The Dear Purchase: A Theme in German Modernism (Cambridge Studies in German)

This book relates twelve major writers of German modernism to the history of the twentieth century; individual works by Thomas Mann, Musil and Hesse, and poems by Rilke, Stefan George, Benn, Brecht and Trakl are among those studied. The unifying theme is 'the dear purchase', the name here given to an ideal of moral strenuousness and sacrifice seen as characteristic of Germany after Nietzsche and Spengler. In this context, the book considers the renaissance of German poetry after 1900, the impact of the Great War, its aftermath in relativism and uncertainty, and attitudes to the Hitler period. As a self-justifying ideal 'the dear purchase' is revealed as flawed, but the conclusion juxtaposes Mann's Felix Krull and Kafka's story Josephine as offering a deliverance from its tyrannical value-system. The Introduction, partly autobiographical, traces J. P. Stern's preoccupation with this interpretation of his material in many of his books (including those concerned with Nietzsche and Hitler) and pays tribute to Wittgenstein's influence on his thinking.

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN GERMAN

THE DEAR PURCHASE

CAMBRIDGE STUDIES IN GERMAN General editors: H. B. NISBET ^ M A R T I N SWALES

Also in the series s. s. P R A W E R

Frankenstein's Island: England and the English in the Writings of Heinrich Heine BENJAMIN BENNETT Hugo von Hofmannsthal The Theatres of Consciousness PHILIP PAYNE

Robert MusiVs ' The Man without Qualities' A Critical Study ANNA K. KUHN

Christa Wolfs Utopian Vision From Marxism to Feminism LESLEY SHARPE Friedrich Schiller: Drama, Thought and Politics PETER HUTGHINSON Stefan Heym: The Perpetual Dissident ERNST BEHLER German Romantic Literary Theory MICHAEL BUTLER (editor) The Narrative Fiction of Heinrich Boll Social Conscience and Literary Achievement

THE DEAR PURCHASE A Theme in German Modernism

J. P. STERN

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS

CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS Cambridge, New York, Melbourne, Madrid, Cape Town, Singapore, Sao Paulo Cambridge University Press The Edinburgh Building, Cambridge CB2 2RU, UK Published in the United States of America by Cambridge University Press, New York www.cambridge.org Information on this title: www.cambridge.org/9780521433303 © Cambridge University Press 1995 This publication is in copyright. Subject to statutory exception and to the provisions of relevant collective licensing agreements, no reproduction of any part may take place without the written permission of Cambridge University Press. First published 1995 This digitally printed first paperback version 2006 A catalogue recordfor this publication is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication data Stern, J. P. (Joseph Peter) The Dear Purchase: A Theme in German Modernism/J. P. Stern, p. cm. - (Cambridge Studies in German) Includes index. ISBN 0 521 43330 4 1. German literature - 20th century - History and criticism. 2. Sacrifice in literature. I. Title. II. Series. PT405.S74255 1995 830.9'353 -dc20 94-5827 CIP ISBN-13 978-0-521-43330-3 hardback ISBN-10 0-521-43330-4 hardback ISBN-13 978-0-521-02440-2 paperback ISBN-10 0-521-02440-4 paperback

To our children

Contents

Foreword by Nicholas Boyle Editor's preface

page xi xxi

Introduction

i

1

The theme

25

2

Reality

61

3

Relativity

84

Introduction

84

Oswald Spengler: The Decline of the West Thomas Mann: The Magic Mountain Robert Musil: The Man Without Qualities

4

The Great War

183

Ernst Jiinger's The Storm of Steel Hans Carossa: Roumanian Diary Stefan George: ' Der Krieg' Georg Trakl: ' Grodek'

5

The purchase of poetry

183 198 211 240

254

Rainer Maria Rilke: transitions Gottfried Benn: toxic spheres Bertolt Brecht: the social engagement

6

88 110 135

Rendering account

254 304 326

346

Hermann Hesse's The Glass Bead Game: a game of Utopia History and allegory: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

ix

346 363

i

List of contents 7

A deliverance of sorts

8 Notes Index

382

Living in the metaphor of fiction: Thomas Mann's Felix Krull

382

Franz Kafka: Josephine the Singer; or The Mouse People

394

Postscript: the divided self

410 418 441

Foreword

The Dear Purchase is Peter Stern's last completed book, and also the book he spent most of his academic life writing. It is a critical study of German literature (especially fiction, poetry and nonprofessional philosophy) from Nietzsche to the death of Thomas Mann. That literature is seen as marked above all by a metaphysical and moral intensity named by Stern in the phrase which gives the book its title and which derives from a sonnet by the seventeenth-century poet Andreas Gryphius, quoted in Chapter I. There are also overtones of the story of Faust. Stern argues that this theme is ubiquitous in German literature of the first half of the twentieth century, and must be accounted either a partial cause, or at least a major symptom, of Germany's readiness in those years to plunge itself and the world into disaster. It is a study which he alone was qualified to write, and it was completed only just in time. He conceived it, as he tells us in his introduction, in 1957, and first published an outline of its argument in an article in German Quarterly in 1968. After several preliminary studies, which also turned into books, he seems to have begun drafting around 1972. The book became his principal, but not even then his only, concern when he retired from his Chair at University College, London, in 1986. He pronounced it finished, from the bed in which he was to die a few days later, in November 1991. During that final illness he was also correcting the proofs of another book, The Heart of Europe, which brought together numerous published but previously uncollected essays. The Dear Purchase, however, was a project of a quite different kind. Long pondered and clearly focused, it was intended, more explicitly XI

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than any of his other literary studies, to argue a case. Particular lectures and articles were deliberately undertaken as contributions to his most sustained attempt at a literary and historical synthesis. Perhaps he felt, though if he did he never avowed it, some reluctance about a task which in its magnitude, and by its potentially systematic nature, could easily have conflicted with his preference for the art of the petit re'cit, for local clarity, and for the aphorism. Perhaps too it would have been better had the task been finished earlier. But finished it was, and the manuscript he left on his death, much of it not previously published in any form, was coherent and without serious lacunae - a work to match and complement Re-interpretations and Hitler: The Fiihrer and the People. In one respect at least it does resemble The Heart ofEurope, too. The Dear Purchase sums up

and crowns a writing career characterised always by variety in unity. However varied the subjects and styles and sympathies, they are unified by an unmistakable personality and an unwavering sense of responsibility: the responsibility of literature to life, and of the critic to literature. In reviewing The Heart of Europe, Ritchie Robertson has surveyed and assessed Stern's other major books (Comparative Criticism 15 (1994)), and that work need not be redone here. But Stern decided, rather against his prejudices and his usual practice, to begin The Dear Purchase in an autobiographical vein, and it may be useful if I set down something of what he does not say, and would not have dreamed of saying, about himself. Joseph Peter Maria Stern was born on Christmas Day 1920 into a well-to-do Jewish—Catholic family in Prague. His halfsister, lisa, had been born to his mother, Louisa (nee Bondy), in a previous marriage. His father, Gustav Stern, who was an economist and later worked for the United Nations, had fought in the Czech Legion during the First World War. Czech only was spoken in the family, and throughout his life Peter felt a natural political affinity for the Masaryk republic. At the age of eleven he began to learn German, but, apart from a year in Bavaria, during which he once saw Adolf Hitler, he had a Czech schooling, three years of it at the Comenius School in Vienna. His holidays were spent on his grandparents' farm at Zamrsk, a

Foreword

xiii

hamlet near Pardubice in Bohemia. In March 1939 Hitler's armies invaded Prague and Gustav Stern fled to London, to prepare the way for the rest of his family. But Louisa Stern could not bear to leave and, like her brother and his wife, chose suicide rather than exile. The grandparents perished in Theresienstadt. lisa was sent to the concentration camp at Lodz, which she eventually survived, though her husband did not. Peter escaped by walking across the border into Poland. With the protection of a British visa, issued in Katowice by ' a public school sort of chap', doing his decent bit as consul in (very) foreign parts - a type for which Peter always retained a romantic admiration he travelled in August in a sealed train to Gdynia. On the quayside, waiting for the last boat to London, he met Erich Heller, who was to be a friend for life, and who, by his commitment to the study of twentieth-century German literature - which he introduced into the Cambridge syllabus - was to exercise a decisive influence on Stern's intellectual development. The Heart of Europe was dedicated to Heller, and The Dear Purchase is the final fruit of their friendship. Having rejoined his father in London, Stern spent a year at Barry Grammar School, where he learned his remarkable English, and in the summer of 1940 was admitted to study economics at the London School of Economics. But the LSE was evacuated to Cambridge, where he switched his allegiance to Modern Languages (German and Russian, with Sanskrit) and to St John's College. He volunteered for the Czech army in 1941, but transferred to the Czech squadron of the RAF. In September 1942 the Wellington of which he was rear gunner was shot down 150 miles from the French coast: he lost half of his left hand and spent fourteen hours in a rubber dinghy before being picked up by a small British vessel, returning from a clandestine mission in France. In 1943 he went back to Cambridge to complete his course and the following year married his fellow student Sheila McMullan, whom he had first met in 1940. Stern graduated in 1945 and trained as a teacher. Then, with financial help from his father, he started research on the eighteenth-century scientist, aphorist and Anglophile G. C.

xiv

Foreword

Lichtenberg, under the supervision of A. H. J. Knight and, later, of Michael Oakeshott. In 1947-8 this work took him to Gottingen, Lichtenberg's university, where, housed in the hotel Zur Sonne, he lived with the British Army and observed the nadir of German history at first hand. Before and after graduating, he was for about two years close to Ludwig Wittgenstein, who was a frequent and welcome guest of the young family at their flat in Park Parade, and later in Grange Road. Stern has recounted the beginning of that acquaintance in the Introduction to this book. In conversation he was also willing to talk about its end. Inevitable anyway, it was hastened by Stern's failure to heed Wittgenstein's advice that it was his moral duty to return to Czechoslovakia (advice of a kind which Wittgenstein readily gave, but did not receive meekly in return). It was increasingly clear to Stern, moreover, that his own first loyalty was to literature rather than philosophy. 'There is no philosopher fuller of metaphors than Wittgenstein', Stern said, ' but there is no account of metaphor anywhere in his work. Our own relationship broke apart on a metaphor. I had some idea about Lichtenberg and rushed round to see him one Saturday morning. I was unshaven and he was very angry. — Why did it not strike me then that he was homosexual? - "Look here, Stern", he said, "the difference between us is this: You are like the golfer cutting about and driving balls into the woods. I am the skulker on the margin, looking through the undergrowth for the balls people like you have lost. We have completely different approaches." I replied, "Yes, but the golfers are the people who are playing the game. " I t seems a very metaphorical argument now, but he was furious and in future would not greet me. He walked stiffly past, pretending he was blind in one eye.' Stern completed his doctoral work in 1949, and in 1950 was appointed to a teaching post at Bedford College, London. Two years later he returned to Cambridge as an Assistant Lecturer (he became a Lecturer in 1957), and was made a Fellow of St John's, where he directed studies in Modern Languages and eventually did a stint as Tutor. He contributed to Michael Oakeshott's Cambridge Journal, translated a German work on Leibniz, and another on Rilke's poetry, brought out his first monograph, on Ernst

Foreword

xv

Jiinger, in 1953, and rewrote his dissertation as G. C. Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions (1959). In 1964 Re-interpretations

appeared - the seven profound and wide-ranging studies of nineteenth-century German prose literature which many think his best book. A companion volume, Idylls and Realities, came out in 1971. Despite his Czech and Austrian upbringing, Stern's intellectual roots were in post-war Cambridge. Heller, Wittgenstein and Oakeshott - to whose names one could add that of another Prague emigre, the Jewish-Christian philosopher Paul Roubiczek - were associated, it has rightly been said,1 with a streak of ' European conservatism' in his attitudes, and that earned him a certain disagreeable isolation in the politicised atmosphere of the 1970s. But he had no time for the New Right - let alone the Old - and he early assimilated another set of influences, more radical, and more radically literary. Leavis and Empson, he said, had been his most important critical models, along with Erich Auerbach (whom he never met). He disliked Leavis's sermonising and aggressive provincialism, but, as The Dear Purchase shows, never abandoned the belief that, in however derived and refined a sense, literary judgements are moral judgements too. Equally, however, he always held, perhaps rather deliberately, to the commonsensical view (not untouched by Roubiczek's Existentialism) that — when this is the issue to be decided - it is better to do good than to write about it. The contemporary critic whom he was happiest to resemble was Lionel Trilling, whom he met in 1951, and who became a close friend. I was first taught by Stern in 1965, and by then his critical stance was firmly and broadly founded and the outlines of his later work were becoming clear. To emerge from the close confines of Part One of the Cambridge Modern Languages Tripos into a second year in which one could go from R. D. Gray's classes in practical criticism to 'Dr Stern's' lectures on theories of tragedy from Aristotle to Brecht, or on 'concepts in literary criticism', was to feel oneself suddenly 1

By Daniel Johnson, in his obituary of Stern (The Times, 21 November 1991), to which I am indebted for a number of biographical points. Both Mr Johnson arid I owe almost all our knowledge of Stern's earlier life to Sheila Stern.

xvi

Foreword

projected to the front line of literary study. Stern later told me, as if he knew I ought to find it surprising, but wouldn't, that the colleague in Cambridge with whom he felt he had most in common was Ronald Gray. For all the unsparing marginalia with which Stern annotated his copy of Gray's The German Tradition in Literature: i8yi—ig^,

The Dear Purchase had its

origins in a similar determination not to shirk the questions raised for German literary history by the monstrous events which, casually and by the way, had ravaged Stern's family, physically wounded him, and shaped the course of his life. ' If you want to get on', a well-intentioned fellow Germanist had said to Stern when his book on Jiinger appeared, 'do not write this sort of thing again'. Stern was incensed. He continued writing, and, in Cambridge at least, he did not get on. London was different. In 1972 Stern took up England's oldest Chair of German, at University College, and an international flowering of his reputation began. On Realism appeared in 1973 and in 1975 he reached his widest public with Hitler: The Fiihrer and the People, which was immediately translated into German, and later into French and Japanese. His interest in Nietzsche was of long standing and now became paramount: the abridged version of A Study of Nietzsche came out in 1978, the full version in 1979, and in 1981 he completed, with Michael Silk, the first full-length commentary on any single work of Nietzsche's, Nietzsche on Tragedy. Meanwhile, in 1980, as editor and contributor, he had published The World of Franz Kafka - that world was of course to some extent his own, and perhaps for that reason there was always something cautious or tentative about his dealings with it. It was, however, a feature of his London years that Stern resumed frequent contact with the Germanspeaking countries which in the fifties and sixties had for him taken second place to North America, its universities and their concerns. He did not lose his taste for the occasional foray into grand issues of critical method, but he had never had any love of literary theory without literature, and, as the tide of-isms rose from Paris to the Pacific, he came to favour the historical perspective and to concentrate on the Central European history to which in a way he belonged. Increasingly he adopted

Foreword

xvii

towards Germany the attitude of an Austro-Bohemian neighbour. He disliked the word 'forgiveness', but he refused the seductions of hatred; he admired the Federal Republic (for the GDR and its apologists he had only contempt), he wrote for German newspapers and periodicals, and he appeared on German television. After a brief return in 1968 he was unable to revisit Czechoslovakia, where he was officially categorised as a deserter from the Czech armed forces, but his interest in the Czech language and in Czech themes revived: he was particularly moved by the samizdat publication of a Czech version of his book on Hitler. (The official Czech edition came out in 1992.) In May 1990, however, he toured Czechoslovakia after its velvet revolution, seeing once again the scenes of his childhood, and speaking to local people who remembered his grandparents at Zamrsk and who, years before, voluntarily and unprompted, had set up a memorial at the place where his uncle and his aunt had died, and a headstone over their graves in the little cemetery.2 Peter Stern's last journey abroad was in December 1990, when he lectured, in Czech, in Bratislava, Brno, and Prague; some of his classmates from school were in the Prague audience. The Dear Purchase is in more than one sense therefore the work of a lifetime. Stern's sister, who after her release from Lodz had no desire to see Germany or speak German ever again, could not understand why her brother wanted to take up the study of German literature. He himself has suggested in his Introduction, in words so fine that it would not be right to repeat or appropriate them, that to understand the past is the only act of homage we can properly pay to its victims. In The Dear Purchase that motive is never absent from Stern's argument, nor even from his choice of material. Much of Stern's intellectual career was spent testing against each other the literary and philosophical heritages of the two countries that came to dominate his life, though he was a native of neither. English approaches to German themes were his concern. Writers in German to whom England meant much, such as Lichtenberg or Wittgenstein; 2

An account of this visit will be found in one of Stern's most personal essays, 'A Crisis of Identity', Chapter 20 in The Heart of Europe.

xviii

Foreword

German practitioners of a genre, the realistic novel, in which the English achievement was so extensive as to be normative; German cosmopolitan thinkers with a significant English audience, such as Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, Spengler and Freud - these were the figures he wrote about for preference. The figures who would seem central in a picture constructed according to purely German rules of perspective - Goethe and Kant, for example, the Romantic poets, or the long line of national dramatists — were not ignored, but they did not get his fullest attention. What mattered to him, I think, was that point of interaction at which the German phenomenon took up a role in a European pattern of contending forces — became, from a European point of view, something pathological, or prophetic, or even, occasionally, typical, the future focus or the present extreme. That point was the literary analogue of the European, and more than European, conflict which had cost him so much, and from which he emerged only at the end of his life, when his Czech roots became accessible to him again. The reader of The Dear Purchase will find it a passionate account of a too passionate - an 'unfriendly' - age.3 Stern thought that age was already over when he wrote, but the reader may think it died only with him. Although Stern regarded The Dear Purchase as finished, there was a considerable amount of editorial and sub-editorial work to be done before the manuscript could be sent to press. Some chapters existed in more than one version, or were disproportionately long; there were inconsistencies in the subdivision of chapters; translations had still to be provided of many passages quoted in German; and the notes - never an obsession of Stern's - were in very varying states of completeness. All readers of the book are indebted to Sheila Stern for her long labour in resolving all these problems. Furthermore, it was not entirely clear how the book was to end. Stern had left instructions on this matter, but they were not easy to interpret, and there can be little doubt that, had he lived longer, he would 3

Stern considered using the phrase ' the unfriendly age', which occurs in the first lines of his Introduction to the present book, as the title of The Heart of Europe.

Foreword

xix 4

have written more by way of conclusion. Sheila Stern was reluctant to add material of her own, and so was obliged to give to what she had a slightly different order from that which her husband would probably have chosen had he been able to do some redrafting. Generally speaking, though, the final chapters certainly reflect Stern's intentions. In September 1991 he told me he wanted to conclude with a discussion of three ' Novellen', as he called them - Kafka's Josephine, Mann's Felix Krull, and 'something by Jiinger'- which would 'show how the dear purchase can be upended into its opposite, desinvolture\ In Felix Krull he said he saw the supremacy of metaphors asserted ('it's none of it what it's supposed to be, but it will do - it's grace and ease'), and so the book would complete a circle, returning to the Nietzschean account of metaphor (in 'On Truth and Falsehood in an Extra-Moral Sense') in which the process he was dealing with had in his view begun. In the event Sheila Stern was able to respect the spirit of this plan, to print virtually nothing in the main text which was not written by Peter Stern himself, and, from the materials he left, to provide a satisfactory, and characteristic, final cadence. May The Dear Purchase now keep alive the memory of a unique critic, a great teacher and a muchloved man. Nicholas Boyle H O L Y I N N O C E N T S ' DAY 1993 4

And probably he would have added to other chapters as well. In the same conversation to which I refer in a moment, he said that he intended to begin the Brecht section with a few points 'against the plays' ('some scenic things, such as the enthronement of the Pope, nothing on the plots or ideas'). His purpose was to explain his concentration on Brecht's poetry, a ' priority' which he felt history was ' going the way of justifying'.

Editor's preface

During the five years that followed his retirement Peter Stern worked as a visiting Professor for periods of some months, the first and longest of which was spent at Williams College, Williamstown, Massachusetts. He felt deep gratitude for this invitation and for the unrivalled beauty of the little house in the woods, some miles from the campus, where he was allowed to live. I know he would have wished to thank the President and Faculty at Williams once more for their kindness to both of us. He was honoured by two invitations, one to the University of California at Irvine and the other to the Vienna Kunsthochschule where he deputised for the Head of the General Studies Department who was on leave. In all these posts Peter Stern had the delight of lecturing and teaching without the burden of administrative duties, and all of them brought us new friends and opportunities for exploring. From Vienna we visited Hungary for the first time, in the depth of winter. For this and our participation in some enchanting social occasions we had many people to thank, especially Dr Bernhard Stillfried of the Austrian Foreign Ministry. The general editorship of the series Landmarks of World Literature for Cambridge University Press was a rewarding and educative task of these years. During this enjoyable and busy retirement the material of the present book was reworked and assembled, but at the onset of Peter's brief last illness still not fully prepared for publication. A few days before his death he handed the typescript of The Dear Purchase to his colleague at the Press, Kevin Taylor, and I am deeply grateful for the immediate welcome given to it by the xxi

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Editor's Preface

Syndics, especially since its existence came as a surprise to them. The knowledge that it would be published set the author's mind at rest. The latest section of the present book, committed to typescript in November 1991 with the author's revisions, was that on Gottfied Benn. In June 1992, with the help of Nicholas Boyle, Martin Swales and Kevin Taylor, the order of the last sections was finalised. Nicholas Boyle has read patiently and made invaluable comments. I am grateful to John Kerrigan for his advice, to Kate Brett for her patience and to Mile Karine Grandjean for a great deal of kindness. The work of tracing references, providing notes for many chapters and translating quotations in the text has been slow for many reasons and I must take full responsibility for any inadequacies, though friends and colleagues have allowed me to consult them. I have been very much helped and encouraged by those already named, by Professor Michael Beddow and by John Sugden, formerly a pupil of Peter's at St John's College, Cambridge, and one who knows all there is to know about his work and his intentions. Sheila Stern JANUARY I994

Introduction

German literature in the first half of this century has a value and an interest which can now be taken for granted. There is, I think, a fairly general agreement that some of its greatest writers are Rainer Maria Rilke, Thomas Mann, Franz Kafka and Bertolt Brecht; and also Gottfried Benn, Stefan George, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Robert Musil and Georg Trakl; and finally (in an order of decreasing agreement) Ernst Jiinger, Karl Kraus and Hermann Hesse. The achievement of each of these authors is individual and unique, each of them has received and continues to receive the attention of readers and critics throughout the Western world, and the fame of the most renowned — Rilke, Mann, Kafka — transcended the ideological divide. These writers did not form a school, they overlap in time but do not belong to the same generation; the oldest of them, Stefan George, was born in 1868, the youngest, Ernst Jiinger, is still alive, at ninety-eight, as this goes to press. They are German by virtue of their language. For the rest, their allegiance to the six states in which they lived — Wilhelmine Germany, AustriaHungary, Weimar Germany, the First Austrian Republic, the Third Reich and Federal Germany - is almost always problematic; but so is their attitude to the language they share. What they have in common, first and foremost, is simply the distinction of their achievement: they have staked out areas very different areas in territory hitherto uncharted - on the margins of experience; here lies the interest and overall value these authors have for us. Yet if their importance can be taken for granted, the individual values which inform and are

2

The dear purchase

conveyed in their writings are certainly open to critical scrutiny, now more than ever before. Some of these values and concerns - attitudes to the world and to man's lot in it - they all share; in other respects they are hardly on speaking terms with each other - in short, they form a family of sorts. The book confines itself to presenting their individual achievements to the extent that they contribute to a literature and through it give articulate expression to the temper of an age - the deeply unfriendly age whose witnesses and representatives they were. This is the agenda of the present study. An indication of how it came to be written may help to suggest with what expectations it should be read. A good many years ago, in the autumn of 1957, I received an invitation from the secretary of the Oliver Pryor Society of Cambridge — an annual conference of schoolmasters and dons devoted to the study of modern languages — to give them ' a paper on some general topic connected with modern, twentiethcentury German literature' - a subject which was then not on the syllabus of most British universities. My instructions were specific: the paper should not be confined to a single author and it should be of interest to non-specialists, yet — an anxious postscript was added —'it should not be too general either'. Delivered before the Society on New Year's Eve of that year under the title 'The Dear Purchase', the poor ghost of that paper has haunted me in everything I have written on twentieth-century topics ever since. What this invitation prompted was the hazy notion of a history of German and Austrian literature during the first half of this century. Nietzsche had taught me that the criteria of what to include in any 'history' were bound to be steeped in value judgements, though I did not believe (as Nietzsche impatiently concluded) that this was bound to render those criteria private and subjectively biased. I came to see my task then, as I see it now, as the study of a series of major literary works, related to the general history of the period and connected with each other through their family likeness. In other words: the book of which that early essay was a sort of prospectus is

Introduction

3

intended to be a series of connected descriptions of what it means for a given group of literary works to be datable as modern. Literary history as I knew it then and as it still continues to be written today seems to me discredited. To the extent that it is conceived as a comprehensive account of as many major and minor works of an era as will find space between the covers of a book, the enterprise strikes me as having very little to do with the study and even less with the enjoyment of literary works; the necessary condition of which I take to be close and patient attention to individual texts as sources of insight and knowledge - as sources of pleasure through insight and knowledge. And if to write the history - any history - of an age is to make coherent sense of a segment of the past, then conventional literary histories are properly speaking not histories at all, but lists of authors, -isms, themes and schools chronologically arranged. Yet the relationship between literature and history is not to be disposed of by deploring the scant insights provided by literary histories of the kind I have mentioned. The old view which claimed that by giving a work of art its historical coordinates we somehow invalidate it and render it ephemeral, seems to me no less odd than the more recent view which looks on the placing of literary works in their time as an eccentric or irrelevant option. The immortality of the great works of literature is in no way diminished by determining their time and place; in an important sense they are as ' timeless' as the human condition of which they are the repository and the source. The genesis of such works (involving questions of biography and historical studies) is different from their substance (involving more narrowly literary studies), and different works will require a different emphasis to be given to each of these enquiries; but neither can be wholly irrelevant to the critic's task. There is no significant disjunction, no 'either or', between the study of'the language' of a work and 'the history' of which it is a part. To study the literature of another age involves some of the same problems as does the study of the literature of another country; to ignore the fact that language is, among other things, an historical phenomenon, and thus subject to change, leads to

4

The dear purchase

much the same inadequate understanding of a text as does ignorance of the vocabulary of a foreign language. Take the word ' Erlebnis': its twentieth-century connotations are in several ways different from those of 'experience', its nearest English equivalent. But they are also different from the connotations the word had for Goethe when he speaks of 'Erlebnisse5 as exciting military adventures. What makes for the difference is that at certain points in the literature (and subsequently in the common parlance) of the age with which we are here concerned, a special value came to be given to certain highly charged inward ' experiences' at the extremes of ordinary human experience, and this value came to be connoted in the 'modern 5 uses of the word. 'Mein Fronterlebnis' is about the only asset the young Hitler can appeal to when he begins his political career; a little later, in 1921, Robert Musil notes in an essay-fragment: was man anfangs stammelte und spater zur Phrase entarten lieB, dafi der Krieg ein seltsames, dem religiosen verwandtes Erlebnis gewesen sei, kennzeichnet unzweifelhaft eine Tatsache ...1 Those words we stammered when it first began, which later degenerated into a cliche, that the War was a strange experience resembling religious experience, undoubtedly describe a fact... - not, however, in the sense of an ordeal sent by God, but as a ' religious' value in and by itself. The historicity of the literature I was interested in - the presence of history in the works and of the works in history — seems to me undeniable. The very fact that, however sceptical I might be of'the general view5, I could not help seeing works written over half a century as 'a literature5, suggested a coherence of the kind that a literary history should provide. For one thing I became aware that there was something apparently radically new about the most distinguished books of the era that followed the death of Theodor Fontane in 1898; for another, I found that these books contained a variety of themes of European interest, and connections linking them with European ideas, such as were hardly to be found in German

Introduction

5

literature in the decades following the death of Goethe in 1832; and finally, in Erich Heller's The Disinherited Mind of 1952 I was fortunate to have a pattern and an inspiration for my undertaking. My indebtedness to Heller's work, which I see not only as an inspiring critical study but also in some ways as a part of the literature that is its subject, will be patent in many arguments of this book. Academic minds work in circuitous ways. Instead of coming straight to the point and writing the book I then envisaged, I found looming up before me three preliminary tasks: first, to discover some nineteenth-century antecedents for the literature whose shape was forming in my mind; secondly, to show something of the politics of the age in its relationship to - its strange affinities with - that literature; and thirdly, to give an account of the philosophical background and heritage from which the literary masterpieces took some of their strength and many of their limitations; here again, Heller's pioneering essays on the Nietzschean influence pointed the way. These three topics were intended as chapters of the present book; in the event, each turned out to require a study of its own. As to the nineteenth-century antecedents, a natural opening and transition offered itself. In 1912, at the period which constitutes the climax and end of the Wilhelmine era, Rainer Maria Rilke had begun writing the Duino Elegies, a cycle whose central importance was recognised almost immediately on its completion ten years later. The Elegies (that much was clear even in the late twenties, after Rilke's death in January 1926) were an intensely philosophical and programmatic work — Rilke himself had spoken of them as 'a project of Being', 'ein Daseinsentwurf' — yet, because that illusory notion of ' timelessness' came between them and their readers, the historical perspective of the poems was less readily acknowledged. The poetic persona round which they are built - we may call i t ' the historical we' - is never in doubt: from the poignant opening of the First Elegy onward it is the condition of modern, twentiethcentury man that is invoked, challenged, lamented, and validated. But the lines that follow provide a connection, too, with the immediate past, with that century into which Rilke

6

The dear purchase

and most of our authors were born and in which some of them remained rooted. For these lines — Ach, wen vermogen wir denn zu brauchen? Engel nicht, Menschen nicht, und die findigen Tiere merken es schon, daB wir nicht sehr verlaBlich zu Haus sind in der gedeuteten Welt Alas, who is there we are able to make use of? Not angels, not men; and even the canny animals are aware that we are not very securely at home in our interpreted world - sum up, with an unparalleled richness of implication, the spirit of those nineteenth-century antecedents which I wished to evoke; and Re-interpretations (1964), the book in which I tried to do this, took its title from these lines and from the human condition named in them. This is the insight on which Rilke eventually based a whole landscape of images in the Elegies, and which I took up and applied to the age that preceded them: that ' we are not very securely at home / in our interpreted world' because we do not live 'where it is real', because (as T. S. Eliot, his contemporary, put it) 'human kind cannot bear very much reality3. No lines of modern poetry are more familiar than Eliot's, or than Rilke's 'gleich dahinter ists wirklich\ in the Tenth Elegy ('just behind there, it's real'), yet that notion of 'reality', which is with us still, proved even more enigmatic than either of them suggested. Here above all the need to provide an historical elucidation was paramount. The wartime generation to which I belong did not find the reading of German literature easy. Given that Hitler's Third Reich was the central event of German history in our time, we were bound to ask what did and what did not belong to that event. A few of our teachers presented the unedifying spectacle of scholars engaged in the study of a subject they loathed. Others encouraged us to proceed on the premise that the masterpieces of the modern era were written in a spirit wholly disconnected from the mainstream of German history, or

Introduction

7

uncompromisingly opposed to it. After all (so the argument went) there were the 'good' Germans, chief among them Thomas Mann as well as his political and personal adversary Bertolt Brecht, who had actively and at times heroically opposed the government and ideology of their own country; and had not Count Stauffenberg, the colonel who made the attempt on Hitler's life on 20 July 1944, been one of Stefan George's disciples? In this spirit the first version of my paper was written. What it contained was a wholly positive statement of my theme, largely free from political considerations. The way the paper was received did not at first suggest to me that I should take a more critical view of my subject. But in 1964 I went to Berkeley and there, in the atmosphere of politicisation — at once indiscriminate and stimulating — which pervaded the place, I began to have second thoughts. My original premise, that the politics of the era could be wholly separated from its literature, became increasingly questionable; not, I thought, as a matter of principle (which fails to ask whether, and when, connections between literature and politics are worth establishing), but in this particular case. The personal heroism of those who opposed the regime remained undisputed - so, too, did the terrible practices of the regime and its henchmen (some of the worst of them recruited from among the dregs of Central and Eastern Europe), the craven conduct and silent connivance of the overwhelming majority of the German (let alone Austrian) population, their contrived ignorance of the sheer numbers of the victims and of their total, forsaken helplessness. The moral divisions, too, remained fairly clear — clearer, at all events, than the ideological ones. I had been a pupil of Michael Oakeshott, who taught me to see history as a field of study - ' a mode of experience' - in which continuities and coherences were to be sought. Was 1933 really such a break with the past as practically every German historian of the postwar era suggested ? And if not, was one committed to those dreary arguments from 'historical inevitability', to 'the straight line of German history from Herder and Hamann to Hitler' - arguments which, even in wartime, had seemed uncomfortably close to the ideology for whose

8

The dear purchase

defeat they were summoned ? Was it really plausible to maintain that, in the case that interested me, there was no connection between the historical and the literary, to argue for a literary history (however rudimentary) without a history? Of course, it was hardly an overstatement to say that the thirties and forties had indeed been an extraordinary era in German history, and it seemed more like five centuries than five decades since a German historian had claimed that every epoch stands in a special relationship to God; the Devil seemed the more likely patron. Still, how exceptional was that era? From the reconstruction by means of which I hoped to answer this question, certain continuities emerged; they did not diminish the extraordinariness of the age (no reputable enquiry could do that), but they did resolve the paradox. It appeared, after all, that the age had, not a single voice, yet a recognisable and distinct tonality of its own that could be heard, a variety of styles with common affinities that could be read in the space encompassed by politics, society and literature. That a study of the politics of the age would have to centre on Hitler seemed obvious (to everybody, that is, except the Marxists who, in spite of Stalin, continued to regard all concern with leadership and the will to power as capitalist evasions). What interested me in writing Hitler: The Fiihrer and the People

(1975) was not the dictator's biography, which even by that time had been so exhaustively documented that it offered no promise of new insights. Instead, I set out to answer some of the questions that had not been asked: how representative was he of the society into which he launched himself in Munich in 1918; what were the ideas and values to which he appealed, and the rhetoric on which he relied; and what, if anything, had these values and ideas in common with the preceding era of German history and with the rest of Europe ? I did not write a book about 'Hitler's language' (as some of the critics said) for the simple reason that I did not believe he had a language of his own, in any except a disreputably metaphorical sense - the sense, precisely, I was intent on refuting. What seemed more promising was to take his rhetoric seriously — as seriously as his followers and the German and Austrian public generally had

Introduction

9

done. Only in that way did it become possible to understand them and the appeal he had for them, and to understand the society to which the writers on my list, too, had once belonged. To focus on the rhetoric inevitably gave it the weightiness that attaches to any object of concerted enquiry. There is no valid criticism, literary or historical, that can proceed without taking its object seriously. The insights I gained, then, as far as they are relevant to this introduction, were not at all startling: first, that Hitler did not fall upon a quiescent or innocent Germany (or Austria) as the conquistadores fell upon Peru; secondly, that Germany, before the thirties at all events, was not an island but an inseparable part of the European main; thirdly, that a total separation between the political and the literary spheres may just be possible in the case of an individual isolated writer (such as Georg Trakl), but that it made no sense where a number of writers with tangible affinities were concerned, least of all in an age that saw itselfas we see it still — as an age dominated by ideologies; and finally, that if a connection did emerge between the political and the literary manifestations of that society, then all that made that connection possible was bound to be of importance not only for Germany, but for other parts of the West also. Here was ' the line that led straight back to Herder': to establish the similarities and preserve the differences between a multitude of literary, cultural and political phenomena was the task Herder had so enthusiastically set himself, and which since his time has been regarded as a respectable use of the critical faculty. I had a further reason for such an undertaking. What I hoped to gain, as I have said, was a clearer view of the past: such a view justifies nothing, assuages nothing, heals no wounds; but it is the only valid homage we are able to pay to the victims. All effective propaganda, and the rhetoric it employs, are based on some preliminary consensus of values. Hitler's rhetoric, and that of his henchmen, followed the pattern of his c Either/ Or, Victory or Death' ideology, and that ideology (I perceived) had strong religious connotations. The point at issue is not whether he believed in it, but that he had the talent to fictionalise it, and himself, in a representative role. And,

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The dear purchase

similarly, the point about all those millions whose hopes and fears and secret thoughts it represented is not whether they believed in it, but that they acted (in both senses of the word) as though they did, all the way to the end. The rhetoric is bound to strike us as primitive and crude; in fact it was a complex, sophisticated affair. At its most blatant and obvious it had what, for want of a better word, we must call a 'positive' aspect. Hitler promised an end to unemployment (then at a figure of six million) with work in a mixed economy based on a stable currency; he promised he would rectify and revenge the Diktat of Versailles; he promised a greater Germany of the future, with a proud and new spirit of self-determination, based on a strong army and a new and better, 'purer' race of Germans. His plans for political hegemony, cultural dominance and economic aggrandisement entailed the conquest, subjugation and plunder of Eastern Europe, and would in all probability lead to war. All these were seen and accepted as desirable, positive goals, though not always by the same people — 'there was something in it for everybody bar the Jews'. And these goals he proclaimed in an unending series of emergencies which appeared - were meant to appear - so dire that any means to escape them would seem acceptable to the overwhelming majority of the public he addressed. Most of these promises he fulfilled. But there was another, 'negative' aspect to this rhetoric, which sounded quite different. Like a dark undertone or a frantic curse, it accompanied each 'positive' pronouncement. It spoke of the need for sacrifice, the harshness of the road ahead, the glory of the holocaust and the supreme heroism of the last stand, 'auf verlorenem Posten'. What 'Providence' or 'the Almighty' called on Hitler and through him on Germany to do, was supremely perilous and had to be done because other, more comfort-loving and decadent nations (like the English) shunned the task - but the harder the task, the greater its value. From the internecine massacres of July 1933 onwards, and through Hitler's explicit equation of those massacred with the victims of the Munich Putsch of 1923, the self-destructive element in the party ideology received its public acknowledgement and ritual.

Introduction

11

The Leader and the sacrifices he enacted were given a quasireligious status. As the years of violence rolled on, the question of what ' the supreme sacrifice' was for was asked less and less frequently. And toward the end of the Third Reich the exhortations to supreme effort in the senseless universal slaughter merged with the wish for national and global self-annihilation. Most of these promises, too, Hitler kept. In the political propaganda of National Socialism as well as in its practice the two strands were closely intertwined, and the consistently anti-critical attitude basic to the ideology encouraged its unitary appeal. (For Hitler himself the failure of the Moscow offensive of December 1941 was the time when the ' positive' promises were put aside and the true motive revealed, at least to his entourage; it is significant that among his last architectural dreams was a plan for a giant Germanic Valhalla of the East.) But our purpose must be to keep the distinction clear, for it is the dark, negative strand alone which provides the missing link, the connection between the pronouncements of the political ideology and its literary antecedents and parallels; between the political background of this study and its literary subject-matter. What connects them is the idea of the supreme value of intensity and sacrifice, put into practice by the political scum of Germany and Europe. There is nothing evil about the idea of sacrifice. Its overall importance, its profound religious connotations, its capacity to yield an existential meaning - the very ' reality' which the age of Hitler was so frantically seeking - as well as its capacity to yield literary images and themes which go to the heart of the human condition - all these must be examined later. Here the question to be asked is whether the object of our concern is, after all, so very strange an idea. Its political application was evil and alien, and was felt to be so by those writers on our list who lived long enough to see it so applied, and by some (like Kafka) who anticipated it. (And even Ernst Jiinger and Gottfried Benn, who in their different ways were, for brief periods, sympathetic to the ideology, recoiled from its practice.) But divorced from that practice we must recognise the idea for what it is: the secularised version of the Christian idea of sacrifice. There is nothing

12

The dear purchase

absolute about it, not even in its Christian form: ' If you offer a sacrifice and feel vain about it, then both you and your sacrifice will be damned' said Wittgenstein.2 Yet it was in its most secular form, as a political 'value', that it was raised to an absolute. It was no accident that Hitler occasionally identified himself with Christ (or was so identified by whoever, in Goebbels's ministry, wrote his speeches), and frequently used the imagery of Luther's New Testament - hardly the rhetoric one would expect from a lapsed Austrian Roman Catholic. The appeal of National Socialism was not simply the attraction of mindless thuggery and loot. Bertolt Brecht's (and after him Ernst Bloch's) attempt to equate it with Chicago gangsterism is a disingenuous political ploy. The party was founded amidst conditions of unprecedented social anarchy and spiritual chaos, in an age which had inherited from the Wilhelmine Reich very high expectations of social stability and order. In that age of ' the death of God', in which, as Nietzsche observed,' everything is false and everything is permitted ' 3 and men will go anywhere to find a substitute for what they have lost, even this ramshackle ideology seemed to go to the very roots of the human condition. One and the same soil bears the wheat and the tares, and often they grow together. It is not only the same soil of the Wilhelmine Reich in which both the poets' writings and the ideology had their roots - the party rhetoric and its success, too, are unthinkable without the idea of man's most strenuous deliverance. Strange 'values' - a strange idea? They belong to a perennial Christian tradition, and their most poignant modern embodiment is to be found in the brief life and writings of Simone Weil, the patron saint of that age. Yet it is in the ambience of German literature that they yielded some of their finest poetic images and some of their most interesting fictions. My third preliminary task, the philosophical one, proved the easiest to locate. In a letter to a friend written in 1949, when all was over bar the mourning, the poet Gottfried Benn confessed: Really, you know, He has anticipated and formulated everything, but absolutely everything we rake around in [worin wir herumstochern] — what else have we done these lastfiftyyears but trot out and vulgarise

Introduction

13

his gigantic thoughts and sufferings [ein reines Nachplappern und Auswalzen seiner gigantischen Gedanken und Leiden] ?4

This is only one among many statements in which the influence of Nietzsche on the age is explicitly acknowledged its implicit signs are legion. But what was that influence? It appeared that a full and critical account of the philosopher's work would have to be attempted before the legacy he left on his death in 1900 could be clearly seen. A Study of Nietzsche (1979) was criticised by some for blaming Nietzsche too readily for a political development he did not live to see, and would assuredly have repudiated with horror had he been its witness; while others took my book to task for letting him off too lightly and failing to show his responsibility for later horrors: was he not, in some of his wilder utterances, the very pattern of a false prophet - one who trimmed his' prophecies' of the terrors to come with expressions of intent? Neither of these views seems to me just. In spite of occasionally striking a vatic pose, Nietzsche was not a prophet, and he warned against those who wished to see him as one. He was a man with a great gift of foreknowledge of some of the evils to come, and of some of their general causes. What strikes one in all this is his naivety in worldly matters, which he hid behind global images and tough talk, and which was coupled with a determination (rather like Bertolt Brecht's) to arm himself against compassion. The conflicting criticisms I mention left me unrepentant as to my main political conclusion: just as the practices of National Socialism were unthinkable without its ideology, so that ideology and its reception were unthinkable without the influence of Nietzsche. But I also saw that I had relied on a general notion of' influence' which was imprecise, and which left my claim open to misunderstanding. I now came to see that a just appraisal of the influence he exercised - that is, the way he was read - cannot be detached from an understanding of the age in which he was read; to gain such an understanding is one of the aims of this book. But it also became clear that I had not given sufficient thought to the difference between a literary influence and a political one. It is just (I now think) to make

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Nietzsche directly responsible for the one, but only at several removes for the other. In speaking of the influence of a writer we are faced, not with a single concept, but with a variety of relationships which lie somewhere between interpretation at one end and causal connection at the other: the literary influence of a text always relates to and is something more than mere interpretation, its political influence always relates to but is something less than a sufficient cause. Of course, more is to be said about the relationship between literature and politics than that in the one things are written about, and in the other things are done; for instance, that there are overlaps, which a regime such as Hitler's exploited to the full. (It is no accident that the theory of speech acts derives from Wittgenstein's insight that 'words are also deeds', an insight he arrived at with some help from Karl Kraus in the age and country in which political propaganda was born.) Nevertheless, in any non-totalitarian context, which has to do without a grand ' unitary' vision, we must preserve a clear idea of the difference between the freedom that is vital to literary expression and the constraints that are bound to operate in politics. Without such a distinction we find ourselves on the road to fascism. What all its forms have in common is the political bondage of literature, flanked by the aestheticisation of politics. As for the latter, it is a corruption for which not Nietzsche but Gabriele d'Annunzio is directly responsible. And yet, there would be no d'Annunzio without a Nietzsche who, in that speculative freedom which he took for granted, commended art as the last metaphysical activity in the era of nihilism. The distinction between the freedom of literature and the constraints of politics, then, is dependent on certain conventions vital to Western culture, and it was these conventions that were seriously undermined in the era in which Nietzsche's influence became effective. What undermined them (among many other things) was the mediation of his writings, in the course of which his brilliant reflective insights were frozen into political cliches and slogans - a labour of crude vulgarisation undertaken by two generations of university professors, litterateurs and plain

Introduction

15

hacks, from the end of the Wilhelmine Reich through the Weimar Republic to the Hitler era. Here is the testimony of one of them - a relation of Nietzsche's and curator of the NietzscheArchive at Weimar - intended as a tribute to the Fiihrer's prophet: 'Nietzsche-Zarathustra makes demands on the total personality which have such tremendous, far-reaching significance that for him who commits himself to them they spell annihilation, no less.' That Nietzsche would have had no truck with such metaphysical kitsch can be shown in many ways, not least by his repudiation of the spokesmen of anti-Semitism and racial purity in the last years of his conscious life. Yet in those last years, too, there were moments when the 'demands' he voiced in his solitude were only a little less extravagant. There were occasions when Nietzsche chafed under the philosopher's yoke. Again and again he deplores the abstractness of the written word and its remoteness from 'life', its ' unreality'; repudiates the decorum and discipline of ' philosophy '; experiments with styles that will bypass abstraction and achieve direct rapport with his readers. At such times he seems determined to break down the barriers not only between philosophy and literature, but between philosophical understanding and political intent also. Yet for his critic the distinction remains vital, precisely because some of Nietzsche's formulations have the dubious attraction of political panaceas. All he wrote (except for his earliest philological papers) is nontechnical, readily accessible on more than one level to a whole variety of readers. His philosophising ranges widely and is unrestrained by any specialisation, and he had what he would have called 'an unerring instinct' for the existential questions that would be of vital importance to the next generations in Germany and in Europe. More than any other German, perhaps any European philosopher before him, he had a gift for the telling phrase, the purple patch, the heuristic innuendo. Above all - and here the danger of the political influence is at its most acute, the material for political mediation at its most abundant — his philosophising is not just highly speculative, but experimental. He is trying out ideas, and their opposites. Thus he not only sets up the concept of'the will to power', arguing for

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The dear purchase

it as the paramount value available to modern man (and giving it its rightful place in politics), but he also writes a series of reflections in which he questions the unity of the phenomenon as well as the very meaning of the term. Nietzsche's influence, which ranges almost as widely as does his philosophising, covers four main areas. First, and most notoriously, there is the complex of thoughts subsumed under the slogan 'God is dead', and Nietzsche's recognition of what the loss of the authority of transcendence means in our time. This recognition is never dispassionate, never neutral. Connected with it but much less influential are his critical arguments directed against a doctrine of static Being, and his proposals for a metaphysics of'innocent Becoming'.5 Secondly, there are his paeans in praise of life, amoral vitality and the will to power, which were taken up by writers as different as G. B. Shaw, W. B. Yeats, and the contributors to Das Schwarze Corps, the journal of the SS; related to these observations are Nietzsche's embarrassing remarks on breeding and race, but also his brilliant insights into the workings of the unconscious, to which Freud owed an intellectual debt he never adequately acknowledged. Thirdly, there are the speculations (even more fragmentary than the rest) in which Nietzsche offers an aesthetic justification of the world, attempts at ' depragmatising' the world by reinterpreting it as an aesthetic phenomenon or (as the preSocratics put it) as 'a child's play, a mere game'. This is how some of the authors presented in this book saw him, among them Stefan George, Rilke and Benn, but also Bertolt Brecht. And there is, finally,' the tragic philosopher', the philosopher of strenuousness who assesses the value of all knowledge and indeed the truth of all insights into the human condition by how much resistance, pain and torment they have cost a man; who rejects all friendship and love, all faith and human association, and all morality, too, that has not been achieved at a supreme cost to the self. This above all is the influence which dominated the literature after the turn of the century, and through it the politics between the two World Wars. With a spectrum of influences as wide as these, it is meaningless to speak of the political responsibility of a writer

Introduction

17

who gave no thought to the means by which his views could be translated into practical politics, who was not interested in personal power, and whose fantasies of political action came to him only by the time he was clinically insane. But the image of 'the tragic philosopher', too, does less than justice to what he achieved. He was a haunted man. What haunted him, more than the future he foresaw, was the magnitude of the philosophical task he set himself- that trunk full of fragments and outline plans under his bed in that last boardinghouse in Turin - and the self-imposed solitude in which he tried to accomplish that task: this is the 'tragic' image to which some of the writers on our list paid their homage. But, pen (or more often the stub of an all but illegible pencil) in hand, he also enjoyed a reflective freedom - including the freedom of self-criticism and the pleasures of a free-ranging, uniquely energetic mind - to which those who drew on him for the slogans of their ideologies were strangers. Politics cannot use philosophical reflection conceived in such freedom other than selectively; and a politically useful selection is bound to falsify his overall concern, which was the ground and impetus of his original insights. Literary persons of all kinds prefer writing to reading; they prefer interestingly formulated and highly metaphorised aphorisms written by one of their own, to the massive systematic expatiations of remote sages. I doubt whether the writers of the age were justified in identifying themselves with Nietzsche's 'heroism of suffering' (a dubious commodity in any event), but many of them certainly had an almost intuitive grasp of the task he set himself: to evoke the full potential of man, his full, attainable greatness, by giving man all the weightiness and gravity - ' die Schwere' - of his immanent, purely human situation together with the weightlessness, the full fervour of transcendence. This conundrum contains his legacy to the subsequent age. The method I have tried to follow in these pages is well known, and if I dwell on it here this is because its origins (as well as my discovery of it) are closely connected with the theme of this study. The conventional terminology of twentieth-century German studies - the vocabulary of 'neo-romanticism', 'sym-

18

The dear purchase

bolism', 'magic realism', 'expressionism' and 'die Neue Sachlichkeit' ( = ' n e w objectivity', more often 'new ugliness')proved not to be very useful where the critical enquiry was intended to cut across 'schools' and to work from a canon formed by writings of distinction, but formed 'spontaneously', without its being made clear what that distinction consisted of. Most of the work with which I shall here be concerned will nowadays be classified as belonging to 'die Moderne'. But ' modernism' is an -ism of many hues: it is often ' a critical construct after the event'. Well — isn't that true of all criticism? What is problematic about this particular -ism is that it yields its critical insights by emphasising originality at the expense of influence, and innovation at the expense of continuity. It asserts the novelty of' the New' as though to place it in its appropriate historical context were to belittle its achievement. But while literary innovation begins by making a complete break with the past, it ends in some recognisable relationship to it; and that relationship, too, is what these pages hope to convey. I haven't made a point of avoiding the -isms of literary history, but have preferred to single out topics instead; and these I have used so as to convey my perception that they contribute to a single theme. In this, as in my pursuit of the pleasures of explication, I was guided by Erich Auerbach's Mimesis and by the way in which, with no help from theory or stated methodology, he came to connect his chosen texts into a coherent history; though by the time I read his book I had the advantage of a theoretical statement. The only procedure suitable for such an undertaking as the present is Ludwig Wittgenstein's method of'family resemblances'. It is the only method I know which offers an improvement on the Aristotelian categories by enabling the critic to mediate between his attention to the concrete and specific - the work of art - and the legitimate claims of generalisation. The theoretical statement I have in mind occurs in a passage in Wittgenstein's lectures of 1933-4, printed for the first time posthumously in 1964.6 There he challenges our regrettable 'craving for generality', and sees in it a source of'philosophical confusions'. Investigating our 'tendency to look for something

Introduction

19

in common to all the entities which we subsume under a common term', he identifies this tendency with the 'contemptuous attitude towards the particular case'. Wittgenstein's argument, it so happens, is not concerned with literary matters at all. But when he goes on to describe the way in which a generalisation, for instance a literary one, may proceed without distorting or being contemptuous of'the particular case', his argument has a direct bearing on our subject. And to make that passage relevant to our enquiry we need do no more than narrow down the 'language games' of which he speaks by replacing them, in his argument, with the study and criticism of literature. 'We are inclined to think', we then read, 'that there must be something in common to all the works of literature we are concerned with, and that this common property provides the justification for applying the term "common theme" to them all; whereas it would be truer to say that these works form a family, the members of which have family likenesses. Some of them have the same nose, others the same eyebrows, and others again the same way of talking; and these likenesses overlap'; and (we may add to Wittgenstein's list) some bear the same name, while those who don't are not, for that reason, deprived of membership of that family. Accordingly, it is in terms of their family likenesses - rather than in terms of ' -isms' or schools that I shall consider these works; and when it comes to showing how a variety of topics conjoins in a common theme, I shall be content with designating a range of overlapping similarities rather than aim at isolating a single quality or denominator common to them all. Wittgenstein's procedure is, as I have said, well-known by now, and I have expatiated on its virtues more than once (though I find it puzzling that our ' deconstructionists' appear to remain ignorant of it). It was my great good fortune that I first learned it not from a book but (before it was available in book form) from its originator. The occasion was a bleak November evening in war-weary Cambridge. In a very small society of mainly literary undergraduates an unremarkable paper (on the scheme of virtues extolled in The Iliad) was followed by an emphatic but untidy discussion: did we really

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The dear purchase

know what we meant by virtue, was it the same as what the Greeks meant by it? (It was the ' What-exactly-do-you-mean-by... ?' era.) A stranger, whom I had noticed sitting by himself in a corner (wisely he hadn't taken off his macintosh, his cap lay on his knee, his hands rested on an ash plant), was introduced by the chairman and took up the conversation. Speaking with a voice that was foreign yet entirely unhesitant, clear yet resonant, in words which occasionally seemed old-fashioned yet never quaint, he began by describing some of the ways in which the history of a concept such as ' virtue' connects us with the past, as with a rope. None of the threads of a rope reach from end to end, its whole strength derives from the short fibres that overlap each other. And what is true of words like 'virtue' or 'courage' (he continued) is also true of what people at various times meant by 'history', 'philosophy', and words of that kind. 'And " t r u t h " ? ' , I asked. Was there any reason (he replied) why 'the grammar of " t r u t h " ' (the phrase struck me as odd) should be different? I could think of no reason. As the speaker moved on, to other illustrations and uses, I suddenly saw in his central metaphor an answer to some of the questions which the literary critics I was reading at the time had failed to solve. His name meant nothing to me. Yet when he spoke I became almost instantly aware of a presence perfectly possessed of the occasion, compelling attention and dominating it by the sheer force and clarity of the argument. The thing seemed - indeed it is - so obvious that I doubt whether, but for that voice and presence, I would have seen its importance, seen the perfect fittingness of the images he used, let alone the range of instances to which it could be applied. In the course of the next two years of our friendship - or rather, perhaps, of my discipleship - his conversations taught me many things. But what was conveyed to me through his presence, though I had to work it out for myself, relates directly not only to the method applied in this study, but also to its theme. Many of those who knew Wittgenstein in his last years, and many who know him only from photographs taken at that time, have remarked on the terrible, haunted expression on his face, which lifted less and less often as the years went by. What

Introduction

21

intimate personal regrets or sorrow may have caused that look, it would be impertinent to speculate on; the publicity he gave (with some reluctance) to the results of his best thinking provides no entitlement to prurient biographical guesswork. What I witnessed at the time, to one side of any private affliction, was his sorrow and boundless dismay at what he was learning, in the last months of the war and immediately afterwards, about events on the continent of Europe. At first he quite literally refused to believe. He certainly thought of himself as a German and Austrian (he belonged to a generation that had thought of itself as German Austrian), but he felt aware of his national identity only, or mainly, in conscious opposition to, and acute dislike of, the English wartime atmosphere that surrounded him. And now, early in 1945, came the news - to him clearly incredible - of the concentration camps, at first via the press, but soon from sources he had to accept as reliable. The most sensational descriptions in the newspapers fell far short of the truth. Now came the moment when he realised that those who had caused and tolerated the hideous, murderous conflagration were part of the very society and culture to which he felt he belonged, of German culture, of the Austria he loved; while at the same time he had to acknowledge that the English way of life with its apparent superficiality was incapable of such horrors; more than that: was capable, complacently but effectively, of opposing those horrors; and more than that: was right. It was this awareness, I think, that was reflected in that expression I came to know well and which I understood at the time, though I could not then have formulated my understanding of it. It is not easy to do so now. He had committed no crime, but he bore the look, the family resemblance, of those who had. I wonder whether later, in the last few years of his life, that look ever left him. If, with those terrible events in mind, he ever felt himself to be Jewish (of which I never saw any signs) this would have added to that look of suffering - suffering, perhaps, with the criminals and their victims. All this, as I have said, is relevant to my present theme. For I can now see that it was the occasion of my gradual discovery - a discovery that was not at all literary, but dim and indistinct

22

The dear purchase

at the time, coming long before this book was ever thought of, and summing up my experience of the Continent I had left shortly before the outbreak of war - that here was a man who perpetually, in his few acceptances and many rejections, even in the trivial exactions of his every day, lived a life of the utmost strenuousness. He too believed, as Nietzsche had done, that every inch of truth has to be wrested from oneself, that, in our time at all events, any other truth is suspect; and he angrily rejected the offer (the English, all-too-English offer) to live life and do philosophy at a lesser price. In this he too is part of that generation of Central European writers and thinkers to whose work this study is devoted; one of their family. Still, the question remains why we should even partly heed that ' craving for generality', why we should wish to think in terms of 'a literature' and its 'common theme' at all. There are two reasons. First, quite simply, because we cannot help it. Reading a number of authors with any attention we cannot help becoming aware of a feeling, however vague and diffuse, that their works have certain likenesses, just as when meeting several members of a family we become aware that, although there is not any one feature that all of them share, there is such a thing as a family face, which also enables us to recognise and identify a person we have not met before; moreover, we shall be forced to consider how important these likenesses are. And this feeling will not become clearer but on the contrary even more blurred as time goes on unless we make it explicit, unless we ensure that the idea of a likeness is not worsted by false affinities and anachronisms. And, secondly, to give explicitness to a common theme will be a step towards what all comparative studies should aim at: making us return to the works themselves and, recognising what each has in common with the others, to see also more clearly what each is about - more clearly, perhaps, than we may have done while considering each in isolation. Ours, therefore, is not a 'contemptuous attitude toward the particular'. We wish, on the contrary, to see each particular also in the light shed by its neighbours; or, to put it another way, in the light of the age to

Introduction

23

which it belongs (for 'an age', too, is nothing but a bundle of affinities in time). In the end it is of course only by an appeal to the particular that we can find out whether our account of family likenesses was right or wrong. Whether there really is such a major, encompassing theme, or whether by pursuing it I have done violence to diverse literary ventures which have little or nothing in common, it is for the reader to decide. The literary era to which this study is devoted is over. It is therefore our task to preserve its achievements in their integrity and uniqueness, but also in respect of what they have in common. We should not lose sight either of the creative courage of these authors or of the limitations under which they wrote, for each in his own way was committed to the age. In this commitment, not despite it, lies their claim upon posterity.

CHAPTER I

The theme

In the last years of Rilke's life, after the immense creative fervour of February 1922 when the Sonnets to Orpheus and two other shorter collections were written and the Duino Elegies completed, he wrote a large number of short lyrical poems. They too carry the ontological message of the earlier work, but their serene air of achievement is something new in Rilke's poetry. Here, chosen almost at random, is the first stanza of one of them, written in 1923: Da schwang die Schaukel durch den Schmerz -, doch siehe, der Schatten wars des Baums, an dem sie hangt. Ob ich nun vorwartsschwinge oder fliehe, vom Schwunge in den Gegenschwung gedrangt, das alles ist noch nicht einmal der Baum. Mag ich nun steiler schwingen oder schrager, ich fuhle nur die Schaukel: meinen Trager gewahr ich kaum. There, through the pain, the swing swept yet what I beheld was but the shadow of the bearing tree. Whether I forward swing or backward flee, by force of flight and counterflight compelled, all that is so much less, still, than the tree. Whether I swing more steeply, more obliquely, all I cleave to is the swing: that which bears me I perceive hardly at all. To read this poem is, first of all, to attend to the image of the swing, the powerful evocation of its movement, the repeated 25

26

The dear purchase

emphasis on the verbs of motion. The way these verbs exploit the dynamic quality of the German language, single-mindedly and at times idiosyncratically, we recognise as peculiar to Rilke — we know it to be the verbal equivalent of Rilke's determination to intimate, through his poetry, motion, transitions, the opposite of stasis. If we compare this with similar poetic passages in Angelus Silesius or the later Goethe, we find ourselves confirmed in our sense of Rilke's verbal inventiveness and hence in our sense of the different points in experience towards which he is taking us. Yet this is only the beginning. The image of the swing too is used here in a special way. Whereas, ordinarily, a swing suggests a stable point of suspension, a bearing at rest, Rilke proposes to alter our perception of it, he presents it as something suspended from ' so much less, still, than a tree'; and again, he says, 'that which bears me I perceive / hardly at all'. We are enjoined to think of and feel a presence situated halfway between being and not-being. The world in which this tree exists is a world of suffering and pain - this is stated with but a single word, ' Schmerz', and left to stand as a mere frame, a setting of the scene. This world is not independent of the tree, but it is its mere shadow; and however hard I try to perceive the tree itself, to reach that which ultimately bears me, all I can ever feel is the swing. One — unemphatic - meaning of this stanza relates to the indirection, the imagery of mere intimation, to which all metaphysical poetry is confined; to this meaning, elaborated in the second stanza, I shall return in Chapter 5. My present concern is with a different but related meaning. The existence of the tree — or is it a being ? a god ? — from which the swing is suspended comes now to be presented as - to us - somehow different from the existence of the swing itself, it appears to be more difficult of access. Yet what Rilke implies is not a radical difference but a difference of degree, something relative not absolute. Just as the movement of the swing must be at least partly determined by that from which it is suspended, the being at rest is also partly intimated in the movement of the swing: and thence, finally, in the self, the 'ich' of the poem's first stanza. As we continue interpreting these lines we come upon a

The theme

27

number of details which answer to our feeling that this could only be a twentieth-century poem. It is not one thing, to be sure, but a combination of several. First, we notice that even in our first groping for a meaning we were obliged to follow the concrete, familiar images of the poem as they were projected upon a metaphysical plane. This much could be said of German poetry in almost any age. But to this is added a second set of elements: the comparatives, the vertiginous verbs, the emphasis on the transitions, the particles of nuance (culminating in the stressed 'kaum': 'hardly at all') suggest a metaphysics of a personal, untraditional kind. All these words, in these configurations, belong to a manner of poetic utterance employed, as a matter of literary fact, by no other age. And when we speak of the great debt modern German poetry owes to Holderlin, in whose poems at least one of these elements, the comparatives, is to be found, we must also add that these words in these images convey a vision that would be alien to him. What then is distinctly ' modern' about this poem? What is its family likeness? How to sum it up? Most directly, perhaps, by way of a contrast. In the third book of the sonnets of the Baroque poet Andreas Gryphius, we find a poeticised version of the Gospel reading from St Matthew for the second Sunday in Advent.1 Gryphius is writing, in 1663, within the established liturgical convention of his day. Speaking of the comfort and salvation which Christ is about to bring to mankind, he describes it as 'freely given to those who before were wholly drowned in tears', to the repenting sinners: Das Losegeld der Welt / der Vater langes Hoffen Kommt noch den Augenblick / und schleusst die Ohren auf, Die Taubheit hat verstopft / der Nichtmehr-stummen Hauf Erzahlet seine Werk: Ihm stehn die Graber offen. Wer blind war sieht und findt / wie eben eingetrofFen Was imal Gott versprach. / Er schaut der Lahmen Lauf Der Aussatz muss vergehn / hier wird ohn teuren Kauf Den Trost geschenkt / die vor in Tranen schier ersoffen. The ransom of the world, our fathers' ancient hope Is close at hand at last, to open all those ears That were by deafness stopped; mankind no longer dumb

28

The dear purchase

Doth praise His works aloud; to Him the graves unlock; The blind now see, and find the hoped-for day has come That God has promised them. He makes the lame to walk, The lepers' skin to heal; here without purchase dear Is comfort freely given to all those who before Were wholly drowned in tears. '... Ohn' teuren Kauf...' - not dearly purchased. In contrast to this, the theme I think of as fundamental to the major achievements of modern German literature is the theme of the dear purchase. In each of its major achievements this literature is concerned with the salvation of man. This is not a salvation in any obvious Christian sense, even though (as we shall see) to some authors Christianity itself appears in its strange light. We shall be constrained to use the word 'salvation' in wholly unorthodox ways; the fact that its meanings vary from one author to another suggests that the argument from family likenesses is appropriate. Beyond the dualisms of spiritual and temporal, worldly and transcendent, in the much-frequented no-man's land between finite and infinite, each of these authors expresses the living experience of a salvation or validation of man which is to be attained at the highest price that man can conceive of: while at times the price exacted is beyond - tantalisingly just beyond - what man can pay with his entire existence. It is a salvation whose very validity is relative to its being supremely difficult of attainment, or even (in its most radical formulation) to its unattainableness. And, conversely, anything that is not attained at such exorbitant cost cannot be the real thing at all: it is either rejected outright, or it is presented in a radically different light. Among the minor writers of that age are those who either do not attempt this theme at all or, attempting it, fail in its presentation, or again hark back to easier modes of deliverance. In setting out the theme in this chapter I shall confine myself to bare snippets of argument. Looking back on Rilke's poem, we can see how its imagery and argument are arrayed to convey the relative remoteness of the 'bearer'; how 'pain' (the shadow of the tree) comes to be its intimation in our lives; in brief, how difficult of attainment is that on which we depend and which

The theme

29

alone is said to give validity to our actions. And to this theme, too, belong Rilke's earlier images of angelic strength, of the smile of the Saltimbanques, his notion of world-creating inwardness... and all these images of Rilke's mature poetry become both expressions and norms, both repository and source of the feelings and perceptions of an age. What colours the mature Rilke's poetic oeuvre is the presence of this supreme effort which, for him, lies in the exploration of feeling, in the inward assimilation of the outward world, for only by way of such an inward conquest is salvation — for him, ' reality itself — to be achieved; and the exemplary lightness and effortless grace of those last poems is the outcome of that conquest. Any experience short of that is condemned as inauthentic. Every one of the major figures of Thomas Mann's novels and stories suggests some aspect of our theme. Take Thomas Buddenbrook, hero of Thomas Mann's first novel (1901), head of the family firm of merchant brokers and centre of a solid burgerlich world replete with the accoutrements of the traditional novel of European realism. Thomas Buddenbrook's dissatisfaction with a way of living and experiencing which was good enough for his stalwart forebears becomes a search for something alien and spiritually more exacting, for a mode of experience that turns out to be existentially beyond him. His life becomes an unnerving search for a meaning and a validation. And when, distractedly and for a brief moment only, he finds that meaning - not in the Gospels, as his forefathers had done, but in a chapter of Schopenhauer - it turns out to be more than he can bear. The scene in which the meaning of his life is revealed to him is cast in the same realistic mode that prevails throughout most of the novel; but the revelation itself comes from another plane. We see Hans Castorp, hero of The Magic Mountain, making his uncertain way through one Weltanschauung after another — humanism, spiritualism, psychoanalysis, primitive Communism laced with Gnostic heresy... At the climax of the novel Hans Castorp attempts to sum up all that he has learned, leaving out none of the contradictions, in a dream of the knowledge of death

30

The dear purchase

and the love of life. The imagery of this dream (it will not surprise us to learn) derives from Nietzsche's The Birth of Tragedy. And again, as with Thomas Buddenbrook, at the point where the search looks like reaching its goal, the narrative plane of Hans Castorp's life is abandoned, transcended. He dreams his dream in a doubly marginal situation: not within the unproblematic and reassuring ordinariness of his North German homeland, but in the hermetic atmosphere of the Magic Mountain, and in a snowstorm that brings him to the portals of death itself. Again, as with Thomas Buddenbrook, as with Gustav von Aschenbach, the ageing hero of Death in Venice, the vision that comes to Hans is confined to a brief and unsteady moment, and it embraces a multitude of antithetic elements. It is a vision that requires a whole man's effort to attain it and (as it turns out) more than that man's effort to sustain it. We can see, then, that the common theme of these works is established in privileged moments on the very margins of ordinary life. Thomas Mann, more than any other major author of his age, believes in man as a sound proposition. Yet even for him, the supreme apprehension of life is not attainable in life itself, in this world of'common indication', 2 and it is the very opposite of facile; the pursuit of a valid knowledge is strenuous in the extreme. If any character in this literature deserves the time-honoured name of hero it is Jacob (in Joseph and his Brethren, written between 1926 and 1942). Let me recall the episode in which young Jacob, having by a fraud extracted the blessing from his readily gullible blind father, runs away from home and on his inglorious flight is overtaken by his revengeful cousin, young Eliphas. What now ensues is a scene of sheer humiliation, as devastating as anything that happens to the equally favoured and equally exposed Felix Krull, the con-man of Thomas Mann's last novel. Jacob simply grovels before the handsome, strong boy. He talks and talks in order to placate him. He cringes in the dust, kissing his feet, until the boy turns away in disgust from the undignified spectacle. Jacob will do anything - deny his fraud, put the blame on his mother, he will even belittle the significance of the blessing itself; every single thing

The theme

31

he possesses (except, incidentally, a ring which he has carefully hidden in his belt) he is prepared to part with. He comes away from this encounter having lost all that we prize most dearly: his honour and good name, his courage and manliness, every shred of human dignity. Yet what is it that he buys so dearly? His bare life? Not just that. His is a special kind of life, which he knows to be worth more than all the decent sentiments and possessions that he cast down before the foolish warrior-boy Eliphas: a life that he, Jacob, knows to be blessed, now and forever. He has stolen the blessing, but it is his. Hungry, weary, the tears of fear and shame hardly dry on his cheeks, he walks by the side of his lame camel through the desert. He is on the very margins of existence, his re-awakened sense of humiliation will not allow him to seek out the company of other men. He finds a circle of boulders near a well, and there lies down to sleep. And what he now dreams is the dream of his life, which he will never forget, the dream that discloses to him, for a brief night only, the knowledge of good and evil, the knowledge of his God on Whom he will meditate and Whom he will serve throughout his life. It is very much an open question whether what Jacob learns here (or what Joseph himself learns in a similar situation) is true religious knowledge; whether what Hans Castorp, or Adrian Leverkuhn or Gustav von Aschenbach come to know is presented, or acceptable, as 'transcendent' faith or whether, in some exalted sense, it is 'immanent 5 . What matters is that in each case the experience is bought at the price of the hero's supreme effort; that each time, the knowledge that leads to the hero's validation (such as it is) is achieved on the very margins of life; and that each time, the very strenuousness that is involved in the attaining of that momentary insight colours every part of the emerging vision. The place of Adrian Leverkuhn, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, in this scheme will concern us later. Whatever deep puzzles the writings of Franz Kafka may offer to his many interpreters, there cannot be much difficulty in recognising the family likeness of their questionable 'heroes', and the relevance of his entire work to our theme. Whatever the

32

The dear purchase

central characters of his stories are striving for-justification, redemption, liberation from a hated but anxiously, often aggressively asserted self-is agonisingly dangled before their eyes; and it turns out to be radically unattainable or, if attained, a mere nothing. A Hunger Artist, written in February 1922, is one of Franz Kafka's last stories. He first published it in a periodical, Die JVeue Rundschau, in October of the same year, and it provides the title of his last collection, published posthumously in Berlin in 1924. In the second of two somewhat ambiguous testamentary notes, written some time in 1922, Kafka enjoined his friend, Max Brod, to destroy all his unpublished writings; this story is included among the very few writings he consented to preserve. It is as though Kafka had written the story in answer to the question Nietzsche asks in one of the posthumously collected notes in The Will to Power: 'The deepest distinction: whether it is hunger or abundance [Uberfluf] that becomes creative?' 3 It is an 'artist story', 'eine Kiinstlergeschichte\ As such it belongs among several of Kafka's short tales in which the closest possible connection is established between the theme of a costly redemption and art. It embodies art not merely as the form, but also as the subject-matter through which the possibility of such a redemption is most directly expressed. Kafka is of course not the only writer who presents our theme by using the subjectmatter - the artistic activity - that is closest to the writer, the practising artist. As the public world, E. M. Forster's 'world of anger and telegrams', comes increasingly to be ruled by values hostile to the artistic imagination and its creations, so some of the greatest artists of the age come to assert an ever higher value for their calling, at the cost of its becoming ever more esoteric, self-conscious and self-contained; or, recognising the paradox of a self-contained art, they make a critical issue of their isolation, or emphasise its irrelevance to the affairs of the world. However, the strangeness of this undertaking should not be exaggerated. Self-consciousness is not to be identified with solipsism. Indeed, literature as the articulated object of the artistic consciousness and the subject-matter of its productions is not as limiting a topic as it may seem.

The theme

33

The figure of the hunger artist is not an invention of Kafka's, any more than the figures of the acrobats (Picasso's Saltimbanques) which form the core of the Fifth Duino Elegy are an invention of Rilke's. The hunger artist - the professional faster - was regularly on display in the fairgrounds and circuses of Central Europe in Kafka's time. (One might find him in a corner of the circus set in Act 11 of Smetana's The Bartered Bride.) Kafka's story is thus built around a curiosity with which his first readers were familiar. The fiction begins at the point where he takes the art denoted in the performer's proud title literally. His is the 'art' of starving, of displaying his capacity for conquering his natural desire for food, and with only an occasional sip of water, for as long as he can endure it. It is a negative art, which consists in doing what is inhuman. But this art is also negative in attracting the spectators by its quality of being repulsive and occasionally unendurable. The hunger artist of this story is famous, he even employs an impresario whose function it is to set a limit to a performance which the artist in his dedication is anxious to prolong indefinitely. The limit is set at forty days, the time Christ spent in the desert. This negative art, which consists in not doing what is human, nonetheless has a value of sorts for the spectators - why else would they come to watch it? Its value lies in its being sensational, something they admire because, in their well-fed existence, they are incapable of it. The value for the performer is somewhat different. More important than his pride in doing something they cannot do, is his pride in conquering his natural desire for food: at its most perfect, his art justifies the artist and redeems his suffering by leading to his death. This is what he is striving for, and this is what he achieves. But what if there are no longer any spectators ? And what if the natural desire, the conquest of which constitutes the achievement of perfection, is absent? The first sentence of the story - ' During these last decades the interest in hunger artists has greatly diminished' — introduces an historical dimension. Such performances no longer attract much of an audience, we are told, other sensations have taken their place. The times are over when the hunger artist in his

34

The dear purchase

bare, straw-covered cage was on display to an eager public who came even at night, the light of burning torches heightening the effect of their visits. No longer do guards chosen from the public — butchers are frequently among the volunteers — watch over the hunger artist night and day in order to make sure that he doesn't break his fast. Once he was a star attraction, and his fast was terminated with a special ceremony, performed by pretty young ladies who were happy to be chosen for the job and then fainted at the touch of the skeleton they were meant to conduct out of his cage. The time has come when his impresario has left him, when he has to give up his special place of honour in the fairground and is forced to join a circus. Nowadays his cage is at the end of an ill-lit, narrow passage through which the visitors hasten on their way to the cages where they watch the wild beasts being fed; now hardly anybody ever stops to pay attention to the act for which he is giving his all. Yet none of this makes him diminish his effort. Without an impresario to set a limit to his fasting, the hunger artist is at last free to attempt the ultimate perfection of his art, and indeed he reaches it. His death is hardly noticed. What is left of him is tossed out with the soiled straw on which he lay, to make room for a young panther, a sleek beast fed on chunks of raw meat, whose 'joy of life glowed with such strength from his throat that the onlookers could hardly stand the shock of it. But they overcame their fear ...' Deprived of a public, it seems that the hunger artist ends by practising his self-destructive art for art's sake. His justification through the perfecting of his art is achieved at the supreme cost of self-sacrifice. Or is it? Once or twice in the course of the story we are given a hint that the longer the hunger artist goes on with his act, the easier it becomes: ' Only he knew what no initiate knew, how easy it was to fast. It was the easiest thing in the world.' As the story goes on and the material conditions in which he has to perform deteriorate, he seems to have less and less reason to do without' the glory of being not only the greatest hunger artist of all time, which he was presumably already, but also of surpassing himself [by a performance] beyond human imagination '; less and less reason to abandon ' his high ambition,

The theme

35

5

his good will, his great self-denial . And these hints are brought together in the only words he speaks, words he addresses to the guard who has come to muck out the cage and get it ready for the young panther: 'Verzeiht mir alle', fliisterte der Hungerkiinstler; nur der Aufseher, der das Ohr ans Gitter hielt, verstand ihn.' GewiB', sagte der Aufseher und legte den Finger an die Stirn, um damit den Zustand des Hungerkiinstlers dem Personal anzudeuten, 'wir verzeihen dir.' 'Immerfort wollte ich, daB ihr mein Hungern bewundert', sagte der Hungerkiinstler. 'Wir bewundern es auch', sagte der Aufseher entgegenkommend. 'Ihr solltet es aber nicht bewundern', sagte der Hungerkiinstler. 'Nun, dann bewundern wir es also nicht', sagte der Aufseher, 'warum sollen wir es denn nicht bewundern?' 'Weil ich hungern muB, ich kann nicht anders', sagte der Hungerkiinstler. 'Da sieh mal einer', sagte der Aufseher, 'warum kannst du denn nicht anders?' 'Weil ich', sagte der Hungerkiinstler, hob das Kopfchen ein wenig und sprach mit wie zum KuB gespitzten Lippen gerade in das Ohr des Aufsehers hinein, damit nichts verloren ginge, ' weil ich nicht die Speise linden konnte, die mir schmeckt. Hatte ich sie gefunden, glaube mir, ich hatte kein Aufsehen gemacht und mich vollgegessen wie du und alle.' 'Forgive me, all of you,' whispered the hunger artist; only the overseer, who had his ear close to the bars, understood him. 'Of course,' said the overseer, and tapped his forehead with his finger, to indicate to the attendants what state the man was in, 'we forgive you.' ' I always wanted you to admire my fasting.' ' We do admire it,' said the overseer affably. 'But you shouldn't admire it,' said the hunger artist. 'Well then we don't admire it,' said the overseer, 'but why shouldn't we admire it?' 'Because I have to fast, I can't help it.' 'What a fellow you are,' said the overseer, 'and why can't you help it?' 'Because' said the hunger artist, lifting his emaciated head a little, with his lips pursed, as if for a kiss, right into the overseer's ear, so that no word might be lost, 'because I couldn't find the food I liked. If I had found it, believe me, I would have made no fuss and eaten my fill like you or anyone else.' The peripeteia is complete: the supreme effort is revealed as a mere nothing, sacrifice turns out to be a mere deprivation, ' the many-digited sum' (Rilke writes in the Fifth Elegy) 'resolves into zero'.

