©
Anton Pugach
1
The figure of Thomas Mann is indeed a figure. Whether it is bronze, marble or whatever else is used today when they erect monuments to him is not important. Any material is hypnotizing, because Thomas Mann is the author of works that continue to be printed and read in dozens of languages, films are made on them, articles and monographs are written about him, and sometimes even big novels. Widespread recognition comes to a writer very rarely. Readership success is not always the result of a Nobel Prize (there are six winners of this prize in the German-speaking environment, but their popularity is far less than Mann's). At least in Germany, Thomas Mann is ‘the most important German-language writer of the last century’, as a 2005 poll showed: 22% of respondents voted for Thomas Mann, 15% for Bertolt Brecht, and 10% for Günter Grass (also a Nobel laureate). Germans who vote for their favorite authors today are well aware that Günter Grass served in the SS (although the writer himself admitted it only in 2006), and Bertolt Brecht was the winner of the international Stalin Prize (1954), in connection with which he did not even fail to come to the USSR. Brecht received this prize only because the opportunity to become its laureate was politely refused by Thomas Mann, which, however, did not affect the subsequent attitude to him: the circulation of the Soviet ten-volume edition of Mann's collected works reached 137,000 copies in 1959/1961. Thomas Mann, the champion of German readership, also has something to boast about in this field of ‘anti-rating’: for a long time he was a convinced antisemite (this was reflected both in his articles and in his works of fiction) and a sophisticated apologist for German imperialism. Despite the fact that his pro-imperialist position was expressed by him not in passing, but in a voluminous volume of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Thomas Mann managed to remain in the memory of people still ‘a good German’. The period of his conscious life when Thomas Mann was a democrat (since 1922) was almost as long in duration as the period when he was a reactionary. Nevertheless this German Magician - this is how Thomas Mann was called in his family
Memorial sign to Thomas Mann in Svetlogorsk, Kaliningrad Oblast, Russia
(see Colm Toibin's novel of the same title) - is immortalized in bronze even in the Kaliningrad region, once part (under a different name) of the German Empire. Anyway, this war claimed the lives of 18 million people (dead and missing), and an equal number more were wounded. For us, Ukrainian contemporaries of the Russian invasion, it will seem strange how this inspired apologist at that time unprecedented destruction of people could get away with his longstanding and calibrated support for military aggression. Thomas Mann zealously supported the war, for which Germany's guilt was known to be far from indirect. The intellectual thoroughness with which he justified it seemed far more sophisticated than those who waged this war. And yet it is true: the posthumous fame of the German writer was not affected by these circumstances at all.
Reflections were a direct response of a famous person to current political events (the name of the author was well known to all reading Germany thanks to the huge success of his novel Buddenbrooks). The famous writer used a title for his new book, which, generally speaking, looks ambiguous: the reader is presented with the reflections of an apolitical person on the most burning political topic, and even in such an unusual volume!? The magnitude of this magnum opus by Thomas Mann is emphasized by the fact that this work is written using over 30,000 original words.
Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, first edition cover (October, 1918)
Calling his work ‘reflections’ made on behalf of an ‘nonpolitical’ person, Mann already in its first pages waddles in search of a suitable definition for the genre: it seems to him that this work can be called... a poem (this is the result of the undoubted piety felt towards the author of Dead Souls, as well as towards a long list of other Russian classics, to which dozens of pages are devoted in Reflections...). The writer's difficulty in finding a genre for his apologetics is understandable. The book was written in the midst of the war, when its devastating scale was obvious to everyone. The German army had already left some European cities in ruins and committed a number of crimes against civilians. It was difficult for a writer who blatantly justified the mass murder of people to view this phenomenon in traditional terms. Already at the level of the title and the introduction, Mann tries to approach it with ‘his vocabulary’, resorting, as it usually does in such cases, to elaborate euphemisms. Mann does not call the war a ‘special military operation’ in his book; he is even more inventive in this matter: in his vision, the German army carries out ‘forced creative offensive actions’. However, the best introduction to this work, the best semantic tuning for understanding Thomas Mann's position, may serve not so much as his own reflections on whether this book should be considered a treatise or a poem, but his early short story The Blood of the Walsungs.
This nаrrative, as well as some of the circumstances of Thomas Mann's personal life, will help us to be better prepared to present the set of ideas with which the forty-year-old father of six children and ‘genius’ (as he undoubtedly considered himself by that time) of world literature justified the right of his countrymen to commit mass murder of people.
2
Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck (a city in northern Germany) into the family of a large merchant and a senator. A few years before Thomas was born, the Franco-Prussian War had ended. This fact, apparently, is the most important of all that is basically known about the childhood of the writer. According to Solomon Apt's biography, Mann's school years are characterized as follows: ‘The relationship between pupils and teachers was based, as a rule, on the unconditional submission of the former to the latter. The cult of power that had flourished in Germany after the victory over Napoleon III (the anniversaries of the Battle of Sedan were celebrated with great pomp) made itself felt within these walls, both in the tone in which the older pupils spoke to the younger ones, and in the atmosphere of the gymnastics lessons, and in the cavalier attitude with which teachers and tutors patronized their favorite pupils.
