influence of the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche
and the composer Wagner, to all of whom Mann was always to acknowledge a
deep, if ambiguous, debt. Most of Mann’s first stories centre in the
problem of the creative artist, who in his devotion to form contests the
meaninglessness of existence, an antithesis that Mann enlarged into that
between spirit (Geist) and life (Leben). But while he showed sympathy
for the artistic misfits he described, Mann was also aware that the
world of imagination is a world of make-believe, and the closeness of
the artist to the charlatan was already becoming a theme. At the same
time, a certain nostalgia for ordinary, unproblematical life appeared in
his work.
This ambivalence found full expression in his first novel,
Buddenbrooks, which Mann had at first intended to be a novella in which
the experience of the transcendental realities of Wagner’s music would
extinguish the will to live in the son of a bourgeois family. On this
beginning, the novel builds the story of the family and its business
house over four generations, showing how an artistic streak not only
unfits the family’s later members for the practicalities of business
life but undermines their vitality as well. But, almost against his
will, in Buddenbrooks Mann wrote a tender elegy for the old bourgeois
virtues.
In 1905 Mann married Katja Pringsheim. There were six children of the
marriage, which was a happy one. It was this happiness, perhaps, that
led Mann, in Royal Highness, to provide a fairy-tale reconciliation of
“form” and “life,” of degenerate feudal authority and the vigour of
modern American capitalism. In 1912, however, he returned to the tragic
dilemma of the artist with Death in Venice, a sombre masterpiece. In
this story, the main character, a distinguished writer whose nervous and
“decadent” sensibility is controlled by the discipline of style and
composition, seeks relaxation from overstrain in Venice, where, as
disease creeps over the city, he succumbs to an infatuation and the wish
for death. Symbols of eros and death weave a subtle pattern in the
sensuous opulence of this tale, which closes an epoch in Mann’s work.
World War I and political crisis
The outbreak of World War I evoked Mann’s ardent patriotism and awoke,
too, an awareness of the artist’s social commitment. His brother
Heinrich was one of the few German writers to question German war aims,
and his criticism of German authoritarianism stung Thomas to a bitter
attack on cosmopolitan litterateurs. In 1918 he published a large
political treatise, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, in which all his
ingenuity of mind was summoned to justify the authoritarian state as
against democracy, creative irrationalism as against “flat” rationalism,
and inward culture as against moralistic civilization. This work belongs
to the tradition of “revolutionary conservatism” that leads from the
19th-century German nationalistic and antidemocratic thinkers Paul Anton
de Lagarde and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the apostle of the
superiority of the “Germanic” race, toward National Socialism; and Mann
later was to repudiate these ideas.
With the establishment of the German (Weimar) Republic in 1919, Mann
slowly revised his outlook; the essays “Goethe und Tolstoi” and “Von
deutscher Republik” (“The German Republic”) show his somewhat hesitant
espousal of democratic principles. His new position was clarified in the
novel The Magic Mountain. Its theme grows out of an earlier motif: a
young engineer, Hans Castorp, visiting a cousin in a sanatorium in
Davos, abandons practical life to submit to the rich seductions of
disease, inwardness, and death. But the sanatorium comes to be the
spiritual reflection of the possibilities and dangers of the actual
world. In the end, somewhat skeptically but humanely, Castorp decides
for life and service to his people: a decision Mann calls “a
leave-taking from many a perilous sympathy, enchantment, and temptation,
to which the European soul had been inclined.” In this great work Mann
formulates with remarkable insight the fateful choices facing Europe.
World War II and exile
From this time onward Mann’s imaginative effort was directed to the
novel, scarcely interrupted by the charming personal novella Early
Sorrow or by Mario and the Magician, a novella that, in the person of a
seedy illusionist, symbolizes the character of Fascism. His literary and
cultural essays began to play an ever-growing part in elucidating and
communicating his awareness of the fragility of humaneness, tolerance,
and reason in the face of political crisis. His essays on Freud (1929)
and Wagner (1933) are concerned with this, as are those on Goethe
(1932), who more and more became for Mann an exemplary figure in his
wisdom and balance. The various essays on Nietzsche document with
particular poignancy Mann’s struggle against attitudes once dear to him.
In 1930 he gave a courageous address in Berlin, “Ein Appell an die
Vernunft” (“An Appeal to Reason”), appealing for the formation of a
common front of the cultured bourgeoisie and the Socialist working class
against the inhuman fanaticism of the National Socialists. In essays and
on lecture tours in Germany, to Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Amsterdam, and
elsewhere during the 1930s, Mann, while steadfastly attacking Nazi
policy, often expressed sympathy with socialist and communist principles
in the very general sense that they were the guarantee of humanism and
freedom.
When Hitler became chancellor early in 1933, Mann and his wife, on
holiday in Switzerland, were warned by their son and daughter in Munich
not to return. For some years his home was in Switzerland, near Zürich,
but he traveled widely, visiting the United States on lecture tours and
finally, in 1938, settling there, first at Princeton, and from 1941 to
1952 in southern California. In 1936 he was deprived of his German
citizenship; in the same year the University of Bonn took away the
honorary doctorate it had bestowed in 1919 (it was restored in 1949).
From 1936 to 1944 Mann was a citizen of Czechoslovakia. In 1944 he
became a U.S. citizen.
After the war, Mann visited both East Germany and West Germany
several times and received many public honours, but he refused to return
to Germany to live. In 1952 he settled again near Zürich. His last major
essays—on Goethe (1949), Chekhov (1954), and Schiller (1955)—are
impressive evocations of the moral and social responsibilities of
writers.
Later novels
The novels on which Mann was working throughout this period reflect
variously the cultural crisis of his times. In 1933 he published The
Tales of Jacob (U.S. title, Joseph and His Brothers), the first part of
his four-part novel on the biblical Joseph, continued the following year
in The Young Joseph and two years later with Joseph in Egypt, and
completed with Joseph the Provider in 1943. In the complete work,
published as Joseph and His Brothers, Mann reinterpreted the biblical
story as the emergence of mobile, responsible individuality out of the
tribal collective, of history out of myth, and of a human God out of the
unknowable. In the first volume a timeless myth seems to be reenacted in
the lives of the Hebrews. Joseph, however, though sustained by the
belief that his life too is the reenactment of a myth, is thrown out of
the “timeless collective” into Egypt, the world of change and history,
and there learns the management of events, ideas, and himself. Though
based on wide and scholarly study of history, the work is not a
historical novel, and the “history” is full of irony and humour, of
conscious modernization. Mann’s concern is to provide a myth for his own
times, capable of sustaining and directing his generation and of
restoring a belief in the power of humane reason.
Mann took time off from this work to write, in the same spirit, his
Lotte in Weimar (U.S. title, The Beloved Returns). Lotte Kestner, the
heroine of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, his
semi-autobiographical story of unrequited love and romantic despair,
visits Weimar in old age to see once again her old lover, now famous,
and win some acknowledgment from him. But Goethe remains distant and
refuses to reenter the past; she learns from him that true reverence for
man means also acceptance of and reverence for change, intelligent
activity directed to the “demand of the day.” In this, as in the Joseph
novels, in settings so distant from his own time, Mann was seeking to
define the essential principles of humane civilization; their spacious
and often humorous serenity of tone implicitly challenges the inhuman
irrationalism of the Nazis.
In Doktor Faustus, begun in 1943 at the darkest period of the war,
Mann wrote the most directly political of his novels. It is the life
story of a German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, born in 1885, who dies in
1940 after 10 years of mental alienation. A solitary, estranged figure,
he “speaks” the experience of his times in his music, and the story of
Leverkühn’s compositions is that of German culture in the two decades
before 1930—more specifically of the collapse of traditional humanism
and the victory of the mixture of sophisticated nihilism and barbaric
primitivism that undermine it. With imaginative insight Mann interpreted
the new musical forms and themes of Leverkühn’s compositions up to the
final work, a setting of the lament of Doctor Faustus in the
16th-century version of the Faust legend, who once, in hope, had made a
pact with the Devil, but in the end is reduced to hopelessness. The one
gleam of hope in this sombre work, however, in which the personal
tragedy of Leverkühn is subtly related to Germany’s destruction in the
war through the comments of the fictitious narrator, Zeitblom, lies in
its very grief.