36

The dear purchase

The autobiographical elements of A Hunger Artist are more transparent and more brutally self-revealing than any we find elsewhere in Kafka's fiction: the embarrassment and dislike he himself felt when thinking of his own emaciated body, mentioned in his letters to his mistresses; his loathing of meat; the traumatic memory of his grandfather, a village butcher; the whisper of a man dying of tuberculosis of the larynx, made unbearably poignant through its contrast with the healthy, terrifying roar of the young panther. But, to one side of these autobiographical traces, the story leads us to the deep doubt Kafka had concerning the living value of his art and his fear that it is not a bounty of life but the product of deprivation. This, after all, is the story of a man's validation through the art he practises, the only thing he knows — a validation achieved through a supreme effort which turns out to be no effort at all. It is a story that has an ending (unlike so many of Kafka's stories), but in its ending deprives the man and his art of the only form of validation he is capable of, the only value which is-just - within his reach. Like most of Kafka's stories, A Hunger Artist calls out for a religious interpretation. The forty days of Christ's sojourn point to it, and so does the hunger artist's skeleton-like body, which reminds us of Dostoevsky's description, in The Idiot, of Griinewald's 'Deposition of Christ from the Cross'. Such an interpretation cannot ever be anything but fragmentary. It works to the extent of suggesting that Christ's sacrifice was a delusion, as though His suffering had been no suffering at all but 'the easiest thing in the world' - the world in which He too' couldn't find the food He liked'; Rilke's poem on Christ on the Mount of Olives (1907) contains a similar thought. But at this point the interpretation peters out. What is redeemed through the sacrifice on the Cross is not Christ but the world, whereas here (where the 'art' is all but self-contained) there is only the most fleeting suggestion that through the hunger artist's suffering the world might become in some sense a better place. And finally - again contributing to. a religious interpretation of this story of the dear purchase, but again only

The theme

37

by way of tantalising uncertainty - there are the words that follow the hunger artist's last speech: Das waren die letzten Worte, aber noch in seinen gebrochenen Augen war die feste, wenn auch nicht mehr stolze Uberzeugung, daB er weiter hungre. These were his last words, but in his dimmed eyes remained the firm though no longer proud conviction that he was still continuing to fast. Subjunctives, in this literature, are charged with special meanings. And because every true ambiguity must come at the closure of a passage or a text, what the verbal mood, 'hungre', conveys here is the ultimate ambiguity: is it the hunger artist's conviction that he was, not simply dying, but' still continuing to fast'? or 'that he would still continue to fast', even beyond death? Are we to take it that the sacrifice (Kafka avoids the word) was not in vain, the act not empty of meaning? That the artist's validation was accomplished after all, his life justified and redeemed, not only for his sake but also (this is the fleeting suggestion) for the sake of those who are left to remember the days of his former glory - the few visitors who tarry on their way to the wild beasts, a father who stops to point him out to his children ? All this talk about the salvation and validation of man seems pretty inappropriate when we come to the down-to-earth, antialmost-everything attitude of Bertolt Brecht, the greatest German dramatist of the age. Brecht is the only one of our authors who concerns himself resolutely and unambiguously with the social circumstances of man, with the condition of 'human kind in a scientific age'. This includes a serious and sustained consideration of some of the institutions men have invented to make social life possible, and especially of those institutions which in his, the Marxist, view are designed to achieve the opposite - and again such considerations are hardly to be found among the other authors of our canon. Equally clear-headed is Brecht's rejection of metaphysical speculation. His theorising is largely confined to arguments which aim at justifying and explaining his theatrical innovations, which in

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the Anglo-Saxon world at all events have proved to be much more influential than the plays in which he applied them. These innovations are overtly designed to diminish the distance between stage and public by dis-illusioning the stage, making the fiction that constitutes it more transparent; whether that is what they achieve is another question. The stage is to present an entertainment in which and through which a social and political message is to be conveyed and presented for serious, critical consideration. Again this is not the only effect his devices achieve. But Brecht's declared aim - social and political enlightenment — is not, after all, very different from the effect achieved by some of G. B. Shaw's plays, though Brecht's debt to Shaw has been largely ignored, especially by Brecht. With his decidedly worldly, anti-metaphysical outlook, does he, too, belong to our enquiry? Yet our theme is at all times rich in social connotations. Stripped of its metaphysics, it provides the unacknowledged sous-texte of some of Brecht's greatest plays, and occasionally emerges into the full light of his brightly-lit stage. His dismissal of every form of idealism is obvious. What is less obvious is his determined search for the truth about man, even if that search leads him to dramatic arguments which derive their substance no longer from Marxism but from a Christian scheme of values; and those values, after all (to one side of all patter about Karl Marx as a Judaic prophet), constitute the unacknowledged source of Marxist ethics, too. In saying this I don't wish to belittle the importance of Marxism for Brecht's dramatic oeuvre and, less directly, for his lyrical poetry. Indeed, the fact that he had to turn to the doctrine amounts to an indictment of the quality of social thinking in the Germany of the twenties. It is in this context that Karl Kraus, usually the conservative satirist, writes in praise of Communism as the only effective curb on the aggressive and unscrupulous conservative nationalism which, in mortal fear of the revolution, left it to a Social Democratic Minister of the Interior to instigate the murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg. Brecht's vitality as a stunningly gifted middle-class schoolboy

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and adolescent from Augsburg seeks its expression in public performance - in lively book reviews and spoofs, in satirical poems which he accompanies on the guitar, in cabaret and theatrical sketches - long before he takes a serious interest in politics or social affairs. His first work for the stage, Baal (1920), with its powerful lyrical interludes and mystical materialism, is Brecht without Marx. It may well be that without his 'commitment' to Marxism Brecht might have gone some of the way of Gerhart Hauptmann, his great predecessor as a dramatist with a social conscience. No sooner had Hauptmann reached public recognition (and the Nobel Prize in 1912) than he all but abandoned his early naturalist themes, turned to a spiritual mysticism he thought he found in the old Goethe, and made his peace with the establishment - though in no circumstances was Brecht likely to do that. The notion — current outside Germany - of Brecht as ' a great dramatist despite his politics' is belied by everything he wrote after 1927, the date of his reading of Das Kapital. Though his allegiance to Marxism was not ' absolute' (it is a term which in the thirties has rarely a respectable meaning, least of all for Brecht), he owes to the ideology the central issues of his plays; he owes to it his emphasis on the economic circumstances in which his characters are presented and in respect of which he poses his dramatic questions: but it does not yield him viable dramatic answers. In the experimental didactic plays of the early thirties he tries his hand at what he believes to be radical Marxist solutions, only to find the plays condemned by the Party. The achieved Marxism of a classless Utopia provides a framework for The Caucasian Chalk Circle (1944-5), but the connection between the agit-prop framework and the play itself is far-fetched. Manifest in the great plays of Brecht's maturity is a radical challenge to all traditional moral values and to the whole repertory of attitudes which the middle-class theatre of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries took over from French classicism and, in Germany, from Goethe's and Schiller's dramas and the plays of the Wilhelmine theatre, the German equivalent of the Victorian 'well-made play'. In Brecht's plays love, heroism, honesty, integrity, mother-love and simple

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goodness of heart are all exploded. They simply don't count where the material facts of life assert themselves. A kind of hardbitten romanticism takes over: the natural inclinations of the men - and especially of the women - leave them unarmed and defenceless against the depredations of society. What counts, for the Brechtian characters, is a full belly and a warm bed, an eye on the main chance, marriage when illegitimacy threatens, a box full of money, cunning and survival. In the face of these, all big words are so much clap-trap. All big words? With an exhilarating dramatic energy the playwright goes through them, one by one, but in our final impression the faint, often lyrical echo of a non-material value, challenged and mortally threatened but still recognisable, is left. Mother Courage and her Children was written in 1939, in the

shadow of the approaching war. The political circumstances of its writing need not be examined too closely - it was first performed in Zurich in May 1941, at the time when its anti-war message accorded with the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact - a month before the Soviet Union was attacked by Hitler's Germany and thus drawn into what the Communists had hitherto regarded (to recall a phrase current at the time) as a conflict in which 'the capitalist hyenas were at each other's throats'. Here the hyenas are of a humbler kind. Set in the Thirty Years War (between 1624 and 1635), the play is designed to show how a petit-bourgeois vivandiere both depends on and is destroyed by the war from which she makes her living. In Marxist terms her profiteering from the war is intended as a replica of the vested interests of the politicians, generals and officers who direct the war, but the parallel is imperfect, for of course she is not essential to the continuation of the slaughter and devastation in the way that they are. She fears the approaching end of the war will be her undoing, but it is the war itself that destroys her. Or rather, not her but her family, which is shown dramatically to be a part of her, with all the poignancy and strength that go with the oikos, the 'House' of Greek tragedy. As each of her sons goes to his death, the message of a ' world upside down' is relentlessly driven home: they are killed while practising in war the virtues that are prized in times of

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peace. She alone survives, pulling the covered van with provisions that contains all she has, barely human, more like a maimed beast of burden. This is indeed a 'tragedy of attrition'. What is left at the end is freed from all dross, but it is not (as Brecht was at pains to point out in his postscript to that first performance of the play) the value of mere survival; it is not the tenacity of the ' Niobe woman' clinging to bare life that we are meant to admire. In a sense there is nothing to quote here. When the validation comes it is silent, for it comes in a world in which all words have been shown up as lies. Instead of words there is an act: the frantic act of self-sacrifice by which Courage's dumb daughter, Kattrin, rouses the inhabitants of the nearby town by beating the drum to save some fugitive children from the marauding soldiery. This is the dear purchase in its simplest, most traditional form. The value embodied in that act is not taken back or exploded. On the contrary, looking back from that vantage-point we see a network of family feelings and values sketched in lightly over the whole play. Though Brecht would give us little thanks for saying it, Kattrin is one of the very few Christian heroines of the theatre in our time. The invocation of the value of that self-sacrifice, and of similar, less extreme values elsewhere, is never absolute and unconditioned. It is always relative to the elements in a given situation, chief among them the material interests of each protagonist. This is why in the scene of the Great Haggle - a scene unsurpassed in twentieth-century drama — Brecht is able to make tragedy from such a prosy consideration as how much, in hard cash, a son's life is worth to his mother, or rather to this mother whose chief concern is to see her family, her oikos, through the war; now we understand what living dialectic is resolved in her final words, CI have haggled too long'. The dear purchase is not enacted by Kattrin alone. The drama of her self-sacrifice has a timelessness about it, it might be found in other eras and other cultures. What makes it additionally appropriate to our theme is all that Brecht sets against it in the play. It is his insistence, as a dramatist, on doing all that can be done to discredit and devalue it as the act of a crazed girl, his insistence on setting up that scene as a viable

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climax against all the odds his dramatic energy can devise. That alone — the recalcitrance of the world against what Nietzsche called 'the value of values' - is the source that justifies the act, humanly and dramatically. The last scene of The Life of Galileo (begun in Brecht's Danish exile in 1938) provides an example of Brecht's favourite stage device, the open-ended play. It is the scene in which the great teacher and scientist (immortalised by Brecht's friend, Charles Laughton) proceeds to disillusion his disciple, the young Andrea, about the motives which made him, Galileo, give in to the Inquisition and recant his cosmological discovery. Galileo could easily accept Andrea's interpretation of his own conduct. He could agree that he bowed before the verdict of the Inquisition and refused martyrdom in order to be able to complete his great new work, the Discorsi, and that he thus advanced what is of paramount concern to them both, the progress of science. In fact Galileo does not accept Andrea's explanation. He confesses to a cowardice and a love of comfort which are no more validated by the play's dramatic argument than was the untrammelled will to survive which Mother Courage had asserted. Either motivation would fit his character, neither helps to justify the didactic peroration which follows on his confession. That peroration is designed as a contribution to the debate about the scientists' responsibility in the age of the atom bomb (which the Soviet Union did not possess at the time Brecht wrote the second, ' American' version of that speech in 1945). It is perhaps the only abstract speech he ever wrote for the stage, and it lands him in a dilemma which is surely impossible to unravel, but which Brecht intends as a provocation of his audience to further thought. But the muddle it leads to - if that is what it is - again reflects the playwright's strenuous effort to push the dramatic argument to a point beyond easier, less exacting modes of resolution. Are the open endings of Brecht's plays really invitations to social criticism? This is how he himself rationalised them, yet his arguments have a transparent naivety about them, and he was anything but a naive playwright. (If Rilke's danger is an excess of feeling, Kafka's the sensationalism of' the pleasure of twisting

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a knife in my heart', Thomas Mann's the tedium of irony beyond a point of no return, Brecht's danger is a false naivety and the bluster that goes with it.) Brecht's entire argument, in which he attacks the anodyne effect of' the bourgeois stage' and rejects the spectators' empathy as conducive to political conformism, strikes me as absurd. Do the endings of Antigone or Hamlet or Phedre really foreclose further thought? The rationale of his open endings is different. Wherever they occur, they are nothing so much as dramatised doubts about a possible ending, Marxist or any other, and sign! of his dramatic truthfulness. The dialectic which informs the great plays of Brecht's maturity has a Marxist analysis of the world for one of its elements. As to the other, it has various names. It is already present in the strangely ambivalent songs of Baal, in the ambiguous last chorus of The Threepenny Opera. It is the tenderness of the lovers in Mahagonny, it is the affinity between corruptibility and mercy in Mother Courage; again, it is the affinity between corruption and justice in The Caucasian Chalk Circle, between exploitation and animal charm in Puntila and his Servant Matti, between sensuous delight, a high intelligence, cunning and cowardice in Galileo ... - in short, it is the evocation of human freedom not beyond but within the firm determinants of history. When Brecht comes to formulate this dialectic theoretically, his words read at first sight like a plea on behalf of that bourgeois individualism of the naturalist stage - of Ibsen and Hauptmann - which he had rejected at the very outset of his career as a dramatist. But that impression is misleading. His words employ the only kind of rhetoric we find tolerable because they describe the only kind of freedom we know, a freedom that is at once narrow and concrete because it is wrested from the actual historical circumstances of our lives: Wenn nun eine Person historisiert, der Epoche entsprechend antwortet und anders antworten wiirde in andern Epochen, ist sie da nicht 'jedermann schlechthin' ? Ja, nach den Zeitlauften oder der Klasse antwortet hier jemand verschieden; lebte er zu anderer Zeit oder noch nicht so lang oder auf der Schattenseite des Lebens, so antwortete er unfehlbar anders, aber wieder ebenso bestimmt und wie jedermann antworten wiirde in dieser Lage zu dieser Zeit.

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Now if a character responds in an historically determined manner and in keeping with his period, and if he would respond differently in other periods - doesn't that mean that he is 'merely Everyman'? True, a man will respond differently according to his period or his class; and if he were still young, or if he were living in another age, or on the dark side of life, he would undoubtedly respond differently - though, again, as decisively; and again his response would be like anyone else's in that situation and at that time. Is that not enough? Perhaps this is not, after all, the whole truth about man. I have called this a theoretical statement, but here too the theory is in the service, not of a philosophy of human freedom, nor of any ideology; it is in the service of the living stage: ist da nicht zu fragen, ob es nicht noch weitere Unterschiede der Antwort gibt? Wo ist er selber, der Lebendige, Unverwechselbare, der namlich, der mit seinesgleichen nicht ganz gleich ist? Es ist klar, daB das Abbild ihn sichtbar machen muB, und das wird geschehen, indem dieser Widerspruch im Abbild gestaltet werden wird. Das historisierende Abbild wird etwas von den Skizzen an sich haben, die um die herausgearbeitete Figur herum noch die Spuren anderer Bewegungen und Ziige aufweisen. Oder man denke an einen Mann, der in einem Tal eine Rede halt, in der er mitunter seine Meinung andert oder lediglich Satze spricht, die sich widersprechen, so daB das Echo, mitsprechend, die Konfrontation der Satze vornimmt.4 surely we should ask whether there are no further differences in people's responses! Where is he, the living man, unmistakably himself - he, that is, who is not quite to be equated with his equals? It is clear that the (theatrical) image must bring him before us, and that will come about if this contradiction is recreated in the image. The historically determined image will retain something of the rough sketches which suggest traces of other movements and features all around the worked-out figure. Or imagine a man standing in a valley and making a speech in the course of which he now and then changes his views, or merely utters sentences that contradict each other so that the echo, accompanying his sentences, makes them confront each other. It is obvious that Brecht's deep and consistent concern with social issues is largely alien to the other writers I have mentioned. Yet in his dramatic dialectic he shares the creative mode of his age to the point where he would rather not attain a

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clear-cut solution at all, would rather confine himself to the 'sketched-in images' (and derive some of his best dramatic effects from them) than allow a false conclusion to emerge. His 'solution', even if it conflicts with the ideology of Marxism, must take full account of the intricacies of human situations, including their little freedoms. 'Where is he, the living man, unmistakably himself-he, that is, who is not quite to be equated with his equals?' What makes the rhetoric of this sentence tolerable is that the deliverance of man it intimates is inseparable from a full realisation of his bondage. My concern is not simply with the human predicament in all ages, which Heracles sums up in his lament to Odysseus as' a life of suffering that must be endured by all men beneath the rays of the sun'; contrary to appearances, 'Urleid', which is what Nietzsche called it in the Birth of Tragedy, is not a German invention. Nor is our theme the only one that engages the authors on our list. The prominence I have given it reflects my belief that it is the one theme above all others which is closest to the temper of the age. At the same time it imposes limitations on creative minds, such as other ages have not known. A comparison with one of its antecedents should make clear the most important of these limitations. The story of these pages (it has often seemed to me) could be told much better in the language and scenario of Dante's Purgatory, for it is here that the idea of a salvation through absolute effort — an effort involving all of man's being — is most fully explored. This is the part of The Divine Comedy where both the personal and the poetic reasons for Dante's journey are disclosed. What justifies the journey to the Inferno and Purgatory for Dante the man is his need to atone for his life after the death of Beatrice. What justifies the journey for Dante the poet is the task he takes upon himself to report on what he has seen and experienced to his readers, and by his report - the poem itself- to show them what punishment and reward await them: to offer them warning and promise. This involves him in a negative aim: to make clear the price, in suffering and

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repentance, that men must pay to wipe out the memory of their sinful past on earth The high decrees of God would be broken if Lethe were crossed and such a draught were tasted without payment* Of penance that causes tears toflow(xxx, 142-5) and to make clear the burden of past wrong under which the men and women in Purgatory have to labour: As, to support a roof or ceiling a statue is sometimes seen as a corbel, its knees pressing against its breast Which, from an unreal, causes a real distress! in the person who sees it, so I saw the shades when I looked closely. They were truly more or less bent over according as they had more or less on their backs; and he who showed most suffering in his looks Weeping, appeared to say, ' I can endure no more!' (x, 130-9)

The same imagery is used when for Dante, in the company of Virgil, the process of redemption has begun: Already we were mounting the sacred stairs and I seemed much lighter than I had been on level ground So that I said, ' Master, tell me what heavy thing* has been lifted from me ...' (xii, 115-19) and again, as the poet Statius explains to Dante why the mountain of Purgatory they are climbing shakes under them: ' Perhaps lower down the mountain quakes more or less from wind compressed in the earth (I know not how), but up here never. It trembles here when a soul feels clean so that it rise or set out for the ascent...' (xxi, 55-60) * ' senza alcuno scotto / di pentimento' | But Dante speaks of'la qual fa del non ver vera rancura'. * The contrast is between 'troppo piu lieve' and 'cosa greve'.

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However, whether or not this is a true feeling f is not a matter for subjective decision, but is determined by the objective theological scheme to which Dante is writing. This insistence on the burden of earthly, unredeemed experience is a part of traditional Christian imagery. Nietzsche, brought up in a Lutheran parsonage and the most famous of Protestant boarding schools, takes it up in £arathustra and in all those passages in which he rails against, or mocks at, ' der Geist der Schwere' - Dante's 'accidie' (xviii, 132) - though the ways in which Nietzsche offers to redeem that 'spirit of heaviness' are much less clear; the lightness of dance (in Stefan George), ' desinvolture' (in Ernst Jiinger) are some of the means proposed by Nietzsche's literary heirs, in whose hands the means - in typical twentieth-century manner - usurp the function of ends. And here of course our comparison collapses, for nothing could be more contrary to Dante's design than a ' redemption' of this kind. For him, the detailed evocations of the dear purchase are neither valuable in themselves, nor will they be superseded by profane frivolities. They are merely the means leading to the positive vision - the vision of salvation that is already adumbrated in the last cantos of Purgatory. For these souls, whom in a less solemn moment the poet likens to ' a dark troop of ants [who] rub noses with each other / perhaps to enquire about their way or fortune' (xxvi, 34-6) - these souls will be saved, their supreme effort will not be in vain, and they know it: Having twice seen their desire, I began: ' O souls, certain of gaining, whenever it may be, a state of peace ...' (xxvi, 52-4) moreover, their blessed knowledge is confirmed by the authority of the poet's teacher and guide, who will not share that peace: and Virgil said, ' My son, here may be torment, but not death.5

(xxvii, 20-1)

Here finally we come to the most exacting aspect of the canto. The whole design of Purgatory would not work but for t ' quando alcuna anima monda / sentese ...'

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the firm dissociation Dante succeeds in establishing between the means and the end - between the poignancy of what is and the knowledge of what is to be; so that the terror of the seemingly endless effort (CI can endure no more!' (x, 139)) exists side by side with, and remains undiminished by, the assurance of the joy that will be its reward. It is, as I said, a supremely exacting achievement, yet we have an intimate understanding of such a division in experience. Thomas Mann plays with it endlessly (and tediously) in Joseph and his Brethren, and offers it as the coda of his Dr Faustus. But since neither he nor any of the other authors in our canon have any framework of authority, within which both halves of the division might be accommodated, their creative attention is limited to the first half only. Only that, only the poignant half of Purgatory can provide them with a valid pattern. To return to that unfriendly era that never recovered from the cataclysm of war: if it is true that the quest I have been describing inspires the works of its greatest authors (as well as the discursive writings of a host of philosophers, historians and the literati generally), it is conversely true that any other mode of salvation or delivery receives from them less credence and fails to engage their creativeness at its best. These matters seem to go by contraries. Where the emotions, the creative energy and intellectual interest of an age are directed toward one kind of resolution, there its opposite will be less readily available. Little of the traditional pursuit of felicity is to be found among these writers, little of the workings of grace is ever shown in their works. Not that it is ignored. In Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Stefan George, Ernst Jiinger we find evocations of a sudden, freely granted deliverance, born beyond the strenuous effort. The figure of a 'Children's King' (in the 1925 version of Hofmannsthal's Der Turm (The Tower)), of the inspired and inspiring youth 'Maximin' around whom George weaves a garland of poems, Ernst Jiinger's grim technocratic construction Der Arbeiter (for which The Worker is an inadequate translation), have indeed little in common, except that they are all intended to convey this deliverance by some kind of effortless grace.

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HofmannsthaPs The Tower movingly bears witness to his readiness, after the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, to turn his creative attention to the contemporary turmoil. The play hinges on the conflict between the pure in spirit who has no place to lay his head and a world of crude power bereft of all spiritual value. Through its imaginary seventeenth-century setting it conveys a very concrete care for the ravaged Europe of the postwar era. Similarly, the array of historical sources, traditional topoi and paramyths 5 that make up its dramatic fabric testifies to the strenuous universality the play is intended to convey. The attempt, however, to resolve the travails of a world in ruins by placing its rule in the hands of a Child King - more like a Vienna choirboy than a viable dramatic figure is apt to strike one as feeble. Hofmannsthal was to find a more effective resolution, and a grace, not in tragedy, but in the fine lacework of social comedy. The problem is similar in the pre-1939 writings of Ernst Jiinger. Starting in 1920 with In Stahlgewittern (The Storm of Steel) each of his embattled diaries depicts a moment of quietness amid the horrors of war unsparingly evoked, an emblem of peace in the very centre (he calls it the still centre) of the battlefield. This moment is intended to give a meaning to the meaningless slaughter around. Even more than Jiinger's glorification of military courage, it is his search for a meaning in ' the sacrifices placed on the altar of war' which answered the need of the age, and made his war-books popular and influential. Into this search - intensified by the unexpectedness of the defeat of 1918 - the tradition of German reflectiveness was channelled: metaphysical and theological speculation as well as the crude appeals of politicians were informed by it. But surely (it will be objected) this search for the meaning of life — of lives so recklessly wasted — is to be found in all post-Christian cultures? Yet nowhere was the search carried on so insistently, and on occasion so expediently, as in postwar Germany; it is this clamorous insistence on c a meaning5 that accounts for the radical difference between a Frederick Manning and an Ernst Jiinger, between most German accounts of the Great War and

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their English equivalents. Yet the connection Jiinger tries to make between the moment of quietness and 'the storm of steel' depicted in its full, hideous violence remains arbitrary, the realism of the warlike scenes gives way to excogitated philosophising. In 1939 Jiinger published Aufden Marmorklippen {On the Marble Cliffs), a highly coloured allegory of the internecine strife that threatened the Party during the first years of Hitler's rule.6 When, at the end of the novel, the narrator and his companion turn their backs on the ravaged countryside of the concentration-camps, the violence and suffering they are leaving behind have been transfixed into a lurid image, not resolved. A resolution - not any kind, but an appropriate, convincing one - lies beyond the limits of the novel, beyond its author's ken. The spirituality those two serene survivors have salvaged (by retiring into a herbarium) is withdrawn from the conflict — into what later came to be called ' inner emigration' — not proved in it. Jiinger is one of the unignorable voices of the age, yet he is at his most revealing and memorable, not in the heroic bluster of his early novels and semifictional diaries, but in subtler, more highly structured forms. As to his war-books, not all of them put together equal Georg Trakl's last poem, ' Grodek' (1914), in poignancy. There is yet another form this incapacity for a valid goal takes: the descent into violence. The fiction of National Socialism is such a piteous affair that we need spend no time on it. But strangely enough, unlike a number of frequently anthologised bloodthirsty poems, the novels of'the Movement' amount to little more than cliche-ridden portrayals of Aryan virtues (including the virtues of clod-hopping German peasantry), Semitic wiles, and French degeneracy; but they are not particularly violent. Even Dr Goebbels's Michael (1932), an early example of the ' confessionary' novels and autobiographies which show true German youth in search of a faith to live by, progressing from the anomie and hopelessness of life in the Weimar Republic into the arms of an all-redeeming Fuhrer even this over-written piece of Expressionist prose is free from the heedless violence that writers like Hermann Unger, Arnolt Bronnen and Elias Canetti indulge in. Canetti's Auto-da-Fe

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(1936), too, is a quest of sorts. Its central character is a solitary scholar surrounded by his books and possessed by a maniacal hatred of the world without which he cannot survive. This world is peopled by creatures conceived with such uniform authorial loathing that it deprives them of the breath of life. ' Here be monsters' : Aristotle explained the pleasure we take in the portrayal of 'misshapen animals and cadavers' by our informed interest in their author's 'workmanship or colour or something else of that kind' (Poetics, iv). But what if all that is absent? if the monstrous remains unassuaged? The savant's quest seems to be for ever greater abstraction, for ever more book learning and through it for his own identity, yet what the novel's combination of solipsism and misanthropy actually leads to are unmotivated acts of macabre brutality, madness and self-slaughter. All this brings us into the vicinity of some of Kafka's stories. But even in the harshest of them there is a redeeming quality — redeeming, however, not in any religious or metaphysical sense, but by virtue of the consequentiality of his art, ' its workmanship or colour or something else of that kind'. The dear purchase (it should be clear by now) takes us to some strange places. Is there then no direct affirmation to be found in this literature ? Do not Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus contain supreme songs of affirmation and praise? But what makes that multi-faceted collection possible is a poetic diction as demanding, as far from 'Sah ein Knab ein Roslein stehn', as anything we have encountered in our discussion so far: seeing that the jubilant affirmation has the poet and poetry as its most direct object, it could hardly be otherwise. What ofJoseph, the hero of Thomas Mann's tetralogy, who is certainly not a poet: is he not endowed with abundant grace? Yes, and for that very reason it is not he, possessor of the coat of many colours, but his ill-favoured brother Judah, burdened with an anxious, neurotic care for his family and his God, who receives the dying Jacob's blessing. The gods, we read, are fun, but ' Gott ist Anstrengung' (which may be put less solemnly as 'God is a strain'). To any of these writers the direct, freely granted gift of grace is only rarely

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available. Among their finest virtues is a creative scrupulousness, which enabled some of them to anticipate, others to attempt to oppose, those monstrous political solutions whose hallmark was cheapness and brutal simplicity, and which won the day. The remarkable linguistic creativeness of these authors, too, has the family likeness of our theme: it is the coinage, in language, with which they pay for the truth about man — a truth (they believe) that can no longer be obtained at a less exorbitant price. Gone is the time when a constant rapport between ' ordinary' speech (Bacon's 'language of the market-place') and the language of literature was taken for granted. In this rapport the realistic prose fiction of the nineteenth century was grounded. When, in the novels of Willibald Alexis (i 798-1871) and Theodor Fontane (1819-98), the influence of French and English realism at last made itself felt, the German novel too came to be cast in the class-determined koine of the social world. It is impossible to generalise about the politics of literary realism. Although Germany's belated contributions to it were largely conservative in outlook, yet there were important exceptions; what is more, the conservatism was often ambiguous and ironic. But there is little doubt that, whatever political sympathies realistic novels display, their implicit attitude toward the language from which they are wrought is 'democratic', at least in the sense that their lexis - its vocabulary, syntax, tropes as well as its author-specific idiom - derives from common speech, takes its derivation for granted, and makes little issue of it. My point here is not that realism has a special claim to 'vraisemblance' (or 'truth to life' or whatever), but that our modern authors' attitude to language is fundamentally different. By and large (Buddenbrooks is among the exceptions) the European realistic novel whose history Erich Auerbach describes is not a genre suitable for their quest. Their linguistic creativeness has few if any precedents, but it is not unconditioned. It must be seen in the contexts of modern German society and of the German language itself. Thinking

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about it in these two contexts we encounter an unsettling paradox, for the two pull in opposite directions. More than other nations, the Germans depend for a confirmation of their national identity on order, that is on a series of systems which are premeditated, fixed by theoretical considerations, creating a horizon of expectations into which diverse undertakings are made to fit and with which individual lives are expected to conform. (The Austrian attitude to order is more devious.) From this, two things follow: on the one hand the search for ideology, for system in history, the sciences, law and psychology, the surprisingly high degree of abstractness in many practical walks of life - the attraction of militarism as the containment and orderly use of violence is an obvious example. On the other hand there is a notorious intolerance of every kind of nonconformism as well as the ' pedantry' and ' ponderousness' ('Schwerfalligkeit') of utterance and conduct which Schopenhauer ridiculed. All these were manifestations of a Weltgefuhl ('a general mode of feeling', a favourite term of Spengler's) of insecurity and aggression, which the desire for order was intended to assuage. The German language, however, moves in the opposite direction. By this I don't mean that it is lacking in order and clarity, for all clarity is relative to the purpose in hand. More than other European languages it is pliable, ready to bend to the wind of individual inspiration, to the imposition of individual order. It is singularly capable of expressing that feeling of uncertainty, of not being ' reliably at home in the world', on which the basic desire for order is superimposed. Like any other language it is available for good and evil ends. Yet it has a potential sensitivity which (as Karl Kraus observed) most of its speakers don't possess; and (as Kraus would deny) this special sensitivity heightens its effectiveness in the service of any purpose. Hitler's oratory is a case in point. The rhetorical mastery with which he exploited the fear of uncertainty and anarchy by a promise of order cannot be detached from the historical situation in which he made his bid for supreme power; but the language meets him halfway. In his debased use of that single

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word, Not (need, poverty, distress), there are echoes — pagan, Christian and Wagnerian - of a thousand years of German history. All that may be said of Hitler's political gifts is also true of his rhetoric: in each case he purposefully radicalises a destructive aspect of his age - the age of'nihilism', the coming of which Nietzsche foresaw. Hitler's rhetoric is the characteristic product of that linguistic corruption which has its origins in the cliche-ridden jargon of the press. This process - a kind of universal catachresis which Schopenhauer called 'Sprachverhunzung' (the ruin or massacre of language) and on which Nietzsche commented at length - accelerates with the growing influence of the press after the turn of the century, and then in the hypertrophy of journalese and officialese that accompanies the Great War. One has to read Hitler's letters from the front to get the full whiff of this influence on 'the little man' (to use the cliche he later chose for his self-presentation to 'the people'). The language of the people - victims of the war and of this process - is not necessarily corrupted by it. The most moving scene in Karl Kraus's giant documentary drama of the war, Die letzten Tage der Menschheit {The Last Days of Mankind) of 1922,

consists of little more than the text (perhaps a genuine quotation) of a letter from a working-class woman, telling her husband at the front in her own simple words that she has committed adultery. But, as Bertolt Brecht found out, this kind of language is difficult to recover for literature. Theodor Adorno is only fair when he accuses Brecht of trying to palm off on his public the gestus of ponderous rural wisdom and ' the earthy experience of South German muzhiks' (which incidentally the playwrights of the Third Reich too were doing), in order to ' make us believe that the good life is where the Red Army is in control'. The language is quick to betray Brecht's intention. These few remarks do no more than sketch in a background against which the special linguistic character of this literature must be seen. It often reflects alienation from the world of the petit bourgeois or the philistine, of the capitalist exploiter or the inhuman bureaucrat, the cold technocrat, or from the world of the decent Burger with his humdrum cares and kitsch amusements, and his cliche-ridden language. This alienation has been

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commented on in every Western culture. In cultures other than German, too, writers have felt that the prose of ' la marquise sortit a cinq heures' is irredeemably prosy. Language-conscious modern poetry and novels everywhere take issue with the same dilemma and attempt to solve it by means of an individual creativeness. But that creativeness need not always be linguistic. Virginia Woolf s formal innovations, even in The Waves, cling to the language of her own social milieu. D. H. Lawrence's achievement as the novelist of common diction has no parallel in German. The technique Samuel Beckett hits on in his plays — to make all discourse not satirical or naturalistic but a string of quotations from common speech — belongs to another age. In the literature with which we are here concerned, all literary originality is apt to have a strong component of linguistic invention, and to turn out prosy and flat (as in some of Hermann Hesse's novels) when it has to do without it. The special qualities of the German language enable each writer either to resolve in his own individual way the unease he feels when facing the linguistic conventions of his age or else to meet the dilemma directly, by making an issue of it. Hofmannsthal raises the dilemma to the level of consciousness, first in the famous Chandos Letter, then in Der Schwierige, a superb comedy of

errors. Georg Trakl reduces the lexis of his lyrical utterance to the narrowest range to be found among major poets, returning again and again to the same paths in a frozen landscape, fashioning from a traditional liturgical vocabulary images of pain; while his friend Karl Kraus attacks the corruption around him by giving his style a complexity of internal relations which deliberately defies the Burger with his notions of an easy, readable style. Rilke and Kafka are traumatised by almost the same social and linguistic background of German Prague, yet they choose opposite ways out of the impasse (we might call them the ways of luxuriance and poverty); while both Brecht and Benn (who would have hated to be mentioned in the same breath) cultivate different aspects - the one naive, the other sophisticated - of self-conscious modernism. These, perhaps unduly simplified, are some of the ventures the language enables the poets to undertake. Yet what is no less

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distinctive about the German scene is how readily the poets' licence to question and go against traditional formal and linguistic conventions is claimed by other, anything but poetic writers; and how readily the language responds to their desire to ' problematise' the common norms. Only a few of the best minds - chief among them Max and Alfred Weber, and Thomas Mann - are intent on understanding the age by searching for its continuities with the past. To others every new situation appears unprecedented, and therefore in need of a new kind of discourse. The need for neologisms, new uses for old words and syntactic deviations is felt in every living language. Here the need has hardly to be proved before it is supplied. The generation whose formative years were spent in the era between two World Wars has a catastrophic, disconnected or dismissive view of the past; to them, historical continuities appear as evasions of a full view of the present. Seeing what was in store - for them, for Germany and Europe - we may conclude that theirs was not the only possible attitude; but this is the wisdom of hindsight. Few accounts of the age by those who survived it are free from special pleas. Heidegger's portentous verbal inventions, Walter Benjamin's dark, oracular pronouncements, Theodor Adorno's self-conscious aphoristic brevities and syntactic affectations, Ernst Bloch's obsession with reified images and metaphorised concepts - all these are symptoms of the age, they enhance our knowledge of it only by indirection; not by the clarity of rational understanding, but by dark intimations. Perhaps nothing more could be expected. Such conceits erode the divide between philosophy and literature from one side, while Thomas Mann's palimpsests of learned styles, Robert Musil's Essayismus, Ernst Jiinger's 'philosophising' in arid abstractions erode it from the other. But philosophy's travail can also be literature's gain. For while this process leads to the disruption of philosophical thought, it enriches the repertory of the language of fiction. And what is true of language is also true of the divisions of knowledge. There is here a constant challenge to the genres of literature as well as the divisions of learning, and this challenge is met by the search for new systems, new 'categorical' or 'strictly

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scientific' divisions, for this is still a society in search of order. Here again the influence of Nietzsche, the most literary of modern philosophers, is dominant. By its very nature, 'Nietzsche's entire enterprise cuts across three established • philosophical conventions. He programmatically links ethics, epistemology and metaphysics, undermining alike the claims of empiricism and ontology. Furthermore, he presents his insights in a wide range of literary forms - from the extended essay (in The Birth of Tragedy) through essayistic collections {Untimely Meditations), long and short reflections and aphorisms, all the wray to his philosophical poems and the paramythology of Thus Spoke £arathustra. Lastly, he devises and explicitly defends a language, a c middle mode of discourse', in which no distinctions are made between arguments grounded in anecdote, image and metaphor, and those elaborating conceptual thought. (The search for system, which he saw as his last task, was cut short by his mental illness.) All these — mostly intuitive — rejections of the forms of contemporary philosophical discourse arose in the course of his agon with German idealism; and all that is said and implied in them is taken up by his literary heirs, sometimes with questionable results. The short forms he chose are signs of a creative haste and tension - of having too much to say, not (like some later 'aphorists') too little. The richness of his imagination and the energy of his intellect enabled him to assemble a treasure trove of insights of exemplary, occasionally dazzling clarity. Lesser minds expatiated on it, pressed it into systems and ideologies, and in the process corrupted it. Or, as Robert Musil's intellectually hyperactive hero observes: Wenn ein bedeutender Mann eine Idee in die Welt setzt, so wird sie sogleich von einem Verteilungsvorgang ergriffen, der aus Zuneigung und Abneigung besteht; zunachst reifien die Bewunderer groBe Fetzen daraus, so wie sie ihnen passen, und verzerren ihren Meister wie die Fiichse das Aas, dann vernichten die Gegner die schwachen Stellen, und iiber kurz bleibt von keiner Leistung mehr iibrig als ein Aphorismenvorrat, aus dem sich Freund und Feind, wie es ihnen paBt, bedienen.7

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When an important man brings an idea into the world, it is instantly seized on by a divisive process of assent and rejection. First of all the admirers tear great chunks out of it, just as it suits them, and rend their master to pieces as foxes rend a carcass, then the opponents destroy the weak spots, and in a short time nothing is left of his achievement but a stock of aphorisms from which friend and foe can help themselves whenever they feel like it.

The tug-of-war characteristic of the post-Nietzschean generations, between the desire for order and a new creativeness, can be illustrated by a linguistic device Nietzsche would have scorned. It is derived from the medieval mystics and taken over by Hegel from Jakob Boehme's speculations on the borderline between mysticism and philosophy. It consists in squeezing new meanings from old words by sweeping aside their contemporary meanings, etymologising them or their component parts, asserting that the earlier, supposedly 'original' meanings as compounded in their new forms are the 'real' or true ones, and finally offering the result as rational proof that the insight which initiated the process is valid; and if etymology won't yield the 'proof, then punning will. (Deconstructing the English word, 'dis-stance', in the hope that it will come to mean its opposite is the nearest I can get to Heidegger's etymologising of 'Entfernung'.8) The practitioners of this weird device seek to legitimate it by combining a ' scientific' appeal to an ' original' order of meanings with a 'mystical' or 'poetic' view of language. It is a modern version of the old Romantic ideal, Novalis's synthesis of'science and dream'. This sententious play on words is not an arbitrary example. To the extent that new situations are experienced as unprecedented, the truth about man cannot be grounded in an historical past. Instead, it will receive its confirmation elsewhere : from eschatology, myth — even from etymologies however doubtful. Language can do many things, but the part it is expected to play in this game it cannot sustain. 'A truth ... that can no longer be obtained.' The feeling that an era has come to an end is present in all these writers. This ' sense of an ending' is defiantly asserted or coolly taken for granted by

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the Germans among them, nostalgically cultivated by the Austrians. The feeling of dispossession - Erich Heller's theme of ' the disinherited mind' — is present as early as Buddenbrooks, it is dominant in the young Hofmannsthal's and in Trakl's poetry, in Rilke's Seventh Elegy, and in Benn's poem 'Spat'; it is expressed, and not always welcomed, even in Brecht's poems. This is indeed the historical matrix in which their theme is grounded. Four thinkers — Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Marx and Freud - have contributed to the pattern. In no case, not even in that of Marx, is it possible to speak of a positive, valuecreating inheritance. From Kierkegaard derives the idea of an abyss between religious transcendence and life in the world, which Rilke seeks to bridge in his celebrations of inwardness and in the figure of Orpheus: 1st er ein Hiesiger? Nein, aus beiden Reichen erwuchs seine weite Natur (Sonette an Orpheus 1, vi) Is he of our world? No, out of both realms did his wide nature draw its strength

while Kafka bridges the gulf in an extreme, Manichean fashion: 'Nothing exists', he writes in one of the notebooks that Max Brod preserved, ' apart from the spiritual world; what we call the world of the senses (die sinnliche Welt) is the evil in the spiritual, and what we call evil is only a necessity in a moment of our eternal development.' Of Nietzsche I have spoken at length; even Stefan George, who rejects the 'positive' aspects of his philosophising, reluctantly acknowledges his indebtedness to ' Nietzsche the judge of his age'; others are more reticent though equally indebted. Add to these influences the Marxist destruction of'bourgeois' history and ethics (accompanied by the clandestine importation of bits of Christian morality); add also the laconic dismemberment of the motives of human action by Freudian psychology's pessimistic analyses of human feelings (performed against the background of an adventitious 'reality principle'), and there emerges a pattern of radical doubts and criticisms of man's worth, which is reflected in, and in turn reflects, the exacting nature of the literary task. The possibility of failure is intimated in some of the finest achievements of the

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age. Failure, for these writers, had a certain enticement and sweetness — the enticement of Timon's wrath and the sweetness of Prospero's despair. The influences I have mentioned are powerful, but they are not overwhelming. They flow into new forms and new images, and these in turn transform the old ideas into new views of the world. Rilke's appraisal of Georg Trakl resumes our theme: Eine neue Dimension des geistigen Raumes scheint mit ihnen [Trakls Gedichten] ausgemessen und das gefuhlsstoffliche Vorurteil widerlegt, als ob in der Richtung der Klage nur Klage sei - : auch dort ist wieder Welt.9 A new dimension of mental space seems mapped out in them [Trakl's poems] and the prejudice against the emotion that is their subjectmatter is refuted — the prejudice that in the realm of lament there is nothing but lament; (but) there too is a world. As I followed the highways and byways along which my authors led me, every now and then I encountered another theme, which seemed at first to have no particular connection with my main enquiry. In a variety of contexts — literary as well as philosophical, moral as well as religious - I found myself compelled to consider the ordinary and the special, and the differences between them. I had to give thought to the question of what it was that gave the ordinary - whether it referred to people or situations, words or deeds, or ideas - that added worth or distinction (or perhaps that grace?) which made them special: special in what sense, under what conditions ? special to whom? But it wasn't always worth that was added. Just as my main theme turned out, unexpectedly, to stretch across the entire moral spectrum, so did this: for of course there were occasions, in that unfriendly age, when familiar evil, such as we know to be part of every age, became a special evil, not measurable by 'ordinary' criteria. This second enquiry, which turned out to be in some ways more difficult than the first, is pursued here only intermittently, at a few points; only where it rose spontaneously and would not go away; could not, as I came to see it, go away because it is, after all, inseparably connected with what this book is about.

CHAPTER 2

Reality

What do these writers seek to purchase ? All manner of things which they call by all manner of names, but above all they call it'Wirklichkeit'. What this word expresses in modern German literature is a concept and a feeling, a threat, and a goal. 'Reality', in this era, is a divinity which has its gospels, its liturgies and commandments; it is something to be accepted unquestioningly because to the metaphysicians it looks metaphysical, to the empiricist the epitome of empiricism; to the Marxist it is the product of economic forces, while to the psychologist it is, on the contrary, the foil of psychic forces; to the politician its promise is a vote-catching device, while the critics use it as a holdall for everything that won't go into their 'formal' or 'literary' arguments. Small wonder that, as manmade divinities tend to be, 'reality' is just about the most ambiguous term we have. A history, however sketchy, of what the word meant at various times should help us to understand how its strange hypostatisations came about. I am not proposing to answer the question, 'What is reality?', or even 'What is the true meaning of the word ?' My purpose is (i) to outline the various closely related meanings of the word 'Wirklichkeit' and of its synonyms throughout its very long history; (2) to describe the polarisation of meanings which occurred in the course of the nineteenth century, and Nietzsche's part in making the new polarity available to his literary heirs; (3) to illustrate the way German literature became involved in this process in the first decade of our century; and, finally, (4) to point to some of its political implications. Such a discussion, like others in this book, is part of a much larger topic, it is not confined either to the 61

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German-speaking countries or indeed to literature. The topic, the ideologising of'reality', is relevant to all modern cultures. From its earliest uses through the writings of the mystics to the end of the nineteenth century and beyond, the word ' Wirklichkeit' is marked by a single central connotation which recurs through several fairly well-defined meanings. The word is an abstract noun formation from wirken - a verb in common usage from the first document extant in the German language, the Wessobrunner Prayer (c. 800), throughout its entire history meaning 'to effect by acting on'. Hence its central connotation is that of an activity in the human world — a being-at-work rather than a static condition or state of things. In this way it is used in Tauler's sermons (after 1330) as a term for human activity and busyness: ' reality' as action is one of the conditions to which a man's soul is called by God, the other being inactivity or emptiness ('wiirklicheit' as opposed to 'lidikeit'). Meister Eckhart uses a near-synonym, Wirksamkeit, to define human activity as ' a breaking-out of divine inwardness into effectiveness' ('Tatigsein ist ein Ausbrechen der Gottinnigkeit in die Wirksamkeit'). The author of a famous devotional tract of 1518, Theologia Deutsch, sees one and the same will at work ('wirksam') in God and man. But while in human kind this will is 'active and willing', in God it is 'original and essential, without all works and reality' ('ohn alle werck und wurcklichkeit'). We find the connotation again, though within a different denominational framework, in Leibniz's Monadology of 1714 (|[ 41-5). There the perfection of God as the centre of the monadic system is designated as 'la realite positive', and the monadic system in turn is' ce qu'il y a de reel dans la possibility'. The system is 'real' only to the extent that it manifests 'appetitive' energies acting upon 'renitent, that is resisting substance'. But (it will be objected), seeing that Leibniz's Monadology was written in French, how could quotations from it illustrate the continuity of Wirklichkeit? Certainly, in his use of ' realite' Leibniz was in no way influenced by meditating on the history of the German word (as was Tauler or Jakob Boehme, or for that matter Heidegger). What makes the passage from the Monadology relevant to our argument is that it belongs not to the

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history of a word but to the history of a conception of the world in which 'activity is the characteristic of substances'. This is a world in which ' the human mind cannot rest: to be motionless, that is without movement toward further perception, is torment to the mind' - the active mind, that is; as to the other kind,' La tranquillite est un degre pour avancer vers la stupidite' ('Tranquillity is a step in the progress towards stupidity5). This argument forms the dynamic aspect of the ' rationalism' taken up by Leibniz's disciples and popularisers. At much the same period, that of the early Enlightenment (1720), Christian Wolff defines 'reality' as 'the fulfilment of the possible', while Lessing's friend, Reimarus, describes truth that is made visible before our eyes and palpable to our grasp as 'truth in its reality'; the opposite, in this scheme, is 'mere appearance'. With Goethe, the notion of ' reality' is usually opposed to ' possibility', occasionally to ' illusion' or' chimera'; in Schiller's theoretical writings 'raw', 'barbaric' or 'base reality' is contrasted with a moral or aesthetic 'ideal' which acts as ' reality's' precept and guide. In the first edition of the Critique of Pure Reason (1781) Kant defines 'the real' as 'that which is connected with the material conditions of experience (or sensation)'; and in the chapter on ' paralogisms of Pure Reason' he adds that, even though space is 'the mere form of our ideas', our ability to perceive objects in space proves that space is, or has, 'reality' and is not merely 'an invention of our imagination'. The contrast on which Kant relies here, between 'reality' and 'imagination' ('Wirklichkeit'-'Einbildungskraft'), may be as old as Plato's Republic (e.g. Book x, 598), but in German thinking it does not seem to go back beyond the Baroque, where it merges with the dichotomy of' Sein-Schein' (' Being-Appearance'). With Hegel's usage of the word the modern, polysemic part of its history begins. In a famous passage in the Phenomenology of Mind (1807), Hegel contrasts the generous human heart (ruled by the law that is valid 'only for itself) with 'reality' seen as a 'contradiction' of that law. Reality 'is thus on the one hand a law which oppresses the single individuality, a violent order of the world which contradicts the law of the heart, and on the

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other hand it is the humanity which suffers under that order, and which does not follow the law of the heart but is subject to an alien necessity5. In his lectures on aesthetics, however, Hegel refers to the common usage of his time, which ascribes c reality and truth' ('Realitat, Wirklichkeit und Wahrheit') to 'the whole sphere of the empirical inner and outer world', but then goes on to reject that usage. At this point the setting up of an alternative meaning still requires an explicit repudiation of the established meaning. Defending art against the charge of being mere deceptive appearance, Hegel writes: 'Only beyond the immediacy of sensation and of the external objects is genuine reality to be found.' 'Genuine', here, is a tell-tale word, it suggests a flexibility and an antithesis - false or inauthentic 'reality'-inconceivable in earlier usage; and Hegel's 'external' connotes 'superficial'. Art is seen as a sphere of 'the Spirit' beyond all contingencies and beyond 'the deception of this bad, transient world ... of ordinary reality'. Art is a 'Beingin-and-for-itself, and as such 'a higher, Spirit-born reality'. Schiller's terminology and meaning have been reversed: the material world (Schiller's 'reality') has become 'external', a mere contingency, while art (Schiller's ideal precept for mundane 'reality' to follow) is now the real 'reality'. The two meanings I have quoted from Hegel — the one derived from common usage, the other which is his own — are fairly far apart; the second foreshadows the drastic semantic change we shall note at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. If in Plato's philosophy the role of art was merely that of intimating the lower, worldly region to the higher, timeless realm of the Ideas, Hegel's view of it is entirely historicised. He represents art and the aesthetic as the content of the higher sphere at a certain stage in the development of the Spirit. Hegel's historical consciousness is taken up by the next generation of German writers: Otto Ludwig becomes the chief mediator of the new, antithetical meaning. In his programmatic essay on 'Poetic Realism' (1858) Ludwig argues that 'common reality' is not — or rather, should not be — the concern of contemporary art, and contrasts it with 'the magic world of art', which is said to present a ' truer appearance of reality'; and

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in a review of The Mill on the Floss (after i860) he praises George Eliot for achieving the highest in art, 'the truth of reality'. Taking Shakespeare as a stick to beat Schiller with, Ludwig decrees that the new dramatic art shall represent 'not an impoverished but an enriched reality', its dialogue shall be 'the conversation of reality impregnated by and reborn in the Spirit'. The contrasts here are less marked (in Hegel, art is a certain kind of'reality', in Ludwig art seems merely to portray it), yet the Hegelian echoes are unmistakable. Like many other passages in his work, Schopenhauer's definition contains an allusion to Tauler and the mystics generally. In the First Book of Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung (The World as Will and Idea)

of 1819, he writes: 'Cause and effect are ... the entire essence of matter: its being is its acting' (' ihr Seyn ist ihr Wirken'). This is why in German the quintessence of all that is material is called 'Wirklichkeit', a word that is much more appropriate than ' Realitat' —more appropriate, that is, to Schopenhauer's notion of matter and to what he proclaims as a German feeling for the world. Schopenhauer's attempt to argue for a distinction between the German word and its ' foreign' synonym continues to be made throughout the next century, though without much success. Almost a hundred years later, Hofmannsthal in his panGermanic mood will write: DaB wir Deutschen das uns Umgebende als ein Wirkendes - die 'Wirklichkeit' bezeichnen, die lateinischen Europaer als die 'Dinglichkeit', zeigt die fundamentale Verschiedenheit des Geistes, und dafi jene und wir in ganz verschiedener Weise auf dieser Welt zu Hause sind.1 That we Germans should call all that surrounds us 'Wirklichkeit', i.e. something that acts, whereas the Latin Europeans call it' Dinglichkeit' [i.e.' reality',' thingness', from res], shows a fundamental difference in spirit, and that they and we are at home in the world in fundamentally different ways. The young Nietzsche may well have Schopenhauer's definition in mind when summarising Heraclitus's central doctrine: 'The eternal and sole process of becoming', Nietzsche writes, 'the total impermanence of everything real [die Vergdnglichkeit alles Wirklichen] - which, according to Heraclitus's teach-

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ing, only acts and becomes and is not — amounts to a terrible, paralysing idea. In its effect it closely resembles the experience we have when, during an earthquake, we lose confidence in the firm ground underfoot.' For the first time, perhaps, what even for Hegel had been 'ordinary reality' has become 'terrible, paralysing'. These remarks come from Nietzsche's notes for a history of Greek philosophy, which he abandoned in favour of completing The Birth of Tragedy (1872), and with that work, Nietzsche's first published book, we turn to our main theme. The book's antiSocratic vein is in some ways deceptive. For what Nietzsche undertakes here is a re-interpretation and re-valuation of the Platonic idea of a transcendent by making of it the object of art and the content of the highest in art. It is this transformation which decisively influences the generation of young poets and writers at the turn of the century. There is no consistency - either in The Birth of Tragedy or anywhere else - in Nietzsche's philosophical vocabulary; like most other writers he uses 'Realitat' and ' Wirklichkeit' interchangeably (except where he puts 'Realitat' into quotation marks, to deride it as the object of realist or naturalistic aesthetics). More important than that, there is no overall consistency in the context-specific meanings he gives to this terminology.2 Yet this flexibility to the point of contradiction, this conscious and instinctive refusal to settle on a single set of meanings, on a single view of the world, or of experience, or 'reality', is part of the attraction he has for our writers; it is to them a sign of his literariness. As we have seen, by the end of the eighteenth century the early, theological meaning of the word was secularised; and, except for its usage in Hegelian aesthetics, up to the end of the nineteenth century the word covered a fairly coherent range of meanings to do with ordinary experience, life in the world, and the like. We know what Thomas Hardy has in mind when, in his Nietzschean poem 'God's Funeral' (1912), he speaks of'rude uncompromising reality'. These older meanings were anything but esoteric or recondite; and this unemphatic usage continues

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from the early nineteenth century into the present day, often in opposition to words like 'semblance', 'appearance', 'Schein', 'Unwirklichkeit', 'Irrealitat' and the like. Jakob and Wilhelm Grimm's Deutsches Worterbuch was begun in 1848; the appropriate volume, from which several of my quotations derive, was compiled sometime in the 1930s. The long-suffering historian of the later era must not be surprised (nor is it outrageously irrelevant) to note that the common-or-garden usage of' Wirklichkeit' is illustrated in that dictionary with a quotation from the autobiographical chapter of Mein Kampf (1924-26) where Hitler writes that he 'transformed [his threat to give up going to school] into a reality' ('Ich setzte [diese Drohung] in eine Wirklichkeit urn'). 3 Now this, of course, is no more than a pretentious way of saying that at the age of fourteen the author became a drop-out, and the phrase is in no sense ambiguous. Yet it illustrates an important step in our argument. To call an expression pretentious is to criticise it for being derived from a different or higher intellectual register than is appropriate to the context in which it is used. A similar shift of register, which may but need not always be pretentious, accompanies the new, polarised view of ' reality' throughout the age in which Nietzsche's influence begins to spread. The shift towards philosophical speculation which now takes place within what is accepted as literature - the immense intellectualising of literature we now witness — is something quite new. One important sign of this shift is provided by the term ' reality', which, without entirely shedding its characteristic philosophical and theological usages, now fully enters both common discourse and belles-lettres alike. At this point the polarisation we have noted in Nietzsche's usage becomes general. Retaining the relative indeterminacy and abstractness of its origins, the word is popularised and down-graded - it becomes a jack-of-alltrades; as in Hofmannsthal's aphorism 'Reality is the fable convenue of the philistines.' Yet at the same time new and very different meanings loom up, resulting from an opposite process: in literature and in philosophy - and to a more limited extent in common parlance too - the word is elevated to a new, ' higher' meaning. It continues to be used in what we may call its

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unemphatic meaning, yet it is also made an issue of. And whenever that happens, it turns into the very opposite of the everyday and solid, the opposite of being an object of ordinary sense perception: it comes to designate a privileged moment, a state on the margins of, hostile to, or contemptuous of, everyday experience. So frequent is the process which I have just described as prone to turning into a cliche that, from the turn of the century onwards, it becomes part of a Weltanschauung. Whether 'reality' is made to connote value (as in £h6here Wirklichkeit5) or nonvalue ('Realitat', 'gemeine Wirklichkeit'), each time it is the centre-piece of a dichotomous yet value-related, implicitly total view of the world: what comes into being is the ideology and literature of' reality'. Nor is German the only language in which these changes happen: in English too the word, while retaining a curious abstractness and indeterminacy, is both popularised and given a high metaphysical status. Obviously, the term gains currency because it gives expression to — and in a chimeric way fulfils — some sort of deeply felt modern need. Yet one cannot help concluding that the form in which this need is expressed is no better than a contingency, that the terminology of' the real' is no more than the dispensable cultural option of one era, while other eras seem to do perfectly well without it. Thus the word ' reality' does not occur anywhere in Shakespeare or Dante, or in the English Bible (nor, incidentally, does 'Wirklichkeit' occur in Luther's German Bible); and again, the word used in the Minor Doxology (Gloria Patri) is not' Reality without end'. There is a difference. One might describe it by saying that one who speaks of'the world' (as does St John in the First Epistle) is expressing a necessity of human nature (to be human is to be in the world), whereas one who makes an issue of'reality' is opting for an overworked though unacknowledged metaphysical metaphor. This new notion of'reality' is the very hallmark of the modern age. Four closely related predicates are attributed to it. First, it is seen as a precarious, problematic state — a state of mind or of the heart, yet also (as in The Birth of Tragedy) the object and product of the mythopoeic imagination. Above all, it

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results from a translation of the outside world into a world within. Virginia Woolf is unlikely to have been familiar with any of the sources I have quoted, yet her formal definition fits them perfectly: What is meant by 'reality'? It would seem to be something very erratic, very undependable - now to be found in a dusty road, now in a scrap of newspaper in the street, now a daffodil in the sun. It lights up a group in a room and stamps some casual saying. It overwhelms one walking home beneath the stars and makes the silent world more real than the world of speech - and then there it is again in an omnibus in the uproar of Piccadilly. Sometimes, too, it seems to dwell in shapes too far away from us to discern what their nature is. But whatever it touches, it fixes and makes permanent... Now the writer, as I think, has the chance to live more than other people in the presence of this reality.4 'Reality 5 as the privileged creative moment becomes the opposite of'reality' in Kant's sense, so much so that in section 4 of The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche can speak contemptuously of the old 'empirical reality', reducing it to 'das WahrhaftNichtseiende', that which 'truly is (or has) no being'. 5 Secondly, it is a state of mind or spirit supremely hard to attain, the fruit of a paramount existential quest, often involving the sacrifice of the endeavouring self and its world. This is what Nietzsche means when he emphasises the existentially destructive, annihilating, yet artistically fruitful nature of 'Dionysiac reality'. However, what is so surprising (as well as characteristic of the age) is that, with these connotations of precariousness and even of terror, the word enters common parlance, so that there ' reality' and ' the real' come to mean all those things which are uncomfortable and without comfort, which hurt and are 'authentic' because they hurt. In an essay published in 1911 Freud sought to modify the rule of ' the pleasure principle' by opposing to it a new concept which he called 'the reality principle'. 6 What this 'reality' means, other than that it excludes all pleasure, he doesn't say; as with other such terms, he practises philosophical incuria, taking its negative connotations for granted. Whatever new insights into the mind he may derive from this move, he seems unaware of how closely

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it follows the fashion of the age: ruled by ' the reality principle', the world becomes the enemy of the mind. Any political or social implications this might have are not considered. Thirdly, seeing that it is connected with an individual existential endeavour, the concept of' reality' comes to have a relative connotation - some things are ' more real' than others, and in this sense it acquires certain important political implications (life under a charismatic leader will be ' felt' to be ' more real' than life in a struggling parliamentary democracy). Again the contrast with the old meanings is instructive. Those old meanings can be summed up by saying that, whatever the value of' reality' to man, it was traditionally seen as something wholly there, given in experience. Nietzsche, however, can write of' the deeper reality' of the Dionysian or catastrophic view of the world (as compared with the Apolline view), and of our historically determined inability to face it; of 'the greater reality' of music over language, attributable to its disclosing a 'greater' truth about the world. Finally and most disconcertingly, the new meaning perpetuates and deepens the old dichotomy of reality' versus language; and again a forceful statement of this peculiar dichotomy is to be found in The Birth of Tragedy. For the book criticises Socratic culture as verbal and 'merely' literary, and therefore a phenomenon of decadence, in opposition to an earlier culture based on the chthonic, Dionysian and 'musical' grounding of pre-Socratic, true art. Here and in numerous later reflections Nietzsche writes as though (to invert Hobbes's statement) truth and 'reality' were to be found everywhere except 'in proposition'. As we shall see, many of the writers in the shadow of Nietzsche take his argument to the point where it runs counter to his main intention: language ends up by being less ' real' than silence, life less authentic than death — especially violent and sacrificial death. Placed in this context it becomes obvious that the scorn of language voiced here is one of the signs of Nietzsche's and the Nietzscheans' distrust of reason. However questionable this language-' reality' dichotomy may be, not only in logic but on

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any commonsense view of things too - and it is difficult to understand how it could have been seriously defended for so long — its fruitfulness as a literary theme is immense. But the same is true of all the 'reality' attributes I have mentioned. They illustrate an unsettling paradox concerning the role of general ideas in literature. The peculiar logic of some of these ideas, their contradictoriness and their deeply disconcerting implications alike do not necessarily impair their importance as the donnees and themes of the literary imagination. Let me sum up the argument so far. The changes I have enumerated in the foregoing sections of this chapter outline different meanings of'Wirklichkeit', 'Realitat' and 'reality5 as they are conveyed in the changing uses of those words: one meaning, or one group of meanings, has been split into two. These are not just distinct meanings, or nuances of the same thing, but polar opposites. It is as if some people had ceased to believe that 'white' means 'white' and had decided it means ' white' and also ' black'; others, that ' white' really means ' black'; and others again were using the word indiscriminately, in both meanings, perhaps without being aware of it. Hegel and Nietzsche are among those who are saying that 'white means also black'; and the twentieth-century authors radicalise that by saying,' The true meaning of white is black, only people don't see this because they can't take black, and so they pretend it's white as it has always been.' This split, which makes a single word stand for two opposite things, has facilitated the active pursuit of' black' as though it were ' white': it has given a new 'value' to the sensational and the catastrophic as though they were the everyday; which in turn has led to the devaluing of the everyday. This process took place in a world of rapid changes. It did not provide the sole cause of those changes, nor however was it irrelevant to them. Since words are not only repositories of old experiences but also the sources of new, the polarisation I have described was not only a sign of those changes, but also an agent that accelerated them. And all this began long before the everyday really did become catastrophic on a global scale.

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It is time to turn to the literary consequences of this semantic development. In 1910, aged thirty-five, Rainer Maria Rilke published his only novel, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge [The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge). The heavily

autobiographical material is fictionalised in the form of a diary kept by a Danish aristocrat of twenty-eight, almost penniless, a member of what Marx would have called das Lumpenproletariat, about to be swallowed up by the anonymous city and its army of the down-and-out. Malte has come to Paris in order (as he says) ' to learn to see': that is, to learn to cultivate his perception and his capacity for creatively experiencing the suffering and decaying city around him, as well as certain pictures, poems, novels and musical compositions closely associated with suffering and decay; and to do all this in order to learn to retrace his perceptions with his pen. In short: his life in Paris is Malte's apprenticeship to the immense, endless, all-consuming task of writing. The pages of his diary, interlaced with prose sketches and letters, record the experience he undergoes, and the way he is gradually defeated by it; the pages of the novel describe the process of learning and exemplify its results. These descriptions are of two different though complementary kinds. One kind (which I shall not illustrate here) is supremely concrete and vivid - a narrative of events and episodes concerned with (as often as not) details of deprivation, disease and death. The other kind, which often takes the form of self-revealing discourse, is equally vigorous and telling, yet its lexis is abstract, conceptual and philosophical. Here is an example from one of the many drafts of letters Malte writes home, to his relations in the ancestral castle in Denmark: Glaube nur nicht, daB ich hier an Enttauschungen leide, im Gegenteil. Es wundert mich manchmal, wie bereit ich alles Erwartete aufgebe fur das Wirkliche, selber wenn es arg ist. Mein Gott, wenn etwas davon sich teilen liefie. Aber ware es dann, ware es dann? nein, es ist nur um den Preis des Alleinseins.7 But do not imagine that I suffer from disappointment here - quite the contrary. I am sometimes astonished tofindhow ready I am to give up all that I expected for the real, even when the reality is terrible. My God, if only any of it could be shared! Ah — but would it exist then, would it exist? No, it is only at the price of solitude.

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The idiosyncratic emphasis on sein ('wenn etwas davon sich teilen lieBe. Aber ware es dann, ware es dann?') as well as its context ('Nein, es ist nur um den Preis des Alleinseins') are examples of what I meant by the combination of the vivid with the abstract and, earlier, by the intellectualising of literature. With the mention of cdas Wirkliche' (in contrast to 'das Erwartete') the old unemphatic meaning is made an issue of, moved into the centre of the perceived experience (or rather of its record), and in the process turned into its opposite. Malte's letter continues: Die Existenz des Entsetzlichen in jedem Bestandteil der Luft. Du atmest es ein mit Durchsichtigem; in dir aber schlagt es sich nieder, wird hart, nimmt spitze, geometrische Formen an zwischen den Organen; denn alles, was sich an Qual und Grauen begeben hat auf den Richtpla tzen, in den Folterstuben, den Tollhausern, den Operationssalen, unter den Briickenbogen im Nachherbst: alles das ist von einer zahen Unverganglichkeit, alles das besteht auf sich und hangt, eifersiichtig auf alles Seiende, an seiner schrecklichen Wirklichkeit. The existence of the terrible in every particle of air! You breathe it in as something transparent; but inside you it condenses, hardens, it assumes sharply pointed, geometrical forms between your organs. For all the torments and agonies wrought on scaffolds, in torturechambers, mad-houses and operating theatres, under the vaults of bridges in late autumn: all these have a stubborn imperishability, all these persist in themselves and, jealous of all being, cling to their terrible reality. The opposite of that ' terrible reality' (we read a little later) is kitsch, ' the sugared water of twilight quietude' and the false, inauthentic security of those who try to exclude that 'reality' from their lives. These lines could not have been written by Nietzsche, but Rilke is using here in his own, characteristic manner an area of philosophical expressiveness made available by Nietzsche. The fact that this 'reality' is said to be 'terrible' does not make it unwanted; on the contrary, we are intended to see the experience in its full intensity and destructiveness as a hallmark of authenticity. Twelve years later, in the tumultuous month of February 1922, Rilke reached the summit of his poetic achievement. The

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Duino Elegies, which he then completed, are a cycle of scenes and images chosen for their particular fittingness to represent the condition of modern man, often by throwing a light on that condition from the perspective of other ages. Explicitly as well as by elegiac intimation the poems are expressions of an acute historical consciousness, the consciousness of a change which they register with unparalleled intensity. The tenth and last of them asks the question: What is man's destiny 'under the stars'? If it is a journey, from a here to a there , how is such a journey to be conveyed? How, in particular, is the journey to be conveyed in the light of the poet's conviction, expressed in the First Elegy, ' Aber Lebendige machen / alle den Fehler, daB sie zu stark unterscheiden' ('But the living / all make the mistake of dividing too sharply')? For that notion of a complete, catastrophic break between the two 'realities', of a division conceived on the analogy of an absolute division between life and death, is an essential feature of the change I have described, yet it also belongs to an eschatology which Rilke's poetry is intent on overcoming. This involves the poet, the bearer of the elegiac message, in a profound relativisation of historical time; this relativisation (with which we shall be concerned in the next chapter) goes with most pronominal and all deictic particles with every 'we', every 'now' or 'once' or 'here' — used in the Elegies.

The journey described in the Tenth Elegy begins in the streets of a city, 'die Leid-Stadt', 8 the city of distraction and of suffering insufficiently acknowledged and validated, of suffering denied and thus wasted. The scene moves to a suburban fairground, and there we find ourselves in the presence of a young man who is leaving the region of the inauthentic city, guided (but this will become clear only in retrospect) by a young girl, perhaps as Dante was guided by Beatrice. Here is a last glance on what he is leaving: Von Beifall zu Zufall taumelt er weiter; denn Buden jeglicher Neugier werben, trommeln und plarrn. Fur Erwachsene aber ist noch besonders zu sehn, wie das Geld sich vermehrt, anatomisch,

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nicht zur Belustigung nur: der Geschlechtsteil des Gelds, alles, das Ganze, der Vorgang, - das unterrichtet und macht fruchtbar .... Oh aber gleich daruber hinaus, hinter der letzten Planke, beklebt mit Plakaten des 'Todlos', jenes bitteren Biers, das den Trinkenden suB scheint, wenn sie immer dazu frische Zerstreuungen kaun ..., gleich in Riicken der Planke, gleich dahinter, ists wirklich. Kinder spielen, und Liebende halten einander, — abseits, ernst, im armlichen Gras, und Hunde haben Natur.9 From cheering to chance, on he goes reeling after his luck. For booths that can please the most curious tastes are drumming and bawling. Especially worth seeing (for adults only): the breeding of Money! anatomical, Not just entertaining! Money's organs on view! Nothing concealed! The whole process - instructive, and guaranteed to increase fertility! .... Oh, but then just outside, behind the last hoarding, plastered with placards for 'Deathless', that bitter beer that tastes quite sweet to its drinkers so long as they chew with it plenty of fresh distractions, just at the back of the hoardings, just behind them, it's real! Children are playing, and lovers holding each other, - aside, gravely, in pitiful grass, and dogs follow their nature. It is the culmination of the Tenth Elegy, and in some ways of Rilke's poetic oeuvre; it is the culmination, too, of the diction and literature of'reality'. My second example is taken from Robert Musil's first novel, Young Torless, of 1906; the work belongs in some ways to the time-hallowed genre of the Bildungsroman, the novel of initiation and development. At the same time it is a grim, AustroHungarian variant on the public school novel (though — worse luck — without a breath of Stalky & Co.). The narrative, again obviously autobiographical in many of its details, centres on a boy's experiences in an aristocratic military academy, culminating in his reluctant yet fascinated participation, with two other boys, in subjecting one of their schoolfellows to blackmail,

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torture and sexual assault. 'The reality one is describing is always only a pretext', 10 Musil writes in his diary at the time, meaning that the outward events of the story are used as a pretext for its psychological and philosophical purport; and this plan, translated into the moral sphere, is intended to motivate and justify the main events of the novel. Not that young Torless's actions, or those of his companions, receive any moral condemnation. On the contrary: the point at issue is to show that these events (whose impact on the victim must obviously be devastating, though we are not told so) belong necessarily to the adolescent hero's intellectual and emotional development; the harsher and more hideous the events are, the more they show up the 'pretext', the 'unreality' of his family background and of the whole adult world, but above all of the school and the various kinds of learning with which the adult world seeks to stifle his intellectual curiosity and damp down his emotional turmoil. (With the help of a flagrant pun, such as one would expect from an author who began his career as a mathematician-engineer, a lengthy discussion on the function of the ' unreal' number of y/ — 1 is introduced, as an example of the spuriousness of all 'scientific' knowledge.) 'True reality' is to be found in the little secret torture room, its walls draped in red flag cloth and furnished with whips, lamps and a revolver, a hideout under the rafters of the old monastic building in which the school is housed - the room to which the boys bring their victim and where they torture him. The action turns into a search for those ' moments of almost poetic inspiration' of cruelty from which young Torless will eventually fashion his literary career: ' It was as though something had fallen, like a stone, into the vague solitude of his dreamy imaginings. It was there. There was nothing to be done about it. It was reality. 3l1 Torless abruptly leaves when his two comrades decide to denounce their victim for the theft that had enabled them to blackmail him. The episodes of his last months at the school are the ' confusions' — the German title of the novel is Die Verwirrungen des Z°gtings Torless - which he must go through, regardless of the cost to himself; the cost to his victim is never considered. Giving an account to himself of what happened, Torless

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glaubte nicht, daB sie [die zwei Kameraden] so litten, wie er es von sich wuBte. Die Dornenkrone seiner Gewissensbisse schien ihnen zu fehlen... Je haBlicher und unwiirdiger das war, was ihm Basini bot, desto groBer war der Gegensatz zu dem Gefiihl einer leidenden Feinheit, das sich nachher einzustellen pflegte.12 did not think that [his two companions] suffered as he knew he did. The crown of thorns that his tormenting conscience set on his brow seemed to be missing from theirs... The uglier and unworthier everything was that Basini [the victim] offered him, the greater was the contrast with that feeling of suffering sensibility which would afterwards set in. And again, recounting the events later in life, Torless says with a smile: ' Ich leugne ganz gewiB nicht, daB es sich hier um eine Erniedrigung handelte. Warum auch nicht? Sie verging. Aber etwas von ihr blieb fur immer zuriick: jene kleine Menge Giftes, die notig ist, um der Seele die allzu sichere und beruhigte Gesundheit zu nehmen und ihr dafiir eine feinere, zugescharfte, verstehende zu geben. 5l3 'Of course, I don't deny that it was a degrading affair. And why not? The degradation passed off, yet it left something behind - that small admixture of poison which is needed to rid the soul of its overconfident, complacent healthiness, and to give it instead a sort of health that is more acute, and subtler, and more understanding ...' And, when Torless is seriously threatened by his companions, the narrator comments: Die Gefahr hatte ihn mitten in das Wirbeln der Wirklichkeit gezogen.14 The danger had drawn him into the maelstrom of reality. The argument of that interior monologue, certainly, is pure Nietzsche. This then, is the story of the self on its indiscriminate quest for ' true reality' and experience — a quest proceeding without authorial dissociation or criticism: the thorny crown of tormenting conscience is proof of the suffering of an aesthetic sensibility, 'eine leidende Feinheit'. And here too we find the language—' reality' dichotomy I mentioned earlier, first in Torless's inability and later in his unwillingness to explain to

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others what these experiences mean to him, in his deep conviction that to explain them in words is to debase and trivialise them, to deprive them of what later writers will call their 'existential reality'. Like Rilke's Malte, Musil's Young Torless stands on the threshold of modern German literature. All these ideas, which constitute the moral (but morally unexplored) horizon of the novel, are central to that search for a redemption, a validation and an encompassing meaning of life to which, at its most characteristic, the word 'reality' or 'true reality' is attached. And this goal, here too, is said to be attainable only on the margins of experience - it is the harshness and hardness of that 'reality', the difficulty in the way of attaining it that are offered as proving the value of the goal. The fact th^t the young gentlemen who dominate the action are Austrian while their chosen victim is given an Italian name, and that the countryside around the school is populated by sordid Slavonic yokels, including a prostitute who attends to the sexual needs of the Herrenvolk - all this has obvious political overtones on which no critic I have ever read has commented (how conscious young Musil was of them I cannot tell). But what makes the novel an even more ominous portent of things to come is that ' the feeling of suffering sensibility' is denied to the victim and attributed to the tormentor alone, for after all it is he alone who 'braves the maelstrom of reality'. What this early novel of Musil's offers is a wholly uncritical and crude version of our central theme. The development outlined in the early part of this chapter was not primarily a history of the word 'reality', but of the feelings and goals it evokes. Such feelings and goals may be attained by diverse verbal means: as the pursuit of this new, catastrophic divinity of the real becomes a common literary theme, so the word itself becomes dispensable. The narrator of Buddenbrooks has no need to use it when presenting Thomas Buddenbrook's vision of'death and the indestructibility of our being as such' (the title of the Schopenhauer chapter he has been reading). Yet the terminology of ' the real' and of the exchange of one ' reality' for another would describe the story of

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Thomas's vision as appropriately as it does so many others. A pattern is set. It is traced out in the endings of Hermann Hesse's stories, of Alfred Doblin's Berlin Alexanderplatz', it is present in Heimito von Doderer's search for a 'second reality' in The Demons (where 'the first reality' of bourgeois life is presented as corrupted by bad faith and routine); and it is part of Robert Musil's search for 'the other - mystical - state' of mind and heart in The Man without Qualities. Franz Werfel's The Forty Days of Musa Dagh, one of the few important political novels of the inter-war years, provides a transition to the dominant ideology of the age. Conceived during the author's extended tour of the Middle East in 1929, its massive Tolstoyan tableau depicts an episode in the persecution and massacres of the Armenians by the Young Turks in 1914-15; by 1933, when the novel was published, and probably already during its composition, Werfel had become aware of its potential as an allegory of the persecution of the Jews in Germany and Central Europe. The members of a small Armenian rural community decide to defend themselves against the Turks by setting up an armed camp on Musa Dagh, i.e. Mount Moses, in the coastal mountains west of Antioch. Extensive study of documents in the archives of the French and German Ministries of War enabled Werfel to tell the story of the Armenians' heroic defence and eventual rescue by Allied warships in convincing realistic detail. Their powerful, religiously motivated racial hatred is presented as a driving force throughout forty terrible days of siege, attack and counterattack, whereas the motives of their Turkish oppressors are more diffuse and more directly political. This complex motivation, as well as the creation of a leader figure not provided by Werfel's documentary sources, are essential features of the realistic novel, but what makes it so suitable as a Jewish allegory is a narrative in which racial, national and religious motives coincide. We are left in no doubt where the narrator's sympathies lie; nor is there any authorial criticism or dissociation from this unholy mixture of motives. Not a sensitive stylist at the best of times, Werfel uses a racialist diction without noticing how close it brings him to the literature of con-

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temporary fascism. To this day the novel is read by Armenian nationalists in exile as an important document in support of their activities. What clearly legitimates this reading is WerfePs invocation of divine support for their national cause. In the figure of Gabriel Bagradian, an Armenian brought up in Paris, deracine, with a French wife and frenchified son, 'fate' has united all the traits of a charismatic leader of men. Bagradian happens to be on a visit to his native village when the persecutions break out; he is rich, head of the local aristocracy; and he has received full military training as an officer during the Balkan crisis of 1908, when the Turks wooed their Armenian minority. While all the neighbouring communities surrender cravenly to the Turkish marauders, Bagradian is determined to defend and avenge his kith and kin. Seen in the perspective of his life in cosmopolitan Paris, 'Blut und Volk' were mere empty words; now they become ' a test of his own reality'. But when at last, after much suffering and great heroism, many deaths in battle and acts of betrayal, the miracle-like rescue comes, Bagradian is not among the survivors. His spiritual development has moved against the grain of the realistic narrative, into a cloud of mystical redemption: 'The reality around him became as unreal as reality always is where its most real concentrations are to be found.' The ancestral religious consciousness he is said to have regained - ' the fate of his blood' - leads him out of this world, into death. And in his freely chosen death, 'Gabriel Bagradian is more real than all men and all nations'. What his life is sacrificed for, we are not told. On any mundane view - as opposed to that nebulous perspective of' the real' - his sacrifice is pointless, but it fits the destructive ideology of the age. The ideology of the oppressors is shared by their victim. I spoke of the quest for a new ' reality' as a cultural option of our age. The need it fulfils, or promises to fulfil, arises in an age of deep bewilderment and unease. This new conception is not intended to bring reassurance and certainty; indeed it rejects all certainties and comfort as inauthentic. The heedless enthusiasm with which almost the entire German intelligentsia and almost all German writers - with a very few honorable exceptions -

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welcomed the outbreak of war in 1914 as a solution to their political, national, cultural and personal quandaries indicates that what they were seeking, not least in their overt declarations, was an extreme, penitential experience; and the events after 1933 constitute a further radicalisation of that same quest. The point of these observations must not be misunderstood. I am not saying that the quest I have been describing necessarily leads to, or fully explains, or contains a sufficient cause of, Hitler's National Socialism. For one thing, the intellectuals of the ideological Left used much the same terminology for their own ends, yet this did not save them from defeat. Their use of it displays inconsistencies, ambiguities and confusions that begin with Karl Marx 15 and don't end with Ernst Bloch. We meet them in Marxism's claim to stand on the threshold of' the true reality' of the classless millennium. More directly relevant to our theme, we meet the terminology of the true, working-class 'reality' in Marxist literary criticism's war of words, launched in the late thirties by the Moscow-based spokesmen of'Socialist Realism'. At a time when other adversaries might have offered a more appropriate target, this war against writers who were critical of the party line on literature - chief among them Bertolt Brecht - was waged in a style every bit as aggressive and violent as was the rhetoric of the other intellectuals - those who stayed at home and eagerly offered their services to the other kind of 'reality', that of National Socialism. And nothing — from the Moscow trials of the thirties to the workers' revolt of '53 and the building of the Berlin Wall in '61 - seems to have made any difference to the belief that whoever has ' the reality' has the power. If this belief- whether it is held on the Left or the Right - means that whoever fashions a Weltanschauung is assured of power, then it is less than a half truth; whatever else it may mean is tautologous. It is a truism that no political ideology or political event has a single cause. The terminology of 'the real' is not related to politics by a simple causal nexus. This becomes obvious as soon as we recall that the search for a new 'reality' is, first and foremost, a literary quest; and that the relationship between the

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creations of the literary imagination and the expectations of politicians, at all times and even in totalitarian states, is full of indirections and indeterminacies. Moreover, this quest is European in scope. It constitutes a major and, I believe, profound literary theme, confined neither to Germany nor to the era in question, but appearing in that place and time in a characteristically radical form. And finally, other countries, in which similar literary themes were explored, did not proceed to similar political solutions; the lack of any political consequences attending the work of, say, D. H. Lawrence, which contains similar thoughts, is a case in point. The connection I am trying to describe is best illuminated by a saying attributed to Hippocrates, that' If one gives to a person in fever the same food which is given to a person in good health, what is strength to one is disease to the other 5 ; or, in his more aphoristic vein, that there are people who fall gravely ill after eating cheese. All this must be said by way of a caution against assuming too direct and too facile a relationship between the literary and philosophical quest for a new 'reality' on the one hand, and the political development of Germany and Austria on the other. At the same time, however, it seems to me obvious that, given the importance of the search I have been describing; given the fact that literature is, after all, a social phenomenon, rooted not only in the individual creative mind but also in the society that encompasses, sustains and hinders that mind; and given, finally, the fact that National Socialism was a phenomenon rooted in recent German history — given all these, the influence of the literary on the political sphere is one of the major factors determining the climate of the age. The attributes attached to the new 'reality' I mentioned earlier - that it is a precarious and problematic state, the opposite of a safe haven; that it is the product of a paramount existential effort, a condition of being which is full of danger, hurtful and involving sacrifice, attained on the very margins of existence; and even the distrust of language, at all events of language as the faculty of reason and of criticism — all these attributes we find present in the ideology and propaganda of

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National Socialism, and in important aspects of its practice too. The author of Young Torless (one of the novels in which the literary-political relationship provides the sub-text) was anything but a National Socialist. Nor do I know of any evidence to suggest that the novel was influential in affecting the course of political events in any direct way. And the same is true of all the works in the canon of this literature. In a society which (as I have suggested) was more afraid of chaos than of tyranny and injustice, especially when these looked like being unloosed on others, the literary and philosophical search for a new ' reality' contributed not merely to the chaos but also to the setting up of that new order which was designed to exploit and supersede the chaos. That these historical circumstances were themselves the result of the process to which the quest for 'reality' was a tributary adds to the complexity of the argument, but it does not, I think, render the argument invalid.

