Audiovisual Companion
to my Spring 2021 seminar on
Nietzsche and Modern Literature

Roderick T. Long

Nietzsche (center); Mann (upper left); Gide (upper right); Lawrence (lower left); Rand (lower right)

WEEK ONE:

The purpose of this page is to provide background info to the readings. Much of the background info will take the form of photos and music (hence the “audiovisual”). There’ll also be some random notes.

The red border around Thomas Mann is to signify our beginning with him among our four novelists.

Oh, and here’s Wagner in a festive mood:

Here’s a timeline of our authors:

Here are the two contrasting quotes on war that I mentioned in class:

And perhaps the great day will come when a people, distinguished by wars and victories and by the highest development of a military order and intelligence, and accustomed to make the heaviest sacrifices for these things, will exclaim of its own free will, “We break the sword,” and will smash its entire military establishment down to its lowest foundations. Rendering oneself unarmed when one has been the best-armed, out of a height of feeling – that is the means to real peace .... Rather perish than hate and fear, and twice rather perish than make oneself hated and feared – this must some day become the highest maxim for every single commonwealth .... (The Wanderer and His Shadow 284)

It is part of the concept of the living that it must grow – that it must extend its power and consequently incorporate alien forces. ... A society that definitely and instinctively gives up war and conquest is in decline; it is ripe for democracy and the rule of shopkeepers. (The Will to Power 728)

And here’s the quote that offers a way of reconciling them:

Every art, every philosophy may be viewed as a remedy and an aid in the service of growing and struggling life; they always presuppose suffering and sufferers. But there are two kinds of sufferers: first, those who suffer from the over-fullness of life – they want a Dionysian art and likewise a tragic view of life, a tragic insight – and then those who suffer from the impoverishment of life and seek rest, stillness, calm seas, redemption from themselves through art and knowledge, or intoxication, convulsions, anaesthesia, and madness. ...

Regarding all aesthetic values I now avail myself of this main distinction: I ask in every instance, “is it hunger or superabundance that has here become creative?” ... The desire for destruction, change, and becoming can be an expression of an overflowing energy that is pregnant with future (my term for this is, as known, ‘Dionysian’); but it can also be the hatred of the ill-constituted, disinherited, and underprivileged, who destroy, must destroy, because what exists, indeed all existence, all being, outrages and provokes them. (The Gay Science sec. 370; pp. 329-30 in the Kaufmann translation):

Nietzsche: “The Greek State”

p. 164: The reference to Horace’s Ars Poetica is to the following passage:

If a painter should wish to unite a horse’s neck to a human head, and spread a variety of plumage over limbs of different animals taken from every part of nature, so that what is a beautiful woman in the upper part terminates unsightly in an ugly fish below; could you, my friends, refrain from laughter, were you admitted to such a sight?

pp. 166-167: As an example of the liberal critique of classical antiquity that Nietzsche speaks of, Bastiat complains about “the strange idea ... of sending the youth of France, with the intention of preparing them for labor, peace, and freedom, to drink in, and become imbued and saturated with, the feelings and the opinions of a nation of brigands and slaves” (i.e., Rome), “a nation ... which, hating and despising labor, has based its whole mode of life on the successive pillage and enslavement of all its neighbors.”

p. 171: The passage about “international, homeless, financial recluses” who “misuse politics as an instrument of the stock exchange” is the one I described in class as having the appearance of being a coded reference to Jews (though at the same time, one needn’t be an antisemite to have concerns about, e.g., multinational corporations).

On the same page (and in terms similar to Thomas Mann’s “Thoughts in Wartime” four decades later), Nietzsche condemns the “liberal-optimistic world view” on the grounds that it is “completely un-Germanic,” with “roots in the teachings of the French Enlightenment and Revolution,” a “flat and unmetaphysical philosophy.” This constellation of positions is going to get much more complicated in Nietzsche’s later works; the “liberal-optimistic world view” remains an adversary, as does the French Revolution; but Nietzsche’s going to become rather fond of the French Enlightenment, at least for a while – and “un-Germanic” and “unmetaphysical” will soon become badges of honour rather than term of abuse.

In contrast to this piece’s attitude toward the role of the working class, here’s the later passage I referred to in class:

From the future of the worker. — Workers should learn to feel like soldiers. An honorarium, an income, but no pay!

