CHAPTER TWO

‘VOLUPTUOUSNESS AND
HOT GUILT’

IN 1935, WHEN Thomas Mann was poised to depict the fate of the lovesick Mut-em-inet, the chaste wife of Potiphar who fell for the young steward Joseph, he interpolated a private reflection on the unity of his work. This was, he wrote with evident emotion, always the same:

it is the idea of a catastrophe, the invasion of destructive and wanton forces into an ordered scheme and a life bent upon self-control and a happiness conditioned by it. The saga of peace wrung from conflict and seemingly assured; of life laughingly sweeping away the structure of art; of mastery and overpowering, and the coming of the stranger god – all that was there from the beginning, as it was in the middle. And in a late age which is aware of its affinity with human beings, we find ourselves still united with them in that bond of sympathy.¹

The ‘middle’ here refers to Death in Venice, where the artistry of Gustav von Aschenbach was shattered. The ‘beginning’ would be the story Little Herr Friedemann. In a letter that is often quoted, but seldom taken quite seriously, Thomas Mann said of this work, dating from 1896, that up till then he still needed a secret diary, but from then on he found for the first time the ‘discreet forms and masks’ under which he could parade his experiences among the public.² The remark is striking, and far more so than has ever been realized; not only because it knows no gulf between truth and fiction and the story now replaces the diary, not only because he situates his future work completely under the sign of masquerade and camouflage,³ but also because he speaks of experiences, not of dreams, imaginings or fantasies.

Johannes Friedemann – like Dunja Stegemann or Paolo Hofmann one of the ego-substitutes that bear their autobiographical stamp in their very name⁴ – the little Herr Friedemann, marked by a bodily defect, oriented himself early in life towards a dry, well-ordered contentment without the fulfilment of love, until he came under the spell of Gerda von Rinnlingen. This masculine Gerda, smoking and swinging her whip, he finds irresistibly attractive. When she inquires about his stigma he stammers out a confession, and when she subsequently rejects him, he drowns himself in the river. It seems hard to imagine a more innocent and defenceless victim, and this is precisely how the narrator of Joseph and His Brothers presents it when he looks back at these dramas of affliction, in the first of which the poor Herr Friedemann is swept away by cruel life.

If we examine the story more closely, however, we find that there is something else going on as well. Friedemann’s erotic humiliation acts on him as an ever more strongly rising emotion. When Gerda shames him for the first time with her glances, the pale man grows still paler, and ‘a strange, bitter-sweet rage welled up inside him’. This anger grows into an ‘impotent, voluptuous hatred’, shoots through him as an ‘impotent; sweet, agonizing fury’, and it is also this insistently depicted, pleasurable rage that drives him to self-destruction.⁵ When Gerda laughingly flings him to the ground and he lies in the water, he asks himself what exactly is going on in his mind:

Perhaps it was that same voluptuous hatred he had felt when she humbled him with her eyes; and now that he was lying here on the ground like a dog she had kicked, did this hatred perhaps degenerate into an insane fury which had to be translated into action, even if it was only action against himself?⁶

Voluptuousness and insane fury – that is rather different from the sound of shawm or cor anglais that has been heard for so long in Mann’s work, the Tristan theme of love and death. For close to a century, the eroticism and metaphysic of death covered up what was rumbling below the surface of this work. Underneath it was not the entrancement of love and death, but rather the pangs of desire and violence.

Little Herr Friedemann still directs this violence against himself. His tale stands at the beginning of a series of fictions, which all revolve around the same motif. The Joker, Tobias Mindernickel, The Wardrobe, Revenge, Little Lucy and The Road to the Churchyard all deal with outsiders, with deep humiliation and uncontrollable rage.⁷ From 1897, however, after Thomas Mann’s second journey to Naples, a certain change occurs: the rage of the humiliated party is discharged as aggression. The story that dates from the Roman summer of 1897 treats of a timid recluse, in whom – the words of an early review – ‘goodheartedness and human bestiality sleep closely together’.⁸ Tobias Mindernickel is his name, a man whom children shout funny rhymes about on the street, and who only gets into a gentle mood if he can commiserate with the sorrows of others. One day Mindernickel goes for a walk over the Lerchenberg, where a salesman has a young hunting dog on a lead. Tobias circles him three times, asks the price with downcast eyes and in low, hurried tones – a scene distantly related to the sale of the shadow in Peter Schlemihl⁹ – and takes his new companion home, giving him the name of Esau.¹⁰ When Esau gets boisterous, Mindernickel is seized like Herr Friedemann by a ‘mad and extravagant fit of anger’, and he beats the disobedient dog. After this chastisement he poses in front of the dog like Napoleon before a defeated regiment,¹¹ Mann’s hero of this era, whose portrait stood on his writing desk. When Esau has the misfortune to injure himself on a kitchen knife, his master cares for him devotedly. Once the animal is well again, however, his mood reverses. ‘His face was drawn with suffering, and he followed Esau’s pranks unmoving, with a sidelong, jealous, wicked look.’¹² Mindernickel was pale like Friedemann, pale like the criminal face in Dostoevsky,¹³ pale like many later characters of Mann’s. The train of events that follows is described by the narrator as ‘sinister, to an extraordinary degree’:¹⁴

That which now happened was so shocking, so inconceivable, that I simply cannot tell it in any detail. Tobias Mindernickel stood leaning a little forward, his arms hanging down; his lips were compressed and the balls of his eyes vibrated uncannily in their sockets. Suddenly with a sort of frantic leap, he seized the animal, a large bright object gleamed in his hand – and then he flung Esau to the ground with a cut which ran from the right shoulder deep into the chest. The dog made no sound, he simply fell on his side, bleeding and quivering …¹⁵

The insane rage is no longer directed self-destructively against the hero, but against the hated and loved dog which Tobias Minder-nickel murders. This is not the last dog in Mann’s opus with a violent end in store, nor the last knife that we see shining there. And Tobias Mindernickel, as has been noted, bears the initials of his creator.

On his return to Munich, Thomas Mann completed the following year a further ‘story full of riddles’ as its subtitle puts it, The Wardrobe, of which he occasionally said that quite against his custom he had written it ‘under the influence of a hot toddy’ and the signs of this could be seen.¹⁶ This tells of the mortally ill Albrecht van der Qualen, who breaks off his train journey to Rome and alights at a town modelled on Lübeck, where he lodges at a small boarding-house – that is, unless he has in fact dozed off on the train and simply dreamed the whole thing. In his room, which also contains Mann’s massive mahogany bed, is a wardrobe, and in the evenings a naked girl appears in it and tells him stories. The only one of these stories that the reader gets to hear has a disturbing conclusion:

But it ended badly; a sad ending: the two holding each other indissolubly embraced, and while their lips rest on each other, one stabbing the other above the waist with a broad knife – and not without good reason. So it ended.¹⁷

Rage against the humiliation suffered is laconically transformed here into the ‘good reason’ for which one party is stabbed to death. The careful avoidance of a gendered pronoun is striking. Mann resorts to this uncommon usage in order, presumably, not to say explicitly that the couple is homosexual, otherwise there would be no reason not to make the genders clear and circumvent so awkwardly the question whether it is the man who sticks the knife into the woman, or vice versa.

Just as striking are the distorting prisms that Thomas Mann interposes before the brute fact. The event ‘A stabs B’ is not related by a narrator as something experienced or faithfully recounted, it is placed in a fairy-tale, and this tale is not related by a real character, but by an unreal dream figure, whose hearer in all likelihood is also dreaming, asleep on the express train to Rome.

The motive – which by this device is shifted into the furthest realm of unreality – occupies Mann also in projects of which we have only indirect knowledge. Peter de Mendelssohn, his first biographer, writes in his commentary on this fairy-tale’s irritating conclusion:

‘Above the waist’, it is expressly said, not below. Murderers impelled by robbery, by lust, or just plain murderers, re-occur with their knives quite frequently in the imaginings of the young writer – not least in the aforementioned plans for stories not completed, from ‘Murderer Schandfleck’ to ‘Murderer Ocean’. They must indeed have had ‘good reason’.¹⁸

A knife even turns up in Buddenbrooks, where it is not so easily smuggled in. The miraculous work of the twenty-five-year-old writer, the great bourgeois family novel, leaves little room for the kind of scandalous happenings depicted in Tobias Mindernickel or The Wardrobe; outward appearances are important in Mengstrasse, where knives should be raised only at dinner. But there is a member of this senatorial family who does occasionally lose his composure. This is Christian, the outsider and failure, to whom Thomas Mann ascribed all those portions of himself that he could not safely deposit on Hanno or his namesake Thomas. Thomas Buddenbrook upholds the achievement ethos, he is the fragile hero of the will; Hanno is the sensitive latecomer, while it is Christian who receives all the odd and neurasthenic qualities that his master surreptitiously endows him with. Not only does he share the insecurity, the tendency to buffoonery, escapism and decadence which Thomas Mann had to combat in himself.¹⁹ He also tells strange stories, which he draws from the experience of his author.