CHAPTER 3

Relativity

INTRODUCTION The decade of the First World War saw the beginning of three major works of German prose inspired by a new experience and embodying a new theme. The relative nature of our perceptions and knowledge of life, the historically, genetically, psychologically or economically determined nature of our personal being, the transient and relative nature of the values and conceptions, including the conception of time, by which we govern our lives - all these constitute a group of insights and modes of living which was first embodied in German literature. The three works are Oswald Spengler's Der Untergang des Abendlandes {The Decline of the West) (volume i: 1918, volume 11: 1922), Thomas Mann's Der ^auberberg [The Magic Mountain)

(begun in 1913, completed in 1924), and Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (The Man without Qualities) (begun from

prewar notes in the early twenties and left uncompleted on Musil's death in 1942). All three works bear witness to a paramount imaginative effort to bring to the light of consciousness a change in our perception of the world. There is nothing abstruse about this theme in the context of its time. Historians have written of the unparalleled loosening of institutional and moral ties that occurred everywhere in postwar Europe (except in Russia, where the opposite process took place). 'What killed the idea of orderly, as opposed to anarchic, progress', writes one of them,' was the sheer enormity of the acts perpetrated by civilised Europe over the past four years. That there had been an unimaginable, unprecedented moral de84

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generation, no one who looked at the facts could doubt.' And the same writer notes how the influence of the ideas of Marx, Freud and Einstein - to which, for Central Europe, Nietzsche's name must be added — combined with the disillusioning effect of the Great War to create a new mental climate. All those ideas had their roots in prewar Europe, but it was only now that they became available outside intellectual circles: 'All at once, nothing seemed certain in the movement of the spheres ... It was as though the spinning globe had been taken off its axis and cast adrift in a universe that no longer conformed to accustomed standards of measurement. At the beginning of the 1920s the belief began to circulate, for the first time at a popular level, that there were no longer any absolutes: of time and space, of good and evil, of knowledge, above all of value. Mistakenly but perhaps inevitably, relativity became confused with relativism.' 1 The causality at work in this process seems impossible to pin down, though Bertrand Russell doesn't think so: with the relativising of time, he writes in The ABC of Relativity* ' the theory of relativity has altered our view of the fundamental structure of the world, that is the source of its difficulty and of its importance.' Yet it would be equally plausible to state it the other way round: as our experience of the world alters, so we (or at least some of us) evolve various descriptive accounts of the alteration — some scientific, such as Einstein's, some intuitive and fictional, like Thomas Mann's and Robert Musil's, some hybrid, like those of Freud and Spengler. The relationship is complementary. The disturbing new experience is on the lookout for a theoretical explanation, and the theoretical explanation affects the experience - or at least those parts of the explanation that can be filtered through the inexpert mind, whose locale is the novel. To what extent was this development foreseen or intended by the thinkers whose ideas had preceded it? Here again we must look for a spectrum of influences. Marx is the only one who consciously aimed at a revolutionary overthrow of bourgeois society, but his few statements on its implications for bourgeois culture are general and abstract rather than specific. Based on

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the tenets of Christian morality, the Marxist Utopia aims at a better order of things, not at an anarchy of values. Freud in his early writings was too preoccupied with problems in individual psychology to give more than an occasional thought to the social consequences of psychoanalysis. Freud had little of the Enlightenment's optimism. Yet his essay 'Thoughts on War and Death' 3 is informed by his belief in the therapeutic value of freeing people from the illusions to which he attributes aggression and war. To Karl Kraus's observation that' psychoanalysis is the disease of which it purports to be the cure', 4 Freud would certainly have replied that, on the contrary, psychoanalysis is the cure of the disease it diagnoses, and that the disorders of the twenties are not to be laid at its door. Nietzsche is mainly concerned with relativising moral values, a process he subsumes under the wider term of'nihilism'. He sees nihilism as a toxic serum leading to health, or again as a necessary stage on the way to a future 'revaluation of all values'; but (he adds) he who fully understands nihilism and lives in its presence can only guess what that revaluation will be like.5 Nietzsche's worst readers shuffled the most destructive of his apothegms until they fudged up an ideology of 'joyful assent' to the destruction not merely of all values, but of all time-honoured decencies too; yet ' Redlichkeit' - intellectual integrity - was the one value Nietzsche had sought to preserve. Some of his best readers - Robert Musil among them understood him very differently, emphasising the openness and experimental nature of his thinking. Both Marx and Freud saw their own work as a scientific or at least ' wissenschaftlich' undertaking, which clearly it was not. Yet the claim to scientific status was important to them - as indeed it was to Oswald Spengler - for the paradoxical reason that they accepted the nineteenth-century concept of'Wissenschaft' as a legitimation of their work. Albert Einstein's discoveries alone, of course, were truly scientific; in 1919 Sir Arthur Eddington led an expedition to Principe Island during the eclipse of the sun in order to observe the effect of gravity on the curvature of light, and thus verified Einstein's General Theory of Relativity of 1915. Einstein was horrified by the

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inference from scientific relativity to moral relativism which, to him, was a confusion and corruption of his discoveries. It is a moot point whether scientific discoveries of such a fundamental kind can be restricted to the scientific sphere. Einstein himself did not think so when, in the late twenties, he opposed Heisenberg's Uncertainty Principle by protesting that 'God is subtle, but he is not malicious'. Of course there is no telling what status to ascribe to this 'God', or indeed how seriously to take the remark. The one thing it may be said to acknowledge is the fact that scientific discoveries have nonscientific implications which are intellectual and perhaps ideological in kind. What the inference from relativity to relativism does not entail, however, is the further claim that relativism necessarily leads to moral confusion and corruption (nor, incidentally do 'absolutes' lead to salvation). The ventures of Spengler, Mann and Musil are in no sense corrupt. If, in Musil's case, confusion eventually gets the better of the tale, the reason is to be sought in the unequal contest waged in his book between narrative skill and philosophical ambition; and this contest reflects not corruption, but the strenuous honesty of a writer who cannot see his way to sacrificing content to form. Musil and Mann fully acknowledge the experience of relativism, and in their fictions, give it literary substance. The heroes they create live in the midst of it. Theirs are decent and honourable lives, enriched in one way or another, consciously or not, by their conditionality. Irony, charm and civility - cousins of Nietzsche's ' Redlichkeit' — are the unemphatic values which both Mann's Hans Castorp and Musil's Ulrich oppose to the disordered world around them. Spengler's construct is made of sterner stuff. Of these three authors, Thomas Mann is the most fortunate. In his novel the experience finds its own fable and, since no relativism can be absolute, its delimiting setting: the sanatorium at Davos, and all the apparently timeless things that go on there, are seen in the perspective of the hero's life, which has its definite beginning in 'the Flatland' and is reclaimed from timelessness, at the end, by History. In Robert Musil's case, too,

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the experience finds its own fable — the intrigues around the ' Parallel Action' of 1913; but having exhausted the possibilities of that inverted Utopia, Musil can neither finish off the fable nor find another that will fully take its place. OSWALD SPENGLER: THE DECLINE OF THE WEST In Spengler's Decline of the West* a deeply divided mind is at work. The fable to which his immense imaginative powers and polyhistoric learning are committed is the entire history of the world seen in the perspective of an all-embracing cultural relativism. But this vision is short-circuited at every critical point - that is, at every point that looks like impinging on his own time and place - by the imperious ' maker of history': the relativist pattern is at war with the aim to serve not insight and knowledge but the will to power. I shall concentrate on the literary dimension of Spengler's undertaking, which offers access to the book to readers who take an interest and pleasure in it and yet are not equipped to judge it and its argument as an historian, an art historian or an anthropologist would do. As to its historical accuracy and predictions, no respectable historian seems to have been other than highly critical of it. The book's main source of strength as well as its main weakness — the reason, certainly, for its immense appeal even to those who have thought it long, repetitious and disorganised — lies in its imaginative and literary use of metaphor and analogy. To say this is not to deny the political background and intention of the book, those aspects of it which are here subsumed under the notion of purpose. However, the politics of The Decline are now a matter of history, and this provides the second reason for a literary reading of it. There is no longer any need to enquire into the book's role in that ' conservative revolution' which contributed to the undoing of the Weimar Republic, and how it thus came (against its author's later protests) to be considered one of the causes of the quite unconservative revolution of 1933 and all that followed. We no longer have to fight the book and what, in terms of that

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disastrous development, it stood for. It and its predictions have been refuted, but no comparable vision has ever been offered as an alternative. Spengler's life7 merits our attention because the experiences that lie behind the writing of his book belong to this study. It is the life of a soul in purgatory: Spengler was on the verge of physical and mental exhaustion when he achieved the task he set himself; and the end of his life was darkened by the political catastrophe he had foreseen in general terms though its specific character had escaped him. In a lighter vein, the life belongs to the Heinrich Mann - Carl Sternheim - Gerhart Hauptmann ambience of Wilhelmine middle-class comedy. Spengler was born in 1880. His father, a Postsekretdr, first in Blankenburg near the Harz, then in Soest, seems to have killed himself with overwork; his mother, crippled from birth and hypochondriac, at least spared the boy by concentrating all her venom and social frustration on the father and (after his early death) on her three younger children, all girls. Although the family was quite well off, the mother's demise was awaited with some eagerness by all interested parties. An atmosphere of slander, litigation and bad temper on the verge of physical violence on the one hand and silence, isolation and cunning on the other left Spengler a prey to deep emotional disturbances. These are recorded dispassionately and often in a generalised form: Es gehort zu den letzten Geheimnissen des Menschentums und des freibeweglichen Lebens iiberhaupt, daB die Geburt des Ich und der Weltangst ein und dasselbe sind ... Eine Angst vor dem eigenen Wachsein, wie sie Kinder zuweilen uberfallt, lernt kein Erwachsener in den schwarzesten Stunden seines Lebens wieder kennen.8 It is among the last mysteries of humanity and indeed of all freely moving forms of life [as opposed to the attached form of plant life] that the birth of the Self and of Weltangst [cosmic fear] are one and the same thing... The fear of their waking state that overwhelms children is something no adult experiences in the darkest hours of his life. There is an obvious connection between this autobiographical note and the notion of Weltangst which in The Decline is

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raised to a universal creative principle. Thus in the first volume Spengler writes that the very awakening of a primitive human self is connected with, or contemporaneous with - he strenuously avoids the term ' is caused by' - a fundamental longing for community and completeness. ' Cosmic fear is surely the most creative of all primordial feelings', and thus the ground of all culture. One other childhood experience is recorded in the diaries that have survived. From the age of eight the lonely boy indulges an abundant talent for fantasising highly structured fictional worlds - a talent which, oddly enough, he retrospectively identifies with the child's and young adolescent's evasiveness and mendacity. At the age of sixteen he creates a continent called £Afrikasien' (Africasia), with an elaborate, largely invented topography of its own. Not surprisingly, this state is the repository of a good deal of patriotic fervour: ' The French conquer Bissandugu, but are instantly decimated'; ' Invasion of Delhi. Fifty thousand English are executed for violating international law.' More remarkably, this state also has its own laws and regulations, its complex religious and administrative problems, presented in intricate detail, and its complicated history. The imagination at work is obviously inspired by popular Wilhelmine authors of the school of 'professorial historical fiction', but the elaborate curlicues of institutional structures (one thinks of J. R. R. Tolkien) are entirely original. Creating a world of its own, the boy's imagination is self-protective and consoling.9 In 1899 Spengler went to study mathematics and natural science at the University of Halle; in 1901, after the death of his father, he moved to Munich and Berlin, obtaining his doctorate in 1904 with a dissertation on Heraclitus. He earned the diploma that admitted him to secondary-school teaching with a dissertation on the development of the eye in the animal kingdom. The prospect of a career as a schoolmaster brought him to the edge of a nervous breakdown. Nevertheless, having qualified, he began teaching at a Hamburg Gymnasium in 1908, but instantly resigned on receiving his share of the family inheritance (in 1910); a year later he returned to Munich, the

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only city in which he seems to have felt at ease. It is the time and the place Thomas Mann chooses as the setting for the opening of his story Death in Venice.

The catchy title10 and the main ideas and structure of Spengler's book were conceived - or so he tells us - in the summer of 1911,' that year which [to quote from Death in Venice] for months on end showed our entire Continent such a menacing countenance'. They were the months of the Moroccan crisis which ended in the profound humiliation of Wilhelm IPs colonial aspirations, and which caused Spengler, like many of his contemporaries, to anticipate a general European conflict. Throughout those years he lived in total solitude and often on the breadline, in lodgings a good deal poorer than A. Hitler's, seated in a chair placed on top of a table for the sake of warmth. He was eking out with journalism a minute income from his inheritance and offering to incurious publishers a good many dramatic fragments, poems and prose fictions, with promises of more to come. Above all, this was a time of profound uncertainties. What he was seeking was a manageable form to contain the inner turmoil of his ideas and feelings. With an astonishing effort of the will he brought his book to completion. Again the comparison with the other future ' maker of history' is illuminating; but one may also be reminded of Heinrich Mann's novel of 1905, Professor Unrat (better known as The Blue Angel), with History taking the part of the artiste Rosa Frohlich. It must be seriously doubted whether the first volume was ready by the time war broke out (as Spengler later claimed). In any event it appeared, together with a complete list of contents of the second volume, in September 1918, a few weeks before the German defeat. 'Disgust and shame [Spengler writes to a friend] at the ignominious events of the last months have so affected me that I sometimes thought I would not be able to continue living.'11 The defeat took him totally by surprise: he had hoped his first volume would contribute to the celebration of a German victory. The entire two-volume work appeared four years later, in 1922, a little over ten years after its inception; in the following year the final version of the first volume was published, incorporating some additions and emendations.

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Intellectually and emotionally the appearance of The Decline was the zenith of Spengler's life. The first volume's success was immense and almost immediate, yet success and recognition did little to lighten the suspiciousness and contempt he felt for his contemporaries. The major work he was planning in the last decade of his life — a ' continuation downward' into the material presuppositions and prehistory of the ' high cultures' - would certainly have upset some of the ideas and claims of The Decline, but most of it remained in note form only. In several short tracts for the times he proceeded to enlarge on the central political message of the main work - a message which is as ambiguous as much else in the book. Finally, in Jahre der Entscheidung [Years of Decision), published in August 1933, and in his posthumous political notes, Spengler dissociates himself from ' the National Socialist circus' and attacks Hitler's tendency to hide 'political reality' (a phenomenon on which Spengler believed himself a great expert) behind egregious racial theories. The racialist bees in his own bonnet were set buzzing by different colours of skin rather than different shapes of noses. In the cultural life of the twenties Spengler chose to be an outsider. He was offered and refused two prestigious University chairs; later he also refused an invitation from Dr Goebbels to declare his sympathies with the new regime, and to revise his magnum opus and its pessimistic prognosis in line with Germany's 'reawakening' and her 'national revolution'. He remained a bachelor, looked after in ever more sumptuous apartments by one of his sisters and a niece. Having suffered from cardiac trouble for most of his life, he died of a stroke on 7 May 1936, a few days before his fifty-sixth birthday. There were rumours in the thirties that he had committed suicide, but they are not mentioned by his biographer. He had few if any intimate friends. Like most of his fellow conservatives Spengler had been profoundly shaken by the abortive revolution of 1918-19, and the memory of the chaotic days of the Munich Soviet determined his political outlook more than any ' world-historical' considerations. Again like those other conservatives, he failed to take Hitler seriously, and when he voted for him in 1933, it was

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not a vote for Hitler's economic programme but for the ' law and order' part of his platform. In July 1933, in Bayreuth, he had a conversation with Hitler (arranged by Else Knittel, a friend of Winifred Wagner's) which turned out less than a complete success. Spengler, who had requested the meeting in the hope that he might be offered the role of an eminence grise, was talked into the ground, and his verdict was, c A highly decent man, but meeting him one has not for a single moment the feeling that he is of any importance. 3l2 So much for the connoisseur of political reality. Throughout the twenties and early thirties Spengler's position resembled that of many literati to this day in Germany and further west, who desire political power on the strength of their intellectual reputation without being willing to enter the roughand-tumble of actual politics. It goes without saying that he had no sympathy with the Weimar Republic, and voiced no objection when it was being undermined and destroyed. Again and again he had claimed special insight into the workings of fate, quoting Schopenhauer's motto, 'Ducunt fata volentem, nolentem trahunt' - he would not be dragged along by History. Spengler's attitude to Hitler's rule was hopelessly paradoxical. He felt keenly that the inevitable and therefore right worldhistorical process — the decline of a senescent culture — was being hastened on by the wrong people; and they were the wrong people because they were leading Germany to decline, that is, along the right path of the world-historical process. What danger, precisely, faced Germany - other than the danger of miscegenation which (he claimed) faces all white races — he does not say; war itself he did not regard as a calamity. Indeed whether, from the point of view of an extreme conservative, Spengler's prognosis of a German disaster was correct or wrong must depend on the time-scale applied to the prognosis. It is not a history of mankind that Spengler's 'total vision of historical life'13 surveys, for Menschheit Spengler declares to be either a purely Darwinian and therefore zoological generic term, or else an empty and meaningless 'humanitarian' abstraction. The object of his enquiry and intellectual construction is universal history, ' Weltgeschichte' or rather ' Welt

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als Geschichte', 'World as History'. He sees this history not in the conventional, time-hallowed way as the continuous threefold development of mankind from Antiquity through the Middle Ages to the Modern Age, but as the discontinuous sequence of a finite series of eight cultures - of formally or (as he puts it) morphologically similar 'culture organisms'. These organisms live their lives in total independence of each other. Like the Egyptian pyramids, like Leibniz's monads, they are windowless, that is, without the possibility of mutually understanding or affecting each other in any way. These cultures are given the status and content of Goethean ' Urphanomene' they are the concrete 'primordial phenomena' embodying Spengler's abstract conception of'this world as history'. To the late Wilhelmine public for whom he was writing, the appeal to Goethe was soundly patriotic and reassuring, not to say anodyne; we are bound to look at it more critically. In Goethe's scientific writings these 'Urphanomene' are archetypal constructs situated halfway between observable natural phenomena and ideas. They represent one of the great syntheses of Goethe's philosophy of nature, giving substance to his belief in the fundamental unity of nature and man; however they also raise problems of morality, above all of the freedom of the will. These problems Goethe sought to solve not discursively, in the context of his scientific enquiries, but in some of his poetry and fiction, most directly in Die Wahlverwandtschaften {Elective

Affinities), his greatest novel. Spengler pays lip-service to these poetic solutions; yet in his scheme of things no moral problem can arise at all, because the analogy between ideas and phenomena is imposed by an omniscient narrator whose godlike thoughts are not shared by those ant-like generations whose cultural patterns he contemplates; as for the moral problems encountered by ' the masses' inside each pattern, ' There are as many moralities as there are cultures.' And so, taking his cue from Goethe's botanical studies, Spengler sets up his rigid ('streng wissenschaftlich') parallels between plant life and the life of 'culture organisms', guided by the express purpose of demonstrating (he, of course, says: proving) the 'organically' or 'morphologically' determined character of 'the world as

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history'. What justifies these parallels? On what evidence is this use of analogy based - apart from the omniscient author's remarkable literary aptitude for discerning similarities and dramatising differences? The questions are never asked. He paints cultural tableaux, and in each of them 'a morality' provides one of the colours on his palette. Identifying 'culture organisms' with Goethean 'Urphanomene', Spengler is led to subordinate all moral, ethical and religious considerations to an aesthetic paradigm. Used as the sole ground of conviction, the argument from analogy is characteristic of the literary mind. Moreover, this is an analogy between plant life, seen as developing according to a single pattern, and human collectives — in other words, a metonymy. Fiction, drama and poetry alike are certainly capable of illuminating the lives of societies and nations; and they arrive at their insights into human collectives by means of metonymies which mediate the experiences of individual men and women who are liable to moral judgements (even though, as befits fictions, these are judgements 'as if). Outside literature this use of metonymy leads to the pathetic fallacy of attributing to nations and societies the qualities of individuals. Spengler's book is both in literature (by appealing to analogy alone for conviction) and outside it (in that it ignores the role of individuals except as spokesmen or ' symbols' of an era) and offers a variation on this fallacy. The patterns into which he fits his cultures are not taken from the life of human beings but applied to them, from the life of plants. The impression of a history shot through everywhere with aesthetic criteria is not confined to Spengler's use of analogy. The cavalier treatment of ' the masses' of ordinary people as chorus or mere stage-decor is another aspect of it. And so are his repeated assurances that he assesses historical insights not as true or false, but according to whether they are 'deep' and therefore 'fortunately unpopular', or shallow and therefore popular. Above all Spengler insists on the supreme value and function of works of art. They are to him not merely representative or symbolical of a given cultural cycle (like the 'great men of destiny'), but they constitute it. Works of art determine each

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cycle by giving appropriate form to that feeling of Weltangst which each cycle expresses in its own way. Though he argues against a Euro-centric view of history, Spengler's observations on the Chinese, Indian, Aztec and Babylonian cultural cycles strike one as far from comprehensive, and the picture of Ancient Egyptian culture too is confined to a few ' symbols' and their significance for the ' cultural organism' as a whole (more details, resulting from accounts of recent excavations, are given in the second volume). His main concern is with the last three of his culture-organisms. He calls them ' the Apolline', an obvious reference to Nietzsche's term, by which he means Classical Greece and Rome; 'the Magian-Arabic' culture, in which he includes Judaea, Byzantium, early Christianity and the entire Mohammedan world; and finally the ' Faustian' culture, which extends from the Gothic Middle Ages through the Renaissance, Baroque and Enlightenment to our own era - the era of that decline which he places at the beginning of the next millennium. Though Spengler has much in common with the type of German antiquary and scholar we know from the writings of Thomas Carlyle or Gustav Freytag, or with George Eliot's Dr Casaubon, his characteristics do not include devotion to a narrow and cramping field of enquiry, nor diffidence in respect of his insights. Each of the culture-organisms is subject to the same inherent morphological development, within which the law that governs its being is manifest. It is helpful to paraphrase Spengler's first statement of the process. This begins with the ' urseelenhafter Zustand ewig-kindlichen Menschentums' :14 a culture organism is born when a great soul awakens out of its eternally child-like state: on waking, the soul takes on its individual shape and identity — a form is born out of formlessness, a thing limited and transient detaches itself from the unbounded and permanent. The culture then blossoms forth on the soil of an exactly defined landscape, to which it remains rooted, like a plant. And the culture dies when that soul has reached the full sum of its potentialities in the form of peoples, languages, religions, arts, political structures and sciences, and

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thereupon returns into its soul-like primal state. But the living being of such a culture - that series of eras within which its inherent perfection is attained - consists of a passionate inward struggle aiming at the outward assertion of the germinative idea against the forces of chaos outside and the unconscious within, an unconscious which acts as a sort of fifth column for those hostile outward forces. Just as the artist - seen as the Faustian hero - struggles against the resistance of the material and the annihilation of the idea that inspires him, so each culture stands in a ' profoundly symbolical relationship' with the time, space and substance in which and by means of which it must strive to fulfil itself. Once that goal is achieved, once the 'world feeling' with all its inner potentialities is realised, the culture rigidifies, its blood runs thin, its strength wanes: it turns into a civilisation. In this form, like a withered giant in a primeval forest, it may stand for many centuries more, overshadowing everything around it with its rotting dead trunk and boughs. This phenomenon Spengler calls c pseudo-morphosis'; the example he offers here is the civilisation of Imperial Rome overlaying the young Arabian-early Christian culture and robbing it of air and light. And then comes the grand peroration - Spengler's first statement of his thesis: This — the inward and outward fulfilment, the finality that awaits every living culture - is the meaning of all declines in history, amongst them the decline of Classical Antiquity whose outlines stand before us with the utmost clarity; and the meaning, too, of another event, entirely comparable to it in course and duration, which will occupy the first centuries of the coming millennium but is heralded already and is to be felt in and around us today - the decline of the West.15 Each culture organism follows the pattern I have described: Faustian culture - ' from the morning of Romanesque and Gothic onward' - is at first delayed in its progression by the pseudo-morphosis of the Renaissance, which Spengler regards as a mistaken attempt to revive the irrevocably dead Apolline culture of Greece; thereafter it proceeds across the centuries of German music and philosophy to the modern city-civilisation of New York, displaying, like all civilisations, symptoms of

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decadence and decline. What characterises this Faustian culture in Spengler's resonant description is a vast array of phenomena connected not by logic or causal development but by association and contrast, metaphors and metonymies. Whereas Apolline (Classical) culture had as its constitutive phenomena the finite human body (soma) and the eternal present, the Faustian is a culture-pattern built up from and dominated by the Urphanomene 'soul', 'infinity' and 'transience5 . The Faustian Gothic with its 'forest-infinity' and the Faustian Baroque with its fugue-like treatment of space suggestive of infinitude are contrasted with the classical temple built in harmony with somatic proportions; the idea of a Kantian moral imperative a outrance with the notion of sophrosyne - self-control, moderation and restraint. Night, distance and solitude in their symbolic and representative functions are contrasted with daylight, proximity and familiarity as the symbolic representatives of the Greek world; the Faustian tragedy of character with the Classical tragedy of circumstance and fate ... What do we make of this astonishing panorama ? Of course we are irritated by the exaggerations — the sheer overkill — of Spengler's mega-arguments. Yet again and again the reader is forced into the reluctant recognition that this is not all pure fabrication and fantasy, that substantial and illuminating insights emerge out of this boundlessness — insights which attach themselves to our knowledge of the past as well as our understanding of aspects of the present. Distortion - a sort of late-summer madness of historiography - goes hand in hand with illumination. But Spengler is not content with that. A culture that is characterised by words like soul, transience and infinity, the will to power, and said to be most fully realised in Leibniz's infinitesimal calculus, in Bach, Beethoven and Goethe's Faust II - is eventually and essentially a German phenomenon. The world-feeling conjured up by Spengler is part and parcel of that cultural pessimism which the Wilhelmine intellectuals, Thomas Mann and Stefan George among them, used in defending their idea of Germany against the ideas of the French Revolution and the 'Western' democratic spirit. To this extent Spengler is one

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of those 'pessimists' who are intent on translating the history of ideas as well as the history of art into political terms, on politicising the concept of a supposedly predictable and predetermined history, and thus conjoining aesthetics and politics into a single entity. But the political message is ambiguous. On the one hand, Western culture is declining and Germany is part of that decline, she must reject her own valuable but now useless past and resolutely espouse civilisation's next phase — the unremitting advance of technology. But then again it seems that Germany is not part of the Western process of decline after all, that she will be able to survive and increase her international power while also salvaging her own incomparable past... and it is never clear which prognosis is relevant, just as one never knows whether the modern city (the location of the technology) is irredeemably degenerate and bad, or whether its badness, being wholly of its time, is not after all a good thing. In any event, the nationalistic purpose this ' cultural morphology' is intended to support is obvious enough - and where this purpose is asserted., the relativist perspective is abandoned. The postulate of cultural organisms which are not only mutually independent but also generically incapable of influencing each other leads to a number of striking inferences and conclusions. There is in this grand scheme a temporal sequence of events but no development and no progress, a characteristic which the Decline of the West shares with the Magic Mountain. Like Nietszche

before him, Spengler takes pleasure in emphasising that faith in human progress is a sure sign of a shallow and mendacious Weltanschauung. Instead he sets up a mode of homology between all these analogous cultures, also called 'contemporaneity'. This term Spengler derives (without acknowledgement) from the Egyptologist Flinders Petrie.16 It indicates that certain phases of one culture correspond to the morphologically similar (though Spengler of course says: morphologically identical) phases of another culture, so that for instance the senescence of Alexandrine civilisation is seen as ' contemporaneous' with the last phase of Egyptian culture on the one hand and the

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European and American civilisation of our own era on the other. Or again:' Pergamon is the counterpart of Bayreuth', or: 'the cinema, Expressionism, Theosophy, boxing championships, negro dancing, poker and the totalisator — all these you will find in [Imperial] Rome too'; and not only there (we may wish to add) but also in the standard rhetorical invective of National Socialism.17 Another implication of the doctrine of' windowless' cultures is that each is complete in itself and equipped with all that is necessary for its term of existence. (It is not hard to see the connection between this postulate and the haughtily solitary and uncommunicative life of the penurious intellectual in his Munich lodgings.) Each culture has not only its own religion and philosophy, art, forms of government and technology, but also its morality, its concepts of time and space, its own ways of experiencing life and death. The languages of different cultures vary in the forms of life they display and the fears and metaphysical yearnings they express, and the importance attributed to language as opposed to other forms of communication is also variable. All cultural organisms have their languages, ideologies, natural sciences and different ways of dealing with man's wretched condition and fear of death (of love and the prospect of happiness we hear very little); but all are divided from each other by unbridgeable gulfs and are not joined by any bond of humanity (a mere zoological term, we recall). This leaves the all-encompassing, all-understanding historian-narrator in a peculiar position: he seems to be forever assuring us that 'the world as history' is full of enigmatic solipsists about whom we can know nothing. In all this it is impossible to see how the inference to a complete cultural relativism can be avoided, and if Spengler were less contemptuous of what is going on around him, he would recognise the affinities which link his argument with such things as Freudian psychology and contemporary physics, with aspects of the theatre of Pirandello, the prose of Franz Kafka and the poetry of Rainer Maria Rilke, or the philosophical view which decrees that a man's horizon is his world. Everything in Spengler's arguments and analogies points to this relativism.

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Not just natural science (he tells us) but the very concept of nature is determined by time and culture. Modern physics and the theory of relativity ('a working hypothesis of cynical heedlessness' which, he adds for good measure, can never be proved experimentally) are Faustian and as such merely modern analogues of Baroque dynamics, the notion of breaking up the uranium atom is ' a bizarre hypothesis' - all these he regards as perhaps useful but certainly empirically unverifiable myths, constructions of the scientific mind at the end of its tether. Spengler's postulate of a series of independent, windowless cultures is not only suggestive of his solitary existence; it also corresponds to his particular literary talent. With static, statuesque descriptions, especially those involving architectural details, he succeeds splendidly - a striking example is his comparison of the cathedral of San Vitale at Ravenna with the Byzantine Hagia Sophia and the Dome of the Rock at Jerusalem, intended as an illustration of the ' cavern-like' notion of space ('Hohlengefuhl') which he regards as the basic element or Urgefiihl of the £ Magian-Arabic' culture organism. What he often lacks - the irony would be lost on him - is an eye and a word for nuances and gradual transitions, for comparative values, for irony as opposed to sarcasm — above all, for the signs of human freedom from the bondage of dualities and antitheses. His paragraphs abound in sudden ascents and dramatic, catastrophic declines, absolute contradictions and unbridgeable gulfs; even his history of mathematics and the sequence of concepts of number which are said to differ from one culture to the next, is cast in terms of victories and defeats. He is not just undialectical but, making a virtue of a stylistic and temperamental necessity, anti-dialectical too. The artist of one epoch (he writes) cannot appropriate or learn from the style or technical accomplishments of the artists of another; he may not make use of the media of another epoch; he must see and represent the world in precisely the way that the age and its fate determine. Kann, darf, mufi\ this is the scaffolding of imperatives by means of which Spengler seeks to support the

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speculative and metaphorical treatment of his immense and immensely fluid subject-matter. Friedrich Meinecke admirably characterised this style in one of two critical essays he devoted to Spengler's work: 'The command rings out "Right wheel! Left wheel!" and one of the great mediaeval popes, Nicholas I, falls in to join the "Magian" front while the other, Gregory VII, is off to join the "Faustian" front.'18 When, again and again, we are told that the method of the book is 'nothing other than' the translation of Goethe's plant morphology into world history, we are sure to feel that this assertion would be the proper object of a logical and linguistic enquiry. No such enquiry is ever initiated — the signs are that Spengler would ridicule it as shallow rationalism. Critical expectations are raised only to be ignored. The search for rational explanations is constantly broken off and confounded by an appeal to the ineffable, the unstatable, to an irrational ' law of all being'; every admission of an incomplete understanding of an age or culture is negated by the assertion of his own complete understanding, and a crypto-religious belief in fate is introduced at every juncture of the argument where we expect reasons to be given. These procedures bring us to the one essential question Spengler never answers: What is it that he considers, and wants us to accept, as a valid criterion of truth? The answer, which we must provide for him, is bound to be ambiguous. The truth criterion he offers takes the form of a repeated appeal to his own intuition, his innermost experience of what the world viewed as history should be, to ' mein innerstes Erlebnis der Urphanomene'. These phenomena, he believes, cannot be known and understood discursively or analytically, but must be grasped intuitively, the operative terms being not knowledge, research, understanding ('erkannt... erforscht... verstanden') but feeling, living experience and vision (' erfuhlt... erlebt... erschaut'). The status of objective knowledge is claimed for the inferences such intuitions yield to the analogical method; and these inferences are said to be 'strictly scientific' to the extent that they establish and confirm the necessity of this or that phenom-

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enon for a given culture. Whatever one may think of this procedure, it runs counter to Spengler's own contention that there are no windows, which would logically mean that as a member of one cultural organism - the Faustian in its final stages - he can have no access to the Urphdnomene of another culture, except in terms of the literary hypothesis of the omniscient narrator in an historian's guise. The nationalistic manoeuvre I have described before is repeated in personal terms: the relativist 'world-feeling' is in Spengler's very bones, yet again and again he will seek to exempt himself from it. Necessity is invoked not only on behalf of the discrete components of a culture, but also at the level of historical totality. The ambition at the heart of Spengler's undertaking is not merely to analyse and describe world history, but 'die Geschichte vorauszubestimmen' - c to predetermine history' an attempt he sees his book as making for the first time. The prognosis is to be not just descriptive but prescriptive as well: 'Everything that is said here is not "true", but necessary for this culture and this era.' 'You don't have to accept everything as true' says the chaplain to Josef K. in Kafka's The Trial , 'you only have to accept it as necessary.' This distinction between necessity and truth19 receives its most powerful illumination in the centre-piece of the second volume, the confrontation between Jesus, witness to a' useless', powerless faith in 'truth', and Pontius Pilate, 'the man of reality and facts'. Living at the beginning of the Arabic cycle, Jesus is presented as the isolated prophet of his own solipsistic vision. The relativism is complete: the prophetic teaching ofJesus does not extend beyond the culture to which it belongs, the religious feeling that survives his death is a 'pseudo-morphosis'. In the two men, two cultures confront each other: Als Jesus aber vor Pilatus gefiihrt wurde, da traten sich die Welten der Tatsachen und die der Wahrheiten unvermittelt und unversohnlich gegeniiber, in... erschreckender Deutlichkeit und Wucht der Symbolik... In der beriihmten Frage des romischen Prokurators: was ist Wahrheit? - das einzige Wort im Neuen Testament, das Rasse hat20 - liegt der ganze Sinn der Geschichte, die Alleingeltung der Tat, der

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Rang des Staates, des Krieges, des Blutes, die ganze Allmacht des Erfolges...21 But when Jesus was taken before Pilate, the world of facts and the world of truths came face to face in immediate and implacable enmity. It is a scene appallingly distinct and overwhelming in its symbolism ... In the famous question of the Roman Procurator, 'What is truth?' the only utterance that is race-pure [or: has true breeding] in the whole New Testament - lies the entire meaning of history, the exclusive validity of the deed, the prestige of the State and of war and blood, the whole omnipotence of success ... Christ's words, c My kingdom is not of this world', have become a part of the morphological approach which (as we have seen) insists everywhere on separation and exclusion, and denies the possibility of communication. The Christian message of salvation for all men since all are equal in the sight of God is not mentioned. Instead, the burden of the Christian message is the incompatibility of the two kingdoms, the absolute duality of darkness and light. In this radically Manichean view of Christianity there is no mediation, no link between Church and State, religion and politics, facts (that is Realpolitik) and truth: No faith has ever altered the world, and no fact can ever refute a faith. There is no bridge between directional Time [directed toward worldly goals] and timeless Eternity, between the course of history and the existence of a divine order... this is the ultimate meaning of the moment in which Jesus and Pontius Pilate confronted one another. 'Gerichtete Zeit' ('directional time') is a chilling pun, gerichtet meaning both 'directed toward a goal' and also 'sentenced and executed'. Spengler's portrait of Pontius Pilate has the enthusiasm of self-identification. He sees all necessity in the sphere of human encounter as an expression of a will to power and, one way or another - as narrator or as potential eminence grise - abstract power is what Spengler is in love with, so that the pursuit of it determines his attitude to his own time. In endless metaphors Spengler voices his contempt for the cultureless, inartistic, tired metropolis of the present and the future (the fact that these cities

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might also be called inhuman is hardly mentioned), but hand in hand with this contempt goes an admiration for the great city as the centre of power in the modern world. Similarly, at the end of that cultural genealogy paraphrased above, the figure of Cecil Rhodes is presented in the frog's-eye perspective of the Wilhelmine Kleinbiirger enthralled by the spectacle of Realpolitik and Empire violating every taboo of traditional morality: here he is at last, the Man of Destiny: his wars, his diplomatic deals, his road-systems, syndicates and armies, his conception of' the great duty to civilisation' owed by the man of brain - all this, broad and imposing, is the prelude to a future still in store for us and with which the history of Western-European mankind will definitely come to a close. Anyone who fails to understand that this is an outcome that can in no way be altered; that this is what he must will or else nothing at all ;22 that this is the fate he must love23 or else despair of the future and of life itself; who does not feel the grandeur in this activity of the highest [technological] intelligences, in this energy and discipline of characters as hard as steel,24 in battles waged with the coldest and most abstract means; anyone who is satisfied with the idealism of the provincial and would pursue the lifestyle of past ages - he must forego all desire to understand history, to live through history, and indeed to make history.25

The technology which provides the great city of our time with its raison d'etre is for Spengler the last product of the ' Faustian' culture organism in its stage of civilisation — that is, its last assertion of power. The end purpose turns out to be a good deal less complex than the pattern. Germany, the home-ground of ' Prussian socialism', is to be salvaged into the technological age after all, together with those Faustian virtues of infinitude, soul and art which were earlier declared incompatible with the spirit of civilisation and its technology. But is Spengler 'prophetic'? How have his four main prophecies fared ? First, in the decade of the Great War almost anybody who wrote on social and cultural matters predicted that technology would be the dominant force of the age, and Spengler does no more than assert that this will be the case. ' The engineer' or technocrat is acclaimed as the true source of

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power in the world to come, yet elsewhere technology is viewed contemptuously as mere application, a handicraft (Bastelei) totally disconnected from fundamental science. With no sense for the links between them, Spengler has no idea how science will progress, and maintains that theoretical thinking generally and fundamental science in particular can have nothing more to contribute to our world (because they belong to the Faustian cycle, which has exhausted itself). In the second place, there are the solemn warnings about the imminent take-over of Western civilisation by 'the black and yellow races'. Spengler envisaged the destruction of the West by the industrial competitiveness of the Third World, while in the event the danger to peace comes rather from the Third World's discontent at being deprived of both the knowledge and the products of technology. The third prophecy is of the future rule of Caesarism' (homologous to the decline of Rome) and the disruption of world peace by the private armies of ambitious individuals. Spengler's description could only apply to men such as Hitler whom (as we have seen) he failed to recognise for what he was; it is not the condottieri and their marauders we must fear, but the ideologists, always regarded by Spengler as harmless cranks. He gives no forewarning whatever of the economic and ecological problems that face the world of the twenty-first century (the age he claimed to 'predetermine'). Fourthly there remains his articulation of the feeling that we come late in the day, expressed with poignancy by Wittgenstein: 'My own thinking about art and values is more disillusioned than the thinking of men a hundred years ago could possibly have been. But that doesn't mean that it is more correct. It only means that in the forefront of my mind there are declines which were not in theforefront of theirs. '26 And in this sense we are all Spenglerians. 'What is being said here is not "true" but necessary for this culture and this epoch.' But a true history of mankind — a history which presented the differences between members of the human race as less than the differences between man and the animals — would have to include an account of men's failures and anachronisms founded in their freedom rather than in

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' pseudo-morphosis'; it would have to account for those unique ventures fitting no pattern and no preconceived scheme - and including the discoveries of critical reason — whose purpose cannot be designated in terms of victory or defeat. To Spengler, of course, our technology is absolute master: ' Anyone who does not understand this ... must despair of the future.' What then is this 'Prussian socialism' which he (and after him Ernst Jiinger) advocate as the appropriate ideology of the future, under which the technological age will flourish ? The 'socialism' he has in mind is as void of all the ethical and egalitarian considerations traditionally associated with that term as the ' Prussianism' of which he speaks is void of all the religious and moral elements that belong to the idea of the Prussian aristocracy - notably Protestant paternalism and patriotic ethos. 'Socialism' he defines as the organisation of production and transport through the state; as total subservience of each subject to the state; and therefore as the total rule of a radically anti-liberal and authoritarian elite sanctioned by the state — in other words ' all that the Hohenzollern State has always wanted'. This picture of true' socialism is not unlike one of F. A. Hayek's caricatures of the term; more than that, reminiscent of the doctrine of the same name advocated by His Excellency Graf Leinsdorf, the spiritual father of Robert Musil's ' Parallelaktion', who believes that any ' -ism' in its deepest and truest sense is bound to be identical both with its opposite and with his own deepest and truest convictions.27 That Spengler's 'socialism' is anti-democratic need not surprise us. More important for the book as a whole is the rejection of criticism it implies, not only in politics but in all other activities. Spengler believes that criticism is an aspect of decadence, a view that is objectionable not because it became a central tenet of National Socialism but because critical thought is a part of every culture and every civilisation with any claim to completeness. The great moments of insight Spengler's work yields to its reader — on the history of human conceptions of time, and his descriptions of time as ' the tragic dimension'; on the dichotomy of' causality versus fate' and the characterology he derives from it; on the two roots of all art — the imitative and

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the decorative; on the 'personal' aspect of modern literature as a substitute for the missing sacrament of penance; on the changing function of religious enthusiasm, on the culturespecific symbolism of colours and shapes and his comparative reflections on Rembrandt and Bach - these and countless other insights cannot quite undo the impression of an anti-critical fatalism reinforced by an abstract will to power; and this fatalism emerges as the only fixed point in the flux of relative beliefs, perspectives and values. Yet this impression recedes as the rhetoric takes wing and, like pathfinder lights suspended above a nocturnal landscape, a series of powerful analogies illuminates a tableau of the human condition. Is there a reader who, once having suspended disapproval of the author's ambiguous political purpose, can deny the intellectual exhilaration that issues from these sequences of contrasts and similarities? The insights that come to us from the vision of cultures juxtaposed are no less astonishing than the close-ups of their individual lineaments - the sheer sweep of the historical imagination is irresistible. No reader of the later Thomas Mann, of Theodor Adorno, of Walter Benjamin and Ernst Jiinger (not to speak of the 'mystical' Ernst Bloch, who turns Spengler's Weltangst into 'the principle of hope') can deny their profound indebtedness, beyond assent or criticism, to this vision. Their debt to Spengler may be less direct, but it is no less profound than his to Nietzsche. Northrop Frye calls Spengler's book 'one of the world's great Romantic poems'; but to call it that, even with the proviso that it is not 'a work of pure imagination', is to place it within a theory of genres to which it does not quite belong. But where does it belong? The literary articulation of a vision such as this, from Goethe's early rhapsodic poems and his scientific essays onwards, has always had to draw on a mixture of genres — has always been intensely German in cutting across the distinctions of French and English theories and literary conventions. Like the two novels which are the subject of the rest of this chapter, and like a long line of prose writings from Novalis and Holderlin onwards, the Decline of the West is composed of a pattern of inherently prosy utterances - some documentary and factual,

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some scientific, some philosophical - which freely cross and recross what a critical Spenglerian, T. S. Eliot, called the 'frontier of metaphysics and mysticism'.28 This, then, is not an historian's but a literary artist's use of analogies, and within the order of literature any one thing may stand in any relationship to another; the sanction of a literary use of analogy derives, not from ascertainable facts or logical coherence, but from an achieved poetic or fictional whole. That such an aesthetic whole is not achieved has become clear - the political will, the complex purpose, the aridities all work against such an achievement. There is deep pleasure in the book, but it is not unalloyed: the mixed mode can only yield a mixed response. Among the few anecdotes recorded by his biographer is a conversation Spengler had with a Protestant bishop shortly after The Decline was first published. Many years later the bishop recalled saying to Spengler that if he had written it he would have put a motto from Isaiah 40 on the title-page: ' All flesh is grass, and all the goodness thereof is as theflowerof the field: the grass withereth, the flower fadeth.' For in these words of Isaiah [the bishop continued] is contained the fundamental idea of your cultural survey - the idea that all life is like the life of a plant, having its seasons of spring, summer, autumn and winter, and perishes when it has reached its winter stage. At this Spengler said to me with deep seriousness:' Herr Doktor, I must tell you that that was precisely my thought, and I reflected for a long time whether I should preface my book with that saying.' I was moved by these words of Spengler's and thought I might venture to say more, and so I took him up: ' And I even know why in the end you omitted the words.' And when he asked me why I thought it was, I answered:' Because Isaiah uses these words twice, but the second time he as it were takes back his doctrine of the transience of allfleshby saying: "but the word of our God shall stand for ever" - and this precisely is what you cannot believe, or at any rate cannot defend.?29 ' Shall stand for ever' is, for Spengler, the hall-mark of every pseudo-morphosis. In the world as history that he acknowledges, there is only one thing of perennial value: to do the bidding of fate - preferably a disastrous, destructive fate -

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willingly and with a total superhuman devotion and effort, willingly and at the edge of despair. Contemptuous of the present, he seems never to have realised how hideously popular that doctrine was to become in his own lifetime and in the years after. His truth was a 'truth for his time5, not for ours. For us, however, the pattern and the 'world-feeling' it conveys remain to offer a permanent illumination. ' If you want to see the description of the epic of an entire culture', so Wittgenstein sums up his reading of Spengler, ' you must look for it among the works of the greatest men of that culture; you must seek it in a time in which the end of that culture could only be foreseen, for later there is nobody left to describe it. No wonder that when it is written, that epic is written in the dark language of presentiment... ' 30 'Dunkle Sprache der Vorausahnung': if, as I think, Wittgenstein meant 'dark' rather than 'obscure', he may also have meant the foreboding experienced by Spengler's alter ego, Pontius Pilate. THOMAS MANN: THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN Early in 1912 Thomas Mann's wife, Katia, contracted a tubercular infection of the bronchi - ' harmless but requiring lengthy treatment' - and was sent to a sanatorium at Davos. During one of his visits there in the summer of that year Thomas Mann developed a feverish catarrh, which was diagnosed by one of the resident physicians ('with a certain profit-conscious smile') as 'at least potentially tubercular'; whereupon the novelist packed his bags and departed. This biographical occasion provides the setting, extreme in more ways than one, of The Magic Mountain;*1 and Mann's impressions of his visits, with his wife's lively reports, form the basis of the novel's main thematic strands. Work on the Magic Mountain was begun in July 1913, and Mann first intended it as a humorous arid satirical counterpart to Death in Venice (1912), the story which had consolidated his standing as one of Germany's greatest men of letters. At the outbreak of the War he abandoned work on the novel a third of the way through the first of its two volumes, and turned to a

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series of essays, effectively political in character. These timely polemical pieces were a new departure in Thomas Mann's literary production. With some surprise he now found himself writing in the service of a self-consciously ' German' ideology, preoccupied with topics to which, as author of Buddenbrooks and the subsequent Novellen (most of them focused on the theme of the artist's conflict with burgerlich society) he had not paid any special attention. The ideology which he, like almost all German intellectuals of the time, felt called upon to defend against c the West' was a highly problematic one, if only because his defence of it was emphatically literary and personal. Linking the national emergency with his growing estrangement from his brother, he typecast Heinrich Mann as the spokesman of 'Western' liberal values, now seen as undermining 'German' culture and its 'spirit of music and inwardness'. The essays sailed under a conservative flag, yet in their literary sophistication were probably rather beyond most members of the Wilhelmine establishment. Most of these wartime essays were collected in book form under the title of Meditations (or, as the 1983 American translation has it, Reflections) of a Nonpolitical Man. The book was published in October 1918, that is, at the very moment of Germany's military defeat. Thus the essays were, in a sense, out of date when they appeared, yet the cultural tradition which they articulate and to which they contribute remains a part of the German scene to this day. Three things stand out in these essays: their author's acute yet idiosyncratic perception of Germany and her role in the world, an extravagantly documented insistence that Germany is different', his eagerness to play the role of Germany's literary representative; and the intricate persuasiveness of his polemical pleas. Their political slant is unmistakable, yet they are written by a man who really is 'unpolitical', at least in the sense of failing to recognise their political import. His advocacy of the German cause is often aggressive or at least sharply indignant, but never fanatical. Yet the tenor of the book is by no means as ironical as the literary manner in which its arguments are conducted; and it is impossible to refute the accusation that these essays did nothing

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to conciliate the dreadful conflict, and may have helped to prolong it. It is not what Mann wrote that is so questionable, but that he wrote. While soldiers are killed, authors commemorate their 'supreme sacrifice'. Mann had no real qualms about this. He fully intended his 'service with the pen' to be, and to be seen as, his contribution to his country's war effort. Given the intellectual preoccupations Mann made his own in the course of writing his warlike homilies, the national defeat and subsequent collapse of the Wilhelmine Empire came as a grave shock; given the literary qualities he developed to match those preoccupations, the shock soon gave way to a revision of the ideology of the Meditations. The process of dissociating himself from the romantic nationalism of the war years was lengthy and slow, and again of course unabatingly articulate. (This process is documented in Thomas Mann's diaries of 1918-21.32) The immediate outcome, however, was to enable Thomas Mann to resume work on the novel in April 1919, with fundamental changes affecting the conception, form and indeed the very substance of the work he had put aside 'for the duration' of the Great War. While Meditations of a Nonpolitical Man is above all a

monologue sustained by an immense quantity of quotations, and enlivened by polemical sorties against intellectual sparring partners, The Magic Mountain is fiction through and through, its narrative dominated by discussion. Few of the ideas advocated in the wartime essays are abandoned: most of them become literary copy. Past convictions and beliefs turn into strands in the narrative, while the gradual abandonment of those convictions and beliefs becomes a rich source of irony. The narrator gives up his claim to representativeness and becomes a friendly, eloquent and occasionally sentimental mediator between the hero, those in the strange world around him, and the reader. And just as the ideas of Meditations are carried forward into the novel, so is the perceptiveness, focused on the contemporary scene, which Thomas Mann had developed in the war years. The abortive revolution of December 1918 and its aftermath, which he watched anxiously from his patrician town-house in the Herzogspark in Munich, is the central private and public

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experience of those years, and with Thomas Mann the two are never separate. The murders of Karl Liebknecht and Rosa Luxemburg in January 1919 and of the Bavarian Prime Minister Kurt Eisner a month later; Mann's meetings with Georg Lukacs (later to become the chief literary theoretician of Marxism) and with the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann; his at first enthusiastic and then increasingly hostile reading of Spengler's Decline of the West; his perfunctory interest in Einstein's theories; the long-delayed personal and political reconciliation with his brother Heinrich; and Thomas Mann's profound shock at the murder of the German Foreign Minister, the Jewish industrialist Walther Rathenau in June 1922, followed by his belated declaration of republican sympathies — these are some of the landmarks on the way to the novel's completion in September 1924. Time, in the Magic Mountain, has many dimensions, or, to use Einstein's term, 'bodies of reference', of which history is one. The novel represents Mann's art at its most seismographic and time-conscious. An agreeable young man, Hans Castorp by name, a graduate in naval engineering and a member of the Hamburg patrician merchant class, orphaned and marked by his experience of deaths in his family, travels from his native flatland to Davos in the Oberengadin, situated at an altitude of some five thousand feet, to visit his cousin, Joachim Ziemssen. Joachim is an officercadet by profession but is receiving treatment for tuberculosis of the lungs in one of the opulently appointed, moderately expensive and superbly staffed international sanatoria fashionable at the time, which is 1907. Hans Castorp plans a holiday visit of three weeks. At the end of this period certain suspicious medical symptoms are observed, and he stays for seven longand-short years. The bulk of the novel is devoted to a kind of descriptive catalogue of the contents of Sanatorium Berghof, its medical staff and (mainly moribund) inmates, and of Hans Castorp's intellectual and emotional experiences there. A network of relationships is set up with Hans at its centre - a memorial to Thomas Mann's ideal of the good German. The narrator's

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repeated characterisation of Hans as 'mediocre' ('mittelmaBig') is a little misleading. What it means is that Hans has, not quite a blank mind, but one whose receptiveness and retentiveness are relative to its fundamental good nature, its even temper, its disarming charm. The main characters in this network are organised in pairs. First and foremost there is Hans's cousin, Joachim, who, in an act of foolhardy but fundamentally moral revolt, abandons his treatment in the sanatorium and ' deserts' into the Army - lest staying longer on the Magic Mountain should estrange him from his true vocation as an officer. A few months after this premature departure Joachim is forced to return to the Magic Mountain - to die 'als Soldat und brav' (the quotation, like much else in the book, comes from Part One of Goethe's Faust),,33 His death is caused by a tubercular infection of the larynx, the disease, strangely enough, of which Franz Kafka died some months before The Magic Mountain was published. Where Joachim is all on the side of the spirit of duty, discipline and form, his counterpart, Clavdia Chauchat, a Russian lady with Kirghiz eyes and a maddening habit of slamming doors, is all on the side of disorder, indulgence and charming fecklessness. These two bring Hans the experience of two kinds of love — Joachim the deep affection that is based on a shared past, Clavdia the fulfilment of sexual desire. The narrator discloses this by means of a symbolic prefiguration, re-enacted when Hans asks Clavdia to lend him a propelling pencil (it is, of course, the time when pencils assume a new function in the cultural ambience). Their conversation, in French, about this 'crayon a visser' would perhaps have an excessive clarity in English translation. This has not deterrred some critics from denying that their love is consummated. Another pair is formed by the two resident doctors, Hofrat Behrens and Dr Krokowski, one offering physiological, the other psychological explanations of the phenomenon of disease. There is nothing so crude here as a conflict of matter versus spirit. Instead, both kinds of motivation — Behrens's materialism and Krokowski's Freudian speculations — engage Hans Castorp's curiosity and interest, and whenever one kind looks likely

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to succeed in accounting for sick people's behaviour, the other shows it up as inadequate. The central chapters are taken up by a full elaboration of the cultural dialectic Thomas Mann had conducted in Meditations, though both his own and his brother-antagonist's views are now radicalised to the point of parody and caricature. The dialectic is in the form of extended battles between Signor Lodovico Settembrini, an Italian litterateur of free-thinking, democratic and encyclopaedist pretensions on the one hand, and the Jewish-Jesuit-elitist-Communist Leo Naphta on the other conceived in the intellectual likeness of Georg Lukacs (who seems not to have recognised his portrait), but also resembling a more recent theoretical terrorist, Herbert Marcuse - perhaps this is part of the peculiar relativisation of time we have referred to. However, this dispute is far from achieving dialectical resolution. Where the humanist Settembrini with his deep affection for Hans voices the opinions of brother Heinrich, while the scurrilous, self-regarding little Naphta parodies Thomas Mann's own wartime beliefs, the conflict is fought out to the bitter end. Here especially irony reigns supreme. The reader is presented with two opposing views of disease (Settembrini condemns it as encouraging an indulgence of the spirit, while Naphta extols it as the source of genius) — yet he is constantly reminded that both contenders for Hans's soul are gravely, incurably ill. And even the last addition to the list of major characters - Mynheer Peeperkorn, who makes his appearance only in the final quarter of the novel - even this strangely breathless, ecstatic figure, the most direct representative of the Dionysian principle, conceived in the likeness of the dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann — is paired with an antagonist: this time it is Hans Castorp himself. One might expect such a narrative to end when the measure of the hero's spiritual and intellectual adventures is complete, but how is that to be shown? Instead the end comes - must come - from the outside, at the moment when his story is overtaken by history. Hans's seven years have brought us to the summer of 1914. The novel's penultimate chapter, 'The Great Irritation', prepares us for the last, 'The Thunderbolt', which

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ends with Hans Castorp's hurried departure from the Magic Mountain for the mud and deadly chaos of Flanders. It is a reminder that however extreme Hans's 'Erlebnisse' seemed in that high-altitude forcing-house, they have their realistic grounding in the world below. The relative view of the world is clearly not a new discovery, but the radicalisation it receives in the twentieth century will yield wholly new insights; for instance in Wittgenstein's Tractatus of 1922:

Die Welt des Gliicklichen ist eine andere als die Welt des Ungliicklichen. (6. 43) The world of the happy is quite another than that of the unhappy. Any claim to totality is seen as false, and the relativity of perspectivism is acknowledged as the only truth we are capable of grasping. This is the position maintained, if sketchily and precariously, in Nietzsche's last notes. His influence here is to mediate between philosophy, which yields insights into how the world works, and literature, which devises ways of distributing those insights among its creations. Nietzsche premises his rejection of absolutes and hence his relativistic speculations by criticising the traditional distinction between a theory of knowledge and a theory of personal morality and being. Non-illusory, true knowledge is for him not knowledge of all that is the case in the world, but authentic knowledge; that is, commensurate with and determined by some kind of personal and individual — existential - entitlement to know. It is this conception of an existential entitlement that is at the centre of the portrayal of Hans Castorp in the Magic Mountain. Whatever is to be included in authentic knowledge would for Nietzsche constitute c a doctrine of the hygiene of life' ('eine Gesundheitslehre des Lebens') 34 - z/^such a doctrine were statable without falsifying each single case to which it is applied. Unstated, it provides the implicit rule which Hans Castorp follows through his time of ' apprenticeship to life', his seven years on the Magic Mountain.

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The authentic knowledge that Nietzsche urges on his readers and Thomas Mann grants to his young hero I shall call knowledge-and-experience. What we need to know, on the most generalised level of knowledge-and-experience (Nietzsche asserts) is that there is no such thing as 'Being at rest with itself, identical with itself, unaltering: the only "Being" vouchsafed to us is changing, not identical with itself, it is involved in relationships. ' 35 Here, then, is the source not only of the novel's particular dramatic tension, but also of its hero's representativeness: knowledge-and-experience of the relativity of all that is given to us in the world of nature and the world of other people is thrust upon a very old-fashioned young man; it is shown to inform every adventure of his mind and body, heart and soul; and it is both part of the hero's self and also a constant threat to the self s integrity and wholeness. Brought up among certitudes that have ceased to be certain, Hans Castorp is transplanted from a universe governed by Newtonian laws and their Kantian philosophical inferences to the world of Einstein and Freud. (Ulrich, the hero of the next novel to be considered, has a much fuller intellectual grasp of this situation, though whether this accrues to the advantage of Musil's novel is another question.) Hans Castorp is not an intellectual, the curiosity that distinguishes him from the heroes of other novels is far from indefatigable. Yet in his desultory, occasionally phlegmatic way he shares his narrator's awareness of the changing world around him. The story of his adventures (we are told more than once) is very much his own, a special story, yet it happens to a somewhat ordinary,' mediocre' young man. And this dialectical interplay between the ordinary and the special, to which reference has already been made, has its analogy in the novel as a whole. The Magic Mountain is different from other novels by virtue of its emphasis on the relative nature of the beliefs and values which inform its world, yet, to one side of that emphasis, this is surely true of any novel. 'The novel is a great discovery' D. H. Lawrence writes, 'far greater than Galileo's telescope or somebody else's wireless. The novel is the highest form of human expression so far attained. Why? because it is so incapable of the

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absolute. In a novel, everything is relative to everything else, if that novel is art at all. '36 And it is of the essence of fictional characters generally that they are 'changing, involved in relationships'; that in every respect - except their mere physical being? - they are what they are by virtue of being involved in the lives, the beliefs and values, of others. Lawrence's 'everything' must not be taken too seriously. But what is to be exempt from this claim? Is even the physical being of characters in a novel to be seen relatively, in perspective ? Throughout his writings and letters, Sigmund Freud had insisted 'that the borderline between the normal and the abnormal in nervous matters is a fluid one, and ... that we are all a little neurotic'; 37 that 'an unbroken chain bridges the gap between the neuroses in all their manifestations, and normality'; 38 and again: 'psychoanalysis has demonstrated that there is no fundamental difference between the life of normal people, of neurotics and of psychotics' (or, as Robert Musil puts it, ' the sane have all the mental illnesses there are, whereas the insane have only one'). And so Freud concludes that 'it can in no way be our intention to operate with a condition of absolute normality in psychic health. On the contrary; that which in practical life we call "mental health" is surely nothing other than a fairly broad spectrum of compensations of neurotic tendencies with a view to solving every oncoming task of daily life; it is surely nothing other than the adjustment of the psyche to the reality principle.' Freud's 'reality principle' is as vague and chimeric as all the other 'realities' mentioned in the previous chapter. It too runs the risk of being hypostatised into the sort of static, normative principle which Freud's argument was designed to avoid. The novelist is free from this danger. The rules of his genre enable him to preserve the interplay between hero and world without forcing either into a fixed mould; he can use Freud's insights, too, without Freud's dogmatic yet vague premise of what constitutes 'reality'. In fact, Thomas Mann will outdo Freud at his own game by setting up more than one character (and not only in The Magic Mountain) in whom physical health is seen as covering the same broad spectrum as that which Freud had

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claimed for the psychic life: a spectrum of more or less tolerable pathogenetic conditions stretching from normal good health at one end to incurable disease and death at the other. When the novel was published, the German Medical Association prepared to sue Thomas Mann for defamation of their profession; part of the plaintiffs' case was that he had represented them as Freudian quacks who, for mercenary reasons, were treating tuberculosis as repressed libido. He is not quite doing that. Yet one of the sources of comedy in the novel turns on the question of how ill its hero really is. On the twenty-first day of his stay (around p. 300 of the first volume) Hans has a thorough check-up, in the course of which the following symptoms are diagnosed: recurrent vertigo, raised blood pressure and irregular pulse, slightly raised temperature, catarrh and permanent hoarseness. In the course of an X-ray examination, calcified lesions are discovered in the upper bronchial tract. All these are objective medical facts, surely. Yes - but what is their significance? The pure air on the Magic Mountain, with its high oxygen content, seems to help to detect them, and yet we are allowed no certainty. Does the air and the altitude at which Hans has been living bring these symptoms out - or on? And what of those calcified lesions? Are they merely the harmless symptoms of an old infection now safely healed, as frequently occurs in adolescence, or do these lesions mask an active disease? Do the psychosomatic adjustments we call 'physical health' cease to work because Freud's 'reality principle' is relaxed in this rarefied air and in this particular mixture of frivolity and fear of death? Fourteen months and some four hundred and ninety pages later, Uncle James - Consul Tienappel from Hamburg arrives at the Berghof Sanatorium to find out what is keeping his two nephews in those alien mountains. Almost instantly the sedate Uncle James develops much the same medical symptoms as those described, and is very soon observed flirting with one of the ladies at the dinner-table. A consultation with the medical chief, Hofrat Behrens, is followed - again at the dinner-table - by one of Behrens's scabrous disquisitions on the chemical process of decomposition that

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occurs in the hours after natural death. Uncle James listens attentively: ' Selbstvers-tandlich!' sagte der Konsul. 'Ich danke verbindlichst!' Und am nachsten Tag war er verschwunden.39 'Of course! I quite understand' said the Consul. 'Thank you very much indeed.' And the next day he had disappeared. Uncle James has taken the early train down to the flatland. Yet when Joachim Ziemssen makes his desperate bid for ' the reality principle5, and escapes to the duties of army service, it is the death of him. And Hans? Cured or not cured, reduced to the staus of a mere malingerer, he too will leave one day, and his leaving, too, in all probability, will be the death of him, though it will be a very different kind of death. However, this elaborate play with the significance of health and disease and with the dignity of death itself is only one among several kinds of relativity explored. It is not to be expected that the novelist, let alone his interpreter and critic, will show more than an amateurish understanding of the most momentous exploration of the idea of relativity in his and our time. Yet when, in 1920, Thomas Mann read a popularised account of Einstein's special theory of relativity, he noted in his diary that ' the problem of the relativity of time' must be seen as a major new preoccupation, and he was quick to point to his own 'seismographic sensitivity' in making 'the problem of time' thematic in this novel. In following him along this perilous path we can, I think, see two close parallels with the scientific thought of the age. Among the tributaries of Einstein's work are the nominalist observations of Ernst Mach, and in particular Mach's proposal to regard general theoretical entities as mere logical constructs or fictions — abstract concepts, as Wittgenstein might say, that held us captive40 - fictions which yield valid descriptions of physical phenomena only to the extent that we are able to verify them by empirical observation. Similarly, at the climax of the

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novel the generalities of life and death, whose absolute, metaphysical status has been drummed into our hero's ears by his two mentors, are denied that status. They are not denied as facts. It is their absolute status that is challenged, their significance as things independent of an individual's - that individual's - knowledge-and-experience of them. In a celebrated (but I think inadequately interpreted) episode, Hans Castorp jolts himself out of his bemusement and fascination with death while out on an illicit skiing expedition. In imminent danger of dying in a snowstorm that has suddenly blown up, Hans articulates, as in a dream, his vision of the good life. In this doubly marginal situation — high up on Mount Venus and on the point of death — he vows that ' for the sake of goodness and love' he will not let death and its fascination have dominion over him. This passage, authorial italics and all, has been criticised as a mere abstract exhortation. The criticism is unjustified. True, the exhortation is abstract. But it is the summary, though abundantly challenged and all too soon forgotten, of a concrete sequence of experiences. 'I have learned a lot from "people up here"', Hans reflects; and, more directly relevant to what has been said of Mach, Hans's resolve is framed by a powerful critique of abstraction itself- that is, of the abstract and hypostatised conceptual entities which those two 'dialectical fighting cocks', Naphta and Settembrini, have been flinging at his head. Disease and death, Spirit and Nature, life and death, ' Are these contradictions ?' — Hans is addressing the flurries of snow that are trying to bury him; 'I ask you, are they problems? ... Man alone', he goes on, 'Homo Dei, he alone is noble, and not the antitheses ...' because ' Man is master of the antitheses ' - not, we note, master of life and death, but of the antitheses - ' they are through him, and thus he is nobler than they'. 41 The allurement of abstraction, which Mach had criticised in the context of fundamental science, is here recognised as the German disease par excellence, and Lukacs/Marcuse in the guise of Naphta is its representative carrier. What makes this deconstruction of the metaphysical entities a legitimate part of

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the novel is that the case for the other side - the allurement of death - has been shown so concretely and abundantly. Fully qualified, Hans comes out of his adventure at the portals of death on the side of Settembrini. There is, for him, no significance to life save what a human being can make of it; there is no significance to death ('Death is not an experience', writes Wittgenstein) save what a human being can do to prepare for it - and the two are one and the same thing. What this man can do is neither 'absolute' nor 'determined'. It depends not only on what life among the morituri has made of him, but also on what this life has not succeeded in affecting: the moral strength and spiritedness, the decency, dignity and capacity for love which he is able to summon from within himself, in order to oppose them to the seductions of the Venus Mountain. The ultimate source of that strength is not indicated. 'Homo Dei?' Perhaps. There is no other affirmation here of life under God save through the exertion of good will. And that exertion brings us, for the first time, within sight of a legitimate, fictionally encompassed, absolute. The final abstraction I shall consider here, as directly relevant to this 'Zeitroman', is the absolute concept of time, which Einstein, in the spirit advocated by Mach, subjects to searching criticism. Einstein, like Thomas Mann and the rest of us, lives in an age dominated by scientifically measured time: not the time of the seasons or of daylight, of the visible sun, but an abstraction of that, mechanical clockwork time. (In Tristram Shandy, written early in the history of clockwork time, the very moment of Tristram's conception coincides with the striking of a clock.) Einstein begins his account by asking: do we know under what conditions two events are truly described as being simultaneous ? And in his special theory of relativity he constructs an experimental situation to show that we do not; that in the space-time continuum we inhabit, our ways of measuring time, like our ways of measuring space (to which they are related) depend, not indeed upon our individual whims, but on our assigning the proper system of reckoning to the right object, to what Einstein calls 'the right reference-body' ('Bezugskorper') or system of coordinates.

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The quaint railway scenario Einstein constructs in his book on relativity,42 published in 1917, has become a part of modern lore (as Thomas Mann does with The Magic Mountain, though with better reason, he keeps on calling it' dieses Buchlein' - this little book). Of the two figures involved in this experiment, one is standing on the embankment that runs parallel to the railway track and at some distance from it, at point M exactly halfway between points A and B; the figure might be Uncle James Tienappel who left in such a hurry, it might be you or me. The other figure is inside the train on the track, which is going (as hypothetical trains are said to go) at a constant speed - it might be Hans Castorp inside his novel; moving along the track from A to B, he is at point M 1 , also equidistant from both A and B. Now the celebrated event occurs: lightning strikes at points A and B (actually, in Thomas Mann's novel it strikes only at the end, at point B, but there are other events to illustrate our argument) and, given that light travels at a constant speed, we who are standing on the embankment equally distant from A and B see the two events simultaneously. Hans Castorp, on the other hand, sees the two events consecutively.' Events which are simultaneous in relation to the embankment are not simultaneous in relation to the train, and vice versa', writes Einstein; and ' every reference-body or system of coordinates has its own proper time. An indication of time is only meaningful when the reference-body to which it relates is also indicated.' However, Hans's position is not only that of the passenger in Einstein's train, where events are experienced in their 'ordinary ' consecutive manner. He is also occasionally that figure on the embankment, standing next to the narrator: as when he protests that up there, in the High Alps, the very seasons of the year seem to come all at once — odd, intolerably sultry days in mid-February, and snowfall in August; or when he notes the peculiar agelessness of some of the patients, including one who ' in no time at all' switches from boyhood to manhood; or again when he remarks on the 'unnatural' speed, giving the impression of simultaneity, with which the days and months and years of his sojourn are telescoped into single entities. In other words: Hans's sense of time is confused (relativity turns into

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relativism) not for any moral reasons, but because he measures time from the vantage points of two c reference bodies'; one inside the events that constitute his story, the other outside those events, next to the (not quite omniscient) narrator. And we too, reading and re-reading the book, notice a double movement, a curious changeant effect. Following the events of the story-line (inside Einstein's train) we find them to be consecutive in time - the sequence Lessing called c nacheinander' - ' one after another'. We notice that this consecutiveness is repeatedly emphasised by the narrator as well as by some of the characters, as though there were something in the text, and in the experience of the characters, that made such explicit emphasis necessary. And indeed there is. For on another reading of the book, and even more strongly when stepping back from it (standing on the embankment and looking at the train), we become conscious of a sensation of simultaneity, a panoramic 'nebeneinander' - cnext to each other'. The suspicion will dawn on us that the sequence of most of the events does not matter at all, and this is especially true of Hans's intellectual adventures. For there is really very little development and maturing in what is supposed to be a modern, if parodistic, version of the Bildungsroman. Hardly anything - least of all the hero's mind - seems to grow organically, as a tree grows, but events and characters blow as the poppy blows, in moments of simultaneity, as they do for Einstein's figure on the embankment. This contrast between events seen and presented as simultaneous and events seen and presented as consecutive nebeneinander and nacheinander — and, hence, the variety and relativity of ways of reckoning time, becomes a major theme of the novel. An elaborate interrelationship is set up between narrative time, the time taken by the events narrated (which we shall call event time) and the place of the action.43 The special sense of time applied by Hans to himself and to the other patients at the Berghof Sanatorium, and indignantly rejected by his cousin Joachim as he decides to leave — this sense of time becomes one of the hallmarks of membership in this strange community. Hans is aware that the sense of the passing of time depends on one's rate of oxygenisation (and thus on one's

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distance from point B on the line, that is from death) and that his sense of time comes to be related to the vegetative and inorganic objects and processes he observes and studies. The relative nature of these concepts of time is signalled, as often as not, by the wildly divergent uses of the word ' neulich', which in different parts of the novel may mean anything from ' the other day' to 'three thousand years ago'. And our attention is also directed toward historical time — increasingly so as we move to the last part of the novel and from the Alpine heights to the flatland of Flanders. The stillness of historical time at the beginning gives way to the gathering tension and gloom before the final flash of lightning of August 1914. That this really is a novel constructed in the space-time continuum of Einstein's theory becomes clear when we turn our attention away from the problems of time to the space in which the events happen. For on one view of it the Magic Mountain really is an island, with measurements and 'laws' and values all its own, yet on the other hand it is a part of the main of Europe from 1907 to 1914; intermittently and, 'as time goes on', more and more closely, the island comes to be connected with the world at large and its major events. 'A certain type of superior person' writes Bertrand Russell, 'is fond of asserting that "everything is relative". This is, of course, nonsense, because {{everything were relative, there would be nothing for it to be relative to. ?44 There are absolutes, and one such within the compass of the novel we have already mentioned: it is the moral strength and spirit of Hans Castorp - main ingredients of his charm as a fictional character - which would be left if, per impossibile, we took away the various temptations to which he is exposed on the Magic Mountain. In the end he ceases to be exempt from what Erich Auerbach called ' the ensconcing of random [beliebig] persons and events in the total course of contemporary history'.45 And history — or rather the fact that in the end its call is heeded - is the other fictionally achieved absolute. However extreme its setting, Hans's story retraces an historical pattern. Like Musil's Ulrich, like a whole generation of young men who lived under the impact of that new, unsettling experience of relative values,

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Hans has been living by a morality par provision, hand to mouth: now taking his cue from Settembrini or (when Settembrini is not looking) from Naphta, now from an Omniscient Narrator, now again relying on the authenticity of his own experiences. But the events that cut a swathe into his seven years take precious little notice of his adventures. It is 'the total course of contemporary history' (or, as Thomas Mann puts it, 'the reality which, as narrator, one cannot ignore') that provides the framework for the intellectual and experiential substance of the novel. And there's the rub, many readers will say. And they will add, what eke but intellectual temptations and philosophical abstractions is this young man ever exposed to? Is not even his single sexual encounter steeped in an intellectually excogitated symbolism? Is there anything to be said in defence of this apparently hybrid mode? Thomas Mann is of course not the only author on our list who has been accused of disappointing his readers' expectations by eking out his narratives with 'abstract ideas'. For some, this is just about the most serious critical objection to his work, which questions its very status and kind; incidentally it also undermines the distinction (made earlier in this chapter) between the polemical Meditations and The Magic Mountain as a work of

fiction. Like almost everything else connected with the novel, 'abstraction' is a relative term. Whatever a reader feels to be ' abstract' depends on the reading conventions of his or her culture. The fiction-reading public of the Anglo-Saxon West have been brought up — or perhaps' programmed' is nearer the truth - on the ' philosophy versus fiction' dichotomy, and are likely to be less tolerant than French, German or Russian readers of the intrusions of' philosophical' or abstract thought into 'the concreteness' of fiction. How then do we account for the success of, say, Malraux's The Human Condition, Camus's The Outsider or Milan Kundera's The Intolerable Lightness of Being?

Kundera's novel, to take the most recent of these examples, vaunts the source of its inspiration in the philosophies of

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Parmenides and Nietzsche, and, what is more, justifies its title by an elaborate play, inside the fiction, with its philosophical sources. Obviously, the success of such works depends on a change in fashion. But such changes in turn signify their readers' recognition that the lexis of fiction can be as varied as the potentially unlimited resources of a natural language; that one of the rules of fiction is that there are no lexical rules or restrictions — any bric-a-brac of language will serve it, including litter from the philosopher's desk. In most readers this recognition is likely to be implicit and reluctant rather than conscious. The reluctance is legitimate whenever novelists use abstract turns inadvertently, or to mask an incapacity to convey 'living' experience; and this happens when events which we expect to make an impact on us as if they were part of the experience of our senses are presented as exemplary or typical. (There may well be situations in which this is the best that can be done; this is the rationale of Ernst Jiinger's early work.) But there are other, more legitimate uses of abstraction. There is nothing inadvertent about fictional passages in which the author decides to face the reader's resistance to abstraction head-on, by 'making an issue of it'. Henry James, whose phrase this is, does just that in his last great novels. He uses the highly abstract terminologies of psychological insight and of logical procedures — whole batteries of '-ments', '-ations' and even ' -isms' - not in order to generalise about human kind, but in the service of a single 'living' character and particular situation. The very discrepancy between what looks like an aridly abstract lexis and an unintellectual character, or the fairly basic moral or social situation to which that lexis is applied, becomes a source of irony or, better still, of humour. And once it has become that — once we see it as that — our resistance to it is at an end. Thomas Mann writes within a culture that is relatively unresistant to abstraction, indeed less and less so as time goes on. He has 'a philosophy' but (unlike, say, Laurence Sterne) he hasn't a philosophical mind. Abstractions seem to come to him as readily as does his gift for narrative, which is perhaps the reason he is not always aware of the tedium he can inflict on the reader. Yet of course Mann is a romancier, a member of that

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' brotherhood of novelists' whom Marx praised for the truthfulness of their account of the social world. And so Mann varies the Jamesian procedure in several ways, for instance by letting the reader in on the creative process itself. The abstractions of which he makes an issue are not only used as devices of irony (as they are by Henry James) but also act as names for motivating forces. The reader's resistance is thus directed not only against the manner in which a given character's conduct is described, but against the reasons the author offers to explain that conduct. In the event, the reader resists, or is reluctant to accept, the narrator's explicit claim that an abstract consideration has all the force and efficacy of a material motive. But what if the narrator lets the character make his claim for him? The protracted quarrel, at once personal and ideological, between Naphta and Settembrini is a case in point. The quarrel culminates in a duel, and the challenger is the rebarbative Naphta. What motivates the duel is the same conflict of ideologies — Right versus Left; authoritarian and absolutist versus liberal; mediaeval versus modern; East versus West - which was enacted in Meditations; there Germany was the battlefield, here it is Hans Castorp. The duel is anticipated by a chapter called ' Die groBe Gereiztheit '46 - ' the Great Irritation', in which several other patients are involved in a series of quarrels, insults and provocations. Early on in the novel there is a glimpse of Hans Castorp 'yawning excitedly' ('er gahnte erregt'), 47 by the end of it the whole Sanatorium is involved in his oxymoron. The boredom, as well as the tensions, which were contained by the Berghof s daily routine of medical care and civilised comforts now flare up in personal hostilities and national antagonisms: finally the hermetic isolation is breached, and the Magic Mountain's unquiet guests are getting ready to join the rest of Europe in its headlong plunge into war. Yes, but is the motive of the duel convincing? Is it credible that, with so many ' natural' deaths around them, two men these two men - should fight to the death because they abominate each other's views on such topics as freedom of the will, or the value of rationality and science, or because they find themselves in 'categorical' disagreement over the significance

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of the French Revolution and the German War of Liberation ? The reader is sceptical, but so is Hans Castorp: c If there were any real offence' he remonstrates with Settembrini when he realises that Naphta's challenge has been accepted: '... Eine Beschimpfung biirgerlicher, gesellschaftlicher Art! Wenn einer des anderen ehrlichen Namen in den Schmutz gezogen hatte, wenn es sich um eine Frau handelte, um irgendein solches handgreifliches Lebensverhangnis, bei dem man keine Moglichkeit des Ausgleichs sieht!... Aber was hat er getan? Ich will ihn nicht etwa in Schutz nehmen, ich frage nur, was er zu Ihrer Beleidigung getan hat. Er hat die Kategorien iiber den Haufen geworfen. Er hat, wie er sich ausdriickt, den Begriffen ihre akademische Wiirde geraubt. Dadurch haben Sie sich beleidigt gefuhlt, - mit Recht, wollen wir mal unterstellen —' ' Unterstellen ?' wiederholte Herr Settembrini und sah ihn an... 'Mit Recht, mit Recht! Er hat Sie beleidigt damit. Aber er hat Sie nicht beschimpft! Das ist ein Unterschied, erlauben Sie mal! Es handelt sich um abstrakte Dinge, um geistige. Mit geistigen Dingen kann man beleidigen, aber man kann nicht damit beschimpfen. Das ist eine Maxime, die jedes Ehrengericht annehmen wiirde, ich kann es Ihnen bei Gott versichern ... es halt sich alles im geistigen Bezirke und hat mit dem personlichen iiberhaupt nichts zu tun ... '48 ' If it were a case of civil, social slander! If one had blackened the other's good name! If it were about a woman, or some such palpable, vital issue, where there is no possibility of reconciliation! But what did he do? I don't mean to stand up for him, I only ask what he did to insult you. He threw the categories to the winds. He stripped ideas of their academic dignity, as he says. And this made you feel insulted justifiably so, let's assume ...' 'Assume?' repeated Settembrini, and looked at Hans... 'Oh, justifiably, quite justifiably! He did insult you. But he didn't slander you. With all respect, there is a difference. It's about abstract things, things of the mind. Where intellectual topics are concerned, there may be insult, but not slander. That's axiomatic, any court of honour will tell you so, I swear to God they will!... The whole affair was in the intellectual sphere, it has nothing to do with the personal Hans is still trying to find his bearings, he still can't believe that the quarrel is personal too, and thus a part of his story. As so many times before, Settembrini corrects him:

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'You are mistaken, my friend' answered Settembrini, with closed eyes. 'You are mistaken, first of all, in assuming that the intellectual cannot take on a personal character' — which is what it must do if it is to be a part of Hans's story, if it is to have a place in the fiction 'You should not think that', Settembrini said, with a peculiarly subtle and painful smile. 'But above all you are wrong in your estimate of the things of the mind generally. You obviously think they are too feeble to engender conflicts and passions comparable in their sternness [Hdrte] with those of real life, and which can only be resolved by resorting to force. AWincontro!'

The ' ineluctable hardness of reality' is one of those snippets from the philosopher's desk which was fashionable in the twenties and has survived to this day. Of course Settembrini would not be Settembrini if he left it at that: '... Das Abstrakte, das Gereinigte, das Ideelle ist zugleich auch das Absolute, es ist damit das eigentliche Strenge, und es birgt viel tiefere und radicalere Moglichkeiten des Hasses, der unbedingten und unversohnlichen Gegnerschaft, als das soziale Leben ...' '... The abstract, the purified, the spiritual is at the same time the absolute — it is true rigour, and it contains much deeper and more radical possibilities of hatred, of unconditional and irreconcilable enmity than social life does ...' unless that life too, like the spiritual, is purchased at the highest price that can be paid, with one's whole being. ' Das Abstrakte, das Gereinigte, das Ideelle': for Settembrini these are absolute. Not so for Hans, or for the reader, for whose benefit Hans had extemporised diegenetically on the difference between insult and slander. Abstractions too (the sub-text is saying) are relative, only in that form do they provide a convincing motive for the ensuing duel; and only by being personalised do they help Hans, and the reader, to fathom the full depth of passion that moves these two adversaries. Settembrini denies that ' the things of the mind generally' are mere rationalisations of other, more ' real' kinds of conflict, but his denial is neither approved nor refuted. The abstract question of

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what does or does not constitute an effective motive is not raised. The issue here is Settembrini's belief in the power of abstraction — his, and Naphta's, for this is the platform they share, without which there can be no duel. Their belief in ideology as a motive of action has a power for these two men in this extraordinary situation which has to be understood before the quarrel can assume a representative function, and only then can we draw the historical lesson from it. But there is a literary lesson too. It still, to be sure, remains an extraordinary conflict. The extraordinary loses none of its power by being motivated and accounted for, and thus in a sense identified with ordinariness itself. One way of reading The Magic Mountain and giving a rightful place to its intellectual discussions is to see it on the analogy with an institution that is (or should be) concerned with the kind of investigation Hans Castorp is conducting there. For all his phlegmatic temperament and ' mediocrity' Hans really is, when you come to think of it, an ideal student; and, however macabre some of the implications of our analogy may be, Sanatorium Berghof is his university. Seen in this way, the novel is based on the hypothesis that all that students are actually doing at an academic institution, such as: - giving their minds more or less eagerly to the study of their chosen subjects; - organising their thoughts for the agony of the weekly seminar which, conducted in the ' Socratic' manner, will turn out to require little of them beyond more or less articulated noises of agreement; - anticipating by intelligent guess-work what the teacher's ' line' is likely to be, and getting ready to fall in with it; -judging people not by their social status but by their intellectual convictions and their mental torpor or liveliness; - contemplating their studies as partly self-contained and partly open-ended, 'for life'; - arguing out among themselves (as Hans argues with his cousin Joachim) what they have been taught, and in-

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cidentally doing that rather more competently than their performance at the seminar would lead anyone to expect; — interspersing their studies with amorous encounters, which may be uneasily related to their intellectual pursuits; — becoming more discriminating, and changing their teachers and friends, their allegiances and interests; -seeing the connections of their 'subject' with other 'subjects' or even with experiences that cannot readily be pigeonholed, and enriching their minds in the process; — in short, converting knowledge into experience, and incidentally discovering that knowledge is experience ... - the novel is, as I say, based on the hypothesis that all these concerns, which are paralleled in Hans's seven years of residence, are an entirely worthy and appropriate subjectmatter for the genre 'novel' (they are, perhaps, a good deal more worthy than the subject-matter of many examples of the sub-genre 'university novel'). The enquiring mind, consciousness itself, is the theme. And the enquiring mind in its relationship to the world is as worthy of the novelist's craft as is the mind of a bullfighter, or a gamekeeper, or of a small-time advertising agent with a weakness for fried kidneys, and a budding young artist in search of a father-figure. Nietzsche attacked what he called the modern Socratic superstition of the pursuit of absolute knowledge, ' knowledge for its own sake', 49 arguing that wisdom lies in relating that pursuit to the being and capacities of the knower. Thomas Mann's task is to relativise knowledge and relate it to the existential needs of his hero. But Nietzsche's argument is laced into a sort of epistemological circle - there is no knower without knowledge - and this circle provides Thomas Mann with his technique. The relativities to which Hans is exposed do not lead to a dissolution of the experiencing self- this is not FinnegarCs Wake, nor a tropistic experiment like one of Nathalie Sarraute's. But then again there is no Hans Castorp without the adventures which form the sort of person he is - and the acquisition of various kinds of knowledge and their conversion into experience

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belongs among these adventures. The novelist's task, therefore, is to show him trying to catch up with each piece of excessive knowledge as it is proffered, to show him as inadequate in his understanding of what is put before him, and then to show him making good the inadequacy as best he can, and rejecting the rest. This is a process (in life and on the Magic Mountain), not of harmonious development, but of fits and starts. The leap-frog technique which Thomas Mann uses in order to relativise knowledge and convert it into experience is outside and perhaps at odds with the tradition of the modern English novel, and Thomas Mann himself did not use it again with anything like this concentration. Critics have often argued that Mann's intention was to make his novel into a Bildungsroman, but, as I have already suggested, an exclusive emphasis on membership of that in German literature well established and extremely prestigious class seems to me misleading. I think it may be assumed that a phrase like ' that in German literature well established and extremely prestigious class' will strike my reader as odd, for the obvious reason that the extended adjectival clause preceding a noun is a bit of a joke in English, whereas in German it is entirely natural. What is an extended adjectival clause doing? It offers a characterisation, which can become quite complex and involved, while leaving a number of descriptive verbal units hanging in mid-air, and organising a sort of guessing-game about whom or what these descriptive elements will be applied to. A whole landscape of descriptions might be organised in this way, giving the reader or listener a passing impression that it is almost adventitious to ask what sort of noun will eventually be attached to the panorama of predicates. This syntactic device is characteristic of Thomas Mann's style, and equally so of the styles of countless other German novelists. Incidentally, Germans too, Schopenhauer among them, have found it comic. My reason for drawing attention to the device is stylistic in an altogether wider sense. On a very much larger scale, it provides a pattern of the author's attitude to the central figure of the

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book. Of course, it always does become clear that the complex and extended concatenation of argument and raisonnement, the dialectical argy-bargy, the plethora of historical, sociological, medical, physiological, crystallographical and toxological information will eventually be related to the figure of that attractive if somewhat stolid young man from the Hamburg flatland; it always does turn out that it is, as the author observes more than once, his - Hans Castorp's - story that is being told; but it is only just his story. If we now address the critical question of literary theory, 'What is radically new about The Magic Mountain?', we get three closely connected answers, all bound up with our altered view of the structure of the world. The relativising of'absolute' time (the old time of clockwork science) is, first, discussed and enacted by the characters in the novel; secondly, it enters the narrator's experience of events, recounted by him in his own person; and, finally, relativity enters the narrative structure of the novel itself. Of course, any novel relativises time. There is never a i: i relation between event time and narrative time. Earlier realistic fictions were content to translate event time into narrative time; the events of those fictions were ' literary' only in the sense of being inside a narrative whose sense of time did not impinge on their heroes' lives. Hans Castorp, in addition to having a place in event time, has also - as the figure standing on the embankment, by the side of the narrator - a place and function in narrative time. Thus the events on the Magic Mountain become doubly literary, sharing the narrator's and his narrative's sense of time. This is a device few novelists will risk - Laurence Sterne is among those who do, Henry James emphatically not. The danger is a tedious knowingness, which settles like a blight on many pages of Thomas Mann's Joseph and his Brethren, but which is here largely avoided. Thomas Mann's grand theme, I have said, is the theme of modern consciousness. That consciousness is in search of values, of 'absolutes'. What legitimates these values is that they are intimated in the face of much (if not all) that can be said against them, in the face of the greatest odds this novelist can devise. In this self-imposed exaction, and not in his views, lies his morality.