No relation between payment and achievement! But the individual, each according to his kind, should be so placed that he can achieve the highest that lies in his power. ...

The workers shall live one day as the bourgeois do now— but above them, distinguished by their freedom from wants, the higher caste: that is to say, poorer and simpler, but in possession of power. (Will to Power 763-764)

Nietzsche: “Homer’s Contest”

p. 35: The Hesiod reference is to this passage:

It was never true that there was only one kind of strife [= Eris]. There have always
been two on earth. There is one you could like when you understand her.
The other is hateful. The two Strifes have separate natures.
There is one Strife who builds up evil war, and slaughter.
She is harsh; no man loves her ....
But the other one was born the elder daughter of black Night. ...
she is far kinder.
She pushes the shiftless man to work, for all his laziness.
A man looks at his neighbor, who is rich: then he too
wants work .... Such Strife is a good friend to mortals.
Then potter is potter’s enemy, and craftsman is craftsman’s
rival; tramp is jealous of tramp, and singer of singer.
(Hesiod, Works and Days 11-26; Lattimore translation)

So Nietzsche is citing, favourably, a passage devoted to praising commerce and productive labour, and denigrating war, in order to support a thesis denigrating commerce and productive labour, and praising war. I’m just sayin’.

Nietzsche: Philosophy in the Tragic Age of the Greeks

p. 46: “the only serious moralist of our century” – Nietzsche means Schopenhauer.

p. 65: “plaudite amici”: “applaud, friends.”

Nietzsche: The Birth of Tragedy (pp. 32-87)

pp. 37-38: Nietzsche offers Beethoven’s Hymn (or Ode) to Joy, from the Ninth Symphony, as an image of the Dionysian. Here it is. It’s not a particularly good performance, but it has Schiller’s lyrics (which Nietzsche likewise references):

p. 45: Here’s Raphael’s Transfiguration painting that Nietzsche describes:

p. 69: Nietzsche’s discussion of Oedipus is influenced by Siegfried’s incestuous conception in Wagner’s Ring, about which see the section on “Blood of the Wälsungs” below.

Magee: “Wagner the Left-wing Revolutionary”

pp. 35-36: Magee points to two anarchists, Proudhon and Bakunin, as influences on Wagner; here they are:


Pierre-Joseph Proudhon	Mikhail Bakunin

p. 37: Here Magee makes it sound as though the anarchists he’s talking about (mainly Proudhon, Bakunin, and their followers) reject all use of force in an anarchist society, even by way of defense against aggressors, and also that these anarchists reject industrialisation; by and large neither claim is accurate (though the claims do apply to some anarchists). The view that these anarchists regarded human nature as rational and unselfish is misleading too; while anarchists disagreed with one another about human nature, what they agreed on is that to the extent that human nature is good, government isn’t needed, while to the extent that it’s bad, no human being can be trusted with governmental power.

Mann: Blood of the Wälsungs (Wälsungenblut)

There’s a movie version of this; here’s the trailer (in German, I’m afraid):

Siegmund and Sieglinde Aarenhold, the incestuous Jewish twins in Mann’s story, are named after Siegmund and Sieglinde Wälsung, the likewise incestuous but decidedly non-Jewish twins (and parents of Siegfried) in Wagner’s opera Die Walküre, a performance of which the Aarenhold twins attend. An odd choice by their parents, to name their twins after a famously incestuous couple. But the really odd choice is arguably Mann’s, since he based his fictional twins on his own wife and her brother.

So, obviously there’s a lot to unpack here.

Wagner’s Ring of the Nibelung

Let’s start with the Ring cycle, of which Die Walküre is a part. We’re going to see recurring references to the events and ideas of the Ring throughout this course, so it’s best to familiarise yourselves with the basic outlines of the operas. Here are links to the Wikipedia synopses of the four parts. Go take a look; I’ll be here when you get back. (Note: Wotan, Donner, and Loge are better known to American audiences under the Norse versions of their names: Odin, Thor, and Loki.)