We don’t know whether Mann actually believed that all the nerves of his left side were too short. But we do know that something far more improbable which he has the sick Christian come out with, is taken from autobiographical fact. ‘Perhaps it happens to you,’ Christian asks when aroused to struggle against his brother, ‘that you come into your room when it is getting dark and see a man sitting on your sofa, nodding at you, when there is no man there?’²⁰ He refrains from saying that this man was the Devil, but otherwise this is just the experience that the prospective author of Buddenbrooks had in Palestrina, and is conjured up once again in chapter 25 of Doctor Faustus.²¹ Now if even this most mythical of experiences has a kernel of fact, and if Christian himself in this apparent nonsense says nothing but the truth, then caution is indicated about lesser stupidities; they may well be true. This must at all events be borne in mind with the other cock-and-bull stories he tells to amuse his family:

But Christian did not hear. His eyes roamed about, sunk in thought, and he soon began to tell a story of Valparaiso, a tale of assault and murder of which he had personal knowledge … ‘Then the fellow ripped out his knife –’²²

This is the first time that the word murder has been dropped, since Tony so stubbornly and unbelievably confused the first name of her Morten Schwarzkopf with the word ‘Mord’.²³ Thomas is unwilling to hear all this, and gives the impression ‘that he thought Christian was exaggerating and joking … which was certainly not the case’. Differently now from The Wardrobe, where he could not draw unrealistically enough away, this time the narrator decently insists that everything really did take place as he described. No exaggeration and no jest: Christian had been present in person at the scene of a murder at which knives were drawn, in the south, one may suppose in the criminal underworld in which the romancer was at home, as is mentioned two pages later. We are in no way told, however, that he felt guilty for witnessing this event; Protestantism and conscience in this novel are ascribed to the Schopenhauer reader Thomas.

The two things are combined, however, the decadent and the moralist, in the protagonist of the short story that appeared in 1903, and to which, right into his old age, Thomas Mann remained particularly tied. Tonio Kröger, the young artist, who from the depths of his being loves the allure of the surface, has much in common with both Hanno and Thomas, and no less so with the impressionable Christian. He too comes into contact with knives, even if this time they are not drawn as weapons. In Tonio Kröger, the knives appear only in a blunted form, transfigured by literature: in the ‘sword-dance of art’,²⁴ the dance of Andersen’s little mermaid, which forty years later becomes a major theme in Doctor Faustus.²⁵ It is a new technique that Mann embarks on here, a new way of telling the old business. The cruelty is no longer shifted into a dreamscape as in The Wardrobe, neither is it placed at a curious margin as in Buddenbrooks; this time it is given pompous significance and symbolically enhanced. All three techniques that Mann felt his way towards and expanded with ever greater virtuosity belong from now on to his secure stock-in-trade; they no longer change till the very end, and are resurrected from one work to the next.

The enhancing idealization, which is shown from Tonio Kröger onwards, does not prevent this tale from being so bluntly auto-biographical that its author even signed letters ‘Tonio Kröger’.²⁶ There are not many details in the story which we could not say where they fit in real life. Even the episode from the travel chapter is taken from Mann’s own experience, when at an hotel in his home town Tonio Kröger is questioned by the police, who confuse him with a man they are pursuing ‘for various frauds and other offences’. After the misunderstanding is cleared up, the hotelier apologizes to the unjustly accused hero:

‘The officer was of course only doing his duty, though I told him at once that he was on the wrong track…’

‘Really?’ thought Tonio Kröger.27

An extremely sybilline thought, reminiscent of the very suggestive silence that Kröger maintains in response to a question from Lisaveta, the painter friend in whose studio he delivers his monologues on art. He tells her about a banker who in his free time has written short stories, despite – ‘I call it “despite”’ – not exactly being innocent enough for this sublime vocation. On the contrary, he has already served a prison sentence, ‘and for good reason’, as Kröger almost literally quotes from The Wardrobe. It was in prison, in fact, that the banker first became aware of his talent, which leads Tonio Kröger to conclude that ‘it is necessary to have been in some kind of house of correction if one is to become a writer’. Lisaveta asks him whether it is only other artists he has in mind. But Tonio Kröger doesn’t answer: ‘He did not reply. He contracted his slanting brows in a frown and whistled to himself.’²⁸

This silence and whistling says enough – put into words, Kröger himself is no stranger to the experiences, or should one say actions, that were good reason for his criminal colleague to be sent to prison. But what could those experiences have been? There is only one earlier passage that gives us some indication of this. In the third chapter we learn something about the recent past of the runaway bourgeois scion:

He lived in large cities in the south, for he felt that his art would ripen more lushly in the southern sun; and perhaps it was heredity on his mother’s side that drew him there.²⁹ But because his heart was dead and had no love in it, he fell into carnal adventures, far into voluptuousness and hot guilt, although such experiences cost him intense suffering.³⁰

In the south he fell into carnal adventures, the man who signed himself Tonio Kröger; this has already been assumed by his recent biographers. But the burning guilt that he speaks of here is something that scholarship has yet to track down.

It is certainly guilt of a non-hypochondriac kind, a misdeed in the same region where Dostoevsky found his own descent into hell. This could all be taken as empty boasting, to bring some blood into the veins of the pallid hero.³¹ But it doesn’t end with Tonio Kröger, any more than it began with him, and everything that follows is coloured by the same voluptuousness and hot guilt.

‘I KNOW WHAT BLOOD IS’

Dripping, running, flowing blood – over time Thomas Mann depicts even its physical trace ever more accurately. The flow of blood is present even in what would seem to be quite innocent asides. One of these is the innocuous tale that he wrote a year before the less innocuous Death in Venice, and which tells nothing more or less than its title promises: The Fight Between Jappe and Do Escobar. This records a memory from a holiday experience in Travemünde, an impending scrap between two adolescents, which was announced to the narrator, a boy of thirteen, by his friend Johnny Bishop. This Johnny, lying naked on his back next to him, is a ‘thin little Cupid’, his manner ‘a little like a woman who preserves her youth’; with his mocking smile and girlish eyes he ensures that the theme of sexual confusion is present even on holiday.³² Jappe and Do Escobar, admired ruffians who in the evenings shared the amusements of the grown-ups, were at loggerheads over a ‘gal’, and hold their duel in public on the beach. Onlookers gather, the fight begins, and comes to an end without too much damage. Only a blow to Do Escobar’s nose leaves the trace to which Thomas Mann is irresistibly drawn: ‘The blood ran between his fingers onto his clothes, it soiled his light trousers and dropped down on his yellow shoes.’³³ Despite the nosebleed the scrap was harmless, but in the imagination of the narrator, who feverishly awaits it, it takes threatening forms. He dreads the shock that the sight of a bitter struggle would arouse in him, a ‘duel à outrance’, a ‘fight for life and death’; in a day-dream he feels with the fighters, senses their ‘flaring, shattering hatred, the attacks of raving impatience’ and revenge, and strikes out ‘blind and bloody with an adversary just as inhuman’.³⁴ Life-and-death struggle as a kind of introspective shadow-play: a new and elegant way of bringing something distant close, or pushing something close away.

A second theme is also developed in the works of this period, and over the decades grows steadily more important. A bloody deed is not only mentioned by the narrator, the culprit himself has to come out with it at some point. Tonio Kröger knew how to speak through silence, but this silence is no longer enough, and the need for confession, for an unburdening admission, grows ever more compelling. In The Magic Mountain, in the Joseph novels, Doctor Faustus and The Holy Sinner, it is vented in long prepared scenes of confession.

The liberating outburst of admission arises already in the Anecdote of 1908, in connection with the theme of a double life.³⁵ At the end of a festive supper, the host Herr Becker, husband of the universally beloved young Angela, is assured once again how much he is envied, congratulated and blessed on account of his wife. ‘Suddenly all went quiet, as Becker stood up, Director Becker, pale as death. For once – the words were wrestled from his breast – for once he had to say it! For once unburden himself of the truth, which he had borne for so long alone!’ And the paralysed, dumbstruck guests who witness this mad outbreak, some sitting, some standing up – the scene anticipates Lever-kühn’s final confession in Doctor Faustus – scarcely believe their ears when Becker draws a picture of his marriage, ‘his hell of a marriage’.³⁶ The angelic Angela is in truth a monster, false, mendacious, and horrific. Becker blurts out:

How the whole day long her only activity is to find new and ghastly ways of torturing her cat. How she torments him mercilessly with her spiteful moods. How she shamelessly betrays him, and cuckolds him with servants, with tradesmen, even with beggars who come to the door.

Not a dog this time, but a cat; yet once again, torment is paired with lust. Unlike on later occasions, however, here it is not his own guilt that the sinner confesses after a long time of silence. This confession is an accusation, but the guilt affects the accuser too: the pale man cries to the assembled company how Angela has also drawn him ‘into the whirlpool of her depravity, how she has humiliated, stained and poisoned him’.³⁷

What precisely this means remains uncertain; but ‘poisoned’ anticipates once again a theme in Faustus, in which Leverkühn accuses himself of a poisonous influence on his beloved boy. The Devil, one of whose names is the ‘poison angel’, the false Angela, has seduced them both, and pulls them both down into the jaws of hell. Both of them are sent to a mental home after their confessions.