The stupidity and philistine limitations of other Lübeck pillars of public education can be seen in an incident that Thomas Mann recalled with a smile in his old age. While reprimanding some tomboys in the assembly hall for cutting up the class tables and benches with penknives, the gymnasium director exclaimed menacingly: ‘You have behaved like Social Democrats!’
Thomas Mann was a mediocre student in school, and the only serious work experience he had in his life was in his early twenties when he worked for a fire insurance company. Later, intending to become a journalist, he attended lectures at the University of Munich. This is also the time of his work for the chauvinistic and antisemitic publication Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert. According to Eugene Berkovich, Henry [Thomas's brother] worked as editor-in-chief of this magazine ’from April 1895 to March 1896, although he began to publish there in 1893. Thomas Mann's participation in the publication was correspondingly short-lived. But it showed very clearly his views at the time… One is in such an ideologically charged environment not because one doesn't understand what one is doing, and not because one needs money, and not because one wants to try different roles. Whoever works for such a journal does so out of principle, in full agreement with what lies at the heart of the profile of such a publication’. Heinrich Mann's articles published in this journal were of the type of views of what later became known as ‘rabid antisemitism’. Let us quote just one fragment: ‘The appearance of the Jew causes the Germans to be disgusted and dislike him. Especially outrageous is the ostentatious luxury created by the simple cunning of the upstarts, those stroppy parvenu, swarthy, fat, ugly’. Although Thomas Mann's articles were written in somewhat more subdued tones, in a diary entry for a much later period (July 1919) he is no less frank and imaginative: ‘the Jewish compartment neighbor looks slouchy, fat and short-legged, the mere sight of which induces vomiting’. Researchers have attributed eight articles in Das Zwanzigste Jahrhundert to Thomas Mann: all of them can be considered antisemitic to one degree or another, but in comparison to Heinrich's ‘сreations’ they are labelled ‘moderate’.
Thomas Mann in the early period of his writing career
In 1900, Thomas Mann was drafted into military service. Judging by his publicistic texts, at that time the young writer was preoccupied with the circle of ‘national issues’ and did not find the strength and motives to serve in the army: he was discharged three months later. Possessing, as indicated by biographers, extensive connections in influential circles, Thomas Mann's mother ‘convinced’ the military surgeon that her son is not suitable for military service: the future Magician was ‘discovered’ to have flat feet.
Ноuse of the Mann family in Lübeck
Thomas Mann's military service came in peacetime, but even in this version of it, apparently, it seemed to Mann too inconsistent not only with his ‘ability’ to bear it (his childhood was spent in very favourable material conditions), but also his high calling. And indeed, after a very short time - in 1901 - was published the novel Buddenbrooks, a shortened version of which subsequently brought the author reader success (28 years later - and the Nobel Prize). It is worth noting that the cumulative circulation of German-language editions of this book by 1936 totalled 1.3 million copies, which was 300,000 more than, for example, Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front. Taking into account all of the following, the circulation of this book can be compared to the sales of Hitler's Mein Kampf : 1930 = 54,000 copies, 932 = 90,351 copies, 1933 = 1.08 million copies.
Cover of the first edition of Hitler's Mein kampf (1925)
The diaries and letters of the young Thomas Mann show homoerotic and suicidal motives (two of his sisters and two sons ended their lives by suicide, by the way). His infatuations and passions for members of his own sex are today considered undeniable, but this is only tangentially relevant to our question (what is important is that he carefully concealed this peculiarity).
Having met the daughter of mathematics professor Pringsheim (a representative of a very wealthy Jewish family), Mann married her after some time. He explained his betrayal of his antisemitic beliefs as follows: ‘At the sight of these people, one does not even think that they are Jews; they are bearers of an unusually high culture’. The head of the family, Alfred Pringsheim, was indeed a man of broad views, an ironic and hospitable host of the Palais Pringsheim, one of Munich's most lively social places, a collector of majolica, and even a composer (he arranged several works by Wagner for piano).
Alfred Pringsheim (1850-1941)
Above all, however, Pringsheim was a mathematician, and it is no accident that his only daughter, Katja Pringsheim, was one of the first women in Germany to be admitted to higher education. Among other things, she attended lectures on Experimental Physics by Roentgen and Infinite series of numbers by her father. However, the future wife of Thomas Mann was not a rigid servant of science, and quite a vital and emancipated woman (she could afford to jump on the streetcar on the fly). Katja Mann had a passion for cycling. It was a hereditary hobby. Her mother wrote essays about family cycling trips, which were published by the leading press of the time.
Hedwig Dohm (1831-1919)
At this point it should be mentioned that Katja's grandmother, Hedwig Dohm, was a prominent figure in the feminist movement, the author of numerous books and articles (she became famous for her essay Women's nature and privilege, 1876), with which Nietzsche probably implicitly polemicised, calling the authors of such works ‘broad of literature’. Hedwig Dohm is also known for her open opposition to the First World War, which was rare in the German intellectual milieu.