     1. Das Rheingold (The Rhinegold)

     2. Die Walküre (The Valkyrie)

     3. Siegfried

     4. Götterdämmerung (Twilight of the Gods)

Comments:

a) Dwarves, dragons’ hoards, invisibility spells, a cursed ring of power, and a wandering wise man in grey? Tolkien denied being influenced by Wagner’s Ring, which he disliked; but he readily granted being influenced by the same Norse legends that inspired Wagner. (For example, the names “Gandalf” and “Frodo,” as well as the dwarvish names “Dori,” “Ori,” “Nori,” “Fili,” “Kili,” “Gloin,” “Dwalin,” “Bifur,” “Bofur,” “Bombur,” “Durin,” “Dain,” “Nain,” “Thror,” “Thrain,” “Thorin,” and “Oakenshield,” all derive from the Icelandic Eddas.)

b) The idea of Siegfried being the product of incest seems to be Wagner’s innovation. In the Icelandic version of the Sigurd/Siegfried legend (as found in the Völsungasaga and the Eddas), Sigmund/Siegmund and his sister Signy/Sieglinde, both members of the Völsung/Wälsung family, do have a child by incest, but it isn’t Sigurd, who is instead Sigmund’s son by an entirely different woman, Hjördis. In the Germanic version of the legend (as found in the Nibelungenlied), Siegfried is indeed the son of Siegmund and Sieglinde, but this time there’s no suggestion that Sieglinde is Siegmund’s sister. (And according to one Norwegian source, Sigurd’s mother was instead named Sisibe. Folklore is the wrong place to look for consistency; just wait till we get to Gudrun/Kriemhild.) One interpretation of the incest theme in the Ring is that it symbolises the heroic defiance of old laws, conventions, and authority in favour of spontaneous love. A less charitable interpretation is that, for Wagner, Siegfried’s being the product of incest makes him a symbol for Aryan racial purity; Mann plays subversively with this latter meaning by offering a Jewish version of the incestuous Wagnerian pair, describing Siegfried in Jewish-coded terms as “the seed of that hated unprized race, chosen of the gods, from which the twins had sprung.” (p. 315) Mann was also fascinated by the medieval legend of Pope Gregory, who was supposedly “marked out for sanctity from birth, being the product of intercourse between brother and sister.” (Mann, Story of a Novel, p. 147)

c) When the Aarenhold twins ask Beckerath permission to go to Die Walküre, their brother Kunz drums the Hunding motif on the tablecloth (p. 304), thus associating Beckerath with the cuckolded husband in the opera. Here’s the motif:

d) Here’s the Prelude to Die Walküre that Siegmund and Sieglinde listen to when they arrive at the theatre:

e) According to his wife, Mann was “under the influence of Richard Wagner his whole life long.” Shortly after attending a performance of Verdi’s Otello, Mann once said: “Oh, put on the record with the entr’acte music from Parsifal. ... Yes, the Otello we heard recently was very good, but when I hear this, ach, du lieber Gott!” (quoted by Katia Mann, in her paradoxically titled Unwritten Memories, pp. 90-91) Here’s the music in question:

We’ll see more of Mann’s thoughts on music when we get to Doktor Faustus.

Katia and Klaus

As mentioned above, Mann based the Aarenhold twins on his own wife Katia Pringsheim and her brother Klaus. Here they are:

In the original draft of the story, Siegmund’s last line is: “We’ve ‘beganeft’ him, the goy,“ using a Yiddish term meaning to rob, cheat, trick, or betray. Mann later changed the line to “he ought to be grateful to us; his existence will be a little less trivial, from now on.” Critics disagree as to which ending is better.

Mann apparently expected his in-laws to take the story in stride; he even read it to them as an evening’s entertainment. But then he often seemed blind to the offensive potential of his words. (For example, upon being asked by his wife’s grandmother, noted feminist author Hedwig Dohm, whether he hoped his first child would be a boy or a girl, he replied: “A boy, of course. After all, a girl is not to be taken seriously.” – Unwritten Memories, p. 22.) In fact Katia’s father was outraged by “Blood of the Wälsungs” and demanded that Mann withdraw it from publication, which he did. (It wasn’t published until fifteen years later.) Klaus, by contrast, quite liked the story, happily identifying with the hero. As for Katia, she thought the controversy over “Blood of the Wälsungs” was “much ado about nothing.” Her position was that if she had really been having an incestuous relationship with her brother, it would have been improper for Mann to reveal it in a story; but since she hadn’t been, it was alright for Mann to invent one. (Unwritten Memories, p. 59)

Ironically, two of Mann’s own children, Erika and Klaus (the latter named after the previous Klaus), both noted authors in their own right, would become so close that their relationship was sometimes suspected of being incestuous, although both were gay.