The composition of the novel was fully documented by Mann in 1949 in
The Genesis of a Novel. Doktor Faustus exhausted him as no other work of
his had done, and The Holy Sinner and The Black Swan, published in 1951
and 1953, respectively, show a relaxation of intensity in spite of their
accomplished, even virtuoso style. Mann rounded off his imaginative work
in 1954 with The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, the light,
often uproariously funny story of a confidence man who wins the favour
and love of others by enacting the roles they desire of him.
Mann’s style is finely wrought and full of resources, enriched by
humour, irony, and parody; his composition is subtle and many-layered,
brilliantly realistic on one level and yet reaching to deeper levels of
symbolism. His works lack simplicity, and his tendency to set his
characters at a distance by his own ironical view of them has sometimes
laid him open to the charge of lack of heart. He was, however, aware
that simplicity and sentiment lend themselves to manipulation by
ideological and political powers, and the sometimes elaborate
sophistication of his works cannot hide from the discerning reader his
underlying impassioned and tender solicitude for mankind.
Assessment
Mann was the greatest German novelist of the 20th century, and by the
end of his life his works had acquired the status of classics both
within and without Germany. His subtly structured novels and shorter
stories constitute a persistent and imaginative enquiry into the nature
of Western bourgeois culture, in which a haunting awareness of its
precariousness and threatened disintegration is balanced by an
appreciation of and tender concern for its spiritual achievements. Round
this central theme cluster a group of related problems that recur in
different forms—the relation of thought to reality and of the artist to
society, the complexity of reality and of time, the seductions of
spirituality, eros, and death. Mann’s imaginative and practical
involvement in the social and political catastrophes of his time
provided him with fresh insights that make his work rich and varied. His
finely wrought essays, notably those on Tolstoy, Goethe, Freud, and
Nietzsche, record the intellectual struggles through which he reached
the ethical commitment that shapes the major imaginative works.
Roy Pascal
|
|
|
|
Doctor Faustus
Thomas Mann
1875-1955
Doctor Faustus tells the story of the rise and fall of the
musician Adrian Leverkuhn through the eyes of his friend Serenus
Zeitbloom. In this novel, Thomas Mann adapts the Faust myth to
suggest that Leverkiihn achieves his musical greatness as a
result of a pact with the devil. Interwoven with the narration
of this bargain and its repercussions is an exploration of how
and why Germany chose to ally itself with dark forces in its
embracing of fascism through Hitler.
Doctor Faustus engages with the ideas of many European
philosophers and thinkers, elaborating its own unique vision.
Particularly brilliant are Mann's meditations on the evolution
of musical theory over the course of the nineteenth and
twentieth centuries, including the advent of the twelve-tone
system of Arnold Schon berg, the composer on whom Leverkuhn is
partly based. Also in strong evidence is Mann's preoccupation
with the ruthless demands of creative life. Leverkuhn suffers
excruciating periods of pain, punctuated by short bouts of
breathtaking genius. Many of the finest passages are those that
explore the relationship between illness and creativity.
The novel's major achievement is its eloquent synthesis of
complex ideas on art, history, and politics, as well as its
elaborate meditation on the relationship between the artist and
society. The final description of Leverkiihn's fate is tinged
with the despair and isolation that Mann himself endured as he
pondered the future of his native Germany from the vantage point
of his exile in California.
|
|
|
|
|
Buddenbrooks
Thomas Mann
1875-1955
Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family is among the last and
greatest achievements of the European realist novel.The book
spans forty-odd years during the mid-nineteenth century.
Set in the Hanseatic city of Lubeck, it follows the fortunes of
one of the leading families of the ruling merchant class. Its
focus is on the growth of three siblings from childhood to
mid-life. Christian Buddenbrook, lacking the self-discipline (or
perhaps self-repression) required to become a businessman and
soiid citizen, performs instead the self-destructive role of
half-licensed fool. His elder brother Thomas adapts himself
fully, but at great physical and psychological cost, to his
position as head of the firm, Consul and Senator. Their sister
Tony passionately values the prestige of the family, but her
infelicitous adventures in love and marriage show that she is
incapable of playing the dutiful daughter and wife. The final
chapters are devoted to Thomas' son, Hanno, who inherits from
his Dutch mother an exceptional musical talent and an
estrangement from the masculine, public shows of the Hanseatic
state. With Hanno, we realize, the Buddenbrook line will take a
new direction, or come to its end.
The novel's tapestry of closely observed scenes is seemingly
inexhaustible—among them are family feasts and arguments,
deathbeds and childbirth, weddings, seaside holidays,
schoolrooms, and ship-launchings. Mann's detailed analysis of
the interplay between public and private self, and between a
declining ethic of civic and commercial propriety and a new
spirit of aesthetic self-cultivation, is remarkable, not only
for its subtlety and objectivity, but for the wider historical
resonances evoked by his characters and their fates.
|
|
BUDDENBROOKS
|
Type of work: Novel
Author: Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
Type of plot: Social chronicle
Time of plot: Nineteenth century
Locale: Germany
First published: Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie, 1901
(English translation, 1924)
|
An expose of decadence in a materialistic society, this chronicle
of a nineteenth century German industrial family follows its members
from their peak of wealth and power into gradual decay and eventual
ruin. Originally an exemplary family imbued with honesty, loyalty, and
strong traditions, they succumb slowly but surely to decadence. Mann
sees in a frail Hanno, the last of the Buddenbrook line, the culmination
of a symbolic clash between the antithetical forces of art and life.
|
|
Principal Characters
Johann Buddenbrook (yo'han boo'denbrok), the stout, rosy-faced,
benevolent-looking patriarch of the Buddenbrook family. He is the
wealthy, successful senior partner of a grain-trading firm inherited
from his father.
Johann (yo'han) Buddenbrook, Jr. (Jean, The Consul), his
serious-looking, aquiline-nosed, blond-bearded first son by his second
wife. Jean combines the sentimentalist and the businessman. He rejoices
over a happy family gathering, worries about the alienation of his half
brother, Gotthold, from the family, and then advises coolly that
Gotthold's request for money be denied because of likely future results
to both family and firm. Jean's pietism seems foreign to the other
Buddenbrooks, whose religion is superficial and confined to conventional
sentiments proper to people of their class.
Antonie (an'tone), (Tony) Buddenbrook, later Frau Grunlich and Frau
Permaneder, Jean's oldest child. She has ash-blonde hair, gray-blue
eyes, and finely shaped but stumpy hands. Impetuous in youth, she
becomes conventional in maturity, but to her brother Tom she always
remains a child in her reactions to the incidents in her life. She
easily adapts herself to any situation; she is not humiliated by the
dissolution of her marriage to Grunlich and is proud of the fact that
she becomes a person of importance in the family. She adapts as readily
to the breaking up of her marriage to Permaneder. As she develops a
closer intimacy with her father following her first divorce, she
recognizes and establishes closer ties with Tom after the death of their
father. She sees the two of them as true Buddenbrooks, for their brother
Christian does not really seem one of the family and young Clara remains
an unimportant sister. The retention of dignity for both herself and the
family becomes almost a religion with Tony.
Tom Buddenbrook, Jean's older son (modeled upon Thomas Mann's father). A
quick-witted, intelligent, even-tempered boy, he becomes a strong,
sturdy youth resembling his grandfather Johann. As he matures, he
develops a stocky, broad-shouldered figure and a military air. His
excessive clothes consciousness seems out of character for a
Buddenbrook. An earnest, responsible businessman, he is proud of his
burgher ancestry, and he contrasts his own desire to preserve the family
name with the lack of imagination and idealism shown by Gotthold, his
half brother. He is increasingly disgusted with Christian's business
irresponsibility and his reputation as a strange kind of clown. He
cannot forgive Christian's joking in public that all businessmen are
swindlers. In his prime Tom is more aggressive than the earlier
Buddenbrooks, but occasionally a little less scrupulous. His
participation in public affairs and his interest in culture set him
somewhat apart from his ancestors and his business associates. Early in
his forties, he becomes increasingly aware that he has grown prematurely
old, and he thinks more and more of death. At forty-eight he feels that
death is stalking him. He dies not many months later following a fall in
a snowy street after the partial extraction of a rotted tooth.