Once, during one of her country bike rides, Katja Pringsheim overtook her fiancé, Thomas Mann, apparently demonstrating her superiority in cycling in some expressively teasing way. This episode was later reflected in the novel Royal Highness. The Pringsheims used the most modern models of bicycles, which were specially ordered from the USA, but Mann will still replace the ‘vulgar bicycle’ with a horse in his work.
As a character, Mann was an obvious candidate for Chekhov's gallery of vulgar oddballs, yet he would not score enough points to resemble them completely. The hero of Chekhov's story The Man in the Case was so embarrassed by the sight of a woman on a bicycle that he refused to marry her. This was in Russia, where a prominent writer (Rozanov), returning from Rome, remarked that cycling would ruin Christianity. Thomas Mann was not disappointed in his chosen woman, who skilfully mastered the ‘vulgar’ innovation, but the style of his writing to her is quite comparable to that of Chekhov's characters:
Portrait of Katia Pringsheim as a child, 1892, Franz von Lenbach
‘Do you know why we're so right for each other? Because... You are something extraordinary, you are, as I understand the word, a princess. And I, because I've always considered myself a prince of sorts, I have certainly found in you a fated bride and companion for life’.
Thomas Mann had a manic belief in his chosenness from childhood, and played a kind of reality game around it: ‘I woke up in the morning convinced that today I was an eighteen-year-old prince called Karl. I would put on a condescending and affectionate grandeur and walk around proud and happy, enjoying the mystery of my dignity. And while studying, walking, or reading stories, I never for a moment interrupted my game,…’. Solomon Apt, author of a biography of Mann, notes that the writer remained such a magician to the end of his days, always comparing ‘the artist to a prince, and the epic narrator, freely disposing of material and language, to God’.
Cover of the first edition of Thomas Mann's novel Royal Highness (1909)
Perhaps precisely because he considered his vocation to be truly ‘divine’, Mann never really worked at any of the human endeavors. Later, when it became clear that other, more determined and concrete ‘high calling’ players had seize power in Germany, Mann would write the article Brother Hitler. Reassessing his worldview, writer characterizes Hitler as his... spiritual ‘brother’, ‘a man defeated more than once, pathologically incapable of any kind of work...
…difficult character, laziness, the pathetic uncertainty of a creature unable to reach maturity, inaccessibility, inability to figure out what you actually want, idiotic hopeless existence at the very bottom of social and mental bohemia, refusal - essentially arrogant, essentially out of the conviction that you were born for the best - refusal of any reasonable and respectable activity’.
However, such Mann's attitude to Hitler and, we must assume, to himself, did not take shape until 1939. Things looked a little different 35 years before it happened.
When Mann was courting Katja Pringsheim, he was still a very different man. As a young writer and a member of a somewhat lower class, he had to put up with a lot of things and hide his resentments. But some things he expressed directly (though often in a joking tone), such as his jealousy of Katya's physics lessons. At a later time, already being her husband and a slightly liberated venerable author, he does not hesitate to call Katya's occupation with science an oddity of ‘militant broad of the new age’ who believed that ‘this is the way they should achieve perfection in following the new trends.
Katia Pringsheim, 1906
However, at the stage of following the strategy of a groom seeking the hand in marriage of a rich bride, Thomas Mann harboured his discontent and tried to please: not only her, of course, but also all the other Pringsheims: ‘I have the impression that I will be welcome in the family. I am a Christian, from a good family, and I have merits that will be appreciated by such people’. However, this was not an easy task. The bride's father, as Mann's biographers note, recognised in his future son-in-law a prim poet (‘typically Lübeckian’).
Palais Pringsheim, Munich
In addition, Mann was engaged in fiction, which did not interest his future father-in-law as such, and was poorly versed in painting. The fact that his daughter's suitor had not the slightest clue about mathematics was also reason enough for Pringsheim's doubts. Nevertheless, the strategy of total seduction, deliberately chosen by Mann at the initial stage, did yield the expected results: the future mother-in-law and the bride's twin brother Klaus, after a while, began to perceive the ambitious Thomas very favourably, setting an example for other members of the family.
3
The pre-marital period is known to have been tedious and long for Mann. How much Mann had to truly ‘put up with’ during this time we can judge from the scandal that developed two decades later. The circumstances of this scandal were as follows. Katia's other brother Peter had once (together with his father) spoken disrespectfully about Schopenhauer: ‘my father, who all his conscious life could not stand Schopenhauer, …had no idea that our Magician was an ardent follower of the philosopher: ‘Unsuspecting, Papa remarked to Peter... that it was no good making such a fuss about such nonsense. Our Magician turned pale and shook like a fever, but he held his temper; ...But at home, Tommy went on a rampage, claiming that he had been deliberately insulted and humiliated, and that ...this had been going on for twenty years’.
What happened during those twenty years?
