Seven years after finishing Bluebeard’s Chamber I wrote the following essay, which once more cast a light – and not necessarily a rosier one – on the trail of blood running through Thomas Mann’s work. The reader who found Bluebeard’s Chamber lacking in a definite thesis might catch a glimpse of one here.
A LITTLE GUESSING GAME: Who is the first character to be invoked in Thomas Mann’s first novel? It’s none other than the devil – disguised in Low German dialect as Düwel, to whom Consul Buddenbrook pays tribute with a joking curse: ‘Well, devil take it [den Düwel ook], c’est la question, ma très chère demoiselle.’
This is the beginning, the portal, in a sense, of the cathedral-like work Mann constructed throughout his life. The same Düwel who is leaning in this entranceway sees the reader off sixty years later. The central symbol in Mann’s last story, Die Betrogene (The Betrayed Woman), is an evil black swan – indeed, The Black Swan is the title of the first English translation of the novella – that hisses threateningly at the main character and appears to her in a comatose fever at the end. As Mann knew from the world of fairy tales, not least those of Hans Christian Andersen, the black swan stands for the occult and the devil. Even after this last story the motif persists. His notes for Luthers Hochzeit (Luther’s Wedding), a drama he never completed, revolve around the question of whether the devil might not be hiding in the Great Reformer.
Despite this diabolical framing of the work, the horned one is to be found only rarely in the literature on Thomas Mann. He is hard to miss only in Doctor Faustus, which in adherence to the Faust legend is quite officially about a pact with the devil. There, to be sure, the devil seems less demonic than allegorical in nature. Put somewhat inelegantly and starkly, the composer’s pact stands for the pact that Germany made in 1933 with the satanic Hitler. This reading is constructed subtly and intricately in Doctor Faustus. Mann uses it in political statements outside of the novel too. In his famous letter to Walter von Molo he laments the difficulties of reaching an understanding between someone who experienced the ‘Witches’ Sabbath’ from outside ‘and all of you who danced along and waited on Herr Urian [a name for the devil].’ In Faustus too, it seems, Herr Urian bears an invisible little mustache and the unnamed first name Adolf. With eerie precision, the name of the man who makes a deal with the devil, Adrian, is a combination of these two names.
In the years after publication, however, Mann distanced himself more and more from the superficial reading of his Schmerzensbuch (‘book of pain’, as he called Doctor Faustus) as political allegory. In his diaries and his letters to friends he sees the novel from the outset in a completely different light. There he repeatedly describes it as a radical confession, as a life’s reckoning and transferred autobiography of ‘almost criminal mercilessness’.
In the novel, the composer Adrian Leverkühn believes the only way for him to overcome the difficulties of modern art is with the help of the old Faustian pact. The devil gives him creative genius in exchange for his soul. As a condition of this oral contract, the artist is forbidden for life to love.
The bargain is struck in the famous twenty-fifth chapter. Adrian Leverkühn is now living in a boardinghouse in Palestrina, where he is working during the hot Roman summer. One afternoon, returning from a walk, he finds in his room known as the “stone hall” an unannounced visitor. A man radiating cold is sitting on the sofa and turns out to be the devil, who wants to at last have a conversation and make a deal with Leverkühn in person. Adrian isn’t surprised, because he had been expecting this visit.
By chance we know that this very scene, the most fantastic of all the episodes in Doctor Faustus, which would by itself seem to rule out the possibility that the novel is strictly autobiographical, is based on just that: strict autobiography. As Peter de Mendelssohn reports, the young Munich painter Fabius von Gugel, during a stay in Rome in 1953, had mustered the courage to call on Thomas Mann in the Hotel Excelsior to show him a portfolio of his work. It contained illustrations for the fairy tale ‘Cinderella’, and the revered author contemplated them for a long time. Finally, Mann had to tell him that these drawings reminded him strongly of one of his own experiences, a vision he had once had as a young man.
A vision? asked the painter. Indeed, a vision. Gugel was certain that Thomas Mann used this word with emphasis, not hallucination, dream, fantasy, imagination, or anything of the sort, but expressly: vision. It had been in his early years, when he was spending the summer weeks in Palestrina with his brother, and there in the stone hall in the afternoon heat he had quite suddenly caught sight of a stranger sitting on the black sofa, whom he had known was none other than the devil.
Mann’s biographers date this diabolical experience to the late summer of 1897. The vision left its mark long before Doctor Faustus. As early as in Buddenbrooks, Christian asks his brother Thomas whether perhaps things happen to him like ‘when you come into your room at twilight, you see a man sitting on a sofa who nods to you and yet isn’t there at all?!’ In The Magic Mountain, too, a similarly ghostly appearance occurs at the end of the chapter on séances. On the whole, it’s astonishing how differently Mann’s great mid-career novel reads when we pay attention to the faint knocking sounds issuing from the underworld.