Is the portrayal of the Aarenhold twins positive or negative? Todd Kontje takes it to be negative, describing Mann’s Siegmund and Sieglinde as “self-indulgent, nasty, incestuous little beasts.” (Thomas Mann’s World, p. 53) By contrast, when I first read “Blood of the Wälsungs” back in college, I took the portrayal of the two siblings to be much more positive; reading the story through the lens of Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals, I interpreted the Jewish couple as intended to be representatives of master morality – healthy, arrogant, self-affirming, beyond good and evil – and Beckerath as a pitiful representative of the lower, weaker masses that, in a Nietzschean perspective, the masters cheerfully dominate. (Likewise for the encounter between the ressentiment-filled Praisegod (Lobgott) Piepsam and the ruthless Life-on-a-bicycle in “Way to the Churchyard.”) Today I find the story much more ambiguous than either Kontje’s straightforwardly negative reading or my own former straightforwardly positive reading. Mann is always ambivalent, always doing some kind of balancing act.

Closely related to the question of whether the twins are portrayed positively or negatively is the question of whether the story is antisemitic. On one reading, Mann is drawing on the Wagnerian idea that Siegfried is able to bring about the end of the gods because he is the product of incest and thus of a breaking of old contracts and commandments, and is thereby making some point (but what?) about the tension, for the modern Jew, between exclusivity/tradition on the one hand and assimilation on the other.

On the broader question of whether Mann is generally antisemitic, here too he’s hard to pin down. On the one hand, Mann married into a Jewish family and firmly attacked the antisemitic movements of his day; on the other hand, his private journals are filled with barbed remarks about Jews, and most of the Jewish characters in his novels are unpleasant (though to the latter charge Mann famously replied that most of his non-Jewish characters are unpleasant too).

Mann: Death in Venice

Nietzsche celebrated strength and self-assertion, and attacked decadence; yet he also praised the Dionysian impulse, which he describes as involving a kind of self-surrender. How can self-assertion and self-surrender both be recommended?

A similar ambiguity runs through Mann’s work as well. In his 1914 essay “Thoughts in Wartime” (discussed in one of the Kontje handouts), Mann hailed the strength and vigour of Germany’s Dionysian spirit, while attacking Germany’s enemies as decadent; but two years earlier, in Death in Venice, Mann had portrayed surrender to the Dionysian spirit as a kind of decadence, and associated that surrender geographically with a move away from Germany toward Italy and India. (It’s fair to say that ambivalence about the Dionysian runs throughout Mann’s works. Certainly there’s no straightforward answer to the question of how we’re supposed to evaluate Aschenbach’s trajectory. Mann was constantly writing stories about characters based largely on himself who end up abandoning their Apollonian restraint and succumbing to Dionysian impulses of one kind or another, as Mann himself seems not to have done.)

In Story of a Novel (p. 142), Mann quotes favourably the Marxist critic Georg Lukács’s judgment that “Heinrich Mann’s Der Untertan and Thomas Mann’s Tod in Venedig can both be regarded as great forerunners of that trend towards signaling the danger of a barbarous underworld existing within modern German civilization as its necessary complement.” This might seem ironic, given that during this era the two Manns were at odds precisely over the value of German culture and nationalism. But Thomas Mann praises Lukács for having “maintained the capacity, indispensable in a critic, to distinguish between opinion and being (or action springing from being), and to take only the latter, not the former, at face value. Irrespective of the opinions I had held at the age of forty, he nevertheless sets me incontrovertibly side by side with my brother ....” Mann adds that “the concept of signaling is of the foremost importance in all literature,” since “the writer (and the philosopher also) is a reporting instrument, seismograph, medium of sensitivity, though lacking clear knowledge of his organic function and therefore quite capable of wrong judgments also.” (p. 143) In other words, Mann now thinks that in Death in Venice he had unconsciously been at odds with the views he was putting forward around the same time in his wartime essays.