In the year when his father-in-law became president of the German Mathematical Society (a visible example of a Jew's successful career in German academia), Mann, like many of his compatriots, still felt that the question of Jewish assimilation needed some special measures, to which he devoted his article The Solution of the Jewish Question. The title is, to put it bluntly, somewhat disconcerting, but Mann in this manifesto decisively declares his philosemitism, and the path he recommends Jews take is Europeanisation, implying that Jews need to ‘become such highly cultured people that Jewry ceases to be visible’. In reality the increase in the number of mixed marriages will depend upon the ennobling and Europeanisation of the Jewish type, and as for baptism, its practical importance should not be underestimated’. Although Thomas Mann was ‘infuriated by the public's desire to sniff out the personal where there is only absolute creativity’, it should be noted that at the time of writing, Mann was just such a young man, having recently entered into a mixed marriage with a ‘slender’ girl who already had ‘everything in order’ with the back of her head, legs, and arms, and among the Jews to whom the writer addressed his instruction to be baptised was his father-in-law.
It would not be necessary to go into all these family details (or to speculate) in such detail if it were not for one episode, which was destined to become one of the biggest Germany literary scandals and whose character sheds light on many worldview aspects of the consciousness of both Thomas Mann himself and many right-wing conservative Germans who assiduously developed the imperialist and antisemitic narrative of the time. Before outlining this fascinating story in all its intriguing and paradoxical sequence, let us give a few quotes from Thomas Mann's correspondence, in which he shares his impressions of the life and manners of his future wife's family: ’The Pringsheim house made an amazing impression on me, a treasure trove of true culture. The father of the bride is a university professor with a gold snuff box, the mother of the bride is a beauty ... I visited the Italian hall, made in Renaissance style and decorated with tapestries, Lenbach paintings, doorways lined with giallo antico, and accepted an invitation to a big house ball. <...>
Interior of Palais Pringsheim, Munich
For the first time, after eighteen reprints of [Buddenbrooks], I was in such a large social circle, and I tried my best to present myself in a dignified manner. ...I think I did pretty well. In principle, I am royally endowed with the talent of making a good impression, as long as I am in more or less decent health’. Following this cathology of the attributes of true culture and mechanisms of self-representation, one cannot help but recall that throughout Mann's correspondence, his articles, and even in the text of his Reflections there are abundant rivers of passionate praise that the writer lavishes on the great and ‘holy’ Russian literature. However, Mann goes on a wedding trip not to the Optina Desert or anywhere else where Russian holiness is closer and more obvious, but to Zurich, where he settles in the luxurious hotel Baur au Lac (the cost of a room in which today ranges from 1,000 to 5,000 euros).
Baur au Lac hotel lobby (modern photo, Booking.com)
This hotel, opened in 1844, hosted the world premiere of Wagner's opera The Valkyrie (so it says on the hotel's website), with the composer himself conducting. The second notable feature is the fact that it was at the Baur au Lac that Nobel's secretary came up with the idea of establishing the Nobel Prize. Mann's biographers Inge and Walter Jens note that in this hotel Mann saw what he (but not his wife) had always favoured: ‘.... the dinner jackets, the livery attendants, the luxurious lobby from which one could watch the arriving guests, the conversations in the salon, the uniformed lift boys ... the lifestyle of prosperous and pampered darling of fortune…’. It is probable that at this point Mann, as once in his childhood, was again ‘assuming a condescending and amiable grandeur and walking proud and happy, enjoying the mystery of his dignity’. But the subsequent course of events suggests that the enjoyment was nevertheless tainted. As an inquisitive observer, Mann could not help but notice that the Pringsheims' treatment of him, including Katja herself, is in places of the same quality as his literary posture: condescendingly amiable.
Mother-in-law calls Mann ‘tenderfoot’ in her letter for 1907, and Katya herself, as biographers note, long delayed the decision to marry, because, probably, did not have strong feelings for Thomas. However, Katja Pringsheim had a strong desire to create a family and raise children.
One of Mann's sons later admitted that their grandmother, on the Pringsheim line, was fond of saying, ‘The Buddenbrocks are not upper-class’ (Thomas Mann's family were prototypes of the characters in this story). Not only condescending courtesy, but obvious property arrogance peeped through in that phrase. Be that as it may, Thomas Mann's marriage did take place, and one day he stood in the lobby of the luxurious Hotel Baur au Lac and looked at the walls, decorated with the opulence so dear to his heart: it's real magic!
Shadows from the hands of Wagner conducting The Valkyrie wandered across these gleaming surfaces not so long ago. If we follow what we know about the origins of artistic creations, then this crossroads - a visible entrance to a new frontier in his life and a stay in the hotel where The Valkyrie premiered - is enough for these two events to mix in the writer's mind and, as a result of this mixing, the idea of writing a short story in which these themes will be closely connected was born. If Mann was indeed seriously wounded, both by the very fact of the long courtship and by the circumstances of the reception of his person in this family, then, as an artist, he must, somehow or other, have freed his soul from this oppressive content (as he confessed in the letter to his brother).
4
The story The Blood of the Wаlsungs begins with a description of a breakfast party at the Aarenhold family's house. The author nowhere indicates that the owners of the house are Jews, but he provides a number of details, from which such a conclusion cannot but be drawn, taking into account the stereotypes that were in vogue at that time. Thus, a certain Beckerath is expected for breakfast, and Mrs. Aarenhold (the mistress of the house, who ‘...was…low, ugly, early aged’) expresses herself about him as follows:
- ...Oh, he's the one who's not coming. He's saving money on breakfast at the restaurant.
