Thomas Mann
From Philosopedia
Mann, Thomas (6 June 1875 - 12 August 1955)
Mann wrote an autobiographical sketch when he received the Nobel Prize in 1929. It starts:
- I was born in Lübeck on June 6, 1875, the second son of a merchant and senator of the Free City, Johann Heinrich Mann, and his wife Julia da Silva Bruhns. My father was the grandson and great-grandson of Lübeck citizens, but my mother first saw the light of day in Rio de Janeiro as the daughter of a German plantation owner and a Portuguese-Creole Brazilian. She was taken to Germany at the age of seven. I was designated to take over my father's grain firm, which commemorated its centenary during my boyhood, and I attended the science division of the «Katharineum» at Lübeck. I loathed school and up to the very end failed to meet its requirements, owing to an innate and paralyzing resistance to any external demands, which I later learned to correct only with great difficulty. Whatever education I possess I acquired in a free and autodidactic manner. Official instruction failed to instill in me any but the most rudimentary knowledge. When I was fifteen, my father died, a comparatively young man. The firm was liquidated. A little later my mother left the town with the younger children in order to settle in the south of Germany, in Munich.
The author of Buddenbrooks (1901), Dr. Faustus (1947), and The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg 1924, translated 1927), discussed the subject of humanism as early as 1938, when he wrote:
- For me and my kind the religious is lodged in the human. Not that my humanism springs from a deification of humanity—verily, there is small occasion for that! Who could find the heart, contemplating this crack-daily given the lie by the bitter and harsh facts? Daily we see it commit all the crimes in the Decalogue; daily we despair of its future; all too well we understand why the angels in heaven from the day of its creation have turned up their noses at sight of the Creator’s incomprehensible partiality for this so doubtful handiwork of his. And yet—today more than ever—I feel we must not, however well-founded our doubts, be betrayed into mere cynicism and contempt for the human race. We must not—despite all the evidence of its fantastic vileness—forget its great and honorable traits, revealed in the shape of art, science, the quest for truth, the creation of beauty, the conception of justice. Yes, it is true, we succumb to spiritual death when we show ourselves callous to that great mystery on which we are touching whenever we utter the words “man” and “humanity.” . . . What Christians call “original sin” is more than just a piece of priestly trickery devised to keep men under the Church’s thumb. It is a profound awareness in man as a spiritual being of his own natural infirmity and proneness to err, and of his rising in spirit above it. Is that disloyalty to nature? Not at all. It is a response to her own deepest desire. For it was to the end of her own spiritualization that she brought man forth. . . . I believe in the coming of a new, a third humanism, distinct, in complexion and fundamental temper, from its predecessors. It will not flatter mankind, looking at it through rose-colored glasses, for it will have had experiences of which the others knew not. It will have stouthearted knowledge of man’s dark, daemonic, radically ‘natural’ side; united with reverence for his superbiological, spiritual worth. The new humanity will be universal—and it will have the artist’s attitude: that is, it will recognize that the immense value and beauty of the human being lie precisely in that he belongs to the two kingdoms, of nature and spirit. It will realize that no romantic conflict or tragic dualism is inherent in the fact; but rather a fruitful and engaging combination of destiny and free choice. Upon that it will base a love for humanity in which its pessimism and its optimism will cancel each other out.
In Dr. Faustus, the character of Serenus Zeitblom is pictured as the extreme academic type of humanist. Zeitblom describes his humanism on page one of the novel, and presumably this also is Mann’s view of a classical humanist, for he wrote,
- I am by nature wholly moderate, of a temper, I may say, both healthy and humane, addressed to reason and harmony; a scholar and conjuratus of the “Latin host,” not lacking all contact with the arts (I play the viola d’amore) but a son of the Muses in that academic sense which by preference regards itself as descended from the German humanists of the time of the “Poets.”
He continued,
- As for my Catholic origin, it did of course mould and influence my inner man. Yet that lifelong impress never resulted in any conflict with my humanistic attitude in general, my love of the “liberal arts” as one used to call them.
Zeitblom, like the neo-humanists Paul Elmer More, L. J. A. Mercier, and Jacques Maritain, deplores “liberal theology,” which he considers a contradictio in adjecto:
- The scientific superiority of liberal theology, it is now said, is indeed incontestable, but its theological position is weak, for its moralism and humanism lack insight into the daemonic character of human existence. Cultured indeed it is, but shallow; of the true understanding of human nature and the tragic nature of life the conservative tradition has at bottom preserved far more; for that very reason it has a profounder, more significant relation to culture than has progressive bourgeois ideology.