The confidence trickster Felix Krull comes to a similar end. This novel, a fragment of which Mann had already started to write in 1910, and which promises its confessions in its very title, does not seem to show the slightest sign of hellish guilt. The Sunday child Felix sins without any pangs of conscience, and falls with the greatest pleasure into the abyss into which the bad love teacher Rosza entices him.³⁸ With her, the Hungarian whore with the boyish body and the almost grim seriousness that will reappear in both Joseph and Faustus, Felix learns all about sensuality and doesn’t even think of feeling guilty on this account. The only thing reminiscent of Dostoevsky is his epilepsy, and even this is just something he fakes for his doctor. At the very margin, however, violence lurks even in this case. It threatens him from the masters of these ‘birds of death’, the pimps. Felix Krull fears their knives, ‘with which they make so free’.³⁹ He himself becomes Rosza’s pimp, even if he rejects this ugly word. His predecessor, a former butcher’s apprentice, has been imprisoned ‘on account of some bloody deed’.⁴⁰

And at the end, for all his jolly adventures, Felix too would have rotted in prison, just like Tonio Kröger’s criminal banker. It is easy to forget that Krull writes his memoirs in jail. A passage in Thomas Mann’s diaries indicates that he may have landed there for more serious reasons than confidence trickery: ‘K[atia] told me of the murder of a postman delivering money orders by a gentleman criminal at the Hotel Adlon. Noted this for my arrangements for the confidence trickster’ (5 January 1919). We do not know whether the trickster himself was to repeat these arrangements, whether he was to be a witness, an accomplice, a foil; but that some bloody deed had to make its appearance even in this burlesque story of the child of fortune says something about the urgency of a theme with which Thomas Mann was himself ‘so free’.

What had enchanted him about Felix Krull was the ‘directness of the autobiographical form’, as he writes in A Sketch of My Life.⁴¹ But he gets far more direct in his next work, again narrated in the third person.

The ‘wanderer’ at the Northern Cemetery, the dreary Pula boat, the grey-haired rake, the sinister gondolier; Tadzio and his family, the journey interrupted by a mistake about the luggage, the cholera, the upright clerk in the Travel Bureau, the rascally ballad-singer, all that and anything else you like.’⁴²

Everything in Death in Venice was drawn from reality, just as in Tonio Kröger, to which Mann expressly refers. Thus the last in this series is also drawn from life, and we have even less reason to doubt the ballad-singer’s reality, in so far as he seems strangely familiar even to those of us left at home. His decisive appearance he spares himself until Faustus. But as early as 1903 he strolls through the study The Hungry. In this, a writer named Detlef has a shocking nocturnal encounter after a visit to the theatre. It is two o’clock in the morning, snow is falling, and carriages are waiting, just as in Krull’s first encounter with Rosza, when Detlef sees a distressing sight: a man in ragged clothing stares at him, a savage, hollow face with a red beard and an expression of vile contempt; and this lecherous and greedy examination is something that he ‘could never get over, could not put out of his mind…’⁴³ This man seems the same type as the minstrel from Death in Venice, who with an ‘insolent bravado’, no beard but still red-headed, ‘thin and cadaverous in the face’, has a way of ‘lasciviously licking the corner of his mouth’ and directs his scornful laughter up to the terrace where Aschenbach is gripped in a posture of defence or flight.⁴⁴ He will work his way up to the Devil before whom Leverkühn falls in a frozen rigidity. But already in Death in Venice we learn what his particular character is: ‘He was quite evidently not of Venetian origin, but rather of the race of Neapolitan comedians, half pimp, half actor.’⁴⁵

How is Aschenbach so familiar with the race of Neapolitan pimps? Naples seems gradually to emerge from behind Venice, as it were, as soon as the bewitched Aschenbach loses his self-control. Vicious riff-raff start to make the streets unsafe at night, muggings and even murders become common, and ‘commercial vice [takes] obtrusive and extravagant forms, hitherto unknown in this area and indigenous only to southern Italy or oriental countries’.⁴⁶ It is the south again where Tonio Kröger goes astray, not without moments of awareness and shame. ‘“How far astray I have gone!”he would sometimes think,’⁴⁷ and Aschenbach thinks the same when he follows the boy through dirty alleys: ‘Where is this leading me! he would reflect in consternation.’⁴⁸

What precisely these paths were, Thomas Mann lets slip again a while later, in a little-noticed passage. In 1928 he published an enthusiastic article on Bruno Frank’s Politische Novelle, which in its tone and many details is obviously modelled on the tale of Aschenbach’s demise. The grateful teacher gives a review that reads like a monologue on Death in Venice. Bruno Frank’s setting is Marseille, but it could also be Venice, ‘stylized completely in the demonic and ghostly fashion, to the point of nightmare, frightening, dangerously seductive, the well-behaved soul completely estranged, immoral entrancement through and through’. In this story the hero gets lost in a red-light district and finds himself exposed to ‘the horrific primeval assault of a street of brothels’. This really must be called unsurpassable, writes the visibly moved reviewer,

the loss of one’s way in those blind alleys and traps, where the man who has consciously and deliberately forsaken the ‘path of reason’ stumbles upon the dark and deadly sweet image of a woman from a distant land, who awakens his blood to a destructive love.

This is full of echoes and resonance; so too is the phrase that sums up the action of the concluding chapter, and has to be deciphered in the same way as the tortuous confession in the letter to Weber about the type of feeling that is accessible to Mann ‘in a scarcely qualified way’. Carmer, the tragic hero of Bruno Frank’s tale, ‘is absorbed by the mala vita quarter of the evil city and falls into a decline, in a manner that is mysterious, yet not undecipherable in terms of a feeling close to his way of being’.⁴⁹ What does this tortuous sentence mean? Whose feeling recognizes a similar being here? The ‘mala vita quarter’, one should note in passing, is not a French but an Italian expression for the red-light district of Marseille. It is not a term used in Bruno Frank’s story.⁵⁰

Carmer is finally stabbed to death in the arms of the prostitute. Aschenbach dies a gentler death from cholera. The outbreak of the epidemic also gives Thomas Mann the opportunity to speak of the second part of Tonio Kröger’s experience. For Aschenbach, too, the south holds an intimate combination of sensuality and guilt. This guilt lies not in the fact that it is a boy whom Aschenbach desires, but rather in the fact that he risks the boy’s life. Aschenbach is an accessory who remains silent and fails to prevent harm, even relishing this: ‘The consciousness of his complicity in the secret, of his share in the guilt, intoxicated him, as small quantities of wine intoxicate a weary brain.’⁵¹

The narrator explains in the same chapter why Aschenbach does not warn Tadzio’s family of the cholera: ‘to passion, as to crime, the assured everyday order and stability of things is not opportune,’ and so it must welcome ‘any chaos and disaster’.⁵² A comparison, no more, in which passion goes hand-in-hand with crime. But there are other ways of speaking of crime, as the early work shows: concealment at a curious margin, symbolic enhancement, and removal into dream. The two last means are combined extremely effectively in Death in Venice. The turning-point in Aschenbach’s passion is a fearful dream; only after this is he ready for his decline. What does he dream about? The stranger-god Dionysus, who descends on the valley with his maenads and carries on orgies, as Nietzsche’s friend Rohde has depicted in Psyche. Not reality, a dream, and not a personal dream, but a symbolic scene from mythology and the history of ideas. The double transfer has been quite effective, in that external sources are still sought for Aschenbach’s nightmare, and the trail of blood that leads to Mann’s early work is overlooked.

At first Aschenbach defends himself. ‘Great was his loathing, great his fear, honourable his effort of will to defend to the last what was his and protect it against the Stranger, against the enemy of the composed and dignified intellect.’⁵³ But then Aschenbach’s resistance breaks: ‘His heart throbbed to the drumbeats, his brain whirled, a fury seized him’ – the old fury of Herr Friedemann –,

a blindness, a dizzying lust, and his soul craved to join the round-dance of the god. The obscene symbol, wooden and gigantic, was uncovered and raised aloft: and still more unbridled grew the howling of the rallying-cry. With foaming mouths they raged, they roused each other with lewd gestures and licentious hands, laughing and moaning they thrust the prods into each other’s flesh and licked the blood from each other’s limbs.⁵⁴

Here, mythologically enhanced and graphically illustrated, is the old recipe from Tonio Kröger, sensuality and blood, pupated into dream. And Aschenbach wades deeply in:

But the dreamer now was with them, and in them, he belonged to the stranger-god. Yes, they were himself as they flung themselves, tearing and slaying, on the animals and devoured steaming gobbets of flesh, they were himself as an orgy of limitless coupling, in homage to the god, began on the trampled, mossy ground.⁵⁵

The theme has come a long way from the days of Tobias Minder-nickel who stabbed his dog, from the days of The Wardrobe with its murderous embrace. But at its core nothing has changed.

One thing, however, is now added to the theme that was already there in The Wardrobe. There was in that tale the infamous knife attack, but there was good reason for this. With the urge to confess now grows a parallel urge to justify. Perhaps it is uncivilized for blood to flow, but is this really an offence against culture? Civilization, according to Mann’s ‘Wartime Thoughts’, is only reason, enlightenment, good behaviour, only spirit and the enemy of the drives, the passions’. Culture, on the other hand, the highest value, may be ‘bloody and fearful’, it embraces ‘pederasty, ritual cruelty, human sacrifice’⁵⁶, i.e. more or less what occurs in the boundless mingling of the dream orgies.

It is remarkable how Thomas Mann returns from this general reflection back to the personal. Quite in the spirit of Aschenbach he compares art and war, the soldier and the artist, who have so much in common: organization, the mutual influence of enthusiasm and order, solidity, precision, and so on for a further half page, on which one phrase alone is italicized, evidently the decisive thing that the artist shares with the warrior, the ‘testimony of blood’.