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Hans Castorp's is the story of one of those everyday random persons who cannot help being ' ensconced in the total course of contemporary history'. It is entirely fitting that when he decides to heed history's call, to leave the Magic Mountain, his decision is neither qualified nor described. There is no comment or raisonnement from him, though of course dear old Settembrini, more than ever the Polonius of the piece, cannot resist giving him the benefit of a last didactic blessing. There is hardly a word of explanation when Hans takes the little train down to the flatland, and none is needed. The world of hideous action has taken over, the adventure on the Magic Mountain is at an end. Yet the value embodied in the adventurer - his charm, and the spiritedness that amounts to a moral strength — survives. As an absolute ? A portrait so fully achieved renders the very question irrelevant and abstruse. Critics have sometimes taken it into their heads to interpret Hans's joining the ranks of the Kaiser's army as a sign of Thomas Mann's unregenerate nationalism. It is nothing of the kind. Nor is Hans's decision thrust upon him by some mysterious irresistible force of history, some sort of Spenglerian fatalism. He answers no absolute, but the call of a duty freely acknowledged. Though, with the author, we wish it were a different call, Hans will not seek exemption from it; any more than will his and Joachim's Shakespearean cousin, Private Feeble, whose words on a similar occasion could well be Hans's own: I will do my good will, sir; you can have no more... I'll ne'er bear a base mind: an't be my destiny, so; an't be not, so. ROBERT MUSIL : THE MAN WITHOUT QUALITIES Viennese literature in this age of relativism shows little concern for the social tensions and political conflicts of contemporary life. Here too, in the last years of an Empire whose intellectuals were aware of living on borrowed time, 'reality' is elevated to an absolute; and there is much talk about the need to redeem human kind from 'unreality' or ' a loss of the real' ('Unwirklichkeit', 'Realitatsverlust'), and other such afflictions. Taking

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their cue from this doleful diagnosis of a situation in which many more people were lacking a roof over their heads and protection from sudden death than were short of a dubious metaphysical comfort, the poets and 'prophets' of the age were setting out to find new values and solutions, forever on the quest for some 'true reality' behind the realm of inauthenticity and routine governing the everyday world. Among the few writers who tried to resist this irritable reaching after metaphysical certainties, Robert Musil is the most interesting. He is abundantly aware of the quest as a sort of unfocused intellectual traffic noise going on all around him — indeed, he records it in his magnum opus, The Man Without Qualities?® in an apparently unending series of anecdotes, interludes and speculations. But instead of offering yet another 'definition of true reality', he proposes to make do with an experimental world compounded of fiction and speculation that would be free from those egregious expectations, ' a provisional state [ein Provisorium] run on interim principles', opposing all useless questions with a resolute 'Not Yet' (WK vol. 1, p. 48). This looks like being a more modest, more realistic undertaking than those we have examined so far; given Musil's high philosophical ambitions, his task turns out to be a most exacting one. The first book of The Man Without Qualities, entitled 'A Sort of Introduction', opens with a chapter designed to delay rather than introduce a story: Chapter One From which, remarkably enough, nothing much emerges. There was a barometric depression over the Atlantic; it was travelling eastward, toward an area of high pressure over Russia, showing as yet no inclination to avoid it by moving northward. The isotherms and isotheres were doing all that was expected of them. The atmospheric temperature was in its proper relation to the mean annual temperature, to the temperature of the coldest as well as the hottest month, and to the aperiodic monthly variation. The rising and the setting of the sun and the moon, the light variations of the moon, of Venus and of Saturn's ring, and many other significant phenomena

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corresponded to the forecasts in the astronomical yearbooks. The tension of vapour in the air was at its highest while the humidity was low. In short, to use an expression that describes the facts pretty well, even though it is somewhat old-fashioned: it was a fine August day in the year 1913.

The stylistic elements of this opening paragraph are mildly contradictory. The distance from which we zoom in on the scene suggests a narrative that will be circumstantial and leisurely, while the scientific data, which in the last sentence are reviewed ironically, suggest a modern, objectively scientific temper. The hero will not be mentioned in this chapter. The enumeration of these data anticipates his penchant for an exact, scientific attitude to all things, but here exactitude is undercut by several anthropomorphic turns which emphasise the subjectivity of the narrative voice: the depression (we learn) is 'not yet inclined to move out of the way' of the barometric high, the isotherms (and the partly tautologous isotheres) 'are doing all that is expected of them', while the temperature of the air is in an 'orderly' relation to the summer mean of the place in question; in fact, all is as the meteorological tables tell us it should be. But (the reader will object) surely this array of data is too much of a good thing. The narrator seems to agree: You, dear reader (he seems to be saying) may be obsessed by this modern yen for science, but you may find that ' old-fashioned' terminology will do just as well. And this single word —'oldfashioned ' — said defensively and with a touch of irony, locates the narrator in historical time. He counts on the reader to register 'August 1913' as a displaced downbeat, a syncopation that means one thing and one thing only: the simple, devastating fact that there is a twelvemonth to go to August 1914. This overdetermined opening sentence is characteristic: very few points in the narrative that follows will be made univocally, again and again formulations will have their meaning now undermined, now again enriched, by near synonyms and periphrastic turns; and there will be few scenes in which the historical dimension will go unmentioned. These two devices linguistic scepticism and historicism - will accompany the narrative throughout.

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The next paragraph is cast in a very different style: Motor cars came shooting out of deep, narrow streets into the shallows of bright squares. Dark patches of pedestrians [Fufgdngerdunkelheit] formed cloudy strings. Where stronger lines of speed drove through their loosely-woven haste, the patches thickened, only to trickle on all the faster and after a few oscillations to regain their regular pulse-beat. Hundreds of sounds were intertwined into a coil of wiry noise, with single barbs projecting, sharp edges running along it and submerging again, while clear notes splintered and scattered. From this noise, even though its special nature could not be described, a person returning after years of absence would have known, with his eyes shut, that he was in the capital and imperial city of Vienna. Cities like people can be recognised by their gait. Opening his eyes, he would recognise this similarity by the way the movement pulsed through the streets, long before discovering it from any characteristic detail. And even if he merely imagined he could do so, this matters little enough. The habit of exaggerating the importance of one's whereabouts goes back to nomadic times, when people had to note the grazing grounds. It would be important to know why, when talking about a red nose, one is content with the inexact statement that it is red without ever asking what particular shade of red it is, although this could be expressed in terms of wavelengths to a millimicron; whereas in the case of something so much more complicated as the town one happens to be in, one always insists on knowing what particular town it is. This distracts from more important things. Thus no special value should be attached to the name of the city... (WK vol. 1, p. 4.) We have left the natural world together with the scientific terminology that indicates its timescale, and have homed in on what will presumably be the place of the action. We are likely to be surprised by how busy this pre-war city seems to be — as a matter of fact the description turns out to be anachronistic, it refers to traffic conditions in post-war Vienna. The passage is stylised in a deliberately ' modern' way, by means of compounds and impressionistic turns, the 'lines' or 'strokes' — 'Striche' — make one think of Camille Pissarro's technique in his city-scapes of Paris. At this point the text is peculiarly difficult to translate: we can cope with 'shallows of brightly-lit squares' but not with ' FuBgangerdunkelheit', one of those ad hoc compounds German is so good at, where ' a darkness of pedestrians' emphasises the

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anonymity of the scene. The series of synaesthetic impressions ends with another disclaimer (emphasising the ' special' nature of the place) and now at last a human agent is mentioned, a hypothetical unnamed 'person', 'ein Mensch', who is trying to find his bearings in this bustle. It seems to be the hero, 'Ulrich von So-und-So? (his full name will not be revealed 'out of consideration for his father' (WKp. 14)) if only because, like this unnamed person, Ulrich too has just returned from abroad. However, this turns out to be a false clue - a fiction subverted - though we shall not find that out until Chapter 3. Nor is this person identical with the victim of the minor traffic accident which will be mentioned at the end of this chapter. The accident will provide another occasion for recalling the theme of exactitude, as one of the bystanders comments critically on the excessive braking distance of heavy lorries and on some American statistics of road deaths (wrongly remembered) for the year 1924. But, like so many other events reported and commented on in The Man Without Qualities, this accident will turn out to be without consequence for the story; its only relevance is that it occurs in the street where Ulrich has rented ' a little chateau' (which happens to be closely modelled on the Liechtenstein Palais in the ninth district of Vienna). To return to our text. What looked like the beginning of a story is almost instantly abandoned, for not only is the narrator uncertain whether it is this city, Vienna, that has been identified, but the significance of identifying places generally is questioned. Compared with the quantitative exactitude of science (measuring 'to a millimicron'), our habit of giving names even to such simple things as 'a red nose', let alone to such complex things as a city, is said to be inexact and therefore unimportant. Is said - by whom? By the narrator, we assume, though elsewhere the question of who is speaking will receive no reliable answer. More than a thousand pages later (e.g. M.o.E. p. 1421) both narrator and hero will still be struggling with the same problem, trying to find a name and ' exact' description for the indeterminate state of mind and soul that will be Ulrich's goal. It so happens that there is a simple solution to their problem. It is provided neither by Musil nor his narrator, but by a contemporary and fellow countryman of theirs, Ludwig Witt-

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genstein, another engineer with an interest in mathematics and philosophical ideas: But is a blurred concept a concept at all? — Is an indistinct photograph a picture at all? Is it indeed always an advantage to replace an indistinct picture by a sharp one? Isn't the indistinct one often just what we need?51 The right, 'exact' kind of description (Wittgenstein is saying) is the one we need in a given context and for a given purpose such as this novel (if it is a novel) will provide. And this will be one part of MusiPs (or is it his narrator's?) task: not to search for a solution to 'the problem of reality' or indeed any other philosophical problem (though this is a temptation he will find increasingly hard to resist), but to fashion their unending play with synonyms and paraphrase into reports on Ulrich's search for 'exact' feeling and its match, 'exact' description; and to embody that necessarily inconclusive search in a series of equally inconclusive episodes (often told in the form of shaggydog stories). This is what the narrator does when he tells us that no special value should be attached to the name of the city. Like all big cities, it consisted of irregularity, change, a sliding forward, a not-keeping-in-step, collisions of things and affairs and fathomless points in between, of tracks and trackless areas, of one great rhythmic beat and the perpetual discord and dislocation of all opposing rhythms against each other, resembling as a whole a bubble seething in a vessel which consists of the solid material of buildings, laws, regulations and historical traditions. (WKvol. 1, p. 4) Again the narrative presents, not distinct things or individual people, but suitably blurred shapes and movements, and again it is helped by the ease with which the German language can articulate such indefinite collective impressions, though now the pictorial analogy has shifted to surrealism. The metaphors, their paratactic arrangement, the verbal nouns - all these make up a city-scape that is nameless and named, and representative by being both typical and special. Now at last two people are introduced, but the way they make their appearance is not likely to lessen our impatience: The two people who were walking up a wide, busy street in this city were of course far from having such an impression. They evidently

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belonged to a privileged section of society, their good breeding being apparent in their clothes, their bearing, and their manner of conversing. They had their initials significantly embroidered on their underclothing, and similarly - that is to say, not outwardly displayed but as it were in the exquisite underlinen of their consciousness — they knew who they were, and that they were in their proper place in a capital city that was also an imperial residence. Assuming that their names were Arnheim and Ermelinde Tuzzi - which cannot however be the case, because Frau Tuzzi was spending August in Bad Aussee, acccompanied by her husband, and Dr Arnheim was still in Constantinople - one is then faced with the puzzle of who they were. People with lively imaginations are very often conscious of such puzzles in the street. Remarkably enough they are solved by being forgotten ... (WK vol. 1, p. 4) A story of sorts is about to begin, though with great reluctance. The author/narrator sets up the fiction — the possibility — of a street in a random city; he briefly actualises this street by placing two named characters in it; instantly subverts them - and to that extent also the fiction in which he has placed them - as an impossibility by denying their present actualisation, though (by naming them) he saves them up for a future occasion; and then returns to the fiction of the street.52 Although we will not be told who ' exactly' these two people are, the reader will want to be reassured: Dr Paul Arnheim and Ermelinde - or rather, in more homely fashion, Hermine Tuzzi, known throughout the novel as Diotima - really are two important characters in this reluctant tale, and they will be heavily involved in what for want of a better word we must call its plot. But for the time of this ' Sort of Introduction' and in many episodes to come, the background - Vienna and the AustroHungarian Empire in its last year of peace - is foregrounded. Like Ulrich, the Empire and its capital have many qualities like any man or city or state; yet these qualities seem to lead nowhere, to have no purpose and achieve nothing positive, they seem to cancel each other out. Vienna is, or at least it likes to appear as, a city of endless possibilities. Here 'anything can happen, and it probably will', yet most things will turn out to amount to nothing out of the ordinary; and all this is equally

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true of Ulrich and of the Empire in which he lives. This at all events is how ' the world' - the international world of high finance, commerce, industry and politics — sees them; and this, too, is how they see themselves every time they are compelled to become, however reluctantly, a part of that world. In this double vision they are presented not merely as ' typical' — as data in an historical or sociological survey — but, because a strong fictional element is mixed in with their very substance as person, city and empire, they are representative, a metonymy of Europe in their time. (They not only belong to a fiction, but their fictional status is occasionally acknowledged.) This representativeness is the one quality by which they are distinguished, the one quality which fits the story, its hero and its setting to perfection, and to the elaboration of which Musil's narrative and his reflective discourse alike are dedicated. (Incidentally, this element of fiction, which is a part of every act of representation, is the converse of the element of truth that is necessarily present in all propaganda and reclame.) The representative is never the average but the best of its kind. Vienna, the oxymoron of a 'random, out-of-the-way city' ('eine beliebige, abseitige GroBstadt') is like every other city only more so. True, Musil's description of the fictional element that raises the average to the level of the representative applies to life anywhere in Europe, but how much more to a culture which is said to have a certain penchant toward the allegorical, if by that we mean an intellectual relationship in which everything means more than it has any honest business to mean. For just as a couple of crossed swords reminded [Austrian] society in the Baroque age of all the gods and their stories, and it was not Lord Harry who kissed Countess Harriet but a god of war who kissed the goddess of chastity, so too nowadays when Harry cuddles Harriet what they experience is 'the March of Time' or any one of the ten dozen sample ideas which of course no longer form an Olympus floating above avenues of yew trees, but the whole muddle of the modern age - a muddle hardly diminished by the reader's recognition of those avenues of ornamental yews as the emblems of a well-

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known Baroque pastiche by Musil's contemporary, the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal.53 How different are Vienna and Austria from Protestant Germany? Both exalt notions like ' genuineness V being oneself ('Selbstsein') and 'authenticity of inner experience'; and (to quote another of Musil's prominent contemporaries, who moved from one to the other) both cultures accept declarations of' my fanatical faith' and ' my ice-cold [or] unshakeable inner conviction'54 as commitments to 'absolute' values - whereas of course what really counts in both is tangible, worldly achievement. All the same, there is a difference. In the German Protestant ethos the gap between authenticity and achievement - between following one's conviction and getting on in the world - is accompanied by a bad conscience and a feeling of guilt. Consequently German culture abounds in strenuous attempts to close the gap, known sometimes as ' the gap between the Ideal and Life'; high among these attempts is the ' spiritualisation' of commerce and technology as practised by Ulrich's antagonist, the Prussian industrialist Dr Paul Arnheim. Austrian culture, however, with its roots in secular Catholicism, is less troubled by such discrepancies. It makes some show of closing the gap, yet remains perfectly content with the possibility of leaving it open, of taking a vacation from both authenticity and achievement. This is known as 'fortwursteln' or 'muddling through', an activity which, in its Austrian form, is not devoid of a certain elegance. And this, of course, is where Ulrich comes in. He is a highly eligible thirty-two year old bachelor who has abandoned a brief career as a professional officer in the Imperial Army, has spent several years studying mathematics, and on his return from abroad decides ' to take a year's vacation from life': proposing to himself to live, without a feeling of guilt, in the noman's land between authenticity and achievement, between self and world. (He also resolves, as it were in parenthesis and under his breath, to commit suicide if his quest should fail.) He is 'a man without qualities', 'a master of the hovering life', a sort of ' universal specialist' or, as Andre Gide felicitously called him,

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'un homme disponible'. He not only lacks the qualities that lead a man to success in the world, but he is also suspicious of those qualities that would make him live by the dictate of his inner self. He does not believe in belief, and his 'faith in exactitude', too, is attenuated by irony. The world, always ready to retaliate against those who show little interest in getting on in it, is apt to look on Ulrich as an amalgam of' many qualities without the man' (heading, Ch. 39, M.o.E. p. 148), while his friends consider that 'he is really a character even though he hasn't one'. Like the hero of Christopher Hampton's The Philanderer, Ulrich might well say of himself, ' I am a man without any convictions, / think...' In a life lived so freely in potentialities, every actual event tends to be merely episodic, inconsequential and self-defeating, like going out into the rainy park in the middle of the night in your pyjamas. What distinguishes Ulrich from most other fictional heroes of the age and establishes his kinship with Hans Castorp, his naive and earnest German cousin, is that Musil sets him up as ' a man of possibilities', 'ein Moglichkeitsmensch'. This involves Musil in an even more radical revision of nineteenth-century realist conventions than it does Thomas Mann. Some of Musil's narrative is compatible with traditional character portraiture, as when he tells us that Ulrich is 'one of those whom the actualising of things always attracts less than leaving them in mid-air, unrealised', or that' every bad action will seem good to him in some connection or other. And he'll always be waiting for a possible context before deciding what to think of a thing.' To show actions, or inactivity, as being motivated by considerations of a relativism of this kind needs no special dispensation from realism. But Musil's vision takes him beyond traditional character portrayal. At the height of the age of Nietzschean individualism he questions and blurs the contours of his individual characters, as though individuality itself had become an outmoded cultural option. In Ulrich he creates a character who has an abundance of talents, social graces, and physical gifts. But when he endows him with apparently unlimited intellectual and spiritual potentialities, and in this way blurs the differences between hero, narrator, and author, he is in fact

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reducing 'character' to a mere contingency, as though Ulrich need be no more than a confluence of feelings, ideas, and more or less indeterminate 'states of mind'. But in so doing Musil still draws on a faithful reading of Nietzsche to legitimate his undertaking: The characteristic thing about Nietzsche is that he says: This could be one thing, and that could be another. And from this one could infer soand-so, and from that such-and-such. In short, what he speaks of are sheer possibilities, sheer combinations, without showing us an actual elaboration of any of them.55 This, then, is Musil's project: to create a figure who is open and flexible enough, with potentialities capacious enough to be able to engage in a whole gamut of contemporary experiences and emerge dissatisfied, wanting not just more of the same, but wanting (and perhaps attaining) something largely or perhaps wholly different: an alternative, ' second' condition and state of being, 'einen zweiten Zustand', in which he, a character living the life of the mind, might go beyond the world and his worldly self. And Austria — Vienna 1913 —is the locale chosen for the project, the meeting place of history, ideas, and fiction. It is shown as the place which offers a minimal resistance — social, intellectual, and emotional resistance — to an undertaking we might call Faustian were it not that it largely lacks the pathos and drama, but also the warm humanity, of Goethe's Faust. Ulrich is not in search of'reality'. True, he too has moments when he yearns to be involved in events as in a wrestling match, even if they are senseless or criminal, so long as they are authentic [gtiltig] - finally valid [endgiiltig] - and not of that permanent provisional nature when a man remains superior to his inner experiences. (M.o.E. p. 738) But unlike, say, Hermann Hesse's heroes, Ulrich is too critical, and too fastidious, to succumb to the most fashionable temptation of the age. He is trying in a number of ways to avoid the 'commitment', the sententiousness, compromises and existential lies which he detects, not without malicious pleasure, in all those around him who are saying to him, in effect, 'But, my

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dear fellow, you too will learn, you too will have to face the reality we all have to face.' Instead, he decides,' one would have to live ... without any reality at all' (WK, vol. in, p. 81). For this de'sinvolture, this exercise in disengagement, the setting is supremely right. So perfect is the fit between person and place that we can no longer tell whether it is the conception of' the man of possibilities' that leads to the creation of his juste milieu, or the brilliant recreation of world and time56 - Vienna as the concentrate of the imperial and royal monarchy - which produces 'the man of possibilities' and his protagonists. The scene is pre-war Vienna, but it is richly seasoned with anachronisms which take us from 1913 through the early twenties to the time after the Anschlufl, when it became the capital of Hitler's Ostmark. And the consequent changes, which are shifts in narrative perspective as well as adjustments to the ideological changes of the age, reflect the long years of the novel's gestation. For behind Ulrich - never far behind - stands Robert Edler von Musil: born in Klagenfurt in Carinthia in 1880, the son of a university professor of mechanical engineering who was ennobled for his work in 1917; himself an engineer by training and the inventor of a gyroscopic gadget which, by turning monochromatic discs, produces impressions of mixed colours; author of a dissertation on the philosophy of Ernst Mach, one of his teachers; Captain in the Imperial Army with more than four years of distinguished war service, much of it in the terrible conditions of Alpine warfare in the Alto Adige; journalist, playwright, and novelist with a high reputation among the literati and a minuscule readership, and married; at the novel's inception (c. 1920) he is earning a scant living first as an officer in the Ministry of War, then as an employee of the Viennese municipal library; twenty years later he and his Jewish wife will be living in exile and great poverty in a garden house in none-too-hospitable Geneva; he will die there of a cerebral stroke, pen in hand, in the summer of 1942, his life's task unaccomplished. ' In this book', Musil notes disarmingly in his diary of 1921,57 4 Ich means neither the author nor a person the author has invented, but a changing mixture of both'. The obvious

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similarities in social status and biographical detail shouldn't obscure the temperamental differences between them. All we know about Musil, from his diaries, letters and friends, points to his passionate, uncompromising preoccupation with this one thing, this 'novel' without end. Countless drafts (some of them lost by his first unhappy editors),58 meticulous revisions not just of details but of whole sections, fights with his publisher which end in his withdrawing a whole ' book' of the novel at proof stage - all this, accompanied by paralysing doubts about the whole enterprise, adds up to the picture of an author obsessed by a mirage-like task; whereas the character on whose behalf this obsession is endured is in many ways his opposite. He Ulrich - is fleet of foot, disdainfully elegant, many things to many men and and even more women. There are moments when Ulrich too is overcome by despair, but (this is a compositional difficulty Musil shares with Hermann Hesse) it is not always clear where, in such a de'sinvolte character, there is room for despair. Both author and hero are given to weighty pronouncements about 'the modern world'; they share a devotion to 'exact' reasoning and mathematics which Ulrich loves ' because of the people who hate it'; and they are much preoccupied with physical fitness, strenuous exercise, and sport (though Musil seems to have smoked himself to death). Ulrich too, like Musil, will eventually be engaged in a redemptive quest, but he will do so lightly, earnestly and ironically, as one who looks for a lost object in this place and that, and wouldn't be a bit surprised if he found it somewhere quite different. And so, while Ulrich's concerns are bracketed by a good deal of irony and some humour, his author has left none for himself. What they do have in common is a wide-ranging curiosity, an intellectual foxiness on which Musil imposes his hedgehog-like singlemindedness: for Ulrich's sake? For the sake of the work, certainly. But this means that Musil would be like Ulrich were he not obsessed by Ulrich; and Ulrich's far from singleminded search for 'the second state' is the transliteration of Musil's search for form. Many authors have been obsessed by their creations: Goethe by Werther, Balzac by Dr Bianchon, Goncharov by Oblomov,

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Flaubert by Emma Bovary, and Thomas Mann (who took a whole volume, The Origin of Doctor Faustus, to document his obsession) by Adrian Leverkuhn; and they freed themselves from their obsession, to the point where they could complete their creation, by finding the form they sought and, trusting in what they found, send it into the world and thus have done with it. Musil can find no such liberation because his creative act never looks like being completed: there never is good reason why the chain of possibilities should end, it doesn't even seem to be a chain. In a similar predicament, in The Magic Mountain, Mann invokes History and brings down the curtain on a scene in Flanders - one wonders why, with August 1914 so obviously in the air, Musil won't do the same. Is it because Thomas Mann beat him to it? Disparaging Mann (both in The Man Without Qualities and in his diaries) for his reputation as 'a literary tycoon' ('ein GroBschriftsteller'), Musil seems to be criticising him for his extra-literary ambitions, but his criticism conceals a deeper anxiety. True, the political airs and paedagogic graces that Mann so readily gives himself often obscure his allabsorbing devotion to his metier, but never for long. That Protestant work ethic which compels Mann to salvage every last anecdote and apergu and the record of every personal disaster for the work in progress, is inseparable from his literary gift, which enables him to finish one thing and use whatever is left over for the next, and to ' sacrifice' speculation to the achievement of form. With Musil the tug-of-war between philosophical ambition and literary gift is never resolved; on the contrary, it is exacerbated by his passionate conviction that 'the only function of a writer is to produce a masterpiece'.59 Musil's masterpiece is to have a hero in quest of another life', a ' second state' whose very nature it is to remain indeterminate - hence the paramount need to counterbalance that state with a concrete and circumstantial picture of the old life, of'the way we live now'. But Musil's interest in providing a relatively realistic scenario for this undertaking is limited. The sympathy Ulrich may count on in his quest for the oxymoron of a private Utopia reflects the fact that a number of other people around him are similarly engaged — a surprising number, one might

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say, were the scene any other than Vienna. As it is, the fictional element inherent in all Utopian thinking, which predisposes so many to Ulrich's quest, is not only in Musil's representation, but already in the represented object. Musil's is indeed an exacting task. At first it seems not very different from the task any novelist has to face who portrays the resistance and mild hostility of people of practical affairs in the presence of a daydreamer and 'idealist' of independent means. But it soon becomes clear that Musil is not consistently concerned to follow the realist prescription of showing the recalcitrance of all that is solidly given in the social world to all that is posited in the world of ideas. His chosen task is the creation of a possibilist universe. And when he observes that the locale of his novel is 'none other than a particularly clear instance of the modern world '60 he is at least partly facing the paradox of all great, socially grounded fiction, the success of which is directly proportionate to its concreteness and particularity. But at its most characteristic, his fiction shows no qualms about avoiding the challenge of realism. And so he fashions a milieu where whatever happens isn't likely to lead to the consequences intended, while momentous 'historical' events will steal upon the scene, not unobserved (nothing in this city goes unobserved), but unheeded. Here intentions are even more disconnected from actual achievement than is usually the case; a nudge-and-wink bureaucracy is at its best and least inhuman when it doesn't quite work; and, while family connections seem to count for everything, almost everything turns out to be a celebration of business as usual. Extravagant in its good and bad temper alike, this is a place that makes a passing show of passion, its inhabitants slip quickly and easily from courtesies to obscenities, from ardent loyalty to perfidy; and, mixing superb good taste with horrendous kitsch, they are equally articulate in the defence of both. Here life is often referred to as a dream by Calderon while it is more like a dream by Franz Lehar; or again, it resembles a tale told by a good many idiots signifying this and that — yet for all that it is the place where most of modern Europe's ideas were born, and mimesis alone (not to mention his philosophical ambition) will

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compel the narrator to give an account of a good many of them. Not that his picture of the city aspires to completeness: next to nothing is said about Vienna's supreme musical achievement. But music has at least this in common with the world of ideas, that they both lead to indeterminate and unintended consequences - nowhere more so than in that ' random, out-of-theway city' that so loves to tell itself and others that it is the heart of Europe. The contrasts and contradictions I mentioned are certainly not only literary, yet the scenario to which they belong is shaped to an unusual degree by the city's literary self-image. In 1438 Aeneas Sylvius Piccolomini (later Pope Pius II) wrote one of the first set pieces on the subject of Vienna's love of food, wine, comfort and finery, and her lack of public spirit. The mixture of admiration and moral disapproval with which Aeneas Sylvius reported on his visit has been echoed down the centuries. From the time the Turks were driven out of it (leaving behind their addiction to coffee), the city has cultivated an image as the grand meeting place of East and West. What Musil presents in his version of that image is a mixture of many elements: aristocratic conservatism trying to appease savage nationalisms of every stripe; a peace-loving officers' corps among a brawl of civilian ideologists; Levantine haggling; Jewish worldly wisdom and tolerance in uneasy partnership with a tiresome antiSemitism and blue-eyed Aryan uprightness - all shielded from comfortless modernity by the cataleptic Hapsburg myth. When Hofmannsthal wrote that the Viennese use the past in order to exaggerate its significance,61 he was referring to the convenient past. In the tableau Musil presents, the memory of Imperial glory may be ironised, yet it is a good deal more vivid than the recollection of Vienna's more recent and less glorious history. It has never been a city of extremes, but with its proletarian slums, and factories run on a six- or seven-day week of child labour, it can compete with most other European cities in poverty and degrading squalor; though reading Musil or almost any of his fellow writers you would not suspect any of this.62 Poverty, if mentioned at all, figures as the picturesque

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squalor of the Lumpenproletariat; among the causes of the Empire's collapse, social and economic tensions are rarely mentioned. Seen as a whole, Musil's tableau of the Empire is hardly distinguishable from that of other, less ambitious Viennese writers: a picturesque muddle hedged in by tolerable conventions is being destroyed by a world hell-bent on new-fangled, barbaric ideologies - though Musil is more perceptive than most of his colleagues in recognising that those ideologies came from Vienna in the first place. Give and take a retouch here and there, as historical fictions go the tableau is splendidly accurate: Whenever one thought of that country from some place abroad, the memory that hovered before the eye was of wide, white, prosperous roads dating from the age of infantry marches and mail-coaches, leading in all directions like well-regulated rivers, streaking the countryside like ribbons of bright military twill, the provinces embraced by the paper-white arm of the administration. And what provinces! There were glaciers and the sea, the Karst and the cornfields of Bohemia, nights by the Adriatic filled with the chirping of cicadas, and Slovak villages where the smoke rose from chimneys like upturned nostrils and the village huddled between two little hills as though the earth had parted her lips a little to warm her child between them. Of course, cars too drove along those roads, but not too many cars. Here too preparations were made for the conquest of the air, but not too intensively. Now and then a ship was despatched to South America or the Far East, but not too often. Nobody showed any ambition for world markets and world power - here one was sitting in the centre of Europe, at the focal point of the world's old axes, words like 'colony' or 'overseas' had the ring of something entirely untried and remote. There was some conspicuous luxury, but of course nothing so sophisticated as that of the French. One went in for sport, but not as madly as the Anglo-Saxons. One spent immense sums on the army, but only just enough to make sure that one remained the second weakest among the great powers. The capital, too, was somewhat smaller than all the other largest cities of the world, but still quite considerably larger than a mere ordinary large city. And this country was administered in an enlightened, hardly perceptible manner, with all sharp points being cautiously clipped by the best bureaucracy in Europe, which had only one defect: it saw genius, and enterprise on the scale of genius, [Genie undgeniale Unternehmungslust] in

private persons, unless they were privileged by high birth or State

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appointment, as impertinence and indeed presumption. But then, who would want unqualified persons putting their oar in, anyway? Besides, [in that country] all that happened was that genius was always regarded as a lout, but never, as happened elsewhere, that a mere lout was taken for a genius. (WK, vol. 1, pp. 31-2) This is the authentic topos of Austrian recollection, in many ways similar to scenes by Joseph Roth, Josef Weinheber, Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Heimito von Doderer, and Hermann Broch. Yet in Musil's book it is merely a means to a more ambitious end. That long and unbroken tradition of ambivalent self-portraits I mentioned leaves us with an impression of Vienna as the city of Public Relations. It is as though PR had been invented there, partly for political ends, partly for the sheer love of it (as Fart pour Vart propaganda), and increasingly, as the glorious past recedes, for the tourist trade. 63 And the fable which sustains the first, predominantly narrative part of The Man Without Qualities, the famous 'Parallel Action' (mistranslated as 'Collateral Campaign') is the PR ploy to end all such ploys. 'The real driving force behind this great patriotic action' (WK vol. 1, p. 98) is a court official of the old school, His Highness the Imperial Liege Count Leinsdorf. To Graf Leinsdorf, as to most people in Vienna, any news from Germany is disagreeable news. On hearing that 'the Reich Germans' are preparing to celebrate, in 1918, the Emperor William the Second's thirty years of reign, Graf Leinsdorf perceives it as his patriotic duty to take them down a peg or two. He has a brilliant idea: a sure way of deflating the 'Germans' with their insufferable reputation for superior efficiency and political skill is to plan an Austrian counter-event - to wit, the celebration of the seventieth anniversary of the Emperor Franz Joseph's accession to the throne, also due in 1918. But since the German anniversary, on 15 June, would (absurdly but inevitably) occur before the Austrian one, which will fall on 5 December, the only thing to do is to organise a joint celebration of the two imperial jubilees - a 'parallel action' planned to last the whole of 1918. A small committee is formed, to prepare for this 'Year of

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Peace5 which (since the narrator's habit of synonymising is catching) is also known as 'the Austrian Year', 'the European Year',' the Year of World Peace' and (perhaps less predictably) 'the Nietzsche Year'. Composed of Austrian patricians and aristocratic dignitaries as well as observers from one or two ministries, this committee needs an honorary secretary - a post which, after some misunderstandings which include his brief arrest by the Viennese police, followed by his farcical release, is offered to Ulrich. Diotima Tuzzi, wife of a senior official in the foreign ministry, is a distant cousin of Ulrich's: she has not only smoothed the way for Ulrich's appointment, she virtually runs the committee. It's not really that Diotima (who, as the perfect hostess, might as well be called Egeria) ' believes' in what this majestic non-event is in aid of- but then, practically nobody believes that the Parallel Action is about any of the things it is said to be about. However, the members of the committee meet in Diotima's house, are given light refreshments there and provided with meticulously sharpened pencils, and that is enough to give Diotima a position of (almost) unchallenged authority. Among the many plans this Committee will have to consider are: a Greater Austrian Franz Joseph Soup Kitchen; a major reform of the official shorthand system; the founding of a 'World Secretariat of Exactitude and Soul' (on Ulrich's suggestion), and/or a 'Central Institute for the Civilian Spirit' (proposed by Ulrich's friend, General Stumm von Bordwehr {WKvol. 11, p. 80)). Indirectly the Committee will be involved in plans to re-arm the Austrian artillery, in polite wrangles over the oil-fields of Polish Galicia, and in the reprieve of a convicted rapist and murderer whose chthonic name is Christian Moosbrugger. The Parallel Action may also turn out to be something of an international event, possibly leading to a summit conference on disarmament as well as a convention on international law. The reaction of foreign governments remains uncertain. This is hardly surprising, seeing that the Austrian Emperor's reaction too remains indecipherable. Franz Joseph ornaments the pages of The Man Without Qualities only indirectly, by way of one of those obiter dicta which attest to his popularity by being

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indistinguishable from the utterances of the lowliest of his subjects. What His Imperial Majesty is reported to have said when told of the planned Action is indeed hard to make out: 'Ah, i mag mi net vordrangen lassen... ' (M.o.E. p. 195) which is a solecism in German - meaning not just' I don't want to push ahead in the queue' but, by way of incongruously expanding the idiom, 'I don't want to let myself be pushed forward', yet amounts to an accurate description of Franz Joseph's constitutional position, an enigmatic compound of the autocratic and the impersonal; but then, in this set-up, anything enigmatic is apt to be seen as divinely sanctioned. However improbable it may seem, there is a covert purpose in the junketings of Diotima's Committee: it is, to show 'the Germans' the superiority of Austrian culture and patriotism as epitomised in the superiority of the House of Hapsburg over the Hohenzollern upstarts; and part of that superiority consists in the fact (recognized only by the truly cultured) that this culture and patriotism are indefinable. But aren't 'the Austrians' also German? Those who, in Ulrich's Vienna, assert and try to define their own Germanness, do so because they feel themselves threatened by the Hungarians, or again by the Slavonic and Italian 'minorities' — their very definition of' Deutschtum' connotes anti-Empire and anti-Hapsburg sentiments. When the Austrians of the Monarchy and the Germans of the Reich proclaim themselves allies and 'blood brothers', theirs is inevitably a profoundly uneasy bond - a political alliance which is destabilised by its claim to be more than a political alliance. Their relationship is fashioned less by obvious common interests than by the partly 'mystical', partly scientific, Darwinian rhetoric of the day — the rhetoric of the blood, whose lowest yet still recognisable form is exploited in the sub-literature that will be the source of Hitler's Mein Kampf. The fictional ties of' Blutsbriiderschaft' are being proclaimed by two ' brothers' with diametrically opposed self-images — the one vaunting the vigour, expansiveness and impatience of a 'young' nation, while the other invokes the wisdom of divinely sanctioned tradition, and indulges its penchant for approximations and 'at least provisionally definitive' solutions (WK

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vol. in, p. 217). All that these two countries really have in common is based on their more or less common language, but language is of course the very medium of PR, and PR is the main motor of politics. It is in Vienna that one of the major discoveries of our century was made and exploited, first intuitively, its philosophical grounding being added much later: the discovery that language is more than mere 'communication'. The basic semantic proposition of the Empire is, ' A world minus PR = anarchy' — a proposition we are likely to be abundantly familiar with. The figure of Ulrich's chief antagonist, 'the famous, immensely rich Dr Paul Arnheim', is taken from the life of the equally rich Dr Rathenau, president of one of the Wilhelmine Reich's largest concerns, the Allgemeine Elektrizitats Gesellschaft,

and German foreign minister at the time of his murder by rightwing conspirators in 1922. Arnheim is the only 'real German' on Ulrich's and Diotima's Committee. His portrait, hardly more fictionalised than are the two urdeutsch ' h's' in the ' real' Walther Rathenau's own name, is the very embodiment of the will to power and achievement. Arnheim is no mere 'roaming wild hyena of the stock exchange' (WK vol. 1, p. 158). In industry, international commerce and high finance, but also as the author of a large number of 'cultural-critical' memoranda and fashionable philosophical books which explain and legitimise power and achievement in the modern world, Arnheim passionately believes in 'reality' (WK vol. 11, p. 244); which is as much as to say that to the Austrians he represents a world they regard with a characteristic mixture of awe, envy and contempt. At first it appears that Arnheim's presence on the Committee as the German Reich's observer is a ruse, his real aim being the acquisition of the oilfields of Galicia; when that aim is revealed as a further ruse, it appears that his even more real aim is to acquire reliable information about the state of the Austrian artillery, which he hopes to supply with up-todate armaments; but perhaps the really real reason for his wasting his precious time in the company of these noble nonentities and non-achievers is more private, for this Prussian tycoon who has everything yearns for the one thing he hasn't

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got: a place in the unstrenuous culture of an old, exquisitely decaying Empire. Arnheim falls in love with Diotima and she with him; at least, a clammy atmosphere of sentiment builds up between them, to which each contributes a heavy dose of high-minded erotic patter. Nothing much comes of this love-affair, which is conducted with the utmost regard for propriety: Arnheim has to balance the claims of his soul against the uncertain price of coal, while Diotima, a little more adventurous, has to contend with her 'cousin' Ulrich's sarcastic grins. Just as Arnheim is incapable of that surrender in love on which he likes to discourse, so he is incapable of hatred. Although he has a vague idea of Ulrich's contempt for him, he is so full of admiration for Ulrich's analytical intelligence that he offers him the post of private secretary, which Ulrich instantly turns down, though not without some later regrets. Arnheim was delighted, for in Diotima he met a woman who had not only read his books but who also, as a Grecianfigureswathed in almost imperceptible plumpness, corresponded to his ideal of beauty, only with a bit morefleshon her so as to render the classical line a little less rigid. Diotima, on the other hand, observed that he didn't look in the least Jewish, but that he was a nobly prudent man with features of an ancient Phoenician cast... (Wif vol. 1, pp. 124-5) and Diotima's attitude to Arnheim's Jewishness - ' a certain cruelly elegiac feeling in her heart' ('ein gewisser grausamer Weltschmerz in ihrem Herz')—is one among many very different reactions to the many Jews - or perhaps one had better put it as Jonathan Miller memorably did: to the many ' Jewish' characters - in the book. The tragic history of' the Jewish problem' on the Continent of Europe, and especially in the territories of the old AustroHungarian Empire, makes it difficult for us to realise that Musil is portraying characters for whom that 'problem' is nothing special. For the people in this book it exists, if at all, alongside a good many other problems, being distinct only because it is (at least to some of them) rather more interesting than, say, the

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language wrangles of southern Moravia, the extortions of Hungarian pig-breeders and wheat-brokers, or the Empire's provisionally retrospective annual budget. Arnheim is as German in his Jewishness as Dr Fischel, who quits a career as a humble bank official to make his fortune as an 'inside dealer', is Viennese; and if Leo Fischel uses the odd bit of Jewish jargon and syntax, so does Ulrich. Married to an anti-Semitic woman with the temper of a fishwife, Fischel has a daughter, Gerda, a sadly unattractive girl in love with Ulrich (as indeed are practically all the women in the book), who is engaged to a penniless 'revolutionary' student obsessed by a fanatical panGerman racism — the only character with a proto-Nazi outlook. Gerda's pathetic attempt to reject the Jewish part of her family background is misplaced, and shown to be so, for the person she obviously ought to get away from is her shrewish mother, not her jolly and (once out of his wife's clutches) untroubled father. And there are several other Jewish characters — a middling bright doctor and a mildly ineffectual psychiatrist, a Bohemophobe, General von Kohn, a self-important journalist with access to fewer sources of confidential information than he likes to let on, and there is Diotima's pretty little Galician Jewish maid-servant, Rachel - of all of whom nothing much need be said than that they are like all the other people in the book only more so, wholly at home in this city which is like every other city only more so; or, as the saying goes, the Jews are 'into everything', including anti-Semitism. Is the reader then intended to conclude that Musil's Jews are nothing special? They are special; but then, so are the Germans and the Americans (Wif vol. 11, p. 354-5), and when one {you ... or the novelist... or God) comes to think of it, so are we all. For this dialectic of the ordinary and the special, too, the locale and its fiction provide the right historical scenario. Among the devices that form the idiolect of The Man Without Qualities, the most marked - indeed the most obtrusive - are the deictic indicators of the Present, that is, the time which Ulrich (but the narrator is not much better) calls by the Nietzschean barbarism of 'Jetztzeit' or 'Nowtime'. There are not many

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paragraphs in the book without a seasoning of 'nowadays', 'today', 'in this modern world of ours', without a dig at 'our materialistic era' or at ' this transitional period that has lost its selfconfidence'; which is ironically contrasted with ' the great eras of wholeness', and with 'those feelings of inner certainty which go with wholesome, healthy ages' (WK vol. 1, p. 231). The Present is the Silly Season. It is the time when the same word, 'genius', is applied both to Einstein and to the currently unbeaten race-horse (WK vol. 1, p. 45), when tennis players are divinely inspired, boxers have a Weltanschauung, and film stars act as catalysts of spirituality; when people ' live for' causes, convictions, and beliefs, but have lost the art of'living in' states of equanimity and peace; the time when people — Ulrich's closest friends — live hopelessly ill-adjusted lives, pay lipservice to mystical, indeterminate and disinterested feelings, pretend to give themselves over to poetry, music, and higher thought, whereas what really determines their conduct is the Arnheimian ideology of achievement and success. It is the age of which Wittgenstein remarked that 'it manifests itself in the building of ever larger and more complex structures', and in which ' to say that [a] book is written to the glory of God would be to utter an infamy' - 'eine Schurkerei'.64 However, it is practically impossible to date this' Nowadays', for as soon as we take it to be that twelvemonth beginning in August 1913, we find that every datable event mentioned is blurred by anachronism. Like Stendhal's realist' mirror carried along the road', Musil's time mirror is moving along the historical events with the years of the novel's composition, albeit in an irregular, indeterminate way. This movement is designed to make the writing of a stable, continuous 'history' impossible. Just as the inconsequential series of private non-events and disappointed expectations is presented as the 'modern', relativist equivalent of traditional story-telling, so causality, which is supposed to connect public events between 'not yet' and 'no longer', is suspended, and (we are told) its absence is the necessary condition of telling the historical truth: the inconsequential narrative represents the only way in which history can be written nowadays *b

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Yet our threefold initiator of the tale — Musil/narrator/ Ulrich - is by no means wholly hostile in his attitude to the modern age. Behind the scorn for its records and crazes, its affectations and fanaticisms, the thought - less than a fullyfledged hope - is expressed that ' the modern spirit of exactitude ' might be pursued to the point where it will result, not in those 'ever more complex structures' against which Wittgenstein protests, but in a union with ' the spirit of the soul'. The partly ironic, partly embarrassed comments which the members of the Committee make about those two Utopian proposals I have mentioned (Ulrich's 'Secretariat of Exactitude and Soul' and its allied institution, General Stumm von Bordwehr's 'Office of the Civilian Spirit'), are not intended to commit the narrator: his commendation of the new esprit mathematique has a reforming intention. Here Musil's attitude seems to be more realistic than Wittgenstein's: being saddled with a world of complex structures, we might as well make the best of what's best in all that has led to them. So much for 'Nowadays'. The view of the Imperial past, on the other hand — for all its ironic rebuttals of sentimentality — is wholly positive. Every one of the legal, constitutional, political and moral paradoxes of which life in the Empire consisted is somehow justified and presented as a sign of civilised behaviour - the kind of behaviour without which the world will be poorer. To the 'subject nations' such a view is identical with the 'Austrian German' view of the Empire. If Musil presents Austria-Hungary as an Empire without imperialist demands, that is because in terms of the Parallel Action the Slavonic populations don't really count - as in Musil's first novel, Young Torless, they figure as hardly more than benighted cavedwellers. At least two splendidly articulate representatives of the old, Austrian German order are introduced. The first is Ulrich's protector, Graf Leinsdorf, the chief exponent of the doctrine of 'the provisionally definitive' (cf. p. 154 above). Leinsdorf has a singularly engaging way of taking the mettle out of any apparently serious controversy. He believes that all that is needed to secure peace, harmony and loyalty to the Imperial

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House, is to preface each of the hotly contested contemporary issues with some such words as 'true 3 or 'real'. (The English equivalent of this practice is Sir William Harcourt's 'We are all socialists now!') In Leinsdorfs interpretation true populism turns out to be identical with the true aristocratic spirit; the influx of Eastern Jews into Austria presents no problem because real Jews have a special nobility appreciated by true Gentiles; real nationalism, when fully considered, turns out to be identical with real monarchism; and of course His Imperial Majesty is not only the first servant in the State, but the only true Socialist to boot. When fantastic rumours of the Parallel Action reach the Viennese populace, and an apparently threatening but really not very violent crowd assembles outside Leinsdorfs residence (WK vol. 11, p. 408), his point is proved once more: were 'the People' apprised of the true nature of the Parallel Action, there would be no such commotion.66 General Stumm von Bordwehr, the other reminder of gentle glories past, is (almost?) one of the great comic creations of our time. As the pattern of non-events and their shaggy-dog stories unfolds, it is greatly enriched by Stumm's role as chief purveyor of disappointed expectations. Stumm is a little general with an embonpoint, a ceremonial sword that constantly gets in his way, and an important-looking attache case which is empty but for a small loaf of black army bread. He is as unlike the notorious 'fesch' ('smart') Austrian officer as can be, and the only reason for his appointment to the General Staff College is that, while serving with the cavalry, he developed an obsessive fear of horses. It is typical of Stumm's bumblingly agreeable incompetence that he almost fails to get on to this all-important Committee, his invitation being mislaid by the machinations of Rachel, Diotima's pert maid ('Rachelle' to her mistress). He too, incidentally, is a little in love with Diotima, but unlike most of the other characters leads a life of monastic chastity. He is a great admirer of Ulrich and of the World's Great Books, though both Ulrich and the books terrify him with their cleverness. While bringing a determinedly civilian spirit to bear on all Army Council matters, Stumm approaches all philosophy and ethical questions systematically and in the spirit of military

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discipline. And here the superb device of disappointed expectations gets all but bogged down in the fiction's inadvertency: dear General Stumm von Bordwehr too, alas, has philosophical ambitions, he too is apt to utter more or less weighty pronouncements on 'Nowadays', and (which is worse) to sound like Ulrich and the other two figurines through whose eyes we view the scenario. As for the future, its grim projection is contained in the story of Gerda's boyfriend Hans Sepp. A mixture of pathos, fanaticism and self-pity, Sepp is portrayed in the likeness of some of the functionaries of von Schonerer's ' Deutschnationale Partei' (precursors of Hitler's National Socialist Workers' Party), as well as of the 'Illegals' (the German fifth column) of the Dollfuss era. Threatening all the world with terror, Sepp lives entirely inside the bubble of his ideology, unable to face the world as soon as the bubble bursts. Following him through his brief and disastrous career as an army conscript to that railway embankment where he takes his own life, Musil gives us an accurate twentieth-century portrait of the Nietzschean, underprivileged in body and full of grudging resentments in mind. But then, impartial in his politics, he does it all over again - his portrait of a left-wing revolutionary is composed of much the same elements, retraces much the same psycho-pathology, but never gets beyond the biirgerlich cliches of 'a fanatical communist'. Anything of value belongs to the past — a past which lives into the present by feeding off its mementos, centuries-old gossip, unhealing grudges, and books. And when this present past is about to die, at first nothing very dramatic happens: ' the State that had originally been as good as any and better than many others, had in the course of the centuries somewhat lost interest in itself (WKvol. n, p. 260), and had become 'the State that somehow only just trundled along' (vol. 1, p. 34). The Empire dies because too many of its subject nations hate it without having any clear idea of an alternative. And they hate it because, lunging ever more wildly among the ' symbolical' and the literal values they attach to their own languages, they contemn the language they have in common: ' Since the world

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began no being has ever died of a speech defect. All the same, this is what happened to " the Austrian and Hungarian AustroHungarian Dual Monarchy": it died of its own unutterability' (WK, vol. 11, p. 182). That 'speech defect'-the language quarrels among the various nationalities in the Empire, reified by PR — not only represents the Monarchy's cause of death, but it will be one of its deadly legacies. The decay and death of Empire is a process Ulrich's Committee can only reflect, not halt. Its agenda may be a non-event, but it is a non-event of a momentous kind. The Committee, too, is searching for 'reality', and its quest does not go unrewarded. Unleashed by those two oddly assorted powers in their Blutsbruderschaft, the Great War is the real Parallel Action. Though that war is not described, we are told something of what led up to it, at leisure and in fine detail. What we are not told is that, despite its anomie and internecine strife, its makebelieve and contradictions, and despite its heedless and fatuous army command, that dying Empire was defended by its Musils, Ulrichs, and Wittgensteins, over four years of the most terrible warfare the world had ever known, with a heroism and a devotion to duty unsurpassed in any other theatre of that war. 'Whoever could describe that\ muses Bonadea, the most charming of Ulrich's mistresses, 'would be a great artist, no, he would be a pornographer!' (WK vol. 1, p. 307). The richly varied sex life of the cast of The Man Without Qualities is rarely mentioned by the critics.67 Yet it can hardly be ignored that Ulrich goes to bed with all the women that cross his path (except Frau Clementine Fischel, who would bite his head off if he tried, and Rachel - but that may be an oversight); that we are treated to several heavy depictions of sexual perversions; and that many of the coital scenes are nasty and end on an unhappy note. But then, in its portrayals of flawed sexuality, too, the book is representative of its locale. No puritan view of intercourse is likely to match the joylessness intimated (albeit with fine tact) in Arthur Schnitzler's Novellen or in Freud's only slightly less fictional 'case histories'. The loathing of sex written large in that olla podrida of anti-feminism and anti-

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Semitism, Otto Weininger's Sex and Character (1903) has few equals in German. Joylessness and nausea, too, are communicated to the hapless reader of Felix Salten's Josefine Mutzenbacher (c. 1900), Vienna's most popular pornographic novel. These are depths Musil doesn't plumb, yet the effect of many of the sexual scenes is murky, as though the narrator didn't quite know what depths he is plumbing. From sexual murder through rape and virtual rape to planned and casual intercourse, to an act of exhibitionism watched by the assembled company of Ulrich's friends, lesbianism and masturbation among the inmates of a lunatic asylum - sexuality is unredeemed, and repeatedly associated with aggression, violence and war; and war with suicide. A Freudian note of sorts is struck in an early (1911) essay of Musil's, where he argues that 'the deviant, pathological or salacious can provide a unique perspective on experience in general'. 68 In The Man Without Qualities sexuality stands as a metonymy of Ulrich's deeply disturbed relationship to the world and to his own psyche in it; and throughout the book both Freudian analysis and Weininger's (largely derivative) theory of bisexuality look like providing a key to Ulrich's adventures. But Musil's sceptical observations on these as on all other systems — his refusal to settle on any one thing as the source of Ulrich's psychic life — should not be read as Freudian evasions. They are attempts at original and independent thinking. His thinking is repeatedly set in train by Weininger and Freud, but its goal — the Utopia of' the other state' — is of no interest to them. Fortunately, to one side of Lacanian gloom, cheerfulness keeps breaking in: there are also encounters - very Viennese encounters - of a Rosenkavalier charm, when 'identity is covered by the convention of masquerade and discourse by the script of seduction'.69 The Bonadea story is a case in point. She is the lady who rescues Ulrich from a minor street brawl (an episode which, with some assistance from the narrator, is easily confused with the accident mentioned in the first chapter of the book): ' Two weeks later', we read (WK vol. 1, p. 29) 'Bonadea had already

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been his mistress for a fortnight.' Then tensions had developed, their relationship was broken off: Bonadea had wept a lot during the period of separation. She had often felt during this time that she had been ill-used. She had often resounded like the rolling of a muffled drum. Bonadea had had many adventures and disappointments. And although with each adventure the memory of Ulrich sank into a deep well, after every disappointment it rose out of it again, helpless and reproachful as the desolate grief in a child's face ... but now she calls on Ulrich again, to propose terms of peace to him. She was charming, melancholy and beautiful as she sat before him, and she had a sick sensation in her stomach. He stood before her 'like a youth'. His skin had the marble polish that went with those great events and diplomacy of which she thought him capable. She had never noticed how energetic and determined his face looked. She would have liked to capitulate with her whole person, but she dared not go so far, and he showed no sign of inviting her to do so. This coldness was indescribably sad for her, but overlifesize, like a statue. (WK vol. 1, p. 306)

Bonadea's little-girl act, traced in the indirect free style of those little sentences, is inspired by two simple aims which she is trying to coordinate: she wants to seduce Ulrich, and she wants him to introduce her to his ' cousin' Diotima, who in turn might invite her to join the Committee; she vaguely hopes the one will lead to the other. Several emotions flit through her birdlike brain: admiration of Ulrich's social success alternates with a strong sexual desire which, when gently rebuffed, deeply confuses her (confusion is the only deep thing about her) by turning first into melancholy, then disappointment, then resignation, and finally into a diffuse, maudlin motherliness. All these emotions are enacted by Bonadea as though on an intimate rococo stage, yet on a level of childlike simplicity which to Ulrich appears as mere importuning silliness. However, the two of them have a strong point of contact. Bonadea, whose husband is a judge, knows that Ulrich is interested in the case of Christian Moosbrugger, the man who is being tried for the rape and murder of a prostitute, and for

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whom Ulrich wants a reprieve. This is Bonadea's trump card. In focusing repeatedly on that magic name, Moosbrugger, she hopes to satisfy both desires (the social and the sexual), though for the present she fails in both. Ulrich meanwhile is trying to calm her down with a glass of whisky and wissenschqftlich ruminations on the present state of research into the legal and psychiatric aspects of diminished responsibility - the very state from which she is suffering. In the event, the whisky has the opposite of the desired effect, while the learned patter bores her, literally, to tears. In this scene, then, 'the deviant, the salacious and the pathological' are mercifully avoided because nothing much happens: a pink foot in a silk stocking is replaced in its fashionable shoe, the hem of a skirt is accidentally raised and regretfully lowered, a bosom is almost uncovered and then gently restored to decency — these two attractive people alone in a room don't really meet, they are more like parallel lines running into trivial infinity. On other occasions such scenes, consummated, will end very differently: 'Ulrich remained behind. He was sated like a beast of prey... or like a dog that, having torn a chicken limb from limb, is oppressed by a bad conscience yet also gratified by the satisfaction of a deep instinct' (M.o.E. p. 1483). If Bonadea's sexual playlet at no point offends against the social convention, Christian Moosbrugger embodies sex at its most anarchic and destructive. His is an ambitious portrait in a very German literary tradition, recalling the figure of Kaspar Hauser and Georg Buchner's Woyzeck. In a world full of beautiful and civilised people (and those who hope to join their company) this journeyman carpenter and tramp provides an obvious, occasionally all-too-obvious contrast. This wild traveller through many prisons, asylums and dosshouses, who is about to end his terrible life on the gallows, is the sinister rallying point of many sentiments and dreams: a bogeyman for some, a redeemer of the world's sins to others, a scapegoat, a freak in a panopticon, or again a radical questioner of established values, laws and orderly procedures. But Moosbrugger is other things as well: to the police a means to promotion, to the psychiatrists

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and doctors a medical phenomenon of great professional interest, and to the society ladies who spend their days roaming the wards of Bedlam to catch a glimpse of him, an emotional thrill and an illicit sexual fascination.70 Like and not alike: how can this mad bruiser who doesn't know his own strength, with hair matted like a thick carpet and skin stiff with years of grime, be related to all those eaudecologned people who wouldn't harm a fly - in what way does he resemble elegant, ironical, fastidious Ulrich? 'If mankind could dream collectively, it would dream Moosbrugger' we read (WKvol. i, p. 85), to which the critic adds, 'Austria and Germany did, of course, dream the psychopath Hitler collectively. ' 71 What is it that makes him, too, representative? For one thing, though Moosbrugger may be insane, he is no fool: having acquired the rhetoric of the forensic and medical fraternities, he conducts learned discussions with them concerning the pathology of his own state of mind and of the state of the world — in fact he turns out to be something of a Freudian. 'Now here, now there, every one of us crosses the narrow boundaries laid down for normality in our own sexual lives', he might so easily be saying,72 and it is this relativist basis of analysis that provides the link between Moosbrugger and Ulrich. The tributaries of Moosbrugger's sexual motive castration complex, the Thanatos instinct, the psychopath's drive to seek his libido in the act of destroying its source — are seen, not as fundamentally different, but as only relatively less controlled than they are in Ulrich. It therefore looks as though, in spite of Musil's scepticism, Freudian analysis will provide the method by which the book is constructed. But in the light of this analysis, wouldn't the novel's entire social edifice - the Parallel Action and the complex institutional pattern so abundantly constructed around it - become irrelevant, and as it were doubly absurd ? When some of its members, with Ulrich at their head, lobby for Moosbrugger's reprieve, their appeal does seem outrageously irrelevant, but it turns out to be hardly more so than all the other requests and proposals that come before Diotima's committee. Of course, its transactions, motivated largely by self-

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interest and leading to nothing, are a farce; and there is the strong implication that everything happening in that world (our world?) amounts to much the same non-event and nonsense. (Martin Heidegger's philosophy leads to a similar conclusion, albeit less amusingly.) But the 'method' according to which the Parallel Action is deconstructed is guided neither by Freud nor Lacan, but by history, and by insight into practical politics. Moosbrugger is like Ulrich, above all because both are living out the extreme possibilities of their marginal situations. Moosbrugger does it in a monstrously concrete way, Ulrich experimentally and largely in the mind alone - in a form made acceptable by the social conventions. 'Take but degree away, untune that string ,..': Moosbrugger is living proof that if you abolish these conventions and established values, the result will indeed be 'mankind dreaming the collective dream' of a berserker. Is Musil then saying, in straight Hobbesian terms, that only institutions stand between us and mayhem? He is saying less than that: for if the Parallel Action is taken seriously - not of course in what it is or does, but in its representative function - then the very unseriousness and silliness of what it is and does will render all institutions equally silly, leaving us unprotected, Moosbrugger's prey. And so, in a sense, we are. The Parallel Action too is mankind's collective dream: though most of its members don't know it (and if they did, most of them, except the little General, would hardly mind), the Committee's agenda is that ultimate absurdity, war. This is the conclusion toward which an historical (as opposed to a psychoanalytical) reconstruction of 'Nowadays' took Musil, and which he wished to recreate fictionally; though given the incompleteness of the text, and the inconclusiveness of the Moosbrugger chapters especially, we cannot be sure. Of one thing we do seem to be certain: the Utopia that is to redeem Ulrich must lie elsewhere, beyond sexuality, and outside all institutionalised life as well. Yet that certainty, too, will be taken away from us. The only way sexuality is redeemed is in an act of incest long deferred and at last consummated.73 In that delay, which

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contains the love affair between Ulrich and his sister Agathe, when they meet after many years of separation on the occasion of their father's funeral, there is time for great tenderness, deep understanding, exquisite pleasure, and brief joy; though even here sex is given little value in itself, being presented as a stage on the road to a mystical union. At the point where both strands of the structure - the narrative and the reflective - merge in evocations of the mystical union of Ulrich and Agathe, and in that 'other state' that is to issue from it, all relativism recedes and our theme of the dear purchase re-emerges. To this 'state', about which in the end we know little more than that it is 'other', is not our ordinary state, all is to be sacrificed; not, however, by some violent sacrificial act, but through the sudden kindling of a new kind of knowledge and detachment. This knowledge comes with the recognition that, in the face of'the mystical', the whole world (and not just the Parallel Action) is gently to be given up as so much vanity and nonsense. Where sexuality in its different forms had figured as a thing of little or no value, and often as an evil, warlike thing, the incestuous union is to fade away into absolute, all-encompassing Utopia. This sudden switch from an intensely private experience to a Utopia of universal value may seem strange to us, yet seen in the context of the thirties it is not unexpected. Musil was a solitary writer, but, contrary to the impression we get from his diaries, in his faith in 'the mystical' he was not alone. In Austria, before and in the early years of the Anschlufi of 1938, a depressingly large number of literati were vying with each other in fulsome calls for a mystical union of self and world. The enclosing of all valid experience - ' Erlebnis' - in ' the mystical' is one of the cardinal points of fascist ideology and propaganda. Trying to steal the thunder from the German National Socialists, 'pagan' and Catholic writers alike toyed with pathetic exhortations to sacrificial death, dreamed of a ' total' - meaning totalitarian Utopia, offered to sacrifice the ordinary for the sake of the special and in due course proceeded to do so - in short, behaved little better than poodles obeying every bark of their German shepherd dogs. (The Jews were by now out of it; otherwise there

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is no reason for thinking that some of them would have acted very differently.) As an historian of the era observes, c No one who was influenced by these mystical ideas ... at the time was to welcome the way they were realised in the years to come. '74 Unlike many of his liberal contemporaries, Musil understood that the fascist 'action programme's' appeal was to a deep, 'religious' stratum of the disaffected consciousness. Whether he also saw the connection between his 'second state' and the unedifying spectacle of an ' Austro-fascist' unio mystica enacted in the last years of the dying republic, is less certain. However that may be, though he tried his hand at some political trimming, Musil (like Ulrich) proved too fastidious to be taken in by the contemporary hysteria. He was not among those venal fantasists who transferred their kaisertreu nostalgia to the saviour from Passau. The motif of' the other state' is sounded early in the novel. It is evoked for the first time in Ulrich's recollection of his juvenile love affair during his service in the army: He was submerged in the landscape, although one might equally well say that it was an unutterable state of being buoyed up and borne along; and when the world brimmed over the threshold of his eyes, its meaning lapped against him from within, in soundless waves. He had drifted into the very heart of the world. From him to the distant beloved was as far as to the next tree. Inscape linked beings without space [Ingefiihl verband die Wesen ohne Raum], as in a dream two human

beings can pass through each other without intermingling, all their relations altered. Yet this state had nothing in common with a dream. It was clear, and abounding in clear thought. Only nothing in it moved according to cause, purpose and physical desire, but everything spread outward in circle upon circle, as when an endless jet of water falls into the basin of a fountain.75 (WK vol. 1, p. 144) Such descriptions accompany every part of the book, and they hardly change. A thousand pages later (M.o.E. p. 1090) we read that ' the self without qualities' is to have its being, not in activity or in a purposeful understanding of the world, but in a state of' unquenchable astonishment' - a state in which ' the slightest experience - this little plume of grass or the gentle sounds when your [i.e. Agathe's] lips over there utter a word - becomes

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something incomparable, solitary in the world, having an unfathomable self-being and diffusing a deep insentience and release from all feeling.' Was this God, Agathe asks. She doesn't think so: God had remained distant during her adventure, yet throughout it she no longer remained alone: these were the only two changes that distinguished fulfilment from its intimation, and they were changes in favour of the earthly and natural. (M.o.E. p. 1095) Clearly this is not a religious state of mind in any traditional meaning of the word. Is it nevertheless mystical? William James, in The Varieties of Religious Experience, devotes a chapter to a description of mysticism which is sufficiently detached from any religious orthodoxy to be relevant to Musil's undertaking (it will be equally relevant to Rilke's poetry). James sets out mysticism76 as the experience of a special condition. (1) It is a condition of passivity and heightened, often musical receptivity ('the mystic feels as if his own will were in abeyance, and indeed sometimes as if he were held by a superior power'). (2) This condition is transient - 'it never completes itself - yet repeatable. (3) It is characterised by words like 'ineffable', 'inexpressible', 'indescribable' (Rilke's cardinal term is 'unsaglich' — 'unsayable'), and by the language of paradox. (4) It is 'noetic', yielding 'illuminations, revelations full of significance and importance ... states of insight into truth unplumbed by the discursive intellect'. (5) In addition to these negative contours of mystical discourse there is one further attribute by which all such utterances stand or fall, not mentioned by James, though it seems to be implied when he speaks of'insight into truth': it is the mystic's assurance that this experience is not mere introspection, not merely a probing of his or her mind, but a vision of'something out there', recognised and acknowledged as holy, whether in the world or out of it the subject matter of an utterance shared or shareable by all of us. None of these attributes can safeguard the mystical against the political debasements it has been subjected to in the age of Musil's 'Nowadays'. Perhaps only such a state as Simone Weil

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describes can prevent that:' God can only be present in creation under the guise of absence',77 a n d these words might have been written by Franz Kafka. The first three of James's attributes of the mystical mode apply fully to Musil's many evocations of it. But James supports his last point by a quotation from Walt Whitman which, with a single phrase, removes Musil's 'other state' from the special, mystical dispensation: There is [Whitman writes] apart from mere intellect, in the make-up of every superior human identity, a wondrous something that realizes without argument... an intuition of the absolute balance, in time and space, of the whole of this multifariousness, this revel of fools, and incredible make-belief and general unsettledness we call the world.1% Whether or not one agrees with Whitman's dismissive way of identifying ' mere intellect' with speculative reason, it is obvious that speculative philosophical argument accompanies every passage in The Man Without Qualities in which ' the mystical' is invoked. There is, in this sense, nothing special about these passages: they are reflections about mysticism, never the thing itself. Stylistic questions that are worth exploring, including questions of genre, have a refreshing tendency to end up as more than stylistic questions. By calling The Man Without Qualities a novel, 'ein Roman', Musil committed himself to the writing of a fiction. From Aristotle onward works of fiction have been seen and read as explorations and actualisations of the possible. This practice is here radically revised and put into jeopardy. This ' novel' does not confine its narrative to one set of possibilities by actualising them, that is, by committing the narrative to a single structure of world and time, as realism does. Instead, it first raises and then deliberately disappoints the expectations of a novel reader by leaving many elements of its structure open and indeterminate. The guidelines of its narrative are: 'This could or should or might happen ... and, well, it might turn out to be quite different' (WK vol. 1, p. 12); or again, things might happen for these, or perhaps for quite other reasons; or one thing may be as possible as another. True, such guidelines are

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compatible with the practice of the nouveau roman. But when Musil ceases to personalise speculation, he takes the book beyond the confines of fiction, into the realm of speculation. In reflecting on its own possibilities the novel subverts its own fictional status, as if to say, 'Maybe it isn't fiction after all, but speculative philosophy... ?' So do many other fictions, from Tristram Shandy onward. But with Musil this turns out to be a journey of no return. This amalgam is intended to express what Musil calls 'the perforated seriousness... of life as experiment' (WK vol. 11, p. 418). To achieve this strange effect he does his best to avoid telling a continuous story, writing a history, or working towards the closure of tragedy; and by calling his form 'Essayismus', he also avoids the closure of a philosophical system. But that designation too is misleading, since his philosophising doesn't take the form of essays but of diverse reflections. At times the book seems to point in the direction of Pascal's Pense'es, Lichtenberg's Sudelbucher (his famous Waste-books), Novalis's Fragmente, or Wittgenstein's Investigations - yet of course we don't expect collections of Pensees to be tied to a fictional narrative, however desultory and episodic. There are four devices that tie Musil's philosophical sketches to the narrative while at the same time leaving it open as a conglomeration of mere possibilities. The first, the practice of inserting an historically indeterminate 'Nowadays' (or words to that effect) at strategic points, and thus actualising the narrative by liberating it from the order of history, has been commented on at length earlier in this chapter. The second, and least successful, consists in the overabundant use of quotational devices, such as '... he reflected that...', '... he said to himself...', 'he imagined the following: ...', '... he remembered having thought this before:...',' let us assume that...', and, again and again '...he thought:..." Nor are these snippets of actualisation made more convincing when they are given a somewhat elephantine form (as when the narrator is reading and transcribing Ulrich's philosophical diary while peering over his sister's shoulder):

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When Agathe had read thus far, she thought she heard Ulrich's steps on the gravel of the garden path, and she quickly pushed all the papers into the drawer. But when she had made sure that her ears had deceived her and that her brother was still in the garden, she pulled out the papers again and read on as follows... (M.o.E. p. 1146)

All that such phrases and passages can do is to arouse a feeling of tedium and impatience in the reader. They are signs despairing signs - of a creative mind that is determined to ignore the traditional distinction between narrative and reflective discourse; that is occasionally tempted to regard 'literature' as inferior to 'exact thought' (M.o.E. p. 868), poetry inferior to mathematics, or at least (here we are back again at the quotational let-out) to attribute such thoughts to Ulrich. But at the very point where 'Essayismus' is about to take over, the mind scuttles back to the protective mimicry of fiction; the plea that 'nowadays' this is all that can be done, remains a specious plea. Here lies a major difference between Musil and Proust. Proust's narrator doesn't try to palm off his reflections on 'Marcel'. The continuity between narrator and hero is too firmly established, the philosophical comments are so securely tied to the action that the need to impose them on the hero or anyone else does not arise. Proust, like Musil, tends to present events, persons and ideas in the mode of the indeterminate; but it is not, as it is for Musil, a theme relentlessly pursued, of which events, persons, and ideas are mere illustrations. Its limits, in Proust, are set by a definite, all-encompassing point of view. The third and most striking aspect of Musil's style is his use of various conditional modes as a way of preventing the possible from being actualised: 'The indicative which expresses the actual events of the novel shrinks to a mere point of reference around which a gossamer of subjunctives is woven'79 by the author/narrator/hero, and occasionally by other characters, too. And because these modes are to be found in the narrative and philosophical sections alike, they too act as links between them. The force of these subjunctives (equivalents of those 'it would have been's' and ' had she been's' and ' whether it be possible's')

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is difficult to convey in English, in which most comparable forms have been replaced by auxiliary verbs, while those that survive sound (at least to other than American ears) pedantic and arch. In German too, such constructions ('Nun komme ja, wie es scheine... dachte er... 5 (M.o.E. p. 599)), aren't exactly part of a top-of-the-bus conversation, but the formality and courtesy they connote, as well as their occasional awkwardness, have their advantages. Musil delights in the little delays these forms cause in the flow of his prose; but difficulty and resistance in the use of words belong to his theme no less than do the eddies that arise in the flow of thought. It has been said that the conditional or hypothetical mode of his style is part of its specifically Austrian charm.80 At all events, what justifies his use of these slightly bookish forms is the fact that in German and Austrian alike they convey meanings beyond grammatical convention. The semantic values they mark are uncertainty and (at times) suspected untruth, hypothesis, and indeterminateness. In this way the modal forms preserved in the language produce, as it were of their own accord, some of the shades used in the portrait of a man without definite (and definable) qualities; but they are also a part of the hypothetical and speculative ambience of ' perforated seriousness' in which he lives, and of the Austro-Hungarian Empire as the State Without Qualities, indefinable in a world that insists on definition, the picturesque flotsam of conditionals in a sea of indicatives. The last element of Musil's idiolect, his linguistic scepticism, takes many different forms and serves several ends. When insights are regularly reformulated by arrays of synonyms, assertions weakened or taken back by being called approximate and inaccurate, feelings described as indescribable, tropes criticised as arbitrary and consistently misleading, we feel that enough (and occasionally more than enough) has been done to demonstrate that this author's attitude to his medium is indeed wary and sceptical. His distrust of language serves to satirise everything pretentious in the company Ulrich keeps; as a part of Moosbrugger's chaotic mind it brilliantly illuminates his maniacal distrust of people, and sets up parallels between the

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violence Moosbrugger does to words and the violence he does to his victims; and this distrust is shared by Ulrich's friend Clarisse, a woman on her way into darkest insanity. But this language scepticism can be ironical, too. It informs a prose style whose tropes are constantly changing, like the weave of a piece of shot silk. Musil's choice of metaphors is as indeterminate, as much an illumination of mere possibilities, as are most other aspects of the book. Although the following passage focuses on the random choices of that bete noire,' the man who believes in reality', the reading it proposes is relevant to the text as a whole: It seems that reality is something that the worthy, practical Wirklichkeitsmensch doesn't ever wholly love or take seriously. As a child, while his parents are not at home, he crawls under the table to make the living-room, by this brilliantly simple trick, into a place of adventure; as a boy he hankers after a watch of his own, as the young man with the gold watch he longs for the wife to go with it, and as a man with watch and wife for a superior position; and when he has successfully attained the fulfilment of this little circle of wishes and is calmly swinging within it, to and fro, like a pendulum, it seems that his store of unsatisfied dreams has not diminished by one jot. For when he wants to rise [above the rut of everyday], he resorts to metaphor. Presumably because snow is at times disagreeable to him, he compares it to the glimmering breasts of women, and as soon as his wife's breasts begin to bore him, he compares them to glimmering snow. He would be horrified if one day he and his turtledove turned out to have hard bills to coo with or if her lips turned into corals, but poetically he finds it exciting. He is capable of turning anything into everything - snow into skin, skin into blossoms, blossoms into sugar - for all that matters to him, apparently, is to make things into what they are not, which is doubtless proof that he cannot bear being anywhere for long, wherever he happens to be. (WK vol. 1, pp. 160-1) A metaphor, in this account, is seen as language taking a vacation from the serious business of being in the service of 'reality', and entering the service of a possibilist point of view - that is, Ulrich's point of view during the year's vacation he takes 'from life'. Images (we are told) are arbitrary, and they mislead. The only way of preventing imagery (here reduced to figurative speech) from giving misleading accounts of how things are in the world is not to take any of it seriously, that is,

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literally. When language is taken literally, as the Germans generally and Arnheim in particular take it, its delusiveness becomes vicious. This kind of delusion (so Musil concludes the above sketch) the inhabitants of that charmed empire know well enough. Not only are they exceptionally metaphor-minded but, being quick at getting bored with one thing and moving on to another, they turn out to be as it were methodically unreliable. All roads in this world of events and ideas lead to Vienna: while there is never any doubt about the Austrian nature of Musil's book, this deconstructing of the source and nature of metaphors as an arbitrary use of language affirms it once more; whether this arbitrariness includes the language of poetry we are not told. But this linguistic scepticism seems also intended as a definitive authorial statement - as ' Musil's view of language' yet as such it offers no further illumination. It features in every scene of the book. Again and again we are told that a signally important part of our experience goes on inside ourselves, in the impenetrable, inaccessible privacy of our minds; that there are, inside us, immense, unworded resources of feeling and thought — inward experiences which are betrayed and worsted as soon as they are articulated. Yet there is, in Musil's view, room for the language of mysticism, and those affirmations of inwardness are intended as pointers to it. But though they are bound to be remote from the everyday, the areas of experience intimated in mystical utterances cannot be wholly separate from other kinds of experience; the language of such utterances is strange, but it cannot be absolutely inaccessible. When Wittgenstein remarks (in words Musil could have written) that 'The inexpressible (that which I find mysterious and am not able to express) is perhaps the background against which whatever I could express receives its meaning', 81 he implicitly confirms the unity of experience which Musil challenges yet fails to break. Once it is acknowledged as giving a meaning to the whole, the 'background' of which Wittgenstein speaks is foregrounded and becomes a part of that whole; for there would be no meaning to ' what I am able to express' (or at least that meaning would be different) were it not sustained by something 'inexpressible',

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which is thus expressed. Whether it is ' mystical' or discursive or poetic, language is at all times experience (Wittgenstein will call it 'a form of life') uttered and thus shared; and, being shared, it is brought out of inwardness into the public realm. To say all this is not to say that in his speculations about the limits of language Musil is pursuing a pseudo-problem, but that what he is concerned with is a part of the ' problem' of living with other people. And so we end up by having to read Musil's linguistic scepticism, too, as a part of the book's historicism; not as a fundamental philosophical insight, but as characterising the world of'Nowadays', the novel's historical dimension. Musil's art, writes Maurice Blanchot, is guided by his precise understanding ' that in a literary work one can express thoughts [pensees] as difficult, and in a form as abstract, as in a work of philosophy, provided they are not yet thoughts. This not yet is literature itself, a not yet which, as such, is achievement and perfection.'82 Writing in the mode of not yet is indeed characteristic of Part musilien - it is Musil's way of contributing to the central theme of our study; but are his philosophical reflections really written in that mode? Blanchot's 'not yet thoughts' are thoughts which can only form a part of the fiction to the extent that they are either Ulrich's or the narrator's thoughts. But when they turn out to be attributable to neither they become the author's, and the literary claim made on their behalf ceases to be valid - hence Musil's repeated cri de coeur, 'Erzahlen!', 'I've got to tell a story!', to remind himself of his chosen task. What Blanchot is describing is Musil's intention rather than his achievement. The book's philosophical reflections mark not just the passage but the passing of the novel. For while in its early parts they are tied (more or less convincingly) to the action, as the fable of the Parallel Action recedes, stagnates, and is finally abandoned, the reflections sprout aerial roots and assume a life of their own. Unconnected by explicit argument and following no particular order, these extended speculations retain certain similarities of procedure and tone, from which we are to infer that they are indeed Ulrich's, rather than merely their author's. And

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so they are, some of the way. For one thing, we are meant to associate them with the regular physical exercise Ulrich takes (but so does the author). For another, these speculations usually proceed from psychological insights to philosophical apergus, and hence to observations on that mystical' second state' which provides the second half of the book with its main theme. But that theme is not securely anchored in the fiction. That these thoughts owe a great deal to Nietzsche is obvious, though the comparison must not be pressed. The distinction and intellectual energy that inform all of Nietzsche's philosophising, even at its most informal and sketchy, is not consistently in Musil's grasp; moreover, the cul-de-sac of language-consciousness that constantly arrests Musil's (and Ulrich's) thinking has no parallel in Nietzsche (though this has not prevented the post-structuralist ' Nietzscheans' from discovering it in the philosopher's writings). The chapter headed 'Ulrich and the Two Worlds of Feeling' 83 contains the most interesting and illuminating of these exercises. As always at this stage of the book, their setting is unemphatic, almost perfunctory. Having abandoned one train of thought (and his resolution never to write), Ulrich seeks rest from his exertion by first looking down on the park of his little eighteenth-century Schlqfi through his study window, and then takes a few turns on the lawn. He returns to his study (at this point the past definite of narrative gives way to the expository present) and, refreshed, he is ready to reflect on the next thoughts that will come to his mind; yet at the same time he is anxious lest he should assert either too little or too much, 'for what was waiting for him to write it down seemed more important to him than everything else.' That's all the setting there is. Ulrich begins this particular exercise by drawing up a list of the names we give to feelings, and then proceeds to arrange these names in two sets: liking, love, fury, distrust, magnanimity, disgust, envy, hesitation, fear, desire make up one set; tenderness, irritation, suspiciousness, elation, anxiousness, yearning make up the other. He calls the first set definite, determinate and specific - these emotions are aroused in us by

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outside events; while those in the second group are indefinite, indeterminate and general - the less we know what has caused them, the more strongly they affect us. There is a sense in which the feelings in both groups are the same; but those in the first group arise from specific situations, have a firm purpose and goal, and demand a distinct response. (They belong to what Husserl calls our intentionality.) Whereas those in the second group are without purpose or goal, distinct without being definite, in fact more like moods than feelings. (Heidegger will call them aspects of our ' Gestimmtheit' - the way we are 'attuned' to given situations.) Where the first lot draws us into events and makes us take an active part in the world, the second allows us to follow those same events at a distance, as through a coloured window. Here the narrative setting is lightly recalled: as often on these occasions, in the intervals of writing Ulrich is in fact observing the world through a window. The distinction between these two sets having been established, Ulrich's next task is to show how they are connected. Both take their origin in our instinctual life (Musil's terminology of elemental ' Triebe' is still part of the heritage of nineteenthcentury materialism). In our instincts a transformation or rather a development is prefigured, which leads from the selfless, indeterminate, intentionless moods to purposeful feelings and hence to action. This is our expulsion from paradise: these purposeful feelings condemn our mental life to transitoriness and frailty; whereas our moods and mental dispositions are relatively stable and unchanging: ' the one dies the death of a single being, the other lasts, like a genus or species'. Now the argument is placed in the historical dimension of 'Nowadays'. Ulrich knows that he is living in an age which claims to place the highest value on inwardness, that is, on those ' inner' objectless mental dispositions; but this is an age in which only those ' outward' feelings and the action to which they lead are at a premium. (We recall the political dilemma between intention and achievement.) And his speculation continues: if our historical situation breeds in us the habit of subordinating our inner indeterminate feelings to the outer, then ' of course' we should be equally capable of the opposite movement, from

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the outer to the inner, from the pragmatic and functional to the non-pragmatic: 'What this means is that there is in us the possibility of turning our feelings around and experiencing our world differently', that is, ecstatically and mystically. At this point the argument stops, and the two sets of feelings are never mentioned again. Q.E.D.? All this has been said, not enough of it has been shown. Everybody — Ulrich, the narrator, the reader — remains sceptical. Perhaps these aren't the right terms to use (Ulrich reflects), and so (the narrator reports) he, Ulrich, will 'try a dozen different ones' in order to avoid the ambiguities of the 'inner-outer' dichotomy. But, the narrator concludes, these doubts 'no longer made any difference to Ulrich's conviction', the task of finding the right terms 'seemed to [Ulrich] merely a chore he would have to face when he came to work it all out a chore arising from the fact that language was not suitable for [expressing] this aspect of being'. And the chapter ends with Ulrich reading to himself (and Musil quoting) a passage from Swedenborg about the various indeterminate, ' dispositional' ways the angels are said to experience what we call space and time. The purpose of the exercise (it now emerges) was for Ulrich to set out the rational grounds for his firm belief in the irrational, grounding the mystical (the special) in our ordinary experience. Why does Ulrich stop at this point? Is it the example of Nietzsche that justifies his abandoning the effort 'to work it all out'? True, Nietzsche's reflections are often no more extended than the one we have examined. But when Nietzsche moves on, to the next link in a chain he leaves to his commentators to fashion, it is not the inadequacy of language he appeals to, nor the (embarrassing) promise of'to be continued next time', but his need to concentrate on his target, the totality of human experience, from a new perspective. Ulrich too will try again, choosing a different point of view. But what causes him to break off his exercise is Musil's untoward realisation that he is, after all, writing a fiction, a novel of sorts; that there are formal and (in the bad sense of the word) literary reasons (as opposed to Nietzsche's substantial philosophical reasons) why the argu-

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merit should come to an end. These are not Blanchot's 'not yet ideas', but ideas which have merely failed to find adequate expression; not the achievement and perfection of literature, but its abandonment. Moreover, although he doesn't seem to be aware of it, Ulrich faces a devastating contradiction. This life he has been leading - this bracketed year of vacation - was to have been an experiment in indeterminacy. Again and again he had proclaimed the value of impermanence: faith cannot last more than an hour without deteriorating into hebetude; ' all propositions of morality ... refer to a sort of dream condition that's already taken wing and flown out of the cage of rules in which we try to hold it fast' (WK vol. in, p. 112); and ' [every] feeling changes as soon as it becomes lasting' (M.o.E. p. 1129) - y e t in that speculation about the two kinds of feeling, this very transience, seen throughout as the hallmark of authentic experience, was deplored as the curse of our modern condition. And this contradiction in Ulrich's thinking reflects the dilemma of Musil's writing. If his hero is ever to reach that 'other state', he must be made to abandon the world of'qualities', purposeful feelings, and action - must be made to leave the world - and enter the angelic, Swedenborgian realm of indeterminate states and moods. Did Musil realise that what keeps the novel alive is Ulrich's failure to do just that? The closer to that mystical state a character (not only Ulrich and Agathe, but Leinsdorf, Stumm and even Diotima and Arnheim) is placed, the less of a distinct role he can be given, the less determinate as a person, a character in a story he becomes, and the more his discourse will become interchangeable with that of the other characters and with the speculations of the author - the more his or her story, and the novel itself, will decay. It is in terms of the novel itself that 'the other state' turns out to be a will-o'-the-wisp. Where then — if not in its exhilarating realist accounts of Ulrich and Vienna and the Parallel Action - does the core of this book lie? Spengler's undertaking was focused in the semifictional pattern of'the world as history'. In Thomas Mann it was knowledge-and-experience which constituted a single, individual and clearly determined character, The Magic Moun-

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tain is his, Hans Castorp's, story and novel. In MusiPs book all that goes into 'history', as well as all that constitutes the genre 'novel', is made to sustain ideas and thought. Its core lies in the tropisms of which it is composed: in the view of personality and society and experience, of politics and sexuality and social structures and conventions, all pulling in different directions, all refusing to form an authentic whole. Where all signs of totality - whether personal, national or philosophical - are rejected as false, and the one possible totality, that of 'the other state', turns out to be unattainable, there the hero's self can escape the indictment of inauthenticity only by showing him as more or less cheerfully accepting himself for what he is — a conglomerate of parts, a set of possibilities, of provisoria. The quest for that unitary state of being for which some sort of name has to be found is pursued at the price of all, or almost all, that is to be said against attaining that state. The price of the purchase is not as high as it is in Kafka: Ulrich is not proud of his despair. For brief moments he finds fulfilment, for even briefer moments he rejoices in it. His creator does not seem to have found such fulfilment. His quest takes him not merely beyond Ulrich's experience, but beyond the genre he has chosen for his experiment. To the question whether what he has written is a great novel there is, I think, only one answer: it is great, but it is not a novel.