Christian (kris'tean) Buddenbrook, Jean's younger son. A born mimic, he
is a moody, whimsical, sometimes extravagantly silly boy. As a youth he
first betrays his weakness for pretty women and his deep interest in the
theater. During an eight-year absence from home, principally in South
America, he becomes lean and pallid, his large humped nose more
prominent, his neck thinner, his hair sparse. Through association with
Englishmen abroad he himself has grown to look like an Englishman. His
self-absorption and his lack of dignity in his social manners disturb
Tom Buddenbrook's sense of propriety. Christian becomes more and more a
neurotic and a hypochondriac as he ages. After Tom's death Christian
marries his mistress, who not long afterward has to put him in a mental
institution. Like Tom's son Hanno, he symbolizes the decay of the
Buddenbrook family.
Frau Consul Elizabeth Kroger (frou konsool' a-le'sa-bat kroe'ger)
Buddenbrook, the wife of Jean Buddenbrook. A woman of the world and a
lover of life, she becomes well known in her later years for her piety
and her numerous charities. After a long life with her family, she dies
of pneumonia.
Clara (cla'ra) Buddenbrook, the fourth and youngest child of Jean and
Elizabeth. Hawk-nosed, dark-haired, and firm-mouthed, she is at times
haughty. She marries Pastor Tiburtius, a minister from Riga, and dies
childless a few years later.
Gotthold (got'hold) Buddenbrook, the elder Johann's unambitious son by
his first wife. Having angered his father by a disapproved marriage and
by becoming a shopkeeper, he is thereafter shunned by the family. He
resents the favored treatment accorded his half brother Jean. After his
father's death Gotthold retires and lives on the income from his
inheritance and the sale of his shop. He dies at sixty of a heart
attack.
Gerda Arnoldsen (gar'da ar'nold-sen) Buddenbrook, an aristocratic Dutch
heiress who attends school with Tony. Her immense dowry later influences
Tom's decision to marry her, though he declares to his mother at the
time that he loves Gerda. The marriage is a happy one, but Gerda
(perhaps modeled in part on Thomas Mann's mother), with her high degree
of refinement, her detached nature, and her intense interest in music,
remains somewhat a stranger among the Buddenbrooks.
Little Johann, or Hanno (han'no), Buddenbrook, the pathetic, sickly son
of Tom and Gerda. He shares his mother's love of music and she thinks
him a precocious genius. He dies in his teens of typhoid fever. Like his
Uncle Christian, Hanno symbolizes the decadence of the family, and with
his death the family itself comes to an end, for no male is left to
carry on the Buddenbrook name.
Bendix Grunlich (ben'diks grun'Hsh), Tony's first husband, a well-do-do
Hamburg merchant and a pink-faced, blue-eyed, golden-whiskered,
obsequious flatterer and rascal. His bogus charm takes in Jean, who
urges Tony to marry him despite her disgust for him. When his impending
bankruptcy later leads him to seek money from Jean, Buddenbrook angrily
discovers that Grunlich, even before marrying Tony, had unscrupulously
capitalized on his supposed connection with the family. A divorce
follows shortly after Tony's return to her parents' home with her
daughter.
Morten Schartzkopf (mor'ten scharts'kopf), a charming, serious-minded,
liberal-thinking but naive medical student whose brief romance with Tony
is broken up when Grunlich reports to Morten's father a prior claim on
Tony.
Alois Permaneder (a'lo-es per'ma-nader), Tony's second husband, a
bullet-headed, walrus-like, fat-cheeked, man of forty, a Munich brewer.
Vulgar in speech and desirous of an easy life, he gets no sympathy from
Tony regarding his decision to retire from the brewing business to live
on his income from rents and investments. After Tony finds him one night
drunkenly forcing his attentions on Babette, the cook, she leaves him.
When she seeks a divorce, he willingly agrees to it and returns her
dowry because he has no need of it.
Erica Grunlich (a'ri-ka grun'Hsh), the daughter of Tony and her first
husband. Tall, fresh-colored, pretty, healthy, and strong, she is
occasionally inclined to melancholy moods. Her marriage, after the birth
of a daughter, ends in disaster.
Hugo Weinschenk (hoo'go wln'shank), Erica's husband, a crude, pompous,
self-made man, the middle-aged Silesian director of a fire insurance
company. Convicted of unscrupulous business practices, he goes to
prison. Upon his release and after a brief visit with the Buddenbrooks,
he disappears.
Friederick Wilhelm Marcus (fre'derik wllhelm mar'kos), Jean's
confidential clerk. After Jean's death he becomes a junior partner in
the Buddenbrook firm. His conservatism counteracts Tom's occasional
tendency to overstretch himself.
|
|
The Story
In the year 1875, the Buddenbrook family was at its peak. Johann had
maintained intact the business and wealth he had inherited from his
father, and the Buddenbrook name was held in high esteem. Johann's
oldest son, Jean, inherited the business when old Johann died. Antonie,
Jean's first child, was born in the family home on Mengstrasse. Tony was
an aristocrat by nature and temperament. The next child was Tom,
followed by Christian, who seemed peculiar in his manners from birth.
Tom displayed an early interest in the Buddenbrook business, but
Christian seemed indifferent to all family responsibilities.
Tony grew into a beautiful woman. One day Herr Grunlich came to call on
the family. Because of his obvious interest in Tony, Jean investigated
Griinlich's financial status. The headstrong girl, however, despised
Grunlich and his obsequious manner. Having gone to the seashore to avoid
meeting Grunlich when he called again, she fell in love with a young
medical student named Morten Schartzkopf. Learning of Tony's interest in
the student, Jean and Frau Buddenbrook hurried their daughter home, and
Tony was too much bred with a sense of her family duties to ignore their
arguments in favor of Grunlich when he asked for her hand. Her wedding
date set, Grunlich received a promise of a dowry of eighty thousand
marks. Grunlich, after taking his twenty-year-old bride to the country,
would not allow her to call on any of her city friends. Although she
complained in her letters to her parents, Tony resigned herself to
obeying her husband's wishes.
Tom held an important position in the business which was still amassing
money for the Buddenbrooks. Christian's early distaste for business and
his ill health had given him the privilege of going to South America.
When Griinlich found his establishment floundering, his creditors urged
him to send to his father-in-law for help. Jean Buddenbrook learned then
of Griinlich's motive in marrying Tony; the Buddenbrook reputation had
placed Griinlich's already failing credit upon a sounder basis.
Actually, Griinlich was a poor man who was depending upon Jean's concern
for Tony to keep his son-in-law from financial failure. Tony herself
assured her father that she hated Griinlich but that she did not wish to
endure the hardships that bankruptcy would entail.
Jean brought Tony and his granddaughter, Erica Griinlich, back to the
Buddenbrook home. The divorce, based on Griinlich's fraudulent handling
of Tony's dowry, was easily arranged.
Jean Buddenbrook loved his family dearly and firmly believed in the
greatness of the Buddenbrook heritage. Tony was once again happy in her
father's home, although she bore her sorrows like a cross for everyone
to notice and revere. Tom had grown quite close to his sister, who took
pride in his development and in the progress of the Buddenbrook firm.
Christian, having failed in his enterprises in South America, had
returned home. His father gave him a job and an office which Christian
hated and avoided. His manners were still peculiar and his health poor.
Serious Tom handled the business as well as Jean, and he remained fixed
in his attachment to family customs. When Jean died and left the
business to Tom, Tony felt that the family had lost its strongest tie.
Tom, too, was greatly affected by his father's death, but the
responsibility of his financial burdens immediately became of foremost
importance.
Because Christian could not adjust himself to Buddenbrook interests, the
ever-patient Tom sent him to Munich for his health. Reports from Munich
that he was seen often in the company of a notoriously loose actress
distressed his family. Then Tom made a satisfactory marriage with the
daughter of a wealthy businessman. Gerda, whose dowry added to the
Buddenbrook fortune, was an attractive woman who loved music. Parties
were once more held at the Buddenbrook mansion on Mengstrasse.
Tony returned from a trip with hopes that a man whom she had met while
traveling would come to call. Soon, Herr Permaneder did call. He was a
successful beer merchant in Munich. Tom and Frau Buddenbrook thought
that Permaneder, in spite of his crude manners and strange dialect,
would make a satisfactory husband for Tony. Fortified with her second,
smaller dowry, Tony went to Munich as Frau Permaneder. She sent Erica
off to boarding school.
Once again Tony wrote passionate appeals to her family complaining of
her married life. Finally she came home, weeping because Permaneder had
betrayed her by making love to a servant. Tom protested against a second
divorce, but Tony insisted. Prevailing upon Tom to write to Permaneder,
Tony was surprised to learn that her husband would not fight the
proceedings, that he felt the marriage had been a mistake, and that he
would return Tony's dowry which he did not need.