Once again the author places the signpost right at the beginning. The first representative of the sanatorium Hans Castorp meets is a concierge with a pronounced limp. Anyone who didn’t know that a limp is a traditional attribute of the devil would be enlightened by Herr Settembrini, who unpleasantly enough refers to the concierge as a limping devil. Because he gives Castorp a lecture on Carducci’s hymn to Satan, Settembrini himself is called ‘Satanas’. He in turn says that the Jesuit Naphta, who lives in secret luxury, is ‘provided for from behind by the devil’. Hofrat Behrens is quite explicitly a ‘devil of a fellow’ and an ‘imp of Satan’; nor does his assistant Krokowski, short, fat, dressed in black, with darkly glowing eyes in a face of phosphorescent pallor, instill much confidence, and Castorp’s cousin Joachim claims that the head nurse cast a spell on him, devil take her.
The Magic Mountain is clearly enough about how the protagonist finds himself in a Satanic sphere and falls more and more under its influence. At the end of the ‘Walpurgis Night’ section Castorp spends a night with the beautiful witch and Lilith Madame Chauchat, in whose form he reencounters a homoerotic love of his youth. Settembrini’s warning not to offer the devil one’s little finger ‘lest he take the whole hand and with it the whole person’ has by now been forgotten. After his night of love Castorp can no longer escape the demonic realm. Meanwhile the demonic is no longer hiding out in idioms but has flung itself openly to the surface. The section ‘The Great Petulance’ begins expressly with the demon, who is now called by his name and whose status as the ruler of these people up on the mountain is no longer concealed. ‘Did you ever see the devil with a nightcap on?’ is the inane parlour game played by the English sanatorium guests – sign of the power that seems to have Haus Berghof definitively under its influence. The great stupor reigns and develops into the great petulance in which the sanatorium guests are at each other’s throats and Naphta shoots himself in the head.
The protagonist is freed from this evil power only by the thunderbolt of historical catastrophe. The world war breaks out, Hans Castorp enlists in the army, and in the final image he is stumbling toward his end on the blood-soaked fields of Flanders. He has offered the demon his little finger, and the demon never lets him go. It is the demon from the Book of Revelation that underlies Mann’s final image: the old serpent who there is called the devil and Satan. Trombones blare and, as after the breaking of the seventh seal, a third of the people perish. Only on the last page does Mann close the bracket that he had opened with the help of the limping concierge. Hans Castorp is staggering across the battlefield when a shell buries itself deep in the ground in front of him ‘like the devil himself’. The devil himself, personified, shoots into the hell that overtly opens up at the end of this monumental novel.
SACRIFICE TO THE GOD
Before this ending, in the middle of the book, the protagonist has a famous dream vision from which he draws a no less famous lesson. The section with the heading ‘Snow’ seems to jut erratically out of The Magic Mountain. Castorp is caught in a snowstorm and, close to freezing to death, has a long two-part vision. First he sees a southern idyll, the seaside life of a harmonious group of people on a gulf that reminds him of Naples. Then the scenery changes, Castorp passes a statue of two women and, with a heavy heart and full of gloomy foreboding, enters a temple. The door of the temple chamber is open, and his knees almost give way in the face of what he sees: ‘Two grey women, half naked, with matted hair, hanging witches’ breasts and teats as long as fingers, were going about the grisliest business in there among flickering braziers. Over a basin they were tearing apart a small child, tearing it apart with their hands in savage silence – Hans Castorp saw delicate blond hair smeared with blood – and devouring the pieces so that the brittle little bones cracked in their mouths and the blood dripped from their vile lips.’
Hans Castorp wants to flee but can’t, until he finally awakes from his dream and after some rumination comes to the conclusion that ‘man shall grant death no dominion over his thoughts’. As a message to humanity Mann even has this conclusion printed in italics, but it fades immediately after Castorp’s return to the sanatorium and is taken up again by the narrator only on the last page. The bloody feast too is recalled admonishingly on this last page.
In the flickering light of the limping devil, this bloody feast seems all too fitting. In the tenth century the Canon Episcopi contains the first mention of witches who make a pact with the devil and take part in nocturnal gatherings. In the twelfth century John of Salisbury writes of witches to whom babies are sacrificed, which they cut up into pieces and greedily devour. What happens in The Magic Mountain, causing Hans Castorp to go rigid with horror, is no different: Inside a temple witches slaughter and consume a small child. Castorp clearly witnesses a ritual sacrifice or black mass. It is certainly no accident when he cries out shortly before his bloody dream: ‘That was the devil of a thing.’