This is from 1915, a time when many writers composed a lot of overheated nonsense about war and blood. But Mann’s persistence on this personal ‘testimony of blood’ did not alter when he changed sides and saw reason. In the republic speech of 1922, his subject in addressing the militarist youth was not just Walt Whitman’s worship of boys. He is no lukewarm pacifist, he confesses: ‘I know what blood is, what death, what comradeship.’⁵⁷

Yet his war service was no more than the writing of his Reflections, and it was only ink that he spilled here.

ALONE TOGETHER

The ‘testimony of blood’ is also vouchsafed to the peaceful Hans Castorp, who travels to Davos for a three-week visit and remains there for seven years, which corresponds more or less to the way that the ‘humorous companion-piece to Death in Venice’⁵⁸ grew into one of the great novels of world literature. That its subject is Eros, sickness and death has been repeated ad nauseam. But blood and violence? In this mystical-humouristic goldfish bowl⁵⁹ one doesn’t expect to find morays or piranhas, nor do they in fact turn up. In this respect The Magic Mountain remains the pendant to the Venice story that Mann has planned: the bloody deed is shifted into unreality. At the centre of the novel the eager Castorp goes out into the mountains, where he is surprised by a snowstorm and in a state close to death has a double dream. First of all, his gaze reveals a landscape of lagoons and the Mediterranean, which he remembers even though he has never been to Greece or Sicily – or more specifically Naples.⁶⁰ Young people are playing on the beach, and the dreamer’s heart goes out to them, even though he asks himself whether he does not make himself ‘perhaps punishable’⁶¹ by watching them. The suspicion is confirmed when one of the boys, a resurrection of Tadzio, signals to him with a serious expression. Castorp is thoroughly frightened, he turns away and finds himself before the pillars of a temple complex. A sculpture of mother and daughter makes him still more afraid, for some obscure reason. The door to the temple chamber is open, and his knees almost give way when he insistently glances inside; two grey-haired witches are tearing apart and devouring a child. Castorp sees ‘bright hair blood-smeared’.⁶² This primal scene, he recognizes in the dreamy reflections that follow, is connected with the southern idyll: the one does not exist without the other, the Apollonian sunny happiness is founded on the hideous crime, the ‘blood-sacrifice’ that underpins the solemn gaiety of the beach people.⁶³

Just as in Death in Venice, everything in this double dream is strongly stereotyped, from the locus amoenus to the statue of Demeter and Persephone. No longer does anything in it seem personal, and the lesson Castorp draws from it is an italicized message to humanity: ‘For the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts.’ Still, the foundation of the ethical imperative develops from the first-person ‘I will’; it is a personal project of pacification.⁶⁴ He does not want to think always of death and hideousness, and elevates this wish into the idea of humanity, which however soon fades away. On his return to the sanatorium Castorp forgets the dream message completely.

This reverie however was not his first. The first of his dreams was that of his youthful flame Hippe. Castorp has ventured one excursion into the mountains already before the snowstorm. He leaves the sanatorium and heads into the unknown, but is in too much of a hurry; he feels giddy and lies down on a bank. Here he has a vision, a reverie, in which the gigantic wooden phallus revealed in Aschenbach’s dream collapses into a propelling pencil. The vision of his schoolfriend Hippe, who lends him the ambiguous pencil, is the first scene in the novel in which eroticism is revealed to be homoeroticism. And the substance flows as it evidently must: Hans Castorp has a nosebleed when Hippe appears to him.

This blood gives the narrator the occasion for a rather too strong comparison. After his vision Castorp returns to the Berghof, where Krokowski’s lecture has already begun. The audience scarcely notice him, and this is just as well, ‘for he looked rather ghastly. His face white as a sheet, his coat spotted with blood – he might have been a murderer stealing from his crime.’⁶⁵ The murder theme continues its perambulations through the mouths of outsiders, after the model of Christian Buddenbrook. One of these successors to Christian is Ferdinand Wehsal from Mannheim, who takes a special interest in medieval torture racks and lies on one himself. If Haus Berghof had offered a rice diet, it would have done him good: the poor man lies on the rack of lust, he is consumed by his desire for Clavdia Chauchat, dreams every night that she spits at him or beats him, and he shares his sorrows with Hans Castorp. It is a human need to relieve the heart, he says to his more fortunate rival, and moans about the ‘hellish disgrace’ of his nights, using a good deal of material from the notebooks that Thomas Mann kept during the Ehrenberg time.⁶⁶ Madame Chauchat refuses him, but for what reason? ‘What is it I want, Castorp? Do I want to kill her? Do I want to shed her blood? I only want to fondle her!’⁶⁷ Not every lover would have in mind this possibility of confusion. But it also slips into the discussions that Naphta has with Settembrini. They are arguing about the death penalty, which Naphta defends. His first argument still follows the teaching of Schopenhauer. Man is what he has willed to be, he neither can nor wants to be other, and this is precisely his guilt: ‘He has revelled in slaying, and does not pay too dear in being slain. Let him die, then, for he has gratified his heart’s deepest desire.’ But this is more than the philosopher had to say. Settembrini is incredulous or indignant, and asks: ‘Deepest desire?’ ‘Deepest desire,’ Naphta repeats. An embarrassed cough. Wehsal, as is only to be expected, pulls a face. Settembrini cunningly remarks that there is a kind of generalization that has a distinctly personal cast. ‘Have you ever had a desire to commit murder?’ To which Naphta answers:

That is no concern of yours. But if I had, I should laugh in the face of any ignorant humanitarianism that tried to feed me on skilly till I died a natural death. It is absurd for the murderer to outlive the murdered. They two, alone together, as two beings are together in only one other human relationship, have, like them, the one acting, the other suffering him, shared a secret that binds them for ever together.⁶⁸

A deep and heavy secret, to be sure. ‘The one acting, the other suffering him’ – a deliberate ambiguity between the sexual act and the murderer and his victim; just as in the fairy-tale of The Wardrobe where the question of gender is avoided when one person stabs a knife into the other.

Settembrini declared that ‘he lacked the brains necessary to the understanding of this death-and-murder mysticism’, and did not miss them either. Not so Thomas Mann, who, in a 1926 article on the death penalty, notes his agreement with Naphta as an ‘unsympathetic friend’, precisely referring to Naphta’s lecture on the deepest pleasure. He cannot see the death penalty as completely evil, Mann writes, especially since in the Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man he had taken it upon himself to maintain ‘that a humanity set on doing life out of all its heavy, deadly serious aspects and pursuing its own unmanning, its castration, such a humanity is not mine, nor what I would desire’.⁶⁹ Which means that killing can indeed be the deepest pleasure and that it amounts to castration – a strikingly chosen word – to renounce this; and furthermore that Mann, when he says ‘heavy’, does indeed mean something deadly serious.

At the end, however, he pronounces himself, like Settembrini, against the death penalty. For this surprising turn he relies on Sigmund Freud, quoting from his ‘splendid treatment’ Totem and Taboo the passage in which Freud indicates the similarity of forbidden stimuli in the criminal and the revenging society. ‘There you have it, hypocrites!’ Mann concludes, and declares himself against the ‘fascist truth’ that knowledge should never hinder will, deed and passion.⁷⁰

It is still, for all that, a truth, even if a fascist one, which from this point Mann therefore opposes. In 1943 Thomas Mann wrote a preface – ‘Tables of the Law’ – to a volume titled The Ten Commandments, designed to show how Nazism had perverted these. Mann describes here the imposition of these commandments, and the man Moses who converts his obstinate people. Again it is Freud whom he turns to for counsel – and once again the not completely evil Naphta is in the wings.

In his celebrated essay on Moses, Freud had reiterated his thesis from Totem and Taboo about the origin of morality and religion. At the beginning was the killing of the father; the formation of conscience derives from a primal crime, from a murder.⁷¹ In Thomas Mann’s account, this principle is reiterated, but with a specifically personal mark. His relationship to the main character is more personal than might be thought. ‘Increasingly desirous of influencing the people,’ he notes in his diary before he embarks on Freud’s Moses and Monotheism (28 April 1939). Just like his other heroes, the author of The Ten Commandments is also an autobiographical figure, a reflection of the man who has to address his stubborn people and hammer moral concepts into them. This reflection is apparent even in Moses’s outward form. A not so distant model would be Michelangelo’s statue, but how does Mann visualize the author of the tablets? Just like the man-loving sculptor himself, the forceful Michelangelo who wrestles for the spiritual under his pressing sensuality, and to whom Mann was to devote a late and impassioned essay, in which he speaks almost without concealment of himself and his sorrow over Franz Westermeier.

We learn in the very first sentence how this Moses, with so personal a mark on his head, had a very unusual birth. This differs from Freud’s supposition, in which Moses was an Egyptian, and prolongs the series of artists who, like Tonio Kröger, have felt mixed blood in their veins. The second sentence gives us the following information: ‘Early on he killed in a frenzy; therefore he knew better than the inexperienced that, though killing is delectable, having killed is detestable; he knew you should not kill.’⁷² The creation of culture is the fruit of an early misdeed. The law is devised and championed not by an innocent, but by the man who has tasted guilt. He has an inner affinity to what he combats; Moses, tracing the letters of the Decalogue with his own blood, repeats this in symbolic miniature.

Thomas Mann did not simply dream this up. His source is the second book of Moses, Exodus 2: 11–12:

One day when Moses was grown up, he went out to his own kinsmen and saw them at their heavy labour. He saw an Egyptian strike one of his fellow-Hebrews. He looked this way and that, and, seeing there was no one about, he struck the Egyptian down and hid his body in the sand.

