Achieving the Impossible: Thomas Mann

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“Who yearns for the impossible I love” —FAUST.
“He could not walk, and he walked; he could not stand upright, and he stood.”

Obviously willpower has a great deal to do with such achievements; Mann was not one of those who find writing easy. In the apparently autobiographical sketch “The Railway Accident” he tells of the experiences of a young writer in a moderately severe train wreck. What worries him is not the fate of the passengers, himself included, but that of his manuscript, “my beehive, my artfully spun web, my cleverly dug fox’s den, my pride and burden. The best of me.” If his manuscript had been destroyed, he realizes he would have begun from the beginning, “with the patience of an animal.” Similarly, young Gregorius, in The Holy Sinner, is not particularly strong or large, but he is invincible in battle because he can “concentrate to an extraordinary degree.” Literally and figuratively, he possesses “a hand which holds fast.” Doubtless Mann’s severe, rigorously observed work schedule would be considered “compulsive” by the joyless little Freuds of today. On the contrary, it sprang rather from a Spinozistic determination to fulfill his proper destiny. He was not one to bury “that one talent, which is death to hide.” Rather, thanks to that emblematic “hand which holds fast,” he eventually surpassed contemporaries whose native gifts were apparently greater than his. Hugo von Hofmannsthal affords a very striking example of a writer who seemed more talented than Mann but who accomplished less work of high quality.

In a highly debatable essay, Heinz Politzer has contrasted Kafka, Joyce, and Proust, the “three sick monks [who lived] for their work,” with Mann. He, according to Politzer’s clear implication, was far too “representative”—in other words, too devoted to power, prestige, and show, to be a fine artist. The logic escapes me here; does Politzer really believe, like Novalis, that sickness is a positive force for a writer, and that Kafka’s novels would be even more fragmentary had he been healthy? All artists may be sick, Mann remarked in a different context, but not all sick men are artists. And can anyone reasonably hold that The Magic Mountain would be a better book had Mann not “wasted” his time in defending the Weimar Republic? During his sojourn in America, Mann defended his participation in public affairs: it had not prevented the writing of the last volume of Joseph nor of Lotte in Weimar. Surely Sophocles, Chaucer, and Milton, not to mention Goethe, would have rejected the notion that the writer owes nothing to society. It is another example of Mann’s “impossibility” that the author of the flaming philippics against Hitler broadcast regularly by the British Broadcasting Company was simultaneously creating the elaborate jests of Joseph the Provider and shaping the structure of Doctor Faustus. Often Mann’s political forays were less than successful. In his nationalistic-conservative phase he appears naive and usually wrong; later he appears naive and no doubt pushed somewhat to the left by his redoubtable daughter Erika, but correct more often than not. To repeat: there is no reason to think that Mann’s politicking, however fallible, injured his talent any more than the insane politics of Pound or the nonpolitical stance of Joyce hurt those writers—as writers. Undoubtedly Mann played a representative role, as did, among others, T. S. Eliot and Hofmannsthal. This need not entail arrogance. Erika Mann, a prejudiced but sharp-eyed observer, remarks that her father’s dominant traits were “modesty, kindness, and humor.” Doubtless there were other less attractive characteristics, but having corresponded with Mann and talked with him I find Fraulein Mann’s verdict generally sound. Of course his wit could be very biting: he remarked to Mark Van Doren that, strangely enough, American novelists didn’t ever seem to write novels. (He was acquainted with some of the less gifted.) Yet a certain coldness, which marked him as a young man and worried both Mann and his fiancée as well as others, seems to have been gradually overcome.