On closer examination, the snow chapter is no more isolated in The Magic Mountain than this type of scene in Mann’s oeuvre. On the contrary, ritual bloody deeds against a demonically shaded background form an uncanny pattern in his work.
It begins with the story Mann writes in the summer of 1897 after his side trip to Naples. This story depicts a derided loner named Tobias Mindernickel, who in a final scene that remains disturbing to this day stabs his dog to death. The fact that Tobias Mindernickel bears the initials of his creator has not escaped the notice of scholars. What’s easier to miss is the subtle connection that this story seeks to establish with one of the most famous devil stories of German Romanticism: it is inconspicuously modelled on Adelbert von Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl. In the little-known 1908 short story ‘Anecdote’ Tobias Mindernickel’s dog is replaced by a cat that is tortured by its owner in ‘gruesomely inventive ways’. Not only the animal is tormented by this woman; she has pulled her husband too down into the abyss of depravity and ‘humiliated, besmirched, poisoned’ him. The name of the besmircher is Angela. As the angel of poison, she presages the devil called by this very name in Doctor Faustus.
Another story, which like ‘Death in Venice’ leads inexorably to an ill-fated death in Italy, alludes to the nickname given to Thomas Mann by his family: ‘Mario and the Magician’. The magician Cipolla is a hypnotist by trade – whether assisted by supernatural forces, ‘only the devil knows’. But it is not only in the way he beckons to his victim Mario ‘just like in a book’ – by holding his hand in front of his nose and alternately bending his index finger into a hook and straightening it – that this limping and hunchbacked ‘personification of all monstrousness’, this demonic ‘goblin’ also proves to be the devil, just like in a book. A revolver shot puts an end to his reign of terror.
In Death in Venice it’s not the devil but the foreign god Dionysus who appears to the writer Gustav von Aschenbach in the midst of his amorous agonies. A Neapolitan minstrel, half actor, half pimp, shows him the way into the abyss. Aschenbach’s dream, the turning point of his Passion narrative, depicts an orgy in the course of which the maenads unveil a wooden phallus and dismember animals. Aschenbach, who resists valiantly, is drawn into the frenzy and rapture against his will. After his dream, he falls helplessly captive to the demon.
His successor, Potiphar’s wife in Joseph and His Brothers, fares no better. At the climax of her amorous distress, she resorts to a final desperate measure. She pays a witch to make the reluctant lover Joseph submissive with the help of her dark goddess, who is known as ‘the bitch’. In describing this black mass, Mann doesn’t skimp on details. As in Tobias Mindernickel the scene involves the slaughter of a dog: ‘Bring the sniffer here, the indecent beast, and slit his throat! Now cut open his belly and plunge your hands into the hot bowels steaming up at you in the coolness of the moonlit night. Smeared with blood, draped with entrails, I hold them up to you, my sacrificial hands, for I have made them in your image.’
The Old Testament is good for many grisly stories, but this one wasn’t in it. This author has a striking tendency to deviate from his sources when it’s a matter of inserting sacralized bloody deeds. In the late novel The Chosen One he retells a medieval legend itself modelled on the Oedipus myth. As a diabolical story with a pious twist, it is anticipated in Faustus. The hero of the legend is conceived in a night of love between brother and sister. He himself ends up sleeping with his mother, atones for seventeen years on an island, and is ultimately raised out of the depths of his sins and named pope. That’s the course of the plot as Mann takes it from his sources. Here too, however, he inserts a brief episode for which no model has yet been identified. He depicts the first night of love between the sinful siblings in the course of which a nasty disturbance occurs. The brother is lying in bed with his sister when the dog howls pitifully. His name is Hanegiff and his life short: the brother leaps for his hunting knife, seizes the dog, and cuts his throat. The monk who is telling the bloody tale sees in this animal slaughter the worst thing that happened that night. He’d sooner forgive even the incest.
There was incest in Hartmann von Aue’s Gregorius – but no dog, let alone a slaughtered one. It’s notable how Mann again lends a demonic tinge to the invented episode. Before the excited brother stabs Hanegiff to death, he calls him a ‘devilish beast’. The monk refers to the love of the sinful children as ‘sweet devil’s torture’. His resigned summary reads, ‘So they went on to the end and satisfied Satan’s lust.’