Here are the locations in Munich (München) where Aschenbach walks in chapter 1:

Prinzregentenstrasse (Prince Regent’s Street), where Aschenbach lives:

The English Garden:

The Nordfriedhof cemetery:

– and the “Hall of Last Rites” where Aschenbach first sees the mysterious figure:

Here’s today’s Venice (Venezia):

Here’s today’s Lido, the island alongside Venice where most of the story takes place:

And here’s the Lido’s Hôtel des Bains, where Aschenbach stays:

Check out the notes on pp. 63-74 of the Dover edition for useful background information.

Wagner is famous for his use of musical leitmotifs (believe it or not, they were relatively uncommon in opera before him; and without Wagner’s influence, the soundtrack of such movies as Star Wars and Lord of the Rings might well sound very different). As has often been pointed out (see again the notes, p. 69), Mann uses a literary equivalent of leitmotifs in Death in Venice, such as the recurring red-haired skull-faced characters (representing Dionysus? death? both?) and recurring mentions of tigers (animals native to India, who traditionally drew Dionysus’s chariot; the plague that afflicts Venice is also said to have originated in India). (P.S. – Who would win in a fight between Thor and Dionysus? Well, probably Thor. But I bet the goats that traditionally draw Thor’s chariot might not fare as well against Dionysus’s tigers.)

The character of Aschenbach is based on several people, including: Goethe, who in his seventies developed an unrequited passion for the teenage Baroness Ulrike von Levetzow (indeed, originally Mann’s story was going to be explicitly about Goethe; he did eventually write a novel, Lotte in Weimar a.k.a. The Beloved Returns, about a different romance of Goethe’s); the poet August von Platen-Hallermünde (who was homosexual, wrote poems about Venice, and died of cholera in Sicily, and whose birthplace of Ansbach may have inspired the name Aschenbach); the composer Gustav Mahler (particularly his physical appearance), who had died the year before (the 1971 movie, incidentally, turns Aschenbach into a composer rather than an author, and makes heavy use of Mahler’s symphonies); Richard Wagner, who died while visiting Venice for his health – as one rumour had it, his death being precipitated by a heart attack brought on by an argument with his wife Cosima over his infatuation with the 24-year-old Carrie Pringle, one of the flower maidens in his last opera Parsifal (most biographers regard this story as a myth; but it needn’t be true in order to be a possible influence on Death in Venice) – and finally Mann himself.

Indeed the whole story is based heavily on an incident in Mann’s life the year before, during a visit to the Hôtel des Bains in Venice; as Mann’s widow Katia explains:

All the details of the story, beginning with the man at the cemetery, are taken from experience ... In the dining-room, on the very first day, we saw the Polish family, which looked exactly the way my husband described them: the girls were dressed rather stiffly and severely, and the very charming, beautiful boy of about 13 was wearing a sailor suit with an open collar and very pretty lacings. He caught my husband’s attention immediately. This boy was tremendously attractive, and my husband was always watching him with his companions on the beach. He didn’t pursue him through all of Venice – that he didn’t do – but the boy did fascinate him, and he thought of him often .... (Unwritten Memories, pp. 60-62)

The real-life Tadzio has been identified as Władysław Moes, nicknamed “Władzio.” Mann makes Tadzio fourteen; the movie makes him still older, and picks this sixteen-year-old actor to play him:

But in real life, the object of Mann’s obsession (despite Katia Mann’s recollection of him as being “about thirteen”) was only ten, and looked like this:

Not to creep you out or anything. (Though if you do want to be creeped out, read Mann’s diary entries where he fantasises about his own son’s young naked body.)

I’ve mentioned the 1971 film Death in Venice; here’s a trailer (apologies for the somewhat pretentious narration, which was common for “important,” “artistic” movies in those days):

The decision to make Aschenbach a composer also allows the movie to incorporate some of the themes of Doktor Faustus as well.

There’s also a recent, short (13 minutes) film, Sea of Ash (not coincidentally, “Aschenbach” means “brook of ash”) that reimagines Tadzio as “a young West African refugee who has survived the treacherous sea journey into Europe,” and now makes his way “to the Venetian coast where he embarks on a doomed attempt to return home.” So here’s another trailer:

Magee: “Wagner, Feuerbach, and the Future.”

Here’s Ludwig Feuerbach:

Coincidentally (unless Mann had him in mind), Feuerbach’s name (“fiery brook”) is a counterpart to Aschenbach’s (“ashen brook”).