In Buddenbrooks, his first great success, Mann resuscitated the long novel, which had been out of fashion for some time. Superficially, this may seem reactionary rather than innovative, but Mann had new things to offer. He was the first German to show by example that a naturalistic—or largely naturalistic—novel could also be a work of art, and that Schopenhauer and Nietzsche could be extremely relevant to the lives of seemingly prosaic burghers. Further, he demonstrated that the dreary themes of decadence and decay, so trite by 1900, could be employed in a fresh and convincing way. Next to Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kröger (1903) is probably the most striking of Mann’s early writings. It seems just to consider the novella less a breakthrough than a supremely successful synthesis of the nostalgic novella à la Theodor Storm—the Grandma Moses of German letters—and the story of ideas, as in Henry James or in Melville’s Billy Budd. Remarkably effective, lyrical leitmotifs hold the work together; but surely this is renovation rather than innovation.

In Death in Venice, however, which appeared nine years later, the near miraculous has been made to seem overwhelmingly possible. It is strange that Nösselt’s nineteenth-century book on classical myth, used by Mann’s mother in a Lubeck upper school for girls, was one of his most important sources. It is clear that he leaned also on Homer and one or two of Plato’s dialogues—in translation of course, for though he had some Latin, he had presumably no Greek at all in the Lubeck Realgymnasium or elsewhere. He relied on Erwin Rohde’s Psyche and that effervescent if none too pure fountain, Nietzsche’s The Birth of Tragedy. Yet apparently the old textbook for a secondary school helped him as much as any of the more distinguished books did. Years later he testified that it was among his favorite books during boyhood. Mann appears as the magician, the alchemist who can transmute base metals into gold. Many years later, he drew on Frank Harris’s notorious book about Shakespeare for the discussions and analyses of Shakespeare in Doctor Faustus—an even more striking transformation.

Less paradoxical, but perhaps more important in the development of prose fiction, was the radical change in the nature and function of the leitmotif, which shift seems to appear first in Death in Venice. Such a motif, of course, tended to consist of a significant word or group of words artfully repeated to make this or that particular effect. One thinks of phrases of Mann’s like “blue shadows below her eyes” or “we aren’t a group of gypsies in a green wagon.” This type of verbal leitmotif obviously persists, but Mann has added the leitmotif of character or figure. In Death in Venice the sinister stranger in Munich, the vile old man on the ship from Pola, the ominous gondolier, and the rude street musician are all essentially the same person. All are marked by the dangerous color red; all share certain physical traits. They are all messengers of death, death figures. Alternatively, the same character may suggest very different meanings: thus Tadzio is no doubt a symbol of Aschenbach’s art, but he is at the same time the beautiful youth familiar from Winckelmann, Lessing, Heine, and many others. He is Death, the brother of Sleep. A further development, in Death in Venice, is the occasional use of hexameters: the rhythm itself serves as a kind of leitmotif, as my colleague Maria Tatar has pointed out.

Many students of Thomas Mann tend to underrate the greatest influence on Death in Venice. I mean Nietzsche, of whom Mann early remarked, “Nietzsche has not found his poet—or not yet.” That “not yet” should have given pause to anyone with the slightest understanding of Mann’s psyche. Obviously it is a broad hint if not a declaration: that poet will be Thomas Mann. It happens that Nietzsche, however deficient as philosopher and would-be poet, was the most stimulating influence on German literary men of the whole nineteenth century. Compared to Plato, Spinoza, or Leibniz, Nietzsche was a minor figure as a philosopher. For his part, Mann was never an uncritical disciple of Nietzsche. Thus he firmly rejected such Nietzschean constructs as the superman, the blond beast, and the prophet Zarathustra as embarrassingly gaudy, while praising Nietzsche the stylist and the master of “unmasking” psychology. Nietzsche the psychologist of decadence particularly impressed him.

Indeed, Nietzsche’s impact is felt again and again: in the early story “The Will to Happiness,” in Buddenbrooks, and so forth. It permeates The Magic Mountain, especially in the climactic section which proclaims the victory of life (Nietzsche) over death (Novalis and Wagner). In Doctor Faustus, the hero “is” Nietzsche in many ways, including his willful contracting of syphilis and his betrayal by a friend in a Miles Standish–John Alden–Priscilla Mullens situation.