Are we to conclude, Warren Allen Smith has written of Mann in "Humanists on Humanism," that inasmuch as the character of Adrian Leverkuhn is obviously not in accord with Mann’s personal beliefs, that Thomas Mann is speaking his thoughts through the person of Zeitblom? That Mann, who used the German equivalent of the word “humanist” over a score of times in the book, is a classical humanist in sympathy with Zeitblom? That in using the first person throughout the book to describe Zeitblom’s humanism, Mann was in fact seeing through the “faustian” character of Germany’s many Leverkuhns and was suggesting that Germany’s only salvation was that of rejecting the materialism of science which had brought about her downfall and accepting the spiritual approach of classical humanism? The answers are not found in Dr. Faustus, a scene of which is based upon his own sister’s suicide. When the reader finishes the book, he not only sees the defects of Leverkuhn’s thinking but also finds Zeitblom’s philosophy distasteful. The two appear to be extremes, and the reader is forced at times to agree with both, though eventually disagreeing with both. In Chapter XXV, the reader finds himself agreeing with the Devil in his reference to theology:
- I hope you do not marvel that “the Great Adversary” speaks to you of religion. God’s nails! Who else, I should like to know, is to speak of it today? Surely not the liberal theologian! After all I am by now its sole custodian! In whom will you recognize theological existence if not in me? And who can lead a theological existence without me? The religious is certainly my line: as certainly as it is not the line of bourgeois culture. Since culture fell away from the cult and made a cult of itself, it has become nothing else than a falling away; and all the world after a mere five hundred years is as sick and tired of it as though, salva venia, they had ladled it in with cooking-spoons.
Here, Smith continues, Mann has given an indication of his own personal view. Like his great grandfather, a freethinker and rationalist, Mann is no supernaturalist but, rather, is a naturalist who, amused, looks at the various theological devices such as heavens, hells, angels, devils, original sins, and other-worldly speculations. Or, as he explained in a speech of Dr. Breisacher:
- In the genuine religion of a genuine folk such colourless theological conceptions as sin and punishment never occurred, in their merely ethical causal connection. What we had here was the causality of error, a working accident. Religion and ethics represented the decline of religion. All morality was “a purely intellectual” mis-understanding of the ritual. Was there anything more god-forsaken than the “purely intellectual?” It had remained for the characterless world-religion, out of “prayer”—sit venis verbo—to make a begging appeal for mercy, an “O Lord,” “God have mercy,” a “Help” and “Give” and “Be so good.” Our so-called prayer . . . is the vulgarized and rationalistically watered-down late form of something very vital, active and strong: the magic invocation, the coercion of God.
It is between the lines of Dr. Faustus that one finds Mann’s personal beliefs. After he finished the novel in 1947, he wrote Smith:
- In my opinion I do not belong to any philosophical school, and I gladly leave it to you to classify me. It has been said of the “Faustus”-novel that I had split myself therein, and that both, the narrator as well as the hero, bore a resemblance to myself. There is some truth in that, and I especially have to admit that Zeitblom displays many traits of my own intellectual form and existence. This is not altered by the fact that he is treated with some irony at the beginning of the book and that, in general, he to a certain extent plays the role of Famulus Wagner in Goethe’s Faust. I don’t believe that I may call myself a classical humanist. This intellectual form seems hardly possible any longer today. You are familiar with my comments on the subject and know that my hopes are aimed at the development of a new humanism which is no longer purely optimistic, but religiously tinted and deeply experienced in all dark aspects of life, a humanism which derives its pride from the unique and mysterious position of man between nature and mind. As I said before, I leave it to you to put a name to this my proud sympathy for the secret of man.
As pointed out by Alex Ross, Doctor Faustus, born of a close study of earlier composers, went on to influence later ones. Theodor Adorno, a philosopher, was Mann’s “musical adviser,” giving advice on technical details and lending his own manuscripts for perusal. Mann cut and pasted Adorno’s and others’ writings into the text. At the time he wrote the work, he was socially friendly with Schoenberg, Stravinsky, Otto Klemperer, Arthur Schnabel, Arthur Rubinstein, Ernst Krenek, and Hanna Eisler. The work, Ross has written, “is not simply a parable of the artistic life; it is a grand realist novel of music, a monument to the culture in which Mann came of age.”
Life’s dark sides were depicted in Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1954), a work said to have been influenced by his guilt feelings about having been a poor husband and a father. Several of Mann’s works, including The Holy Sinner (1951), show people who need to be creative but who, in practice, experience the concept of evil, leading to a form of artist-guilt.
Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain) concerns a fanatical Freemason and a fanatical Jesuit, the implication being that neither extreme is preferable to a humanistic naturalism.
Although Mann undoubtedly is one of the giants of the century, he received much negative criticism for Doctor Faustus, which to many elevated Germany’s Nazi era to a kind of demonic myth, not attacking it analytically from a social or political point of view.
He also was faulted for exploring sibling incest (Katia and her twin brother, Klaus Pringsheim) in The Blood of the Walsungs; caricaturing his parents and friends in Buddenbrooks; and including platonic homosexuality and the culture of decline in Death in Venice (1925). Many criticized the support he gave to the German cause in the First World War. However, his supporters point out that he fled Germany, became a US citizen in 1944, and has been recognized as an outstanding German literary figure of the 20th century.