CHAPTER 4

The Great War

ERNST JUNGER'S THE STORM OF STEEL Throughout the completed parts of The Man Without Qualities, the mystical ' other state' is designated as a state beyond good and evil; though in trying to imagine it as 'a possible way of life', Ulrich and Agathe speak of it as a desirable, supremely good state. Conversely, war is seen in the narrative parts of the book predominantly as evil; but, hidden under a debris of variora and unfinished sketches, we find remarks in which Musil experiments with a very different evaluation. By the time the Parallel Action collapses, Ulrich is ready to rejoin the army; active service now appears as the decent and honourable alternative to the life from which he took a year's vacation - the year that took him nowhere. One of the most revealing of the fragmentary notes of the Nachlafi reads like a variation on W. B. Yeats's lines on 'the passionate intensity' of the worst: 'War is the same as "the other state", only (as a possible way of life) mixed with evil.5l That, as a matter of history, is what the quest leads to. No account of the events of August 1914 is complete without an understanding for the reckless solemnity, the ' otherness' of the mood with which large sections of the populations of Europe went to war; and what must also be understood is their disaffection with peacetime as the dispiriting, boring norm of 'ordinary' life. In Edwardian England, the Empire overseas offered one kind of escape from that boredom, individual adventure another: 'I want to tell you that we have missed getting through by a 183

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narrow margin, which was justifiably within the risk...', Captain Robert Falcon Scott wrote in his last letters home from his ill-fated expedition to the South Pole; and he continues: ' After all we have given our lives for our country... I shall not have suffered any pain, but leave the world fresh from harness and full of good health and vigour. We have decided not to kill ourselves, but to fight to the last... but in the fighting there is a painless end. How much better it has been than lounging in too great

comfort at home. ' 2 It is a remarkable testament. It has often been described as quintessentially English, and so it is, in its considerateness for the feelings of those to whom the letters are addressed. But for the rest, the sentiments expressed are those of a European generation. Those poignant last words describe very precisely what Rilke will call the state of' the young dead'. Yet Scott's celebration of the vigour of sweet life contrasts strangely (at least to our ears) with the claim that 'we have given our lives for our country', and that 'we have decided ... to fight to the very last' - words which will soon be decked out with the official solemnity of'the supreme sacrifice'. The truth is that Captain Scott's claim, at once brave and despairing, can be made to yield a meaning only metaphorically. He and his men 'fought', and 'gave their lives for their country', not against an enemy who threatened its survival, but in the pursuit of those sporting records and competitive achievements mocked by Ulrich, and soon to be celebrated, at least in its first two years, by writers on both sides of the Great War. There is a great difference: what Captain Scott and the members of his expedition undertook was an individual venture freely engaged in, not one that dragged a whole world into war. Yet where it intimates the idea of sacrifice, the language of that testament anticipates the rhetoric of the Great War. In Germany much the same experience issues in collective enthusiasm and collective action. Its spirit is recaptured on the first page of Ernst Jiinger's first book, The Storm of Steel: We had left our lecture-rooms, our class-rooms and benches. In the course of a few weeks' training we had been melted down into one great enthusiastic body, inspired by one great thought. Grown up in an age of security, we all felt a yearning for the unusual, the great

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danger. This was the moment when the war seized us, like an ecstasy. We had set out in a rain of flowers, in a drunken mood of roses and blood. Surely the war would bring it to us — would bring us all that was great and solemn and strong! The war was the manly deed, a merry battle on flowery meadows bedewed with blood. 'No better death can be our lot...' Anything rather than stay at home, anything to join the rest!3

The Storm of Steel, a record of the Great War taken 'from the diary of a German storm-troop officer on the Western Front', has in the subtitle of its first edition the author's full credentials: 'By Ernst Junger, Volunteer [Kriegsfreiwilliger], later Lieutenant and Company Commander of the Fusilier Regiment of Prince Albert of Prussia (Hanoverian Regiment No. 73)'. The book took some time to reach a wider public. The first, privately printed edition of 1920 was followed by several revised editions, the last of which, dated 1961, is reprinted in the two monumental editions of Ernst Jiinger's collected works.4 By the end of the twenties The Storm of Steel had become the most popular of those books in which the Great War is celebrated as the supreme adventure, combat in the trenches as the true test of heroic living in the exaltation of constant danger, war wounds as the true emblems of sacrifice, and the endurance of pain as the true touchstone of man. The book became the most highly regarded fictional document of the right-wing ' Conservative Revolution': its politics follow from the fact that its patriotism is identified with consistent assent to warlike action. The first edition, which appeared when the author was twenty-five, precedes Erich Maria Remarque's All Quiet on the Western Front (1929) and Arnold Zweig's

trilogy Sergeant Grisha (1927), as well as several other anti-war novels with a vaguely left-wing, humanist, and internationalist outlook, whose authors were among the first victims of the Third Reich. By the time the third edition of The Storm of Steel was completed, those anti-war books were being publicly burned in the squares of German cities and (with the enthusiastic support of their rectors) in the courtyards of German universities. In his Introduction to the English translation of the book

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(1929), R. M. Mottram praises the young Lieutenant Jiinger's ' sterling honesty' in presenting the war ' as he saw it': He [Ernst Jiinger] had his regrets for friends and comrades slain all around him, aesthetic appreciation of the landscape of the Western Front, on which alone he served, bursts of philosophy which are no worse than most, and very considerable narrative power. Yet none of it helped him to an understanding of what war is, and must be. Right to the end, when, helmetless, his lungs full of blood, he saw the German troops coming up from the support line, holding up their hands and throwing away their arms and their equipment, he clings to his ideal of military Germany. And, Mottram adds, the book shows the necessary limitations of one who was never more than a company officer, and who in his four years of service did not at any time obtain a wider, strategic view of the action in which he was engaged. As we shall see, Jiinger's perspective isn't quite so limited. The book has few if any equals in German, and none (as far as I know) in English. It attempts to give the reader an accurate idea of day-to-day trench warfare and its tactics, and to convey the moods of one who, engaging in combat freely and successfully, ' fresh from harness and full of good health and vigour', seeks out its moments of exaltation and accepts its terrors, not without moments of fear, but always without regret. In some ways it speaks with the authority of a professional officer, which is indeed what Jiinger had become by the time the book was published. Mottram's point of view is totally different. He himself wrote a powerful and moving chronicle of that War - moving above all in its expressions of sorrow and compassion with the suffering it brought its victims.5 But when he reads Jiinger's diary as an unwitting testimonial to the meaninglessness of war, looking in Jiinger's report for signs of disillusion, he reads it against the grain. Did the author of The Storm of Steel really fail to understand 'what war is, and must be'? What writers like Mottram fail, most honourably, to give due weight to is the force and conviction, and the relative consistency, that inform this enthusiastic assent to warlike action, and the central place in experience war is given here. At various points in his long life

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Ernst Jiinger modified his assessment of war, but his view of the Great War and of his own representative role in it seems never to have changed. In the twenties he published three more war books,6 further elaborations of those seventeen pencilled and tattered notebooks he had kept in the trenches, celebrating the same experience with further arrays of technical details and further observations about the psychology of men living and dying under conditions of static warfare on the Western Front. War, in these accounts, appears as the dear purchase in its direst, most concrete form. It is the greatest of all adventures, yes, but not an end in itself: a supreme test and a last judgement in which modern man's right to enter his new world - Spengler's world of technology - is being either confirmed or denied. Realistic reportage and mythologisation go hand in hand. Especially in its early versions, The Storm of Steel contains occasional expressions of a nationalist sentiment. Highest praise is reserved for the men under Lieutenant Jiinger's command, for German courage, endurance and skill in combat; English troops ('the adversary' or 'the opponent') are commended at the expense of the French (' the ancient enemy', 'der Urfeind'). Although the last two chapters of the book contain indications that' the meaning with which one had gone to war was depleted and no longer adequate' (p. 271),7 and that after the failure of the great German offensive of March 1918 victory was no longer to be reckoned with, the actual German defeat and the armistice of November 1918 are never mentioned. And the last chapter of the book's 1924 version concludes with a peroration cast in the predictable manner of nationalist propaganda: ' As long as the blades flash and shine in the dark [i.e. clandestinely, in defiance of the Versailles Diktat], the word must be: Germany lives and Germany will not go under.' This is the version which consolidated the author's fame and political influence in the years preceding the Third Reich, and made him one of the spokesmen of those conservative forces which helped to bring down the Weimar Republic. However, after 1933 Jiinger never again felt at ease as a spokesman of any political faction. The revision of the book on which he was engaged when Hitler came to power in February 1933 no longer contains that exhortation,

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or other nationalist pronouncements like it, which the regime would much have welcomed. Nationalism is not the book's main theme, a somewhat different ideology is being formulated. The praise of war as the supreme sacrifice includes, yet goes beyond, nationalist politics of the conservative kind; or rather, its nationalism is part of an ideology - a ' metaphysics' - that goes beyond politics as we understand it, aiming at a total validation of man; but so (as Jiinger was to find out once the regime had consolidated its power while he had decided he didn't like the smell of it) did the ideology of National Socialism. The structure of the book follows the geography of battle. Most of its chapters bear the names of places - the villages and rivers and small towns of Flanders and north-eastern France which were fought over, abandoned, occupied again and fought over a second, even a third time in the trench warfare ('Stellungskrieg') to the point of attrition and all but complete annihilation. This liturgy of names - Orainville, Bazancourt, Guillemont; the Somme; Langemarck, Regnieville, Cambrai partly coincides with, and is partly different from, the English liturgy. In one form or another it has entered the history and paramythology of the West. In German history many of its names bear the additional overtones of victories followed by final defeat. For the soldiers in the field the defeat came wholly unexpectedly - when Prince Maximilian von Baden sent emissaries to the Allied High Command to plead for an armistice, Allied soldiers had penetrated only into Alsace. Yet the book ends triumphantly - its last paragraph (in its most familiar versions of 1935 and 1961) contains the regimental citation of Jiinger's award of the order of Pour le me'rite, the highest German decoration for valour. The defeat is implied; but the daredevil deeds celebrated throughout the book suggest with far greater force that the warlike values will survive undefeated. The German soldier is undefeated, immortal. There will always be another war. By the time the book ends, Lieutenant Jiinger is already engaged in the skirmishes of the ' after-war' in which the nationalists tried to keep some of Germany's border territories from leaving the crumbling 'Reich'. The geography of battle shapes the structure of the book also

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in a narrower, tactical sense. As in The Song of Roland, the episodes recounted are determined each time by the landscape of battle. Every sunken road and field, every copse and brook and river, every shell-crater and trench represents a point of brief safety or mortal danger, a point of life or death. As in The Song of Roland? The analogy has only to be mentioned to be worsted by its absurdity. For this warfare there is no precedent. The infantryman (Jiinger calls him 'the Warrior') is totally at the mercy of the landscape or habitation he is destroying, his survival is at one with its survival. One way or another, what has been described so far is to be found in most war books. Jlinger's 'diary', however, is concerned with more than mere reportage. The notes from which it is written up may be those of an adolescent in love with danger and violence, but even in its first published version the 'diary' is informed by the ambition to explain, theorise, justify the war-justify it, not morally or even politically, but ideologically, metaphysically. What fashioned that landscape before the slaughter began was the farmer's work, which is now the infantryman's 'work area' (' mein Arbeitsgebiet'). As war is the pursuit of peacetime politics by other means, so trench warfare is seen as the pursuit of peacetime work on the landscape by other means, and the soldier is 'the worker' in the medium of war. In the programmatic book which he wrote on the eve of the revolution of 1933, Jiinger continues this argument. The Worker9 - an authentic persona ('eine Gestalt') of'metaphysical' significance, at times resembling what James Burnham will call ' the Technocrat ' - unites the energies manifest in war and in modern technology. The clatter of the looms of Manchester and the machinegun fire of Langemarck are indications of one and the same spirit, the spirit of the modern age, whose only real enemy is not' the Enemy' at all, but the bourgeois,' lounging in too great comfort at home', the Burger with his craven condemnation of ' the immorality of war' and his belief in safety from attack as the highest value. The kinship between these two kinds of ' worker' - the warrior ('Krieger') and the technocrat - is confirmed by the

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rapid development and increasing deployment of heavy armaments. The effect of the heavy artillery used on the Western Front for the first time is to bring about a radical change in the nature of modern warfare: Let us remember the famous attack of the Volunteer Regiment at Langemarck. This event, which is of greater significance in the history of ideas than of war, is of the highest importance in answering the question of what attitude is possible in our time and our place. What we see here is the failure of a classical attack, in spite of the will to power which informs individual men and in spite of the moral and spiritual values which distinguish them. Free will, higher education, enthusiasm and ecstatic contempt for death do not suffice to overcome the gravitational force of those few hundred metres over which reigns the spell of mechanised death.10

Here the wider, ideological perspective opens up. The 'war diary' is not merely an expanded version of the brief notes Jiinger made about his adventures in the trenches - it is also an attempt to find a substitute for those 'moral and spiritual values' lost in a situation which spells his and his comrades' defeat, but which at least gives him grim satisfaction in his recognition of it as a situation without precedent. Thus the book records a functional change in the conduct of war, from the action of individual men using their skill and initiative to the activity of mechanical, supra-personal forces. It is a change in the direction of indiscriminate slaughter - you cannot win, but you can record it. If, in the early parts of the book, the narrative was filled with stories of individual bravery and bravado, with episodes of lucky escape or absurd coincidences testifying to the fortunes of war, 'the battle of materials' ('die Materialschlacht') which dominates the book in its later chapters renders the effects of individual sorties insignificant; and this diminution of the type of action conveyed in traditional accounts of war is symbolised by the Spanish 'flu epidemic that spread on the Western front, but especially among the German troops, in the spring and summer of 1918. From one revision of the book to the next, the role of the hero is ever more clearly outlined. As the text is pared down and stripped of 'philosophical' ruminations, so it becomes the

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fiction of a type. Lieutenant Jiinger's immense courage, his moods - which vary from a sporting lightheartedness and a penchant for practical jokes to deep dejection - his skill as a reconnaissance officer and as commander of a platoon of storm troops, as well as his heedless, merciless brutality in the long minutes of hand-to-hand fighting - all these warlike values do not strike us as the qualities of an individual person, nor are they intended as such. They are the attributes of the 'modern' warrior type — of the infantryman in the era of transition from personal combat to the mechanised weaponry of what we (monstrously) call 'conventional warfare'. In this sense the 'diary' ceases to be a personal testimonial and becomes representative, a partly fictional, partly historical document. Descriptions locating very particular events in abstract 'realms', 'positions', 'zones' and 'spaces' are of the essence of this document. Abstraction - the annihilation of an enemy who is no longer seen face to face, ' eyeball to eyeball' - is a condition of modern warfare, as it is of its description. While the officer's pistol has still something of the aura of traditional individual combat (the direction in which it is aimed raises a question Jiinger doesn't discuss), the machine-gun with its spraying action is the characteristic weapon of this war. Success and failure in the 'softening up' of infantry resistance by heavy bombardment from positions far behind the lines, or from the air, constitute strategic elements of a wholly novel kind; and courage and fear, their psychological correlatives, must be adapted to this novel situation, in which machines rule supreme. (Only Tristram Shandy, Lieutenant Jiinger's constant companion in dugout and field hospital, marks his connection with a world that is not at war.) This need to adapt to a wholly novel condition is the lesson of war which Lieutenant Jiinger learns; but while learning it he becomes aware of being involved in a contradiction. His training, personal courage and skill have made him into an exemplary leader of a small group of men engaged in reconnoitring the precise position and strength of the enemy, and the nature of his armaments: this is the information which Lieutenant Jiinger is required to convey to the field command.

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The damage he and his men inflict on the enemy is incidental to the resistance they encounter in the course of their 'recce'. Theirs is a supremely exacting task. It is different from the solitary work of a non-commissioned despatch runner and cyclist like Hitler, who served on other sections of the same Flanders front. The success of Lieutenant Jiinger's mission depends each time on the close co-operation between all members of the small group (preferably less than a platoon) under his command. But as the war goes on,' the storm of steel' grows in volume; and as it becomes ever more violent and indiscriminate, so the need for precise intelligence at platoon level diminishes, until in the end such intelligence becomes redundant - becomes meaningless, not in some grand metaphysical sense of the word, but in the plain tactical context of the battle. This is how Jiinger looks back on his last great offensive, 21 March 1918 at Ecoust-St-Mein and Noreuil: The tremendous accumulation of forces in the hour of destiny, in which a distant future was being fought for, and the unleashing of those forces which followed so surprisingly and precipitously, had taken me for the first time into the furthest reaches of the suprapersonal. This was different from everything I had experienced so far: it was a sacred initiation [eine Ein-weihung] which not only opened the glowing chambers of terror but also led through them.11 The Lieutenant's precise idea of what makes this initiation c sacred' is less clear than the hubris manifest in his readiness to resort to the language of theology. Are such quasi-religious invocations (repeated in many similar contexts) more than empty rhetoric? Perhaps not - but it is rhetoric of a special kind, uniquely adapted to its time and place, uniquely acceptable to the age that follows. The point has already been made (and it is valid not only for the German experience) that the War with all its destruction, deprivations, and dangers represents the idea of the dear purchase in its harshest and most radical collective form. But what needs emphasising also is the converse of the dear purchase; is the fact that, in the German context at all events, the most exacting of deeds are apt to attract the emptiest of phrases. The apologia for war and its justification — all that

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comes under the heading of the metaphysics of war - is here all too easily come by; the quasi-religious sanction is all too quickly claimed and granted; the spiritual alms too readily disbursed and received. This author certainly holds back nothing that is to be said about the dangers to life and limb the War brings with it; he certainly says all that needs to be said by way of validating ' the storm of steel' as the supreme test of physical courage. But when he talks of the carnage in sacred language (the language of' the supreme sacrifice'), how do we decide whether what he is saying has any meaning, is not just the rhetoric of nihilism? If his apologia for war and warlike values is to be safeguarded from the nihilism of which Nietzsche says that it undermines all values, should we not expect Jiinger to question the rhetoric of war, and cultivate a critical awareness of its metaphysics ? A little of Musil's distrust of conceptual language would go a long way: should we not expect Jiinger to consider whatever might be said against seeing the War as a test, not of valour only, but of other values, too? But here the author fails us. When searching for ways of validating and justifying the War, Lieutenant Jiinger turns out to be as credulous, as ready to accept the nearest bit of grandiloquent comfort, as the defamed Burger. The individual self (we have been told more than once) is no more than an outmoded, nineteenth-century atavism and must be submerged in the type - but the very metaphysics by which this process is to be justified is a hangover from nineteenth-century individualism. And so what this expanded and repeatedly revised 'diary' records is, after all, the search for individual, personal identity. Triumphantly, Lieutenant Jiinger will count and describe his fourteen injuries and twenty scars (p. 299); will record and count the occasions when he actually saw the enemy face to face (p. 243); will celebrate the victories in attacks carried out with rifle-fire and hand grenades in contrast to the destruction wrought by machine-guns and heavy artillery. In this way the ' diary' is intended to convey to posterity that even in the age of heavy armaments skilled reconnaissance work is at a premium; yet he does not hesitate to confirm the futility of this individual

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effort by describing scenes in which German troops are shelled and decimated by their own artillery. The personal reactions of the author-as-hero are a throwback to traditional warlike virtues: responsibility for the welfare and survival of the men under Jiinger's command, quick adaptation to changing physical conditions, camaraderie and the sharing of hardship, authority and resoluteness in the giving of orders. Yet all these qualities hardly matter in the face of an artillery barrage which within a few minutes transforms the very landscape upon which it is let loose; they cease to matter when, in the spring of 1918, Jiinger has his first experience of British tanks and of chemical warfare. ' Chivalry here took a final farewell. It had to yield to the heightened intensity of the war, just as all fine and personal feelings have to yield when machinery gets the upper hand. Here for the first time and on the field of battle, too, the new Europe appeared' 12 - among bomb-craters and scaffoldings, in laboratories and in those lost command posts at the silent centre of the battle in which (we are told) a new warrior race is being tested. From the world of heroic fiction Jiinger is taking us into a world of science-fiction, though it is still, for all his claims of standing above the parties, a politicised world. As in all dystopias, acknowledged or otherwise, the technology as well as the psychic values that are praised here are in the service of a conservative ideology. But then, Ernst Jiinger was by no means the strangest of the bedfellows among whom the hapless German conservatives found themselves at the end of the Weimar era. Part history, part fiction, The Storm of Steel has been justly praised for conveying the experience of the Great War more accurately, and more unsparingly, than any other book of its kind. What it also expresses, even before Jiinger had read a word of The Decline of the West,13 is Spengler's paradox. Germany (Spengler had written) must abandon the individualism of the Faustian era and its outdated idealist values — the values which Jiinger saw manifest in trench warfare; she must make her way into the new era of technology, the era of 'the battle of materials'. Yet (Spengler had proclaimed with equal con-

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viction) Germany will adapt her idealism to the technology of the new era, her special destiny will enable her to dominate the modern world without having to abandon her Faustian spirituality. In Jiinger's terms: the valour and supreme effort of the reconnaissance officer and his men are of no avail in the storm of steel — their valour and supreme effort will live for ever; the new era of war and technology is upon us - vive le travail pour le Roi de Prusse !

Not only their valour and effort, but their self-sacrifice, too. I have already referred to Jiinger's definition, in Der Arbeiter^ of the figure of the worker-warrior. Attracting the highest veneration as well as the most extreme hatred, this Spenglerian representative of the modern age embodies all the forces latent in the contemporary world. Bearing 'totality' ('das Ganze') within himself, he offers a total challenge to the world. The supreme value by which he must direct his life is intensity of effort beyond good and evil — this is his Faustian heritage. Discovering his identity as that heroic persona, modern man discovers his purpose and destiny. It is this discovery which makes the worker-warrior capable of that sacrifice whose most significant expression is written in blood. Translated from ' metaphysical' into plain historical terms: the war is lost - the war will be continued by other means. This is the continuity of war and peace which became the centrepiece of Hitler's ideological programme, and which the German electorate enabled him to translate into practical politics. Gravely wounded, Lieutenant Jiinger is carried from the field on 24 August 1918; it was his last battle. In hospital he reflects on his experiences, yet the contradiction between traditional values and modern technology - between the value of the individual heroic act and the validity of indiscriminate collective action - remains unresolved. Its source is not, I think, simply an unregenerate nationalism refusing to acknowledge defeat, and the area to which the contradiction relates is not primarily that of ideology but of literature. From its first version to the last, The Storm of Steel is also a literary document, the first book of a very young writer. If the search for an individual

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identity is its psychological sous-texte, this fictional diary is also motivated by a search for a concrete, literary way of conveying an all but annihilating experience, which is at once personal and collective — the author's Fronterlebnis. How is he to do that? After all that has been said here it should be clear that human sympathy and compassion — the obvious reactions of a writer to war - are ruled out by the role Lieutenant Jiinger has chosen for himself. He has no private life, and wants none. About his few weeks of leave he says almost nothing; the only member of his family he ever mentions is his brother whom he meets, shellshocked and wounded, and is able to save by ordering a party of stretcher bearers to take him away from the battlefield; his only friends are his companions in battle; and his occasional sympathy for the French and Flemish civilian victims of this slaughter is diluted with expressions of fatalism. Is there anything he can appeal to that will be neither a part of this landscape of destruction and death nor be counted as a sign of a 'womanish disposition'?15 The only concrete idea he is left with and can proclaim without fear of losing face is the idea of Germany. It may seem somewhat inappropriate to mention the most esoteric of German jin-de-siecle poets, Stefan George, in this context, and even more inappropriate to refer to the patriotic tradition in German literature which begins with Klopstock and Friedrich Holderlin. The 'Germany' Holderlin names in some of his greatest odes, written in the wake of the French Revolution, is indeed a radically different place from the battleground of vengeful nationalism Jiinger invokes (and it is different, too, though less so, from the place Germany is given in George's war poems). Perhaps it doesn't need saying that I regard Jlinger's ideology and the values he commends in The Storm of Steel as false, whereas I see Holderlin's patriotism as a serene benediction and a pious exhortation addressed to his country in a time of spiritual travail. However outrageous any mention of Holderlin in this context may be, it does point to the use and function of a name — this concrete name of Germany — as the poetic embodiment of an ideal and as a literary symbol. More than a century later it had become the rallying point of

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writers who felt they could not fight the war - or at all events write about it - without invoking a metaphysical or religious sanction for it; who felt compelled to ground their metaphysics and its literary expression in a symbol sanctioned by tradition, yet found this procedure wholly compatible with political expedience; men who would eventually swear allegiance to Hitler, yet would not do so without insisting that he was the true heir of Holderlin, Eichendorff and Stifter.16 Jiinger's metaphysics is indeed different from Holderlin's. Yet, like Holderlin's, it is an attempt to fulfil a longing for ' a local habitation and a name' —for a place that is, and is not, in the world. Certainly, not all German nationalism is of this kind. But among the many reasons why in the aftermath of the Great War German nationalism, including Jiinger's, could hope for an enthusiastic reception was its appeal to the patriotic tradition of some of Germany's greatest poets, and the authority that went with that appeal. Few books written about the Great War have any literary precedents to follow: it seems that a mere word, 'Germany', is almost the only connection they have with the past; but in literature there are no 'mere words'. Intensified by the military defeat, the search for a 'metaphysics ' of war - for any expression that will convey the totality of the experience - presented German war writers with a very special, modern problem. If literature embodies the theme of war by particularising it in the suffering of its individual victims, it is likely to fail to convey the sheer size and extent of the destruction the War wrought in the lives of millions; whereas in attempting to convey the magnitude of the destruction in some direct way, literature is likely to end up in a desert of abstract rhetoric. (This was the solution which the Expressionists adopted, sometimes with comic results.) Jiinger's solution is to ignore, or at least strictly to control, the emotional correlatives of the destruction by typecasting the reaction to the horrors of war in the figure of the heroic 'Lieutenant Jiinger'. The inevitable result is a loss of feeling. The fictional aspect of The Storm of Steel doesn't consist in making the hero heroic, but in making him heroic at the expense of all other personal qualities. But in doing so Jiinger

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involves his ' diary' in a further contradiction, which relates to the role of suffering in the recorded experience. The authority and influence of Jiinger's generation in the political life of Weimar Germany derives from their proud claim to have suffered and sacrificed themselves, ' that Germany may live5. While others insist on their deserts unashamedly and without compunction, the author of The Storm of Steel will disdain the veteran's appeal for alms; and about his deserts as a patriot he will maintain a dignified if deafening silence. Yet there really is very little indication of suffering in this 'diary'. Has Jiinger lost or suppressed his capacity for it, or did he never possess it? How is one to tell? The personal image he has created is representative by virtue of a heroism that feels no pain and knows no suffering. Wounded fourteen times, Lieutenant Jiinger knows himself to be invulnerable. This invulnerability is of the essence of the style of his book.17 The task he will eventually set himself-to honour suffering, give meaning to pain, learn fear and pity - will be all but insuperable, for by then his work will have set and hardened in a rhetoric that will make his exhortations and his appeal to traditional charitative values sound unconvincing and gratuitous. Ernst Jiinger's strenuous attempts to give expression to a sentient self belong to the next stage in the story of his long life and career as a writer of our time. HANS CAROSSA: ROUMANIAN

DIART

On 27 August 1916 Ferdinand, King of Romania (not without prompting from Queen Marie, a granddaughter of Queen Victoria) declared war on the Central Powers, thus dragging Germany into a remote territorial conflict; by mid-November the Romanian troops were expelled from Transylvania, the (partly Hungarian) territory Ferdinand had been promised by the Allies in return for joining them in the war; on 6 December 1916, after routing the Romanian troops, Field Marshal August von Mackensen's army occupied Bucharest; three months later, by the time the Revolution of February/March 1917 had collapsed, the Russian troops who had been fighting the

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Germans in the Western Carpathians were reduced to marauding bands, and the Romanian campaign was over. On 4 October 1916, Dr Hans Carossa, recently qualified as medical officer and posted to a battalion of the 3rd Infantry Regiment of the Augsburg Voluntary Reserve (the German, 'Landsturm', sounds more formidable), broke a little bevelled mirror in his billet in Libermont, north of St Quentin; Mme Varnier refused his offer to pay for the damage, but not a box of chocolate macaroons he had recently been sent by relations from Munich. A few days later, when helping a bored colleague, Lieutenant T., to censor the regimental mail, the MO found himself' almost instinctively looking for the bold, clear handwriting of young Glavina, the soldier who often writes such strange sentences to his friends. This time I read: "What kind of a spiritual unity could it be that would be blown to pieces by a stupid shell?'" 18 On 13 October at Aubigny-au-Bac, Stabsarzt Carossa, his medical orderly Raab and his batman Rehm receive their orders and entrain with their regiment for an unknown eastern destination; a week later they arrive at the little Transylvanian mountain town of Parajd. No two serving officers with literary ambitions are likely to have less in common than Jiinger and Carossa. When we first meet Ernst Jiinger, the Hanoverian Prussian, he is hardly more than an adolescent, whose entire emotional life and intellectual interests are centred on the war and the diary in which he hopes to give it validity and lasting form. Hans Carossa, a peaceable, heavy-jawed Bavarian with some Italian ancestry, aged thirtyeight, has left a small family and a moderately successful general practice in the foothills of the Alps - a civilian in the uniform of a medical officer, with an instinctive concern for the sick and wounded, intent on saving lives first and foremost. Almost every aspect of the stereotype of Prussian versus Bavarian is reflected in the contrast between these two diarists, above all in the different ways they use their literary talent to give meaning to the war. What they have in common is an insistent concern to find such a meaning. After a brief period of training at the military hospital at Augsburg (where, two years later, the young Bertolt Brecht was

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to serve briefly as a medical orderly), Carossa volunteered for active service at the front. He had published a little volume of lyrical poetry and would soon be adding a volume of meditative prose; encouraged by Hofmannsthal and by Anton Kippenberg, the owner of the famous and influential Insel Verlag, he had considered giving up his medical practice for a literary career - a difficult decision which, along with several others, more personal in kind, could be shelved, 'for the duration'. Unlike Jtinger, Carossa doesn't rapturously welcome the war, but it comes at an opportune moment. Carossa's entire oeuvre — twelve volumes of poetry and prose - is cast in the mode of more or less fictionalised autobiography, almost all of it explores intimate relationships, often those between doctor and patient. The writing is at all times innocent of irony or satire, the point of view it expresses is almost always the author's own; its main virtues are sincerity and a frankness the limits of which are set by considerateness for the readership he addresses, consistently and with immense success: that is, the educated German middle classes, the Bildungsburgertum. Wholly uncontentious and largely unproblematic in its intention, the prose avoids taking explicit issue with the politics or the ideological wrangles of his time, and only Carossa's wartime diary relates directly and in detail to an actual historical event. There is a purity of style - a language almost without modish blemishes - which reconciles us to many authorial complacencies. Lucid descriptions of dreams alternate with episodes from ' ordinary lives' without resort to literary experiment. The star turns of this narrow oeuvre will be given a place of honour in many German schoolbooks and anthologies,19 in France he will be called ' a second Duhamel', and in England in the thirties he will be greeted as representative of those ' good Germans' who chose not to leave Germany (and whose attitude was later to be called 'the inner emigration'). The source of the unemphatic selfconfidence that informs Carossa's writing is not far to seek. He takes up the familiar heritage of Goethe's autobiography, Dichtung und Wahrheit [Poetry and Truth), and of his ' poetry of

experience', in the firm, barely argued conviction that to recreate Goethe's attitude to the world at its most lyrical and

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affirmative will be as relevant to the spiritual concerns of the German burgerlich reading public of his day as it was in Goethe's. (Whether this is a true reading of Goethe is another question.) Yet Carossa's writing is free from any blatant anachronisms of style or thought. Its avoidance of radical evil and of what Nietzsche called the 'irremediable' aspect of experience is made possible by an act of authorial identification with its readership in its best Sunday mood, at its most highminded. Fate is not always kind to us (this prose is saying), the world is full of disease, disasters and calamities, I have experienced them as fully as any of you - but there is comfort in accepting what has been decreed for each of us, and little point in arguing whether it is God or fate whose decree we must follow. A flower, a tree or a butterfly, a poem, a melody or an ancient piece of wood carving are perennial repositories of meaning and value - it is the writer's or poet's task to bring meaning and value to light and make them available to all mankind, or (if that's too ambitious a conception of the task of writers) to all those who, by background and education, are disposed to give them a hearing. The writer will not unlock the riddle of the universe, but knows there is some good in everyone - in an ambitious young official of Dr Goebbels's ministry or a bright young journalist from the Vdlkischer Beobachter (the party newspaper)20 no less than in an old Bavarian peasant woman. In such autobiographical musings Carossa conveys consolation often only just short of sentimentality, harmony not readily distinguishable from conformism, a sense of goodness not shallow but apparently untested by evil. He doesn't simply confirm the nicest and most comfortable self-image of the Burgertum for whom he writes, but he heightens that image by a spirituality to which they aspire in their best moments. Yet even where the flow of his poetry and the themes of his prose take him furthest from the concerns of his readers, he is never tempted by a moral perspective which would view those concerns less than charitably. He doesn't confine himself to idylls, but he is a stranger to criticism of any kind. Content to trace the contours of a benign, acceptable world, he will never venture beyond the margins of previously charted experience.

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Among the finest and most famous of his lyrical poems is one entitled 'The Old Fountain': Der alte Brunnen Losch aus dein Licht und schlaf! Das immer wache Gepla tscher nur vom alten Brunnen tont. Wer aber Gast war unter meinem Dache, Hat sich stets bald an diesen Ton gewohnt. Zwar kann es einmal sein, wenn du schon mitten Im Traume bist, daB Unruh geht urns Haus, Der Kies beim Brunnen knirscht von harten Tritten, Das helle Platschern setzt auf einmal aus, Und du erwachst, - dann muBt du nicht erschrecken! Die Sterne stehn vollzahlig iiberm Land, Und nur ein Wandrer trat ans Marmorbecken, Der schopft vom Brunnen mit der hohlen Hand. Er geht gleich weiter, und es rauscht wie immer. O freue dich, du bleibst nicht einsam hier. Viel Wandrer gehen fern im Sternenschimmer, Und mancher noch ist auf dem Weg zu dir. Put out your lamp and sleep. Only the ever wakeful Plashing of the old fountain fills the night. All who were guests beneath my roof Have soon become accustomed to that sound. It may be that, while you lie dreaming, A restless air moves round the house - the crunch Of heavy steps on stones is heard, Then suddenly the plashing intermits And you awake - you need not be afraid! The stars still shine in their full number on the land, Only a traveller at the marble basin Scoops up the water in his hollowed hand. He'll soon be on his way, the water murmurs on. Oh then be glad, for you are not alone, Many in starlight go their distant journeys, Still many a one is on his way to you. The poem has a timelessness and freedom from stress quite unlike the writings that form the theme of this study. Its

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timelessness does not necessarily work to its advantage like Roumanian Diary,21 it might have been written at almost any time after the end of the eighteenth century. Its beauty lies in the celebration of an order affirmed and not disrupted. How then will this writer convey order irreparably destroyed ? Roumanian Diary begins early in October 1916 in Northern France, and covers some ten weeks of bitter fighting in the Western Carpathian mountains. It describes the somewhat unequal contest in which all Central Europe seems to be involved - Prussian, Austrian, Hungarian, Bavarian and Polish units on one side, Romanian and Russian mountain troops on the other. The local population, which is friendly to the Bavarians and Prussians but not to the Hungarians and Austrians, turns out to be less than half Romanian, and includes the descendants of the old German colonisers, thirteenthcentury Siebenbiirgen 'Saxons', and eighteenth-century Protestant 'Swabians', as well as a small number of Jews, some of whom act as interpreters for the Germans at the interrogation of prisoners of war. Since the terrain is mountainous and heavily wooded, the conditions of fighting are never the same from day to day. Summits are taken and lost, there are no dugouts and no front line, mountain tops change hands more than once in the course of a single day's fighting, field dressing stations are set up next to machine-gun emplacements or in mountain huts, and stretcher bearers have to cover long distances, often behind enemy lines. In these frequently changing conditions a battalion medical officer and his small staff must improvise as best they can, and what Carossa lacks in experience is readily supplied by Raab, his faithful Swabian orderly, the very pattern of conscientiousness and efficiency. Carossa's duties consist largely in dressing the wounded before they are taken to the field hospital behind the lines, and are confined to the periods following each engagement. They leave him plenty of time to keep a diary, look after the medical supplies (which are plentiful), write letters home, and talk to the men. His status as a non-combatant medical officer (in the

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Landsturm, these officers wore no distinctions of rank) as well as his warm and sympathetic personality make contact with the men easy. Once or twice his medical reports on the condition of the shellshocked lead to their being sent back home, at other times ' the fortunes of war' make it possible for him to avoid having to make a difficult decision. He is obviously a good and hardworking MO, whose competence in giving first aid to the wounded and looking after the sick, including occasionally Russian and Romanian prisoners of war, is recognised by officers and men alike.22 The hard winter with its deprivations cheerfully endured, the magnificent Transylvanian landscape, its picturesque farmsteads with their simple, dignified peasants - all these make Carossa's Romanian campaign 'a good war'. Like everything else he has written, the ' diary' proceeds at its own pace, by way of anecdotes and association, it makes no attempt (as Jiinger's does) to provide any sort of historical record beyond that of the events that happen to come his way. In the main the book is confined to the purely personal reactions these events evoke. The diary ends, on 15 December 1916, when Carossa's part in the campaign comes to an end. A few days before, 'Glavina', the despatch runner whose strange sentences are quoted throughout the diary, has been killed, and Carossa has kept the last notes that were found on him. Sheltering from heavy bombardment by Cherkess troops under the wall of a burning sawmill in a ravine above the valley of Sostelek, he is trying to decipher some of these notes. When he notices that his companions have been watching him, he starts reading the notes aloud, hoping that, while listening to him, the men will keep cover, night will fall, the shelling end, and they will be able to withdraw without further losses. His plan almost succeeds. The orderly, Raab, observes that though he doesn't have the faintest idea what all these strange words are about, the sentences make him feel quite jolly, while the others sit quietly, tensely, waiting. Only a young lieutenant who is with them, Little Liittich, wounded and drowsed with morphine, breaks cover, and is instantly killed. Then, at five o'clock sharp, the bombardment stops:

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Dusk and night took possession of the valley. Kristl made a cross for Liittich, and put his name on it and the date. His watch and identity disc were taken off and safely stowed, after which we buried him. The ground is frozen a long way down, it took us more than two hours to finish. The snow and stars gave us a glimmer of light. About ten o'clock, as the moon was rising, we reached Sostelek.23

This is how the diary ends. The cadences are those of the greatest of the books that have come out of that War. Carossa's attitude to the war, then, appears to be largely neutral, at least in the sense that he neither exalts heroism and warlike action nor defends the war on national or political or 'philosophical' grounds; nor, however, does he question the war as the cause of suffering and death. Courage and resoluteness are admired, but cases of breakdown under fire are described with unfailing sympathy. On this collective level neither pro nor contra prevails. His intimate personal reaction, on the other hand, though not free from ambiguity, is one of fundamental acceptance. To the man who had proved irresolute in several private conflicts he left behind 'in civvy street', there was fulfilment in discipline and honourable work in the presence of danger and death - but danger and death inflicted by others and therefore removed from guilt. Instead, there is a feeling of duty sought out, accepted and competently discharged - hence the satisfaction recorded: ' After so many years in the service of the sick I felt it a great boon to be an integral part of a large and strictly organised order of things, which made demands on my professional service but left my inner life alone. Also, as a doctor, I enjoyed the advantage of not having to kill anybody ... '24 However, this feeling of satisfaction is not enough, the very core and safe centre of the diary lies in the record of that' inner life'. This record receives its inspiration and literary substance from various sources. Most directly it is sustained by the diarist's great descriptive skill in the presentation, not of whole landscapes, but of the fine details of a rock or a tree, or again of folklore customs, of ornamental patterns on a farm gate, a traditional stove or piece of embroidery. Here are things

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celebrated as emblems of a pietas of possessions handed down through generations of toiling peasants, but celebrated, too, as signs of the writer's sensitivity to that pietas, his loving appreciation of order and beauty despite the chaos and destruction all around. And still this is not enough, the inner life is in search of further sustenance, and finds it in those sketches from the poet's notebooks which are thinly fictionalised as 'Glavina's messages'. The Slavonic sound of the name is significant — not of any message of peace between the warring nations, but of that German romantic recreation of a mystical, otherworldly 'Mother Russia', which owes more to the interpretations of Dostoevsky fashionable in the twenties (via Merezhkovsky) than it does to the actual country in which momentous political changes were taking place while Carossa was writing.c Glavina' seems to be a despatch runner, but the peculiar designation (' Befehltrager') he is given in the diary only adds to his mystery. The message he bears is not a message of peace but of the pure sacrifice: Let us build up a cairn on the mountain of Kishavas, a trophy to the slain on its icebound floor of rocks and juniper! Obedient to the law, uncomplaining, unregarded, they lie bleeding on the alien stones where not an oak tree puts out a leaf. What the end will be, who can tell? Darkly brood the nations. Have a care, o friends! When you see a dying man, entreat him humbly that he die a healing death, thinking no curses! Soon all this will be only a prelude. We all moulder into dust. Dead hands, cover them with the dark sprays of the blue-green juniper!.. ,25 Such lyrical-mystical notes accompany the diary throughout; one of them, 'Wrest the light from the jaws of the serpent', serves as the motto of the book. The emphatic, often Biblical images which form the core of these notes are not intended to be converted into discursive prose, they contain more than one dark message for the time of war as well as for the time of peace to come. But the basso ostinato which acccompanies them is the message of justification, of order and beauty not despite the chaos and destruction but issuing from it, because of it. One of Rilke's Sonnets to Orpheus (n, 14), written in celebration of the

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skilled hunters who hunt the doves in the ravines of the Karst, justifies the ruse they employ: 'Aber auch das ist im Recht. / Fern von dem Schauenden sei jeglicher Hauch des Bedauerns ...' ('But that, too, accords with the law. / Let no sigh of regret escape the onlooker ...') Glavina's messages do for the war what Rilke does for the hunters: they make it right. Our brief survey of Carossa's work should explain why he is unlikely to face the main challenge of Ernst Junger's war books, Junger's attempt to represent the mass destruction of' the storm of steel'. It should also explain why, though there are no obvious anachronisms of diction or ideas, Carossa's Roumanian Diary leaves us with the impression that it might have been written in, and about, almost any other war. True, the Romanian campaign was a side-show, a 'traditional war' (our 4 conventional war') forced on the Central Powers by an irresponsible king intent on territorial gains; it was conducted by Germany and Austria with a limited aim in view, and it was brief. But it was, for Carossa too, an interlude in a world-wide, 'total' conflict. His attitude to it - his justification of i t - i s different from Junger's, but it is no less exalted, no less 'metaphysical'. The 'Glavina' messages are attempts to endow death in war with a mystical meaning by commending it as the fulfilment of ineluctable destiny - a meaning which, in terms of its intended readership, was likely to be mystifying rather than mystical. The assent voiced in those poetic images is not a political assent, but it makes their message open to a political interpretation. By the time the diary is given its authority as the record of a sensitive poet's response to the war, the plausibility of that interpretation ceases to be a matter of literature and becomes one of power. In his quest for a meaning in war, Carossa (unlike Jiinger) is not afraid to lose face by showing his sentiments and giving expression to sympathy and compassion. His solution to the riddle of how to convey the warlike experience is a ' poetic' one: the image he settles on is not 'Germany' but a dying kitten. The scene, which occupies two long entries (25 and 28 November 1916), derives from the same area of'my inner life' as do the Glavina messages, and complements them. More than

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that, the scene is central to the book by being intended as a symbolical summation of the gratuitousness and pointless cruelty of war, recorded elsewhere without comment. Billeted in a farmhouse where life goes on largely undisturbed, the MO watches from his room a young farmhand carrying a large litter of cats across the yard, and before I could guess his intention, I saw him dashing them one after the other with incredible speed against the wall of a shed, where they remained lying; then, whistling and swinging his arms as usual, he returned to the kitchen, where the food was just being served, sat down with the others, and began to eat heartily. But one of the executed kittens, quite unlike the others, a blueish-grey kitten with a white face, breast and legs and a silvery fringe on the back of its neck, was only stunned and began to recover little by little ...26 There follows a long and detailed description of the kitten's agony, its apparent recovery, and its death three days later. The stable lad realises what he has done, sits with the dying kitten, and attempts to alleviate its suffering; the MO too gets involved by administering tiny anaesthetic injections; and before long the whole family is trying to save the kitten's life. The air of mawkishness and sentimentality which my (greatly shortened) account of the episode suggests is not misleading, nor is the effect likely to be improved by the diarist's expatiations on the dignity, grace and final contentment with which the kitten dies. Even with this, though, he cannot let go: the stable lad (we are told) has learned from the experience, 'It seems to me that something in his nature has changed; his face is more alert, his step firmer...' And so, inevitably, ' Some spiritual meaning is vouchsafed us here ... '27 No elaborate critical theory is needed to conclude that this symbol of the dying kitten is inadequate as a source of meaning intended to encompass the war experience; that the cruelty in that act of killing means less to us than was intended. What it evokes is not the gratuitousness of death in war, but the horrid death of a wretched kitten. But if this is so, then the inadequacy of the symbol in turn becomes symbolical of a literary failure bordering on the frivolous. Carossa's 'metaphysical' musings yield no world-historical,

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Spenglerian Weltanschauung', they belong to a private mystical vision designed for that Burgertum which is the object ofJiinger's contempt, and (to judge by the contemporary reviews and record of sales) are eagerly appropriated by it. Ernst Jlinger welcomes war, with bravado, as the great existential test in which some men succeed and others fail. What he does not do is try to pacify the victim, to make war acceptable. Is this really Carossa's aim? Given the readership for which he wrote, the spiritual frills of the style in which he approached that readership were likely to lead them to conclude, not indeed that war is the only harbinger of value, but that when war happens (not perhaps as, but like, an act of God), it must be accepted, and when it is accepted, it will bring its spiritual reward. This doesn't make either the war or Carossa's apology for it acceptable to us, who aren't among his implied readers - either morally or aesthetically, in literary terms. The question of how death in modern ' total' war can be adequately represented in literature must remain open. Carossa's image of the dying kitten attempts one kind of' symbolical' answer to that question - it is certainly free from false grandeur. Its failure is not only embarrassing (a particular embarrassment goes with every sentimentality that has its national origin stamped on it), but, in its trivialising way, hardly less ominous than more ambitious undertakings. The search for meaning (like the search for 'the unity of being') may be no more than a twentieth-century cultural option, but it is so deeply rooted in our post-Christian world that it would be quixotic to raise moral or philosophical objections to it. Yet what outcome do we expect of such a search ? By what criteria are we to decide that a meaning has been found? What constitutes a valid meaning? What is objectionable, both morally and philosophically, is the assumption that any kind of search is, if not valid yet valuable; that although the search may not lead to a valid meaning, yet its being undertaken must in itself be a sign of value. More questionable still, and characteristic of the German literary and political context, are the many occasions when the search for meaning comes to serve as a substitute for the attempt at remedying the

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predicament which made the search imperative in the first place. But the question of value criteria is not unanswerable. For what makes us conclude that Carossa's kitten is an inadequate and inappropriate symbol on which to concentrate the quest for meaning is nothing more mysterious or recondite than a consideration of literary taste and tact. It is not often that moral and aesthetic criteria are so closely related. Carossa's literary biography - the scenario formed by his life and writings - turns out to be a strange case of art-and-life imitating art: his place in literature is anticipated by Gustav von Aschenbach, the hero of Thomas Mann's Death in Venice of 1911. Both Aschenbach and Carossa are major men of letters on intimate terms with a large and faithful public - a public which they are able to influence because they share its sensibilities, and to the extent that they are its creation. Both Aschenbach and Carossa are 'represented in all the schoolbooks', and achieve their literary status (though Carossa comes too late to be given a von) at the cost of not exposing their work to ' the passionate intensities', the full range of human possibilities in their time. Whether or not this is a conscious compromise, who is to say? For both of them there then comes a time when they are called upon to confront what they have hitherto so successfully bypassed. For Aschenbach this takes the form of a partly erotic, partly aesthetic temptation: his dear purchase of a moment of fullest consciousness will turn out to be his secret triumph, while all that the world will see of it will be his sudden and less than dignified death. The test Carossa faces is both simpler and cruder - it seems (but isn't really) less dramatic. His is partly the predicament (fundamentally trivial, when all is said and done) of the many German authors who succumbed to the vulgar temptation of honours from a political regime they knew to be iniquitous; more importantly, Carossa's predicament turns out to be his incapacity to respond creatively, even in retrospect, to the evil and the suffering around him. His ' Abendlandische Elegie' (' Elegy for the West') of 1943 contains a deeply moving panorama of the ruins of Western culture. The

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elegy recreates Florence in a marvellous array of colours, pays homage to Michelangelo's statue of Night, celebrates the coming rebirth of Europe in the image of the sunflower, 'the little counter-sun'... It is the panorama of the educated Biirgertum once more, its ideals of Bildung, but it is not much more than that. An elegy is hardly the place to look for the reasons why those ideals were threatened and why they proved ineffective. But his last prose works, ever more autobiographical and ever more frankly apologetic, do not contain those reasons either. His timelessness has not truly stood the test of time. STEFAN GEORGE: 'DER K R I E G ' Stefan George's long poem, 'Der Krieg', is the most ambitious and exacting as well as the most controversial portrayal of the Great War in German poetry. The poem's diction builds on the two modes of warlike experience considered earlier in this chapter: the modern vision of the war as the supra-individual cataclysm which Ernst Jiinger called ' the storm of steel', and its traditional depiction, exemplified by Hans Carossa, as suffering and death endured by the individual soldier. In George's poem the vision of war under these two modes is attributed to the persona of'the Seer' - the poet himself- who describes, mourns, and validates the lethal conflict. After its first publication in 1917, the poem became the centre-piece of Das neue Reich, the last volume of George's collected writings (1928). Appearing near the end of a lifetime uncompromisingly devoted to strenuous poetic and aesthetic activity, Das neue Reich is the last and most direct expression of George's poetic and personal aim: to act as vates by making himself through his poetry a 'prophetic' moral and political force in contemporary Germany. Even in the anarchic conditions of the twenties, George's undertaking was to many deeply disturbing; while to us he seems to be striking attitudes that ocasionally try our sense of humour. ' Complete absence of humour', writes one of George's disciples,28 'is the basic condition of [the poems'] crystalline purity'. (This may well be the place where some of my readers will wish to turn to the next chapter.)

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Now, it would be possible to salvage George's standing (which at present is not high in Germany) by singling out the lyrical mode of his poetry, and disregarding its ideological intention. This would be tantamount to doing the work of an anthologist: it would deprive his work of what I take to be its greatest interest - its historical dimension. If I here concentrate on the politics of aestheticism which is now implied, now again overtly expressed in his poetry (including some of his lyrical poems), this is because I see it as a serious attempt to refute the disjunction of politics from poetry, or (in retrospect) the historical from the aesthetic. Ironically enough, among the great German writers of the age it is only Bertolt Brecht who would have agreed with George's belief in the political function of poetry - and Brecht of course went out of his way to express his contempt for George's 'aestheticism', which he rightly saw as inseparable from George's politics. However, we no longer have to fight Brecht's battles; nor, for that matter, Walter Benjamin's, whose readiness to identify 'aestheticism' and 'elitism' with fascist politics is no better than an unhistorical generalisation. To one side of the question of what kind of politics is involved, here is a poet who really does see himself as a legislator of mankind, or at least of one carefully selected part of it, and acts accordingly. George's poetry, like the programmatic prose writings that accompany it, is distinguished by a unique singlemindedness of aim and consistency of manner. The most obvious sign of his imperious personality is the type-face he designed and used in all his manuscripts and books, which is vaguely art nouveau, though based on the nineteenth-century 'grotesque' typeface.29 The make-up of the pages of his books challenges several formal conventions of the German printed page, such as the use of capitals for nouns, and some spellings; more forcibly, he strips down contemporary punctuation by dispensing with it as a grammatical convention, to emphasise not just the syntactic function but above all the meaning of the few punctuation signs he does use. These devices leave the page intelligible, but they force a distinct kind of attention on the reader. The poetry does

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nothing to encourage 'creative reading'. Its characteristic devices assert George's authorship even when (as in some of the collections) the poems were written by his disciples. The poet's will is everywhere present, every line of his mature poetry is unmistakably his own. A look at two earlier poems will help us to assemble some elements of the diction characteristic of 'Der Krieg'. The poems I have chosen are unrelated to the subject-matter of war in any way, nor is the first remotely political. Yet such is the consistency of the poetic diction that its characteristic elements prevail from one collection to the next, regardless of changes of subjectmatter, tenor or mood. The first poem, untitled, opens Das Jahr der Seele, a collection first published in 1897: Komm in den totgesagten park und schau: Der schimmer ferner lachelnder gestade • Der reinen wolken unverhofftes blau Erhellt die weiher und die bunten pfade. Dort nimm das tiefe gelb * das weiche grau Von birken und von buchs • der wind ist lau * Die spaten rosen welkten noch nicht ganz • Erlese kiisse sie und flicht den kranz • Vergiss auch diese letzten astern nicht • Den purpur um die ranken wilder reben Und auch was iibrig blieb von griinem leben Verwinde leicht im herbstlichen gesicht. Come to the park they say is dead and look: The lustre there of distant smiling shores The virgin clouds' unhoped-for blue restores The brightness of the pathway and the brook. There take the gentle grey and tawny gold Of box-trees and of birch, the wind's mild breath Cannot undo the roses' last display Select them kiss them bind them to a wreath Remember too these asters in decline The purple round the tendrils of wild vine And all that still remains of living green Wind softly in amid the autumn scene.30

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A strictly regular metre - the unyielding iambic beat and absence of enjambement, the alternation of masculine and feminine rhymes - determines the poem's form, its 'hard configuration'.31 The poem makes no pretence to a Romantic portrayal of Nature; like the wreath it celebrates, the nature that is its location, a park, is an artefact, wholly under human control. Nor does the poem make any claim to organic being: it doesn'ty?0Z£;, as the poetic recreation of a part of nature might. On the contrary: in celebrating a man-made thing it invites a comparison with itself. As the wreath is woven from a collection of carefully chosen leaves and flowers, and colours specifically named, taken from nature as from a palette and arranged by human skill, so the poem is made of words carefully chosen and assembled by the poet: he is in control of the creative process as he is (or perhaps wishes to be) of the person apostrophised in those stressed imperatives. Artifice and transience are the poem's themes, it celebrates a subtle mood. An aphoristic version of that mood may be found in one of G. C. Lichtenberg's Waste-Books: Am 10. Oktober 1793 schickte ich meiner lieben Frau aus dem Garten eine kiinstliche Blume aus abgefallenen bunten Herbstblattern. Es sollte mich in meinem jetzigen Zustand darstellen; ich lieB es aber dabei nicht sagen. (11, K 48) On 10 October 1793 I sent in from the garden to my dear wife an artificial flower made of fallen autumn leaves of many colours. It was intended to portray me in my present state; but I sent no message with it. The verbs of George's poem - all imperatives - are addressed to an unnamed ' du' (which we can be sure is not a ' dear wife'), but two of them are special, containing multiple meanings. 'Select [those colours, those roses] from among the rest', we read at the end of the second stanza: in this 'erlese' 32 there is also a hint of' erlose ... sie': by being woven into the wreath the flowers are to be 'redeemed', are to be given not a new life but a little more of the life they had in the summer that has just passed - redeemed (and this is the third meaning of'erlese') by

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the act of being ' read' in the poem that will perpetuate their life and give them a little permanence. A similar play on a verb opens the poem's last line, 'verwinde': a parallel to 'erlose' ('redeem ...'), this compound of 'winden' ('wind the wreath5) has the additional abstract meaning of'get over, do without yet reconcile yourself to, the imminent loss ...' The metaphysical connotations of these images are unemphatic, an adverb, 'verwinde leicht', lightens the weightiness of the renunciation it expresses. All indications of time in the poem - the park that' is said to be dead' but is given a new life by the poet's 'saying'; the sky's ' unhoped-for blue'; the roses that' haven't yet quite faded ...'; the ' forget not...' of the last stanza, which relates to ' what is left of the green life' at this time of Indian summer- all these are arrayed to celebrate transience, and by celebrating it to halt it. The last words,' im herbstlichen gesicht' - once more emphatic in their scansion, once more a play on a word: a ' vision' and a 'face' - re-invoke and take their leave of the autumnal scene, as indeed does the whole masterly and masterful poem. Its lyrical quality and its imperatives are inseparable. Celebrating a landscape, the poem hides an emotion. It dawns on us that it is a love poem, but the emotion comes to us through indirection, lover and beloved are separated by a distance which the poem does not set out to abolish: its mood is cool fervour. In this way (and without losing its purely lyrical quality) the poem puts a distance between itself and the poetry of Romantic love. Three aspects of this poem will persist in George's poetry on its way to the vatic vision of his later work. First, and most obviously, the poem belongs to that poetry which, in English literature (by way of an unavoidable pun) goes by the name of ' Georgian' - the poetry of Jugendstil which is steeped in the aesthetic moment and written (as has been said a propos of W. B. Yeats's poems before his reading of Nietzsche) 'under the auspices of Lapres-midi diun faune' ;33 all later collections will contain such poems side by side with his 'prophetic' poetry. Secondly, the metric control and rhyme scheme admit of no irregularities — this poem is as far as can be from the then

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fashionable vers litre. Its scansion frequently falls on monosyllabic words; and its metaphors and vocabulary, too, aiming at subtle effects and achieving them, are informed by an imperious and highly controlled poetic consciousness. Finally, those plays on words I have singled out, as well as the hint at a literal use of 'totgesagt' in the first line, suggest a poetic consciousness that is not content with the ordinary use of words, but is pressing on the reader unusual and complex meanings, as though the language of the market place were not good enough for its subtle mood. Exclusiveness is a consistent mode of this work as it is of the personality of the poet: the special, here, is achieved at the price of contemning the ordinary. On their first appearance the volumes of Stefan George's poetry were confined to two or three hundred copies intended for a small group of likeminded poets and artists, literati and bizarre ideologists. After several changes of membership accompanied by a good deal of personal rivalry and strife, this group, based at first in Berlin, later in Heidelberg, Munich, Kiel and Marbach, finally near Locarno, formed an exclusive Circle of disciples devoted to ' the Master' and his cult of beauty. The members of this ' pedagogic province' saw themselves as the sort of young men with whom Socrates conducted his dialogues. Good looks - soulful Ariels rather than Siegfried types; black, quasi-clerical garments rather than Lederhosen; above all submission to ' the Master's' guidance - and decent manners qualified for admission. Der George Kreis was partly but not exclusively homoerotic, recruited from the ranks of the aristocracy and the upper middle class. It contained a surprisingly large number of young Jewish intellectuals, yet professed tenets that were anti-intellectual and highly critical of the materialist civilisation from which most of its members, not least those of Jewish origin, derived their economic security. George's liking for Jews implied that he saw them as being in some ways different from the Germans - less sententious, less heavyhanded, less set in their ways. But this ascription of a difference followed current cliches rather than an ideology. When Friedrich Gundolf, for a time the closest of his disciples, defied ' the

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Master's' command by marrying, George's censure was extreme, the betrayal never forgiven; but his recriminations contain not a word of anti-Semitic slight. A frugal way of life was practised, all party politics were proscribed, nor did George himself have any political aspirations.34 There was much solemn concern with German and Aryan 'chthonic' mythology, including the decorative and symbolical use of the swastika,35 but this did not prevent the closest, most loyal and most gifted of George's friends, the poet Karl Wolfskehl, from voicing Zionist sympathies. If the Circle's ideology was anti-democratic, this tendency followed from its aesthetically motivated contempt for ' the materialism of the masses'; if it was vaguely conservative, what it sought to conserve was akin to the ritualism of southern German Catholicism (George himself was born in 1869 into a Rhenish Catholic family) with its Romantic vision of the Middle Ages, and hostility to the ideology of the Prussian Junker and officer class ;36 in sum, the Circle was no more conservative, and no less, than the present Green Party in Germany is socialist, and its attitude toward industrial civilisation was similar. And if George admired Caesar and Napoleon rather than Bismarck, and himself assumed the role of charismatic leader, placing his own and his disciples' lives wholly in the service of his poetic vision, this again was a part — indeed the centre-piece — of a willed aesthetic cult, with 'the Master' in a position of absolute authority. We are emphatically still in the age of Great Personalities, in a society still — and then increasingly — in search of what Max Weber called 'charismatic leadership'. Unlike all forms of bureaucratic administrative systems, Weber writes, charisma recognises only those stipulations and limitations which come from within itself. The bearer assumes the tasks.appropriate to him and requires obedience and a following in virtue of his mission. His success depends on whether he finds them. If those to whom he feels himself sent... recognise him, then he remains their master for as long as he is able to retain their recognition by giving 'proofs' [Bewahrungen]. His right to rule, however, is not dependent on their will, as is that of an elected leader; on the contrary, it is the duty of

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those to whom he is sent to recognise his charismatic qualifications 37

The Circle held anti-modern and selfconsciously ' untimely' views, yet it belonged to its time. Its cultural ideology was consolidated in Blatter fiir die Kunst (1892-1919), a publication that resembled a circular rather than a periodical,38 and continued in a direct line the attack on the culture of the Reich which Nietzsche had initiated in the second of his Untimely Meditations of 1874. The Circle too considered itself to be indifferent to the political issues of the day, yet we can see it as a part of that momentous rear-guard action which German conservatism waged throughout the first third of this century, and which came to an end with the failed officers' coup of July 1944. But whereas the conservative establishment was aiming at and achieving economic hegemony while trying at the same time to hold out against the social and political consequences of industrialisation, George, and with him his faithful Circle, rejected all economic and social thought together with its industrial base as decadent: The important point [Weber continues] is that charisma rejects as dishonorable all rational planning in the acquisition of money, and in general all rational forms of economy ... If its mission is a peaceful one, its requirements are economically provided by individual patrons or by donations, contributions or other voluntary services given by those to whom it is directed.39 When Max Weber, in his conversations with Stefan George in Heidelberg in 1910, insisted on defining the social status of the Circle and its Master, using the fatal word 'Rentner' (people of private means) in denying its 'economic independence', he encountered stubborn incomprehension.40 No wonder that the Circle was never more than a minute sect with hardly any real influence on the course of events. As with all quasi-religious sects, its beliefs were based on personal witness and private values; unlike such sects, it was consistently averse to any form of publicity, and even those private values were reduced to an aesthetic legitimation of existence. George himself lived the itinerant life of a modern troubadour

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or poet-king in search of a court, with few personal possessions, relying for his domicile and support first on his family and then on his friends. Like Rilke he travelled widely, to meet French, Dutch and Belgian poets. In Blatter fur die Kunst he and a few of his disciples, including the young Hugo von Hofmannsthal, published their poetry alongside reflections on the nature of poetic language and the function of the arts in the contemporary world; he translated from the Latin, from the Divine Comedy, Shakespeare's Sonnets, Ibsen, d'Annunzio, and extensively from the French, Belgian and Dutch symbolists; he helped and advised his disciples in their publications, among them Norbert von Hellingrath, who under his guidance in 1913 published the first modern edition of Holderlin. These poetic undertakings were his 'proofs', his 'Bewahrungen'. Yet his poetry must not be read as an epiphenomenon of his will to power,41 though it is this will that occasions it. Its greatness, at all events, is not the gift of a disinterested and uncontentious outflowing of the poetic imagination, but springs from a fully realised intention. George, too, proposes to 'justify the world and the being of man' aesthetically, and he alone (and through him the Circle) takes on the burden ofjustification. Once again, of course, these are thoughts which go back to Nietzsche (whom George never met, but to whom he devoted several poems - though again these are poems less about Nietzsche than about his, George's, reactions to Nietzsche's thinking). But here a caveat is required: preaching the doctrine of the Superman, Nietzsche never attempted to practise it. On the contrary, having a fine critical sense for the temptations and dangers of demagogy, he would surely have rejected George's imperious stance as pose. A pied piper of Hamelin? 42 A master of the abracadabra? The seventh volume of Stefan George's poetry, entitled Der siebente Ring (alluding to the seventh year-ring of a tree) was published in 1907, and is composed of seven 'books', each containing a multiple of seven poems. The volume opens with a group of fourteen ' Zeitgedichte' (a term he had used since 1902). In these poems George takes issue with, and offers criticism of, topics related to the contemporary world. In the thirteenth of

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these poems, 'Die tote stadt' ('The Dead City3), blame and praise alternate, to provide the structure of four eight-line stanzas of unrhymed regular iambic pentameters. The double image of the new and old cities is taken from the harbour and city of Genoa, it is framed by the semi-circular hill behind it on which, fortress-like, stand the derelict houses of the old town. The first and third stanzas describe the new city and convey its atmosphere — ' Stimmung' rather than idea or episode, is the true substance of poetry43 - while the second and last stanzas, in sharp dramatic contrast, portray the old town and the reaction of its inhabitants to the pleas of the new: Die tote stadt Die weite bucht erfullt der neue hafen Der alles gliick des landes saugt * ein mond Von glitzernden und rauhen hauserwanden • Endlosen strassen drin mit gleicher gier Die menge tages feilscht und abends tollt. Nur hohn und mitleid steigt zur mutterstadt Am felsen droben die mit schwarzen mauern Verarmt daliegt • vergessen von der zeit. Die stille veste lebt und traumt und sieht Wie stark ihr turm in ewige sonnen ragt * Das schweigen ihre weihebilder schiitzt Und auf den grasigen gassen ihren wohnern Die glieder bliihen durch verschlissnes tuch. Sie spurt kein leid * sie weiss der tag bricht an: Da schleppt sich aus den iippigen palasten Den berg hinan von flehenden ein zug: » Uns maht ein odes weh und wir verderben Wenn ihr nicht helft - im iiberflusse siech. Vergonnt uns reinen odem eurer hohe Und klaren quell! wir finden rast in hof Und stall und jeder hohlung eines tors. Hier schatze wie ihr nie sie saht - die steine Wie fracht von hundert schiffen kostbar • spange Und reif von werte ganzer landerbreiten! « Doch strenge antwort kommt: » Hier frommt kein kauf. Das gut was euch vor allem gait ist schutt.

The Great War Nur sieben sind gerettet die einst kamen Und denen unsre kinder zugelachelt. Euch all trifft tod. Schon eure zahl ist frevel. Geht mit dem falschen prunk der unsren knaben Zum ekel wird! Seht wie ihr nackter fuss Ihn iibers riff hinab zum meere stosst! « The Dead Town Across the wide bay curves the new-built harbour Draining all gladness from the land • a crescent Of houses with rough stone-walls glittering bright Unending streets wherein with equal greed By day crowds haggle and by night run wild. Pity and scorn alone reach the high cliff Where still the black-walled mother-city lies In poverty • the town that time forgot. The silent fortress lives and dreams and sees How strong her spire juts up to eternal suns Silence protects her sacred images And in the grassy lanes her dwellers' limbs Blossom like flowers through the ragged cloth. She feels no pain knowing the day will break: Then from the proud new palaces a train Of supplicants winds wailing to the rock: » A grey scourge lays us waste and we are lost Without your succour amid luxuriance sick Grant that we may breathe the pure air of your heights Drink your clear spring! rest in your courtyards and in your barns and hollows of your gates. Here treasures you have never seen - the stones As costly as a hundred laden ships Bracelet and ring alone worth lands galore! « Yet stern the answer comes: » Here thrives no mart. The goods you prized above all else are trash. Seven alone are saved who came here once And whom our children smiling welcome bid. Your lot is death, and sacrilege Your very numbers. Away with your false pomp Our boys loathe and contemn! See their bare foot Kicks it across the riff into the sea! «44

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If subtlety of mood (the number of hues accommodated on a palette of a few subdued colours) was the main virtue of'Komm in den totgesagten park ...', 'Die tote stadt' is made of different stuff. Here all is subordinated to antithesis: though the values are reversed, all is cast in black and white. The new city is dead, the old, 'black' city is the location of purity and life. The new city with its commercial harbour is portrayed in the first stanza as a parasitic growth that has battened on and sucked dry all the strength of its parent, 'die mutterstadt' on the hill. The emphasis is on luxury, opulence, 'gier' (craving and lust), 'hohn' (scorn), the contemptuous pity ('mitleid') of the rich for the poor, and the endless noise and patter and craving for distraction which to George represent modern cosmopolitan civilisation. Not to George only: here, with a tradition of a hundred years of romantic poetry behind it, is the ' outmoded idealism' which Spengler will ridicule yet indirectly validate in The Decline of the West. It is the emotionally weighted antithesis between wicked modern 'civilisation' and authentic old 'culture', whose most articulate spokesman is Thomas Mann, author of Meditations of a Nonpolitical Man of 1918.

What is so striking and poetically effective about this first stanza, and indeed about the poem as a whole, is how much of its meaning is thrust at us in monosyllables: 'bucht' (the bay), 'gliick' (good fortune), 'saugt' (sucks dry), 'mond' (crescent), 'gier' (wanton desire), 'feilscht' (haggles), 'tollt' (runs wild), and finally 'zeit' (time). Once again these stressed nouns and verbs are there by design. In the programmatic prose of Blatter fiir die Kunst contemporary neo-romantic verse was condemned for being unduly dependent for its metric arrangements on words like 'doch' and 'noch', 'schon', 'worn"-mere fillers ('fullworter') with weak meanings, intended to eke out faulty metres. George's monosyllables in their stressed positions in the pentameter are not only brimful of meaning, they give the verse its characteristic severity, give it a peremptoriness which creates and sustains the prophetic tenor.45 The second stanza is composed of similar devices, but to a more complex effect. The severity and authority of utterance are joined by a strong lyricism: 'Die stille veste'-the old

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fortress-like town on the hill - 'lebt und traumt und sieht'. The archaic spelling and formation of'veste' allude to cfest5 (firm, strong) and hence 'Festung', the ordinary word for a fortress or citadel; similarly, in the penultimate line of the stanza, where 'wohnern' for the ordinary 'Bewohnern' is shortened by a syllable (as 'inhabitants' might be to 'habitants'), the conviction is voiced that for what he sees and aims to convey the language of the market place is inadequate. Expressiveness must be true to itself even if- or rather: especially when - being true to itself it defies convention. In contrast to the wantonness and opulence of the new, the old town is poor, its streets overgrown, its inhabitants free from pity and self-pity alike; the image of their ragged and faded clothes through which ' blossom their limbs' is effective through the erotic charge it exudes: 'le bleu delave de ses jeans: it fades, fades and fades. L'etre aime, ainsi, n'en finit pas de s'evanouir, de s'affadir ... '46 Frugality and indigence, here and everywhere in George's poetry, are the hallmark of superiority and strength; that is, of beauty. The values for which the poem's encompassing image, 'stadt ... mutterstadt', acts as a repository are aggressively male: the spire 'juts up strongly' into eternity ('wie stark ihr turm in ewige sonnen ragt'); the old town is 'silent', and 'silence' ('das schweigen') protects its vatic images against desecration by the babble and haggle of cosmopolitan civilisation. These manly connotations of'silence' George shares with Wilhelmine (or, for that matter, Victorian) convention. Elsewhere - in Rilke, Gottfried Benn and Kafka, in Musil and Hofmannsthal - we shall find no such crude affirmations of masculinity. But they too will attribute a metaphysical value to the silence that is 'beyond language'; following (in this too) Nietzsche's conviction that no truth, nothing that really matters - no real 'realities' - can be expressed in language. From description the poem moves to action: the third stanza contains the desperate plea of the corrupt dwellers of the new city. Pollution and pestilence have broken out, contagion made more terrible by their sheer numbers overwhelms them. Appealing to the mother-town for refuge, they will offer

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anything in exchange for the comforting shade of a gateway, for a breath of the fresh air of the hills, a drop of water from its clear spring. And the fourth and last stanza contains the old town's merciless, inexorable rejection of that appeal, and of the promise of riches that went with it: 'Your values... are trash', and 'Schon eure zahl ist frevel', the very numbers of those multitudes that seek succour are a horror to behold, a sacrilege. The word 'frevel', 'sacrilege', connotes, literally and metaphorically, a divine authority by whose commandment civilisation itself is condemned. It is easy to see that in George's mature poetry, from Der siebente Ring onward, a religious authority of some kind is invoked; it is more difficult to see what this authority is, for George's invocations of it are consciously enigmatic. In our poem it is only once alluded to, in the second stanza: 'Silence protects [the old town's] sacred images', 'ihre weihebilder': these emblems, perhaps banners, are the sacred symbols or myths of old, under whose protection and blessing the wholesome life of the old town is lived. In the poems of George's last collection, Das neue Reich, they will form the core of his affirmation. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche had asked what function myths had in the golden age of Greece, the era of the great tragedians from Aeschylus to Sophocles. Among his answers, the one relevant to our poem is this: myths enshrine and bear witness to the fundamental experience of human kind, they are 'metaphors [Gleichnisse, elsewhere Schutzbilder] of mankind's most universal facts' (§21); and, Nietzsche concluded (§23), ' Every culture that has lost its myths has lost, by the same token, its healthy creative power. Only a horizon ringed about with myths can unify a Culture and enclose it in that unity.' This is what Nietzsche missed in contemporary Germany and believed he had found in Richard Wagner. Engaged on the same search, George finds this unity in the mother-town of his poem - a feminine symbol after all - and places it under the protection of those sacred images or emblems of old which the new civilisation has corrupted and abandoned. Once, and perhaps only once, did George feel himself to be in

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the presence of a god, of one whom he called his God.' Maximin' (Maximilian Kronberger), to whom three times seven poems of Der siebente Ring are addressed, was a lively and handsome boy of thirteen when George, aged thirty-three, met him in the street in Munich in 1902. The boy's quick, exceptional intelligence, his receptivity to the poetic and mythological lore George taught him, and his readiness to enter on the lonely man's imperious moods while yet cheerfully asserting a mind and independence of his own - these, it seems, were the elements from which, with the knowledge of the boy's parents, a close friendship developed. A diary, a few letters, a few poems (among them one entitled 'Die tote Stadt', written apparently at the same time as George's poem) bear witness to the boy's surprisingly confident literary gift, richly imaginative yet free from preciousness and imitation. The two of them met for walks after school in Munich's Englischer Garten and to Schloss Nymphenburg, in George's lodgings and at parties with friends. Once or twice they took part, with the rest of the Circle, in tableaux vivants, with George dressed as Dante, Karl Wolfskehl as Caesar, Maximin in the scarlet dress and stockings of a renaissance page. The photographs show a solemn group of figures with taut faces; the boy's face in particular, with its strong jaw and prominent sharp nose, seems excited and preoccupied with the ritual of the occasion.47 Maximin died, after an illness lasting four days, of meningitis, in April 1904, the day after his sixteenth birthday. There is no reason to doubt that for George his death was a shattering blow. Was this really his experience of the divine ? Alas, the poems that commemorate Maximin, and the long reflection in prose George wrote for a commemorative volume, Maximin, ein gedenkbuch, do not make good reading. They are intended to give meaning to the boy's death, to offer consolation from the remembrance of his beauty. George speaks of Maximin not as an intimation of the divine but as his very own God. Insisting on the divine nature of the experience, and giving the boy's life an historical significance, he loses sight of the living being, and heightens the pathos of the occasion heedlessly, into bathos. If the encounter really was, as George claimed, a redemption and

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a grace, his poetry fails to convey it. In later years he spoke of Maximin's death as of the greatest loss he had suffered, but he also compared it to the defections, never to be forgiven, of some of his favourite disciples. The image of this strange god is rooted in George's intimate experience, but it is historicised so as to transcend the personal. He sees Maximin as a classical, mediterranean deity, as one who has his being in the calm centre between two ideologies - the German and the Jewish - which are at war with each other, and yet at one in the lethal extremity of their positions.48 In this wild paramythology the Germans appear as a race of warriors, committed by fate to conquest and deadly strife, forever seeking some unfathomable victory and forever deprived of it by their own treacherous god. Whereas the Jews (here George follows the story of Ahasuerus) are seen as eternally agitated by a restlessness that takes them from land to land, from culture to culture; surrounded by enemies and rent by self-hatred, they survive by defying all bonds of friendship and loyalty. What unites these two hostile tribes or races is the love of death; and it is to this love of death that George opposes the beautiful image and being of Maximin, the serene god. The contrasts ofc blond and black issuing from one womb', of storm-swept northern cliff and burning desert from which this pattern of racial antagonisms is wrought, strikes us as sensational and crude. It owes something to Heinrich Heine, whose poetic genius George denied. It is wholly different from the eminently reasonable scenario of social accommodation designed for his Jewish characters by Robert Musil in The Man Without Qualities, though it does remind us of the world as seen in that novel by Dr Paul Arnheim and the fanatical Hans Sepp. But history is on George's side, for once he really is prophetic. Less than two decades after these poems were written, the lurid contrasts ceased to be poetic inventions. George showed little interest in the day-to-day politics of his age; and he was even less interested in contemporary philosophical ideas. (He admired and was influenced by Nietzsche, but took him to be a poete manque'', as for Plato, the other

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philosopher he mentions, it was the practice of Socratic teaching and the idea of the Academy that fascinated him.) All that he identified in his £eitgedichte as characteristic of the world he lived in-Husserl's 'Lebenswelt' - he viewed with deep contempt; and he firmly believed that this, too, was Dante's attitude to the world. He therefore saw Dante as an example offering legitimation of his own existence as a person and poet. The matrix from which George's critical poetry issues is twofold. To use E. H. Gombrich's formula once more: the matching of the poems is in this abiding hostility and contempt (and it is worth recalling that parts of The Divine Comedy are proof that such feelings can occasion the greatest poetry), while their making springs from his endeavour to create a world of moods and persons whom he could situate outside that Lebenswelt. It is this strenuous endeavour that explains the high artifice of George's poetry and its disdain of the common language, but also the strains under which he and the members of the Circle lived. And yet, the portrait of 'the Master' must not be oversimplified. He was by no means always solemn, spoke in the comfortable dialect of Bingen on the Rhine where he spent his childhood, and addressed his loved ones as 'Kinder'. More important, that poem of autumn mood, 'Komm in den totgesagten park' does not stand on its own. It is characteristic of the many short lyrical poems of surpassing beauty which are wholly free from the taint of hostility and contempt, and free, too, from the strain of the selfconsciously grand occasion. They are among the greatest poems in the language and belong to its perennial lyrical tradition, yet they have little in common with the lyrical poetry of his nineteenth-century predecessors. There is no danger that they will date, but this does not make them 'timeless'. Rejecting the nature imagery of the previous generation as sentimental, rejecting the aura of homeliness, the warmth and comfort of the familiar and reassuring that characterise Carossa's poem, George creates a lyricism of stately splendour; and replaces ' the happiness of things close at hand' by elegiac invocation.49 Some of these poems recreate, without a trace of pastiche, the mood and tenor of mediaeval lieder. Some were written to celebrate beloved disciples, others to mourn

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those killed in the War; others again give permanence to fleeting occasions in the manner of the Volkslied. But they are addressed to the privileged few, recalling special moods, as do intimate, private poems unconcerned with public matters. They cannot satisfy George's prophetic ambition, for prophecy, as foresight and warning, is never private. George's commentary on the Great War, 'Der Krieg', in which invective and praise alternate without mediation, leaves us in no doubt as to its prophetic intention and visionary grandeur. Its success as poetry is imperilled, yet at no point do we feel that it could have been cast in prose. The poem of twelve unrhymed twelve-line stanzas of heroic verse was written in Heidelberg in the Spring of 1917, while the outcome of the War was still undecided; fearing that it might be censored on its way to his friends in Switzerland, George made one of his disciples learn it by heart, though it is not clear why he supposed a customs official would have objected to its being read abroad, assuming he understood any of it; anyway, no objection was raised to its publication later that year in Blatter fur die Kunst. Canto xvii of Paradise contains Dante's indictment of the corruption of Florence, and his condemnation of her luxuriance, malaise, and 'brutish folly' (line 67); and here, in some of the most famous lines of the Divine Comedy, Dante's ancestor, the poet Cacciaguida, foretells his unjust banishment: Tu lascerai ogni cosa diletta piii caramente; e questo e quello strale che l'arco de lo essilio pria saetta. Tu proverai si come sa di sale lo pane altrui, e come e duro calle lo scendere e'l salir per l'altrui scale. Thou shalt leave all things that most tenderly Are loved by thee; and this is from the bow Of exile the first arrow that doth fly. How salt that bread doth taste then thou shalt know That others give thee, and how hard the way Or up or down another's stair to go.50

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Cacciaguida then charges Dante with his prophetic mission. But, Dante rejoins, what if all that he has to tell 'will taste to many of bitter herbs' ? (However truthful and affecting they may be, tales of exile are apt to be a bore.) George takes his motto from the end of this canto; and as he seeks to legitimate the poem that follows by invoking the authority of Dante, so Dante had invoked Ezekiel (2:10), whom the Lord had charged with a similar and equally unwelcome mission of 'lamentations, and mourning, and woe'. It is Ezekiel's image of the divine message as food that fills the belly, and from being bitter turns to sweet honey in the prophet's mouth, that Cacciaguida borrows when he makes his reply to Dante: Coscienza fusca o de la propria o de l'altrui vergogna pur sentira la tua parola brusca. Ma nondimen, rimossa ogni menzogna, tutta tua vision fa manifesta; e lascia pur grattar dov' e la rogna. Che se la voce tua sara molesta nel primo gusto, vital nodrimento lascera poi, quando sara digesta. Only a conscience dyed, Or with its own or with another's blame, Will feel thy speech grate harshly on its pride; Yet not the less, all falsehood put to shame, Make thou thy vision fully manifest, And where the itch is, let each scratch the same. For if thy voice and speech do much molest, When tasted first, a vital nutriment 'Twill leave behind when men thy words digest. In George's translation, used as the motto for 'Der Krieg', Dante's lines undergo a significant change: Wem das gewissen drohe Mit eigner oder fremder schande drucke Empfindet deine worte wol als rohe. Dem ohngeachtet halt dich frei vom schmucke

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Und ganz eroffne das von dir geschaute. Lass es geschehn dass wen es beisst sich jucke. Wenn auch beschwerlich werden deine laute Beim ersten kosten: wird lebendige zehrung Man draus entnehmen wenn man sie verdaute. Those oppressed By guilty secrets, others' or their own, May feel your words grate harshly in their breast. Do not give way, don't ornament with grace What you have seen, but speak it clear and plain And if it itches, let them scratch the place. Your songs may jar and give offence to taste At the first sip; and yet prove wholesome food To those who mark them and digest. 4

Ma nondimen, rimossa ogni menzogna ...' ('But nevertheless, eschewing all lies ...') becomes 'Dem ohngeachtet halt dich frei vom schmucke' ('But nonetheless, keep free from ornament'), which hinges on a rhyme ('... sich jucke') as brilliant as Dante's ('... rogna'), but changes a moral warning into an aesthetic one. Legitimated by its motto,' Der Krieg' opens with a magnificent fanfare: Wie das getier der walder das bisher Sich scheute oder fletschend sich zerriss Bei jahem brand und wenn die erde bebt Sich sucht und nachbarlich zusammendrangt: So in zerspaltner heimat schlossen sich Beim schrei DER KRIEG die gegner an . . ein hauch Des unbekannten eingefuhls durchwehte Von schicht zu schicht und ein verworrnes ahnen Was nun beginnt... Fur einen augenblick Ergriffen von dem welthaft hohen schauer Vergass der feigen jahre wust und tand Das volk und sah sich gross in seiner not. As jungle beasts, which slink away or snarl At one another in their greed to rend,

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Seek company and huddle in a flock When forests are ablaze or mountains quake, So in our country, split to factions, foes United at the cry of WAR. A breath Not felt before, a breath of concord swept From rank to rank, and a confused divining Of what was now to come. The people, seized By throb of changing worlds, one little instant Forgot the glut and gauds of craven years And rose to greatness in its hour of need.51 'Eingefiihl', George's own coinage, expresses accurately the feeling of national unity of August 1914 to which almost every writer of the time paid homage, though unlike most of them George sees that it is only temporary. The abrupt reversal that follows in stanza 2 foregrounds the poet himself as 'the hermit on the mountain' ('siedler' for 'Einsiedler'), later to become 'the Seer' ('der seher'). 'They' - the people, but perhaps also the loved ones in the Circle have come to him to complain that he seems to take little notice of the great events of the age; to which he replies, Was euch erschiittert ist mir lang vertraut • Lang hab ich roten schweiss der angst geschwitzt Als man mit feuer spielte . . meine tr&nen Vorweg geweint . . heut find ich keine mehr. What shocks you now — I knew it long ago! Long have I sweated blood of anguish while They played with fire. Long before My tears exhausted ... I have none today. The cliche of the hermit/poet/seer's 'sweated blood' amidst the horrors of war is questionable enough, but the impersonal, wholly abstract 'man' ('one') that introduces the second conceit, the 'playing with fire', as a self-righteous explanation of the cause of the present agony, immolates all feeling in a second deadly cliche. The poetic failure of these lines is dire. For when the Seer goes on to assert that he and he alone, looking down from his place on high, grasps the full meaning of the bloody conflict:

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we are bound to ask on what authority he makes these pronouncements. With this imperious intrusion of the Seer into the conflict, the charismatic self is made absolute, and assumes the authority of a judge on high over the life and death of whole nations. His verdict is based not on thought but on his person as a poet. The one thing that (in Max Weber's phrase) should 6 offer proof of the genuineness of his charisma must be his poetry: but what is left when his poetic authority is so gravely compromised ? The Seer's self-absorption, now bordering on self-pity, turns into a grand accusation (stanza 3): the War has come as a punishment for years of'sacrilege' (c angehaufte frevel'). Again we ask, what is this sacrilege, by whose authority is it deemed such ? and again the answer is an insensate abstraction: Was ist IHM mord von hunderttausenden Vorm mord am leben selbst? What are, to HIM, the slaughtered multitudes If life itself is slain!