Turning back to Death in Venice, we see evidence of decadence almost everywhere: in Aschenbach’s physical weakness, Tadzio’s decaying teeth, political corruption in Venice, the repulsive old roue on the ship, and so on. Yet essentially the novella is focused on very different things: Aschenbach’s heroic devotion to his task, and to beauty. Essentially it is tragic, not pathological. How differently the basic plot would have been treated by Genet or even by Proust. Again, the alchemist’s touch: cholera, barbaric orgies, and homosexuality have been absorbed into the work of art, becoming constituent parts of the esthetic whole. Schiller demanded that, in a genuine art work, form must obliterate the raw material. Just that has happened here.

It has become customary to neglect Royal Highness; in fact Mann’s shorter, lighter novels or “entertainments” are mostly ignored, often by the very people who complain of the length of the others. And indeed, it is hard to find anything new or experimental in this Bildungsroman, this portrait of an artist disguised as a picture of a prince. The most original thing about the book is its light-heartedness and grace, but these are qualities which German critics often seem to mistrust. Often faulted as too light, above all too optimistic, Royal Highness can be more cogently criticized as bearing an excessive load of didacticism. The two criticisms more or less cancel each other, but this is surely not a great novel. Still, not every novel has to be a Götterdämmerung or an exercise in phenomenology in fictional form. What would Central European critics have made of Max Beerbohm and Evelyn Waugh?

With some assistance from Hermann Hesse, Thomas Mann revitalized the novel of education, which seemed about to perish, the victim of its own triteness. Paradoxically, he did so by making his second Bildungsroman, The Magic Mountain, still more inward, omitting most outer action. It remains surprising that one rarely hears things said against the novel like “Nothing happens,” “There is no real hero,” or even “There are no credible characters in the book.” Shortly after The Magic Mountain appeared, a critic remarked: “With this novel the German people learned to read again.” Mann’s advice, that persons who liked the novel at all should read it twice, seems sensible.

Normally, the protagonist of an educational novel has a mentor or guide; Hans has at least three. What a grotesque crew his tutors are: the verbose, basically naive Italian; the sinister Marxist Jesuit, largely drawn after Lukacs and himself the prototype of various Communist gurus of today; the Dutch magnate—or “magnet” as Frau Stöhr calls him—who normally talks as if he were under the influence of drugs, Marshall McLuhan, or both. O tempora! It can hardly have been thus when Socrates talked with Plato on the banks of the Ilissus; or, to paraphrase John Kennedy, when Thomas Jefferson talked to himself.

And yet, Castorp’s ambiguous guides do teach him a great deal; his consciousness has been literally raised. In this Alpine context the cliché is for once acceptable. Steigen (to climb) and steigern (to intensify) almost coincide here. The reader becomes fond of most of the persons in this strange seminar; there is an increase in human warmth. One has experienced a great deal, and if one hesitates to say “I’ve learned much,” presumably that stems from a reluctance to make the book seem too didactic. Of course Mann’s great didactic theme is, “For the sake of goodness and love, man shall not relinquish to death the mastery over his thought.” Not too long after the novel was published, a Welsh poet echoed the exhortation, “And death shall have no dominion!” Far from new, this imperative goes back to Goethe and eventually to Spinoza. It should be doubly valuable to a culture which has tended to exalt death in battle, Liebestod, “free death” (meaning suicide), and so on. On the other hand, I know a man who came down with pneumonia just after finishing The Magic Mountain. Coincidence? Perhaps; but would Freud have thought so?

It is indeed striking that a semi-dropout from the Gymnasium wrote what is probably the great novel of ideas of our century. Comparison with H. G. Wells or Aldous Huxley should make this clear. The one appears clumsy and flat, the other often too much of a smart aleck. No doubt Musil was intellectually keener than Mann, but was he really a successful novelist? No doubt Broch was more single-minded and perhaps more profound; but was he, as a writer, anywhere near the level of Joyce, Kafka, or Mann?