What is noteworthy about Mann’s version is the little reinterpretation. The biblical Moses evidently acts not in a blaze of fury, but rather, in the literal sense, with circumspection. He looks this way and that, and makes sure that no one can spy on his deed. If he had been seen, he would have been able to leave off. And the Bible says neither that he finds this delectable nor that he is subsequently plagued by remorse.

As we shall note, Thomas Mann always deviates from the source when he is drawn back to his original story. The source may even be something recently experienced, which he leads round to the lethal theme. This is the case with the story Mario and the Magician, which like Death in Venice was sparked by a vacation in Italy – notoriously dangerous as these now were. In September 1926 Mann spent two weeks with his family at Forte dei Marmi; apart from the unpleasant impressions of a hysterical national mood, he also brought back home the memory of the performance of a well-known hypnotist. Three years later, after these memories had sufficiently fermented, he wrote the story that was to be one of his best, and in which it is not hard to recognize the old theme. Mario and the Magician ends, like The Wardrobe, with a murder, and in this case too there are good reasons for it. The hypnotist Cipolla, to whom Mann lends his own private nickname of ‘Magician’, exposes Mario, whom he signals up onto the stage with his index finger, to a fatal erotic humiliation. The magician leads Mario to believe that he is the girl with whom Mario is in love:

‘Kiss me!’ said the hunchback. ‘Trust me, I love thee. Kiss me here.’ And with the tip of his index finger, hand, arm, and little finger outspread, he pointed to his cheek, near the mouth. And Mario bent and kissed him.⁷³

This has its fatal results. After Cipolla has woken him with a crack of the whip, Mario presses his hands to his abused lips and storms down the steps: ‘Once below, and even while in full retreat, Mario hurled himself round with legs flung wide apart; one arm flew up, and two flat shattering detonations crashed through applause and laughter.’⁷⁴ The enforced kiss between two men leads to the revenge of the humiliated party: Mario shoots the seducer who exposed him.

This ending is no longer drawn from a holiday experience in Il Duce’s Italy. Everything was as he had depicted it, except for the deadly shots and the love intrigue. It was precisely for the sake of this invented finale, however, that Mann had written the whole story, as he explains in a letter. The lethal ending, the shooting, was an idea of Erika’s⁷⁵ and set everything else in motion; he would otherwise have had no impulse to tell the story, ‘and if you say, without the hotelier I would have left Cipolla alive, the real truth is exactly the reverse: in order to kill Cipolla, I needed the hotelier – and the rest of the preparatory annoyances’.⁷⁶

The desire that leads to a bloody deed is also the theme of the Indian novel written in 1940, The Transposed Heads. The themes from the early work that return again here – the stabbings from Tobias Mindernickel and The Wardrobe, the suicide from Little Herr Friedemann – blossom unexpectedly in this exotic air. The realm of eighteen-armed Kali is not for the squeamish; this story, whose graphicness is surpassed only by the superb sense of comic detail Mann has by now achieved, swims in blood as much as the goddess of desire and death herself: ‘Blood steamed hot in the skull she held with one hand to her lips, and blood was at her feet in a spreading pool.’⁷⁷ This is the horror that confronts the frail sage when he enters the temple which has become the scene of the grisly event. The sage is named Shridaman (only one ‘n’), and because his wife, the beautiful Sita, desires the strong-bodied Nanda, in full view of the goddess Kali, with his sex aroused in despair, he seizes the sharp-cutting sword and separates his head from his torso. His blood flows wild and fast, like that of his friend Nanda, who follows him into the shrine and, when he realizes what has been done, likewise hacks off his own head.

This is the same mythologically enhanced temple-and-sacrifice scene familiar from The Magic Mountain. And the obscene symbol from Aschenbach’s dream is here as well: inside the temple loom the ‘linga stones’ which unobtrusively the two men touch before they draw their swords.⁷⁸ Kali in the end shows herself merciful and permits a restoration, which Sita uses for a transposition that leaves Shridaman’s head on the powerful body of Nanda. But their pleasure is brief; at the end the newly joined stab each other, and Sita steps onto the pyre.

The ‘productive terror’ that the Indian material generated had already been detected by Thomas Mann’s Goethe who, in the seventh chapter of Lotte in Weimar, reflects about seduction as the ‘paradigm of all temptation and guilt’. The poem that Goethe wants to make of the pariah story, of the seduced Brahmin woman and the severed and transposed heads, he had found in some old tome. ‘Make a poem of this! ‘ he and Mann instruct themselves.⁷⁹ The ‘autobiographical urge’ that Goethe has to justify in his soliloquy⁸⁰ is that of Thomas Mann throughout the whole novel. Seduction by one’s own sex appears to Goethe as the revenge of narcissism;⁸¹ revenge is linked as ever with seduction; cruelty is for him the main ingredient of love,⁸² the ego a ‘sword-dance of difficulty’;⁸³ he finds his own existence murderous;⁸⁴ and even Lotte, in the carriage conversation that proceeds in the same open way as that between Krull and Rosza, speaks to him of ‘human sacrifice’.⁸⁵ With all this, Mann has not stepped one foot away from his innermost thematic circle.

SHECHEM

As the Indian legend was simply an offshoot of the Goethe novel, this in its turn was a mere insertion into the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers. This masterpiece in humorous vein, which occupied Thomas Mann for almost two decades, appears at first sight free from the compulsive motif. But this first sight could not be more deceptive. On closer inspection it is striking to discover how in all four books the lines of force run towards scenes that once again tell the old business, the tale of voluptuousness and hot guilt. Let us consider the series more closely.

The first book in the tetralogy deals with The Tales of Jacob, the bloodiest of which is the story of Shechem – a fortified city which Jacob’s sons, who had already acquired land in the region, were keen to attack, needing only a pretext for this. They find this pretext in their sister Dinah, whose charms make the son of the city’s lord a second Wehsal. This Dinah is no beauty, but irresistible; her aura even overspills the bounds of one novel. Before this son and heir she had already seduced Felix Krull: with her long, sinister-sweet and sometimes squinting eyes, her snub nose, her broad, red, upturned mouth and her petite breasts, she is the spitting image of the bad love teacher.⁸⁶ Without Dinah, the Khabir maid, complains the son and heir, his body will rot. When he appeals to Jacob for her, and offers rich wedding gifts, it is explained that first of all he must have himself circumcised. A week later, radiant if still weak, he returns to collect his hoped-for reward. Certainly, he is told, he has been circumcised, but with a metal knife, not a stone one, so this is not valid. When he then loses patience and abducts Dinah, he actually falls in with the brothers’ secret wish. After consummation the son and heir returns for reconciliation, but the brothers then demand that all the men of the city must be circumcised, and with stone knives, then there can be a wedding with laughter and tears. Three nights later, when the men of the city are still lying in pain and changing their bandages, the brothers fall on the city and carry out a frightful butchery. The inhabitants without exception are massacred with fire and sword, alleys and houses are awash with blood, the son and heir is placed ‘shamefully disfigured, stuck head-down in the waste-pipe of his own latrine’.⁸⁷ This ‘bloody marriage feast’⁸⁸ is the original crime that is alluded to over and again in the subsequent volumes, until the late marriage of Joseph gives the author occasion for a long reflection on the affinity between wedding and death, the theft of virginity and murder.⁸⁹

The attack on Shechem, if not its sadistic details, is familiar from the Bible. The fate of Dinah, however, is an invention of Thomas Mann. Different from the original, and also contrary to how he initially presents it – for his Dinah has nothing against lying with the son and heir – the ostensible reason the brothers give for their butchery is that their sister was ‘violated’ and had to be rescued from the ‘lustful Sodomites’.⁹⁰ Here, in the spiteful exaggeration of the brothers, we glimpse once only, in the whole of Mann’s work, the explicit name of that hidden event: a homosexual violation leading to bloody revenge.

But this subject also recurs in the following volume Young Joseph, which likewise relates a bloody deed. Insulted by Joseph’s boastful dreams of elevation, the brothers abandon Shechem. At Jacob’s command Joseph travels after them, and what happens next we know from the Bible: the brothers throw him into a pit. How is this related in Thomas Mann’s version?