Tom and Gerda had produced a son to carry on the family name. Little
Johann, or Hanno, as he was called, inherited his mother's love for
music, but he was pale and sickly from birth. Tom tried to instill in
his son a love for the family business, but Hanno was too shy to respond
to his father.
The death of Frau Buddenbrook brought Christian, Tony, and Tom together
to haggle over the inheritance. Christian demanded his money, but Tom,
as administrator, refused. Infuriated, Christian quarreled bitterly with
Tom, all the pent-up feeling of the past years giving vent to a torrent
of abuse against the cold, mercenary actions of Tom Buddenbrook.
Tom was not mercenary. He worked hard and faithfully, but despite his
efforts the business had declined much in the past few years because of
economic changes. In poor health, he felt that sickly Christian would
outlive him.
Although Tony found a fine husband for her daughter, even the marriage
of Erica and Herr Weinschenk was destined to end in disaster. Herr
Weinschenk was caught indulging in some foul business practices and went
to jail for three years. Accustomed to public scandal, Tony bore that
new hardship with forbearance. Erica also adopted her mother's attitude.
Suddenly, Tom died. He had fallen in the snow, to be brought to his bed
and die, a few hours later, babbling incoherently. His loss was greater
to Tony than to any of the others. Christian, arriving from Munich for
the funeral, had grown too concerned over his own suffering to show
grief over the death of his brother. Gerda felt her own sorrow deeply,
for her marriage with Tom had been a true love match.
After the will had been read, Christian returned to Munich to marry the
mistress whom Tom's control had prevented him from marrying. Soon
afterward, Christian's wife wrote to Tony that his illness had poisoned
his mind. She had placed Christian in an institution.
Life at the Buddenbrook home continued. Little Hanno, growing up in a
household of women, never gained much strength. Thin and sickly at
fifteen years old, he died during a typhoid epidemic.
So passed the last of the Buddenbrooks. From the days of the first
Johann, whose elegance and power had produced a fine business and a
healthy, vigorous lineage, to the last pitiably small generation which
died with Hanno, the Buddenbrooks had decayed into nothing.
|
|
Critical Evaluation
Buddenbrooks was Thomas Mann's first novel, and it was a great success.
It is still one of his most popular works and has enjoyed international
fame. Though not as complex or problematic as his later novels, it
develops most of the major themes that came to occupy him throughout his
career. The work had originally been planned as a novella about the boy
Hanno Buddenbrook, but in assembling the material, Mann found himself
compelled to trace the story back four generations. Thus, the novel
became a family chronicle with a broad social milieu, a type of novel
rare in German literature, which has tended to concentrate on the
Bildungsroman, or novel of development, a form that traces the growth of
a single character. Buddenbrooks further departs from the tradition in
that it reverses the emphasis on growth and development to concentrate
on decay and decadence. In this, it represents a typical aspect of
Mann's work, the fascination with the conflict between the life force
and the death wish, especially as it appears in the artist type. Mann's
artist figures are the product of robust bourgeois stock, families whose
drive for work and achievement has led to prosperity and comfort. As the
family, however, attains greater refinement and sensitivity, the life
force slackens. At this stage, the artist figure appears, estranged from
the bourgeois world and its values and curiously drawn toward disease
and death. It is no accident that several of Mann's works take place in
sanato-riums, or that typhus, syphilis, and tuberculosis figure
prominently in his work.
The importance of this theme is perhaps best explained by the fact that
it is essentially autobiographical, and Buddenbrooks is the most
thoroughly autobiographical of Mann's novels. Every character in it can
be traced to an actual prototype; the people of Liibeck were quite
shocked when the novel appeared and protested what amounted to an
invasion of privacy. The streets and houses, the seashore and the
countryside were all identifiable as actual places, and the Buddenbrooks
are, in fact, the Mann family. Yet Mann is obviously not Hanno, although
parallels may be drawn—Thomas Mann was an artist, working in words
rather than in music, and he rejected his family, a middle-class career,
and the expectations of his community. He had left Liibeck for Italy,
where, in fact, he began to write the Buddenbrooks chronicle. Thus, the
stuff of the novel was intensely personal to him. Despite the
autobiographical aspect, Mann has carefully structured the work so that
the process of family decay proceeds in a clear and almost inevitable
movement, by stages through the four generations, gathering momentum and
expressing itself simultaneously in the business fortunes, physical
characteristics, mannerisms, and psychological makeup of the four eldest
sons, Johann, Jean, Thomas, and Hanno.
At each stage there is both a descent and an ascent.
Vitality and physical vigor decline and the business skill likewise is
lost, as is evidenced by the steadily declining capital. This external
decline, however, reflected even in such details as increasing
susceptibility to tooth decay, is counterbalanced by an increase in
sensitivity, an inclination toward art and metaphysics, and an
increasingly active interior life. Johann may indeed play the flute—a
necessary social grace for the eighteenth century gentleman—but he is
not given to introspection. He lives to a ripe old age, and although he
is an honest man, he has no scruples about the propriety of business and
profit, and he has a sure sense of investment. His son Jean is far more
concerned with moral principles, and business is no longer for him a
natural drive but a responsibility. His health is diminished, and his
life shorter, but his capacity for artistic enjoyment and religious
emotion is greater. A tension between inner and outer begins to manifest
itself, which becomes evident in Thomas. In him. refinement becomes
elegance, and an inclination for the exotic manifests itself in his
choice of a wife. Yet the strain of preserving his exterior form—a new
house, high social position, and the fortunes of the business—show in
his weakened physical constitution and in his attraction, late in his
short life, to the philosophy of Schopenhauer, in which he sees the
possibility of the dissolution of his embattled individuality into an
eternal impersonal spiritual existence. Hanno, the last of the
Buddenbrooks, dies while he is still a youth, his life filled with pain
but rich in its inner creativity, expressed in his Wagnerian flights of
musical composition. For Mann, Wagner was always linked with decadence
and the death wish.
Many of the elements of this sequence recur in Mann's other works,
especially his early works; the family is instantly recognizable. It is
also clear that Mann is absorbed by the psychological development of his
figures. The novel dwells more and more intensely on the inner states of
the later characters. Hanno, the starting point of Mann's conception,
retains a disproportionately large share of the novel's pages and
remains one of Mann's most engaging and memorable creations. Yet it is
also clear that Mann, for all of his understanding and sympathy toward
the artistically inclined temperaments of the declining Buddenbrook
family, drew a clear line between that sympathy and his own allegiance.
Not only does he dwell on the increasingly difficult lives and demeaning
deaths of the later characters—the eloquent and self-possessed Thomas
collapsing and dying in a pool of filth on the street, Hanno's dying
suddenly of typhus—but, in the case of Hanno, he also unequivocally
attributes the death to a failure of the will to live. In one of the
most remarkable chapters of the book, the narrator, who has generally
retained his objectivity in chronicling the fortunes of the family,
describes the course of a typical case of typhus, raising it to a
mythical encounter between life and death:
At the crisis, the victim may either exert his will to live, and return,
or proceed onward on the path to self-dissolution in death. Hanno, whose
music has expressed this longing for release from the demands of life to
which he is not equal, takes the latter course and dies. Here, any
similarity between Mann and his characters ends. Although Mann as an
artist felt himself estranged from the social world of the bourgeoisie,
for him, unlike Hanno, art became the means by which he could retain his
focus on life. Buddenbrooks may describe a family's loss of the will to
live, but in so doing, it affirms the writer's most profound love of
life.
|
|
|
|
Death in Venice
Thomas Mann
1875-1955
When renowned author Gustave von Aschenbach. with
uncharacteristic spontaneity, travels to Venice his attention is
captivated by a young boy whose blond curls and exquisite
proportions seem to embody the Greek ideal of beauty. Watching
Tadzic soon becomes the focus of Aschenbach's days; and then, of
his existence. On board the ship to Venice, Aschenbach looks on
with horror as a simpering old man with a painted face mingles
with a group of young men. But by the close of the story,
Aschenbach has become that man, as, intoxicated, he pursues
Tadzio through the passages anc canals of an infected city.