The Magic Mountain appears still more implausible when one realizes that its intellectual and political strata derive from Mann’s least engaging book, Reflections of a Non-Political Man; or better, he took much raw material from the Reflections and transformed it; instead of being ultraconservative like the essays, the novel is deeply humane and ambivalently liberal. It is not that the Reflections are proto-Fascist; they are reactionary at times but clearly individualistic in thrust. The real sin of these essays is a formal, not a political, one: they are verbose, repetitious, and strangely pedantic. Mann argues at great length with his brother, with Romain Rolland, etc.; not least with himself. But by 1918 the worst was over; the author bounced back very quickly.

Years later, Mario and the Magician (1930) appeared; one of Mann’s finest stories, it is at the same time one of his most unexpected. Only twelve years before, in Reflections of a Non-Political Man, he had repeatedly made clear his conviction that politics and art do not mix. Clearly, he then agreed with Schiller’s contention that a work which tries to sway men to any definite course of action is esthetically bad. For, as Schiller put it, “Life must be earnest, art serene and gay.” By 1930 this distinction could no longer be maintained; and Mann, who had given political speeches against reaction from 1922 on, now deliberately injected politics into his fiction.

The evidence for this builds up gradually to a point where my assertion can hardly be questioned. One notes the chauvinism and stupid moralism of the thin-skinned Italians on the beach. The magician Cipolla spouts absurdly nationalistic phrases and, as a cripple and demagogue, reminds us of Dr. Goebbels. Mann’s slyest tactic is to have his German narrator suggest that the Italians are going through a sort of sickness, whereas his silence about things in Germany implies that in the Reich no one is sick at all! Of course Mann knew better; he had been living in Munich for a very long time. He is trying his hand at psychological warfare; if he can convince his readers that Fascism is un-German and therefore inferior, he will have contributed something toward the defeat of Hitler. Any stigma to beat a dogma; but alas, the increasing millions of the unemployed, more and more radicalized, were hardly in the mood to read Thomas Mann, even if they could have afforded his books.

The element in the story which links its political and moral elements is the will, free or otherwise. Apparently no one in Cipolla’s audience can will strongly enough to defy him successfully; even the aristocrat from Rome with his finely cut features eventually succumbs. The narrator observes that he falls because of the negativity of his position. “Probably one cannot keep one’s soul alive by not-willing; not to will a thing is nothing to give content to one’s life in the long run.” Positive goals, therefore? Now this, while persuasive, is debatable: thousands of Christian, Stoic, Jewish, and political martyrs have died heroically, even though they had no pat countersolutions to those offered by the tyrants. Yet Mann appears almost prophetic here, when one recalls the miserable years from 1933 to 1939. The West and the Slavic East had the advantage in arms for years; the Fascists had the willpower of a half-mad magician. On the other hand, the simple Mario, who brings the tyrant Cipolla down, is no hero of the will or of anything else. When his human feelings are unbearably injured, he strikes; that is all. As a waiter he is no doubt a proletarian, but I can catch no whiff of Karl Marx or Lukács hiding behind the scenes or between the lines.

Naturally, as a Mannian protagonist, Cipolla is almost inevitably an artist of sorts. Three indices point toward Wagner as the archetype of the evil artist: Nietzsche’s repeated reference to him as the magician; Mann’s own feeling that, however great the composer’s powers, he was an inferior human being; and, most important, Wagner’s combination of musical genius with political evil. His polemic “Jewry in Music” is essentially as bad as anything in Mein Kampf. In 1911 Mann wrote to Julius Bab, “Should not every German realize . . . that Goethe is an incomparably more venerable and more trustworthy leader and national hero than this sniveling gnome from Saxony with his smashing talent and shabby character? That’s the question.” Yet Mann remained enchanted for decades by the magic of Wagner’s music. At the very end of the novella, which is subtitled, “A Tragic Travel Experience,” Mann makes it clear that Mario is tragic even in the Aristotelian sense. He speaks of “an end with terror” which is nevertheless liberating, in fact cathartic.