Here Joseph approaches the brothers’ camp in the veiled wedding-dress of his dead mother Rachel. As soon as they see him they attack him:

They fell upon him as a pack of hungry wolves falls upon the prey; their blood-blinded lust knew no pause or consideration […] ‘Down, down, down!’ they panted with one voice; it was the ketonet they meant, the picture-robe, the veil. It must come off.⁹¹

They undress him and tear his veil, and his garland of myrtle is soon lying torn in the moss. These are metaphors of deflowering or rape. Indeed, a more direct expression is soon used:

Desperately he tried to protect the garment and keep the remnants and ruins of it still upon him. Several times he cried out: ‘My coat! My coat!’ and even after he stood naked, still begged them: ‘Don’t tear it!’, as if fearing for his virginity.⁹²

Why does Mann introduce virginity here? In order to rule out the slightest doubt as to what he has in mind, he sums up once again what happened to Joseph, as it had previously to Dinah: ‘As love unveils the bride in the bedchamber, thus had their fury done to him, and they had known him naked, so that his frame quivered with the deathly shame.’⁹³

Even in Felix Krull the verb ‘know’ is unmistakable,⁹⁴ in a biblical epic it is quite unambiguous: Joseph fell victim to a gang rape, with a deadly blow only just prevented. As if to show that, after already indicating so much, he could now actually call the thing by its bare name, Thomas Mann returns to it once again. He lists the reasons for Joseph’s chastity; one of these is the caution ‘which the experience of frightful violation, the tearing of his wreath and robe, must have strengthened mightily’.⁹⁵ It need scarcely be spelled out that the wreath is not torn without blood; in winding streams this runs down Joseph’s body, spilled by his brothers’ rage, a body that was so exquisitely tender to their untender contact that the malefactors brooded over it for a long while after they had finished their work.⁹⁶

When they took counsel after this first explosion, little would have lacked for them to bump Joseph off altogether. As in both Tobias Mindernickel and Felix Krull – in the latter case on an occasion that only Naphta would perceive as akin⁹⁷ – the narrator refuses to go into too coarse a detail: ‘I would fain pass over what was said next, for it would shock our modern taste.’⁹⁸ Even so, we learn that the sturdy Gad proposes to run his knife through Joseph’s throat, ‘as Jacob had done with the kid’, and Tobias Mindernickel to his dog Esau. Thanks to Reuben’s intervention, Joseph’s fate was moderated to being thrown in the pit, though even so Joseph feels compassion ‘for his murderers’.⁹⁹ When, in a narrow escape, he is freed from the pit, it is Judah who comes to his aid. Joseph is sold to the Ishmaelites for twenty pieces of silver (though they don’t pay cash for him, but ‘a great many knives and trinkets’).¹⁰⁰ When they have sent Jacob the robe smeared with an animal’s blood, the brothers swear an oath of silence, designed to bind and tie them, as if they were not distinct people, ‘but one man who presseth his lips together and openeth them not, but rather dieth, his mouth shut together over his secret’.¹⁰¹

Joseph, meanwhile, travels with the Ishmaelites into Egypt, and is sold to the house of Potiphar, where throughout the third volume in the series – Joseph in Egypt – he works at his ascent and struggles against the attractions of Potiphar’s wife. Married to a eunuch, this Mut-em-inet, whose desire is awakened by Joseph’s beauty, pleads with him ever more forcefully to still her blood, and finally resorts to action. First she entices him, then she threatens him with exotic tortures if he will not sleep with her,¹⁰² tortures whose depiction caused their inventor, according to a passage in his diary, sexual excitement (29 May 1936).¹⁰³ When even these threats prove ineffective, Mut-em-inet loses her last inhibitions and tells everyone around her pangs of love. A group of ladies, whom she craftily manipulates, are to give her words material expression. The important instruments here are the fruit-knives which she has had so thoroughly whetted that they are as sharp as razors. These little knives are found next to the blood-oranges that are being peeled by the ladies of the household, when Joseph enters and attracts the glances of all. They stare at him with desire, and what happens then is exactly what Mut-em-inet had in mind:

It was a fearful sight. With some the nimble knife had gone an inch deep in the flesh and blood did not ooze, it spouted. The little hands, the golden apples, were drenched with the red liquid, it dyed the fresh whiteness of the linen garments and soaked through into the women’s laps, making pools which dripped down on the floor and their little feet.¹⁰⁴

There was lust, so blood must flow; the principle is so powerful that it finds expression in the smallest details.

Mut-em-inet, who becomes ever more of a maenad, finally resorts to the ultimate means. She conspires in witchcraft with the old hag Tabubu, who agrees to deliver the stubborn man to her. Tabubu calls on the assistance of an obscure goddess, known as ‘the bitch’; a living dog is also needed for the ceremony. Given Esau’s fate, it is not hard to suspect what will happen to it. This time the narrator does not refrain from going into detail:

‘Where is the double-edged blade? To hand. And the cur? It lies on the floor, like a young hyena, with chains on its claws, and with moist muzzle bound […]’ ‘Bring him on, then, the sniffling cur, the obscene beast, and slit his throat! Slit his belly open and bathe your hands in the smoking entrails as they steam up into the cool moonlighted night. Smeared with blood, dripping with entrails, I hold them up to you, my hands, for I have made them in your image.’¹⁰⁵

The ritual slaughter, at the hands of witches or Bacchae – as we had in the dream scenes – serves bodily pleasure. The soul, to Mut-em-inet’s sorrow, remains turned away. Just as Tonio Kröger in his descent into sensuality and burning guilt suffered ‘unspeakably’, so Mut-em-inet likewise, at the end of the ritual, complains to the purer spirits how sad this vileness makes her. Tabubu, however, is still brazen after all this excess, and addresses her with contempt, which gives the narrator the occasion for the following sentence:

That is a very old human experience: that when a man is tempted to fall below his better self, his tempters, those who drag him down, alarm him and mock him when they have him safely below, by the insolence with which they suddenly speak of his new and unfamiliar state.

As Settembrini rightly observed, there is a way of generalizing that gives the subject a personal colour. And more personal still is the sentence that follows:

Pride demands that he conceal his fear and bewilderment, that he answer them: ‘Let things be as they are, I knew what I did when I resolved to follow you.’ And in such a way did Mut express herself.¹⁰⁶

By following the seducer, Mut-em-inet approaches close to the goal of her desire: the erection that she catches a glimpse of when Joseph escapes her by the skin of his teeth. When Joseph flees from the love-crazed woman he is revealed as a rampant ass – ‘his flesh stood up against his spirit’¹⁰⁷ – yet even so he remains steadfast. He is the lucky hero of the fairy-tale who resists the two things, seduction and violence, or more precisely, the seduction to violence offered him by Mut-em-inet in a lisping childish voice. Thomas Mann has added to the biblical account that Mutem-inet proposed Joseph should murder Potiphar:

‘So, sweet Osarsiph, let us make him cold, for it is a little thing. […] For you are right, my divine boy, to say that he stands in the way of our joy and we may do naught to him – you are right in your misgiving. But just therefore must you see that we must make him cold and send him out of this world, that the misgiving may be satisfied and we do him no more harm in our embracing. Do you understand, my little one?’¹⁰⁸

Joseph replies that this is repugnant to him; all that is lacking is for her to say they would be accomplices together, as she gave him the idea and now unfortunately it is also his.

The fourth book – Joseph the Provider – deals at last with the great secret and its revelation, when after his second fall Joseph becomes Pharaoh’s right-hand man and as governor of Egypt receives his brothers who are suffering from the corn famine. The climax of this final volume is Judah’s great speech of confession, in which he breaks the brothers’ fearsome oath and admits to the governor their original crime.

It had already dawned on the sons of Jacob quite a bit earlier that all the governor’s remarkable measures, as well as the plague and the accusation of their being spies, were ‘punishment for long past guilt’.¹⁰⁹ And Judah was the first to suspect that the secret that underlies all this could only be explained by revealing another secret.¹¹⁰ In their hour of distress, when they stand accused before Pharaoh’s representative, Judah’s heart revolts, he delivers the novel’s great speech, and breaks the oath in two over his knee: the eleventh son, his father’s lamb, was not torn to pieces by a wild animal, but sold by his brothers into slavery. ‘He stood weaving to and fro. The brothers had gone pale; yet they were deeply relieved that the secret was out at last.’¹¹¹

At the climax of this final book, if not before, Judah proves to have been a major character in the novel, long undervalued. Judah is the shadow of Joseph, the dark chosen one on whom Thomas Mann conveys everything that he elsewhere deposited onto Wehsal or the hallucinating Christian. He would later thank a reviewer of Doctor Faustus for pointing out ‘the parallel between Adrian and Judah’.¹¹² There are three characteristics that he endows him with, and all are related. All three would be familiar to us even if all we had of Thomas Mann was his speeches, letters and diaries; they form the inner triumvirate of his artistic existence.

The first of these three is the suffering that goes with desire. Judah’s ‘sex life had from the first been marked by disorder and suffering. His relationship with the love-goddess kept him strained and unsatisfied, he writhed under her lash and was her unsubmissive slave – hence the deep conflict in his soul and the lack of unity in his character.’¹¹³ But after Judah and his brothers had got rid of Joseph, Ashtaroth had intensified her plaguing; it has to be said ‘since that time the man had atoned in hell – in one of the hells there are, the hell of sex’.¹¹⁴

Judah sees this as punishment for his old misdeed. And this is the second of his characteristics, the sense of guilt, blame, duty, corresponding to an equally strong need for purity. Just like Christian Buddenbrook he is caught up in an act of violence, and though far from the worst of the brothers in this respect, he is certainly the most sensitive. He is the only one to be dreadfully upset by the act, which gnaws at his conscience.¹¹⁵ And for this reason – the third characteristic – his spirit develops. Judah delivers the brave speech because he ‘had familiar knowledge of sin and guilt, and therefore he could fitly represent the brothers. For guilt creates spirit, and the other way round: without spirit there is no guilt at all.’¹¹⁶

This is just one of such sentences, with both a general and a personal stamp, that Judah leaves in his wake as he proceeds through the text. Time and again the narrator uses him as an occasion to speak of the nature of guilt. Even as a child, Judah is inflamed against the still unborn Joseph; Leah places the kernel of hatred in the brothers’ hearts, and the narrator raises the question whether the brothers could not simply have come to terms with each other. His answer is not surprising, Mann has already prepared his line of argument in his reflections on culture versus civilization:

Very much happens in the world; and as we cannot wish that it might rather have peacefully remained unhappened, we may not curse the passions which are its instrument; for without passion and guilt nothing could proceed.¹¹⁷

This is even before the crime that also drives Judah forward, precisely because he always has it in mind. The barb of the bad conscience sharpens the moral sense. It should not be thought that the guilty one is immoral, quite the opposite. The narrator instructs us that ‘sinners can be extremely sensitive to the sins of the world,’¹¹⁸ and has Judah declare, about the silver beaker hidden in his brother’s pack: ‘I do not say we are innocents, that would be sacrilege. But there is guilt and guilt, and maybe guilt is prouder than innocence is; anyhow, to nab silver cups is not in our line.’¹¹⁹ The dignity of guilt: this is the halo on Judah’s head, the single thought of this character that underlies his very existence. In a further aside the narrator informs us yet again:

Only the thick-witted should commit crimes; they do not mind, they live from day to day and nothing worries them. Evil is for the dull-witted; anyone with even traces of sensibility should avoid it if he possibly can, for he will have to smart for it. That he has a conscience makes him worse off than ever; he will be punished precisely on account of his conscience.¹²⁰

In Judah’s case, conscience does not just lead to his seeing all the misfortune that he suffers ‘as retaliation […] for what he committed, what he was involved in committing’, it also means that he understands this misfortune as an honour: ‘he would have it that he was suffering punishment, he alone, and looked with contempt on those who, thanks to their thick skin, remained unscathed. Such is the particular arrogance of conscience.’¹²¹ A conclusion that clearly expresses the particular tone of ‘I know what I’m speaking about’.