'Life itself? Relating it to the age that is being condemned, we recognise the phrase as the tip of that vicious, supposedly scientific terminology of'decadence', 'degeneracy', and 'natural selection' which Sozialdarwinismus had bequeathed to the modern world and which, in spite of its notorious political history, is with us still. But the abstraction, 'Life itself, also recalls the quandary Ernst Jiinger faced when trying to convey the sheer magnitude of the destruction wrought by modern

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warfare, when (as George writes in stanza 5) ' the ancient god of battle is no more5. Ernst Jiinger did not find an acceptable solution to a literary problem which, more than most, is steeped in moral considerations; but at least Jiinger's failure was not compounded by the claim to a privileged view au-dessus de la melee , the view of the 'hermit on the hill'. But worse is to come. Stanza 4 opens once more with the poet draped in liturgical vestments: Sein amt ist lob und fern • gebet und siihne • Er liebt und dient auf seinem weg. Die jiingsten Der teuren sandt er aus mit segenswunsch . . Sie wissen was sie treibt und was sie feit. . Sie ziehn um keinen namen - nein um sich. IHN packt ein tiefres grausen. His charge is praise and blame, penance and prayer. He loves and serves in his own way: with blessings Sent out the youngest of those dear to him. They do not march for catchwords but themselves. They know what shields them and what leads them on. HIS is a deeper dread. 'A deeper dread' than the prospect of the massacre of generations ? Wer begreift sein flehn: » Die ihr die fuchtel schwingt auf leichenschwaden Wollt uns bewahren vor zu leichtem schlusse Und vor der argsten vor der Blut-schmach! « Stamme Die sie begehn sind wahllos auszurotten Wenn nicht ihr bestes gut zum banne geht. Who will hear his plea: » You who over reeking corpses swing the broadsword, May you preserve us from too light an ending And from the worst, the blood betrayal!« All tribes Guilty of it must wholly be extinguished Unless the best that's in them bans the crime. Much has been written to explain away these terrible lines, and 'Blut-schmach', literally 'miscegenation', in particular.

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Post-1945 commentators have been indecently eager to argue that George did not mean Jewish-Aryan intermarriage, as though what he did mean was more excusable. The death and maiming in battle of so many of those young men who were George's beloved friends; the enmity with England and France whose cultures he cherished; the hideous coarsening of discourse and its worse corruption in war propaganda (for this was not only the first war of mechanised killing, but also the first war in which the propagandists saw themselves as combatants, encouraging their own troops to ever greater slaughter, pouring torrents of hatred and ignominy on the enemy from their safe positions at home) - all this George, a civilian now in his late forties, experienced and turned into poetry. But he is not content to lament the destruction of those sacred symbols in which he saw the culture of his fatherland enshrined. He will not join the propagandists, but, for him, racial differences require symbolic expression too. At stake is the ' racial purity' of what the geneticists of the time thought to be a single Indo-Germanic race: this race is seen as threatened by 'the yellow peril5, but also by 'the black, African peril'. Thus 'Blut-schmach' turns out to be an oblique reference to the French decision to send in their colonial troops to occupy parts of Alsace-Lorraine;52 and it is a moot point who showed the greater contempt: the Germans for the African troops who, they feared, would mix with local women, or the French for the Germans who, they knew, would feel this occupation as the greatest possible calculated humiliation. There is nothing 'untimely' about the Seer's descent into the cesspool of racialism, for this is the parole of several self-appointed prophets - some Aryan German, some Jewish, some French and AngloSaxon pinko-grey - who were full of those hysterical racial forebodings for which, in other contexts, George had shown such articulated contempt. This, then, is perhaps the lowest point of the poem, a compound of abstraction, archaic attitudinising, and racism. Is this really a great poet? Can a great poet ever fear that any war, this modern war, will end too quickly, too easily? What poet has the right to ' send out the youngest of those dear to him', with or

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without his blessing, and then go on to write another poem ('Dem Andenken des Grafen Bernhard Uxkull'), to commemorate two of his disciples who, unable to face the slaughter once more, committed suicide while recovering from their wounds in a military hospital ? When, at the end of stanza 5 of 'Der Krieg', we read: Heilig sind nur die safte Noch makelfrei verspritzt - ein ganzer strom. Only those ichors are sacred Which, still untainted, are poured out in floods. we wonder what poetic authority can rescue this ghastly image, what sanctity can be claimed for this slaughter. The message is clear enough. 'The masses... shape no symbol' (stanza 7): if the sacred images are to be saved from annihilation, then it must be the small band of young disciples who will accomplish the deed by their heroism, their selflessness and - here comes the astonishing turn, the terrible volte face their youthful readiness for self-sacrifice and death (stanza 9); and the implication is at hand that, through his song in praise of their heroism, it is the poet who emerges as the chief preserver of the sacred images. And still the contaminated fervour of prophecy continues: 6 On the other side' (in France) rational insight is supposed to prevail, yet there too no-one understands that' once again' it is the Germans who may bring redemption to the West: dass die Verponten Was fallreif war zerstoren • dass vielleicht Ein » Hass und Abscheu menschlichen geschlechtes « Zum weitren male die erlosung bringt. that those slighted Destroy what has been ripening for destruction And that, perhaps, a » hate and scorn of human kind « Will usher in redemption yet once more. Two notorious tags are combined in these concluding lines of stanza 10. The first is from Nietzsche's Thus Spoke £arathustra:

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' O my brothers, am I cruel? But I say: whatever is falling, we should still thrust down!' The second, ' the hate and scorn of human kind', is a reference to the Christians based on a passage of the Annals of Tacitus.53 Are these lines, too, to be read under the sanction of Dante's attacks on his enemies and the enemies of Florence ? George could not have failed to realise that for Tacitus the Christians were identical with the Jews. Is this to be the bond that unites the two hostile tribes? Again and again the poem recovers its greatness. In the magnificent opening of stanza 5: Zu jubeln ziemt nicht: kein triumf wird sein • Nur viele untergange ohne wiirde . . Rejoicing is unseemly. There shall no triumph be, Only uncounted and inglorious deaths - i n the detailed and uniquely powerful scenes in which the devastation of war is recreated, unsparingly and accurately, often with the aid of George's own verbal inventions; or again in the poem's penultimate stanza, which opens with 'Doch endet nicht mit fluch der sang' ('But let my song not end in curse'), and then turns into a lovely panegyric of the German countryside, though even here praise is mixed with the temper of war: O Land Zu schon als dass dich fremder tritt verheere: Wo flote aus dem weidicht tont * aus hainen Windharfen rauschen • wo der Traum noch webt Untilgbar durch die jeweils triinnigen erben . . Wo die allbliihende Mutter der verwildert Zerfallnen weissen Art zuerst enthullte Ihr echtes antlitz . . Oland Too beautiful for alien feet to ravage, Where groves are harps for winds, where in the osiers A flute resounds, and where the dream still lives Undimmed through generations of faithless heirs . . Where the radiant mother of the white race divided in its decline, first showed her face unveiled . .54

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And, in the last stanza, the determination to bring together antithetic images - Christ the Crucified and Dionysos, Baldur and Apollo - leads up to an envoi of unalloyed praise of those who will 'shield the palladium', the life-giving and lifeprotecting ' guardian image': Der kampf entschied sich schon auf sternen: Sieger Bleibt wer das schutzbild birgt in seinen marken Und Herr der zukunft wer sich wandeln kann. The fight has long since been decided in the stars, and victor Is he who offers shelter to the sacred image within his land, And he who changes lord of times to come. This, from one who saw his own charisma as inseparable from his unchanging authority, comes as a strange conclusion. But then, no stanza of this astonishing poem is without its greatness, none without a stain. At many points in the present argument one is reminded of the poetic and political career of Ezra Pound. Of course, there are striking differences between the two poets, which reflect their characters as well as the cultures from which they issue and which they criticise. No poet writing in English would care to adopt the solemnity of George's stance, no major poet writing in German (except, as I have said, Bertolt Brecht) would include in his poetry the sort of detailed historical and economic invective one finds in Pound's Cantos; Pound's consistent and passionate preoccupation with 'usura', his disastrous commitment to fascism and anti-Semitism (long before racial doctrine was a part of Italian fascism) have no simple equivalent in Stefan George, whose racialism is confined to that moment in the Great War when he felt German and to a lesser extent European cultural values threatened by ' the black and yellow peril'. Both George and Pound see in Dante their great exemplar, though there is a sharp and characteristic contrast between Pound's informal and relaxed use of themes and images from the Divine Comedy, and George's highly formalised and scholarly recreation of parts of Dante's poem in his own idiosyncratic diction; and the same contrast applies to their

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numerous borrowings from other poets and cultures. Both poets celebrate moments of uncontentious lyricism, and both enrich the poetry of modernism by running together lyrical lines and lines of cultural and political invective - e.g. nature poetry and £eitgedichte - though here again Pound's free verse has no parallel in George's severely wrought stanzas.55 But, above all, both are poets of the dear purchase: they use their poetry to encompass, and thus bear witness to, some of the worst evil, the barbarous monstrosity, of our culture. ' If the function of epic', and indeed of poetry generally, 'is to reflect and express an entire cultural ethos, Pound's sixty-year project [of the Cantos] serves to do that for Euro-America. The work is no more or less demonic, no more or less contradictory, than its historical subject',56 and the same may be said, though in a more restricted sense, of Stefan George. 'Der Krieg' (it will be recalled) was written and published in 1917; for three years Stefan George had kept silence, this was his first publication since the outbreak of war in 1914. The poem was re-published, almost without changes, in 1921; and when in 1928 it appeared in Das neue Reich, it seemed even more appropriate to the temper of a time of defeat than it had been while the outcome of the war was in the balance. There is no lesson to be drawn from the conflict, stanza 8 had proclaimed, the victims are not to be turned into sacrificial figures, any justification of the conflict is deferred, seems to be rejected... but in the end the search for meaning and justification prevails. It is this search for meaning, and justification through faith in meaning, that is so characteristic of the German attitude towards the War throughout the twenties and thirties, and so different from the English (and indeed from the German attitude after 1945). Politics and eschatology are conjoined in this strenuous insistence that, even though - or rather because - the war is lost, it has not been fought in vain. 'We had to lose the war to win the nation', became one of the slogans of the new regime.57 The nation the author of that slogan had in mind is indeed very different from the Utopian spiritual Reich George

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celebrates in his last poems. (He left for Switzerland shortly after Hitler came to power, turning his back on the honours that Dr Goebbels showered on him, and died there in December 1933.) But the belief that there is a positive, 'existential' value to the suffering, which gives Germany a spiritual advantage over other European countries and informs her culture with a seriousness beyond compare — this belief is a part of the vision contained in George's mature poetry, and it will be central to the propaganda of the new, that is the Third Reich. The events of 1933, which George watched perhaps with horror, certainly with distaste, showed that there was a realistic political dimension to this tragic view of life, which a politician of supreme skill could exploit. It seems that George knew this. In her account of his last conversations before leaving Germany (in March 1933), the wife of one of his disciples reports him as saying ' that it is after all the first time when the views which he [George] represented were echoed back at him from outside. And when I pointed out the brutality of the form, he replied that, well, in politics things were different....>58 We must, I think,

read this as a recognition that there was after all a kinship between the spiritual Reich he proclaimed and the Reich Hitler established. If that is the correct interpretation of what was probably no more than a casual remark, we should not forget that this was not the only 'echo from outside': eleven years later, in July 1944, Count Claus von Stauffenberg, one among the beloved disciples of George's last years, obeyed the teaching of'the Master' to the letter. This search for ' a meaning in all that has happened [in allem Geschehenen] even if it is not there' Nietzsche identifies as one of the forms of modern nihilism.59 What makes this search so distasteful is its unashamed (often shameless) exploitation of suffering, other people's or one's own. Ironically enough, it lands some of George's poetry in a disillusioning contradiction. Repeatedly the invective of his £eitgedichte is directed against the commercial mentality (which is traditionally, and in stanza 10 by George too, attributed to the English), against trade and haggle (which is traditionally, though not by George, attributed to the Jews); his aesthetic ideal, on the other hand, is cast in

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terms of lightness and grace or, to borrow one of Ernst Jlinger's favourite borrowings, of' desinvolture'. Yet what could be more commercially minded, less desinvolte, more lacking in grace of any kind, than this trading of the war experience for authenticity, what more sordid than this purchase of spiritual salvation for the price of suffering and death ? Perhaps highminded expedience is the secret vice of the tragic poet. GEORG TRAKL: ' G R O D E K ' It must not be thought that all German poetry of the Great War achieves its greatness in such defective shape as that of Stefan George. The brief and catastrophic life of Georg Trakl (1887-1914) ends with a poem that confronts the reader with the suffering of war more directly, and with a poetic force that is undeflected by any justificatory devices. On 6 November 1914 a young officer-cadet of the AustroHungarian artillery, Einjdhrig-Freiwilliger Ludwig Wittgenstein (then serving on a patrol boat in the Vistula), arrived at the garrison hospital of Cracow, hoping to meet Georg Trakl, a lieutenant medical orderly in the infantry; Trakl, by then a patient in a mental ward, had written to Wittgenstein requesting a visit.60 The two men - Wittgenstein was twenty-five, Trakl twenty-seven - had never met, but Trakl knew through Ludwig von Ficker, a common Innsbruck friend, that Wittgenstein was the anonymous donor of a large sum of money he had received in June of that year. In civilian life Trakl had worked intermittently as a qualified pharmacist in Salzburg, Innsbruck and Vienna; since 1907 he had had a history of drug addiction. On 24 August, less than four weeks after Austria-Hungary's declaration of war on Serbia, Trakl joined his regiment and was almost immediately posted to the eastern part of Galicia in Southern Poland. In the first week of October the battle of Grodek near Rawa Ruska was fought. During the retreat that followed Trakl attended the wounded and the dying in a barn used as a field dressing station: ' They were stacked one upon another in what appeared to be ten layers. Here and there a

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hand still moved, a pale mouth groaned. ' He witnessed the violent suicide of one of the wounded and in a moment of panic ran into the open, where he found himself surrounded by a clump of trees on which hung the corpses of Ruthenian deserters from the Imperial army. After two days and two nights of this hell he suffered a complete mental breakdown. He was taken to the mental clinic at the army hospital in Cracow, 'for observation', and there tried to shoot himself. His orderly, a miner called Mathias Roth, seems to have been the only person in whom he could confide. Trakl told him that he feared he would be court-martialled and executed for cowardice. Then he took an overdose of the cocaine he had carried with him for some weeks. (Mathias Roth's moving letter to Georg Trakl's brother on the death of' my loving Master' shows that simple people could be immune to the monstrous cliches of war.62) By the time Wittgenstein arrived Georg Trakl had been dead for three days; the cause of death was determined as ' dementia praecox'. It was in this setting that the greatest German war poem had come to be written. The first version of the poem, which Trakl read in the mental ward to his Innsbruck friend and patron, is lost; the pencilled manuscript we have, its first six lines in roman script, the rest in gothic, was written after 25 October; it is free from all emendations or erasures.63

Grodek Am Abend tonen die herbstlichen Walder Von todlichen Waffen, die goldnen Ebenen Und blauen Seen, dariiber die Sonne Dlistrer hinrollt; umfangt die Nacht Sterbende Krieger, die wilde Klage Ihrer zerbrochenen Miinder. Doch stille sammelt im Weidengrund Rotes Gewolk, darin ein ziirnender Gott wohnt Das vergofine Blut sich, mondne Kiihle: Alle Strafien miinden in schwarze Verwesung. Unter goldnem Gezweig der Nacht und Sternen Es schwankt der Schwester Schatten durch den schweigenden Hain,

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Zu griiBen die Geister der Helden, die blutenden Haupter; Und leise tonen im Rohr die dunkeln Floten des Herbstes. O stolzere Trauer! ihr ehernen Altare Die heiBe Flamme des Geistes nahrt heute ein gewaltiger Schmerz, Die ungebornen Enkel. At nightfall the autumnal woods resound With deadly weapons, the golden plains And blue lakes, above which more darkly Rolls the sun; the night enfolds Dying warriors, the wild lament Of their broken mouths. Yet quietly there in the willow copse Red clouds in which an angry god dwells, The shed blood gathers, lunar coolness. All roads lead into black corruption. Under golden boughs of the night and stars The sister's shadow sways through the silent grove To greet the ghosts of the heroes, the bleeding heads; And softly the dark flutes of autumn sound in the reeds. O prouder mourning! You brazen altars, Today a mighty grief feeds the spirit's burning flame, The generations unborn.64

There is here no foreground or background but a single poetic landscape with colours that have the sharpness of one of El Greco's pictures of Christ at Toledo. The arrangement is almost entirely paratactic: simple subject-predicate phrases are organised into large syntactic units, but these units appear to be disconnected from each other.65 There is, in the poem's seventeen lines, not a single causal or temporal conjunction; there are two pronominal adverbs which establish an unemphatic spatial relationship —'dariiber', 'darin' ('above which', 'in which'), and an infinitive expressing purpose - 'zu griiBen' ('[in order] to greet'): the only connections between the parts of speech given in the poem are simple copulas and the punctuation; it is as though its meaningful totality were formed by a pattern of relatively independent images. The poem achieves its unity without reference to an authorial self. We recall by way of a contrast Stefan George's lines in his war poem: ' Lang hab ich roten schweiss der angst geschwitzt / Als man mit feuer spielte . . meine tranen / Vorweg geweint'

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('Long have I sweated blood of anguish while / They played with fire... Long before / My tears exhausted'). 66 Perhaps he had, at that. Trakl in this as in some other respects recalls Franz Kafka: neither can make such a statement about himself, neither has enough authority for any 'statement'. Nor does Trakl make a show of speaking through his poetry: unbidden, his poetry speaks for him. Here the voice of suffering and sorrow is not contaminated by that combination of self-pity and selfassertion which troubles us in George's stanza. (Self-assertion and self-pity don't impair poetry in and by themselves, but they do so amidst the high pathos of George's warlike context.) In what sense is this a war poem? It is a poem written in the war, about and against war, certainly. But this is not a new theme and attitude, matched by new metaphors and diction (as for instance it is for August Stramm, whose war poems represent a last radical departure from his earlier writings). The war, for Trakl, is an extension and confirmation of his catastrophic vision of experience. If there is a change when war comes, it is this: what had hitherto been dark scenes from a single life, with emphasis on its isolation, now becomes a panorama comprising something like a community - a community seen not as a mass, not as 'ein Volk', and not at all in political terms, but as a community of suffering persons. An earlier poem, ' Im Osten' ('In the East'), written in Innsbruck a few days before Trakl joined his regiment, addressed a community in the diction of war: Den wilden Orgeln des Wintersturms Gleicht des Volkes finstrer Zorn, Die purpurne Woge der Schlacht... 'The people's dark wrath resembles / the wild organs of the wintry storm', the lethal action is seen as 'the purple surge of battle', the dying are apostrophised as 'sterbende Soldaten' ('dying soldiers') though later the poem addresses 'die Geister der Erschlagenen' (' the ghosts of those murdered', not, we note 'der Gefallenen', 'of the fallen'). But already in the poem 'Klage' ('Lament'), written in Galicia and immediately before 'Grodek', the warlike tropes are abandoned: 'An schaurigen

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Riffen / Zerschellt der purpurne Leib' ('against terrible reefs / [man's] purple body is shattered') is an image of violent death that may but need not be read as part of a warlike action. And in ' Grodek' war is no longer imaged as a discrete experience but has become an inseparable part of Trakl's catastrophic vision of all things. The character of a war poem is not abandoned Heidegger's claim that 'Grodek' is 'infinitely more than, because different from, " war poetry " ' is merely an expression of his disdain for what 'one' ('man'), any reader, accepts as obvious.67 But here war ceases to be an objective event bounded by peace and becomes a totality, an extension and confirmation of the human condition, though discrete living images alone can body it forth in poetry. Ernst Jiinger too was to see the war as such a totality; he however perceives that totality as a fulfilment, not a sacrilegious destruction, of man's destiny.68 From the first words onwards, 'Grodek' is placed in a landscape of poignant beauty and death: it is evening (the time of peace and repose...), yet the woods ' resound with lethal arms'. This opening is followed immediately by that parataxis which is the poem's most characteristic trope: golden plains, the blue lakes and, above them, the darkening sun are placed next to the autumnal woods - that is how the scene appears at a first reading. Only when we return to lines 2 and 3, wondering what to do with these apparently uncoordinated images, does it strike us that they too are governed by 'tonen' in the first line, achieving a synaesthetic effect by combining a visual experience with a musical verb (which will be repeated in line 14), and this device weakens still further what was already, through the parataxis, a weak connection. Now, in line 4, one of the two comparatives in the poem ('die Sonne / Dlistrer...' 'more darkly the sun...') again breaks the continuity, for the comparatives (both here and in line 15,' O stolzere Trauer!',' O prouder sorrow!') are used without naming the absolute term of the comparison. And again we can connect these phrases only after we have stopped and asked what is intended by the comparison : the sun is not merely darker because it is about to set, but it is 'more sinister' than we know it to be because it darkens above this warlike zone of death as it darkened only

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once before, in the afternoon of Good Friday. It may have been Holderlin's use of' absolute' comparatives that was in Trakl's mind, although in Holderlin's poems such catachresis is in the service of harmony rather than catastrophe.69 The next phrase, ' umfangt die Nacht' - the night encompasses and holds in deathly embrace - seems once again wholly disconnected from what has gone before; and again we look for a connection, which takes us back, past the woods and lakes and the sun, to the first words of the poem, 'Am Abend', and then forward, to 'dying warriors' and 'the wild lament / Of their broken mouths.' The syntactic dislocation of the second of the two verbs, '... hinrollt; umfangt...' (which can be rendered in English by a similar device made up of nouns, '... the sun; the night...') has created a ' hard configuration' of great force and originality; and the first part of the poem ends with the sequence of' sterbend ... wild ... zerbrochen' (' dying... wild ... broken'), achieving the utmost in living concreteness. In his commentary on 'Grodek', Patrick Bridgwater quotes some lines from Charles Sorley, another even younger poet who was killed in that war: 70 When you see millions of the mouthless dead Across your dreams in pale battalions go Say not soft things as other men have said ... Trakl too is one who does not say ' soft things as other men have said'. The disconnections to which I have pointed are in the poem because its meaning is to bear truthful witness, to give as direct and undistracted an expression as it may be possible for poetry to give to the monstrous event of death in war, yet to do this with as few naturalistic devices as possible. Hence the two colours, gold and blue, which stand in sharp contrast to that event: gold as the colour of peaceful plenty, blue as the colour of the Virgin Mary, queen of the seas. Can poetry be at odds with individuation? 'No cry of torment can be greater than the cry of a single human being' :71 Wittgenstein's apergu is negated in George's lines, 'Was ist IHM mord von hunderttausenden / Vorm mord am leben selbst?' ('What are, to HIM, the slaughtered multitudes / If life itself is

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slain!'). It is an impossible sentence (one cannot think of a context that could salvage it), a confession of George's inability, in 'Der Krieg' at all events, to respond to the suffering of individual persons,' the dying warriors' of' Grodek'. And again it is not the abstraction of ' life itself that gives those lines of George's such a hollow ring, but the unimaginable claim that the lives of' multitudes', let alone a single life, are less important — to the poet of all people — than the generality. Yet 'Krieger' ('warrior'), the word Trakl uses here, is strange. If'broken mouths' strikes us with its unsparing violence, as a naturalistic image, 'Krieger' differs from 'Soldaten' (the word used in 'Im Osten') by its formality, its archaic tone, indeed its solemnity. (Ernst Jiinger was to use the same word, 'Krieger', with a similar intention but, placed in a different context, its effect is very different.72) This solemnity is present throughout Trakl's poem: it goes with the invocation of divine wrath in line 8, of the heroes in line 13, and with the 'bronze' or 'brazen' altars in line 15. It is this solemnity which limits, though it does not entirely exclude, the naturalistic lexis. Unlike the poets of the Second World War, Trakl is still able to endow the monstrous event with something of the grandeur that the poets of old - in the death of Achilles, the lament of the Anglo-Saxon poets, the death of Archbishop Turpin in La Chanson de Roland - gave to death in war, making the event solemn without taking away any of its poignancy. And this conjoining without diminution of the solemn with the terrible is among the greatest things that poetry can do; this is what elegiac poetry shares with tragedy, with (for instance) that supreme moment in The Bacchae of Euripides, where the old man, Cadmus, both bitterly protests against and accepts his grandson Pentheus's terrible death: 'Dionysos, god of joy, has been just but too cruel'; and again, addressing the god himself, he acknowledges human guilt, 'But your vengeance is too heavy.' The second section of the poem, lines 7-14, opens with a contrast, 'Doch stille...' ('Yet quietly...'): in the low-lying pastureland (or 'willow-grown hollow'73 - there is nothing to help us decide) the warriors' lament is received in silence. Here

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- again there are three disconnected phrases - the red cloud formed from the warriors' spilled blood, now eerily cold as the moon, 'collects'; the angry God (Christian? perhaps Dionysos, certainly not Mars) who has created this landscape now sees how men have disfigured it, what they have done to it; while images of the moon and its cold pallor evoke (as always in Trakl's poetry) madness, alienation from the world of 'the golden plains'. The alternation of the natural (as in 'Weidengrund', 'willow copse' and again in 'rotes Gewolk', 'red clouds') with the universal ('ziirnender Gott', 'angry God') manifests a strange assurance, as of a somnambulist or of one in a drugged state, who unerringly and without explanation or mediation reads his poem and its parts off the landscape around him. We don't see Trakl transposing the scene from one medium to another, from landscape to inscape, but (like one who finds 'tongues in trees, books in the running brooks') he perceives and apprehends the scene in the images, shapes and words named in his poem. Yet at the same time we note that most of these images have occurred in Trakl's earlier poetry; that in placing them here without evident help from his critical consciousness, he (an even more tragically doomed Dylan Thomas) is at the same time reaching the consummation of his development as a poet. The elegiac is never abandoned. At no point is the poem concerned with the writing or reading of poetry or the setting up of gradual transitions, the two preoccupations which mark out Rilke's poetry. The absence of language-conscious or ' logocentric' tropes confirms the undistracted poetic vision: this is indeed a modern poem (its imagery is close to Holderlin's, but its configuration of imagery and syntax would yield no meaning to an earlier reader), yet there is no room here for a direct evocation of the poetic self or for a reduplication of its poetry as a theme. Alle StraBen munden in schwarze Verwesung is the pivotal line of the poem:' All roads issue into black decay.' As so often in this study, we must face the problem which the use of abstract words, such as 'Verwesung', raises in the reader's mind. The resistance to abstraction and the evocation of

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sensuous detail are assuredly among the very few essential aspects of elegiac poetry, though to shield the poem from aridity cannot simply be a matter of wrapping up 'unabashed abstract nouns and conceptually aerated adjectives'74 in sensuous language; nor is it a matter of avoiding generalities. Again Stefan George's anti-poetic practice acts as a deterrent. The concrete generality (George is saying) is no longer of any concern to me, it won't help me to say what I wish to say - I must now express not a feeling, not the living experience of calamity, but the general idea behind it, or beyond it. And since the abstraction he ends up w i t h - 'das leben selbst', 'life itself cannot be reversed and re-interpreted as a feeling for the particular, the poetry reaches a dead end. Trakl proceeds in the opposite direction. 'All roads issue into black decay' is certainly a weak rendering. Michael Hamburger gets round the difficulty by turning the abstraction into an image that is faithful to one large part of the original meaning: All the roads lead to blackest carrion. Two American translators, James Wright and Robert Bly, try another image: All the roads spread out into the black mould.75 The first thing that neither translation is able to convey is the context-creating verb, 'miinden' ('to flow out into', 'to issue and spread out', or' debouch into'). The last of these renderings is an ungainly word. It so happens that through its history it harks back to 'bouche', as indeed does the German 'miinden' to 'Mund', but that etymological connotation is unavailable to an unforced English reading. Trakl's German, moreover, has some aural connection, probably inadvertent, with 'zerbrochene Miinder' of line 5. But the central word here is ' Verwesung', a word hardly any other poet uses. Trakl places it (as he does in 'Ruh und Schweigen' and in many other poems) in a prominent, metrically heightened position. Drawing attention to it here, he draws attention to its etymology in a much more direct, much less forced way than any English

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rendering can. The old verb, 'wesen', to be', is preserved in modern German, apart from dialect, only in the past tense, 'gewesen', and in 'das Wesen' ('essence', 'essential being' and the like),76 a noun which, ironically enough, expresses the very epitome of abstraction. In Trakl's arresting use of' Verwesung' - placed in the living context he has devised for it - the old verb is fully present: here it comes to mean ' decay' by way of' unbeing', or rather 'being that is despoiled and destroyed' (as the prefix 'ver-' often expresses the corruption or undoing of something). The pivotal line, then, does express a generality by way of a summary of what has gone before, but this 'undoing of being' is instantly rendered concrete by recalling to us the word's most obvious and most powerful meaning, that of 'Verwesung' as physical corruption, as the decay of dead bodies in the open space to which all roads in this landscape are leading. It is, for added concreteness, 'black' corruption (as in 'black death'), yet again this 'blackness' has also a general connotation characteristic of Trakl's catastrophic vision, making the corruption spiritual and sinful as well as physical. The elegiac tone of the poem remains constant while the narrative line changes. Like most of its imagery, 'der Schwester Schatten' ('The sister's shadow' in line 12) has a history in Trakl's poetry: it points to an intensely personal, erotic, possibly incestuous relationship; still the self is not named, but this is the closest we come to an intimation of it. A critic speaks of' the decadent, titillating mixture of sin and eroticism which marked [the sister's] appearance' in Trakl's earlier poetry;77 in later poems the relationship calls up an atmosphere of sacrilege. Yet though it is difficult for a reader acquainted with Trakl's earlier poems to break this web of catastrophic connotations, here the effort to keep them out becomes a part of the reading. 'The sister' is invoked as a symbol of sacred protection - the kind of protection in the borderland between the worldly and the sacred that Orestes finds in his sister, Iphigenia. Framed by the golden boughs of night and the stars, all is arrayed for her solemn greeting of the heroes' ghosts 'in the silent grove', the grove which no longer reverberates with the sounds of war; 'Hain', even more than 'Krieger', is a word hallowed by

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solemnity, as the dwelling of the divine — it is so in Klopstock, Schiller and Holderlin. The dark-sounding flutes of autumn complete this part of the poem; flutes, ever after Nietzsche's Birth of Tragedy, connote Dionysos, the god of ecstasy and death. We have seen how much of the poem's meaning is created by its paratactic structure. Nowhere is this more marked than in the enigmatic introduction of the sister, Es schwankt der Schwester Schatten ... which, since the proclitic pronoun is grammatically redundant, creates a wholly new beginning: 'Es schwankt' attributes to what follows an impersonal — here a supra-personal — function as we know it from more homely phrases, such as ' Es regnet...' or 'Es gibt...' ('It is raining...' or 'There are such things as ...'). Once again the syntactic sequence is disrupted, the new beginning sets off the image of the sister and her place in the warlike landscape; indeed, it is merely her shadow, as though that were all this landscape can accommodate; and in the phrase, ' Und leise tonen ...' (' and softly sound ...'), the copula performs the same distancing function as did the proclitic pronoun, confirming the musical, the solemnly operatic nature of the scene: Briinnhilde welcomes the dead heroes to Valhalla.78 This is a sense which it is not easy for us to recapture. We don't readily perceive the operatic as an intimation of the sacred. Our concern with sacred music foregrounds its aesthetic aspect, we confine the sacred and the religious to the sphere of sincerity (hence the anti-liturgical emphasis of the Protestant divine service), and the operatic to the theatrical and, by extension, to the insincere. And Wagner? A combination of Nietzsche's polemic, Freud's deconstructions and nationalist politics (absurdly, we reverse the line from Gobineau and Wagner through Houston Stewart Chamberlain to the unspeakable Rosenberg)79 has made it difficult for us to recapture The Ring as a religious project. Of course, there is something incongruous in drawing on a work of the magnitude of The Ring for the explication of a poem of seventeen lines; Trakl was, it seems, fascinated by Die Walkure80 and (no doubt) its incest motif, but this justifies no more than a few discreet pointers to the poem's

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meaning. Chief among them, and relevant to the tetralogy and the poem alike, is the central role of the catastrophic, the interplay of the continuous with discontinuities, the bypassing of the moral and the placing of the work of art on the borderline between the metaphysical and the religious ways of experiencing the world. The distance we have travelled along the narrative line in this single landscape is indicated by the distance the poem has travelled from the dying warriors' ' wild lament' of line 5 to 'And softly the dark flutes of autumn sound...' of line 15. Again we should recall what the poem means us to hold together in our minds: the horror and the monstrous nature of the event, and its solemnity and sacredness. Though George's poem too is engaged in a celebration, his aim is quite different. What he intends is to make use of the solemn and the sacred, to treat war expediently as a sacrifice for mundane and ultimately political ends; and this, at our point in the history of Europe, placed as we are by events set in train by George's generation, we can no longer do: we cannot eke out the misprisions of politics by invoking the sacred. Trakl however is saying: here is the horror and there is the solemnity, they are parts of one scene, one El Greco picture, but separate; parataxis prevails. Hence (we turn to the envoi of the last three lines) the sorrow and mourning are ' prouder' than the everyday world knows, there is here no worldly pride in what the world so readily calls ' sacrifice'. A flame of the spirit burns on the brazen altars of war (brazen and hard in the sense of inexorable, but also monumental, and again, in that difficult sense: operatic). If sacrifice there is, it is in the sphere of the spirit, not in material and worldly terms, even though this flame is nourished by ' a mighty grief that encompasses both, the spiritual and the material. Destruction is the poem's present, its 'today': this moment, a watershed between past and future, annihilates both the warriors of the past and the generations as yet unborn. And again, for a last time, the phrase, 'die ungebornen EnkeP, is separated from the rest of the sentence while retaining its connection with the fire and the great, momentous pain; and this relationship is left open, needs no spelling out: 81 the flame

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consumes all. Annihilation and celebration stand in that relative independence from each other that has been the poem's hallmark throughout. The comparison with Celan's 'Todesfuge' attempted by some critics is wholly mistaken. Trakl's poem may well be the last in which the solemn celebration is acceptable. Other critics have interpreted the last line as a sign of hope: 'after all this', the interpretation goes, 'not all has been destroyed, what is left is a promise of the future, a hope for the generations unborn' (and, to descend from the sublime to the ridiculous, a whole generation of young Austrian poets is said to have identified themselves with those 'grandsons yet unborn'). 82 There is nothing in these last lines to suggest the possibility of a wholly new turn, of a thought in no way anchored in the rest of the poem. Is this then a poem without hope? There are such wholly destructive, nihilistic poems: Trakl himself wrote one or two, Gottfried Benn certainly did - poems in which what is being destroyed is in itself so inferior, so contemptible and unworthy of serious poetic attention that the mood of regret and sorrow - let alone the celebration of what is being destroyed - never arises; poems presenting a game that has not been worth the candle in the first place. All I have said here is intended to convey my conviction that this is not a nihilistic poem in the sense indicated. What enables the poet to create this double movement of annihilation and celebration is that he is in love not with destruction but with what is being destroyed; not with the warrior heroes because they are being destroyed, but with the poignant beauty of Grodek and its warriors as a part of it. And that, after all, is the simple prescription of all great elegiac poetry: that it should be in love with the lives the poet mourns and celebrates. Trakl's poetic language is not greatly different in war from what it was before war broke out. Through it there looms up a lament that is more than personal - a metaphysical lament for the warlike sacrifice. It is written in an age in which sacrifice will be discredited, in which the metaphysical, separated from the moral, will be exploited for base political designs. The diffi-

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culties of the poem are not accidental or inadvertent but a part of its greatness: the celebration would not be valid at a lesser price. It enshrines a moment in history, and one would like to say that it redeems the travail of a disastrous life; but that would be another story.

CHAPTER 5

The purchase of poetry

RAINER MARIA R I L K E : TRANSITIONS ' Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes', a narrative poem in free verse of ninety-six lines, is among the greatest of Rilke's Neue Gedichte [New Poems) of 1907, the first collection of his maturity. The poem was inspired by the depiction of the three mythological figures on an Attic stele dated c. 400 BC, a Roman copy of which Rilke saw, probably the one in the Louvre.1 (The full stops in the title allude to the mason's craft.) The poem also opens the view on the Duineser Elegien (Duino Elegies) written between 1912

and 1922, the consummation of Rilke's entire work. Orpheus, 'the fox roaming in the wilderness', belongs to the oldest strain of Greek mythology. The Muse Calliope was his mother, Apollo is sometimes mentioned as his father, but he is a hero, not a god.2 It is he who introduced a religion of ecstasy without intoxication into the world. Pindar names him as 'the father of song'; the lyre is his emblem. 'Poiein' (hence our 'poetry') is the making of something, a concrete creative activity: with his music Orpheus drew the trees from the rocks, made the rivers change their course, charmed wild beasts into submission - in short, ancient myths invoke on his behalf the activity we call 'perlocutionary speech acts'. Orpheus's wife, the nymph Eurydice, while fleeing from Aristeus, was bitten by a snake and died. By his music Orpheus softens the hearts of Pluto and Persephone, rulers of the underworld, and is allowed to bring Eurydice, guided by the god Hermes, back among the living. It is the condition of Orpheus's rescue that while leading her back he should not turn round until both have reached the 254

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upper world; the reason given is not that the gods don't want him to see Eurydice, but that they don't want him to see the secrets of the underworld. Plato's Phaedros (in the Symposium, 179 d) continues the story: because Orpheus was only 'a lukewarm lover', the gods never intended to let him have her back, and so it was not Eurydice he was guiding b u t ' her mere shadow'. Virgil (Georgics iv, 454-503) gives us the version current from the Renaissance on: in his anxiety Orpheus breaks his promise and turns round, and Eurydice vanishes for ever, while Hermes, 'guide of the dead' ('Psychopompus') looks on, 'executor of an inexorable fate'. In Ovid (Metamorphoses, x, 1—73) the scene ends with Eurydice's despairing 'Farewell', her cry 'hardly audible to Orpheus's ear'. In both poems Eurydice is aware of, and laments, the separation to come. The use of myths is at all times an artist's way of invoking certain expectations he shares, or hopes to share, with the reader or spectator. The creative interpretation which ensues (Herder's' Paramythie') will entail a changing and updating of those expectations by way of modifying the earlier version; and these changes are bound to reflect the time and place which gave rise to them. This restructuring of ancient myth into paramyth, where the original 'pre-text' acts as a pattern of the new, is one example among many of what happens in art and literature everywhere: the relationship between a myth and its creative re-interpretation is not the same as but is analogous to the relationship between a person, a thing or an event as they are in the world and their representation in literature. This is one analogy set in train by myths, but there is another. Anything we can say about the blessed in heaven who sit on the right hand of God, or about the heathen dead who have gone down into Hades, is bound to be in some way related and similar to what we say about our neighbours and friends and enemies here in the world; and if we have any inkling at all of what that landscape in Hades looks like, how could that inkling be unrelated to, how could it possibly be wholly different from, the landscapes we know? Metaphysical poetry — a major aspect of it, anyhow — is just this process of showing similarities between our Here and their There; and, for metaphysical poets

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like Virgil, Dante and Rilke, poetry is the activity of comparing and contrasting, and never quite identifying, the one with the other. There are two landscapes in Rilke's 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes \ 3 They are not identical, but they resemble each other: by being poetic creations, but also by taking the form of an enumeration of those similarities which the poetic process is designed to retrace and of which the poem is the product. The first landscape, in Hades, is the one through which the three figures make their way into the upper world: Das war der Seelen wunderliches Bergwerk. Wie stille Silbererze gingen sie als Adern durch sein Dunkel. Zwischen Wurzeln entsprang das Blut, das fortgeht zu den Menschen, und schwer wie Porphyr sah es aus im Dunkel. Sonst war nichts Rotes. Felsen waren da und wesenlose Walder. Briicken iiber Leeres und jener groBe graue, blinde Teich, der iiber seinem fernen Grunde hing wie Regenhimmel iiber einer Landschaft. Und zwischen Wiesen, sanft und voller Langmut erschien des einen Weges blasser Streifen wie eine lange Bleiche hingelegt. Und dieses einen Weges kamen sie. That was the wonderworking mine of souls. And they, like silent veins of silver ore, made their way through the darkness. Between roots sprang up the blood that flows on, to mankind, heavy like porphyry it looked. And in that dark Nothing else was red. Rocks were there, and forests of unbeing. Bridges over void, and that immense, grey, unreflecting pond which hung above its deep and distant bed like a rain-bearing sky above a landscape. And between meadows, gentle, filled with patience,

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appeared the pale strip of their single path like a long line of linen laid to bleach. Along this solitary path they made their way.4 This Dantesque scene5 confirms the point with which we started: all landscapes (whether poetic, or science fiction or Utopia), like all our inventions, always resemble, and take their cue from, the landscapes and inventions we know. Yet the poet - I mean Rilke, for Orpheus has not yet appeared - seems not to think this obvious. Instead, he explicitly points to the connection between this landscape and our world. With such words as ' Bergwerk ... Silbererze ... Adern' (' mine ... silver ore ... veins') he appeals directly to our knowledge of these things, and later with the words 'Wald und Tal / und Weg und Ortschaft, Feld und FluB und Tier' ('Forest and valley / and road and hamlet, field and river and beast') he is reciting a litany of the things we are familiar with and have our dwelling among; and the verbs, too, are chosen to underline that these things are similar to but also different from the things we know. 'Zwischen Wurzeln', down there, among the roots of the Stygian landscape, a river of blood takes its origin - 'fortgeht zu den Menschen' — and then continues on its way until it comes up into our world; as the river Po does,' where it sprang up and took its course to the world above' (Aeneid vi, 659f.). Again, more mysteriously, 'die Walder' ('the forests') are called ' wesenlos' - they are like our forests but have a different being, an ' unbeing' which hasn't the substance we know them to have, just as the bridges lead over insubstantial rivers called, briefly, 'Leeres', rivers of emptiness. And for a third time, and now more fully and elaborately than before, the poet emphasises the ' similar but different' status of that landscape by means of an astonishing mirror design: the grey,' blind', unreflecting mirror of a pond ' hangs above its bed' in much the same way as does 'a rainy sky above a terrestrial landscape'. In short: the landscape of Hades is like ours only less so, created in a less substantial medium. Only now, in the third stanza, Orpheus appears, ' the slender man in the blue mantle'. His portrait constitutes the first major

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departure from the old myth. Orpheus's character is all disunity: 'Und seine Sinne waren wie entzweit' — 'And his senses were as though divided' between his desire (illicit, as we shall see) to rescue Eurydice and his inability to prevent himself from violating the condition of her rescue. And so his character is all impatience and distraction: Orpheus in Hades is outside the domain that is proper to him, which is the domain of poetry: seine Hande hingen schwer und verschlossen aus dem Fall der Falten und wuBten nicht mehr von der leichten Leier die in die Linke eingewachsen war wie Rosenranken in den Ast des Olbaums. his hands were hanging heavy and clenched out of the falling folds, no longer knowing of the weightless lyre ingrown into his left hand, as twining roses into the branch of an olive tree. And he is beside himself in his anxiety ' that they [the silent couple] might follow ... that he might be allowed to turn'; and in a sequence of emphatic subjunctives — Er aber sagte sich, sie kamen doch; sagte es laut und horte sich verhallen. Sie kamen doch, nur waren's zwei die furchtbar leise gingen. Diirfte er sich einmal wenden (ware das Zuriickschaun nicht die Zersetzung dieses ganzen Werkes, das erst vollbracht wird), miiBte er sie sehen, die beiden Leisen, die ihm schweigend nachgehn: Yet still he told himself that they were coming, said it out loud and heard it die away. That they were coming, only they were two whose tread was fearfully soft. If only he dared turn round but once (if only turning round were not the undoing of this whole labour still unaccomplished) he could not fail to see them, the two light-footed ones, who followed him silently. - t h e anxiety of both poets is expressed: Orpheus's, lest 'his turning should be a destruction of this whole labour / that is still to be completed'; but also Rilke's strenuous effort to give

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adequate poetic expression to that impatience: the stanza is over-emphatic, and (compared with Rilke's later poetry) a little unsubtle, because it betrays that effort. In its emphasis on Orpheus's impatience the stanza departs from the old pattern and reflects the era, the datability of the poem: partly because it foregrounds his divided mind but, more fundamentally, because the stanza contains an extended psychological reinterpretation of the old myth; and psychology is one of the hallmarks of modernity. There follows a brief and serene portrait of Hermes, the gently guiding god who (unlike Orpheus, but like Eurydice) is in his proper habitat: Den Gott des Ganges und der weiten Botschaft, die Reisehaube iiber hellen Augen, den schlanken Stab hertragend vor dem Leibe undfliigelschlagendan den FuBgelenken; und seiner linken Hand gegeben: sie. The god of journeys and of distant message, the travelling-helmet above his limpid eyes, the slender wand held out before his body, wings at his ankles lightly beating; entrusted to his left hand: she. ' She': Eurydice is the true centre of the poem: it is as though she were all being and hardly any doing at all, and in placing her there, the poem reaches the most radical part of its reinterpretation. The extravagant construction in which the first words of the next stanza are cast is insisted on with the same selfassurance as is the recasting of the myth itself- with these words she is placed firmly inside her world, the poem's second landscape: Die So-geliebte, daB aus einer Leier mehr Klage kam als je aus Klagefrauen; daB eine Welt aus Klage ward, in der alles noch einmal da war: Wald und Tal und Weg und Ortschaft, Feld und FluB und Tier; und daB um diese Klage-Welt ganz so wie um die andre Erde eine Sonne und ein gestirnter Himmel ging,

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Once again, now more explicitly than before, the poetic origin and making of this second landscape is insisted on: 'So intensely was she loved [in the poet's song] that...' Orpheus is no longer named. 'The man who surfers' disappears behind ' the mind that creates' ;6 and what he creates from the lament over his loss is ' a world in which / everything was there once more', made over again in the substance of poetry. Thus Orpheus's song no longer merely moves the trees and mountain tops, tames the wild beasts and makes the rivers change their course, but it creates a whole world. With mirroring effect the simile is reversed, so that our habitat now appears as ' the other earth', around which 'a sun moves / and a whole starry heaven / a heaven of mourning with dis-placed stars — : so was she loved '.7 But all this is in the past, when his love was transformed into the lament which was his poetry. Perhaps here again Rilke was remembering those lines from the Aeneid (vi, 634-641) where the Sibyl shows Aeneas the Elysian Fields after his cleansing ritual is performed: ' Here an ampler air clothes the meadows in dazzling light / With its own sun, its own stars. ' 8 The practice is the same for both poets. But while for Virgil a comparative and two possessive pronouns are enough to establish the similarity-and-difference ('largior hie campos aether et lumine vestit / purpureo, solemque suum, sua sidera norint'), the modern poet needs the self-assurance that goes with the explicit mention of the poetic process. The Orpheus of this portrait, then, is a figure conceived in wholly modern, post-Nietzschean terms — a figure of incom-

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pleteness and inauthenticity. (He is thrice inauthentic: in being where he ought not to be — a living man in the underworld; in violating the condition of his admission; and in having forgotten what his true calling is.) He will not be named again in this poem, and at the end of it he will be ... nobody, a mere ' Who ?'. Hence the harshness, the inexorable logic of the concluding stanzas: Und als plotzlich jah der Gott sie anhielt und mit Schmerz im Ausruf die Worte sprach: Er hat sich umgewendet - , begriff sie nichts und sagte leise: Wer? Fern aber, dunkel vor dem klaren Ausgang, stand irgend jemand, dessen Angesicht nicht zu erkennen war. And when abruptly the god had halted her and, with an anguished outcry spoke the words: He has turned round - , she failed to understand, saying softly: Who? But in the distance, dark in the bright exit, someone or other stood, whose countenance she could not see. Eurydice, on the other hand, is now in every way and with her entire being his opposite: 'Sie war in sich' ('she was in herself). Her walk in his wake is hesitant: hindered by ' the long shroudings', she is 'uncertain, gentle, and without impatience'. So complete is she in herself, so utterly self-contained, ' that she no longer thought of the man who went before them'. In this state she is likened to one in the blessed state of pregnancy, or again of virginity, 'intangible; her sex was closed / like a young flower'; so unused to the embraces 'of that man whose property she is no more', that even Hermes's gentle guiding touch seems excessive, a hurt: Sie aber schritt an jenes Gottes Hand, den Schritt beschrankt von langen Leichenbandern, unsicher, sanft und ohne Ungeduld. Sie war in sich wie Eine hoher Hoffnung und dachte nicht des Mannes der voranging

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The daring analogy between the images of pregnancy and virginity serves to embody that quality of being herself and wholly dwelling in herself which provides the poem's central contrast; and the analogy is further heightened by an even stranger, even more daring image: Sie war in sich. Und ihr Gestorbensein erfullte sie wie Fiille. Wie eine Frucht von SiiBigkeit und Dunkel, so war sie voll von ihrem groBen Tode, der also neu war, daB sie nichts begriff. She was within herself. Her being-dead fulfilled her like a fullness. And as a fruit is full of sweetness, darkness, so she was full of her own great death, so new to her she comprehended nothing.

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In other poems of this first volume of JVeue Gedichte as well as in The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (1910), Rilke's only

novel, a very different conception of death is judged by the same scheme of'existential' values. Thus the sonnet 'Die Morgue' (SW 1, p. 503) portrays the anonymous, accidental death of people in the big city as a haphazard conclusion to their anonymous lives (and yet how much more gently than Gottfried Benn treats it in his poems on the same subject): Da liegen sie bereit, als ob es galte nachtraglich eine Haltung zu erfinden, die mit einander und mit dieser Kalte sie zu versohnen weiB und zu verbinden; denn das ist alles noch wie ohne SchluB. Was fur ein Name hatte in den Taschen sich finden sollen? They lie there ready, seeming still to face the task of working out an attitude to reconcile them with each other and with this coldness; to unite them; for as yet they lack an ending. What name might have been found in their pockets?

This is death in the Heideggerian mode of' das Man' - the way 'one dies', as part of 'a public', without a meaningful action, a proper ending, a proper name belonging to no-one else; it is the absence of all significance which makes for the random, arbitrary, trivial nature of these deaths. (Yet in stating this anonymity, the poetry gives the dead a rudimentary identity and significance they lacked while alive; in Gottfried Benn's Morgue poems, we shall see, not even that rudimentary identity is preserved,) Whereas Eurydice is fulfilled in her present state in the realm of the dead, fulfilled in her total acceptance of her new state - so much so that she is now selfcontained and can take nothing in: ' daB sie nichts begriff.' This is the summit of the poem, the point at which it opens out on to the Duino Elegies, Her state of completeness is not a state of personal fulfilment — it's not her individuality that the poem

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exalts; on the contrary: her fulfilment and self-containedness have become the conditions of her fruitfulness, of her being scattered, like fallen rain, over all things: Sie war schon aufgelost wie langes Haar und hingegeben wie gefallner Regen und ausgeteilt wie hundertfacher Vorrat. Sie war schon Wurzel. She was already loosened like long hair, dispersed abroad like fallen rain, distributed like hundredfold reserves. She had taken root. And this completeness will be the positive pole of the ' Daseinsentwurf, the 'project of Being' which constitutes the cycle of the Elegies.

The last poem ofJVeue Gedichte,' Die Rosenschale' (' The Rose Bowl' (SWi, p. 554)), addresses itself directly to the question of what this 'completeness', this 'self-containedness' might be. The shapes, colours and movement of several roses of different varieties are subtly and sensuously bodied forth, including (at the end of the penultimate stanza) 'und jene da, die nichts enthalt als sich' ('and that one, there, containing nothing but itself); and that last rose's emptiness opens into the concluding stanza: an astonishing paratactic arc extends over eight lines to form a sentence in which description, taking (again) the form of enumeration, becomes an enactment, a saying is complemented by a showing: Und sind nicht alle so, nur sich enthaltend, wenn Sich-enthalten heiBt: die Welt da drauBen und Wind und Regen und Geduld des Friihlings und Schuld und Unruh und vermummtes Schicksal und Dunkelheit der abendlichen Erde bis auf der Wolken Wandel, Flucht und Anflug, bis auf den vagen EinfluB ferner Sterne in eine Hand voll Innres zu verwandeln. Nun liegt es sorglos in den offnen Rosen.

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Are they not all so, each itself containing if self-containing means: to take the world out there and wind and rain and waiting patiently for spring, and guilt, unrest, and fate in its disguises and darkness of the earth at evening, even the travelling clouds,fleeingand hastening, even the dim dominion of distant stars to take and change all this into a hand filled with inwardness. Now it lies easy in the open roses. The paratactic arc of this structure outlines and poetically reenacts the transformation of the most fleeting and indeterminate things in our experience into ...' inwardness' ? Transformed into poetry, certainly, the sequence forms a magnificent conclusion to the first volume of Rilke's maturity; and transformation, too, will be one of the poet's tasks - the major task - i n the Elegies. But if we look back once more to 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes', and recall the various ways in which that poem departed from the old myth, the invocation of Eurydice's inwardness will appear as the most radical departure of them all, and the clearest sign of the poem's datability. At the age of thirty-six, in January 1912, Rilke was staying as a guest in the castle of Duino, the home of Princess Marie von Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe above the Adriatic not far from Trieste. There he watched from the ramparts a storm raging over the blue and silvery sea two hundred feet below, and out of its roar heard a voice calling the first lines of the First Elegy. Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? Who, if I cried out, would hear me from among the ranks of angels? He completed the First Elegy that evening. From that first hour on, it seems, he was conscious of the inspiration that had come to him as of an immense task - the most momentous, as it proved to be, of his existence as a poet. The cycle of the ten elegies (SW1, pp. 685-726) was not completed until ten years

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later, in February 1922, in the little castle of Muzot in the Swiss Valais. Elegies, traditionally composed in alternating hexameters and pentameters, are poems expressing regret, most often over the loss of a loved person. Rilke's elegies are written for the most part in vers libere\ that is verse which alludes to but has liberated itself from the conventional pre-existent form, here the elegiac distich. Thus the dactylic opening of the first line, Wer, wenn ich schriee, horte mich denn aus der Engel Ordnungen? or line 18 O und die Nacht, die Nacht, wenn der Wind voller Weltraum (Oh, and the night, the night, when the wind full of world space) uns am Angesicht zehrt (feeds on our faces - ) combining allusion and liberation, evokes in the German reader memories of a whole elegiac tradition, from Klopstock through Goethe and Schiller to Holderlin and von Platen. To recall what was said earlier in this chapter about the way the poet may secure a new lease of life for old myths: the same double process of allusions to and liberations from pre-existent patterns which gives birth to modern paramyths determines the rhythmic pattern of these elegies and, as we shall see, much else in them. These are modern poems, poems concerned to describe, evaluate and perhaps overcome the condition of modernity. And this double device - determining the rhythmic scheme and the mythopoeia alike, and drawing poetic strength from the anxiety of a rejected influence — is characteristic of poetry in the modern age: in this sense, at all events, the Duino Elegies make a special issue of a common poetic practice. There are ten of them, like arrows centripetally arranged, or like a single panoramatic landscape in a family album, composed of adjoining, occasionally overlapping pictures, yet

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folded across their differences and similarities, or again like a series of episodes from an anthropology or mythology of the modern age. And while the logical structure of each elegy is determined by the connections and breaks of its dominant imagery, they present different balances between description, regret, criticism and jubilant affirmation, though the poignancy of regret prevails. For the modern age which is here elegiacally evoked is characterised by a pervading sense of deprivation, a lack of existential assurance, or again a lack of the strength that once went with faith. Hence the First Elegy begins emphatically yet not with an assertion, with a dissonant cry yet cast in the conditional mode: ' Who, if I cried out, would hear me ...' The strong anguish expressed in this first line and the lines that follow is apt to be attributed to a spiritual deprivation. That would be wrong. At this stage in the Elegies, at all events, Rilke is critical of such contrasting distinctions as that between spiritual and material implied in the Cartesian interpretation. The deprivation he speaks of is similar to the kind expressed triumphantly and by way of affirmation in Nietzsche's rhetoric of the death of God (the precondition, as Nietzsche sees it, of the coming of the Superman) and the desuetude of faith; the consequences of these ' events' he saw as affecting every aspect of the coming age, the age of modernity. It is the kind of deprivation expressed in a more muffled way in T. S. Eliot's line, ' Human kind cannot bear very much reality.' Instead of this grey, Prufrockian 'reality' Rilke introduces ' the Angels': und gesetzt selbst, es nahme einer mich plotzlich ans Herz: ich verginge von seinem starkeren Dasein. Denn das Schone ist nichts als des Schrecklichen Anfang, den wir noch grade ertragen, und wir bewundern es so, weil es gelassen verschmaht, uns zu zerstoren. And even if one of them suddenly pressed me against his heart, I should fade in the strength of his stronger existence. For Beauty is nothing but the beginning of Terror we're still just able to bear, and why we adore it so is because it serenely disdains to destroy us.

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All that we are told about them at this point is that they are, or have, a being stronger than ours - a comparative ('starkeres Dasein') which leaves open the other term of the comparison (as some Holderlin poems do). But we also know that they, the Angels, represent supreme beauty, a perfection that is greater than we can bear, so that beauty itself becomes ' nothing but' ('nichts als... 5 ) a form of and 'the beginning of terror': and though no poetry could be less political than Rilke's, we are reminded of W. B. Yeats's phrase from his poem on the Easter rising of 1916, 'a terrible beauty is born'; it too points to the continuity of beauty with terror. In these first lines, then, we have the first of the many images which derive their context-determined meaning in Rilke's poem from the double process I have mentioned. The allusion which the word ' Angels' carries with it, pointing to both the Old and the New Testaments, seems inescapable - these surely are the only angels we are bound to know anything about. And even though Rilke himself, in his numerous, all-too-numerous comments on the cycle goes out of his way to disclaim any Christian allusions (at one point he wishes us to be reminded of the angels of Islam), it is to the familiar scenes of the angelic salutation of Mary (in Luke 1:28), and of the shepherds' visitation by the angels (in Luke 2:9), ending in the words,' and the glory of the Lord shone around them, and they were sore afraid' - it is to these scenes the reader is bound to turn in trying to understand this image of the Angels as messengers of the continuity between perfection and terror, reinforced in line 7, 'Each angel is terrible'. Terrible, too, are the angels of Genesis 3:23-4, ' So He drove out the man; and he placed at the east of the garden of Eden Cherubim, and a flaming sword which turned every way, to keep the way of the tree of life.' My suspicion that there isn't all that much difference between the Hebrew, the Christian and the Islamic conceptions (to which the Hellenistic may be added) is confirmed by a recent study, Angels* which, without mentioning Rilke, helps us greatly to understand their function in his poetry. But what of Rilke's anxious disclaimer, that we are not to think of a Christian symbolism and imagery, and his partial

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liberation from that and thus from his own past, including his early poems to the Virgin ? This is no mere rhetorical gesture: he completes (in lines 5 and 6) the thought of the deprivation and the terror it entails with an astonishingly concise and entirely pagan, Olympian turn: our survival (in the face of that angelic strength) is made to depend on the mere disdain of Beauty for what we are, filling us with amazement that 'we are casually spared'. And so (lines 8-9) I had better stifle the lure, the call to the Angel to come to my rescue: ... uns zu zerstoren. Ein jeder Engel ist schrecklich. Und so verhalt ich mich denn und verschlucke den Lockruf dunkelen Schluchzens. ... to destroy us. Each single angel is terrible. And so I repress myself, and swallow the call-note of dark sobbing. At the end of the Seventh Elegy the theme of rejection enfolded in the angelic image is taken up once more. Now however the hesitation is unhesitatingly articulated, and ambiguity - the gesture of fear and consequent rejection on one hand, the angelic lure and human call for help on the other, finds its full expression: Glaub nicht, daB ich werbe, Engel, und wiirb ich dich auch! Du kommst nicht. Denn mein Anruf ist immer voll Hinweg; wider so starke Stromung kannst du nicht schreiten. Wie ein gestreckter Arm ist mein Rufen. Und seine zum Greifen oben offene Hand bleibt vor dir offen, wie Abwehr und Warnung, UnfaBlicher, weitauf. Don't think that I am wooing! Angel, even if I were, you'd never come! For my call is always full of resistance; against such a powerful current you cannot stride forward. Like an outstretched arm is my call. And its hand, for some grasping, skywardly opened, remains before you as opened so wide for warding and warning. You inapprehensible.

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I have quoted this passage because the (unravelable) complexity of its yes and its no and its if nevertheless ... — in short, the complexity of the hesitation I have mentioned — should not be seen (as some critics have seen it) as a sign of poetic uncertainty and weakness but, on the contrary, of poetic virtuosity. It is one of the many places in the cycle which are designed to retrace a specifically modern experience: here it is a faithful account of a complex psychological state (the anxiety of influence in the literary sense as well as its sense of an emanation ...from the stars'), 10 elsewhere it is an authentic account of inauthenticity. The metaphysics of the poem should not blind us to its psychology, the accuracy of its mimesis. So ' we' need help, but who is there that will help us, that we can 'make use of? ('Ach, wen vermdgen / wir denn zu brauchen? Engel nicht, Menschen nicht...') Not, as we have seen, the angels, but why not human beings? Rilke doesn't think there is any need to explain why not. It seems obvious to him (as it seemed obvious to Nietzsche) that the sphere of association, where people come together for mutual aid, is not the sphere of authenticity, is not the source from which men and women can draw strength; and in this repudiation of the social (whether in history or in the contemporary world) lies the most important and consistent difference between Rilke's Elegies and Eliot's Four Quartets, & cycle and family album of scenes in many other ways closely related. Even the dumb yet canny animals notice our weakness and unease, even they know, instinctively and without need of ratiocination, without the alienation that thinking brings into being — even they know (if it can be called 'knowing') that we are indifferently, unreliably at home... in the world ? No, not even in the world, but ' in our interpreted world': Engel nicht, Menschen nicht, und diefindigenTiere merken es schon, daB wir nicht sehr verlaBlich zu Haus sind in der gedeuteten Welt. Not angels, not men; and even the canny animals are aware

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that we don't feel very securely at home within our interpreted world. As so often in the poetry of that disturbed age, these lines lie on the very boundary of philosophy, they allude to philosophical reflection in using its vocabulary, yet they retain the freedom to use it not abstractly but poetically: the canniness of animals, the feeling of being reliably at home: the poetry lies in the concision with which these lines disclose one of the central donnees of our existence. The world we live in, unlike the world of our ancestors, is an interpreted world; a world in which what we (but not Rilke) call 'the media', the agents of interpretation, play an incomparably greater part than they have ever played before. Poets from Shakespeare to Hofmannsthal and Pirandello have declared that' all the world's a stage / and all the men and women merely players'. Rilke's image of'die gedeutete Welt' tells us that what was once an enchanting metaphor has come to function as a mere prosy perspective on our entire lives, encompassing our cultural pursuits, our sciences and our emotions; and yet here, for all its philosophical prosiness, it has been transmuted into the memorable image of' the interpreted world'. It is a complex image. The more we think of it, the more it disquiets us by reminding us that where 'interpretation' is at issue, the allusion to something not interpreted, the presence of some sort of absolute text, is entailed. (And what age other than ours would have attached any meaning to a phrase like 'an absolute text'?) And so this image of the interpreted world, too, implies the existential deprivation mentioned at the beginning, on which this entire cycle is built, and liberation from which seems ever more difficult. And still the poem goes on asking what it is that could supply our want, whence we might draw strength for the attainment of that' stronger being' which we lack. Might it not be something quite inconspicuous, some indeterminate, contingent thing, 'some tree on a slope that we see every day', or maybe 'yesterday's street', or again - the extraordinary device of reification and personification may be noted as a part of this utterly personal poetic practice - might it not be ' a habit'

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which 'liked us' and sticks to us, consoles us, offers us reassurance ? Es bleibt uns vielleicht irgend ein Baum an dem Abhang, daB wir ihn taglich wiedersahen; es bleibt uns die StraBe von gestern und das verzogene Treusein einer Gewohnheit, der es bei uns gefiel, und so blieb sie und ging nicht. There remains, perhaps, some tree on a slope, to be looked at day after day, there remains for us yesterday's walk and the pampered loyalty of a habit that liked being with us and stayed on rather than leave. With the invocation of 'the night' (in line 18) the tone changes from that of a complex personification to a more purely lyrical mode, expressing night's consoling mystery, connecting us with 'the vacant interstellar spaces' of which Eliot speaks. Again and again, though, the poem resorts to questions: take 'the night', perhaps a first intimation of mystery and death, of the mystery of death - isn't that something which 'remains', remains valid as a source of succour we can use? Yet it too is ' gently disappointing' - and now the thought changes track again, and what looked like sources of comfort we could call on turn out to be tasks imposed upon us: O und die Nacht, die Nacht, wenn der Wind voller Weltraum uns am Angesicht zehrt -, wem bliebe sie nicht, die ersehnte, sanft enttauschende, welche dem einzelnen Herzen muhsam bevorsteht. Oh, and there's Night, there is Night, when the wind full of cosmic space feeds on our faces: for whom would she not remain, the longed-for mild disenchantress, awaiting the lonely heart as its laborious task? What task? We don't know. Other ages had a God who set men and women their destination, determined their destiny. But just as we live in the world interpreting we don't know what Urtext, just as the angels will turn out to be messengers 'moving between heaven and earth with a lightly rushing motion' (as

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Plato says) with we don't know what message from we don't know whom, so we have tasks set we don't know by whom and on whose authority. This sounds like a mystifying metaphysical riddle, yet, as happens so often in these poems, the meaning intended turns out to be something simpler and less recondite. The mention of 'tasks imposed on us' is this poet's way of conveying something entirely familiar: I mean our intimate, strenuous search for meaning, that unceasing search for something elusive and always in the moment to come. And this search for meaning, which was not familiar to human kind at other times, when ' the meaning of life' lay in the fulfilling of commandments,11 is central to our modern condition. 'The night' and its meaning face us, the poet believes, as an arduous task ('das uns muhsam bevorsteht'), and if the single individual cannot accomplish it (the night, the task) and human beings in mutual association also fail (as I suggested Rilke expects them to fail), why then can that task (whatever its precise nature may be) not be accomplished by the lovers, their strengths combining for the fulfilment of it? It is with this mention of the lovers (line 21) that most hostile criticism of Rilke's poetic landscape sets in: wem bliebe sie nicht, die ersehnte, sanft enttauschende, welche dem einzelnen Herzen muhsam bevorsteht. 1st sie den Liebenden leichter? Ach, sie verdecken sich nur miteinander ihr Los. for whom would she not remain, the longed-for mild disenchantress, awaiting the lonely heart as its laborious task. Is night easier for lovers? Alas, all they do is to hide, each with the other, their lot. More than once the Elegies have been criticised for apparently disdaining love when seen as the emotion shared by two people; for apparently condemning love as a distraction and a drain on a man's or woman's inward intensity; and for perversely glorifying unrequited love (and suffering generally) and the inward-turned ardour of feeling precisely because it is unshared. The celebration of intense, as it were unconditioned feeling now becomes the occasion for invoking the name of a

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famous mid-sixteenth-century Paduan poetess; and this, in line 45, is done with a little inadvertent turn: 'Hast du der Gaspara Stampa / denn geniigend gedacht?' ('Does Gaspara Stampa / mean enough to you yet?'). Deserted by her lover, she drew on the very sorrow of the desertion she had suffered, transmuting that sorrow, though it proved her undoing, into poetry. And this brief mention of the loving girl and the sorrow of her waiting in vain on that pier in Venice, is only one among the many scenes and episodes and images suggesting, often merely hinting at, the uses of deprivation and adversity which take us to the centre of the Elegies. Another such scene (lines 50-3) 1st es nicht Zeit, daB wir liebend uns vom Geliebten befrein und es bebend bestehn: wie der Pfeil die Sehne besteht, um gesammelt im Absprung mehr zu sein als er selbst. Denn Bleiben ist nirgends. Is it not time that, loving, we freed ourselves from the loved one and, quivering, endured: as the arrow endures the string, to become, in the gathering out-leap, something more than itself? For staying is nowhere.

is provided by the image (familiar to us from Zen Buddhism and the art of archery) of the arrow that ' quiveringly endures' or 'stands on' the bowstring (Rilke creates his own pun on 'besteht'): the arrow takes the energy necessary for its flight from the bow in the same way as, freeing ourselves 'lovingly from the loved one', we become more than ourselves — the game of allusion and liberation is now being enacted by the image itself. These, then, are some of the moves that take us to the centre of the Elegies and thus (since this is the most representative of the texts with which this account is concerned) to the centre of modern poetry, or at least of modern German poetry: to the theme of the gain that is entailed by loss, the validation (or, as they used to say, the bonification) of suffering and the heroism of sacrifice, the purchase of value and meaning at the highest conceivable price, and perhaps even beyond the price, that the

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imaged figures of the poem can pay. And this central theme is summed up for the first time in the cycle in lines 49—50, Sollen nicht endlich uns diese altesten Schmerzen fruchtbarer werden? Isn't it time these most ancient sufferings were more fruitful for us at last? These lines come immediately after the mention of Gaspara Stampa - Hofmannsthal and Richard Strauss's operas bear witness that Rilke is not alone in the culture of German and Austrian modernism in representing the man in the congress of love as the source of inauthenticity and distraction, while it is the woman in her suffering who is the source of trust, authenticity and spiritual strength. But what of that criticism levelled against the Rilkean vision of inward-turned, 'non-transcendent' love? It is one thing to find a place in the history of literature (or for that matter of contemporary opera) for this strange validation of strenuous, unrequited love above the comfort and ease of love fulfilled; it is surely quite another thing to defend that vision against the charge of perversity and excessive sophistication. Can great poetry be rooted in perversity? To return to an earlier passage (lines 21-3): if the solitary heart cannot face the night ('the mild disenchan tress') and the arduous task it sets each of us, the poem then asks, 'Is that task easier for lovers?' Not at all, it answers, for (as we have seen) Ach, sie verdecken sich nur miteinander ihr Los. Alas, all they [the lovers] do is to hide, each with the other, their lot. Again the dating is part of the meaning: love as an anxious escape from what is in store for the lovers seems more familiar to us than it may have seemed to other ages. It is relevant to recall those two superb intermezzos in John Osborne's Look Back in Anger, when Jim and Alison, the disenchanted couple, try to avert the quarrel that is yet again about to erupt between them by ' playing bear and squirrel' and thus trying to block out the world in their tight embrace, burying their heads in each other's

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shoulders in order to draw 'stronger being', from the other; but the ritual gesture of propitiation doesn't work, it cannot work because all they can do is try to draw strength from each other's weakness and use one another in order to hide from what awaits them. This kind of love - the conjoining not of mature emotions but (as Rilke puts it in the 'Letter to a Young Poet') 12 of things incomplete and blurred, mere rudiments of broken feelings leaning against each other - this kind of love he regards as characteristic of the contemporary condition; so that, compared with that defective emotion - a sort of ' loving and partly loving', to misquote T. S. Eliot — those who were betrayed and forsaken, the Gaspara Stampas, are seen to be 'more loving', capable of greater strength of love, which is greater strength of being. They (not those two playing bear and squirrel) are the proper objects of praise, and so (line 41) is 'the hero', whose very destruction, 'sein Untergang', is a pretext for being, 'a last birth'. What kind of hero? We don't know. The year is 1912. In another two years' time poets everywhere, including briefly Rilke himself, in England and France no less than in Germany, will be poeticising and mythologising ' the greater strength of being' in military heroism, eventually celebrating the rebirth of mankind in 'the supreme sacrifice'. The lovers thought of as tragic in their solitude, the hero whose very destruction is validated as an affirmation of life these are now joined by 'the saints' (line 55) Stimmen, Stimmen. Hore, mein Herz, wie sonst nur Heilige horten: daB sie der riesige Ruf aufhob vom Boden; sie aber knieten, Unmogliche, weiter und achtetens nicht So waren sie horend. Voices, the voices. Listen, my heart, as only saints have done; for the gigantic call that must lift them aloft; but they went on kneeling, the impossible ones, in undistracted attention so intently hearing. - men and women so completely committed to prayer that they became oblivious of the God to whom their prayer was directed;

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a God whose call is beyond our enduring (lines 58-9) as the Lord who addressed Moses from the burning bush was beyond human enduring (Exodus 3:6). And these, finally, are joined by 'the young dead' (lines 61-5) such as the one commemorated on a solemn inscription in 'high relief (the play on 'erhaben', also 'sublime', can't be recovered in the translations) in the Venetian church of Santa Maria Formosa (Rilke loves inscriptions, as the Fifth Elegy shows). But all these figures Was sie mir wollen ? leise soil ich des Unrechts Anschein abtun, der ihrer Geister reine Bewegung manchmal ein wenig behindert. What do they ask of me ? I must gently remove the appearance of suffered injustice that hinders a little, at times, their spirits' pure movement. - require the poet 'gently to remove the semblance of injustice', the injustice of neglect. In its last two sections the poem homes in on those young dead. Slowly, line by line, it is praising them that emerges as the task that is set - praise, which is lament without blame. And this praise is both the object and the source of our inward intensity; though in this Elegy the special role of poetic creativity as the form of that intensity is only lightly touched on. There are three passages in the First Elegy where enumeration (occasionally a characteristic weakness of Rilke's poetry) is cut short and the poem recovers under the impact of lyrical affirmation: first, in line 18,' O und die Nacht...', the paean to the night and the contact with the cosmos that it vouchsafes us; then, at the opening of a new section (line 54) with the invocation of the voices ('Stimmen, Stimmen') that come to us from the praying saints, from the cosmic spaces, indeed from everywhere as long as we are undistracted enough to attend to them; and finally, at the line, ' Freilich ist es seltsam, die Erde nicht mehr zu bewohnen ...' ('True, it is strange to inhabit the earth no longer ...'). And what the section which opens (at line 70) with these words does, so clearly that it needs no detailed comment, is what Rilke the poet is supremely good at. I mean this: time and again he abruptly breaks the poetic sequence by

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turning to a new scene, or even by a mere sentence or phrase of the utmost succinctness, as in 'to inhabit the earth no longer5, and then proceeds to draw out the imaginative implications from that scene or phrase. Talk of' implications' may suggest that the poetry is about to slither into ' thought' or ' ideology' or some other kind of non-poetry, and thus fails to convey the fully concrete, sensuous character of what follows; yet what follows is concrete and sensuous — the energeia Aristotle insisted upon — even though here the implications drawn are those not of being but of not being; characterised by our no longer practising the habits we have learned,' no longer seeing roses, and other things that promise so much / as harbingers of our future3, by no longer being what we once were and ' laying aside, like a broken toy, even one's name'. The only convincing things the poet can say by way of describing that state of the young dead seem to be of two kinds: either he can turn to the theological language of transcendence, speaking as it were of a future clarity - of hoping to see 'face to face' all that here and now we can only see ' as in a glass darkly'; in doing this he has to appeal to a Christian orthodoxy which (as I have suggested) is not open to Rilke. Alternatively, he may insist that the 'here' and the 'there' aren't perhaps so different after all, and that in any event we have no other language than the language of the worldly ' here' (or, as Eliot puts it in an unwonted moment of drollery,' I gotta use words when I talk to you'). But as far as language is concerned (and whatever the theological implications might be) there really is no difference, at least no 'fundamental' difference, between the two approaches : to one side of any orthodoxy we do indeed have only one language, the language of the worldly ' here' - what other assumption can Rilke proceed on? And even though his may or may not be the language of mysticism, that language too, however ' hermetic' or ' esoteric' its lexis whenever it liberates itself from our prosy discourse, still draws on meanings which allude to our common usage, to what Wordsworth called our 'common indication'. This argument in support of a single, unitary conception of language (with which this chapter opened) unlocks the pen-

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ultimate section of the First Elegy. If the state of the young dead is 'strange' (as the opening of that section insisted), this may be because Lebendige machen alle den Fehler, daB sie zu stark unterscheiden. Engel (sagt man) wiifiten oft nicht, ob sie unter Lebenden gehn oder Toten all the living make the mistake of drawing too sharp a distinction. Angels (they say) are often unable to tell whether they move among living or dead - allowing shades to sharpen into differences, when the poet knows better, because he is reporting on a world of transitions. But the poet is not alone in this. Plato (in the Symposium 21, b, c) appeals in very similar terms to the gradual unfolding of the mystery of love, and in Persian poetry ' it can never be said for certain if the "beloved" being addressed is human or divine. Surely such a figure, which thus mediates for the lover between this world and heaven, deserves above all to be called an Angel.' 13 Yet it takes more than this warning against an ingrained habit for the poet to obey his own injunction. Finding a poetic way round the either/or of 'too sharp distinctions' and contrasting them with images of transition constitutes one of the main sources of strength of Rilke's poetry. And this is so because, far from being only ' a poetic device' or (as hostile critics have claimed) only a ' logocentric' fantasy or trick,14 his search for transitions is a full mimetic device, a making of poetry out of a vital, poetic but not exclusively poetic experience. For the time being, though, the metaphysical perspective prevails. The image of'the eternal torrent' ('ewige Stromung', line 83) is designed to carry all the ages, all the scenes of history, 'through both realms', the 'here' and the 'there', immanence and transcendence, 'drowning out the human voices in both'. There is here no (Hegelian) sense of history as continuity, as sequential development: the verb, 'reiBt durch beide Bereiche...', the torrent 'ripping through both realms ...' is as violent, as emphatically discontinuous as can be. At the same time, though, history is for Rilke a

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synchronic aesthetic scenario, recalling Lessing's nebeneinander, the only historical scenes that matter to him are part of a musee imaginaire.15

The First Elegy ends, as it began, with the question of who there is that can be of help to us; and it answers, first, by pointing once again to ' the early departed' (they don't need us, while we need them), and then to the myth of Linos, its very fragmentariness yielding a particularly suitable motif. For all we know of the young demi-god of that name is that he, son of the Muse Urania, was killed by Apollo after challenging the god to a singing contest - here his death (like the empty space under the stars that was praised early, in line 23 of the Elegy) becomes the source from which music itself is born - music, which 'now charms us and comforts us and helps.' This may be the occasion for emphasising once again (and misquoting Eliot for a last time) that the poetry does matter; that this entire venture is not in support of some philosophical nostrum or of a 'religio intransitiva' 16 - that the poetry is neither that nor its opposite, not a creed (in an age obsessively given to creeds and nostrums of all kinds) but a panorama of images. Another way of putting this is to insist on the equivalent status of the three sources that mattered to Rilke in his mature poetry: the Old Testament and the New, classical mythology, and Nietzsche. It is these three kinds of motifs which, in the Elegies, in the Sonnets to Orpheus and in many other places demonstrate with great poignancy that combination of allusion to scenes and creatures and persons (Biblical, Nietzschean, mythological) which were there long before the poems were ever conceived, and the liberation from those pre-existent donnees for the sake of the new thing that will be his, the poet's own task accomplished. This journey through the First Elegy was intended to show the kind of poems that make up the cycle, and so to intimate something of the kind of experience that will be described-andcreated by the whole (to the extent that there is a whole). The angels of the First appear again at the opening of the Second Elegy (also written in Duino, in late January and early February

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1912), as 'almost death-bearing birds of the soul'. They are contrasted with ' us' who ' breathe ourselves out and away; from ember to ember / yielding a fainter scent'; and then again with ' the lovers', in a passage which intensifies the failure of requited love by questioning their very being. At this point, though, and whatever Rilke's italics may achieve, the reader may wonder how far into ontology the simplest and least emphatic - and most mysterious? - of verbs, the verb 'to be', will carry us. The most moving, most elegiac tone of the entire cycle is reserved for 'the days of Tobias' and his leave-taking (11, lines 3-9); and if indeed there is such a thing as 'pure poetry'-not just uncontentious but free from all intent outside itself and from any 'message' save that of 'listen to me', liberated from conceptualisation at one extreme, practical usefulness at the other, but also from a prosy mixture of the two in the middle, alluding to the illusion of autonomous sensuousness - the Elegy's second stanza, with its portrayal of what the Angels might be and mean to us, is just that:17 Friihe Gegliickte, ihr Verwohnten der Schopfung, Hohenziige, morgenrotliche Grate aller Erschaffung, - Pollen der bliihenden Gottheit, Gelenke des Lichtes, Gange, Treppen, Throne, Raume aus Wesen, Schilde aus Wonne, Tumulte stiirmisch entziickten Gefuhls und plotzlich, einzeln, Spiegel: die die entstromte eigene Schonheit wiederschopfen zuriick in das eigene Antlitz Creation's early successes, they are its spoiled darlings, are the high ranges, summits, dawn-red ridges of all beginning creation; are the pollen of the blossoming godhead, hinges of light, passages, stairways and thrones, spaces of essence, shields of sheer joy, tumults of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, separate mirrors - mirrors which draw their own beauty that streamed out of them, back into their faces again ... ' The hidden, guilty river-god of the blood' is invoked in the Third Elegy (Duino and Paris, 1912): the wild, chthonic urges in us (clearly a variation on the Freudian notion of the ' Id') are

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older than individuation, older and more powerful than a mother's love or the soothing, restraining comfort of the beloved. Rilke's encounter with psychoanalysis (through his friend Lou Andreas-Salome) left him wary and frightened of what it might do to his poetic gift, and the Third Elegy, its beginning written just before the final split-up between Freud and C. G.Jung, is the main witness to the process of how psychic data analytically arrived at might be mythopoeically transmitted. The Fourth (written in wartime Munich, 1915) moves among fragmented images in a world ' where everything / is something other than itself.' The theme of discord - 'But we, wholly intent upon one thing / can already feel the exaction of the other' turns into a first strong critique of inauthentic being: even a marionette, moved by the Angel as we intently watch the stage of the puppet theatre, is a truer thing than the make-believe of 'half-filled masks'; and that scene of make-belief, too, finally gives way to the most poignant evocation of meaninglessness in the whole cycle: Wer zeigt ein Kind, so wie es steht? Wer macht den Kindertod aus grauem Brot, das hart wird, - oder laBt ihn drin im runden Mund so wie den Grops von einem schonen Apfel ? Morder sind leicht einzusehen. Aber dies: den Tod, den ganzen Tod, noch vor dem Leben, so sanft zu enthalten und nicht bos zu sein, ist unbeschreiblich. Who will show a child just as it is? Who will make its death from grey bread that grows hard - or leave it there, inside the round mouth, like the choking core of a sweet apple ? Murderers are easily divined. But this, though: death, the whole of death, - even before life has begun, to hold it all so gently, and not be cross: this is indescribable.