In the case of Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1942), Mann hardly needed to gather figs from thistles. In its own way, the account in Genesis is unsurpassable; but Goethe himself had remarked that one felt called upon to work it out in detail. In fleshing out the story to its eventual four volumes, Mann did employ some questionable authorities, such as pseudo scholarly speculation on the lost continent Atlantis, or the bold claims of members of the so-called pan-Babylonian school, such as Alfred Jeremias and Hugo Winckler; but the mistakes and overstatements of these persons did the novel no major esthetic harm. The pan-Babylonians believed in a supermythology, overarching and uniting all the mythologies of the Near East, including the Hebrew. True or false, this theory suited Mann’s leitmotif technique perfectly; he could see Osiris, Adonis-Tammuz, and Dionysus Zagreus as variations on the archetype of the dying god who would be resurrected. Young Joseph follows this pattern, mere mortal though he is; Jesus would of course reenact it.

That Mann completely broke with the function which myth normally had in modern German literature is one of his major exploits as a quiet revolutionary in literature and thought. Not all the literary myths presented from the mid-nineteenth century on were reactionary or conservative in thrust, though many were. They were, overwhelmingly, dark, irrational, relying on atmosphere and incantation—“huge cloudy symbols of a high romance.” Alas, these romances were not always high. One thinks of Zarathustra, Wotan, or the chauvinistic poems of Mann’s sometime friend Ernst Bertram. There is also the evanescent concept of “Secret Germany,” a sort of symbolic league of the noblest Germans, existing out of time and space. Worse phenomena were Rosenberg’s Myth of the Twentieth Century, the chauvinistic films about “Fridericus Rex,” and the mythification of the First World War. In Joseph, Mann completely reversed this tendency, celebrating such entities as reason, enlightenment, and progress: the protagonist of the tetralogy is closer to Franklin Roosevelt than to the great Hebrew prophets. These are precisely the notions which, right-thinking Germans thought, were the delusions of Western democrats. (Mann himself had once felt the same way, as the Reflections of a Non-Political Man testify.) More shocking still to the philistine mind, he made the myth optimistic, a scandalous procedure in a culture whose thinkers, from Schopenhauer to Spengler, are so frequently proud of being glum. Also, strangely enough, the leading characters in Joseph, aside from the Egyptian contingent, are all Jews. It is rather surprising that the first volumes of the tetralogy could appear in Berlin in 1933 and 1934, but the Nazis were still feeling their way, in a relatively cautious manner.

In Joseph we encounter a further elaboration of the leitmotif technique and it turns out that the leitmotif works together smoothly with the mythic way of experiencing time and individuality as Mann explains it. To the initiated, time is an illusion: the only tense is the eternal present. To use an illustration of Mann’s: every Christmas the holy child is born; there is no question of his aging or of past and present. Similarly, figures representing the same archetype may recur at different times, under different names. According to the Babylonian notion of the revolving sphere, a figure may appear now as a man, now as a god. Thus the theme of hostile brethren appears before Joseph’s day in the clashes between Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau; also between the Egyptian gods Osiris and Set.

Narrower in scope and in appeal, The Beloved Returns: Lotte in Weimar is still a fascinating experimental novel. Like Joseph, it combines psychology and myth; beyond that, it unites the historical novel with the stream-of-consciousness technique. Historically it tells of the visit of Charlotte Kestner, the proto· type of Werther’s adored Lotte, to Weimar, forty-four years after the events portrayed in Goethe’s novel. (Her return actually took place, but most of her doings in the novel are Mann’s invention.) In the climactic seventh chapter we find the daring attempt to reproduce in words Goethe’s own stream of consciousness. Now this technique had been successfully used, especially by Arthur Schnitzler and James Joyce, but Mann’s task was vastly harder. Schnitzler’s Lieutenant Gustl is a low fellow and quite stupid; Molly Bloom’s talents are confined to the horizontal plane. For his part, Mann had to illuminate the mind of a genius who was also a highly complicated and at times a very difficult human being. Mann has incorporated perhaps a thousand genuine quotations of and references to Goethe and added a few of his own invention; he achieved great verisimilitude. His fictional Goethe has been praised by the finest Goethe scholar of our day, Barker Fairley, as persuasive and generally authentic. It is certainly persuasive. Sir Hartley Shawcross, the British prosecutor at the Nuremberg trials, quoted Mann’s Goethe to the effect that the intransigent chauvinism of the Germans would bring down on them the hatred of the world. Remarkably prophetic, Sir Hartley must have thought, but the entire speech is Mann’s invention.