But why does Thomas Mann choose Judah for this guilt complex, why not Joseph, why not Reuben or Zebulun? Because it is Judah who receives the blessing. Not Joseph, the fortunate one, who escaped the bloody act, but Judah, the sinner, tormented by his feeling of guilt and driven into spiritual development.

This introduces the theme that dominates the late novels of Thomas Mann: elevation despite guilt, elevation precisely because of guilt. It is a theme that grew important to him only with his worldwide celebrity; no longer would the laurel crown be just a crazy dream. From Joseph on, it drives out everything else: Leverkühn, allied with the Devil, ends as the lamb of God and Messiah of art; the Holy Sinner, who combines in himself all the horrors of sin, becomes the head of Christianity. And on each occasion we have a speech of confession and acknowledgement such as Judah delivers before Joseph. Each time, moreover, the guilt is precisely named.

PALE MAN, CONFESSING

In The Holy Sinner, one might believe, the guilt in question is the sin of incest: that is how the story’s material is presented. The original guilt however is something other, which no source discloses.¹²² In reporting what took place, the good narrator-monk Clemens has to overcome his own disgust: the bedchamber of brother and sister is ‘so full of tenderness, defilement, rage, and blood and sin that my heart turns over for pity, shame, and anguish and I may scarcely tell it all’.¹²³ The defilement we know from the legend of Gregory, but the blood and rage? In The Holy Sinner something happens before the incest, something one might seek in vain in the medieval source of Hartmann von Aue. The dog Hanegiff is in the chamber of the excited pair and howls painfully:

And the younker just as he was, half crazed, sprang out of bed for his hunting-knife, seized the dog, and cut his throat, so that with a throat-rattle he stretched his limbs in death; threw the knife on the body, whose blood the sand of the floor drank up; then he turned drunkenly back to the place of another shame.

Oh woe for the good and lovely dog! To my mind it was the worst that happened that night, I rather pardon the rest, unlawful as it was. But I suppose it was all of one piece and was not more blameworthy here than there: a spewing of love, murder and passion of the flesh, that may God pity.¹²⁴

A spewing, in fact, that had proceeded through Thomas Mann’s work ever since Tobias Mindernickel stabbed poor Esau. The original sin is the murder that precedes the act of desire, not the incest that sets the powerful apparatus of mercy in motion; Clemens leaves as little doubt about this as does the bride and mother of the new pope, who in her final confession expressly remembers the howling Hanegiff.¹²⁵

A second if putative murder corresponds to this first one, and this does have its prototype in Hartmann von Aue. After the incest with his mother is discovered, Grigorss seeks a wasteland where he can atone and takes his rest in a fisherman’s hut. This fisherman, jealous of the handsome ascetic, sets him down as he wished on an island and chains him with a leg-iron, the key to which he throws in the sea. Seventeen years pass. Against all expectation Grigorss survives on his rock, and in Rome two people dream of a newly chosen pope. These two dreamer-emissaries set out to find him and stumble on the old hut. What they, and the reader, are seeking is Grigorss on his stone; no one has asked about the situation of the ill-willed fisherman. In Hartmann von Aue he has completely forgotten the incident.¹²⁶ Not so in Thomas Mann, who affords us a glance into his soul:

I will add that the man did not in the least want to remember the visit and shoved it out of his mind as much as possible. For in retrospect it always seemed to him, though actually he had at that time done just what the strange man wanted, as though he had committed something like a crime – in short, a murder. And one would rather banish such ideas.¹²⁷

This kind of thing one would rather banish, but does not succeed in doing so. The fisherman, for his part, ‘did not succeed badly, so far as the upper layer of his consciousness went’. The lower layer, however, sees to it that he betrays himself as soon as the emissaries from Rome arrive. He claims not to have sent anyone away from his door, whether ‘lord or beggar’,¹²⁸ but when the key to the legiron turns up in the belly of the pike that he serves up to them, Thomas Mann has him where he wants him: ‘Then the blenched man straightened and made his confession.’¹²⁹ He is pale as the brothers were at Judah’s revelation, pale as Adrian Leverkühn in his final address, whose admissions were recorded by his friend Zeitblom in Doctor Faustus, his pen already trembling as he sits down to write – a tremble that he shares with his author.

No other book so exhausted Thomas Mann as Doctor Faustus, this ‘radical confession’, this ‘confession of a life’ and ‘transformed autobiography’, which he wrote in a ‘state of profound excitement, deep turbulence and surrender’ and with such a determined ‘investment of reality and a life’s secret’ that the ‘idea of making public this work of life and its secrecy’ remained ‘in the depths of my soul something strange and unfathomable’ – ‘the whole thing is like an open wound’.¹³⁰ There can be no doubt about it: if there is one work to which Thomas Mann confided, in however coded a form, the secrets whose discovery he feared in April 1933 as a mortal danger, then this work is Doctor Faustus. And vice versa; what else should the secret work deal with if not precisely those secrets of his life that the diary passage mentions?

This however is almost the only sure thing that one can say about this most intricate of his novels, in which allusions are piled one above the other like the mattresses and eiderdowns in the tale of the princess who still feels the pea underneath. And at the deepest point beneath the layers of allusion there is concealed here, too, the hard nub that robbed the author of his sleep and sorely pressed on his soul.

Is this nub the affair with Schwerdtfeger, whom Adrian addresses in the familiar form after they have spent a holiday together – in short, the story of Mann’s youthful passion for Paul Ehrenberg? But something is no longer a secret if it is bruited about at every opportunity. All that was needed was the inquiry of an acquaintance, and Mann burst out:

Ah, those friends of my youth, the Ehrenbergs! Carl, who wrote you the stupid letter, played Tristan with such legato, and ‘that Paul’, who was certainly a painter, like so very many, but an attractive lad and indeed one of my great passions – I cannot put it otherwise.¹³¹

No one forced this incriminating word out of him. And no one could overlook, in reading The Genesis of a Novel, how in Doctor Faustus ‘the homosexual element plays an impish role’ in the relationship between Adrian and Rudi Schwerdtfeger.¹³²

Is it then the guilt of the cold, egocentric artist that Mann demonizes in the figure of Leverkühn? This is certain enough, also that Mann suffered from it, yet for that very reason this cannot be the secret: in The Genesis of a Novel Mann speaks quite openly of a ‘colouring of existence by this sense of guilt’, bearing on his ‘inhumanity based on absentmindedness’.¹³³ Perhaps the question should rather be posed the other way round: what can these secrets not be, what is open to view in these layers of allusion?

Let us suppose that Faustus was relieved of all those passages where a well-annotated edition would indicate a source, whether another text, a work of plastic art or a transmitted biographical detail. It would be possible in this way to remove page after page: references to the medieval Faust-Buch and the life of Nietzsche, to Luther and the engravings of Dürer, to the twelve-tone doctrine and Adorno’s musical theory, to Frau von Meek and the composer Alban Berg; to Kierkegaard and the tales of Hans Christian Andersen, to Reisiger, Preetorius and Mann’s grandson Frido, to the suicide of his sister Carla, the triangular wooing from Shakespeare’s comedies, the tramcar murder from a press clipping, Mahler’s Kindertotenlieder, the mental breakdowns of Schumann and Hugo Wolf, Dante’s Inferno and Michelangelo’s Last Judgement.

Not a lot would remain if all these pages were removed. The novel has no page free of such references, and reveals its ‘bloody radicalism’¹³⁴ in its citative style. But there would be a few passages without references, and there are quotations which, as in ‘Tables of the Law’, the Joseph novels and The Holy Sinner, undergo a small but decisive alteration.