THE GAME OF BLOOD AS BAPTISM
Mann’s unfinished novel about a confidence man also ends with a mythical animal sacrifice. The humorous surface of The Confessions of Felix Krull has until now successfully concealed the theme of contact with dark powers that lies at the heart of this novel too. At the same time, this concealment is as semi-transparent as the euphemism by which the direct naming of the horned one is avoided: ‘Zum Kuckuck!’ Krull cries out inadvertently at one point, substituting the mythological devil bird, the cuckoo, for the taboo name of the devil – an embarrassing mistake for which he immediately apologizes, because the elderly gentleman sitting opposite him on the train to Lisbon bears that very name. Professor Kuckuck himself offers no lack of hints as to his secret nature, which are directed at anyone familiar with Goethe’s Faust. Kuckuck comes from Gotha and by this as well as other half quotations proves his identity as a successor to Mephistopheles. His mentorship of Felix Krull consists in persuading him to attend a local ritual. The Kuckuck family rides with him to the place of the ceremony, dressed in black, ‘a little as though going to church’. They’re on their way to the solemn spectacle of a bullfight.
That is, in actuality, as Kuckuck later intimates to his guest, who is listening with only half an ear, what they witness is an ancient sacrificial ritual. Even though he doesn’t use the word, Kuckuck speaks of the Persian–Roman Mithras cult. The bull-killing god worshipped in the cult, a men’s secret society with a strong inclination toward blood, rivalled Christianity for centuries. And the latter’s victory over the foreign god was not complete, as Krull learns when he inquires further of Kuckuck the next day, who answers that ‘those official rites had not been so completely driven from the field, for all the pious activities of mankind had forever steamed popularly with sacrificial blood, divine blood, and he hinted at connections between the sacrifice of the Mass and yesterday’s festive game of blood’.
Kuckuck’s reference points to the – from a Christian point of view – blasphemous character of the Mithras cult as much as the continued existence of those cult forms in the present. The blood of the bull serves the baptism, the initiation. Surprisingly, or by now no longer surprisingly, the conclusion of the cheerful story of a confidence man turns out to be a blood mass in disguise.
Thomas Mann’s mythological adviser Karl Kerényi was positively delighted about this conclusion. He had immediately recognized the Mithraic subtext of the corrida and wrote to the author enthusiastically that he didn’t believe that this depiction could be based solely on a scholarly theory: ‘Here art, the daimon, is speaking – probably on the basis of a view (I don’t know this, but assume it) – surpassing every view, in the direction of the primordial.’
Though Kerényi’s florid style makes it hard to know whether one understands him correctly, he appears to presume a personal view of the author’s, which helped him or his ‘daimon’ achieve the depiction of the cultic event. And this indeed raises a question. Why does Thomas Mann, for over fifty years, from the early Tobias Mindernickel to the late Krull, invent these demonically charged sacrificial scenes? Why for God’s sake the insistence of this motif? This author never made a secret of the fact that in his stories and novels he was always speaking of himself; on the contrary, he emphasized it. When Thomas Mann spends a lifetime circling a theme, then this theme was personally very close to him. In Mann’s case, not to think of a basis in his life history is similar in difficulty to obeying the command not to think of a polar bear.
As of when did the horned one cast a shadow on his life? Even before the vision in Palestrina, in May of 1896, in one of his first published reviews, the still unknown debutant uses a collection of Tyrolean legends as a pretext to tell nothing but devil stories for three pages. This interest, surprising in a sceptical Hanseatic citizen, is less so in light of his close bond with his mother. Until the age of seven Julia da Silva-Bruhns had grown up in Brazil, where an atmosphere of hysterical belief in the devil prevailed. ‘At home, when some unfamiliar voice sounded from the jungle, word passed from mouth to mouth among the blacks: “The devil”; and if somewhere a light that no one knew blinked there were whispers: “The devil.”’ So Heinrich Mann describes it in his novel Between the Races, which draws on Julia’s childhood memories. He and his younger brother, Thomas, must have imbibed the devil stories with their mother’s milk.
But does this suffice as an explanation? That is the hard-to-answer question from which a cluster of other questions hangs. For example, this one: What actually made Thomas Mann conclude without hesitation that it was the devil sitting there on the sofa in the stone hall? The immediate recognition could indicate that he was in some way prepared for it, that he, like Leverkühn after him, had vaguely been expecting this visit. Someone who is not inwardly occupied with the devil will not instantly recognize him in the visitor who has arrived out of the blue or model his vision on him. But what reason could the young traveller in Italy have had to expect such a visit? Could his stay in Naples have played a part, where all sorts of cult forms flourished, including animal sacrifice, and tourists able to pay were lured to black masses? Although we’ll never know for sure, this seems not impossible.