The author characterizes of Kunz (mistress's son) as a man with ‘twisted lips’. Marit (mistress's daughter) has an ‘eagle nose’ (‘she studied law and, radiating contempt, generally lived by herself’). There are other children in the Aarenhold family, twins Siegmund and Sieglinde, whom Thomas Mann describes as follows: ‘identical, slightly flattened noses, identical full, gently curved lips, protruding cheekbones, shining black eyes’. Berkovich, the author of a special article on the literary antisemitism of this story, analyzing these descriptions, notes that ‘Siegmund is extremely sensitive to smells, constantly uses cosmetics and incense, and ‘he had such an extraordinary and incessant need to wash that he spent a significant part of the day near the washbasin’. The author makes it clear that his character knows what kind of society he comes from. According to antisemitic stereotypes, there is filth and stench there, which he seeks to get rid of’.
Siegmund's torso was ‘furry with black hair’, and ‘the twins’ caresses also resembled animalistic ones: 'they began to play like puppies, biting with just their lips'. 'The comparison of the elder Aarenhold to ‘a worm, a louse’ is less sympathetic but telling. In the Judeophobic tradition it is common to compare Jews to beasts, reptiles, insects in order to separate them from the rest of the human race, to show their isolation from other people. In high-sounding language, we can say that such comparisons achieve the dehumanization of the Jew, depriving him of his humanity’.
Mann writes that this family speaks a ‘dialect’: ‘Her speech was saturated with strange, guttural-rich words - expressions from the dialect of her childhood’. Some time later, a certain Beckerath appears in the drawing room. This German wants to marry the owner's daughter. The groom is designated in the story as a man of zealous courtesy, ‘an official and of noble birth - a wedge beard, small, canary-colored’. The writer notes the presence of this ‘zealous courtesy’ in the groom not at all accidentally: this is the quality that distinguishes him from all the others - arrogant and pompous people. The dialog begins with a petty rebuke that Sieglinde hurls at her fiancé, and then the author notes that what the ‘children’ were saying was hurting Beckerath - however, the author writes, it would be pedantic to ‘sulk at them for it’ (sic!). Mann's eye misses no significant, for his purposes, detail. The master of the household, ‘putting some bone marrow on a piece of bun and sprinkling it with salt’, addresses Beckerath with a sermon of hedonism. After a while the conversation touched upon philosophical questions, over the discussion of which Beckerath was unable to speak. On the subject of dress, Sieglinde noted that only ‘animals’ are capable of showing up in a tuxedo after dinner (‘Beckerath laughed hard, especially as his conscience reminded him how he himself had once appeared at tea in a tuxedo…’). The further conversation turned out to be a no-nonsense humiliation for Beckerath: ‘Cramped by their cheerful superiority, he grew smaller in his chair, pressed his chin to his chest, and breathed confusedly with his mouth open. The children objected to everything, as if not to object seemed impossible…’
The story provides an overabundance of descriptions of the characters' appearances and actions - one could say that Thomas Mann is so obsessed with creating repulsive portraits of those to whom his protagonist has lost in a table fight of opinions that he is not afraid to over-salt it (Siegmund wrinkles his face three times, as if ‘a man whose eyes are blinded by the sun’ - it is clear to us that such a man looks at everything somewhat, if not squeamishly, then with a touch of detachment, although there are already enough indications of his arrogance).
Then, as the narrative progresses, we learn that to her patient, diligent, and infinitely courteous fiancé, Sieglinde repeatedly declared that she did not love him, but in time she began to "look at him probingly, expectantly, silently, with a brilliantly serious look that spoke not the language of thought, like the look of an animal - and said 'yes'." This is the second time that the adjective ‘animal’ is used in this short story in connection with Sieglinde's view of Beckerath. Thomas Mann is not Chekhov, who called for throwing away the first and last page of a written story to remove all the ‘why's’: his pen does not shy away from pressure, that is, the repeated use of indexical comparisons.
The fact that Siegmund and Sieglinde are animals is made clear to us at the end of the story with the help of another ‘lining’: brother and sister, coming home after an opera performance, merge with each other in an incestuous relationship, and Thomas Mann lays them on a bear skin in this action. In doing so, the twins exchange remarks with each other, from which it follows that Beckerath is someone or something used by them for functional purposes. In the opening section of the story, Mann is preoccupied with only one thing: he draws portraits of people who belong - there can be no doubt about it - to some special breed (‘she wrinkled in pain, which made the physiognomic features of her breed extremely apparent’, and these features are too expressive not to recognise the person in question (‘her lips gripped the thin rim of the cup tightly, softly, and while she drank, large, moist black eyes looked at Siegmund’). We have before us people of ‘austere and extraordinary destiny’, they do not just live - they blissfully enjoy their superiority: ‘their praise was a restrained approval, criticism - instant, sensible, irreverent - disarmed in an instant, so much so that any enthusiasm, falling under its attack, dimmed, dumbed and numbed’.