Death in Venice, as Manr maintained, is about the artist's loss
of dignity, but Mann also examines the relationship between art
and life. Aschenbach believes that with labor and discipline he
can master life and even mold it into art. But Tadzio's
Dionysus, inspiring unstructured emotion and unruly
passion,forces him to recognize the fallacy of that
conviction.The mythical elements of the novel offer a context
for the portrayal of homosexuality. Written with subtlety and
profound psychological insight, Death in Venice is a vivic
account of what it is like to fall in love.
The novella was perhaps Mann's ideal artistic form (Death in
Venice runs to a mere seventy pages from the first hints of
foreboding to the final pathetic climax, this is a masterwork of
its genre.
|
|
DEATH IN VENICE
|
Type of work: Novella
Author: Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
Type of plot: Symbolic realism
Time of plot: Early twentieth century
Locale: Italy
First published: Der Tod in Venedig, 1912 (English translation,
1925)
|
This novella of great psychological intensity and tragic power is
permeated by the rich and varied symbolism of Mann's many conflicting
themes—being and death, youth and age, sickness and health, beauty and
decay, love and suffering, art and life, the German North and the
Mediterranean South. The story of a middle-aged artist whose character
deteriorates because of his hopeless passion for a young Polish boy, and
whose death is the final irony of his emotional upheaval, Death in
Venice examines under standingly and critically the solitary position of
the artist in modern society and uses the infatuation with the boy to
dramatize symbolically the narcissism which can be one of the fatal
qualities of art.
|
|
Principal Characters
Gustave von Aschenbach (goo'staf fon a'shen-bach'), a middle-aged German
writer. Small, dark, his bushy gray hair (thinning on top) is brushed
back on his over-large head. His mouth is large, his cheeks lean and
furrowed, and his prominent chin slightly cleft. He wears rimless gold
glasses on his thick, aristocratically hooked nose, and his eyes are
weary and sunken. A widower, he has one child, a married daughter.
Precocious, Aschenbach early longed for fame, which he has achieved
through several works acclaimed by the general public and the critics as
well. He is not a born artist but has made himself one through rigorous
discipline and unwavering dedication. A solitary man, he has only a
superficial, limited knowledge of the real world. In cultivating his
intellect he has denied his feelings. His passion for Tadzio is symbolic
of his narcissism, which first degrades and then destroys him.
Aschenbach is a symbol of the artist in modern society.
Tadzio (tad'tsi-б), a Polish boy of fourteen who possesses a perfect
Greek classic beauty of face and form. To Aschenbach his beautiful head
seems that of Eros and the boy himself the essence of beauty. When
Aschenbach almost touches Tadzio and then draws back in panic, the
action symbolizes the artist's fear of giving way to an emotion.
Sometimes the artist sees in Tadzio the youth Hyacinth, who died the
victim of the rivalry of two gods. When after many days Tadzio finally
smiles at Aschenbach, the smile is that of Narcissus looking in the
pool, and the artist whispers his love. Tadzio's is the last face the
artist sees before he dies.
A Stranger. Thin, beardless, snub-nosed, red-haired, freckled, and
exotic-looking, he seems to Aschenbach to be bold, domineering, even
ruthless.
Another Stranger, an old man masquerading as a youth on an old, dingy
Italian ship. He is flashily dressed, his face and eyes are wrinkled,
his cheeks rouged, his brown hair and yellow teeth false, and his
turned-up mustaches and imperial are dyed. He becomes disgustingly drunk
before the ship reaches Venice. When Aschen-bach's desperate passion for
Tadzio consumes him he, like the painted stranger, tries foolishly to
hide his age.
A Strolling Player, a pale, thin-faced, snub-nosed, red-haired man of
slight build whose singing is entertaining but obscene and who carries
with him an odor of carbolic acid.
A Gondolier. Undersized, brutish-looking, an expert boatman, he is gruff
and rude, and he disappears before Aschenbach returns with change to pay
him. The gondolier represents Charon, and the artist's ride in the
gondola portends his death in Venice.
|
|
The Story
Gustave von Aschenbach was a distinguished German writer whose work had
brought him world fame and a patent of nobility from a grateful
government. His career had been honorable and dignified. A man of
ambitious nature, unmarried, he had lived a life of personal discipline
and dedication to his art, and in his portrayal of heroes who combined
the forcefulness of a Frederick the Great with the selfless striving of
a Saint Sebastian he believed that he had spoken for his race as well as
for the deathless spirit of man. At the same time, his devotion to the
ideals of duty and achievement had brought him close to physical
collapse.
One day, after a morning spent at his desk, he left his house in Munich
and went for a walk. His stroll took him as far as a cemetery on the
outskirts of the city. While he waited for a streetcar to carry him back
to town, he suddenly became aware of a man who stood watching him from
the doorway of the mortuary chapel. The stranger, who had a rucksack on
his back and walking staff in his hand, was evidently a traveler.
Although no word passed between the watcher and the watched, Aschenbach
felt a sudden desire to take a trip, to leave the cold, wet German
spring for the warmer climate of the Mediterranean lands. His impulse
was strengthened by a problem of technique which he had been unable to
solve in his writing. At last, reluctantly, he decided to take a holiday
and leave his work for a time in order to find relaxation for mind and
body in Italy.
He went first to an island resort in the Adriatic, but before long, he
became bored with his surroundings and booked passage for Venice. On the
ship, he encountered a party of lively young clerks from Pola. With them
was an old man whose dyed hair and rouged cheeks made him a ridiculous
but sinister caricature of youth. In his disgust, Aschenbach failed to
notice that the raddled old man bore a vague resemblance to the traveler
he had seen at the cemetery in Munich.
Aschenbach's destination was Lido. At the dock in Venice, he transferred
to a gondola which took him by the water route to his Lido hotel. The
gondolier spoke and acted so strangely that Aschenbach became disturbed,
and because of his agitation he never noticed that the man looked
something like the drunk old scarecrow on the ship and the silent
stranger at the cemetery. After taking his passenger to the landing
stage, the gondolier, without waiting for his money, hastily rowed away.
Other boatmen suggested that he might have been afraid of the law
because he had no license.
Aschenbach stayed at the Hotel des Bains. That night, shortly before
dinner, his attention was drawn to a Polish family—a beautiful mother,
three daughters, and a handsome boy of about fourteen. Aschenbach was
unaccountably attracted to the youngster, so much so that he continued
to watch the family throughout his meal. The next morning, he saw the
boy playing with some companions on the beach. His name, as Aschenbach
learned while watching their games, was Tadzio.
Disturbed by the appeal the boy had for him, the writer announced his
intention of returning home. On his arrival at the railroad station in
Venice, however, he discovered that his trunks had been misdirected to
Como. Since there was nothing for him to do but to wait for his missing
luggage to turn up, he went back to the hotel. Although he despised
himself for his vacillation, he realized that his true desire was to be
near Tadzio. For Aschenbach there began a period of happiness and
anguish, happiness in watching the boy, anguish in that they must remain
strangers. One day he almost summoned up enough courage to speak to the
youngster. A moment later, he became panic stricken for fear that Tadzio
might be alarmed by the older man's interest. The time Aschenbach had
set for his holiday passed, but the writer had almost forgotten his home
and his work. One evening, Tadzio smiled at him as they passed each
other. Aschenbach trembled with pleasure.
Guests began to leave the hotel; there were rumors that a plague had
broken out in nearby cities. While loitering one day on the piazza,
Aschenbach detected the sweetish odor of disinfectant in the air, for
the authorities were beginning to take precautions against an outbreak
of the plague in Venice. Aschenbach stubbornly decided to stay on
despite the dangers of infection.
A band of entertainers came to the hotel to serenade the guests. In the
troupe was an impudent, disreputable-looking street singer whose antics
and ballads were insulting and obscene. As he passed among the guests to
collect money for the performance, Aschenbach detected on his clothing
the almost overpowering smell of disinfectant, an odor suggesting the
sweetly corruptive taints of lust and death. The ribald comedian also
had a strange similarity to the gondolier, the rouged old rake, and the
silent traveler whose disturbing presence had given Aschenbach the idea
for his holiday. Aschenbach was torn between fear and desire. The next
day, he went to a tourist agency where a young clerk told him that
people were dying of the plague in Venice. Even that confirmation of his
fears failed to speed Aschenbach's departure from the city. That night,
he dreamed that in a fetid jungle, surrounded by naked orgiasts, he was
taking part in horrible, Priapean rites.