Whatever the reason may have been and however it would be possible to fill in the blank, there’s no doubt that in his essays and letters too Mann circles the theme again and again. In 1914 he writes to his publisher Samuel Fischer about the conflict between ‘civilized and demonic tendencies’ in the human being as the problem that has ‘completely ruled’ him ‘not only since yesterday.’ In The Magic Mountain, then in its early stages, he attempts in the snow vision for the first time a symbolic transcendence: the bloody feast in the temple shall not morbidly dominate man’s thoughts but shall serve him as a moral teaching. In the decades that follow, he increasingly devotes himself to the idea of the double blessing, which includes the blessing from below; it is this idea that binds him for so long to the Joseph novel. And throughout this period he repeats variations on the statement that a proper humanism must not ignore or deny ‘the subterranean, dark, demonic, evil’.
He constructs Doctor Faustus, which he believed would be his testament, as a full confession, as a novel that no longer is one: ‘It is reality, ruthless biography.’ Only very few, such as Karl Kerényi, dared to take the implications seriously and grant the book that ‘bloody radicalism’ of which Mann spoke in almost desperate candour. In 1950 he professed his Christianity, attributing his religiosity to an experience of life as guilt and indebtedness, which was why his work arose completely from the need for restitution and justification. In the past he had defined his religiosity with a decisive small addition. In his Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, which was directed against the self-certainty of his brother Heinrich, he wrote, ‘If, however, one may understand by religiosity that freedom which is a path, not a goal; which signifies openness, sensitivity, readiness to live, humility; searching, attempting, doubting, and erring; a path, as I have said, to God or, as far as I’m concerned, even to the devil […] – well, perhaps I may call some of such freedom and religiosity my own.’
This author knew how to weigh his words, and his inclusion of the devil certainly didn’t slip in without due consideration.
MIDAS AND THE
CONFESSION OF ART
His path, to the devil or to God, ended like that of ‘the chosen one’, who says of himself, ‘One must only need it more than others, then one makes a name for oneself among mankind.’ Like his ascetic sinner, Thomas Mann is granted a late elevation. Since 1952 he had been toying with the idea of requesting a private audience with the pope. A year later the dream came true. On 20 April 1953 Mann flew to Rome for a week, where he received Fabius von Gugel in his hotel and told him – with oppressed inflections, as Gugel still remembered decades later – of his vision of the devil. His diary reports nothing about this. Instead it reveals his experience of visiting a Mithraic temple underneath the church of San Clemente: ‘The most ancient, deep down into the Mithras sphere.’
The devil in Palestrina and the Mithras sphere are close to him during this week in Rome. And finally, on 29 April, comes the ‘special audience with Pius XII’ – ‘The white figure of the Pope stepping before me. Emotional genuflection and gratitude for the grace.’ Leverkühn too struggled for grace in his final confessional speech, grace that makes the highest demand on God, because the man who made a deal with the devil factors it into his calculations in a coolly speculative fashion. This increases his sin all the more, but that very fact only presents an even greater challenge to grace in its omnipotence, which, however, the son of hell has once again factored in – and so on in endless escalation. Between sin and grace the scales are never at rest. They waver to the end; they waver even in the case of the man of God Luther, demonically as Mann renders him in his final sketches.
The choice of subject matter couldn’t be more Protestant. Despite the visit with the pope, the confession as a sacrament remained barred to the Protestant. That didn’t prevent him from applying himself to the task every morning. Writing, according to Ibsen’s overused pronouncement, means holding a Day of Judgment over oneself, and this Day of Judgment was not of this world. With the confessions of this writer, however, it was always the same story. Leverkühn’s final confession is at first taken by the listeners for art, for fiction. Only when they comprehend that it is ‘quiet and pallid earnestness’, does horror overcome them, and they run away in droves. Leverkühn’s creator was never exposed to this danger. Everything he touched turned into gold – that is, into art, the bloody radicalism of which was no longer believed. To claim that this starved him emotionally would be taking the analogy too far; but he may have suffered under this curse, which at the same time formed the basis of his existence. Whatever he might confess – the world took delight in what his Midas hands had touched, in a work that seemed to it playful, sceptical, virtuoso, and humorous.
And it was quite right to do so. Thomas Mann was no Baudelaire. The work of this great author is playful, sceptical, and humorous. Only it is so against a dark background, a profoundly serious colouring against which the glitter of the cheerful can first stand out. Only both elements together make the work of the man who perhaps gave the devil his little finger and spent a lifetime artfully wresting himself free from captivity.