Mann has used a technique of encirclement which enables us to receive several partial impressions of Goethe, from various angles, before we actually see and hear the poet. As if hesitant to confront him directly, Mann first gives us the accounts of the factotum at the inn where Lotte is to stay (even he is a Goethe fan), of Adele Schopenhauer, the sister of the philosopher and very much of a bluestocking in her own right, of Goethe’s rather dissipated son, and others. Finally, in the seventh chapter, we can listen to the poet’s famous interior monologue. Later, we observe him as the host at a stiff, rather unsuccessful dinner party.

There is a certain hero worship here, but not of the naive sort. We see at least as much of Goethe’s difficult, problematic side as of his more attractive aspect; Lotte becomes aware of the odor of human sacrifice surrounding him. This however does not in the least detract from the reader’s sense of Goethe’s greatness. The Beloved Returns is not one of Mann’s major successes, mainly I think because it is very difficult to determine Goethe’s real status in the novel. Is he intended as a biographically correct figure, or primarily as a fictional character in a narrative? One feels a certain malaise, as one does when confronted with Abraham Lincoln in a play or Beethoven in a movie. Nevertheless, the novel stands as one of the few really successful attempts made in the twentieth century to “realize” Goethe, to make him challenging and important in our day.

A far more experimental work, Doctor Faustus, appeared in 1947. Into this novel Mann poured the agony, the anger, and the frustrated love which Germany had evoked in him since 1933. How could the catastrophe happen? When did things go wrong? Germany had sold its soul; therefore the Faust legend must supply the basic plot. On the intellectual plane, hybris and coldness had been superseded by madness; thus the protagonist Leverkühn is modeled on Nietzsche. And so on; the structure of the book is almost unbelievably complicated. Mann had grave doubts about the viability of the novel, but again the “just barely possible” took place. Disliked by many, Doctor Faustus seemed challenging and exciting to many others. If it did not have the overwhelming success of The Magic Mountain, it exercised a fascination which still persists. To keep the potentially explosive emotions of the book under control, Mann has made his admirable but often boring narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, rather a figure of fun: “Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse; / At times, indeed, almost ridiculous.”

Zeitblom’s presentation does indeed have a damping effect throughout most of the novel. Whether its intricate intellectual structure has a chilling effect or the reverse is arguable. There are several major themes, such as the breakthrough, the Faustian pact, the end, and several levels, including music, politics, theology, etc. Each theme appears on every level; thus there is the end of music, of Germany, of Adrian himself. One of Mann’s metaphors for the novel was the “magic square” in which the numbers, vertically, horizontally, and diagonally, add up to the same sum. The events in music, politics, and even dentistry noted in the book should similarly “add up.” Undoubtedly, tracing down the occurrences of each theme has a cooling effect on the reader; but for many readers the form is too complex to analyze or even to perceive; they are all the more vulnerable to the emotional power of the book.

Possibly the most striking feature of Doctor Faustus is its ambitious scope: it relates the fate of a man, a nation, and an art, along with minor matters. And Leverkühn-Nietzsche, Germany, and music are all intimately interconnected: the trinity is also a unity. Along with its broad historical sweep, Doctor Faustus has a curiously involuted aspect; a Faustian composer writes Faustian music about the original Faust. Somehow Mann makes even the most discursive parts of the novel interesting. Whatever its defects, it remains not the greatest of Mann’s works but—despite Zeitblom—the most stirring.