The original story that triggers off all the others is taken from Paul Deussen’s Erinnerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche and the account of the philosopher’s sickness in Jena. On his arrival in Leipzig, Leverkühn is enticed by a city guide into a house of pleasure where he suffers ‘the trauma of encounter with the soulless drive’: caressed by Hetaera Esmeralda whom he flees from but who, a year later, when he follows her to Pressburg, specifically infects him.¹³⁵

But this is not quite how it was in the Nietzsche tradition. There the arrogant man is not caressed by an arm – a contact that Zeitblom traces the whole day on his own cheek¹³⁶ – and there he doesn’t follow after the dark-haired woman, but simply ‘returns to a place of that kind’, as Thomas Mann himself puts it.¹³⁷ The long journey and the fixation is new – although the model for the fixation has long been familiar to us. Hetaera Esmeralda wears a little jacket like Dürer’s ‘Negress Katharina’; but with her ‘big gam, snub nose, almond eyes’¹³⁸ she is strongly reminiscent of Rosza, the earliest seductress in Felix Krull, who for her part conjures up the portrait that the young Thomas Mann gave of Naples. The origin of the corrupter is taken not from Nietzsche’s life but from that of Felix Krull. Rosza is a Hungarian, and this is where Leverkühn pursues the dark lady, to enjoy her poisoned flesh. Hungary is likewise the origin of Adrian’s invisible patron Frau von Tolna, a reapparition of the mysterious hetaera.¹³⁹

Esmeralda has a pimp, and he too is an old acquaintance, to be sought in vain in other sources. The ‘losel’ in Adrian’s conversation with the Devil, the weedy, pale red-head with a cap on his head and his tongue in the corner of his mouth, is the equivalent of both the Neapolitan pimp-comedian from Death in Venice, and the Municher Strolch from The Hungry; as his actor’s voice shows, he too is from the dramatic profession.¹⁴⁰ His entrance is also familiar to us: suddenly he is sitting on the sofa, in the stone hall in Palestrina, and any doubt about his actual existence he declares to be ‘pure hypochondria’.¹⁴¹ Quite rightly, as we know, for the beginning of the scene relates to a visionary experience. Christian Buddenbrook speaks of him, as he spoke of the drawn knives in the south: knives which in Faustus become the symbolic knives of the little mermaid, whose pains her lover must also suffer.

Adrian may have contact with her – or with him, as she conceals the Devil within – but he must not love her, this is what the cheesy hoodlum teaches him at the end of the discussion. They are in business together, as attested by his blood, which means that he will achieve a ‘breakthrough’ with ensuing success and fame, but at the price of a ban on love.¹⁴²

The consequences of this ban are the two crimes that run through the novel from its very beginning. The first is the death of the child, for which Leverkühn feels responsible. Apart from an allusion to the tragedy of Gustav Mahler, who lost his beloved daughter after he wrote the Kindertotenlieder, this part of the action is poorly sourced. ‘What a sin, what a crime,’ Leverkühn laments when his nephew dies; but where exactly does his guilt lie, except that he uses Echo as inspiration (as Mann did with his grandson Frido, whose depiction goes beyond the many ‘murders’ that Mann acknowledged to his wife and put quotation marks around in his diaries)?¹⁴³ The logic of myth requires the Devil to carry off the boy, since Leverkühn loves him impermissibly. This ‘impermissible’ passes into ambiguity, when Leverkühn accuses himself of having feasted his eyes on the boy and exposed him to ‘poisonous influences’.¹⁴⁴ Removed from its context, this could describe the uncle as a wicked paedophile – but only if removed in this way. There is an abyss, if indeed a narrow one, between the love of Leverkühn for Echo and paedophilia – which is precisely why the author defended himself so sternly against a doctoral student who made too free with the traces of homosexuality. He can admit something here and there, says Mann, but the epiphany of the heavenly child is something that the researcher ‘should not impugn, however “gently”’.¹⁴⁵

There was not much to admit, since it lay open to view, in the second case in which Leverkühn breached the ban on love. The persistent courting of Schwerdtfeger reaches its goal in Hungary, after which Adrian addresses him with the familiar Du. But he takes revenge on Schwerdtfeger for coming too close. Zeitblom indicates this right at the beginning, and later speaks of the catastrophe in which Adrian is ‘involved and active in an obscure and fatal way’.¹⁴⁶ Adrian sends Schwerdtfeger out as a suitor, but he woos successfully for himself. This is the theme of triangular wooing from the Shakespeare plays that Adrian sets to music. In Thomas Mann’s account the theme undergoes a decisive extension: the betrayed one steers the too forceful party to his death. Schwerdtfeger’s former beloved shoots him out of jealousy, before he can marry the woman intended for Adrian. The intrigue is convoluted enough, but its meaning is clear. ‘Certainly I am changing this,’ Thomas Mann wrote of his adaptation of Shakespeare: ‘Adrian kills the friend whom he loves.’¹⁴⁷

He changes it into something for which there is no source. But this change comes before the quotation. Shakespeare is the cover, and only secondary. The core of the plan is revealed in an early working note: ‘He is forced to make use of his desire for marriage precisely to kill the person whom he had sex with.’¹⁴⁸ And so he sends Schwerdtfeger off to get shot in a tramcar.

Many readers of Doctor Faustus found this course of events unconvincing, so Mann frequently had to explain it. It strongly irritated his son Michael. In the Lübeck birthday speech on the felix culpa, Michael answered as follows the question as to how far a ‘transformed autobiography’ was actually involved in the collapse of spiritual arrogance into barbarism, which was the presupposition of fascism and the sin of Leverkühn: ‘the implications cannot be thought through to the end’. What was certain, however, was ‘that the narrator shared heavily in the guilt of the “friend” that he portrays here’.¹⁴⁹

If Thomas Mann shared heavily in this, then what was transposed from life into fiction also had something relieving about it. ‘This gloomy and radical work first had to be written, if I wanted to offer myself completely,’ he said in a letter, and gave two examples of what the Joseph novels still did not contain: the epiphany of the child and ‘Adrian’s final confession of his life and sins’.¹⁵⁰

In this ultimate confession, the climax of the novel that Thomas Mann also saw as his own testament, the man of sorrows Leverkühn, whose time has run out, confesses his series of sins.¹⁵¹ His listeners first of all take this as art, as fiction. But quite wrongly: ‘This was dead sober earnest, a confession, the truth, to listen to which a man in extreme agony of soul had called together his fellow-men’, who for their part of course respond to this truth, ‘when they could no longer consider it as poetry’, with cold terror.¹⁵² It is this ‘bareness and baldness of unmediated revelation’ that so vexes Zeitblom and causes him to hold high the protective vagueness of art.¹⁵³

The confessor sits there pale as death, and admits the pact with the Devil that ‘some kind of deed’ had been sufficient to seal; he admits that he pursued the dark woman, that he poisoned the boy with his glances and that the Devil not only forbade him to marry, but also denied him the love for the man that he addressed as Du: ‘So he forced me to use precisely this intent, that I coldly murdered the trusting one and will have confessed it today and here before you all, that I sit before you also as murtherer.’¹⁵⁴

The confession is followed by a collapse and decline on the lines of Nietzsche. But before this point is reached, hope springs for a last time. Leverkühn had completed his work by way of murder and sexual abuse, and he only hopes that this work, created in misdeed, can mercifully turn out good. Perhaps God will take into account that he let himself grow sour, and count it in his favour that he ‘obstinately finished all’.¹⁵⁵ Who here is speaking exclusively for himself is scarcely concealed any longer – for who else could raise this hope? Certainly not Leverkühn, whose pact with the Devil expressly relieved him of this very worry, so that he did not need to piece his work together half a page each morning, but either lay fallow like death or, in waves of overwhelming inspiration, shivering in holy terror, in a night kept from darkness by incessant lightning, could scarcely write down the inspirations that flooded over him.¹⁵⁶ With this kind of artistic creation there can be no talk of a work ethic of obstinate finishing, that was the whole point of the pact, and if Thomas Mann forgets this in the finale, this throws – if not a shaft of lightning, then at least a candlelight – on the autobiographical furore in which he let any conception of art slide in order to offer his own self completely.

Doctor Faustus was to be Mann’s Parsifal, that is how it was planned, and everything after seemed to him just epilogue and pastime. The Holy Sinner was still to come, his final masterpiece on the tangle of love, murder and the desire of the flesh, the last novel on the ‘indispensable idea’ of forgiveness.¹⁵⁷ But even the latest short works stand under the spell of the old theme. The Black Swan deals with it in the variant of sickness; a tumour of the sexual organs ‘with concomitant haemorrhages’ – the adjective in every sense justified – kills off Rosalie after her desire is aroused.¹⁵⁸ The essay ‘On Schiller’ speaks of the morally destructive idea of shattered faith, the ‘necessity to live a lie’; of the monstrosity that it means for the poet of Demetrius that at the pinnacle of success he should be tortured by the theme of deceit, the theme of deception and illusion, ‘with whose secret a soul parted for ever from the truth must live alone and go forward’.¹⁵⁹

Finally, the ultimate novel, the second part of the confidence trickster fragment, celebrates once again the slaughter of the sacrificial victim that arouses the flame of desire. Felix Krull, although ‘somewhat queasy’ and ‘not the man for national massacres’,¹⁶⁰ is taken to the bullring where there has to be stabbing with bare steel and a thick wave of blood gushing into the sand, unpleasant for him to watch, but making his mistress’s bosom surge.¹⁶¹ Unpleasant to watch, but in no circumstances to avoid: this is the law that right to the end allows no escape. The very last sentence of this last novel pronounces yet again the little words in which everything – artistry, desire, cruelty – seems to join for a final farewell: ‘And high and stormy, under my ardent caresses, stormier than at the Iberian game of blood, I saw the surging of that queenly bosom.’¹⁶²

The concluding sentence of a life’s work, in which a compulsion seems to keep watch that pleasure cannot surge without the bloody game being joined.