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Nietzsche set out again and again, throughout his years of reflective endeavour, to create, elaborate, defend, and re-create all over again, an aesthetic interpretation of the world and human existence that would go beyond, and replace, the categories of morality, the censoriousness of good and evil. By and large it may be said that he failed. Rilke, on the other hand, unconcerned with system or philosophical consistency, writes, with the strangest ease, ' und nicht bos zu sein [not to be cross] ist unbeschreiblich': is ' indescribable' — is this, then, to be seen as an aesthetic category? It certainly is not a moral one, but more like a child talking about a child. Inside each of these poems continuities of sorts are set up between one group of images and emotions and the next (thus the dead child of the last section of the Fourth is anticipated by a childhood scene, which in turn concludes the angel-andmarionette episode, itself contrasted with ' the dancer' who lives in a bourgeois world of 'half-filled masks'), but all these connections are loose, often casual. In the Fifth Elegy discontinuity itself moves centre stage. Inspired by one of the Saltimbanques compositions of Picasso's 'Pink Period', the Fifth is the last elegy to be written (in the little castle of Muzot, on 14 February 1922), and perhaps for that reason the most immediately accessible. A strong and unenigmatic opening introduces the troupe of travelling artistes as symbols of modern humanity, only ' a little more fleeting than ourselves'. Somewhere, on some 'threadbare carpet that's lost in the cosmos / laid on like a plaster where the suburban / sky had injured the earth', they perform their desolate acrobatic act, 'wrung by an (oh, for whose sake?) never-contented Will'. The contrasts of images and movements that follow are among the most powerful in the Elegies. Rilke is not working to some premeditated scheme — a rose, for him, is not a traditional rose is a rose. 'The spectatorial rose' ('die Rose des Zuschauens') that forms around the Saltimbanques is a complicated artifice made up of the public's distracted attention to an act that is 'fertilised over again / to a sham-fruit of boredom'; and this is starkly contrasted with the Saltimbanques' vertiginous acrobatic act itself, representing a total disjunction between effort

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and achievement, cause and effect. Each member of the troupe is described - ' t h e withered wrinkled old weight-lifter', the athletic young man who is all muscles and energy, the wan, patient girl, the boy who is still learning the trick that one day will be the perfect act but as yet is incomplete, over and over again a painful failure: Du, der mit dem Aufschlag, wie nur Friichte ihn kennen, unreif taglich hundert Mai abfallt vom Baum der gemeinsam erbauten Bewegung ... abfallt und anprallt ans Grab: manchmal, in halber Pause, will dir ein liebes Antlitz entstehn hintiber zu deiner selten zartlichen Mutter; doch an deinen Korper verliert sich, der es flachig verbraucht, das schuchtern kaum versuchte Gesicht... You, that fall with the thud only fruits know, unripe, daily a hundred times from the tree of the movement you've built up together ... fall and rebound on the grave: sometimes, in half-pauses, a tenderness tries to steal out over your face to your seldom tender mother, but scatters over your body, whose surface quickly absorbs the timidly rippling, hardly attempted glance ...

And here, suddenly, the summit of the poem is reached, and one of the summits of the whole cycle. With this 'hardly attempted glance'. But how can a flop, this failure, be a summit? The thud and the fall, the boy's galloping heart and the burning soles of his feet, the involuntary tears that well up in his eyes — all this leaves him no time at all for the most fleeting of smiles in the direction of his mother, and yet: Und dennoch, blindlings, das Lacheln

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Engel! o nimms, pflucks, das kleinbliitige Heilkraut. Schaff eine Vase, verwahrs! Stells unter jene, uns noch nicht offenen Freuden; in lieblicher Urne riihrns mit blumiger, schwungiger Aufschrift: ' Subrisio Sal tat.' And still, all instinctive, that smile Angel! oh take it, pluck it, that small-flowered herb of healing. Bring a vase to preserve it! Set it among those joys not yet open to us: in a graceful urn praise it, with florally bold inscription: ' Subrisio Saltat.'

Purchased with unending pain (physical pain - what else?), the smile is made valid and meaningful by being wrested from failure; is made precious because it is born in a moment of failure and will die, never to return, in the moment of achievement, when the skill that is now still being perfected topples over into the boredom of routine: Und plotzlich in diesem miihsamen Nirgends, plotzlich die unsagliche Stelle, wo sich das reine Zuwenig unbegreiflich verwandelt -, umspringt in jenes leere Zuviel. Wo die vielstellige Rechnung zahlenlos aufgeht. And then, in this wearisome limbo of labour, all of a sudden the ineffable place where the pure too little incomprehensibly changes -, shifts over into that empty too-much Where the many-digited sum resolves into zero. The little smile which, the moment before, celebrated the effort from which it was born, is cancelled out by the achievement of an empty skill - are we really to accept this mere pittance as a last, unquestioned value, to see this Proustian little smile as the poem's high point? That the scene functions as a metonymy of human endeavour is clear enough; but it may

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seem also a rejection of mechanical modernity (anticipating the Seventh) implied at the point where arduous existential endeavour turns into mere arithmetical routine. But with that break between 'pure too-little' and 'empty too-much' goes what many modern poets have attempted (and none that I know with greater success) - the celebration of the modern mode by the poetic embodiment of discontinuity: it is through its function as an antithesis that the scene of the Saltimbanque's smile and its emotional and aesthetic validation ('Subrisio Saltatoris') points to the last part of the Fifth Elegy. We return once more to the lovers, who are now no longer here but part of a there that is not, that cannot be, wholly different. After all, there 'might be' another place ('Platz' - also 'une place' - a square) not a mere showplace in Paris like Madame Lamort's, but such a place as we don't know, and another carpet (not threadbare, this one) on which the lovers would perform ' their daring / lofty figures of heart-flight, / their towers of pleasure, their ladders, / long since, where ground never was, just quiveringly / propped against each other.' Very likely 'they would be' the same hapless lovers who, like the acrobats, had made use of each other but to no purpose, and had failed to achieve the perfection they promised each other. Yet whereas here their act had failed (as, in the disharmony of 'animals not quite properly paired', the sexual act fails), there the act now attains consummation. But this is success of a kind different from that which we know: this (now at last) is success and achievement not followed - no longer followed - by the surfeit of empty routine. (How else, except by the negations of what we know, can absolute, unconditioned, metaphysical things be described ? But these negations, the Eighth Elegy will insist, are 'never nowhere without No', never pure negation.) Inspired by the poet's visit to Karnak in 1911, the Sixth Elegy was composed in three stages (February—March 1912 in Duino, January—February 1913 on Rilke's memorable visit to Ronda, 9 February 1922 in Muzot), and in its final form takes up and expands - above all celebrates - the archetypal figure of the Hero who made his first appearance at the beginning of the

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cycle. Introduced by the elaborate (perhaps over-elaborate) riddle of the secretly flowering fig-tree, both in his destruction (in the First Elegy, lines 41-2) and in ' his rising' (c Sein Aufgang ist Dasein', Sixth, line 22), the Hero uses the world and its contingencies as confirmations of'his Being5. But in this aim of celebrating pure Dasein, his 'Being' in its existential strength, lies the Elegy's difficulty. Once again we ask: what kind of a hero is he? Verbs — pure verbs without objects — are intended to resolve the difficulty that defeats poetry whenever it is made to evoke types, arche- or any other; true, the shadow of a named person, the temple-destroying Samson, crosses the page; for the rest only hints and guesses are provided. A double irony envelops this elegy. For one thing, more than any of the others it is marked by the ontological intention, 'pure Being', and fulfils it less. But many of the shapes intended somehow to portray that 'Being' are non-representational, abstract in the contemporary sense of the word. Although he changed his mind, perhaps more than once, Rilke was hostile to Cubism and to all forms of abstract art; yet there are passages in this Elegy (and in the Eighth) which aim at effects strikingly similar to those of Kokoschka and Klee, with whom he was friendly at the time while remaining sceptical of their ' betrayal' of figurative painting.18 The Seventh Elegy (written on 7 and 26 February 1922 at Muzot) opens and closes in the timeless realm of the lovers and the Angel, but much of it might have been written to resolve the ironic paradox of the Sixth. Here no 'pure Being' is invoked but, on the contrary, some of the scenes are grounded in the history of the contemporary world and its civilisation, and replete with the signs of our damaged, fragmented, alienated experience: '...ever diminishing, / outwardness dwindles. Where once was a lasting house, / up starts a thought-out structure, askew, as fully / at home among concepts as though it still stood in the brain.' The visionary critique of conceptual thinking-'erdachtes Gebild'-which opens here (and which will be continued in the Ninth) speaks very directly to us. We too, coming at the end of Rilke's century, are the agents and

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victims of technology and of the process of abstraction that makes it possible: Jede dumpfe Umkehr der Welt hat solche Enterbte, denen das Friihere nicht und noch nicht das Nachste gehort. Denn auch das Nachste ist weit fur die Menschen. Each torpid turn of the world has such disinherited children, to whom no longer what has been, and not yet what is coming, belongs. For even what is most imminent is remote for mankind. If there is a notion of evil in Rilke's scheme of things (rather than of sorrow and the lament that accompanies it) it is in this (presumably self-inflicted) loss of the outward, sensuous world, but the loss is reparable: not by more abstract thought and planning, but by the inward re-creation of the outward world. And the device of this re-creation is announced triumphantly at the summit of the Seventh Nirgends, Geliebte, wird Welt sein, als innen Nowhere, beloved, shall world be but within19 - for such inward re-creation of the visible helps us ' to preserve the still-recognisable form' of past grandeur. 'Nowhere, beloved, shall world be but within' has become something like a motto of the Elegies, of the poetic process of which they are the outcome, of creativeness itself; and the poet's own comments as well as the concluding section of the Ninth Elegy leave us in no doubt as to the central importance he himself attached to this conception of'the world within'. However willing we may be to yield to the enchantment of Rilke's poetic vision, detached from the specific context of this Elegy the notion of a ' world within' looks very much like a misprision. Poetry can change the contours of our world, it can make an apple fall upwards and reverse the flow of time, but it cannot turn itself into an inward activity, into pure intensity into the opposite of what it is, namely language: a shared, worldly convention. It may well be born in wordless, silent inwardness, but it is not poetry unless and until it becomes that thing outside we call utterance or poetic discourse or a particular kind of shared experience, never merely private and never in the

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mind alone; in sum, that phenomenon which the distinction between 'outward' and 'inward' does little to illuminate or identify. As we have seen, in those stanzas of the Seventh where Rilke deplores the loss of the outward world he speaks really of two kinds of' inner experience': the wrong one — which I have called abstraction, and which is either an end in itself or merely furnishes the blueprints of technology; and the right kind, ' Innerlichkeit' or 'Weltinnenraum', 'inwardness' itself, which (for him as for us) may well be the birthplace of true images and a source of strength, but is not accessible in and by itself except in the process of being made and becoming a part of the outward world, the only world we can share with others. And love too is never 'pure inward feeling', but feeling released into the world, for instance in the form of poetry or the communion between two lovers; or in the silent yet shared act of love itself; or, as with Gaspara Stampa, as the inspiration of poetry. To be sure, utterance is difficult. There is an earlier instance of this difficulty, that part of the Fifth Elegy which speaks of the 'unsayable place' ('inexpressible'? 'ineffable'?) where want turns into surfeit. ' Unsaglich' describes the ' unutterable' place better than the more common 'unsagbar', it defines and defies silent inwardness better than another word (and by that token becomes what it says it cannot be, a descriptive adjective). But there is no reason for thinking that difficulty of utterance is inwardness. And so Rilke's theme cannot be 'praise of pure inwardness'. We recognise the re-creation of the outer world in our thoughts and feelings within as the putative transitory stage (or perhaps, as we saw in the portrait of Eurydice, a necessary stage) on the way to poetry. But as the goal of the poetic process - can this project of a world and a poetry of inwardness be anything but a chimera? One hesitates to press the point: is it likely that the poet will mistake the nature of the task to which he has committed so much of his sentient being, his thought and ambition? (Yet it is just as surprising that no critic seems ever to have questioned the meaning of'inwardness'.) We shall return to these queries when they are raised in the Ninth Elegy.

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The Eighth (written at Muzot on 7 and 8 February 1922) is the only elegy directly influenced by a contemporary philosophical fad, 'openness5, hastily appropriated by Rilke but fortunately not pursued at length. (Incidentally, nothing could be less Nietzschean than that macabre notion of 'openness toward death', fashionable in the second half of the Great War among the literati around Stefan George.20) Rilke's version of 'das Offene' is yet another of his attempts at finding the right word for ' pure Being'. This time it is invoked by way of a negation, as that which is beyond or (as in the Tenth) behind the crowded wasteland of civilisation: unlike the animals, ' we have never, no, not for a single day / pure space before us.' Instead, 'there is always world, / and never nowhere without No... For this is our destiny: to be opposite, and nothing else, and always opposite', or rather, continuing the imagery of the Fourth, 'to be opposed, and nothing else, and always opposed'. Yet then the Elegy introduces 'the wakefully warm beast', from which we are not totally divided for we share with it the memory of the womb, our great sadness in having left it. (Thus we explain ' the dismay of any womb-born thing / that has to fly... zigzagging through the air / like crack through cup, the way the track of a bat / goes rending through the evening's porcelain'.) This is a physical sadness, not consciousness. Consciousness is ours only and not shared by the beasts, and the source of our distraction and disunity with ourselves, for we are 'spectators always, looking at, and never out of, everything... ', this 'everything' which blocks out our view of' the open space': Uns uberfullts. Wir ordnens. Es zerfallt. Wir ordnens wieder und zerfallen selbst. It overwhelms us. We set it up neatly. It falls asunder. We set it up again, and fall asunder ourselves. And the Elegy ends with a view back from the last hill, down into the valley of perpetual leave-taking. 'It overwhelms us ...' Unkindly, a grumpy critic once wrote of Rilke's poetry as 'highbrow baby-talk'. 21 Is this more than a polemical distortion ? The phrase may be taken to point to the many gentle turns in the poetry, as of a child only just finding its

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way among words and the things they designate. But looking more closely at the lines 'It overwhelms us...', we are again reminded of Paul Klee's abstract potsherds, and the gentleness turns out to be anything but childlike: the ' I t ' turns out to be everything; insinuating here (where the ' world of inwardness' is not mentioned) that this everything, this world of ours, is not just in dire need of change and redemption, but that 'it' is no good as it is. By the time we reach the Ninth Elegy (most of it composed in early February 1922), we feel that the elegiac, almost brooding criticism of our modern condition has run its course, and we welcome the poem's change to affirmation. That, to begin with, takes the form of reversing the Nietzschean 'Yea-saying to the eternal recurrence of the same' (as Zarathustra's test of the strength of man's love of life) into an affirmation of the absolute value of the unique experience: Aber weil Hiersein viel ist, und weil uns scheinbar alles das Hiesige braucht, dieses Schwindende, das seltsam uns angeht. Uns, die Schwindendsten. Ein mal: jedes, nur ein mal. Ein mal und nicht mehr. Und wir auch ein mal. Nie wieder. Aber dieses ein mal gewesen zu sein, wenn auch nur ein mal: irdisch gewesen zu sein, scheint nicht widerrufbar. But because being here amounts to so much, because as it seems all this Here and Now, sofleeting,seems to require us and strangely concerns us. Us, the mostfleetingof all. Just once, everything, only for once. Once and no more. And we, too, once. And never again. But this having been once, though only once: having been once of the earth, seems irrevocable. The assent here, it seems, is not to the quality of an experience, but to uniqueness itself. Yet our natural desire is not to let go, to cling to the things and feelings that have weight in our lives, to things which seem - or rather: which had better remain ' unsaglich', ' unsay able', because ... ? More than one passage in Wittgenstein's Tractatus LogicoPhilosophicus speaks of the futility of putting names to grand

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metaphysical themes; and in Philosophical Investigations, §97, he writes about our illusory desire to create some special language which should grasp incomparable essences and profundities; 'whereas if words like "language", "experience", "world" have a use, it must be as humble a one as that of the words "table", "lamp", "door"'. Similarly Rilke: if there is anything ' that we can take across, into the other relation' (for instance, the 'there' of the lovers), then it may turn out not to be any of the things that are 'unsayable', it may not be anything grand and weighty, like 'sufferings' or 'the gravity of life' (the equivalents of Wittgenstein's ' language',' experience',' world') - or again anything like ' the stars...: they had better remain unsayable.' Our lot is humbler than that: Bringt doch der Wanderer auch vom Hange des Bergrands nicht eine Hand voll Erde ins Tal, die alien unsagliche, sondern ein erworbenes Wort, reines, den gelben und blaun Enzian. Sind wir nicht hier, urn zu sagen: Haus, Briicke, Brunnen, Tor, Krug, Obstbaum, Fenster, hochstens: Saule, Turm . . . . aber zu sagen, verstehs, o zu sagen so , wie selber die Dinge niemals innig meinten zu sein. For even the traveller from the edge of the mountain brings down into the valley not a handful of earth - unsayable, to us all but a word he has won, pure, the yellow and blue gentian. Are we, perhaps, here just for saying: House, Bridge, Fountain, Gate, Jug, Fruit tree, Window, at most: Pillar, Tower? . . . . but for saying, remember, oh, for such saying as never the things themselves hoped intensely to be. Scepticism in the face of big words is similarly formulated in Hofmannsthal's Brief des Lord Chandos an Francis Bacon {Letter of

Lord Chandos...) (1902). All these - Hofmannsthal, Wittgenstein, the journalist-philosopher Fritz Mauthner and a host of others - provide parallels, not influences, they all point to that specific Austrian language consciousness bordered by philosophy at one end and the feuilleton at the other; and this nominalism in its watered-down form becomes the fashionable theme of fin-de-siecle Vienna.22 Here in the Ninth the nomin-

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alist move serves to provide a connecting link with the Elegy's second form of affirmation, the affirmation of all that is' sayable' because it is 'here and now' and thus becomes the stuff of poetry. Without these ' things' and their names and the saying of their names we are once more reduced to that bad inwardness which I have called abstraction: exposed in the Seventh, it will be attacked in the Tenth as the insidious malady of our era and named, memorably, 'ein Tun ohne Bild', 'an imageless act'. And so the Elegy moves on to its third kind of affirmation and praise: the re-creation of the world as a world of good, positive inwardness. And so...? The connection seems adventitious. To make it, Rilke briefly returns to the poetic autonomy of 'the things' rehearsed in JSfeue Gedichte: ' the things' need us, need our praise, need to be perpetuated and thus 'saved' in and through our words? our poetry? No: 'in our invisible heart'. And once that strange image looms up and its phrase is uttered, the rest of the incongruous story of inwardness follows. Incongruous, for whatever may be ' in our invisible heart', it cannot be poetry, or praise, or anything other than whatever is private and incommunicable, perhaps a chimera. (And again Wittgenstein's observations on the impossibility of a private language are relevant.)23 Of course, the reader has long since been prepared for the coda: the poet's task and the dearest purchase he is capable of envisaging is the transformation of the world into the invisible: Erde! unsichtbar! Was, wenn Verwandlung nicht, ist dein drangender Auftrag? Earth! invisible! What, if not transformation, is your urgent command ? But we had expected it to be a poetic act, of which only poetry could say that it isn't nothing, whereas poetry cannot say that without contradicting its very nature, because at this point, in inwardness, there is no poetry, the poetry no longer matters. It's not that one would wish to question the meaningfulness of all that the metaphors of 'within' and 'without' and the transitions between them help us to say about human ex-

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perience; nor are we left in any doubt about what poets and others mean when they speak of'the heart' or 'the soul' or (as Rilke does) of'Weltinnenraum', 'the world's inward space' as the source of poetry. Again, in the portrait of Orpheus, ' the invisible within' appears as the transitory stage on the way to the poet's songs of praise; and in the lovely tribute to his Polish translator Rilke writes in praise of the ' Unsayable' as the foil 'behind all tongues', from which 'greatness reaches us in the forms we delight in': Gliicklich, die wissen, daB hinter alien Sprachen das Unsagliche steht; daB, von dort her, ins Wohlgefallen GroBe zu uns herubergeht! ( W n , p. 259) Happy they who know that behind all languages still the unsayable lies; that from that place greatness reaches us in the forms we delight in!

All these are recognisable ways of situating poetry in the creative process. But if inwardness (the transformation of the visible world into the invisible) is the source of poetry, it cannot be its goal, and if that transformation (the earth's 'urgent command') has any meaning at all, it looks very much like the annihilation, gentle but radical, of the world we know. (In a similar vein of high-minded nihilism Wittgenstein writes, in the Tractatus 6.41:' In the world everything is as it is and everything happens as it happens. In it there is no value - and if there were, it would be of no value.') Can that be Rilke's theme? Certainly, we can offer antecedents from the history of German Romanticism's celebrations of inwardness, and we can go further back, to Kant's categorical imperative and Luther's exaltation of spirituality over the material world - but all these are mainstays of a German-Protestant tradition that has little to do with Rilke's own Bohemian-Austrian-Catholic background. If, moving forward from Novalis's paeans to inwardness, we note the parallel with Hegel's exaltation of 'Geist' and its history, our argument runs into the further difficulty of having

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to skate round the Nietzschean influence, vital to Rilke in many ways but emphatically anti-Hegelian in all those attacks of Nietzsche's in which he speaks of'our inner world'as'/flpartie honteuse of our constitution',24 in his rumbustious sallies against the German 'barbarians of inwardness', and the like. Anyway, antecedents and other such creatures from the history of ideas may explain changes but don't resolve contradictions; nor do they help us to answer the question whether Rilke was aware of what the goal of inwardness implied for his poetry; aware that poetry itself would emerge as the price of the dearest purchase of all. The Tenth and last Elegy could hardly be more emphatic in asserting that the poetry does matter. The exalted note of its first twelve lines belongs unmistakably to the original inspiration of Duino in January—February 1912, the rest was composed on 11 February 1922. Powerfully, the Elegy opens in the manner of a counterpoint to the opening of the First, with an almost classical apostrophe - to the poet's Muse? to Fate? There is little difference between them, his Muse is his Fate: DaB ich dereinst, an dem Ausgang der grimmigen Einsicht, Jubel und Ruhm aufsinge ^wstimmenden Engeln. Would that, emerging one day from this harrowing insight, I may burst into jubilant praise to the assenting Angels. The antitheses expressed in the prefixes (which I have emphasised) reinforce the antithesis that dominates the opening : the ' grim insight' is into the life recreated in the Elegies and embodied for instance in that 'pure, narrow, human strip of orchard, contained between river and rock' that was apostrophised at the end of the Second Elegy (lines 74f.)- And what this insight discloses is to be the object of'jubilation and praise' even though it is 'harrowing'? No, because it is so. DaB von den klargeschlagenen Hammern des Herzens keiner versage an weichen, zweifelnden oder reiBenden Saiten. Let not one of the clear-struck keys of my heart fail to resound from strings slackened or weakened or rent.

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This seems to be one of those passages where 'normal' expectations are flouted. Why praise the harrowing sorrows? For Rilke, jubilation and praise - that is, poetry - are ways of using suffering and making it fertile: that, certainly, is what this last Elegy is designed to affirm 'for us, spendthrifts of sorrows' (line 10). This of course is a thought already encountered more than once, in the Elegies (First, lines 49-50), and throughout the literary domain of'the dear purchase'. In a less lyrical or less sentimental mode this thought underlies the Nietzschean device ofamorfati: true human identity and its aesthetic justification are to be founded in an ' assent regardless ...', in our resoluteness to make our way per aspera adastra. With Nietzsche this sequence of ideas had an unmistakable (and, as it turned out, unavoidable) moral drift: it remained a 'justification'. Not so with Rilke: his notion of what is and what is not' real' suspends the rule of good and evil, it offers to replace evil with the inauthentic, with what is not itself but another thing. That, roughly, describes the journey traced here, and the report of this journey from the inauthentic to ' the Real' will give this Elegy a more distinct structure than any other. But of course the difference between Nietzsche and Rilke lies above all in the poetry. We cannot abstract the process of 'replacing evil by inauthenticity' except at the price of the poetry - except, that is, at the price of ignoring the description of'die Klagen' ('the Sorrows'); which is really no description at all but a marvellous, Picasso-like embodiment and impersonation of them in space and time, full of shapes that have only to be named to become instantly familiar and meaningful though they never were on land or sea; hard to translate to be sure, but giving to ' Sorrows' or ' Laments' a life that leaves our ' normal' responses lifeless and prim: Wir, Vergeuder der Schmerzen. Wie wir sie absehn voraus, in die traurige Dauer, ob sie nicht enden vielleicht. Sie aber sind ja unser winterwahriges Laub, unser dunkeles Sinngrun, eine der Zeiten des heimlichen Jahres -, nicht nur Zeit -, sind Stelle, Siedelung, Lager, Boden, Wohnort.

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We spendthrifts of sorrows! How we, calculating the time of sad endurance, try to foresee their end! Whereas they - they are our foliage, winter-enduring, our sombre-dark evergreen, one of the seasons of our own inward year: not only season - they are place, habitation, encampment, soil, our dwelling. (Green - the metallic green silk blouse of the girl among the Saltimbanques, the laurel's green that is ' a little darker than the other, surrounding green' (vi, line 2), and now 'dunkeles Sinngrun', an archaic variation on 'Immergnin', periwinkle is one of the few colours that recur in the Elegies.) This Dantesque journey starts in the desolate 'City of Pain', a necropolis full of the swaggering monuments and gilded fuss which are a pretext for commemorating death by denying it, with a ' market of comfort' next to ' the church bought readymade ... disenchanted and shut, like the Post on a Sunday.' From there the journey leads through the milling and throbbing edges of the fair with its swings and ' booths that can please the most curious tastes', like the one 'for adults only': Fur Erwachsene aber ist noch besonders zu sehn, wie das Geld sich vermehrt, anatomisch, nicht zur Belustigung nur: der Geschlechtsteil des Gelds, alles, das Ganze, der Vorgang -, das unterrichtet und macht fruchtbar For Adults Only! Not to be missed! The Sex-Life and Breeding of Money! Scientific! No Mere Amusement! Money's Organs on View, Nothing Concealed! The whole process! Instructive and cures Infertility! Rilke's fairground scenario contains some of the very few sharp, satirical thrusts to be found in his work, reminiscent of Eliot's 'Waste Land' and 'Triumphal March', and Pound's 'Usura' poems. But when the journey continues, it follows through a

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contrasting movement unlike anything aimed at by Eliot or Pound. The contrast the Elegy now sets up could hardly be more explicit: the fairground ends abruptly, with a few hoardings ' plastered with placards for " Deathless " ' (a brand of beer), and then, . . . . Oh aber gleich darliber hinaus, hinter der letzten Planke, beklebt mit Plakaten des ' Todlos' gleich im Riicken der Planke, gleich dahinter, ists wirklich. . . . . Oh, but just beyond it, behind the last hoarding, plastered with placards for 'Deathless', just at the back of the hoardings, just behind them, it's real. Those countless images and scenes of' the Real' with which the literature of the era abounds seem all concentrated in this sudden movement that takes us beyond, behind our world of distracting artifices and evasions - yes, but what is there beyond this world? Another world? Even here the poetry is intent on recording not divisions (against which it warned in the First Elegy, lines 80-1) but transitions: 'just at the back of the hoardings' begins a landscape that seems at first sight not much different from the fairground we are leaving, except that it is poorer, more serious. There, on a pitiful, half-bare patch of grass, children are playing, lovers, anxiously holding each other, are seeking solitude, dogs follow their nature ... It comes to us that we already know the sudden movement which discloses all this from the Fifth Elegy: it is the transition from surfeit and empty routine - ' das leere Zuviel' - of the fairground to the dearth and poverty, 'das reine Zuwenig' ('the pure too-little') of all that is beyond its borders. With this transition, the poem now sets out on the next, the ' real' stages of the journey. This new beginning is utterly sober and povertystricken, for poverty - ' a great lustre from within' - was once part of Rilke's ' Franciscan' pose and survives here as a value by way of contrast with ' the gilded fuss' and the other pointless possessions of the City of Pain.

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But whose journey is this? We hardly know — so far all we have met were some adults inspecting the organs of Money, a marksman in the shooting-booth, a few people drinking beer, nobody; then children, the lovers. And then there is, suddenly, 'der Jungling', 'a young man', perhaps in love with a girl who is native to this increasingly strange land,' eine junge Klage',' a youthful Lament'. He follows her briefly, but soon - after all, what is she to him? - turns back impatiently. It is the young dead who follow her, into the landscape we are already familiar with from the opening stanza of'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes'. Individuation is at a bare minimum. Yet here, once more, is the young man (the same one?) led by the Lament through the landscape of transitions: Wir waren, sagt sie, ein groBes Geschlecht, einmal, wir Klagen. Die Vater trieben den Bergbau dort in dem groBen Gebirg; bei Menschen findest du manchmal ein Stuck geschliffenes Urleid oder, aus altem Vulkan, schlackig versteinerten Zorn. Ja, das stammte von dort. Einst waren wir reich. We were once, she says, a powerful race, we Lamentations. Our fathers worked the mines in that mountain-range: among men you will find fragments of original pain our fathers once polished, or of drossy petrified rage from some old volcano. Yes, those things were ours. Once we were prosperous people.

This astonishing landscape - ' die weite Landschaft der Klag e n ' - w i t h its 'tall tear trees', 'flowering Sadness (known to the living only as tender foliage)' and ' pasturing herds of Grief intimates a transcendence, but of what kind? Is it anything but poetic, an aesthetic fiction? Again and again the poetry leads us to a point where only it seems to matter (and thus away from that ' pure inwardness' where it mattered not at all). And at these points (which are like the neck of an hourglass) the poet's creativity is asserted as the pattern and paradigm of all that is of value in our world, and all other kinds of experience are ignored. This happens most obviously in those many contexts in which the self-reflective, 'transparent' or

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'Orphic' lexis, the lexis of'praise', 'song', 'poem', 'voice', ' inscription' and the like, dominates the verse. Or again it is the explicitness of the mythopoeic allusions, as at line i oo die Quelle der Freude. In Ehrfurcht nennt sie sie, sagt: ' Bei den Menschen ist sie ein tragender Strom.' the source of Joy. With awe she names it, says, 'Among men it is a great river that bears them along.' - the naming and saying and comparing - that foregrounds the poetic process and thematises it. And when, toward the end of the Elegy, the young man's guide draws his attention to 'the new constellations of the Land of Pain' (with their almost surrealist appellations:' the Staff',' the Rider',' Fruit-garland', 'the Burning Book', and many more), we are left in no doubt about the cosmic dimension - ' the scale of the stars' - on to which the process of naming has been projected. Of course, the naming has run through the poems from the beginning, but now, as we reach the metaphysical summit of our journey through them, we can no longer ignore it. Which critics are we to believe: those who accept the self-referential, 'poetry about poetry' view of the Elegies (and by extension of Rilke's later poetry generally) as valid and constitutive of their greatness and value; those who agree that this interpretation is valid but by the same token renders the poetry esoteric and of little value; or those who think of the poetic activity enacted in the poems as a metonymy of many other kinds of human creativity? A reading of the next stage of the journey we have been following may help to decide the issue. Past the realm of the Sibyls and Warners, the young man and his guide now come to the moonlit Sphinx with his double crown of the two Egyptian kingdoms: Und sie staunen dem kronlichen Haupt, das fur immer schweigend, der Menschen Gesicht auf die Waage der Sterne gelegt. And they gaze in wonder at the crowned head that, eternally silent, has placed the human face on the scales of the stars.

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The complicated image that follows (another intricate construct difficult to unravel) initiates 'the one recently dead' into his new state, this strangest of ceremonies being brought about by a mere glance from his guide, the Lament: Nicht erfaflt es sein Blick, im Friihtod schwindelnd. Aber ihr Schaun hinter dem Pschent-Rand hervor, scheucht es die Eule. Und sie, streifend im langsamen Abstrich die Wange entlang, jene der reifsten Rundung, zeichnet weich in das neue Totengehor, iiber ein doppelt aufgeschlagenes Blatt, den unbeschreiblichen UmriB. His sight, still dazed with his early death, cannot grasp it. But her gaze frightens an owl from behind the rim of the crown. And the bird, brushing, in slow down-skimming, along the ripest curve of the Sphinx's cheek, faintly inscribes in his new death-born hearing, on the double page of an opened book, the indescribable outline. Perhaps this is the book of life and death, opened at the double page which contains two copies of the same drawing symmetrically arranged, one for each state, its outline 'indescribable5 yet at least named. In the early Spring of 1911 Rilke spent seven weeks in Egypt.25 Together with the El Greco-like vision of Toledo, his nocturnal visit to the Sphinx at Gizeh remained one of the strongest sensory experiences of his life, and his re-creation of it here is proof of his great mastery of the art of seeing, which he assiduously cultivated. He recalls the visit in a letter of 1 February 1914 to 'Benvenuta', the young pianist Magda von Hattingberg. Like so many of Rilke's letters, this is really a brouillon, a. breathless try-out of the poetry, which in no way impairs its charm and appropriateness as a personal communication (though it does not betray the fact that Rilke and Benvenuta were having a love affair at the time). The letter

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anticipates briefly the imagery of the initiation ceremony undergone by the newly-dead, but above all it helps to elucidate and strengthen the earlier image o f the scales of the stars'. The letter describes how Rilke was lying alone on a sloping sand dune during a cold desert night, facing the Sphinx and behind it the rising, almost blinding full moon: You too will remember having experienced this: that the view of a landscape, of the sea or of a great starry night fills us with an assurance of connections and accords which we could not survey as a whole — [' Zusammenhange und Einverstandnisse ... die wir nicht zu iiberschauen vermochten': this is much more sober than Rilke's usual appeal to the 'indescribable' nature of the experience] - this is what I experienced in the highest degree, here a configuration [ein Gebild] rose up and turned toward the sky; a structure on which millennia had wrought no change except a little contemptible decay; and - most astonishing of all - this thing bore human features (the deeply familiar features of a human face), and they proved sufficient to its sublime situation. Oh my dear friend, these, these things which we hold out alternately into Fate and into our hands - they must be capable of meaning greatness if their form can endure in such surroundings! The experience of seeing the flight of the owl then follows. Recognition of a human meaning that has been tested and has proved its worth in such solemn and exacting surroundings - this is what is intended by the elliptical image of the human face - the Sphinx's face - ' being placed on the scales of the stars'. This image, together with the rich meaning it connotes, helps to resolve the interpretative controversy I have mentioned. In a sense it is true to say that it too is a celebration of poetry, since poetry is the activity which retraces and names the scene and interprets it as a testing. However,' the configuration' central to the scene is not a poem but, emphatically, the likeness of a human face; and it is this face, a little the worse for the erosion wrought by time (there is always something moving about these little touches amidst the grandeur of Rilke's poetic turns), that is proclaimed worthy of such surroundings, the most sublime the Elegies have to show.

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There is no call for generalisation about the Elegies as a whole. At least, no more than to say that, returning to the indictment of 'self-referentiality', what is being weighed in this scene with the Sphinx - weighed and found to be weighty enough - is not poetry but the human condition itself. True, the journey continues, for the young man alone, into the Mountains of Primal Grief (it is Nietzsche's word, 'Urleid', from The Birth of Tragedy, that names them), where 'his steps no longer resound as their sound is lost in a soundless last Fate'; but the image of the Sphinx - ' that, surely, seems irrevocable ...' And yet this is not quite the end. The very last lines of the Elegy and of the cycle return to the question implied in several earlier scenes, implied in all metaphysical poetry but here pressed to the point of explicit wording - the question of how poetry is to convey the great transition. The conditional mode with which the First Elegy began concludes the Tenth, but the realm of images to which it now directs us could hardly be more different, less angelic, more humble: Aber erweckten sie uns, die unendlich Toten, ein Gleichnis, siehe, sie zeigten vielleicht auf die Katzchen der leeren Hasel, die hangenden, oder meinten den Regen, der fallt auf dunkles Erdreich im Friihling. But if they, the endlessly dead, were to offer us terms of comparison, see, they would point perhaps to the catkins that hang downwards on leafless hazels, or they might show us the rain, as it falls on the dark realm of earth in the Spring. Symbols, then, the dead might wish to awaken within us - an attempt to ensure that we have understood them and their state. And even now the poet - a German poet after all - cannot let go: Und wir, die an steigendes Gliick denken, empfanden die Running, die uns beinah bestiirzt, wenn ein Gliickliches/#///. And we, who think of happy fortune asrising,might feel the emotion that almost dismays us, seeing happiness fall.

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GOTTFRIED BENN: TOXIC SPHERES Among the poetic themes celebrated in the Duino Elegies is the metaphysical dimension of language, manifested in different ways; one is the poet's creation of meaning and coherence by his giving of names. In this activity no dialogue is involved. On the contrary: there are passages in Rilke's cycle where fullness of poetic achievement is seen in the gentle destruction of the Other, the Opposite; thus when Eurydice's return to the upper world is abandoned, at the brightly-lit end of the dark path in Hades, there stands ... 'Who?' In Rilke's poetry at all events, this function of language as naming, as the creative poetic act, is not threatened by any 'crisis of communication'; words like 'the inexpressible', 'the unsayable' are culled from a sphere beyond the social. Naming is a part of the poet's soliloquy, the expression (as T. S. Eliot puts it, quoting Gottfried Benn) of'an obscure impulse ... [The poet] is not concerned whether anybody else will ever listen to [his words] or not, or whether anybody will ever understand them if he does.' 26 In that sense it is distinct from language as communication, as dialogue between an ' I ' and a 'You'. But there is a third, a simpler level still, language as talk: words perhaps signifying what they say, perhaps not, yielding neither the assurance of truth nor the suspicion of deceit. The only valid assurance such basic words provide is that they were uttered, that there is someone to utter them: Kommt, reden wir zusammen, wer redet, ist nicht tot. Come, let us talk together, whoever talks is not dead. Of those addressed, great things may on occasion be predicated: that they form a community, a nation, a companionship of valour or race, or a tradition. Nothing like this is mentioned here, in the rock-bottom, ' clear-felled' area of this poem, only an almost beseeching 'Kommt...' It is a warm yet unsentimental invocation of others not named, whose only characteristic is that they are not beyond the reach of this word, 'Kommt...', which calls to them.

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Emphatically, this is a post-1945 poem: it comes from a late collection of Gottfried Benn's, Apreslude (1955),27 and is one of several attempts to gain this simplest level of language and thus to banish the isolation of soliloquy. The poem doesn't stay at this level, perhaps it cannot: the words - the talk - will sooner or later be about something. But it begins and ends with that simple, irreducible mention of words that imply hardly anything beyond the assurance of having been uttered by the living. Hardly anything? It is worth noting that even here a complex generalisation is involved, that in this second line, 'whoever talks ...', a community and a communion are implied through the proverb-like form. The scene is now being set in a landscape of scorched earth: Kommt, reden wir zusammen, wer redet, ist nicht tot, es ziingeln doch die Flammen schon sehr um unsere Not. Come, let us talk together, whoever talks is not dead, theflamesare licking round us in our extremity. No dramatic summoning in the face of danger, only a brief exclamation, 'doch', intimating something like 'Hurry up!', against an almost childlike 'schon sehr'('to be sure'). 'Talk' here is not contemptuous but humble and lacklustre; whatever this talk is about, it matters little: Kommt, sagen wir: die Blauen, kommt, sagen wir: das Rot, wir horen, lauschen, schauen wer redet, ist nicht tot. Come, let us say: the blue ones, come, let us say: the red, we look and hear and listen, whoever talks is not dead. Again, not much more than the act of naming at a prosy level is asserted, as though even it were not assured:' Come, let us say just this!', but a third thing is named, and with that naming

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goes an enumeration of those simple, irreducible activities by which the self is identified as human, and a basic community is established, and immediately denied in what follows: Allein in deiner Wiiste in deinem Gobigraun du einsamst, keine Buste, kein Zwiespruch, keine Fraun ... Alone in your bare desert, in your Gobi desert of dread, no dialogue, no women, no marble bust, alone ...

- and no syntax that would create meaning either. This is the most difficult stanza to translate, and also the weakest: the Gobi desert would, in an English poem, figure as no more than a flat, conventional image, in German it is partly rescued from banality by the treble meaning of' graun' - ' grey' or ' greying', ' dread' and ' daybreak'; while ' einsamst' may be a superlative of 'solitary' or, more likely, the second-person singular of a made-up verb, 'einsamen', meaning something like 'to wither away in solitude5; and my rendering of 'Buste' as 'marble bust', designed to forestall an erotic pun, remains funnypeculiar. And yet the weakness of the stanza is redeemed by the uncompromising parataxis. This absolute refusal to create discursive linear meaning through wrought syntax is the most obvious of Benn's anti-bourgeois expressionist devices: it is his most influential bequest to the poets and writers after 1945. und schon so nah den Klippen, du kennst dein schwaches Boot kommt, offnet doch die Lippen, wer redet, ist nicht tot. nearing the cliffs so quickly, you know your frail craft well — come, open your lips, whoever talks is not dead.

In this last stanza the order of the two particles used in the first ('doch: schon' - for Stefan George and his purists they are the mark of poetic imprecision) is reversed. The one ('schon')

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is attached to and stresses the danger of shipwreck, the other ('doch') repeats the imploring gesture of the first stanza. Only to this extent is the syntax allowed to contribute to the structure and meaning of the poem. At the end of it the poet is content with less than uttered words - with a mere movement of the lips. It is a poem by Benn, the great survivor, intent on affirming that something - not truth or falsehood, but utterance at all events - has survived. Born in 1886 of a French Huguenot mother and a Prussian Lutheran parson, he published his first poems at the age of twenty-six, in 1912, and his last volume came out in 1958, two years after his death.28 He studied medicine and became a specialist in venereal and skin-diseases, practising in a quiet middle-class district in south-west Berlin from 1917 (when he returned from the war) until 1935. Among his few medical publications is a paper on the side-effects of inoculation against gonorrhoea. Benn's literary career begins with a big bang: the poems of his first collection, Morgue (1912), draw directly on the young consultant's hospital experience. Many of them, such as 'Little Aster' ('tucked into a drowned drayman's breast cavity / between the cotton wads / as he was being sewn up again') or ' Man and Woman Walk Through the Cancer Ward' became almost instantly famous or notorious for their shock tactics, their sensational, occasionally ribald imagery. In a review of that year the poet Ernst Stadler29 says that Benn's 'desperate revolt against the tragedy of life and monstrous insensateness of nature' masquerades as 'detached objectivity'; and this, ' unbeteiligte Sachlichkeit', is the main impression they seek to evoke. Here are attacks, sustained by very nearly intolerable details of pathology, on the reader's sight and smell and touch, on every bourgeois taboo, sentiment and aspiration. Outrageous, certainly, but also outraged: that visit to the cancer ward calls up details of merely physical existence, often drugged and beyond the reach of pain, to contrast them with the cliches of romantic love. Bloodstained and morbid, the sarcasm and irony are a poet's protective devices, no doubt - yet these are

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poems nevertheless, by which I mean structures which don't merely 'talk about' suffering, but embody and convey what they are intended to protect from. Something of this shocktactic diction runs through most of Benn's poetic oeuvre, and it is relevant to add that this element - avant-garde, expressionist, radically modernist - represents what the National Socialist literary bosses will eventually come to regard as decadent and un-German, typifying 'entartete Kunst' (degenerate art) in literature, like the work of Otto Dix and George Grosz in painting and that of Ernst Barlach in sculpture. Benn served for three periods - a total of twelve years - in the army as medical officer, and in this capacity attended the execution of Edith Cavell in Schaerbeck, a suburb of Brussels, in October 1915. Of the months following the execution he will write many years later (probably in 1943): whatever I wrote by way of literature - except the Morgue poems I wrote in that Spring 1916 in Brussels. I was appointed doctor in a hospital for prostitutes - a wholly isolated post, living in a requisitioned house, eleven rooms, all alone with my batman, hospital duties very light, allowed to go out in mufti, attached to nothing and nobody, hardly understood the language; long walks through the streets of the city, strange lot of people; peculiar spring, three incomparable months, what did the heavy daily shelling from the Yser river amount to, life swung to and fro in a sphere of silence and abandonment, I lived on the borderline where Being recedes and the Self begins. I often recall those weeks; they were life, they will never come back again, everything else was a dead loss.30 The series of prose sketches written during those days in Brussels31 present a thinly disguised self-portrait under the name of' Dr Werff Ronne'. The young medical officer at the centre of these sketches (with more than 2,000 dissections behind him) is paralysed by his infinite disgust with and contempt for the company of bored and boring profiteers in uniform, their endless strings of cliches, their talk confined to prostitutes, V.D. and black market deals. It is a portrait of complete, solipsistic isolation in a world in which no ' moral laws', no basic decencies rule, in which there is no authority to appeal to, no assurance to hope for: and no lesson - political or any other - is drawn from

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this situation. The aim, obviously, is pure description - the more merciless the better - yet that is not quite all. Years later, in one of his political apologias of 1934, he recalls: In war and in peace, in the front line and at the base, as officer and doctor, among con-men and excellencies, before padded cells and prison cells, at bedsides and coffins, in triumph and decay, I was never free from the trance-like feeling that this was a reality that did not exist. But then, he continues, A sort of inner concentration ensued, setting secret spheres in motion, and all that was individual lapsed, and a primordial layer rose up, intoxicated, rich in images and Pan-like ...32

Superadded to the portrait of 'Dr Ronne' is a wild, panic-filled vocabulary combining psychological, philosophical and worldhistorical elements and pointing to the poems in Morgue and much that will follow. There is a striking contrast between the detailed report about the execution of Nurse Cavell which Benn wrote for a newspaper in the role of medical expert, and the description of life in the officers' mess in German-occupied Brussels - a contrast, indeed a contradiction, which is characteristic of the man, the poet and the age. Benn's article on Nurse CavelPs execution is cast in the cool, matter-of-fact, 'scientific' language of a forensic report.33 The article is intended to dispel any rumours that the execution was in any way irregular or unusual; neither the moral nor the legal aspect of the event is discussed, Nurse CavelPs 'patriotism' is briefly mentioned but not dwelt on. (Benn praises her 'poise and bearing' on a later occasion.)34 This style of a routine report is one Benn will use over and over again. There is nothing remarkable about it, ' poetic effects' of any kind are absent. In that report, then, and in scores of articles, autobiographical writings, comments and private letters there is little to suggest any disturbance in the writer's ability to experience 'reality', to suggest that the time is out of joint and that 'the hidebound world of tradition' is finished and done with. The poet who celebrates Ophelia's death by evoking her rat-infested

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corpse lives the exhausting and not particularly satisfying life of a VD specialist with research ambitions (years before penicillin, in tedious disputes with litigious health insurance companies), never free from financial worries ('What sort of a life is this, this daily round of quackery, dispensing doubtful ointments and injections, having to be polite to all those pigs, one's patients ...'), 3 5 writing his poetry, ambitious metaphysico-anarchic prose, a few stories without story, some literary journalism and all this in his spare time. In 1912, a love affair with Else Lasker-Schiiler (the most extravagantly bohemian of contemporary women poets, celebrating her Jewish origins in Hebrew and oriental themes) introduced him briefly to the expressionist coterie of the Cafe des Westens, yet when in 1917 he settled in Berlin, he preferred to take his meals in the anonymity of the local Weinhaus. He was what a later generation called ' kontaktarm' — not very sociable, thrice married, twice widowed, one daughter, without close friends except one, a Bremen patrician merchant with whom he conducts a formalised correspondence over many years — ' What sort of a life is this...?' This contradiction between a frequently mentioned ' loss of reality' and a sort of metaphysical despair on the one hand, and an apparently unimpaired capacity for conventional, biirgerlich assessments of the events of daily life ('Father's funeral in Mohrin was wonderfully peaceful and quiet. The coffin lay in state in the church, covered with beautiful wreaths') 36 is characteristic of a whole literary generation. The late twenties and the last years of the Weimar Republic abounded in 'world-historical' or 'cosmological' manifestos. Inspired by Nietzsche, by Spengler's Decline of the West or Moeller van den Bruck's influential The Third Reich (1923), literature of the time abounds in self-fulfilling diagnoses of' the contemporary geistig situation' by Benn, Ernst Jiinger and his brother Friedrich Georg, by Hermann Broch, by Husserl, Jaspers and Heidegger. The writers differ in many details of argument and tone — some are solemn and sententious, some ironical or sarcastic (Tucholsky), or satirical (Kraus); some (like Freud) claim a 'scientific' status for their findings, others

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again (like Benn) are unashamedly if not joyfully anarchic and chaotic. What these gravediggers of the Republic all share, mostly under the banner of'the Conservative Revolution', is the absoluteness of the changes they announce, the radical break with the past. Sometimes the rejections of traditional loyalties are triumphant, sometimes the loss of values and accepted decencies is viewed regretfully; and the ' prophecies' are based on immense generalisations and often argued in all but impenetrable abstractions. But no less remarkable is the fact that while these men were prophesying ' the decline' of the West and the 'dissolution' of its 'values' and waiting impatiently for these things to happen, they were living the humdrum, more or less comfortable lives of bourgeois professionals - suffering from the country's economic decline but overcoming its consequences much more quickly than most of those around them, following the biirgerlich conventions and appealing to the very values they pronounced outmoded and dead, or at least inauthentic. Although biirgerlich morality constitutes the only value to which he spontaneously appeals, Benn is the poet above all others who will celebrate this dissolution and decline (in the 1920s), lose his nerve and try to resolve the contradiction by projecting the 'as if of poetry into politics (in 1933-4), and then, terrified out of politics, return to the 'as if of poetry and transfix in it the most transient segment of the modern world. In the late 1920s Benn had quarrelled with the vanguard of Marxist literati - Brecht, Johannes R. Becher, Egon Erwin Kisch — opposing to their criticism of his poetry a non-political, elaborately aesthetic attitude. Part of the contemporary Marxist line on literature was a radical denial of the artist's non-political status and hence the identification of ' aestheticism' with fascism. To the communists and those who (like Brecht) were close to them, Benn's provocative attacks on the literature of political commitment appeared as a proof of his reactionary attitude. Then, in February 1932, on the recommendation of Heinrich Mann, Thomas's activist socialist brother, Benn was elected into the recently founded poetry section of the Berlin Academy of the Arts; its president (soon to be forced to resign

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for ' racial' reasons) was Berlin's greatest painter, Max Liebermann, a conservative in art and a patrician liberal in everything else. Very soon Benn, a shy, private person without organisational experience of any kind, with the social skills of a recluse and the politics of a lamplighter, found himself honoured with all sorts of functions and posts; after Hitler's accession to power on 30 January 1933, Benn thus acquired an influential position overnight. There now began a process of politicisation which, in the Academy as in every other cultural institution in the country, led to a relentless polarisation; now the non-political attitude was not merely anathematised by pamphlet and broadsheet (as it had been by the Left) but countered by a propaganda wave of unknown ferocity. Those who either opposed the new regime or were rejected by it on political or racial grounds faced suspension from office, persecution, exile and, by June 1933, examination by the Gestapo and torture as well as death in the concentration camps. Could those willing to collaborate be forced to trumpet their allegiance? It is a moot point which in Benn's case doesn't arise. He was eager to place his reputation in the service of the new state, not only as the most important poet of his generation but with the additional ornament of his various honorific functions. To this end he needed to reinterpret his own poetry in terms of the new ideology, and he did that too. The contradiction seemed resolved: a more or less rational advocacy of the politics and aesthetics of irrationalism would do the trick. On 24 April 1933 Benn delivered his ' Manifesto' on Radio Berlin, an address on 'The New State and the Intellectuals', accusing the Left of their intellectual failure and moral defect in not seeing [in the new 'Movement'] its great readiness for sacrifice and for loss of the Self in favour of Totality, the State, Race, Immanence; its failure to see the turning away from the economic to the mythical collective - its failure to see in all this the greater anthropological depth ... History doesn't proceed democratically but in an elemental manner ... It doesn't put matters to the vote but places the new biological type in the vanguard, history knows no other method ... And then this new biological type acts, and mostly such movements are directed against a society which creates no new criteria, no transcendent justice - does such a society deserve anything other than a yoke and a new law ? ...

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History is rich in combinations of displays of pharaonic power and culture; the song that celebrates them revolves like the starry sky, today's verse sings of Freedom of the Spirit which must be sacrificed - for whom? Answer: for the State!37

And when one of his erstwhile admirers, Thomas Mann's son Klaus, writes from his exile on the Cote d'Azur38 to protest against Benn's readiness to serve the barbarians, he accuses all those who have left the country of betraying 'the Nation's heroism', of avoiding 'the heroic choice'. And as for his own past, to which Klaus Mann had appealed, the City, industrialism, intellectualism, all these shadows which the age threw across my thoughts, forces of the century which I faced in my production - there are moments when this entire tortured life sinks into the abyss and nothing is left but the plain, the expanse, the seasons, the earth, simple words - : das Volk.39 (And while this great heroic legend of the expressionist poet as the spokesman of Fiihrer and Volk and of' the Brown Hordes' was being constructed in the German press and radio, Dr G. Benn was writing anxious letters to get the genealogical authorities of the Reich to help him refute all the allegations that' Benn' was a Jewish name, and declare that' Durkheimer Benn' was and always had been a pure Aryan vineyard.40) Most of Benn's expository prose, not only of those two years, 1933-4, *s hard to take, but so is that of many of his contemporaries. How he must have wished to identify with his portrait of Chopin: Nicht sehr ergiebig im Gesprach, Ansichten waren nicht seine Starke, Ansichten reden drum herum, wenn Delacroix Theorien entwickelte, wurde er unruhig, er seinerseits konnte die Notturnos nicht begriinden.41 Not very forthcoming in conversation Views of things weren't his strong point, Views talk around things, when Delacroix spun his theories he grew restless, he on his part could give no reasons for the Nocturnes.

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His prose was certainly chock-a-block with views that talked around things, endlessly; including the claim (which must have offended Klaus Mann more than the rest of those blush-making explanations) that he, Benn, hadn't really changed, that he had always been a celebrant of the chthonic, irrational, anti-rational - that he had always been on the Dionysian side of the Nietzschean dichotomy.42 Yet this is not so very far from the truth. His views were cruder, wilder and richer - and in some ways more interesting - than Thomas Mann's ' non-political meditations' of 1918, but like Thomas Mann he had no very clear idea that they might have a political effect, and what that effect might be. (The National Socialists used him yet didn't need him, as they used and didn't need most of his fellow poets and literati, and they got rid of him as soon as they began to suspect that to assimilate the oeuvre to the ideology would give them more trouble than it was worth.) That was a failure of political calculation on his part. He praises Hitler's assumption of power as representing the politics of 'the chthonic, the irrational and the anarchic', yet his imagination fails him when it comes to anticipating what all this might mean in practical political terms. However, that he had always been on the side of Dionysos, and that his poetry would convey 'the trance-like feeling that this reality doesn't exist' - that part of the claim was surely true enough. The experience of post-war chaos did not merely disillusion Benn about the stability of the biirgerlich values of the prewar era of prosperity and imperial peace: 'The old realities of space and time - formulaic functions; health and sickness have become functions of consciousness — everywhere imaginary magnitudes, everywhere dynamic phantoms, even the most concrete powers like state and society are beyond our grasp, all we can grasp are processes as such, are the dynamics of things... As for the old truths, the old contents, nothing can be saved. ' 43 From all this he emerges in a temper of radical scepticism, concerned above all with one thing: to find linguistic expression for the experience of a fragmentary and dissolving self and for the isolation to which it is condemned.

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The contradiction in which he is involved is unique, at least in its articulateness. First, there is his refusal, lasting throughout the 1920s, to accept or evolve a set of values, a Weltanschauung which would fill the vacuum left by the collapse of the old order, whether these values be Marxist (as with Brecht), or authoritarian (as with George), or metaphysical-religious (as with Rilke). But he is also unique among major German poets in accepting, for a brief but disastrous period, the political solution offered to and embraced by the vast majority of the German people in 1933. This period in his life, when he placed his poetry and himself enthusiastically yet very self-consciously in the service of National Socialism, has been seen by some of his critics as motivated by personal expediency and time-serving; but the advantages that came to him through the services he rendered Dr Goebbels's Ministry of Propaganda do not seem adequate to this account. The other explanation — morally less damaging — is that after a period of twenty years or so of the strenuous search for images — new images — which would contain the meaning and validity he could not find in the contemporary world, he finally caved in and espoused the new order as did most people around him. This explanation, which envisages the volte-face of an anarchist turning conformist, would be nearer the truth if applied to a good many of his contemporaries, but it too is misleading in the way some explanations for the rise of Hitler are misleading. For (it seems to me) what people like Benn hoped the new regime would bring was not a new order at all, but on the contrary new excitement and adventure, a new ' reality' full of danger and heroism, of occasions for sacrifice, conquest and destruction; in other words, what Benn hoped for was that the new regime would somehow provide a political and existential substance for which his poetry would in turn provide the form. He saw Hitler's accession to power as ' elemental, ineluctable, the anthropological turn', the birth of a new species of man, 'symbolically ecstasy-begotten' and sustained by instinct; and it is interesting to note that Benn later explicitly referred to Schicksalsrausch ('ecstasy of fate') 44 to explain his state of mind

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in 1933, with the help of a word coined by Thomas Mann, to explain what befell him and Germany in 1914. Like others, Benn expected from the National Socialist Revolution an amalgam of archaic virtues and modernity. On the one hand it represented to him a mythology of race and leadership and revenge come true, while on the other it was the triumph of organisation, technology and genetic science placed in the service of the mythologising heroic vision. It may seem strange now that anybody could sincerely believe this peculiar and essentially poetic mixture had anything to do with the actual regime which, after its victory in the Reichstag, gradually took over the government and eventually almost every single institution in the country, and did so with considerable political skill. Did Benn and those like him really believe that a modern state in the centre of Europe could be run on such a weird mythopoeic blend? that the sordid tug-of-war that was all around him could really be described and explained in such ecstatic and essentially aesthetic terms? Searching (like every major German poet) for some valid transcendence, could he really believe that the new State was engaged in the same search? Probably not. Indeed it is difficult to say what anyone of Benn's generation believed. One thing he did believe in is clear enough: not in himself (the 'Ronne' self-portrait shows a mind on the verge of dissolution) but in what he called ' asthetische Form' and what we may call, less ambiguously, his own poetry. For a short time - fifteen months, to be exact - he could act as though his poetry had overflowed the page and spilled out to fill the world. He saw - or believed he could see something like the Greece of Aeschylus and Sophocles invoked by Nietzsche: believed he could see a new state in which the world would be justified as a phenomenon beyond good and evil, as an aesthetic phenomenon; and that, to put it in his own apparently more sober and more realistic terms, all that was happening around him was the accumulation of impressions as material for poetry.45 He was quickly disabused; and very soon lost the taste for this aesthetic vision. Ironically enough, it was his poetry that caused offence to the regime. The 'expressive world' of his poems was

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denounced as cosmopolitan, decadent, pornographic and unGerman in Das Schwarze Korps, the periodical of the SS, a unit formed in imitation of those selfsame Fascist 'black hordes' whom Benn had celebrated in a notorious essay of 1933. Benn's disastrous political involvement has to be considered in order to give full significance to the continuity of his poetry, to the fact that it remains a witness to the chaotic 'existential movement' of an age. The poem 'Quartar' ('Quaternary') was written in 1946,46 when that era was over. There is no poem of Benn's —just as there is no published statement of Heidegger's — in which the victims of the age are mourned. The title names the quaternary period, the geological age in which we live, and, as it indicates, the poem will be concerned with no individual life or fate - it presents a huge meta-historical panorama. The quaternary period is ending, as Benn put it later, 'nicht dramatisch, nicht wie das Ende einer Schlacht, mehr atrophisch, durch Abspannung der der Art bestimmt gewesenen Formen' ('not dramatically, not like the end of a battle, but rather by way of an atrophy, the exhaustion of the forms that were appropriate for our species');47 it is an end, as Siegbert Prawer writes in his commentary,48 'not with a bang but a whimper'. Quartar Die Welten trinken und tranken sich Rausch zu neuem Raum und die letzten Quartare versenken den ptolemaischen Traum. Verfall, Verflammen, Verfehlen in toxischen Spharen, kalt, noch einige stygische Seelen, einsame, hoch und alt. 11

Komm - laB sie sinken und steigen, die Zyklen brechen hervor: uralte Sphinxe, Geigen und von Babylon ein Tor, ein Jazz vom Rio del Grande, ein Swing und ein Gebet -

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Riesige Hirne biegen sich uber ihr Dann und Wann und sehen die Faden fliegen, die die alte Spinne spann, mit Riisseln in jede Feme und an alles, was verfallt, ziichten sich ihre Kerne die sich erkennende Welt. Einer der Traume Gottes blickte sich selber an, Blicke des Spiels, des Spottes vom alten Spinnenmann, dann pfliickt er sich Asphodelen und wandert den Styxen zu laB sich die Letzten qualen, laB sie Geschichte erzahlen Allerseelen Fini du tout.

The purchase of poetry Quaternary The worlds are swilling and drinking pot-valiant, towards new space and the last quaternaries sinking Ptolemy's dream without trace. Decay, conflagration, transgression in toxic spheres that are cold, still just a few Stygian spirits solitary, haughty and old. 11

Come - let them founder and flounder the cycles are breaking forth: ancient sphinxes, violins and a gateway to Babylon, a jazz from the Rio del Grande some swing and then a prayer by sinking fires, on the margins where everything's ash blown away. I cut the throats of the sheep and filled the trench with their blood the shadows came to their trysting, met here, and I listened well —, each of them drank and told his tale of sword and fall and they questioned, and women mated with bull and swan wept in the long procession. Quaternary cycles — scenes, yet none can tell you for sure is the last thing to be tears or is the last thing joy or are both a rainbow refracting a few colours reflected or simply a lie you know, you know it not. in

Gigantic brains are bending over their Then and When and they see the threads that fly spun by the old spider with probosces to every far corner

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German thinking has frequently been occupied with a metahistorical panorama of this kind; it is the theme of works like Oswald Spengler's Decline of the West (whose influence can be felt in Benn's poetry) or Alfred Weber's Farewell to Recent History, a book in which the attempt is made to show that history as the story of individual lives and decisions - the history of postReformation Europe - has come to an end and is about to be superseded by a history of collectives. Such a panorama, a pretty daring project even for discursive prose, does not provide an obvious topic for lyrical poetry, which is most at home in the representation of the single and the particular. But modern lyrical poetry especially lives by appropriating ever new and unexplored themes: it lives by their recalcitrance. It is this that explains some of the difficulties and strangenesses of 'Quartar'; for instance, in the first stanza (line 5), the paratactically listed alliterative verbal nouns, all connoting the sense of an ending, ' Verfall, Verflammen, Verfehlen', violent (here at least with a bang, not just a whimper) and inadvertent, with the note of a malfunction and failure of what has gone before. And again, to make the meta-historical theme poetically available, time, throughout the poem, is seen as space, synchronicity, as a 'nebeneinander', a panorama of events. Thus the opening: whole worlds, no less, are engaged in summoning energies for a new era, but the approach to this era is ' toward new space', and in the course of that change man's 'Ptolemaic dream' is being buried - that vision, now no longer valid (and therefore a mere

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dream) in which the Alexandrian astronomer Ptolemy had seen the earth at the centre of the universe; a geocentricity that for Benn (as indeed for Brecht) is the - now no longer valid symbol of order and regularities and laws, with rational, lawgiving man at its centre. The ending that is spoken of here is an ending cin toxic spheres' - perhaps a reference to the fallout of the first atom bomb a year before the poem was written, perhaps rather to that symbol of a poisoned atmosphere surviving from the experience of the Great War, at all events a new, aggressively twentieth-century image placed immediately alongside one of our most ancient myths-, that of the souls crossing the River Styx on their way into Hades. The opening apostrophe of assonant verbs ('trinken und tranken') is recapitulated in 'lass sie sinken und steigen', with which the second stanza opens. To whom is the 'komm' addressed? It is hard to imagine an interlocutor other than the poet himself; he addresses to himself an invitation to recall and make poetry of a timeless vision of time. It is the perennial invitation of all poetry, to give some permanence to the marked symbols of ages past (as Faust's ' der Vorwelt silberne Gestalten' - 'the silver figures of an earlier world') by re-presenting them once more and now for a last time - paratactically, one age side by side with another, each merely named without description or evaluation, like a muse'e imaginaire or a collage by Juan Gris or Picasso. There is here no logical or historical sequence, no Ptolemaic order, only an arrangement of words made to serve the melody and rhythm of the verse — making visible the important function rhythm, as a substitute for order, is bound to assume in the context of this poem and in all of Benn's later poetry. This, the seminal function of rhythm, is one way in which the poem conquers the recalcitrance of its meta-historical theme. And there is of course another: the grand, more than worldhistorical panorama is evoked in the poem by single, wholly specific, individual things - in the first stanza of section II it is indeed things rather than scenes; and these single things determine the meaning of the poem, at this point, and thus recapture the theme for lyrical poetry. One is struck by the

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disparity of these single names - Sphinxes seem more appropriate to the grand context than ' ein Jazz' and ' ein Swing'; they are expressions of that curious magnetism of things American, with just a touch of the provincial showing his knowledge of the cosmopolitan world, just that touch of selfconscious modernism, which Benn shares with Brecht. One notes Benn's odd way with foreign words: 'ein Jazz' and ' ein Swing' (both part of the terminology forbidden throughout the Third Reich), the even odder 'Rio del Grande' and 'fini du tout' at the end; in each case the verbal oddity is explicable (and is once so explained by Benn himself)49 by the metric requirement of the poem. In all these paratactic, alliterative and assonantal devices Benn is not aiming at cumulative effects, each single noun or phrase or (in the next stanza) each episode is intended to evoke its own rich connotations. So is there no sum total of these single data, no total effect? There is. Rilke's Malte Laurids Brigge formulates it in this way: c ... daB so das Leben sein wiirde: voll lauter besonderer Dinge, die nur fur Einen gemacht sind und die sich nicht sagen lassen' ('that life would be like this: entirely filled with separate things that are made for one person alone and that cannot be expressed').50 Kafka places the same idea at the end of his parable Vor dem Gesetz {Before the Law), when the seeker after justice is told 'Hier konnte niemand sonst EinlaB erhalten, denn dieser Eingang war nur fur dich bestimmt' ('nobody else could have gained admittance here, because this entrance was intended only for you'). The transformation of time into space is part of a wider, more strenuous undertaking: to make poetry out of an anarchy of images while yet attempting to preserve as much as possible of singularity and anarchy alike. Only in the next stanza do the single words give way to a brief tale (from Odyssey, Book xi, lines 34-8) of Odysseus's descent to the River of Ocean where he offers sacrifice to the host of the dead, among them Leda whom Zeus visited in the shape of a swan and Europa to whom he appeared as a bull. It is the one directly narrative scene in the poem — the ritual of drinking and telling stories, and of keening women, gives it the true quality of an epic archetype, utterly brief and for that reason effective; it's

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Homer's myth, of course, not Benn's, and yet he (a little like Joyce) appears as its rightful heir. The last stanza of the second section returns in tone to the opening of the poem: how are we to evaluate it all, to make sense of it? Our consciousness does not reach all the way to the point of that deepest insight that might help us to decide whether it is tragedy, the source of which Nietzsche had called 'Urleid', or the joy of being, which form the basis of our existence; or whether the whole is decked out as a rainbow in which a few of the colours of being are refracted - perhaps Benn here alludes to the famous image of the. 'nunc stans', the ineffable moment of the present which Schopenhauer pictured as the point where the wholly still rainbow hovers above the turbulently moving drops of a waterfall. Ambiguity and uncertainty prevail: the alliterative verbal forms, 'gespiegelt oder gelogen', refer to the refracting rainbow as an aesthetic phenomenon: is it a true reflection of life or (from Plato to Nietzsche to Benn: the old suspicion that, as Nietzsche put it, 'the poets lie too much5) is it merely a lie? Truth (Thomas Hobbes said) is 'of propositions only'. If words, in Benn's poems, are allowed such rich but separate, largely disconnected auras of connotative meanings, if moreover rhythm, rhyme, alliteration and assonance play such an important part in the choice of words, what guarantee is there that they will tell the truth about life? What guarantee should there be? Hence the disquiet, that 'vehemente Existenzbewegung' of Benn's poetry: at the point where we as readers are content to take its musical qualities and indeterminate rings of connotation as the most important thing about them — where we are content to rest in the logocentric or phonocentric qualities of these poems — there the poet himself shakes us out of our lyrical contentment, disturbs our delight (again: the parallel with Brecht) and offers us uncertainty instead: ' gespiegelt oder gelogen — / du weiBt, du weiBt es nicht'. He likes to shock by praising form and style at the expense of truth, yet then presses on to the point where this assertion too is questioned by a straining for the truth. In the final section the age of toxische Spharen' is recaptured once more. From that very early collection of Novellen called

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Gehirne to the end, more than forty years later, Benn had always seen himself as belonging to an age of excessive rationalising and scientific thought (it was the supersession of the scientific and rationalistic by notions of instinct, impulse, race and myth that had made him choose National Socialism as the salvation of the modern world). Half polemically, this theme of excessive rationality, this hypertrophy of cerebration is now developed in some detail: the research of modern science ('biegen sich iiber...'), biological ('zuchten') and nuclear ('Kerne'), is curiously tied together with the ancient myth of Arachne, who, famous for her weaving or spinning, was turned by the jealous goddess Minerva into a spider (hence the species of the arachnids) - and this in turn provides the threads of the spider's web and the probosces ('Russel') as images of our technology of communicationcommunication, though, which again is part of an end state, attaching us 'an alles, was verfallt' - 'to all that decays'. In short, what science has produced or bred for itself (if line 40 is the object of the nearest verb, of which I am not sure) is a selfconscious, self-recognising world which yet (as we have seen in the previous stanza) knows none of the important truths about itself; just as Nietzsche could never decide on the truth about life - whether it was tragic or merely a game. The theme of the threads encompassing the world and the theme of our problematic self-knowledge are continued in the final stanza, though the mutation of the girl Arachne into ' der alte Spinnenmann' who presides over all creation is in no way made clear. Do we know who ' Einer' is? The cosmological speculations of the pre-Socratics were taken entirely seriously, perhaps for the first time in our era, by Friedrich Nietzsche, not merely as curious potsherds of archaic wisdom, but as philosophy. Among these pre-Socratic fragments there are speculations (on which Nietzsche wrote variations) to the effect that man might be no more than a dream in the mind of some god or demiurge, or again that he might be only an object of mockery or a mere plaything in the hands of some cosmic power. Here in Benn's poem, one such creature — it may be the poet himself, but Nietzsche is more probably intended - is capable of some self-

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knowledge even as he is mocked by the old spider-spinner, the artificer of it all - mocked as he makes his way to the underworld through the asphodels of the Elysian fields. The last stanza has ten rather than the regular eight lines, the two trimeters of the last octet are powerfully rhymed, and issue in a final naming of the dichotomy that informs much of Benn's poetry and indeed much of all modern poetry - the dichotomy of ' qualen' ('torturing') and 'erzahlen' ('story-telling') - that is of being, always represented in its negative aspect, and writing, or again of life and art. After this the syntax breaks down irreparably and for a last time - the two lines at the end are mere echoes, the invocation of the feast of All Souls being no more Christian, but also no less, than the story of Odysseus's sacrifice was Greek. Let me return once more to my indiscreet political introduction. If, as I believe, this is a poem typical of Benn, with all its enigmatic intimations, its subtle rhythmic and melodic patterns and classical allusions, its transformation of metahistory into panorama (that is, time into space) - was the poet mad to think that such poetry as this would be acceptable to that regime of power-crazed sadists? of those who invented death-camps in which people were made to stand in concrete cells until they died, and who made such practices part of the political process long before they had total command over the country, in fact within six months of coming to power? He really did believe this, and so did a whole host of writers and disaffected intellectuals; in this Benn is representative. What all of them shared with the new regime was not only the utmost contempt for the Weimar Republic they helped to destroy. It was also the vision of a totalitarian state - the Romantic view at last come true - in which everything, including poetry and philosophical reflection, would be part of one total ideology, and in which their nihilism and their fragmented self could be accommodated and made whole. They confused nihilism with the tragic view of life - the two cardinal terms of Nietzsche's later philosophy, which he too had not always distinguished clearly enough. Half a century later it is apparent that their expectation, and any hope for such an ideology, was total error.

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But the poetry remains. It describes a panorama, it gives expression - ' vehemente Existenzbewegung' - to the consciousness in which that political state could be born and realised as the reflection or chimera - ' gespiegelt oder gelogen' - of a strenuous poetic undertaking. Of that state of mind Benn is the best witness we have.

BERTOLT BRECHT: THE SOCIAL ENGAGEMENT The most obvious characteristic that distinguishes Bertolt Brecht's poetry from the poetry so far discussed is his profound social concern; the consistency and firmness with which Brecht's poetry, like his large dramatic oeuvre, is grounded in the society and politics of the era he lived through - his youth in the Weimar Republic, his exile after 1933, the Second World War and its German, especially East German, aftermath. Despite the difficulties and ambiguities of Brecht's position in the newly founded DDR, where at least some of his social concerns became official policy, there can be no doubt that it was a leading position nevertheless, and that no other poet and indeed no other German writer could conceivably have occupied it for as long as he did. In the poetry so far studied here, the social dimension is either ignored or merely implied. The social and political views that may be discerned through some of those other poems were not readily available to their first readers; they are implications we are able to infer because we can see the poems and the situation from which they arose in the light of events intervening between their time and ours. They must, I believe, be read in the light of history. Brecht's literary and political concern is of course with the life and socio-economic circumstances of the working classes and the poor, which he approaches, after his extensive study of Karl Marx in 1926, from an actively Marxist point of view. (He once calculated how much income he lost by this six months of study.) The orthodoxy or otherwise of Brecht's Marxism is not at issue in a consideration of his poetry. In saying this I do not, however, argue as some critics have done51 that there is a split in his work, in the sense that Brecht reserves his Marxism for his

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plays and lyricism for his poetry. The social concern informs all his work. However, his adherence to Marxism does raise a psychological question which is of some importance in reading his poetry. The dominant element in Brecht's poetic inspiration is compassion, and it is in this sentiment, the representation of which is a vital part of the German, European and Christian poetic tradition, that his Marxism and his poetry have their common roots. It has been argued, not least by Brecht himself, that to emphasise this origin in compassion is to play into the hands of his enemies, and that his claim to be a Marxist in the fullest sense relies on his demanding for the proletariat and the masses not pity but social justice. Brecht's accusation against these 'enemies', the well-meaning yet self-seeking middle classes, was that they wished to fob off the proletariat with the alms of compassion in order to be able to deny them their rights. This is a strong and emphatically typical argument but it fails to convey the whole truth. Why fuss about the difference between compassion and the pursuit of justice and human rights? In the situations Brecht depicts, that pursuit inevitably takes the form of action designed to eradicate injustice, and whenever such an action adds to the suffering in the world, it turns out to be a self-defeating process. One example to show that Brecht was aware of this comes from the farcical mock-ending of Die Dreigroschenoper52 of 1927. Mackie Messer has sung his ballad of forgiveness, Polly and Lucy, his wives, have sung their farewell duet, and he is about to be led away to the gallows. Now Jonathan Jeremiah Peachum, owner of the famous firm ' Bettlers Freund' (The Beggar's Friend) addresses the audience: Verehrtes Publikum, wir sind so weit Und Herr Macheath wird aufgehangt Denn in der ganzen Christenheit Da wird dem Menschen nichts geschenkt. Damit ihr aber nun nicht denkt Das wird von uns auch mitgemacht Wird Herr Macheath nicht aufgehangt Sondern wir haben uns einen anderen SchluB ausgedacht.