By that time his deterioration was almost complete. At last he allowed a
barber to dye his hair and tint his cheeks, but he still refused to see
the likeness between himself and the raddled old fop whose appearance
had disgusted him on shipboard. His behavior became more reckless. One
afternoon, he followed the Polish family into Venice and trailed them
through the city streets. Hungry and thirsty after his exercise, he
bought some overripe strawberries at an open stall and ate them. The
odor of disinfectant was strong on the sultry breeze.
Several days later, Aschenbach went down to the beach where Tadzio was
playing with three or four other boys. They began to fight, and one of
the boys threw Tadzio to the ground and pressed his face into the sand.
As Aschenbach was about to interfere, the other boy released his victim.
Humiliated and hurt, Tadzio walked down to the water. He stood facing
seaward for a time, as remote and isolated as a young Saint Sebastian,
and then he turned and looked with a somber, secret gaze at Aschenbach,
who was watching from his beach chair. To the writer it seemed as though
the boy were summoning him. He started to rise but became so giddy that
he fell back into his chair. Attendants carried him to his room. That
night the world learned that the great Gustave von Aschenbach had died
suddenly of the plague in Venice.
|
|
Critical Evaluation
Thomas Mann is ranked with James Joyce and Marcel Proust as one of the
greatest writers of the early twentieth century. Mann was born into a
wealthy German family. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in
1919. In 1933, he left Germany because of his opposition to Hitler and
the Nazi party. He later came to the United States, where he taught and
lectured. A scholar as well as an artist, Mann shows in his works the
influence of such diverse thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Arthur
Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Sigmund Freud. The problem of the
artist's role in a decadent, industrialized society is a recurring theme
in many of his works, such as Buddenbrooks (1901), Tonio Kroger (1903),
Death in Venice (1912), and The Magic Mountain (1924).
Death in Venice, Mann's best-known novella, is a complex, beautifully
wrought tale dealing with the eternal conflict of the forces of death
and decay with man's attempts to achieve permanence through art. Mann
portrays the final triumph of death and decay, but not before the hero,
Aschenbach, has experienced an escape into the eternal beauty created by
the imagination of the artist. The escape of the famous writer,
Aschenbach, is accomplished, however, not by his own writings, but by
the art of his creator, Thomas Mann. Form and order do finally impose
themselves on the chaos of his life; corruption and death are
transformed into the purity of artistic beauty. To accomplish this, Mann
utilizes an elaborate technical skill in structure, characterization,
and symbolism which establishes him among the great writers of Western
literature.
The characterization of Aschenbach, the literary hero of his age, is
subtle and complex. Author of prose epics, philosophical novels, novels
of moral resolution, and aesthetics, Aschenbach has created the hero for
his generation. He is aware that his success and talent rely on a basis
of physical stamina as well as moral and mental discipline; his key word
is durchhalten (endure). His work is a product of strain, endurance,
intellectual tenacity, and spasms of will. He recognizes, however, that
his writing has been to some degree a "pursuit of fame" at the expense
of turning his back on a full search for truth. As the novella opens,
Aschenbach, exhausted, finding no more joy in his craft, and aware of
approaching old age and death, is faced with the fear of not having time
to finish all the works he desired to write. Restlessly walking amid the
beauty of the English Garden of Munich, Aschenbach is inspired to leave
his relatively rootless life on a pilgrimage for artistic renewal in
Venice, the perfect symbol of man's art imposed on nature's chaos. This
journey motif begins with his glimpse of a stranger, a foreigner with a
skull-like face and a certain animal ruthlessness, in a cemetery.
Arriving at the port of Venice, he discovers he is being taken out to
sea, rather than into the city, by his gondolier, a figure whose
physical description ominously echoes that of the stranger of the
cemetery. The gondola itself is specifically compared to a black coffin.
The trip, then, becomes the archetypal journey of life to death and of
man into the depths of himself. Aschenbach discovers Venice, the symbol
of perfect art in his memory, to be dirty, infected, corrupt, permeated
by the odor of the human disease and pollution spread in the natural
swamp on which the artifice is built. Aschenbach's own transformation to
a "foreigner," one who belongs in Venice, is accomplished at an
increasingly mad tempo after the moment when, turning his back on the
possibility of escaping from Venice by train, he collapses at a fountain
in the heart of the city. His death becomes almost self-willed; he dies
not because of the plague, not because of his love of Tadzio, but
because of his will to live and to create atrophy.
The exterior events of the story, which are minimal, can be properly
explained only in terms of the inner conflict of the artist. To produce
art, Aschenbach believes he must practice absolute self-denial,
affirming the dignity and moral capacity of man in the face of a world
of self-indulgence that leads to personal abasement. Yet the artist is
also a man and, as such, has drives connecting him to the chaos of the
formless elements of nature. This inner conflict is objectified in the
boy Tadzio, who embodies all that Aschenbach has rejected in fifty long
years of dedication to Apollonian art. As his desire for Tadzio becomes
obsessive, disintegration sets in and death becomes irrevocable.
Subconsciously. Aschenbach is choosing to pursue the sensual, Dionysian
side of himself that he has always denied.
Mann uses dream visions to underline and clarify the subconscious
conflicts of Aschenbach. Aschenbach's first hallucination of the
crouching beast in the jungle is evoked by the glimpse of the stranger
at the Byzantine chapel in Munich. This vision literally foreshadows the
trip to Venice and metaphorically foreshadows the inner journey where
Aschenbach discovers the jungle and beast within himself. The second
vision on the beach in Venice, cast in the form of a Platonic dialogue,
explores the interre-latedness of art, love, and beauty with the bestial
in man. In a third major dream, Aschenbach is initiated into the worship
of the Dionysian rite and finally glimpses "the stranger god" of sensual
experience, of formless, chaotic joy, and excesses of emotion. The most
striking vision occurs at the end of the novella, when Aschenbach.
viewing the amoral beauty of perfection of form in Tadzio silhouetted
against the amoral, formless beauty of the sea, accepts the promise
inherent in the sea's chaos as the equivalent of the beauty produced by
order and moral discipline. The reader assumes the vision to be
objective reality until he is brought sharply and suddenly into the
present reality of Aschenbach's dead body. Ernest Hemingway used this
same technique later in his own novella-length study of death and art
"The Snows of Kilimanjaro." Mann's use of natural, geographical symbols
also underlines the central conflicts of the novella. Aschenbach
identifies the discipline of his art with Munich, a city of northern
Europe, and with the snowy mountains. These places are associated with
health, energy, reason, will, and Apollonian creative power. Against
them, Mann juxtaposes the tropical marshes, the jungle animal and plant
life, the Indian plague, the sun and the sea, which are associated with
Dionysian excesses of emotion and ecstasy in art. The beast, the jungle,
the plague, the chaos lie within the nature of man and art just as
clearly as do the mountain, self-denial, will, and reason, qualities
which enable man to construct artifice upon the chaos of nature. Great
art, Nietzsche says in The Birth of Tragedy, is a product of the fusion
rather than the separation of the calm, ordered, contemplative spirit of
Apollo and the savage, sensual ecstasy of Dionysius. This is what both
Aschenbach and the reader discover in Mann's great work Death in Venice.
|
|
|
|
The Magic Mountain
Thomas Mann
1875-1955
The Magic Mountain opens with Hans Castorp making the journey
from Hamburg to a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss
mountains. The first three weeks of what was supposed to be a
temporary visit pass by achingly slowly. But Castorp is soon
seduced by the repetitive, strangely enchanted existence of the
patients. His imagination is caught by a series of vividly drawn
characters who come to recuperate, and to die, on the mountain.
The novel belongs to the bildungsroman tradition, though
Castorp's initiation is not into the world of action and
events—the clamor of the approaching world war is consigned to
somewhere below the quiet of the sanatorium—but into the world
of ideas. Mann uses the debates between patients as a way of
exploring the philosophical and political concerns of his time:
humanism versus the very real threat of absolutism. Castorp must
also struggle to understand what it means to fall in love in a
place marked by illness and death—the Iroublingly intimate
memento that Clavdia Chauchat confers upon her lover is an X-ray
photograph of herclouded lungs.