Mann: “Disorder and Early Sorrow”

This story takes place against the real background of the German hyperinflation of 1923; the very first two sentences, concerning the corners that have to be cut when serving dinner (in what is implied to be a formerly more prosperous – and of course still comparatively well-off – household), hint at a background of financially straitened circumstances, and further indications of a general economic crisis recur throughout the story. But monetary inflation also serves as a metaphor for the breakneck pace of modern life and old standards losing their value. (Paul Cantor has an article analysing the economic aspects of “Disorder and Early Sorrow.”) Indeed, the Cornelius household is affluent enough (as was Mann’s own) for the hyperinflation to be more of an annoyance than the apocalyptic disaster it was for many other families; hence Mann’s focus is really more on its metaphorical than on its literal aspects. The decline of traditional authority is reflected in the forwardness of the servants (Xaver borrows his employer’s bicycle without permission, and looks indistinguishable from the professor’s son), and the children calling their father by his first name. The professor’s fear that his love of history is a love of death reflects ideas in Nietzsche’s Advantage and Disadvantage of History for Life; the breezy independence of his children, as well as his five-year-old daughter’s crush on a college student, also portray the fleetingness of time (see especially pp. 506, 511, and 523, where the theme becomes explicit). Dr. Cornelius’s slight feeling of resentment against the rising generation, and the pace at which they are outgrowing the past which he represents, is a much more complex, nuanced, and ambivalent successor to Praisegod Piepsam’s ranting against the bicyclist; while the “big folks” (i.e., the two older children) are likewise a subtler version of the Wälsung twins (they even have similarly ironic ways of talking). As always, Mann’s sympathies seem to be with both sides.

Most of the characters are based directly on Mann’s own family: Dr. and Frau Cornelius on Thomas and Katia Mann; the younger children, Ellie and Snapper, on his own children Elisabeth and Michael; and the older children, Ingrid and Bert, on the aforementioned Erika and Klaus. Mann’s two middle children, Golo and Monika, are quietly dropped. Here they all are in 1924, at just about the right age (a year after the story takes place, a year before it’s written):

Katia, Monika, Michael, Elisabeth, Thomas, Klaus, Erika (Golo missing)

This story has also been made into a movie; here’s a clip,(sorry, no English subtitles):

p. 501: “moujiks” are Russian peasants. According to Katia Mann, Ivan Herzl is based on the actor Albert Fischel:

p. 507: Did Elisabeth Mann have one ear larger than the other, as Ellie does? This picture suggests yes, but it may just be the angle:

p. 509: The “Open the gate, open the gate” poem could be given a sexual interpretation, connecting with Ellie’s infatuation with Max. This may be why Mann describes its “romantic appeal” as “unutterable and unuttered” (though the German is closer to “inscrutable and unsolved”).

A cheerful children’s song about Mariechen sitting on a stone combing her hair when a stranger comes along and stabs her to death is found in many versions; here‘s one:

p. 514: a Wandervogel (“wandering bird”) is a member of one of the German youth groups devoted to hiking in the mountains.

p. 517: “Joli Tambour” (“Handsome Drummer”) is an 18th-century folk song; here’s one version:

And here’s a translation of the lyrics (I’ve left out the “rapataplan” chorus, which is just the French-folksong way of imitating the sound of a drum):

Three young drummers were coming back from war;
the youngest carried a rose in his mouth.
The daughter of the King was at her window:
“Handsome drummer, give me your rose.”
“I’ll give it to you, but you must be my sweetheart.”
“Handsome drummer, ask my father.”
“Sire the King, give me your daughter.”
“Handsome drummer, you’re not rich enough.”
“Sire the King, I am the son of the King of England;
I have three vessels upon the beautiful sea:
one loaded with gold, the other with silver,
and the third one to escort my sweetheart around.”
“Handsome drummer, in that case you shall have my daughter.”
“Sire the King, I thank you for her:
but in my country there are prettier girls.”

p. 518: One wonders how Klaus felt to see his father describing him (“Bert”) as one who “knows nothing and can do nothing and thinks of nothing except playing the clown, without even talent for that!” In fact Klaus turned out to be a fine novelist in his own right.

p. 521: The “console thee” song is from Hugo Hirsch’s operetta Der Fürst von Pappenheim; I couldn’t find a sample.

p. 522: Biblical overtones have been read into Hergeshell’s kneeling to help Dr. Cornelius with his boots: John 1:27, 12:3, 13:5.

p. 526: Max is described as a “swan knight,” a reference to Wagner’s Lohengrin, in which the heroine Elsa, falsely accused of murder, is about to be executed when the magical Swan Knight appears, rescues her, and marries her. The darker side of the story is that he makes her promise never to ask his name, but of course she eventually breaks her promise, causing him to vanish and leaving Elsa to die of heartbreak.

p. 527: The “sit the livelong night” quotation is from Goethe’s Wilhelm Meister.