Mann gives not only a broad exposition of the physical attributes of the Jews in this story - these include physiological features, appearance, manners, mode of expression, and even odors, - but also shows how the young members of the Aarenhold family depart from simple and clear definitions in their mode of reasoning, taking a step toward German philosophical casuistry: ‘The conversation ...wrapped around a single point…: if a is a necessary and sufficient condition for b, must b also be a necessary and sufficient condition for a. …Marit brought up the difference between philosophical concepts, namely between real and causal reason. Kunz, raising his head and addressing to her from top to bottom, declared ‘causal reason’ to be pleonasm. Using irritated expressions, Marit defended the right to her own terminology. Mr. Aarenhold made himself comfortable, picked up a piece of bread with his thumb and forefinger, and expressed his readiness to explain everything. He had failed completely. The kids mocked him. Even Mrs. Aarenhold humiliated him’. Aarenhold's and Kunz's worldview, whatever you want to call it, is bound up with the principle of sufficient reason, and, of course, in such a frame of reference there can be no distinction between ‘real’ and ‘causal’ reason. Aarenhold's younger children already think differently, betraying in their reasoning a familiarity with Schopenhauer's ideas. For some, in the subsequent historical outcome, the ‘right to one's own terminology’ is the right to argue about the concept of ‘dasein’ (аs Heidegger was orchestrating this richly connotative philosophical invention, an NSDAP membership card appeared on his lectern), and for others to call a war of conquest, as Mann did in Reflections, ‘forced creative offensive actions’.
In fact, Thomas Mann, a living witness to the historical emancipation of the Jews of Germany, shows us some features of this process, also described in Eric Hobsbawm's book Fractured Times: ‘It did not mean a denial of their Yewish identity, not even in the very unusual case of conversion. German Jews survived as a group conscious of their Judaism until extirpated by Hitler’. Hobsbawm does not indicate in what exactly this ‘a group conscious of their Judaism’ was preserved, but in Thomas Mann's story we see the emancipated forms it took. At the same time, Hobsbawm writes that ‘wealthier Jews, parvenus into an established society, were even more likely to abandon visible and audible marks of their origins’. Looking at the example of the Pringsheims, we see that this was in fact the case. Biographers inform us that in this family the children did not know they were Jewish: the range of their interests was, if not entirely, then to a large extent connected with purely German realities. Hobsbawm, speaking of broader contexts, notes that Jews often saw in German language and culture the means by which they could become even more free and civilised. In fact, it turned out that this aspiration was so strong, and their abilities and possibilities so suitable, that the Jews occupied a place, to use Mann's phrase, in the ‘avant-garde of taste’. It seems that the German Beckerath is not given a word at the table only because he, a German, can no longer, neighbouring with those in the ‘avant-garde of taste’, express anything meaningful: the Jews do it better than he does.
However, there were other opinions about the extent to which Jews became - or could become - Germans in the process of emancipation: ‘the national spirit, or rather the race, does not consist in language, but in blood’ (Mein kampf).
5
The writer very much regretted that the expensive edition of the story, published for bibliophiles in a morocco binding, used the version that does not include the final phrase spoken by Siegmund in Yiddish:
- Beganeft haben wir ihn, - den Goy [We deceived him - the goy].
Experts note that Mann did not so much resort to Yiddish as invented his own version of the verb ‘to deceive’, i.e. he did not do without ‘his own terminology’ in this case. However, the main point is not this nuance, but the very fact that the story ends with a statement of deception, which the characters, who have ancient Germanic names (and in fact are Jews), commit in relation to a German - Beckerath. By using the word ‘blood’ in the title, Mann gives a very specific hint that these characters, Siegmund and Sieglinde, remain true to their blood - that Sieglinde's impending marriage to Beckerath is a social game, and that the essence of these people - unchanging and based on pragmatic calculation - is predetermined by their blood.
In Berkovich's excellent articles on the antisemitic aspects in Mann's work, much of the author's critical attention is given to the writer's ‘relief imagery’ (or aspects of his biography). However, Mann, as a conscious heir to Wagner's universalist aspirations, was well aware that ‘in a work of art, relief representativeness can be combined with a sceptical generalisation that elevates the depicted to the rank of myth’ (Apt). Moving in the same vein in this story, Mann sought to mythologize the racial aspect of the Jewish question, but this fact - one might say it is the foundation of the artistic idea of this work - is often overlooked by those who analyze it.
Some of Thomas Mann's statements were not clothed in a vibrating shroud of artistic imagery and resembled Hitler's attitudes most directly. Long before the relevant set of ideas comes into confrontation on a political level, Mann records in his diary (2 May 1919): ‘We also talked about this type of Russian Jew, the leader of the world movement, an explosive mixture of intellectual Jewish radicalism and Slavic Christian dreaminess. If the world has not lost its instinct for self-preservation, it must move with all vigour and in a military-like swiftness against this type of man’. With Hitler's rise to power (but not immediately), Mann realised his own apparently striking spiritual affinity with the German Führer. His thoughts about this formed the basis of the already mentioned article Brother Hitler, which among other things became an expressive example of Mann's self-abuse. It is interesting that about the same years Russian poet Boris Pasternak, writing the lines ‘he believes in the knowledge of each other/ of the extreme two beginnings’, will note in his diary: ‘...meant Stalin and himself’.