In his last work of fiction, Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, Mann revived the picaresque novel, long quiescent in Germany, by combining it with the Bildungsroman, or rather with a parody thereof. The rogue often sounds like the narrator in Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister, an impudent if not blasphemous sort of imitation. Toward the end of Felix Krull, Part I—which is all that was written-the tone becomes much more serious. Who but Mann would have inserted into a comic novel a long passage about the aging of our universe and its inevitable end—and gotten away with this bizarre mixing of the genres? A paleontologist tells the fascinated Felix: “Doubtless,” he said, “not only life on earth was an episode which would pass by relatively fast, being itself was an episode too—between nothing and nothing.” It is hardly incidental that this nihilistic passage was written at a time when Mann was deeply concerned about the possibility of atomic war. To be sure, Mann tempered the darkness of this passage by giving its speaker the delightful name of Kuckuck. Cuckoo he is not, but his name indeed pushes him into the comic realm, rather unfairly.

Krull also contains elements of the mythical novel. These become more important in the latter part of the book, for Mann was still more fascinated by myth in the ‘fifties, when Part I was finally finished, than around 1910, when it was begun. His favorite deity had long been Hermes—an ambivalent, two-faced god who was both a handsome rogue with a strong phallic aspect and the beneficent god of the dead, among other things. In Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, and Joseph he appears in one or another role, more or less disguised. Here, though, his role is central, for Felix Krull is himself a Hermes figure—a charming, clever rogue, extremely handsome and attractive to women. Perhaps it is in dubious taste to devote books to gods one does not really believe in, but this has been going on intermittently since the days of Euripides. At any rate, to apply solemn moral standards to Felix Krull would indeed be breaking a butterfly upon a wheel.

In a sense, Mann’s last years form a fabulous success story. The great success of Felix Krull contributed to the gaiety of nations. How refreshing that a writer who had begun with generally dark little stories and the massively pessimistic Buddenbrooks should end with a comic novel. Similarly, the “Essay on Schiller” centered on the poet’s idealism and faith in man; it too was a triumph. Appearing in the last year of Mann’s life, 1955, it can be seen as the crowning victory.

Yet there was another side: Mann’s last years were darkened by the fear of war and anxiety about the future of literature, of culture generally. These are expressed in the essay on Chekhov. He quotes the passage from “A Dull Story” in which a great scholar is asked by his ward, “What shall I do? . . . I implore you: what shall I do?” The old scholar replies, “By my honor and conscience, Katia, I do not know.” Mann points out that a writer of Chekhov’s modesty and social conscience was continually plagued by such questions. At the end, the essayist is talking about himself. He can only admit, “On my honor and conscience, I do not know. And yet one keeps working, tells stories, gives shape to truth and thus delights a needy world in the dim hope, almost with the faith that truth and serene form can indeed have a liberating effect on men’s souls and prepare the world for a better, lovelier life, more adequate to the spirit.” This ending is not one of despair, but it shows Mann deeply concerned about the human condition in the twentieth century, unable to give binding answers, forced to rely on a rather tenuous faith.

In the last months of his life Mann suffered from so severe a hardening of the arteries that he was virtually a moving shell. Significantly, though, his cerebral arteries were unaffected; he remained active and creative almost to the end. He “should” have died months earlier, but his keen mind defied his sick body.

Thanks to the reminiscences of Galo Mann and the researches of Herbert Lehnert, we now know the last consuming interest of Mann’s life. In an unpublished letter to Erich Kahler, he described his intellectual activities during the last weeks of his life. For decades Mann had been a Wagnerite, though in a remarkably ambivalent way, wavering between enthusiasm and rejection; in the long run, rejection prevailed. In his final days, though hopelessly ill, he devoted himself to the study of—Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Since Mann never wasted his experiences or his reading, we would doubtless have had another splendid essay had he lived but a little longer. What a climax this would have been to a great career! The priest of the sun vanquishes the king of the night.