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The Sexual Escapades
Mann was generally known in artistic circles as being bisexual, and his son, Klaus (1906-1949), was openly homosexual. Critic Gordon A. Craig, in fact, has listed the names of Mann’s young men who, like Horace’s Ligurinus, he “yearned for.” (Of Ligurinus, Horace wrote, “. . . In dreams at night/I hold you in my arms, or toil/behind your flight/Across the Martian Field,/Or chase through yielding waves/the boy who will not yield.”)
Mann’s loves were Lübeck schoolmates Armin Martens and Willri Timpe; the art student Paul Ehrenberg, “with whom he became a close friend in 1899, during his first years in Munich”; then, later in life, the seventeen-year-old Klaus Heuser, “whom he met while vacationing on the island of Sylt in 1927, when he was fifty-two”; and Franzl Westermeier, “a waiter in the Grand Hotel Dolder near Zürich, with whom he became infatuated while staying there in 1950.” The latter was immortalized in Felix Krull. In each case, according to Craig, “the passion with which he was affected was powerful, brought him moments of exaltation and despair, and, in the case of Ehrenberg at least, to open declarations of love.” However, Craig notes that so far as we can tell there is no proof that the Mann’s love was reciprocated, let alone consummated.
In 1941, according to W. H. Auden, Auden and his lover Chester Kallman visited Mann’s California home:
- At the Manns, we took turns screwing a friend on Thomas’s big bed when the family was away.
The Critics
James T. Farrell was one of many who wrote negatively about Mann' political views. Van Meter Ames had qualifications about his philosophic outlook.
The Federal Bureau of Investigation kept a special file on Mann.
Ronald Hayman, in Thomas Mann, A Biography (1995) states that Mann was deeply influenced as a young man by the writings of Nietzsche. Hayman alleges that Mann had a fiercely competitive relationship with his older brother, had a secret attraction to young boys as well as to his son Klaus, and scolded his son Klaus for disturbing his tranquillity by once attempting suicide. When Klaus did successfully commit suicide, Mann chose to continue a lecture tour and did not attend the funeral. Mann’s son Michael also committed suicide.
Later Years
Mann’s diaries detail not only his attacks of hypochondria but also, while in his seventies, his flirting with hotel waiters and observing muscular young men on beaches. Although an admittedly heartless egocentric, Mann continues to rate more positive than negative literary criticisms.
Mann left the United States in 1954, hounded by McCarthyites and disenchanted with American politics. He spent his last years in Switzerland. In his Diary, Mann had directed that he wanted his gravestone to stand in a land where German-language poets reposed. The cemetery is next to a church at Kilchberg near Zurich, Switzerland. On his marker are his name and dates as well as the name and dates of his wife Katia (died 1980), who was the daughter of a wealthy mathematics professor who came from a Jewish family that had converted to Protestantism. Adjacent is Erika (died 1969), their eldest daughter, who had given up a career as a journalist and cabaret performer to manage his affairs. Nearby is an obelisk that marks the grave of Swiss writer Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, as well as the snow-capped Alps and a fragment of Lake Zurich.
Correspondence
While pursuing his M.A. at Columbia, Warren Allen Smith wrote to Mann as to what he meant by "humanism," citing the word in Dr. Faustus. Mann's response led to Smith's suggesting that there are seven humanisms. Of the seven, Mann eventually chose "naturalistic humanism," terminology also used by Smith's professor, Corliss Lamont.
Heinrich Mann, Brother
Adam Kirsch in 2012, reviewing House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann by Evelyn Juers, includes the following:
- Few writers have ever revealed themselves as daringly and completely as Thomas Mann; and from the very beginning, one of the things he felt it most urgent to reveal was his obsessive sense of fraternal rivalry. In Buddenbrooks, the family epic that made Mann famous in his mid-twenties, we meet Thomas Buddenbrook, a rigidly disciplined businessman (and the author’s namesake), and his brother Christian, a neurotic loafer whose only interest is the theater. Precisely because Thomas feels himself vulnerable to the same vices that have destroyed Christian, he holds his brother in “fierce contempt”: “You’re an abscess, an unhealthy growth on the body of our family,” Thomas rails.
- Juers misses the pathos of the brothers' intimacy and solidarity, despite their differences of personality and, yes, their opposite feelings toward Nelly Kroeger. If you see Thomas Mann only through Juers's eyes, it's impossible to understand the emotion that shines out from the telegram Heinrich wrote his brother in 1946, when Thomas was undergoing life-threatening surgery:
- my beloved brother you must have the strength to live and you will stop you are indispensable to your great purpose and to all persons who love you stop there is one who would feel vain to continue without you stop this is the moment for confessing you my absolute attachment stop.
(See earlier comments by Van Meter Ames.)
{CB; CE; CL; GL; HNS; HNS2; Alex Ross, The New York Times, 6 April 1997; WAS, 23 December 1948}