6
The first publication of The Blood of the Walsungs failed because the Pringsheims saw in it what could not be unseen and forced Thomas Mann to ban its publication. The text had already been typeset and even printed. Sheets not included in the current issue of the literary magazine were later used by the publisher as wrapping paper, upon examining which one bibliophile recognised Thomas Mann's style. There were already bad rumours about the story, which almost caused a rift in the Pringsheim family, and after the text itself appeared in the hands of people, a real scandal broke out in Munich. However, these circumstances are important to us not for their truly detective twists, but only in the sense that they took place at all, because many years after this story there are still people who believe that ‘to associate the name of Thomas Mann with antisemitism is not to understand him at all, not to know him at all, and to deny the value of his work’ (German literary critic Finkler). It is not our aim here to know and understand all of Thomas Mann. However, for a better understanding of how the writer himself felt about his writings, which sometimes had such a provocative character, and about himself, their proud author, it is worth adding a few more touches to his portrait.
In one of his letters to his brother Heinrich, also a writer, Thomas Mann wrote: ‘I think that… you are called upon to represent on earth that dark and doubtful mixture of Lucifer and clown which is called an artist’. It sounds like a joke, but the mocking author of The Buddenbrokes is not joking at this point. In another letter, written just in the year of writing The Blood of the Wаlsungs, we read this: ‘I assert that the greatest writers never invented anything in life, but only filled with their soul and transformed the already known’. In tracing the connection between the motifs of the story and the circumstances of Thomas Mann's courtship of Katja Pringsheim, it is hard to disagree. But the writer in the same letter, just in case, seeks to protect himself from one-dimensional biographical interpretations: ‘I want to point out the fallacy of identifying reality with its artistic representation. I want the work of art to be regarded as something absolute, not subject to discussion from a worldly point of view’. Despite the obvious ambiguity of this reflexion, in another letter Mann takes a note higher: he states that he would have signed such words: ‘My books are not only poetic works: as moral revelations, as testimonies of seriously and strictly guarded human dignity, they have a value more durable than poetic’.
Who creates these ‘moral revelations’? How does the bearer of such a conception of artistic creation see himself? In this connection, Thomas Mann spoke of himself as follows: ‘...If you find me withdrawn in personal communication, the reason for this is probably that, being accustomed to expressing myself symbolically, i.e. in works of art, one loses the taste for personal sociability. You lead, I would say, a symbolic, representative existence, like the life of a prince…’.
Scattered throughout Mann's correspondence are confessions of how ‘the newspapers have placed amorous descriptions’ of his person. At one point he tells of how he carefully considered a pose for a staged photograph in which one of his hands would be resting on volumes of his writings. In both letters and reflections, Thomas Mann often quotes Schiller's saying that a man is only a man when he plays, and it is indeed wonderfully said, only Thomas Mann himself would never have agreed that any play was possible with such a thing as his ‘conspicuous position in society’.
In October 1941, Thomas Mann shows signs that the game of ‘prince’ has not yet left his mind (in other words, that his ‘prominent position in society’ is not visible enough): ‘To my friend, the poet Hermann Hesse, a wealthy Swiss philanthropist ... has built a beautiful house. Why has it never occurred to any city or University in this country to offer me something like that, even if only out of 'ambition', just to say: 'We have him, he is ours'?".
Hermann Hesse`s House in Montagnola, Switzerland
However vigorous Mann's anti-Hitler activities may have been in the relevant years, it should be borne in mind that this letter refers to a house in the United States, a country with which Germany was at war during the years Mann wrote Reflections. In 1918, a ministerial advisor even saw ‘military significance’ in this book, but Mann did not reprint it until the end of his days (the English translation was published only in 1983, the Russian one in 2015).
7
The best way to conclude the story of this generally strange rapprochement between German writer Thomas Mann and the Jews and their simultaneous ‘unmasking’ in the short story The Blood of the Wаlsungs is to make a representation of the circumstances of the young Hitler's life that echo what we know about Thomas Mann. In this we will be helped by Brigitte Hamann's brilliantly book Hitler's Vienna: A Portrait of the Tyrant as a Young Man.
In this thorough work, the Austrian researcher provides a bewildering array of information about the young Hitler's relationship with the Jews. Contrary to, if not common knowledge, then quite expected, Hitler's contacts with the Jews during his stay in Vienna were paradoxically not of the nature that one might have assumed on the basis of all subsequent historical events: ‘An authorized employee of the NSDAP archives in 1938 collected material about the Führer in Linz and, to his great surprise, learned that Hitler's favorite performers, his idols, who appeared in productions of Schiller and Wagner, were 'strangely ... almost entirely Jewish'. The man whose version of the solution to the Jewish question was known to be ‘final’ in character, remained selective in his treatment of Jews even in those years when it was no longer necessary to behave in a cautious manner: ‘According to an eyewitness who knew Hitler in the 1930s, the Führer had no sympathy for ‘nationalist sectarians’. And once, when he was brought a new ‘Aryan text’ for The Magic Flute instead of Schikaneder's libretto, supposedly generated by the Jewish spirit, Hitler rejected it, noting that he was not going to become a laughingstock.