The prospect of his return to the flatland is deferred, and as
the weeks stretch into months and then Into years, time seems
not to pass by at all. We experience with Hans Castorp the
intensity of the formative moments—tragic, erotic, mundane,
absurd—of his seven years in the sanatorium, all suspended in a
heightened present.
|
|
THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN
|
Type of work: Novel
Author: Thomas Mann (1875-1955)
Type of Plot: Philosophical chronicle
Time of plot: 1907-1914
Locale: Davos, Switzerland
First published: Der Zauberberg, 1924 (English translation, 1927)
|
|
This novel, concerned with perspectives of history and philosophy
in our time, is considered one of the great intellectual achievements of
the twentieth century. Modern ideologies and beliefs are represented by
characters such as the Italian humanist, the absolutist Jewish Jesuit, a
German doctor, a Polish scientist, and the hedonistic Mynheer
Peeperkorn.
|
|
Principal Characters
Hans Castorp (nans cas'torp), a young German of middle-class and
commercial background. He is a sedate, sensible, correct young man,
appreciative of good living, but without particular ambition or
aspiration. This spiritual lack, Mann suggests, is allied to physical
illness. About to enter a shipbuilding firm, Hans goes to make a
three-week visit to the International Sanatorium Berghof, where his
cousin is a patient. There he learns that he himself has contracted
tuberculosis, and he spends seven years at the sanatorium. Spiritually
unattached to his own time and place, he resigns himself rather easily
to his new role as an inmate of the "magic mountain," where the
spiritual conflicts and defects of modern Europe are polarized and where
time and place are allied to eternity and infinity. His experience takes
on the significance of a spiritual journey. He is exposed to a
threadbare version of Western liberalism and rationalism (in the person
of Settembrini); to the lure of irrational desire (in the person of
Madame Cauchat); to Catholic absolutism and mysticism (in the person of
Naphta, whose arguments with Settembrini make up a large part of the
second portion of the novel). Finally (in the person of Mynheer
Peeperkorn) he feels the attraction of a strong, vital personality that
makes the intellectual strife of Settembrini and Naphta sound quite
hollow. Lost in a snowstorm that quickly becomes a symbol of his passage
through uncharted spiritual regions, Hans attains a vision of an earthly
paradise and of blood sacrifice—the two opposed forces life has revealed
to him—and he achieves a further revelation of the importance of
goodness and love. Ironically, after he returns to the sanatorium, he
forgets; the vision has literally led him beyond himself and his
capacity. He now dabbles in spiritualism and, in a famous passage, also
soothes himself with romantic music that, he feels, contains at its
heart the death wish. It is a snatch of this music that Hans has on his
lips when, at the conclusion of the novel, he is glimpsed on a
battlefield of World War I.
Ludovico Settembrini (loo'do-fe'ko se'tem-bre'ne), an Italian humanist,
man of letters, apostle of reason, progress, equality, and the
brotherhood of man, as well as a fiery Italian nationalist. His case is
incurable; no longer able to return to the land of action (a fact that
has obvious symbolic connotations), he spends his energy in hollow
eloquence and in ineffectual writing for the International League for
the Organization of Progress.
Leo Naphta (la'6 naf'ta), an apostate Jew converted to Catholicism,
educated by the Jesuits, brilliant in his defense of the immaterial, the
spiritual, the authoritarian, the medieval. He gets the better of
Settembrini in his many arguments with the Italian, but it becomes clear
that Naphta's rigidity is essentially a form of death. Toward the end of
the novel, having goaded Settembrini into a duel, Naphta turns his gun
on himself.
Clavdia Chauchat (klaf'de-a кб-sha'), a Russian, married but refusing to
carry a ring on her finger, wandering about Europe from sanatorium to
sanatorium. Her manners are in many ways the antithesis of what Hans has
learned to accept as ladylike; but that very difference seems to attract
him once he has begun to lose his ties with Hamburg, and on a carnival
night they consummate the passion she has aroused in him. She leaves the
sanatorium for a time but returns in the company of Mynheer Peeperkorn.
Mynheer Peeperkorn (men'har pa'per-korn), an enormously wealthy, burly
ex-planter. He is inarticulate (thus enforcing the difference between
him, on the one hand, and Settembrini and Naphta, on the other), but
exudes a strength of personality that engages the respect of Hans, who
allies himself with the Dutchman. But Peeperkorn, feeling the approach
of impotence, kills himself (another facet of nineteenth century
individualism gone).
Joachim Ziemssen (yo'akh-fm zem'sen), Hans's cousin, soldierly,
courteous, brave. A foil to Hans, he refuses to yield to the magic of
the mountain, keeps track of time, anxious to return to the flatland so
that he can pursue his career as a soldier. Though in love with an
inmate, Marusja, he, unlike Castorp, refuses to yield to his passion.
Finally he insists on leaving, though not fully cured, is gloriously
happy for a while, but returns to the sanatorium to die.
Marusja (ma-roos'ya), a pretty young Russian girl, silently adored by
Joachim Ziemssen.
Hofrat Behrens (hok'rat ba'rens), the chief medical officer at the
sanatorium. His wife had died there some years before, and he stayed on
when he found himself tainted with the disease. He is a mixture of
melancholy and forced jocularity.
Dr. Krokowski (kro-kof'ske), a foil to Behrens. If Behrens represents
the medical point of view, Krokowski represents the psychoanalytical.
Frau Stohr (frou stoer), a middle-aged woman who irks Castorp at the
dinner table by her boring conversation, yet he welcomes her gossip
about Clavdia Chauchat,
Miss Robinson, an elderly English spinster and table companion of
Castorp.
Fraulein Engelhart (froi'lin ang'el-hart), a school mistress from
Konigsberg, another table companion of Castorp.
Dr. Leo Blumenkohl (la'o Ыоо'тёп-кбГ), a physician from Odessa. The
advanced stage of his illness causes him to be the quietest person at
Castorp's table.
Herr Albin (har al'ben), a patient who, unable to take his illness
philosophically, creates excitement by demonstrating suicidal
intentions.
Tous Les Deux (too la doe), an old Mexican woman known by this name
because her conversation consists of only a few French phrases which
always contain the words "tous les deux."
Sister Bertha (bar'ta), formerly Alfreda Schild-knecht (al-fra'da
shild'knasht), a talkative nurse who tries to explain her frustrations
to reluctant Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemssen.
Adriatica von Mylendonk (a-dre-a'ti-ca fon me'len-donk), the directress
of the sanatorium, who surprises Castorp by her businesslike manner.
|
|
The Story
Hans Castorp had been advised by his doctor to go to the mountains for a
rest. Accordingly, he decided to visit his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen, who
was a patient in the International Sanatorium Berghof at Davos-Platz in
the mountains of Switzerland. He planned to stay there for three weeks
and then return to his home in Hamburg. Hans had just passed his
examinations and was now a qualified engineer; he was eager to get
started in his career. His cousin was a soldier by profession. His cure
at the sanatorium was almost complete. Hans thought Joachim looked
robust and well.
At the sanatorium, Hans soon discovered that the ordinary notions of
time did not exist. Day followed day almost unchangingly. He met the
head of the institution, Dr. Behrens, as well as the other patients, who
sat in groups at dinner. There were, for example, two Russian tables,
one of which was known as the bad Russian table. A couple who sat at the
latter table had the room next to Hans. Through the thin partitions, he
could hear them— even in the daytime—chase each other around the room.
Hans was rather revolted, because he could hear every detail of their
lovemaking.
There was another patient who interested him greatly, a merry Russian
woman, supposedly married, named Clavdia Cauchat. Every time she came
into the dining room, she would bang the door, an act which annoyed Hans
a great deal. Hans also met Settembrini, an Italian, a humanist writer
and philosopher. Settembrini introduced him to a Jew, Naphta, who turned
out to be a converted Jesuit and a cynical absolutist. Because the two
men spent their time in endless discussions, Settembrini finally left
the sanatorium to take rooms in the village, in the house where Naphta
lodged.
From the very first day of his arrival, Hans felt feverish and a bit
weak. When his three weeks were almost up, he decided to take a physical
examination. The examination proved that he had tuberculosis and so he
stayed on as a patient. One day, defying orders, he went out skiing and
was caught in a snowstorm. The exposure aggravated his condition.
His interest in Clavdia was heightened when he learned that Dr. Behrens,
who liked to dabble in art, had painted her picture. Furthermore, the
doctor gave Hans an X-ray plate of Clavdia's skeletal structure. Hans
kept the plate on the bureau in his room.
He spent most of his free time with Joachim or with Settembrini and
Naphta. The Italian and the Jesuit were given to all sorts of ideas, and
Hans became involved in a multitude of philosophical discussions on the
duration of time, God, politics, astronomy, and the nature of reality.