Max calls Ellie “Lorelei,” a reference to the following poem by Heinrich Heine (translator unknown), about a cross between a Wagnerian Rhinemaiden and a Homeric siren. (My grandmother used to recite it in German.)

I cannot tell why this imagined
despair has fallen on me;
the ghost of an ancient legend
that will not let me be:
the air is cool, and twilight
flows down the quiet Rhine;
a mountain alone in the high light
still holds the faltering shine.
The last peak rosily gleaming
reveals, enthroned in air,
a maiden, lost in dreaming,
who combs her golden hair.
Combing her hair with a golden
comb in her rocky bower,
she sings the tune of an olden
song that has magical power.
The boatman has heard; it has bound him
in throes of a strange, wild love;
blind to the reefs that surround him,
he sees but the vision above.
And lo, hungry waters are springing –
boat and boatman are gone ...
then silence. And this, with her singing,
the Lorelei has done.

So Mann references two folktales about a girl combing her hair, both in relation to Ellie; in one of them she gets stabbed by “bloodthirsty Rudolf,” while in the other she lures a sailor to his death. With Mann, death always seem to be lurking below the surface of love; indeed Dr. Cornelius’s own love for his daughter takes the form of not wanting her to grow older, to freeze her at her current age, which links back to his love of history as what is past and unchangeable.

Mann: Doktor Faustus (beginning)

Doktor Faustus, written during World War II, represents Mann’s attempt to come to terms with what Germany had become, as well as with his own German nationalist past, and with Nietzsche. In part it’s a reply, by WWII-era Mann, to WWI-era Mann.

The legend of Faust or Faustus, the German scholar who sells his soul to Mephistopheles in exchange for magical knowledge and worldly power, exists in many versions; the two best known are Christopher Marlowe’s 16th-century play The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus and Goethe’s late 18th/early 19th-century epic Faust. Many musical adaptations exist as well, the most famous being Gounod’s opera. Wagner never wrote a Faust opera, but he did plan a symphony, and completed at least the overture:

For Mann, the Faust legend suggested itself as a useful metaphor for Germany’s descent into Nazism. Mann described the “central idea” of Doktor Faustus as “the flight from the difficulties of the cultural crisis into the pact with the devil, the craving of a proud mind, threatened by sterility, for an unblocking of inhibitions at any cost, and the parallel between pernicious euphoria ending in collapse with [sic] the nationalistic frenzy of fascism.” (Story of a Novel, p. 30) [Who knew this was going to be so topical?]

Another undoubted influence is Oswald Spengler’s 1922 magnum opus Decline of the West, which pairs the Apollonian principle not with the Dionysian but with the Faustian – where the Faustian principle is characterised by an insatiable yearning for infinity, infused with the tragic insight that the goal is impossible. On Spengler’s view, the Faustian principle has been the driving force of modern western civilisation, which is now becoming exhausted. (Spengler is also the likely origin of Mann’s distinction, back in his World War I writings, between healthy, vital Culture and decadent Civilisation.) Spengler was originally popular with the Nazis, but when his own initial support for the Nazis grew increasingly lukewarm (he said, essentially, that the Reich was doomed to fail, and that the Nazis’ obsession with the Jews was groundless crap) they withdrew their support, while otherwise leaving him alone.

Nietzschean Tune of the Week

Finally, in addition to writing about music, Nietzsche also composed it. People usually expect his music to sound Wagnerian, but it actually sounds more like Chopin, at least to my ear. Here’s a sample – the “Heldenklage” (“Hero’s Lament”):

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Audiovisual Companion to my Spring 2021 seminar on Nietzsche and Modern Literature

Roderick T. Long

Audiovisual Companion
to my Spring 2021 seminar on
Nietzsche and Modern Literature