Hitler remarked that ‘Jewish youth can be seen constantly in educational institutions, whether male or female, but Aryan youth hardly ever appear there’. Hitler's friend Kubitschek writes in his memoirs, ‘The standing seats in the parterre and on the fourth tier were occupied mainly by Jews and Jewish women, and they, finding themselves in the majority, behaved with appropriate insolence’.
If music and going to the opera were Hitler's hobbies, then painting pictures was the occupation by which he survived. Hitler's watercolors were eagerly bought by shopkeepers selling baguettes (they served as a kind of representational addition to the patterned frame).
Watercolour painting of Neuschwanstein castle, A.Hitler.
However, to ensure his livelihood in this way, it was necessary to paint one picture a day, and Hitler was not distinguished by the ability to work. Hitler also fulfilled orders, pretending to be an artist with academic training. Young Hitler, in order to survive, had to get out of it, resorting, among other things, to criminal tricks. Hitler, like Thomas Mann (let's leave aside the nuances), was an evader (for Hitler it was so at the stage of his stay on the territory of Austria-Hungary).
Hitler lived in such cramped circumstances that any support was important to him. Who did Hitler rely on during his most difficult period? Let's quote Brigitte Hamann: ‘Even statements by Hanisch that are often questioned (e.g., as if the young Hitler preferred to settle near Jews) are supported by the registration data’. Elsewhere, Hamann notes that ‘the most reliable buyer of Hitler's paintings’ was the Jew Morgenstern (their relationship was long and reliable: ...many of Morgenstern's regular clients, also Jews, acquired his paintings in those years). In 1943, Morgenstern died in the ghetto from exhaustion. In 1939, he wrote to Hitler pleading for rescue, reminding the Reich Chancellor that he had once had ‘an opportunity to appreciate me as an honest and decent man’. Dr. Bloch, Hitler's mother's attending physician, wrote a similar petition, and this Jew was not only saved by the Führer, but a guard was assigned to his house. Landsberger and Altenberg, other buyers of Hitler's paintings and drawings, were also Jews. Those of these men who lived through the war did not recall ‘a single antisemitic statement by the young Hitler’, and the already mentioned Hanish testified that in 1910, when a wave of publications denigrating the Jew Heine swept through the antisemitic press, ‘the young Hitler stood up in defense of the poet’.
In attempting to give a general characterization of Hitler's contacts with Viennese Jews, Hamann resorts to definitions that will seem familiar to us: ‘Hitler's close contacts with the Jews may indicate that he was aware of their superiority. As Kubitschek recalls, on standing seats at the opera, he had the opportunity to observe the Jewish interest in culture and the lack of it in the typical ‘Viennese’. Hitler was aware of the disparity between the number of Christian and Jewish students at the universities, and more than once heard popular jokes about the 'clever' and 'cunning' Jews who easily overpower the 'honorable' Christians’.
Hitler, when he was 19, honoring Mahler and Roller, found himself, according to Kubitschek's testimony, siding with ‘crooked-nosed Mahlerians’ and ‘Jews’. Mahler's performances of Wagner were characterized ‘in that era by downright dazzling perfection’. Hitler, who recognized himself as an artist first and foremost at that time, may indeed have been blinded by this perfection - other emotions, like antisemitism, may have seemed secondary to him. There may have been a functional strategy in his approach as well. Apparently, Hitler considered the opinion of educated Germans important to him. He was distrustful of the so-called ‘nationalist forerunners’, all those bearded Agaspheres who, ‘wearing a cap of bear fur with bull horns, waved tin swords’ (Mein kampf).
Carefully covering the traces of that part of his biography, which was associated with humiliating poverty, Hitler was still aware of how much money his paintings were actually worth. Since 1933, their prices have soared 50 times, and, as Hamann notes, in order ‘not to disgrace themselves in front of experts’, he had to intervene and stop this spontaneous speculation. In the same way, we must suppose, he was well aware of what his prospects were in the eyes of specialists if he began to attack the Jew Mahler, whose performances of Wagner were justly admired by himself. Hitler was confronted with the fact that the best representation of the Germanic spirit, as it was then believed, was made by Jewish hands. The racial aspect remained the only argument that could be used to deny Jews the right to occupy a dominant position (in the ‘avant-garde of taste’), but it was finally developed and presented until many years later.
8
Alfred Pringsheim ended his days in Switzerland, where he managed to leave with his wife in 1939. In 1933, his family home Palais Pringsheim was requisitioned by the Nazis and the Führerbau (‘Leader's Building’) was built in its place.
Hitler and Mussolini on the balcony of the Führerbau, 1937 г.
It was in this building that the Munich Agreement was signed in September 1938.
A year after Pringsheim's death, his wife also died. She probably burned the letters from Richard Wagner to her husband along with all the personal belongings she had brought to Switzerland. Alfred Pringsheim was Wagner's friend and patron of the arts. Once, according to Thomas Mann's daughter Erika, Pringsheim even participated in a duel in connection with an insult to the German composer.
Modern eхterior of the Führerbau
5853