Joachim, who was rather humorless and unimaginative, did not enjoy those
talks; but Hans, since he himself had become a patient at the
sanatorium, felt more at home and was not quite so attached to Joachim.
Besides, it was Clavdia who interested him.
On the occasion of a carnival, when some of the restrictions of the
sanatorium had been lifted, Hans declared his love for Clavdia. She
thought him foolish and refused his proposal. The next day she left for
Russia. Hans was in despair and became listless. Joachim grew even more
impatient with the progress of his cure when the doctor told him that he
was not yet well and would have to remain on the mountain for six more
months. Wanting to rejoin his regiment, Joachim, in defiance of the
doctor's injunctions, left the sanatorium. The doctor told Hans that he
could leave too; but Hans knew that the doctor was angry when he said
it, and he remained.
Before long Joachim returned, his condition now so serious that his
mother was summoned to the sanatorium. He died shortly afterward.
Clavdia Cauchat also returned. She had been writing to the doctor, and
Hans had heard of her from time to time, but she did not return alone.
As a protector, she had found an old Dutchman named Mynheer Peeperkorn,
an earthy, hedonistic planter from Java. Hans became very friendly with
Peeperkorn, who soon learned that the young engineer was in love with
Clavdia. The discovery did not affect their friendship at all, a
friendship that lasted until the Dutchman died.
For a time the guests amused themselves with spiritualist seances. A
young girl, a new arrival at the sanatorium, claimed that she was able
to summon anyone from the dead. Hans took part in one meeting and asked
that Joachim be called back from the dead. Dr. Kro-kowski, the
psychologist at the sanatorium, however, was opposed to the seances and
broke up the sessions. Then Naphta and Settembrini got into an argument.
A duel was arranged between the two dialecticians. When the time came,
the Italian said he would fire into the air.
When he did so, Naphta became more furious than ever. Realizing that
Settembrini would not shoot at him, Naphta turned the pistol on himself
and pulled the trigger. Dying, he fell face downward in the snow.
Hans Castorp had come to the sanatorium for a visit of three weeks. That
stay turned out to be more than seven years. During that time he saw
many deaths, many changes in the institution. He became an old patient,
not just a visitor. The sanatorium became another home in the high, thin
air of the mountaintop. For him time, as measured by minutes, or even
years, no longer existed. Time belonged to the flat, busy world below.
Then an Austrian archduke was assassinated. Newspapers brought the world
suddenly to the International Sanatorium Berghof, with news of war
declared and troop movements. Some of the patients remained in neutral
Switzerland. Others packed to return home. Hans Cas-torp said good-bye
to Settembrini, who was his best friend among the old patients, and the
disillusioned humanist wept at their parting. Hans was going back to
Germany to fight. Time, the tragic hour of his generation, had overtaken
him at last, and the sanatorium was no longer his refuge. Dodging
bullets and bombs in a frontline trench, he disappeared into the smoky
mists that hid the future of Europe.
|
|
Critical Evaluation
The Magic Mountain, begun in 1912 but written largely after World War I,
was actually planned as a novella, inspired by Thomas Mann's own brief
stay at the sanatorium at Davos, Switzerland. In fact, his early novella
"Tristan" lays much of the groundwork for the later novel. The Magic
Mountain, however, grew in bulk and complexity to become a veritable
mirror of European society in the period leading up to World War I. It
lies directly in the tradition of the German Bildungsroman, or novel of
development, which goes back to Goethe's Wilhelm Meister novels. In this
genre, a relatively unformed character is exposed to manifold aspects of
life and various influences, often quite conscious attempts to educate
or mold his attitude. In a gradual process, his character achieves form,
erroneous goals are cast aside, and the true calling and, more
important, the right relationship to life are found. Hans Castorp is
just such a character when he arrives from the flatlands for a brief
visit at Berghof. Mann emphasizes his bourgeois background and the lack
of firm convictions and direction in his life. For Mann, the North
German type—Hans is from Hamburg—had always represented the solid,
respectable middle-class life. Yet Hans is also something of a quester,
curious and adventuresome in the spiritual and intellectual realm. He
observes the new world of the sanatorium avidly and becomes involved
with the personalities there, inquiring and holding long conversations.
The narrative voice of the novel, as in most of Mann's works, has a
certain degree of ironic distance, but the pace of the work is very much
tied to Hans's own experience of events and temporal rhythms. The three
weeks of his planned visit stretch out to seven years, and the work
becomes the record of the growth of his character in a microcosm of
European society.
Mann's style had developed out of nineteenth century realism, and he
observes and describes reality lovingly and with minute care. Yet his
work becomes increasingly symbolic in his major novels, and the
structure of these novels becomes increasingly expressive of symbolic
values. Thus, the character development of Hans reflects the problems of
European thought as a whole, and the various ideas to which he is
exposed represent various intellectual and spiritual currents of the
epoch. Hans initially falls prey to a fascination with death, a
dangerous attraction to the irresponsible freedom of the mountain world,
the temptation to turn inward and to fall in love with sickness. He
studies the illness whose symptoms he himself soon exhibits. He visits
the "moribundi" and has long talks with Behrens and Krokowski, two of
the doctors. Here life is seen as a process of decay, and even the
intellect and the emotions are reduced to unconscious urges in the new
psychology of Freud. Hans crystallizes these ideas in his feverish love
for Clavdia Cauchat, who represents the Russian temperament—the urge to
lose oneself, to give in to the emotions, to live life for the sake of
life. She is contrasted to Settembrini, the Italian intellectual,
educator, and humanist. He is an optimist, believing in the
perfectability of man by reason, and he opposes the fascination with
death that Hans manifests. Settembrini is again contrasted to Naphta,
his intellectual opponent, an irrationalist, a Jew turned Jesuit, with a
highly Nietzschean viewpoint. He is a pessimist, deriding Settembrini's
optimism and ridiculing his arguments as inconsistent. Neither figure is
meant to convert Hans; their arguments cancel each other, as does so
much else in the novel. Hans finds his own position midway between the
various opposing forces. This occurs primarily in the chapter "Snow." If
the magic mountain is a timeless realm above the immediate concerns of
the world, "Snow" is a hermetic world within that realm. Hans loses his
way in a snowstorm, and exhausted, and in danger of death, he has a
dream, a vision in which he sees juxtaposed an idyllic world of tropical
paradise, peopled by gentle and happy folk, while in a temple there is
performed a terrible ritual of human sacrifice. Here the two poles of
human life are symbolized, and Hans's response is clear and decisive:
Life is inseparably bound up with death, the horrible is real and cannot
be denied; but for the sake of goodness and love, man must not grant
death dominion over his thoughts.
It is following this chapter that the figure of Mynheer Peeperkorn
dominates the novel for a time, a figure of great vitality, simple in
his thoughts but of powerful personality, in love with his life force,
yet terrified of losing it, who commits suicide finally rather than face
decay. He, like the other figures, represents an aspect of contemporary
European thought and attitudes. Indeed, his traits, like those of
Settembrini and Naphta, were drawn from life, from figures known to
Mann. Thus, the novel has something of the autobiographical and
represents a stage in Mann's own thought. In the realm he has
constructed, all these aspects—Bildtingsroman, intellectual
autobiography, and symbolic portrait of the prewar era— merge. This is
made possible in part by the very foundation of the novel, the mountain.
The small community is elevated above the flatlands, in the rarefied
Alpine air, remote from the problems of the world and the demands of
everyday life. Time is dissolved, the rhythm of the novel moves from
sequences of hours to days, weeks, months, and finally years, all
rendered indistinguishable by the precise daily routine. In this world
outside of time, Hans can grow, can hover between conflicting opinions.
Here he has freedom, most essentially in the "Snow" chapter, where even
space is obliterated. Yet in contrast to the earlier romantic outlook,
this elevated position of freedom in isolation is not seen as a good
thing, for though it provides an aesthetic space in which ideal
development can occur, it is divorced from life, and life is the value
which Hans's development leads him to affirm—life, with all of its
horror as well as its beauty. The European world saw itself plunged into
World War I, Thomas Mann saw himself jolted out of his apolitical
aesthetic stance, and thus it is only fitting that Hans Castorp, too,
must come down from the mountain to the world of time and action, even
if only to be lost among the havoc of a world at war.
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
|