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Damit ihr wenigstens in der Oper seht Wie einmal Gnade vor Recht ergeht. Und darum wird, weil wir's gut mit euch meinen Jetzt der reitende Bote des Konigs erscheinen. Good people, now the end has come And so Macheath must swing for it For in the whole of Christendom Not one can get away with it. But no - hold on - that's not our view Please don't suppose we think that's right We've got another final scene for you Macheath will not be hanged tonight. Justice shall yield to mercy here At least on stage you'll find it so. The royal messenger shall now appear And cry ' Reprieve! reprieve!' to make a jolly ending to our show. And so he does - though as Peachum concludes, the herald on horseback very rarely arrives in real life: the last lines are Verfolgt das Unrecht nicht zu sehr, in Balde Erfriert es schon von selbst, denn es ist kalt. Bedenkt das Dunkel und die groBe Kalte In diesem Tale, das von Jammer schallt. Let punishment be not severe; for crime Is cold and freezes of itself in time. Think of the darkness and the fearful chill Within this vale that rings with misery still. This last quatrain with its image of the world as a vale of tears corresponds to little that has been said in the play, yet in its position asfinaleit is unambiguously lyrical. Brecht is here not only the poet and dramatist of social justice, but also, more poignantly and lyrically, the poet and dramatist of compassion - more poignantly because compassion is a sentiment while social justice is a political concept, and sentiments are more apt to find their expression in poetry than concepts are. It may be objected that the whole of that last scene in the Threepenny Opera is a spoof, and that such evidence can be used to prove anything. True, in the context of the play it is a piece

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of farce, a theatrical gimmick, a parody. Spoof and parody, however, are essential elements in Brecht's lyrical poetry. He had an extraordinary capacity for absorbing and refurbishing for his use a wide variety of themes and literary modes from different cultures, not always successfully; he was very much better read than he admitted at any one time and to any one group of friends or associates. It is not my intention to overstate the case for Brecht's consistencies by setting him up as a parodist. But it is very much to the point to look at numerous contexts in which the note of compassion is struck, and spoof or parody - wholly compatible with a serious poetic intention provide some of these contexts. Die Hauspostille53 the first published version of which is dated 1927, founded Brecht's fame and popularity as a poet; it remains to this day the most popular of his collections. The title, sometimes translated as The Domestic Breviary, is a direct satiric and parodistic allusion to the collection of homilies, interpretations of biblical texts and sermons which Martin Luther published in 1527 as Kirchen- und Hauspostille (the word itself refers to the exegetic part of the liturgy, 'post ilia verba'), and the five sections into which Brecht divides the book are closely and satirically, indeed blasphemously, related to the liturgy of the Mass. Not all the five 'lessons' or sections are equally successful. The fourth group especially, with the jazz rhythms that were 'all the rage' in the roaring twenties, is full of awkwardly self-conscious references to the life of American hoboes and barmaids, and includes a few doggerel verses in English which are positively blush-making. Nor does the attitudinising as poete maudit - which Brecht takes over from Francois Villon — carry much conviction. A much more important and wholly successful borrowing from Villon is the ballad-form itself, so easily turning into song (Brecht set several of these ballads to music and accompanied himself on the guitar when he sang them to friends in Augsburg and Munich in the early twenties). Though Brecht does not quite follow Villon's very strict rhyme-scheme, he takes over the rhymed ten-line strophe whose

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last two lines, the 'envoi', are repeated with slight variations at the end of each stanza. It is equally important that, like Villon, Brecht is prepared to shock his audience by his insistence on subjects they consider taboo. But while Villon usually directs his most shocking material at his enemies, or, in the ' Epitaph' to his Grant Testament, turns it into the dialogue of the hanged villains who were his companions, Brecht's shock tactics are clearly employed for social ends. He imitates the famous quatrain said to have been composed by Villon when under sentence of death: Je suis Francois, dont ce me poise Ne de Paris, empres Ponthoise Or d'une corde d'une toise Saura mon col que mon cul poise. I am Francois and woe is me Born at Pontoise and near Paris. A rope that measures just an ell My arse's weight to my neck will tell. The final poem of the Hauspostille, the ' Ballade vom armen B.B.',54 is effective only part of the way, most of all in the opening stanza: Ich, Bertolt Brecht, bin aus den schwarzen Waldern. Meine Mutter trug mich in die Stadte hinein Als ich in ihrem Leibe lag. Und die Kalte der Walder Wird in mir bis zu meinem Absterben sein. I, Bertolt Brecht, am from the black forests. My mother brought me to the cities When I lay in her womb. And the forests' cold Will be in me until the day I die. Regrettably, the poem soon weakens, as though the poetic energy of the opening, with its unsparing self-revelation underlined by the assonance of'Kalte' and 'Walder', were insufficient to last out. There is nothing in Brecht's collection to equal Villon's love-ballads, such as the one whose refrain, ' Et c'est la fin pourquoy sommes ensemble' is so memorably translated by Swinburne as ' This is the end for which we twain are met.' Nor does Brecht's atheism express itself in any equivalent of the envoi of Villon's ' Epitaph' addressed to the

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Prince Jesus, 'Mais priez Dieu que tous veuille absoudre'. Characteristically, the poem ' Die Verfuhrung' that forms the ' SchluBkapitel' of the Hauspostille attacks Christian transcendentalism not because it is a lie, but as Nietzsche would, because it offers to make people content with less of life than there is in the world. This is one of the first of those thoroughly sober and deliberately prosy poems, cast in an iambic trimeter, which Brecht often used for didactic purposes. What makes these poems effective is the simplicity, the disarming bareness of their metaphors: LaBt euch nicht verfuhren! Es gibt keine Wiederkehr. Der Tag steht in den Tiiren; Ihr konnt schon Nachtwind spiiren: Es kommt kein Morgen mehr. Don't be deceived by lying! There will be no return. The day is dying; The night-wind sighing: Morning will come no more. ('In den Tiiren' means 'on the way out'.) For all its studied violence (as in ' Die Ballade vom Liebestod', an elaborate, deliberately shocking and not very convincing description of the process of physical decomposition) Brecht's muse is a good deal tamer than Villon's. He does not, like Villon, write as one of the down and out, he writes about them. He is at his best when he can turn the shock tactics he has learned from Villon (or rather from translations of Villon by K. L. Ammer) 55 to social ends, as he does in the ballad 'Von der Kindesmorderin Marie Farrar'. 56 Three elements combine in the structure of this ballad: the so-called 'Moritat', the forensic report, and compassion, and each shows an admixture of parody. 'Die Moritat' is the popular narrative of some notorious act of violence, recited and sung in Bavarian and Austrian small towns and villages in Brecht's time (and indeed in my childhood too). The singers were itinerant hurdy-gurdy men, and the texts the equivalent of English recitals such as ' The Murder of Maria Marten in the

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Red Barn' or 'The Cruel Mother'. Here an unmarried girl's crime of infanticide is narrated; it is an old literary theme in German, going back to the Sturm und Drang period with Die Kindermorderin (1776) by Heinrich Leopold Wagner, to Maler Miiller, J. M. R. Lenz and to Goethe's Urfaust (1774). These writers felt anger at a cruel law, and desired to see it reformed - indeed they contributed to such a reform. But its literary attraction for them was its demonstration of the conflict (central in one form or another to all their dramas) between instinct and reason, feeling and convention, and also between sex and love. There is no conflict of any kind in Brecht's poem, yet our reading is to some extent determined by the expectation of it. No father is mentioned, the girl is described (in stanza 3) as lacking any charm ('since no-one thought / That she, so unattractive, could have been seduced') and she strangles the child in a fit of irritation ('verdrossen' in stanza 8). These facts are significant precisely because the traditional topos involves a high-born lover (Gretchen speaks of Faust's lordly bearing and noble figure), passionate love ('Doch-alles, was dazu mich trieb / Gott! war so gut! ach war so lieb!' - ' how good, how sweet, was all that led me to it!'), a lowly but beautiful sweetheart, and infanticide as the consequence of madness. The dominant tone of Brecht's ballad, by contrast, is one of terrible ordinariness. The girl's attempts to have the child aborted (in stanza 1) characterised by the phrase 'doch ging's nicht heraus' - 'but it wouldn't come out'; her labour in the small hours between her icy bedroom and the lavatory; and the strangling of the child, described in some detail - it is the utter ordinariness and undramatic nature of all this that the poem conveys, and from which its social indictment is fashioned, with its address in the last stanza to 'Ihr, die Ihr gut gebart in saubern Wochenbetten / und nennt gesegnet euren schwangeren SchoB' - ' you who give birth properly in clean bed-linen / and call your pregnant womb blessed'. This tone of ordinariness and indifference prevailing in the nine stanzas of the poem except for the two-line envoi at the end of each, is achieved by casting the narrative in the form of a forensic report. This becomes clear in the first quatrain:

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Marie Farrar: born April, Orphan, a minor, rickets, birthmarks - none, No criminal record proved, Admits she killed a child as follows: and the fiction of this legal statement is reinforced by the heavily accentuated subjunctives of reported speech ('Sie habe dennoch ...', 'Ihr Leib sex zusehends geschwollen, habe / Auch stark geschmerzt' etc), and these forms are maintained throughout; the corresponding tone in English would require the use of the policeman's-notebook style as in interviews read out in court 'the accused stated that she did on the date in question ... etc'. The satiric indirection achieved by this device is superbly effective. Justice under the capitalist system is a farce (this narrative mode is saying), for it is confined to the mere formality of an accurate statement bureaucratically reported; and by this same device the narrator in his borrowed objectivity is able to keep his distance from the event and its victim. What justice under capitalist law cannot do is to prevent the terrible predicament of the servant-girl Marie Farrar from arising in the first place - not the predicament of being seduced, but of being the dumb victim of her deprived social condition, of leading a life of degrading ignorance and pain, and dying in prison. The third and last element of this poem is the lament of compassion expressed mainly in the envoi at each stanza's end: Und ihr, ich bitte euch, wollt nicht in Zorn verfallen Denn alle Kreatur braucht Hilf von alien. And again, in the last stanza: Wollt nicht verdammen die verworfnen Schwachen Denn ihre Siind war schwer, doch ihr Leid grofi Darum, ich bitte euch, wollt nicht in Zorn verfallen Denn alle Kreatur braucht Hilf von alien. Do not condemn the weak and outcast For though her sin was heavy, great was her suffering Therefore I pray you, do not give way to anger For human creatures all need help from all. These plangent lines are not easy to unravel, for they are not far from parody and irony. How does a professed satirist of the Church and the Christian faith come to speak of sin? The

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answer is that the poet shifts into indirect free style to reproduce the language of the indignant pharisaical bourgeoisie, Marie Farrar's employers for instance, who judge her and condemn her, from their comfortable position, as a sinner - and moves back to speak in his own voice, with Christian compassion, in the second half of the sentence: 'great was her suffering'. But the last two lines (the refrain that goes through the entire poem) are a mirror image of that double point of view: on their own, out of context, we could read them as purely compassionate, wholly unrelated to what I have called the forensic mode of the poem. (The law has nothing to do with compassion.) However within the context of the poem as a whole, within the context of legal routine (the ordinariness of the crime), expressions like 'I pray you' and c Do not give way to anger' must strike us as odd and oddly old-fashioned, as words belonging perhaps to a seventeenth-century chorale, and by their incongruity satirising bourgeois Christian compassion. And so we are compelled by these odd formulations to ask: why this complex indirection ? Who is Marie Farrar? A random, ordinary person, an unknown servant girl tried and condemned by a Bavarian court for the murder of her illegitimate child, but also a poor creature of God in need of all the help the rest of us can give her. She is precisely that kind of person of whom Erich Auerbach has written in Mimesis. For Auerbach, the history of the European novel is marked by ' the serious treatment of everyday reality, the rise of [ever] more extensive and socially humbler human groups to the position of subject-matter for problematicexistential representation'; 57 and the first time this process of elevation to the sphere of seriousness and dignity takes place is in the Gospels, particularly in the episode of Peter's betrayal of Christ. Auerbach's history (which is as much a history of culture and literature as it is of the novel) is the story of a development, a cumulative process. That episode among some poor fisherfolk at the troublesome end of the Mediterranean is not merely the first occasion when ordinary random persons are thus dignified - as human creatures made in the image of God - it is also part of a causal argument: because that process was set in train then and there, some of what has been gained remains alive as part

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of our heritage, available as a literary and existential gain and value for subsequent ages, even if those ages are no longer able to accept other parts of the world picture belonging to the age of Christ as it is shown in the Gospels. In other words, compassion in our culture is still a Christian virtue. Brecht cannot say as much. To say so would land him among his enemies, the established Church and its pharisaical supporters, it would make him a catspaw of capitalism. He found a way out of the difficulty. What he does say by way of explaining how he learned to open his heart to compassion is contained in a discursive autobiographical note: Unlike many of my comrades in arms today I arrived at my Marxist position by what might be described as the cold route. Probably this is associated with the fact that I began by studying natural science. Reasoning had more effect on me than appeals to my emotions, and experiments swayed me more than experiences. Confronted with misery, I reacted like any normal person with pity, but when I was told that masses of people suffer hunger, I would always ask: isn't that inevitable? It seemed to me unreasonable to bewail unavoidable ills. Given this attitude I obviously felt relief when I heard arguments to prove that hunger on a huge scale is not inevitable, and learned of practical experiments to change the ways in which sustenance is procured with the aim of abolishing hunger in the world - I refer to the great example of Russia. I was happy to understand that there was something obstructive, unpractical in the general way of life among nations, something that could be avoided. Good, I said to myself (to cut a long story short) then I can open my heart to compassion. You understand - 1 was seeking a kind of retrospective insurance to validate compassion, fearing perhaps that compassion without hope [of remedy] might destroy a person of weak intelligence.58

In his poetry the view Brecht evolves is similar but more subtle - what I might call a strenuous minimalist faith. There is compassion in the world, it is a possible and indeed a desperately necessary attitude - but it is the very last thing of all to which we may appeal, not the first or the universal thing to be appealed to all the time as a matter of course. When all and more than all that can be said against compassion (or, as we shall see, against love; or, as in Mutter Courage, against charity and self-sacrifice) has been said, when the very invocation of pity has been

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satirised or placed in the apparently inappropriate language of anachronism, as in ' wollt nicht in Zorn verfallen' - when, in other words, compassion has been relegated to the absolute end of the argument, the story, the poem, then and then only may it be invoked, and count as valid and untainted by the suspicion of connivance and conformism with the corrupt call for pity which comes so readily from the pharisaical bourgeois pewrenters. This supremely costly purchase of those very values which are cheapened in our world by being on everybody's lips is the pattern traced out in this poem, and it is also I think the pattern of the system of values that goes through Brecht's entire work, drama and poetry alike. It is not irrelevant to add that Kattrin, the mute daughter of Mother Courage, is the prime example of the Christian heroine in twentieth-century drama. With his highly developed feeling for the social predicament of modern men and women, Brecht is the odd man out in our assortment of poets. His politics could hardly be more different from those of George, Rilke or Benn, for the first and last of whom he felt a mixture of loathing and contempt. Yet with his poetic practice of postponing the invocation of traditional values, which in his case are remarkably akin to Christian values - with what I have called his minimalist faith - he is one of their company. It would not do to present Brecht as a Christian poet, but his poetry is the unmistakable product of a Christian culture. If there is one thing that distinguishes Brecht's work from the literature of the socialist realists who used often to appeal to his authority it is its mixed mode. His is an oeuvre that abounds in loose ends, inconsequentialities, violent changes of mood and sketches dashed off, rather than in rounded masterpieces. At the most obvious level this is revealed in his peculiar writing habits. He was content to publish a lot of unfinished material, while at the same time continuing to rework his manuscripts over and over again, as if to defy any critical attempts to classify and canonise the poet, to congeal him into a classic. None of this is inadvertent. The inconsistencies of action and characterisation, the sketchiness and the mixture of modes

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reflect his understanding of what the function of literature (and of music) should be in the modern age, which he calls ' das wissenschaftliche Zeitalter' - the age of science. The opera he wrote with Kurt Weill, Aufstieg undFall der Stadt Mahagonny (1930) is a case in point. It is a musical farce designed, though far from consistently, to satirise capitalist entrepreneurship on the one hand, and on the other, one of its products, classical opera (incidentally, too, contemporary operas which try to make the old genre ' relevant' and socially conscious). Two swindlers and a whore called Begbick in flight from the police set up an eldorado of gin palaces and whisky bars on a deserted stretch of the Californian coast. This settlement, ramshackle in every way, is descended on by four lumberjacks from Alaska, looking for somewhere to paint the town red with their savings. The city is shaken by a hurricane (didactic in kind like most of Brecht's natural phenomena) and in the ensuing lawlessness and hyperaction, under the Nietzschean sign of'Alles ist erlaubt', the true face of capitalism is revealed in four exemplary lessons, ' Eating, Loving, Fighting, Swilling'. As there is no plot to trace further, I turn to the second of these 'Lessons in the high season'. It is enacted by one of the lumberjacks, Paul Ackermann, and Jenny, a young prostitute working for Begbick. With the row of men waiting their turn at the brothel door, the haggling and discussion of which turn what sum of money can buy, it is obvious that the atmosphere is not conducive to a love-duet (and what has been said about Brechtian indirection should make it equally obvious that that is the last thing he wants). Yet this scene introduces one of the greatest love-poems of German literature in this century and perhaps any other. It is the incongruity expressed in the saying ' Es paBt wie die Faust aufs Auge' - it fits as the fist fits the eye, i.e. not at all (like a square peg?), but that seems to be something like what Brecht is after. The poem remains an incongruity - it has no effect on the subsequent action, it is what the world could be and what it inexorably is not. Scene 6 contains the Brechtian version of the old cliche of love at first sight, enacted with extraordinary finesse: at first Jenny

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addresses Paul as ' Sie', then at his request as ' Du', then, as soon as he gives a coarse reply to her question, she immediately reverts to 'Sie' and when, at this, he asks 'Und Ihre Wunsche?' 'And what would you like?' (himself returning to the polite form) she replies ' Es ist vielleicht zu fruh, um davon zu reden' - 'perhaps it's too soon to speak of that'. It is not much to say. Yet in that sentence their privacy and humanity, and their chance of love as a genuine emotion in a moment of time, beyond sex, is preserved. These words, asking for the possibility of postponement - 'Not yet, not yet' because this moment in its brevity is different from all that is coarse and vile, will be all but forgotten, but they will re-emerge, inconsequentially, in the duet at the end of Scene 14. Here Jenny and Paul are sitting at some distance from each other ' he smoking and she making up her face'. What follows is a poem consisting of seven stanzas of terza rima plus a two-line envoi, perfectly rhymed, as Dante uses the metre throughout the Divine Comedy, spoken alternately — what could be more out of character? - by these two random persons, a lumberjack and a whore; only the sixth and last lines are spoken together. And now, set in the rough and tumble of this farce in which we expect that any old words will do, now every single bare word is arrayed for the tender and solemn song of love. Looking up into the sky, she begins: Sieh jene Kraniche in groBem Bogen and he continues Die Wolken, welche ihnen beigegeben and she takes up Zogen mit ihnen schon, als sie entflogen and then he Aus einem Leben in ein andres Leben. (Roughly) You see the great curve of that flight of cranes The clouds that keep them company Were moving with them, when theyflewaway Out of one life into another life. It will be noticed that the two images - the cranes and the clouds, a male symbol and a female one - are complementary,

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as man and woman are, and are shown to be so by the stichomythia, which makes her refer to the male and he the female part of the picture in the sky; so that in a tender and inexplicit way (in a context that is anything but tender, and explicit to the point of coarseness) this scene is a re-enactment, in words, of love itself. The core of the poem, round which its action and its images are assembled, is the metamorphosis, the flight from extreme vulnerability to invulnerability and the indomitable unity of two people in love, and a description of the conditions under which this may happen. Cranes and clouds belong together on their journey 'from one life into another life'. Surely there is no 'other life'? Is the poet succumbing to that Christian 'Verfuhrung' which he attacked at the end of Die Hauspostille? Again, it is nothing so explicit. Perhaps they - cranes and clouds, substantive things in the sky, never adjectivally described — are merely moving to another landscape, only sketchily called 'another life': however that may be, they are moving together ' In gleicher Hohe und mit gleicher Eile' and (now Jenny and Paul together complete the second terza rima): Scheinen sie alle beide nur daneben. This is the only difficult line of the poem. In their communion with each other, their isolation from everyone else and their invulnerability (which have yet to be described), and in their journey 'von einem Leben in ein andres Leben' they both seem (' scheinen sie') to others who don't share their experiences to be merely 'on the wrong track', pursuing an illusion. The poem will not argue against this being a mere appearance. Perhaps they really are victims of an illusion. But the poem will allude to conditions in which the act of communion these two people are engaged in is not illusory, or at any rate not 'daneben' (an informal expression, something like 'astray') and the poem now goes on to describe two of those conditions. It does this formally, with a ' DaB' apostrophe; ' Let this be so that...' The first of these conditions is brevity, the second is autonomy, selfcontainedness (very much the same as what Rilke calls ' Sich-

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enthalten', keeping oneself back). First, the poignant brevity of their encounter, their flight together (the way the cranes and clouds 'befliegen' ('cover') the sky): 'kurz' says she ('briefly'), and ' DaB also keines' - neither of the two: ' langer hier verweile', (should stay here long) echoing on the rhyme 'mit gleicher Eile' ('with equal haste'); and then the brevity of the moment of love is repeated and re-emphasised in the coda: wie lange sind sie schon beisammen? he will ask, and Seit kurzem she will answer; and again Und wann werden sie sich trennen? and she Bald. how long is it they've been together? A little while. And when are they to part? Soon. Transience as a condition of life and love is hardly a very original theme; from the Song of Songs through the AngloSaxon poems and Shakespeare's sonnets to countless romantic lyrics it is one of the topoi of lyrical poems. Yet rarely has it been invoked so briefly, so unself-indulgently, in a mere monosyllable like 'soon'. The rest of the poem is devoted to the second condition, which the poet offers, not indeed as a proof, but as a suggestion that their love may not be illusory - I mean the condition of solitude and self-contained absorption of the lovers in each other. Let this be an encounter in which neither will remain here alone, neither will see more than the cradling of each other by the wind, both ensconced in the oneness of their flight. True, there is danger in their exposedness - but even if the wind carries them into 'das Nichts', where there is no life, even then kann sie beide nichts beriihren (nothing can touch them) Wenn sie nur nicht vergehen und sich bleiben (as long as they don't vanish, but remain for each other)

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Again I want to refer to Brecht's minimalist faith, as I have called it. Neither the word 'love' nor any of its synonyms are used, only c Wenn sie nur...sich bleiben'. All that the poet insists on, then, is the least emphatic, the least sentimental expression capable of intimating the union of love. This is not - and as it is Brecht's it cannot be - a poem that wholly ignores the world outside the lovers' reach. They may be driven off - ' vertreiben'- wherever the cloud is dissolved by rain, wherever shots are fired; the two dangers are again precisely allotted the one to the male, the other to the female part of the composite range. And yet these threats and dangers don't prevail over what unites them: Solange kann sie beide nichts beriihren. The sixth terza rima, starting with a distancing 'So', surveys the scene at a distance: So... fliegen sie hin, einander ganz verfallen. — wholly under each other's spell, under the moon, under the sun, which to them hardly differ from each other. The distancing continues with an address directed at them,' Wohin, ihr?' and with the change to ' I h r ' in line 21, addressed to the reader (perhaps to those who, at line 6, supposed them on the wrong track, in the throes of an illusion). Whither do they fly? Nowhere. Who do they fly from? From all. Here the rhyming scheme, strictly adhered to in the terza rima mode, changes to two perfect rhymes, one semi-rhyme ('beisammen') and then, with the maximum of feeling the poet will allow his poem, to the last emphatic perfectly rhymed couplet of the envoi. Paul Und wann werden sie sich trennen? Jenny Bald. Beide So scheint die Liebe Liebenden ein Halt. ' Liebenden' - to lovers, not ' to these lovers'; and it is only here that the central words, 'love' and 'lovers', are used at all. The poem concludes strangely, with what might be called a hint of a realistic ending. It is to the lovers themselves that their

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love seems, and must merely seem, a comfort, a source of strength and inviolability: Paul Wohin, ihr? (Where are you going?) Jenny Nirgendhin. (Nowhere.) Paul Von wem entfernt? (Away from whom?) Jenny Von alien. (From all.) Paul Ihr fragt, wie lange sind sie schon beisammen? (You ask how long they've been together.) Jenny Seit kurzem. (A little while.) Paul Und wann werden sie sich trennen? (And when will they part?) Jenny Bald. (Soon.) Beide So scheint die Liebe Liebenden ein Halt. {Both And thus love seems a strength to lovers.) It is not in the least a harsh ending, though, let alone cynical or satirical - that note is provided, with a vengeance, in the Stimmungsbruch, the ' break in mood' of the farce in which, it must not be forgotten, the love-song is embedded, and which reminds us that this was merely the conclusion of one of the four Lessons: Erstens, vergeBt nicht, kommt das Fressen Zweitens kommt der Liebesakt Drittens das Boxen nicht vergessen Viertens Saufen, laut Kontrakt. Vor allem aber achtet scharf DaB man hier alles diirfen darf. (Wenn man Geld hat.) First, do not forget, comes eating Second the act of love Third, fighting must not be forgotten Fourth drinking, as the contract says. But most of all please be quite clear That nothing is forbidden here. (If you've got money.)

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If, then, the poem's end is not satirical and yet, in a precise sense of the word, disillusioning, it nevertheless follows a pattern we are familiar with, for instance in Shakespeare's sonnet cxvi 'Let me not to the marriage of true minds admit impediment', ending with the envoi If this be error and upon me proved I never writ, nor no man ever loved. These words undermine the truth of the main body of the poem in much the same way as ' So scheint die Liebe Liebenden ein Halt'. There is, however, an important difference. Shakespeare's sonnet is of course a great deal more complicated and sophisticated than Brecht's terza rima. And this is particularly evident in the two envois. Shakespeare follows the tradition of the self-conscious or language-conscious muse: he concludes by appearing in person and invoking his poetic activity — the poem itself — as witness to the truth of claims it has made for 'the marriage of true minds'. This is a very modern thing to d o twentieth-century poetry is full of such self-references, 'poetological' allusions. But Brecht's poem is not. Here there is not a single turn or word which could be meaningfully deconstructed into self-reference, that is, be shown to have at least one part of its meaning construed as referring to the poetic activity. Even the ' DaB...' phrase, which looks like meaning c Let it be supposed that' (as if it referred to a speech-act, or at least to a statement act of some kind) is really an elliptical ' Let it be so that...', ' Let there be a world in which ...' This absence of a self-referential element goes hand in hand with the sheer bareness and economy of this poem, the fact, for instance, that it contains no description and hardly any adjectives; that it is cast in the strictest and firmest, most formal of metres; that it is happening, not on our earth but in some nowhere in the sky, though it is a positive, auspicious nowhere, the place Rilke called ' ein Nirgend ohne Nicht'; and that the emotion it depicts, or rather enacts, is presented to us in the barest, the least romantic terms. There is not a whiff of irony, let alone satire; feelings are indulged in, but they are hedged by brevity, danger, impermanence, the possibility of illusion. These

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are the conditions - it seems as if they were the only conditions - under which, for this tough poet of disillusion and harsh invective, and in our age which he sees as one of conflict and harshness, love poetry is possible and meaningful. Meaningful in itself, yes, but not for the surrounding world. T h e poem is in the farce of Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny

but not of it. It affects nothing. Once sung it is as if 'writ on water', as if it had never been. Rough and prosy and anti-poetic in its free verse, with only an occasional refrain to give a vestige of formality, An die JVachgeborenen59 is Brecht's account of his life and his testament. In it the full bitterness of the age is expressed: Wirklich, ich lebe in finsteren Zeiten! Truly, I live in times of darkness! The age - full of adversity and of the politics of darkness presses down on everything: the harmless word, the smooth brow, a man's calm walk across the street, a conversation about trees - in this age they are all signs of insensitivity and unconcern for the evils perpetrated at that very moment, in the next street. Compassion dominates the first half of the poem not as a healing sentiment, but, because it is powerless against evil, as a searing emotion. Precepts for the good life, the wisdom of old books, are of no avail. The politics of protest are felt to have achieved something Aber die Herrschenden SaBen ohne mich sicherer, das hoffte ich. But the rulers, I hoped, Were safer in their seats of power but for me. - however it was not very much, and the great goal, though clearly visible in the far distance, was hardly to be reached: So verging meine Zeit Die auf Erden mir gegeben war. Thus passed the time That was given to me upon earth.

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Bitterness begat bitterness, righteous wrath produced wrath in its turn: it is this thought (echoed from the final chorus of The Threepenny Opera ten years before) that for Brecht constitutes the tragic nature of the age: verzweifelt Wenn da nur Unrecht war und keine Emporung. Auch der HaB gegen die Niedrigkeit Verzerrt die Ziige. Auch der Zorn iiber das Unrecht Macht die Stimme heiser. Ach, wir Die wir den Boden bereiten wollten fur Freundlichkeit Konnten selber nicht freundlich sein. Ihr aber, wenn es so weit sein wird Das der Mensch dem Menschen ein Heifer ist Gedenkt unsrer Mit Nachsicht. despairing When there was only injustice and no rebellion. Hatred of infamy, too, Distorts the features. Fury over injustice, too, Makes the voice hoarse. Alas, we Who wanted to prepare the ground for friendliness Couldn't be friendly ourselves. But you, who live when the time has come round That man is a helper to man Think of us then With forebearance.

The invocation of the small virtues so dearly bought (Rilke's 'small-flowered healing herb') is the poem's final message and exhortation to posterity. 'Nachsicht', the word the poem ends on, is a last little triumph of poetry: it is ' looking back with considerateness', not in anger.

CHAPTER 6

Rendering account

HERMANN HESSE: THE GLASS BEAD GAME: A GAME OF UTOPIA Gottfried Benn's words about Nietzsche, already quoted ('He has anticipated ... everything ... why, what else have we done these fifty years but trot out and vulgarise his gigantic thoughts and sufferings?')1 make an implicit connection between the thought and the suffering. Benn is speaking the language we recognise from countless other sources as that of his age. What he does not say is that a deep and, I think, unbridgeable division informs all Nietzsche's writings - a division reflected in Nietzsche's bequest to the literature about which and in which Benn is writing, German literature in the first half of the twentieth century. On one hand there is Nietzsche's constant concern with what I have called the 'morality of strenuousness',2 his proposal of a self-validating, sacrificial moral theology without a god, the 'dear purchase' in its purest form. Ancestor of Sartre's and Camus's acte gratuity it is a validation of modern human life by a supreme existential effort without a purpose separate from the effort. It is a 'morality' which follows the pattern of Kafka's laconic observation 'the verdict doesn't come all at once, the proceedings merge gradually into the verdict'. 3 It accompanies Nietzsche's philosophising throughout his brief career, and is related to his early conception of the Dionysian element in tragedy and in life. On the other hand there is Nietzsche's proposal for a total reinterpretation of the world, which is to be seen as a dream, a 346

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game or a play, a sport of the gods. This, like the Dionysian element, is first referred to in Die Geburt der Tragodie of 1872: Nur als asthetisches Phanomen ist das Dasein und die Welt ewig gerechtfertigt4 Only as an aesthetic phenomenon are existence and the world eternally justified and all Nietzsche's writings contain variations on this theme; one of the most striking occurs in Jenseits von Gut undBose (§ 150): Um den Helden herum wird alles zur Tragodie, urn den Halbgott herum wird alles zum Satyrspiel; und um Gott herum wird alles wie? vielleicht zur 'Welt'? Around the hero everything turns into tragedy, around the demigod everything becomes a satyr-play; and around God everything becomes - what ? - perhaps ' world' ? The end-phase of the literature chiefly inspired by Nietzsche's divided bequest, the period which begins with the collapse of peace and civilised life in the thirties, finds its fullest expression in two great novels, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus and Hermann Hesse's Das Glasperlenspiel. A world is coming to an end, two old men are taking their prolonged leave of it. Both novels constitute the conscious conclusion and summation of their authors' oeuvre, and a response - one explicit and direct, the other oblique and reluctant - to what their authors perceive as the spirit of their age. Both relate to the tradition of the Bildungsroman, the novel of initiation and education for the world, and both are selfconsciously German works. At the centre of each is a hero whose creative life, like Nietzsche's, is brief. Both make use of the archaic devices of narrator, epistolary informant and scholarly transcriber of biographical documents, and in doing so risk involvement in some mannerisms that are also arch. Each draws on musicology (a study fairly recently engaged in ad hoc by both authors) in order to provide a language for its main symbolical meanings. In each, a last-minute rescue of the hero's soul is mounted. And here, for the time being, the parallel ends. Of that Nietzschean legacy I have referred to, each takes up

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a different aspect. To place Doktor Faustus (written between May 1943 and January 1947) beside Das Glasperlenspiel (April 1932 to April 1942) is to note that their heroes, Adrian Leverklihn and Joseph Knecht, represent two different kinds of artist. Leverkiihn is the composer whose works have cost him the utmost in emotional sacrifice, psychic effort and existential strenuousness. Of him it is said, again and again, 'er hat sich's sauer werden lassen', 'er hat um das Schwere gerungen' - (he has eaten the bread of bitterness, he wrestled with hard and heavy things), 'he has laboured with might and main, nor rested nor slept but toiled and moiled and undertaken all manner of hard things, following the words of the Apostle, saying "Whoever seeks hard things, to him it is hard."' 5 And if Leverkiihn's compositions have any distinct form and value (where form is the repository of value), if his life itself has any value and meaning, and if his soul is to be saved, 'after all, after all', then these three things-form, value and salvation - will come his way only as the expression of that morality of strenuousness whose first statements are contained in Nietzsche's writings. Leverkiihn - it may be concluded provisionally, in the expectation of further qualifications - is the Dionysian artist in Lutheran disguise. Hesse's hero, the magister ludi6 Josef Knecht, is not an artist in the ordinary sense of the word. He is the virtuoso sans pareil, the champion, practitioner and teacher of the glass-bead game, which is described as the supreme ' game with the total contents and values of our culture'. 7 He is — though again the phrase is provisionally used — the Apolline artist-virtuoso. The game fills out his life, and he acquires knowledge and mastery of it easily and playfully. Throughout his pedagogic apprenticeship, his BildungsprozeJJ, the emphasis is on his immense gifts and quickness of understanding; on the effortlessness of his rise to the top of the hierarchy in Castalia, his native province; and on the supreme functional ease of the game itself. It is in the game, and not in its most accomplished practitioner, that the Nietzschean notion of' the world as an aesthetic phenomenon' is most fully embodied. In this way each of these two novels of the end phase

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is built from one of the two aspects of Nietzsche's legacy. The relationship of the two works is expressed by Thomas Mann in the dedication he wrote in Hesse's copy ofDoktorFaustus: 'Here is the glass-bead game with black beads. ' 8 A suspiciously neat-looking parallel emerges at this stage of the argument; Doktor Faustus takes up the moral-theological aspect of the Nietzschean heritage, while Das Glasperlenspiel takes up its other, aesthetic aspect. In fact, the two novels are related in a more interesting fashion than I have suggested so far. There are strong elements of playfulness both in Adrian Leverkiihn's character and in his musical compositions. The hero's artistic intention as conveyed by the narrator and occasionally by the author is certainly ' aesthetic' in Nietzsche's sense: to recreate the world in a lighter substance, in musical sound, of which the narrator remarks (inconsistently perhaps, but explicitly) that music 'says everything and nothing', and that its relevance to moral considerations can never be anything but tenuous.9 If Leverkiihn's work succeeds in bearing witness to the tragic weightiness of human experience in his time, it can only do this because certain formal - in a sense weightless considerations have entered the work and contributed to the outcome; because the Dionysian makes no sense, and lacks coherence, without the Apolline. And a corresponding qualification must be made for Josef Knecht and his existential undertaking. There comes a point in Knecht's life when the Apolline game is played out; when it comes to figure as a thing inadequate, a frivolity almost; when Josef Knecht must follow his daemon and leave Castalia for the worldly world, which will turn out to be the world of death. The novels cross and recross each other's paths. But this is to anticipate. The first question must be: what is this strange invention, this Apolline game to which Hesse's novel is so single-mindedly devoted ? What is music? or, to put it more crudely, what is music about? The Pythagoreans taught that the harmony of musical intervals - the octave, the fifth and the fourth - proceeds according to the

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same numerical laws as does the movement of the stars. What they called the ' harmony of the spheres' could be determined in ways which were cognate with, or perhaps the same as, the laws governing the sequence of natural numbers. Music, Schopenhauer argued, at length and with exquisitely pedantic ingenuity,10 is 'the voice of the Will5 - that is, a retracing of the entire world (which is the world of'the Will') in the weightless, ethereal medium of sound. Music, then, on both the ancient and Schopenhauer's hypothesis, is about the world. It can be seen to follow certain rules which are notationally (for instance, numerically) expressible, and these rules must be like - must have something like the same form as - the rules which govern life as it is lived in the world. This hypothesis of a rule-governed correspondence between music and the world is the basis of Hesse's invention. The glassbead game is said to have evolved through various forms of notation to a maximum comprehensiveness and elegance, until it has become a sort of symbolical mimesis, a Leibnizian 'universal language' or Fregian 'Begriffsschrift',11 a total representation of the world in a single unified medium. Hesse's Utopian story is placed in the year 2200, and the game is said to have been invented in the 1930s. Its history covers some 250 years; Josef Knecht's life as Master of the Game is placed at the end of this time. Hesse mentions a number of activities in order to illustrate what the game is like, but these activities also designate stages in its history. Evolving from certain cardgames, it is taken over first by musicians, then by mathematicians, theologians and symbolical logicians, all of whom influence, change and perfect its notation. Hesse likens it to a giant organ on which the whole world is played, and again to intense inward contemplation (here a certain glibness in his description brings to mind that more recent quietistic navelscrutiny known as Transcendental Meditation). And when for good measure he throws in the / Ching, the glass-bead game can be seen to anticipate all the games within the 'alternative' culture which are played so solemnly in our time (in the 1930s as in later decades) as though they too were what the world is about.

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All these are explanatory analogies - metaphors - to help us understand what is intended. The notion to be conveyed is of a vast aesthetic invention - the most self-consistent, the most relentless and single-minded one I know in all literature - even more comprehensive than Adalbert Stifter's Der Nachsommer and Herman Melville's Moby Dick. At the same time what is envisaged is also a philosophical enterprise, something like Wittgenstein's Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus: a total re-enacting of' all that is the case in the world' in some unified but indeterminate medium. Is such an enterprise possible? Wittgenstein in the Tractatus concluded that it was not; that, whatever else such a systematic enterprise can achieve, it cannot reflect its own reflecting, or represent its own representing.12 His philosophical difficulty is similar to Hesse's compositional, literary difficulty. We all represent. Half our waking life is spent talking, describing and interpreting, converting experience into ruledetermined media like language, or money, or government forms or whatever. All these, being representations, are parts of our lives and can never be more than parts of our lives. Can the aesthetic escape this limitation? Hesse is aware of the difficulty. Perhaps this is the reason for his never quite telling us what the actual medium of his game is - beyond telling us that it is ruledetermined, infinitely flexible, unresistant and adaptable to new situations; that it has, as the mathematician would say, a supremely elegant notation. Has - or is? sometimes it looks as though the glass beads themselves are the medium in which the re-enacting takes place, sometimes they are merely part of the abacus on which the scores of the games and the results of the championships are noted. But the indeterminate nature of its medium still leaves us with the question: Can a game represent everything there is? The glass-bead game is an abstraction, abstracting away from the actuality of a world which does not appear to be ruledetermined, elegant and aesthetically pleasing, but chaotic and hideously all over the place. (It is because the game is such a brittle, indeterminate and abstract affair that the very solid figure of Josef Knecht achieves its poignant and moving

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quality.) Given Hesse's conception of a game capable of yielding a total representation, the world from which it is abstracted need not — indeed cannot — be there in any other form but as part of the game. Accordingly, it seems at first sight quite irrelevant to recall the historical circumstances from which the novel arose - that it was begun less than a year before Adolf Hitler became German Chancellor, and finished ten years later when Germany was master of Continental Europe; when Switzerland, where Hesse lived all the last five decades of his life, was one of the few countries not under German occupation; and that the novel came to be intended - as Doktor Faustus was intended - to be a taking-issue with, and a humanistic rebuttal of, the chaos and strife, the all-over-the-place viciousness of the age. The rebuttal remains implicit. The novel is at its weakest and least interesting - is little more than indignation - where it attempts a retrospective critique of the era of its composition. Looking back from the year 2200 to the 1930s, the various narrators, and especially the chronicler who writes the introductory history of the game, comment on that age in terms which seem surprisingly superficial and bad-tempered. To call the 1930s 'the era of the feuilleton' seems both unoriginal and inadequate. Above all, Hesse's observations on what we may broadly call ' Nietzschean politics' - the politics of the Will to Power - are anodyne and almost trivial. (This inability to find an adequate literary form for the politics of the 1930s has its parallel in the author's determination to keep all overt sexual motifs out of the Castalian Utopia; the affinities with Stifter's Der Nachsommer are striking.) Certainly, Hesse's insights into the ideological strife of his own times are inferior to Thomas Mann's. There is, however, another kind of politics on which, as will be seen, his comments are profound and illuminating. A game has rules; these have to be learned; learning, the pedagogic process, is central to the presentation of the game as the game is central to the novel. Learning, from Plato's Academy through the mediaeval monastic centres of learning to the university of our own day, has invariably been institutionalised, and institutionalisation in the form of a hierarchy of

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academic competence and talent provides a major aspect of Hesse's fictional scheme. The learning process and the game have two things in common: they are governed by rules, and they can be no more than segments of experience. Education is always education for something ('for life', we say), and a game, like a model, is an abstraction from a totality greater than itself. In order to make this totality possible, Hesse places his story in a Utopian ' pedagogic province' — a term he has taken from Goethe's Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre —just as he has chosen his hero's name (Knecht means 'servant') to contrast with that of Goethe's hero. Castalia, where Josef Knecht receives his schooling and spends almost his entire life, is a province in a State reminiscent in its confederative structure of the Swiss cantons. Castalia is largely self-administered under a central government, it has its own system of schools and universities, and all these educational institutions are in the service of the game. The higher you go, from elementary to high school to college, the more exclusive the emphasis on learning the rules of the game; on learning to apply, vary and interpret them; on studying its history and the skills and biographies of its greatest past practitioners; and on learning how to accommodate ever new areas of experience within its rules. All this is made possible because Castalia is a secluded province outside what E. M. Forster called 'the world of anger and telegrams', a province without any overt political power in the confederation and without much contact with its daily affairs. Most of the boys who go through this educational system next to nothing is said of girls or women in the course of the novel — leave Castalia for service 'in the world'. The devotion, conscientiousness and intellectual skill they acquire in their years of schooling are said to be transferable. Learning the game and its practice is for them primarily not an aesthetic activity, but an education; it is intended to make them into better servants of the state and better professional men than they would otherwise have been. If the game itself is the result of an 'encoding' (converting into rules) of all aspects of experience, then those who leave Castalia will profit for life outside the

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province by reversing the process, 'decoding' the rules they have learned into precepts for practical - mainly political action. As far as they are concerned, the purpose and the educational goal of the game are unambiguous. Nowhere does the book go more against the spirit of the age in which it was written than in its descriptions of the political contacts between Castalia and the Federation, and of Josef Knecht's activities as a diplomat abroad on behalf of his province. Throughout the novel Castalian politics are seen as an oligarchic or patrician occupation. This is politics in the service of a community and of its moral and ethical ideas which — since their fullest expression is to be seen in the game — are really aesthetic ideas. As against Hesse's plaintive remarks about the politics of the Will to Power, his detailed presentation of the politics of an essentially aesthetic elite, as well as his observations on the function of a university in a free but intellectually highly competitive society, are among the most memorable aspects of the novel - because in his positive interest in the hierarchic political structure that makes the province work Hesse is almost alone in the literature of his time. This was how Jacob Burckhardt (who makes his appearance thinly disguised as Pater Jacobus) conceived of cantonal politics, and how at least some parts of Swiss municipal government worked in his lifetime. In view of the patina of mystical kitsch the book has acquired, it is worth pointing out that Hesse is among the few modern authors (Brecht is another, and so is Thomas Mann in the Joseph tetralogy) to take institutional life seriously and to devote some of his best creative thinking to a sympathetic presentation of it. He is able to acknowledge solitude as one of the conditions of human greatness and yet postpone for as long as possible the moment when the theme of 'individual versus society', an ancient standby of German literature, rears its weary head. Hesse can also depict the formal and impersonal details in the life of an institution without succumbing to that other cliche, which regards all impersonal contact as inhuman and all formal considerations - that is, all considerateness - as inauthentic.

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Thomas Mann does not seem to have understood any of this. In a letter to Hesse in which he points to the kinship between Das Glasperlenspiel and Doktor Faustus he expresses his disappointment that Hesse should still be writing in c the perspective of the nonpolitical man' 13 (which he himself had long since rejected). The criticism is misconceived. The author of this novel is not 'nonpolitical ': he is writing a Utopia in the full socio-political sense of that word. Every Utopia bears the marks of the age from which it is projected: the education dispensed in the Castalian colleges is not so timeless as we are meant to believe. For one thing, in their scholastic aspect they purvey the kind of traditional education Hesse himself received as a scholarship boy in the Protestant seminary at Maulbronn, as he describes it in several earlier stories. But beyond this, the mixture of communal service and aesthetic noblesse oblige which informs these schools and colleges belongs to a very particular kind of public-school ethos, similar for instance to that Kurt Hahn went in for at Salem and Gordonstoun; and this, in turn, is the atmosphere consciously cultivated — if with very different ends in view — in the Ordensburgen, the National Socialist residential schools for political indoctrination. This resemblance is not cited to throw any doubt on Hesse's political integrity - his personal record in such matters is impeccable - but to suggest something of the intricate texture of the 1930s with its ravel of ideals and ideologies; to suggest indeed that the novel is not (as Hesse was to claim) wholly remote from the spirit of its age.14 Like many of his German contemporaries, Hesse is in love with this public-school ethos and delights in depicting it from the inside. He shows a schoolmaster's partiality for those pupils who are allowed to stay on and continue to the higher levels of Castalian education. These happy few (he tells us) tend to ironic disdain for the many who leave without achieving such academic glory, yet it is a disdain mixed with feelings of deprivation and envy. (This sort of ambivalence seems to belong to every academic institution in real life.) There is thus a certain amount of mild academic snobbery in Castalia, an assertion that the values manifest in the game and the skills it

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demands are the only values that really count. Preparation for a political life outside is recognised as one of the legitimate purposes of Castalian education, and the main motive for the population at large to keep the dons in clover. But the view they take of the world outside, though it changes in the course of the novel, is never positive. Implied throughout, and gradually increasing, is that tension which seems to be characteristic of all Bildungsromane, and which arises from the belief that education might somehow be presented and experienced as a selfcontained thing, not for anything outside; it is the belief that the hero might choose to remain in his own world and never enter the other; and, finally, that to enter our world is a desperate choice, or at least a regrettable one. The entire institutional structure of Castalia is described as Josef Knecht's career unfolds. Like the heroes of Hesse's earlier novels, Knecht begins as a scholarship boy of indigent background, who makes his way by his own academic and artistic talent, supported by a handsome and sensitive appearance, a singularly attractive manner and just a touch of obsequiousness. Eventually he joins the academic upper class of the province a class of men who devote their lives to the advancement of the game, teaching it, safeguarding its purity and continued vitality, extending its range and incorporating new areas of experience in it. He becomes the youngest practitioner of the game to be elected to its highest office, and he is the only one ever to resign that office in order to leave the province for the world. With all this it is inevitable, as several critics have observed, that the figure of Josef Knecht should be given more individuality and more of a personal story than the first narrator had allowed for at the beginning of the book.15 Knecht's growing individuality and self-determination as well as his eventual departure can only be explained by his deep discontent with Castalia and with 'the game'. Since such discontent is inseparable from an individuality which, according to the rules of the kind of novel-writing Hesse practises, must be revealed to the point where it provides a convincing motive for the departure, the individuality and the separateness of the hero his idiosyncrasy - are bound to intensify as the story reaches its

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climax. But throughout this process the negative evaluation of thatfor which Knecht defects from his office never changes. The denigration of the world outside Castalia remains an inseparable part of the design. It is difficult to tell how far Hesse is aware of the problematic nature of his undertaking, but the way his prose is written will help in the understanding of some of the tensions it is meant to accommodate. Here is his description of the Castalian scholars as seen by the ordinary people outside the hierarchy; Man lieB die eigentliche Gelehrtenschaft in nahezu vollkommener Freiheit ihre Studien und Spiele treiben und stieB sich nicht daran, daB manche ihrer Arbeiten augenscheinlich dem Volk und Gemeinwesen keinen unmittelbaren Nutzen brachten, ja den Nichtgelehrten als luxuriose Spielereien erscheinen muBten. Es ist mancher dieser Gelehrten wegen der Art seiner Studien belachelt, niemals aber getadelt oder gar seiner Privilegien beraubt worden. DaB sie auch beim Volk Achtung genossen und nicht bloB geduldet wurden, wenn es auch viele Witze iiber sie gab, das hing mit dem Opfer zusammen, mit welchem alle Mitglieder der Gelehrtenschaft ihre geistige Freiheit bezahlten. Sie hatten viele Annehmlichkeiten, sie hatten in bescheidener Zuteilung Nahrung, Kleidung und Wohnung, sie hatten herrliche Bibliotheken zur Verfugung, Sammlungen, Laboratorien, aber dafiir verzichteten sie nicht nur auf Wohlleben, auf Ehe und Familie, sondern waren, als monchische Gemeinschaft, aus dem allgemeinen Wettbewerb der Welt ausgeschieden, kannten kein Eigentum, keine Titel und Auszeichnungen und hatten sich im Materiellen mit einem sehr einfachen Leben zu begniigen. Wenn einer seine Lebensjahre an die Entzifferung einer einzigen alten Inschrift vergeuden wollte, stand ihm dies frei, man leistete ihm noch Vorschub; aber wenn er auf gutes Leben, auf elegante Kleidung, auf Geld oder Titel Anspruch machte, stieB er auf unerbittliche Verbote, und wem diese Appetite wichtig waren, der kehrte meist schon in jungen Jahren in die 'Welt 5 zuriick, wurde besoldeter Fachlehrer, oder Privatlehrer, oder Journalist, oder heiratete, oder suchte sich auf irgendwelche Art ein Leben nach seinem Geschmack.16 The community of scholars themselves were allowed to pursue their studies and games in almost complete freedom, and no objection was offered to the fact that much of their work was of no ascertainable benefit to the people or to corporate life, was indeed bound to seem to the unlearned like self-indulgent trifling. Many of these scholars

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aroused amusement because of the form their studies took, but they were never censured or in any danger of losing their privileges. The fact that the people not only tolerated but respected them, even while often joking about them, was the result of the sacrifice all the scholars made in return for their intellectual freedom. They had many advantages, and were allowed a modest provision of food, clothing and accommodation, had splendid libraries, collections and laboratories at their disposal, but in return they renounced high living, marriage and family, and as a monastic community were excluded from the competitive life of the world in general; they possessed nothing, received no titles or distinctions and had to content themselves with very simple conditions of material existence. If one of them wanted to expend his time on earth in the deciphering of a single ancient inscription he was free to do so and was given assistance, but if he demanded good living, elegant clothes, money or titles he encountered implacable prohibitions, and if these appetites were important to him he usually soon returned to the ' world' to become a salaried school-teacher or a private tutor, or a journalist, or he married, or sought the kind of life he desired in one way or another. With its relentless repetitions ('they had many advantages etc. etc...) the quotation is characteristic of Hesse's strange undertaking; with its flat, paratactic enumerations and its anxious insistence on covering every aspect and contingency of the situation it reminds us of Adalbert Stifter's prose at its most circumstantial ; 17 that is, where it is most informed by fear. These repetitions leave a strange trail throughout the book. ' The details of a scene or situation having been offered to the reader, they are then reassembled, not always in a different order, and offered again. This so often occurs immediately after the first statement that it has the effect of an obsession, of the overheard mutterings of a person talking to themself... Is this reiteration a warding-off of pain, a flattering unction applied to gaps and cracks and sore places? Pain, if so, from a recognition of creative inadequacy, gaps in what ought to be coherent imaginings?' 18 It is as if the effort to compose a fictional structure which would negate the times proved too great for the texture of the book to be controlled as well. For it is not really true to say (as Hesse claims in a letter written towards the end of 1940) that the book shows no signs of the era in which it was composed, that

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nobody would attribute it to 'that dreadful age', and that it runs 'counter to all the solutions which that age forces upon us'. 19 The fact that the aesthetic reconstruction of the world sub specie ludi turns out to be incomplete and is acknowledged as such seems to me a sign of authorial honesty. The alternative, which shows it up as a thing incomplete, lies under the heavy shadow of ideology. Given Hesse's lack of insight into contemporary politics,20 the determination seems inescapable. Of course, no man can jump over his own shadow. Nietzsche too could only plan and project his total aesthetic 'justification' or 'vindication' of the world, he could in no sense accomplish it. Yet Nietzsche was able to retain his reflective freedom, on this topic as on most others, and his endless and lively aphoristic skirmishes are a sign of and a means towards that freedom. For Hesse there is no such escape. The gravitas, the very coherence of his Utopian invention, spell immovable commitment. The manner in which Josef Knecht resigns his high office and departs from Castalia, his explanation of his action and finally the chronicler's particular insistence on vindicating his death all these speak the language of that ' dreadful age' and offer precisely those 'solutions' which the age has forced upon the author. When Knecht leaves the province for ' the world' (as we have seen, the hapless quotation marks are Hesse's own), he does so by breaking the rules of the Castalian order and going against the advice of his colleagues. As he leaves he has a premonition. Feeling that he has given too much of himself to his beloved community and to the game, he knows that he has not much time left for life in the world. But why then does he leave Castalia? The answer may be sought in the central questions of the book: How much experience does the glass-bead game encompass? How much world and life is left outside, incapable of being drawn into its ambience, into the charmed circle of aesthetic re-interpretation? And this brings us back to our Nietzschean beginning: How is the total validation of the world by means of the aesthetic to be encompassed ?

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On the one hand the game is a matter of great seriousness and requires a 'monastic community', no less, for its cultivation. Literally monastic (i.e. religiously inspired) or only metaphorically? Hesse will not say. He never quite decides how far he ought to let his invention take on the characteristics of a faith or a theology, a full alternative to the Christian order of things; like so many of his contemporaries, he too seems to be ' after strange gods'. But to outsiders, we read, the pursuits of Castalian lore appear as little more than 'self-indulgent frivolities'. Yet how are these ' Spielereien' to be distinguished from ' Spiel' the game itself? Clearly, by accepting the game as a serious matter. In other words: since it is said to be a game with ' the total contents and values of our culture', it will have to have a notation for everything: for the ephemeral nature of life and its historicity; for all social, cultural, scientific and aesthetic patterns, but also for a personal human fate and story, and for the passionate, Dionysian aspect of personal existence. In short, the game will have to have a notation for seriousness. Whereas our first criticism revealed a text saddled, almost inadvertently, with a pseudo-religious value, now we are left with an unresolvable contradiction. If the game excludes a notation for seriousness, it is indistinguishable from those 'frivolities' which (we were told) are unworthy of prolonged attention; if, however, it includes this notation, it becomes indistinguishable from the real thing - it ceases to be a game. Every supposedly ' total' interpretation of the world, including Schopenhauer's, and including also Nietzsche's project for an all-encompassing aesthetic, must surely be involved in a similar dilemma. Wittgenstein's early Tractatus was built on just such a claim to total representation, and it is this claim that is abandoned in Wittgenstein's later writings. Language, in the language games of the Philosophical Investigations, is a form of life; not the whole of life or a representation of that whole. Hesse cannot modify the system he has constructed or abandon it for another - all he can do is surreptitiously withdraw the claim to totality that was made for it. The game turns out not to have a notation for seriousness, or, to put it in Knecht's terms, not to be 'reaV enough. The words in which

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Knecht conveys his disappointment and his decision to quit Castalia are the overcharged, helpless, rough-and-tumble cliche words of the world of the thirties. They are the words of promise which connected that world with its dominant ideology and to which that ideology owed some of its immense attraction. It is the promise of'absoluteness', the hunger for 'reality': 'Was ich suche, ist nicht so sehr Stillung einer Neugierde oder einer Lusternheit auf das Weltleben als vielmehr Unbedingtheit. Ich wunsche nicht in die Welt hinauszugehen mit einer Ruckversicherung fur den Fall einer Enttauschung in der Tasche, ein vorsichtiger Reisender, der sich ein wenig in der Welt umsieht. Ich begehre im Gegenteil Wagnis, Erschwerung und Gefahr, ich bin hungrig nach Wirklichkeit, nach Aufgaben und Taten, auch nach Entbehrungen und Leiden. '21 'What I seek is not so much the satisfaction of a curiosity or lust for the worldly life but rather the unconditioned. I do not want to go out into the world with an insurance policy against disappointment in my pocket, like a cautious traveller intending to see something of the world. On the contrary, what I desire is risk, difficulty and danger, I am hungry for reality, for tasks and deeds, for privations and sufferings too.' And again, when the senior Castalian councillor whom Knecht tells of his decision asks whether he feels he is acting from some religious impulse: 'Nein, an Manifestationen eines Gottes oder Damons oder einer absoluten Wahrheit habe ich bei jenen Erweckungen nie gedacht. Was diesen Erlebnissen ihre Wucht und Uberzeugungskraft gibt, ist nicht ihr Gehalt an Wahrheit, ihre hohe Herkunft, ihre Gottlichkeit oder dergleichen, sondern ihre Wirklichkeit. Sie sind ungeheuer wirklich, so wie etwa ein heftiger korperlicher Schmerz oder ein uberraschendes Naturereignis, Sturm oder Erdbeben, uns ganz anders mit Wirklichkeit, Gegenwartigkeit, Unentrinnbarkeit geladen zu sein scheint als die gewohnlichen Zeiten und Zustande ... in der Stunde des Erlebens dulden sie keinerlei Zweifel und sind bis zum Bersten voll Realitat.' ' No, when I experienced these revelations I have never thought of a god or a daimon or of an absolute truth. What gives these moments their force and power of conviction is not the truth they contain, their sublime origin, their divine nature or anything like that, but their reality. They are enormously real, in the way a violent physical pain

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or an astonishing natural phenomenon, a storm or an earthquake, seems to us full of reality, immediacy, inescapability, quite differently from ordinary times and circumstances ... at the moment of experience they leave no room for doubt and are bursting with reality.?22 What emerges from these tell-tale words is hardly a very original conclusion. A desire for undiscriminating, indiscriminate experience drives Knecht into the world, a search for the challenge, for ' difficulty and danger... privation and suffering'. For the sake of what? We are not told. The Dionysian swamps the Apolline, the total asethetic interpretation turns out to be not just less than total, but invalid: 'the game' is only 'playing about', after all. At first sight it looks as if the novel were completing a respectable traditional pattern. What it conveys is ' the attitude of one who takes a certain thing seriously, but then at a certain point does not take it seriously and declares that something else is more serious still' ;23 or again we might put it in the words of St Paul (1 Cor. 13:11): 'When I was a child I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child; but when I became a man I put away childish things.' But when Josef Knecht puts away childish things, he does not face another higher or more serious world: all he faces is death, the world into which he flees is for him identical with death. The reader is entitled to wonder with apprehension if this is what constituted and perhaps still constitutes the attractiveness of this late work, this end-game. Going out into the world (Hesse suggests) his hero is taking upon himself some sort of sacrifice. A scene heavy with Dionysian symbolism is followed by Knecht's death, presented as 'his sacrificial death'. 24 Every critic seems readily to accept this view, yet I can see nothing in the novel - no cause or person - to justify it. It is a claim, however, for which the postNietzschean age was notorious - an age full of talk about the sacrificing of oneself, and full of the practice of sacrificing others. A similar doubt attaches to the value of the ethos of strenuousness which Knecht chooses, the ethos of the dear purchase, which in Hesse's novel turns into a search for 'reality'. After all, even assuming that the word has a definite meaning, by what strange philosophy should ' reality' be something to ' sacrifice'

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one's life for? ' Reality', in Hesse's novel, is neither harmony nor order nor truth, but more resembles strenuous though apparently pointless effort and death. The ' philosophical' appeal of the notion goes hand in hand with its vagueness and with its modernity. Undoubtedly 'reality' is a keyword of the age. Yet, devoid of any stable meaning and usefulness, is it more than a modish word, a sticky, amorphous and poisonous jellyfish of a word? However moving the description of Josef Knecht's d e a t h and it has a beauty and a poignancy quite free of the repetitiousness that has been noted - it cannot dispel the impression, not indeed of ponderousness, but of a false alternative being posed. Were Knecht's ending presented as pointless, it would have the irony of a disappointed expectation (the liberating irony, for instance, that attaches to the death of Father Zosima in The Brothers Karamazov). Instead, Knecht 'sacrifices' himself for a 'reality' represented by a boy who (we are told) may perhaps one day come to understand the value of his sacrifice... Is it to be inferred that Josef Knecht is in love with the boy, and that those ascetic ideals by which he has lived are a cover for a sexual motif after all ? Hesse, it seems, though he spent years in Jungian analysis,25 hardly knows. Nietzsche would have understood the conclusion of the book for what it is: the revenge of the god Dionysos, not on the magister ludi, but on his creator. HISTORY AND ALLEGORY: THOMAS MANN'S DOCTOR FAUSTUS 'At the boundary the strangest creatures are always to be found', Lichtenberg observed:26 Thomas Mann's Doktor Fanstus27 is such an exceedingly strange creature, on the boundary lines between many different preoccupations, modes and themes. Erich Heller called it' a scandalously profound book' ;28 scandal and greatness are inseparable in it. The book is first and foremost 'ein Kunstlerroman', the fictional biography of a musician told by his life-long friend and admirer Serenus Zeitblom, a classical scholar; Goethe's Faust

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had a disciple called Wagner, Mann's Faustus has Zeitblom. This is the life-story of the composer Adrian Leverkiihn, born on a farm near the town of Kaisersaschern in 1885 (the name comes from the real towns of Kaiserslautern and Aschersleben, and in the early part of the novel there is emphasis on the town's mediaeval past as an aspect of its living present). From Leverkuhn's schooldays onwards a quality of intellectual strenuousness isolates him from his companions, fastidiousness and a cold pride make him despise the comforts and compromises of the society of ordinary men. Turning his back on his innate gift for music, Adrian Leverkiihn studies theology at the University of Halle; but as an adolescent in Kaisersaschern he has received a sophisticated musical education and critical encouragement from a German-American musician, Wendell Kretzschmar, and after a time he follows Kretzschmar to Leipzig, where his career as a composer begins. The life of this solitary man with his strange mixture of hubris and charm - the charm that belongs to every tragic hero in literature - is rich not in outward events but in the adventures of the mind and soul. Thomas Mann presents to us a modern artist - one whose great gift is threatened and paralysed by the impasse which, as he believes, art has reached in his time. Contemptuous of the banal harmonies of the post-Romantic era, Leverkiihn must pursue his art and create the new through the shock-effects of parody and dissonance, and to help him in this pursuit he seeks out the devil. He deliberately contracts a syphilitic infection - the episode in a Leipzig brothel is taken from Deussen's memoirs of Nietzsche29 — and in a later discussion with the devil (inspired partly by The Brothers Karamazov and partly by Gogol's diary) he signs a pact, or rather an agreement, purchasing twenty-four years of strenuous life as a composer at the price not only of his immortal soul but also of all capacity for love. Three times Leverkiihn tries to break out of the icy and desolate solitude to which his character, his gift and the devil have condemned him, but his love for a woman, a child and a man all end in disaster. In 1930, aged forty-five, now living on a Bavarian farm that is almost a mirror-image of the one in Central Germany where he grew up, Leverkiihn suffers an attack of general paralysis of the

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insane. He dies ten years later on 25 August 1940, which was the fortieth anniversary of Nietzsche's death. The structural features are, then, those of the fictional biography of an artist, and accord closely with Thomas Mann's literary gifts. First and most obviously the biography enables Mann to concentrate through Zeitblom, the narrator, on a single life and on a psyche all of whose adventures are translated into artistic - that is musical - terms. The biographical fiction involves Mann, secondly, in detailed presentation of the artist's oeuvre, for the claim that this is a composer of genius cannot be merely asserted but must be borne out by descriptions which intimate something of his powers. All that need be said about these musicological passages in the book is that at least in one instance - the description of Leverkiihn's last great composition, Dr Fausti Weheklag (The Lament of Doctor Faustus) - the

undertaking splendidly succeeds. Thirdly, Mann's old difficulty in keeping more than one narrative strand going is disguised by the biographical form that allows him to confine his presentations of the surrounding world to the episodic: this is partly because continuity and coherence are provided by 'the life' rather than a history of 'the times', and partly because his artist-hero lives in ever-increasing isolation. Leverkiihn's attempts to grapple to himself the world of common humanity are worsted by his character and by the conditions of the Satanic compact, which is no more after all than a heightening of the gifts and tendencies - the musical genius and the emotional deprivation - that informed his temperament from the beginning. Common to all these features of the fictional biography (and to the musical oeuvre it depicts) is a high degree of articulated self-consciousness. Like many other novels, from Don Quixote to Ulysses and beyond, Doktor Faustus contains a variety of parodistic and quotational elements in its episodes and ideas, and also in the stylistic turns devised for them. The book's chief sources are das Faustbuch of 1587 and the life of Nietzsche. But it contains a vast array of scenes and themes culled from the biographies and writings of Beethoven, Carl Maria von Weber, Tchaikovsky, Hugo Wolf and Schonberg, Ernest Newman's

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biography of Wagner, Stravinsky's memoirs, Kierkegaard's Either/Or, Luther's letters and table-talk. It makes use of verbatim extracts from the political literature of the 1920s, and of detailed references to Spengler's Decline of the West and Sorel's treatise on violence. It is full of internal cross-references and mutually validating leitmotifs, and its action is the movement of a mind and of an age retraced by a narrator who (to use Auden's nice distinction)30 is in no way boring though in some ways a bore. The special kind of plasticity Zeitblom's insights have is achieved - by a hazardous and yet in the end successsful device - by an elaborate show of wonder and incomprehension bordering on obtuseness.31 Thus Doktor Faustus is a fiction studded with fragments of its author's unabating self-consciousness - a collage, or perhaps a mosaic of many colours, some parts of which are like little mirrors shaped to fit into the overall pattern. When Zeitblom comments on his own inadequacies as a biographer, and begins to be exasperating with his indirections explaining why indirections are what he needs (11-12); when he sums up and interprets in one chapter the episodes of the previous chapter (272), criticising his own longueurs (113—14) and his inability to keep to a chronological sequence (45); when he explains how he couldn't have been present at an event he has just been describing in intimate detail (661), glosses the stylistic and syntactic features of his own composition and muses on its translatability into English (764), and generally puts the critic out of business by doing his work for him and telling him that that is what is going on - it is hard to know with what expectations this work should be approached. It is almost 800 pages long and the narrator several times refers to it as 'ein Biichlein'. Apart from being a biography, Doktor Faustus is also a historical novel. This elaborate display of all the devices known to the literature of selfconsciousness, from Laurence Sterne to Nathalie Sarraute, has its justification in the novel's historicity. The work is located at a most critical point in time: the moment when the creative self- Thomas Mann's self- meets and responds to the challenge of his time and country. It is in this novel that he comes closest to that history, and to the temper of

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the age in which National Socialism was born. He achieves this strenuous proximity by means of a double perspective, by lacing the age of which the novel tells - Leverkiihn's life from 1885 to 1940 — into a framework of the time in which the novel is told -from 27 May 1943 to 15 April 1945. There is no need to emphasise the exacting nature of this undertaking: the last phase of National Socialism constitutes the historical perspective of the novel. If the book has some deep and disquieting flaws, they are the price we must pay for its two greatest achievements: the presentation of the old German theme of solitude, made the more poignant by the hero's position at the very centre of a rich panorama of social and intellectual life; and the presentation of Germany in the first three decades of the twentieth century. In both respects it is unsurpassed. The historical realism of the novel was brought home to me when, in the autumn of 1947, I went as a research student from Cambridge to Gottingen, taking with me a copy of the book, which had been published earlier that year in Stockholm. It was the first copy my German fellow-students had seen. The winter was hard, the last before the currency reform of 1948. In order to read the book, the students who borrowed it retired for twenty-four hours under their Federbetten (eiderdowns) and then passed it on to the next reader. They were my contemporaries, and it was my first contact with members of a German generation whose life belonged to the era encompassed by the novel. The night-long conversations in the course of which we discussed the book (so much like the Strohgesprdche - conversations in the straw - that it describes) left me in no doubt that what fascinated, overwhelmed and sometimes angered them about Doktor Faustus was the illumination of self-knowledge it provided for each of them. Those conversations in the Gottingen of 1947 now belong more to the age of which Thomas Mann was writing than they do to modern times. The historicity of the work is certainly a rounded thing. But, it will be objected, that's all half a century ago, and it is not to be expected that a novel's historicity should provide the foundation of its literary immortality. Yet may this not be so? That era closed with the defeat of Germany in 1945, but it

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began, not in 1914 or 1918, as the history books tell us, but much earlier, in the nineteenth century. Historical epochs begin and end less tidily and sharply than do novels. But what Doktor Faustus does, among other things, is to provide us with a better periodisation of modern German history. It does this with a clarity which is not and cannot be a part of its author's selfconsciousness, because that periodisation is implied in and created by the book, and is available to us as it was not to the author and his first readers. In our perspective it becomes clear that Doktor Faustus is the last great literary document of the old Germany — from the Second Reich to 1945, the Germany of which the monstrosity of National Socialism was the final though not disconnected degradation. This - the modern era of the dear purchase - was the age when most of Germany's greatest minds saw their country as the exception among the countries of Europe, and were intent on stressing and augmenting all that divided her from the rest of Europe. What was exceptional about their country, they felt and we feel too, was its concern with ideology and metaphysical speculation as explanations for social and political phenomena. The main reason for accepting 1945 as the watershed is that in the period after 1918 people still believed in, and acted on, systematised tenets and convictions to a degree mercifully unparalleled in the Germany that began to rise from the ruins when Doktor Faustus was published. It is this continuity which the historical perspective of Doktor Faustus helps us to establish. The conservative ideology that assisted the National Socialist rise to power had its roots in the Second Reich and in German Romanticism; but the ingredients of that 'satanic brew' 32 - the phrase is Hitler's - were, each and every one of them, discussed and propagated well before 1914. Sociologists of the present anti-ideological age are inclined to argue that the role of ideology in the shaping of society has been traditionally exaggerated, that its dominance is a myth. But it was just such a myth that gripped Germany, and she eventually followed the man who gave the myth substance and political reality. Germany followed — that is her civil servants, lawyers and doctors, her philosophers and artists and purveyors of culture of every

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kind followed, and so did her university teachers, who are also portrayed in Doktor Faustus, and who would in due course be the gratuitous propagators and fellow-travellers of the ideology. They would object to National Socialism in all sorts of ways but one. Since it provided them with the stable and vital standards they missed, they saw it as a haven of authenticity in the face of disaffection and anomie. (It is here that the ideas from Sorel's treatise on violence are taken up by characters in the novel (559-60).) Often they strained at the means, and even, though less often, at the ends. But this vision of a total ideology, of a network of correspondences between politics and culture, between the aspirations of private lives and those of a social whole, between the life of the mind and life in the world - this vision appeared to them as the only way out of their national impasse. How do we know? Among the many witnesses to this is Mann's Doktor Faustus. This vision of 'der Durchbruch' ('the breakthrough') is the message of the theological lectures Adrian Leverkiihn attends at Halle in 1903-4, it is the theme of the ' Strohgesprache' - his night-long discussions with his fellow-students when they go off walking in the nearby countryside and rest on the straw in barns; this too is the message of the violent arguments in the intellectual and artistic circles he and Zeitblom visit in post-1918 Munich. When, to give a few examples, the devil tells Leverkiihn ' Das Leben ist nicht heikel und von Moral weiB es einen Dreck' (375) ('Life is not fastidious and it doesn't give a damn for morality'), he sums up the credo of vitalism precisely on the level on which fascist ideologists used it. Again, when Zeitblom conveys the attitude of the Munich intellectuals towards the nationalist revolution as follows (567): Das kommt, das kommt, und wenn es da ist, wird es uns auf der Hohe des Augenblicks finden. Es ist interessant, es ist sogar gut - einfach dadurch, dafi es das Kommende ist, und es zu erkennen ist sowohl der Leistung wie des Vergniigens genug. It is coming, it is coming, and when it arrives it will find usrisingto the occasion. It is interesting, it is even good, simply because it is the coming thing, and to recognise it is to satisfy our duty and our desire.

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— this summary is a sketch of intellectual conformity in the wake of Spengler - a sort of mini-Spenglerism - in which every intellectual pretension is deflated. And finally, on the topic of nationalism, there is Saul Fitelberg, the French-German-PolishJewish impresario who comes to invite Leverkiihn to abandon his Bavarian solitude and wants to take him on a tour of the great world (621-2): Man spricht vom Zeitalter des Nationalismus. Aber in Wirklichkeit gibt es nur zwei Nationalismen, den deutschen und den jiidischen, und der aller anderen ist Kinderspiel dagegen — wie das Stockfranzosentum eines Anatole France die reine Mondanitat ist im Vergleich mit der deutschen Einsamkeit - und dem jiidischen Erwahltheitsdiinkel... France - ein nationalistischer nom de guerre. Ein deutscher Schriftsteller konnte sich nicht gut ' Deutschland' nennen, so nennt man hochstens ein Kriegsschiff. Er miiBte sich mit 'Deutsch' begniigen - und da gabe er sich einen jiidischen Namen ... People talk about the age of nationalism. But actually there are only two nationalisms, the German and the Jewish, and everyone else's is child's play—just as the deep-rooted Frenchness of someone like Anatole France is sheer cosmopolitanism in comparison with German solitude and the Jewish obsession with being chosen. France - a nationalistic pseudonym. A German writer couldn't very well call himself' Deutschland' — at best it's a name for a battleship. He would have to make do with ' Deutsch' - and that's a Jewish name ...

Never in the history of Europe was the love of a tribe for a nation so terribly requited. All these problems, as problems requiring political solution, no longer concern us. And anyway, it may be objected, what are history books for? Are they not the appropriate place for the portraying of an era? But the rich and intricate presentation of these problems in the form of a highly structured fiction, enriched by wit and anecdote and anchored in a variety of individual lives full of bizarre Dickensian idiosyncrasies and contradictions - the contradictions between sober living and extravagant speculation - such a presentation is the very body and form of the art of the historical novel. As I have already suggested, both the narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, and his creator belong to the period that is being

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depicted. The historicity of the novel is not leapfrogged by authorial selfconsciousness. Every consciousness is bounded by a horizon. The critic is not entirely out of a job. By attempting a 'total' novel of interconnections and allegorical correspondences, the author of Doktor Faustus shares an important feature of the ideological network. Here the element of scandal arises that was referred to at the beginning of this account. For when we ask how the life and oeuvre of Adrian Leverklihn are to be connected with the epoch, we receive a direct answer. The life and the work, Zeitblom says more than once, are to be seen not only in a free interplay with their epoch but are to stand in an allegorical relationship to it. Leverkiihn's solitariness is the equivalent of the self-imposed isolation of Germany; his commerce with the devil is Germany's commerce with evil; the inspiration he buys from the devil vouchsafes him an escape from sterility, from 'harmonic subjectivity' into 'polyphonic objectivity', that is, a music (corresponding to a state of mind, an ideology) which replaces the 'mildewed freedom' (294) of the individual by ' the choral discipline of the collective' Leverklihn is exchanging the freedom of bleak isolation for conformity with the ' objective forces of history'. To sum it up in the words of Ernest Newman in the first review the English translation received: 'This ruthless piece of symbolism has apparently been too much for some German critics of the novel, who resent the implication that the history of Germany during the last generation has been the history of a moral and intellectual "infection", a pact with the Devil. ' 33 But that is not all. There is also another, complementary meaning to the allegory, which Ronald Gray certainly had in mind when he wrote that the ending of the novel has an implication which is 'absurd or horrible'. 34 What is this implication? There is more than one hint, in the last two chapters especially, that Adrian Leverklihn will be saved. The theology of Doktor Faustus, which Thomas Mann takes from his peculiar reading of Martin Luther, is the theology offortiter peccari, of salvation through a superabundance of sins: a salvation, moreover, not through repentance and contrition but through attrition and anguish. The reading to which Thomas Mann

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subjects Luther was very much part of the intellectual fashion of the German twenties.35 It finds a parallel in the Dostoevsky literature with which Thomas Mann was intimately familiar from the time of his Meditations of a Nonpolitical Man. Merezhkovsky, Eliasberg and Stefan Zweig were among the authors who, in response to the mood of the age, offered sensational manichean interpretations of the Russian novelist's work. These misinterpretations, far from being merely the objects of Thomas Mann's attention in the novel, colour its every important belief and mood. If, therefore, we are to understand that there is, in Leverklihn's life, a hope of salvation beyond anguish and despair; if we are to understand that there is in his last great work ' a light in the night' and in that closing tenuous high G from the cello 'a light of hope' beyond hopelessness; and if that work (like all Leverkiihn's later compositions) is to be seen as the fruit of the devilish compact, are we then to conclude that the monstrosities of National Socialism are in some inconceivable way to be seen as justified and validated? The suggestion is indeed horrible and absurd. And it is not to be refuted by arguing that Thoman Mann cannot possibly have intended it. Zeitblom at least once says - though he is speaking of the post-1918 period - that through her defeat Germany has gained a certain spiritual advantage — ' einen gewissen geistigen Vorsprung' (557) - over her less disrupted neighbours. What does refute the suggestion is that Thomas Mann has not in fact written a novel of total correspondences; that on the level of specific events and individual ideas the allegorical parallels are incomplete and intermittent, implying and leaving room for the freedom of the individual from a total determinism. The parallel must be drawn where it is meaningful, and abandoned where that freedom is invoked. The hope beyond despair with which the novel closes is the intimation of that freedom, and it is by no means only the ending that escapes the application of the parallel. For one thing, Adrian actually commits very little objective evil — objective in terms of the reality of the novel — for the hubris and cold pride and incapacity for love that inform his character are his own afflictions, they bring harm to nobody but

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himself. (His feeling of guilt for the deaths of his friend Rudi Schwerdtfeger and his nephew Nepomuk is another matter.) Moreover, what Leverkiihn buys from the devil is not power or worldly goods, it is not even (as in Goethe's Faust) the knowledge-and-experience of a fuller life. What he buys is twenty-four years of strenuous creative work, years which will expressly include periods of hideous suffering through the disease he has contracted. What he buys is in a sense the opposite of easy success: it is recalcitrance in the musical material he is after, compositional tasks of supreme difficulty, and the avoidance of banal ease and harmony. Finally, the music he composes may strike him as godless and evil (as Kafka sometimes thought of his own work as desolate and tainted), but we know - it is Zeitblom who conveys this knowledge to us that for all its diabolical origins, for all the despair and anguish it expresses, it is the music of a genius. Serenus Zeitblom is right, surely, to believe that such music can never be anything other than an illumination and a delight. When Leverkiihn proposes to 'take back' Beethoven's Ninth Symphony (725-6) he is in fact adding a composition to the world of music. The music we know is either good or bad, not good or evil. Like the creative literature we know, music is not this human emotion or that, but an expression of human emotions. To put it another way: E. M. Butler was certainly right when she wrote that the cap doesn't fit and that an 'artist's fate is something much too individual to symbolise a nation's destiny', and 'ruthless political ambitions are in a different category from the hubris of genius'. But when she concludes that' the symbolical validity of Mann's Doktor Faustus is questionable in the extreme', 36 she seems to me to overstate her case against an historical interpretation. Was Thomas Mann mistaken - as E. M. Butler implies - in attempting the parallel at all? The question is rather how he could possibly have avoided attempting it; how, given his undertaking to trace the life and times of a great artist, he could possibly have failed to show some reflections of the contemporary world and some prophetic intimations in the composer's oeuvre. 'C'est "boche"' says the impresario, talking to Lever-

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kiihn about his music, 'C'est "boche" dans un degre fascinant' (613) - how could Mann have failed to show what that remark might mean? He could, it is true, have been more discreet about the parallel (and about several other things; unlike Leverkuhn's music the novel has plenty of free notes and excessive ornamentations). But to have attempted a musical biography unrelated to its age would have been an esotericism and an absurdity. The relationship is not one of determinism or of a consistent ongoing allegory, but of an illuminating and sustaining symbolism. This symbolism is consistent and it cannot be abandoned or overtaken by the author's creative consciousness, because it is in the very manner of writing. Throughout, our subject has been a literary epoch in which difficulty, the .resistance of ideals to human aspirations, the inexorable hardness of an individual's task, are seen as the hallmarks of authentic existence; and authentic experience - 'Erlebnis' - is all. Difficulty, resistance, hardness: in brief, 'das Schwere'. And this, 'das Schwere', is one of the key words oiDoktor Faustus, it informs every aspect of Leverkuhn's life, of his relationship with his art and with his world, it is the mode in which the novel is cast, and it is this that enables us to see the novel as the last great document of its era.37 In making Doktor Faustus an example of what I take to be the characteristic mode of thinking and feeling, as well as of writing, in a whole era, I wish to distinguish this mode from the parallelism of the historical allegory. Whereas the allegory is intermittently valid, the idea of the dear purchase is consistently adhered to and constantly present. Or, to put it another way, there is a freedom of the individual from a total determinism, but this freedom is still the attribute of an individual who belongs to a certain time and place and speaks the language of his epoch, and whose life and works are described in that language. In the case of Leverkuhn's last work, The Lament ofDr Faustus, the literary representation of that cantata is more, a great deal more, than a technically elaborated foil to an allegory, and is not the intended text behind a piece of programme music a la Richard Strauss (such as Leverkiihn had composed when he was a young man), but another and a more original thing. The

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musical and partly technical description is a sort of prose-poem on the theme of human emotion, the expression - at once poetic and discursive, at once lyrical and technical - of lament. Poetic and discursive, in the sense that a vocabulary which we associate with intellectual analysis - with musicology - is transmuted into an evocation of the feeling of desolation in somewhat the same way as the vocabulary used to describe the group in Picasso's Les Saltimbanques is transmuted by Rilke into an evocation of the feelings of evanescence and inauthenticity. Both of these - Rilke's Fifth Elegy and Thomas Mann's rendering of The Lament of Dr Faustus - include in their wording a self-reflective, self-conscious element, a second look at the creative process that produced these descriptions and a second look at the work of which each is an integral part. Of course, the success of these major creations in the selfconscious manner is threatened by this second look - but it is threatened only to be enhanced by it, just as the lyricism of the Four Quartets is first threatened and then enhanced and movingly completed by its own self-reflective passages. There is a tense truthfulness in this strenuous play with the discursive and analytical lexis, with the technicalities of composition, which locates each work in the age to which it belongs. In a different way in each case, this truthfulness enhances our feeling that literary greatness obeys Blake's maxim that ' eternity is in love with the productions of Time'. The self-reflective element in Zeitblom's description of Leverkiihn's magnum opus is manifold. It directs our attention to the first Faust chapbook from which both Thomas Mann and Adrian Leverklihn derive important facets of their respective compositions. It also directs us to the sea-changes of time: to Mann's and Leverkiihn's consciousness of undertaking a late work, a work at the end of an all-but-exhausted tradition (the parodistic, bookish nature of Zeitblom's style is reminiscent of T. S. Eliot's 'periphrastic study in a worn-out... fashion').38 And this self-reflective element relates, thirdly, to the oeuvre of both artists, to the cantata as the consummation of the fictional composer's lifetime labours, and to the novel as its author's hard-won late achievement.

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Only at the end of the description, when this complex and sometimes bewildering task of indirection has been discharged, is a glimpse of freedom allowed. The lyricism of the lament, now pure and unalloyed, soars out freely and is transformed, transmuted into hope: Hort nur den SchluB, hort ihn mit mir: Eine Instrumentengruppe nach der anderen tritt zuriick, und was iibrig bleibt, womit das Werk verklingt, ist das hohe g eines Cello, das letzte Wort, der letzte verschwebende Laut, in pianissimo-Fermate langsam vergehend. Dann ist nichts mehr, - Schweigen und Nacht. Aber der nachschwingend im Schweigen hangende Ton, der nicht mehr ist, dem nur die Seele noch nachlauscht, und der Ausgang der Trauer war, ist es nicht mehr, wandelt den Sinn, steht als ein Licht in der Nacht. (745) Listen to the ending, listen with me: one group of instruments after another retires, and what remains, as the work fades on the air, is the high G of a 'cello, the last word, the last fainting sound, slowly dying away in a pianissimo-fermata. Then nothing more: silence and night. But that lingering note that vibrates in the silence, which has ceased to be heard except in the listening soul, and which was the last sound of mourning, is mourning no longer. It changes its meaning and abides as a light in the darkness. This is more than a gratuitous purple passage, for it is not only carefully led up to and integrated into the development of the novel, it also anticipates its ending. It is the musical counterpart of the heartbreaking oration on the brink of madness which Adrian Leverkuhn delivers before the assembled friends, acquaintances and half-strangers he has invited to a piano recital of his last work. In the language peculiar to him, full of Lutheran archaisms and idiosyncratic turns, he confides to them his strenuous vision: Vielleicht auch siehet Gott an, daB ich das Schwere gesucht und mirs habe sauer werden lassen, vielleicht, vielleicht wird mirs angerechnet und zugute gehalten sein, daB ich mich so befleiBigt und alles zahe fertig gemacht... (761) Perchance too God will this descry, that I sought out the hard and laboured with might and main, perchance, perchance it will be counted unto my credit and benefit that I diligently applied myself and strenuously wrought all to its completion ...

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In this and several similar passages Leverkiihn is expressing a belief which is shared by his friend the narrator, as well as by Thomas Mann himself. Occasionally, it is true, Mann's critical intelligence is capable of thinking beyond it. What he cannot do is to transcend it creatively - to create figures which convincingly embody a different, less catastrophic mode of salvation. Only in Felix Krull is there a release from it. The belief, which Thomas Mann identifies (I think mistakenly) with the Christian, is that salvation and freedom beyond determination can come only at the issue of the kind of existential effort and strenuousness that he has depicted here. It is, as I have said, the belief and mode of thought of a whole epoch. Rilke, George, Hofmannsthal and Gottfried Benn have all expressed it. Even Bertolt Brecht voices it. Having shown, as abundantly as any writer ever did, how men are determined by their historicity, and made all but indistinguishable from each other by their social situation and their material want, Brecht exclaims: Wo ist er selber, der Lebendige, Unverwechselbare, der namlich, der mit seinesgleichen nicht ganz gleich ist?39 Where is he himself, the living man unlike all others, he who is not precisely to be equated with his equals? In the great plays of his maturity Brecht will show characters who are struggling against just such determinations. Rather than accept the easy solutions of ready-made ideology, he will merely sketch in the outlines of tentative, often contradictory dramatic conclusions. The way Thomas Mann comes to identify belief in the saving power of strenuousness with Christian salvation is worth examining in some detail, for it throws light on the predicament of a creative mind torn by conflicting allegiances: a mind which is both critical and in need of a traditional framework within which to create, in an age when such a framework is hard to come by. The climax of Adrian Leverkiihn's public confession in the penultimate chapter of the book, shortly before the words already quoted from it, runs thus:

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so hab ich dem ungeachtet mich immerfort emsig befleiBigt als ein Werker und nie geruget... noch geschlafen, sondern mirs sauer werden lassen und Schweres vor mich gebracht, nach dem Wort des Apostels: 'Wer schwere Dinge sucht, dem wird es schwer.' (760) yet aside from all this [my sins] have I busied myself as a labourer does, nor rested nor slept, but toiled and moiled and undertaken all manner of hard things, following the words of the Apostle: ' Whoever seeks hard things, to him it is hard.' Which Apostle, it may be asked; these words do not occur in the New Testament. Yet to a reader of the novel they have a familiar ring: on an earlier page (336) Serenus Zeitblom had used them to characterise his friend, attributing them to St Paul's Epistle to the Hebrews. In actual fact they come from Luther's translation of Proverbs 25:27: 'Wer zuviel Honig isset / DaB ist nicht gut / Und wer schweer ding forschet / dem wirds schweer, ' 40 rendered in the Authorised Version: c It is not good to eat much honey; so for men to search their own glory is not glory.' However, this wrong attribution is not the end of the story. Thomas Mann's source is not the Bible at all, but Luther's letter to Melanchthon of 30 June 1530, or rather its German translation in the two-volume edition of Luther's letters41 which Mann used while writing Doktor Faustus : 'Doch es heiBt: "Stehe nicht nach hoherem Stande" [Seek not high place for yourself]', Luther writes in admonition to Melanchthon, quoting from Proverbs 25:6, and he continues: cund "Wer nach hohem Stand sucht, den erstickt die Ehre", oder wie der Hebraer sagt, "Wer schwere Dinge sucht, dem wird es schwer." Das geht Euch an!' ('and "He who seeks high place shall be crushed by honour", or as the Hebrew says, "He who seeks hard things, to him it shall go hard." This concerns you!'). Now the crucial passage, Proverbs 25:27, which Luther goes over twice, preferring the Hebrew text to the Septuagint,42 is certainly difficult and (as one scholar has observed) cit offers an accurate commentary upon the difficulties presented to scholars by it'. 43 But whatever its detailed meaning, the general drift of most readings, including the Authorised and Revised versions, tallies very closely with the context of Proverbs 2544 as well as with Luther's admonition to Melanchthon: Do not

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follow your own will (Luther is saying) nor your own foolish reason: to search for glory (or: for the hard thing) is as bad for a person as to eat too much honey; let God's will be done instead. Thomas Mann however completely reverses this meaning. He not only turns into a positive value what Solomon and Luther had condemned as spiritual pride — turns a warning into an affirmation - but by attributing the statement to St Paul he offers to provide an explicitly Christian sanction for his revaluation. It is the phrase 'as the Hebrew [i.e. Solomon] says' which causes Thomas Mann's misreading ' (the Epistle) to the Hebrews' (336) and which then becomes 'according to the words of the Apostle' (670). The point of this ferreting about is certainly not to indict Thomas Mann of exegetical sleight of hand. It is rather to show how his belief in the saving power of 'the hard things', of strenuousness, has interposed itself, like a distorting lens, between him and the text of Luther's letter; how it in fact distorts that faith within the framework of which he wishes to place his story. This strong belief, shared by all the greatest creative minds of the age, is not overtaken by Thomas Mann's critical consciousness. There is here no recognition that Christianity is not all toil and travail and struggle on the edge of despair; that it is also the faith of its founder who said ' My yoke is easy and my burden is light' (Matthew 11:30). This aspect of the faith is not available to the imagination which created Adrian Leverkiihn and placed him in the modern world. In setting out the theme of this book I wrote that the paramount virtue of the authors of that epoch was the creative scrupulousness with which they anticipated, and sometimes attempted to oppose, the monstrous political solutions whose hallmark was cheapness and brutal simplicity and which of course conquered; and Thomas Mann was one of these authors. Yet it is essential to acknowledge the parallel between the modes of thought common to these writers and those of the political literature of National Socialism. In many of its pronouncements - in Rosenberg's book, in the speeches of Hitler, Himmler and others - the propaganda plays on the need for sacrifice, on the exacting

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nature of the struggle, on the difficulties and perils of the road ahead, and on the exalted value of authenticity seen as the individual's commitment to a supremely hard task. It is clear that, accepted as an absolute value, this idea of salvation through extraordinary effort was open to horrifying abuse. But in appealing to it - and it should be emphasised that the leaders of the Third Reich did no more than appeal to it; what they practised was for the most part something quite different - in appealing to the idea of a supreme, self-validating strenuousness, the politicians knew that they were speaking the language of the intellectuals almost in the same breath in which they were addressing the masses. Franz Werfel wrote of his own generation of artists and extremist intellectuals: '... to the amused but indignant laughter of a few philistines we in our modest way first stoked up the fires of the hell in which mankind is now roasting'.45 There is of course a radical and unmistakable difference between the mortified self-understanding behind this judgement, and Goebbels's evil gloating over the holocaust oibilrgerlich Europe;46 just as there is a difference between the self-destructive strenuousness of Adrian Leverkiihn and the spirit of annihilation, including at the last the annihilation of the self, which emerges as the unifying principle of the Third Reich and of its leadership. But all these are equally unmistakably the voices of one age — the voices which make the years of Adrian Leverkiihn into a single epoch of German history. The voices of one age: a peculiar superstition has arisen in our time, fostered by the strenuous anti-historical bias of structuralism, to the effect that in speaking the idiom of a particular mode of thought people are bound to share that mode of thought even where its implications are hostile to their own beliefs. This superstition has only to be stated to be seen for the absurdity it is, for if it were true it would mean that no protest could be voiced that would be understood by those it is directed against. And this, on any level short of the pathological, is nonsense. Doktor Faustus is, among other things, a protest. It is only necessary to read the passages in which it describes the last indignities of torture to be aware of that. But it is a protest

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against the abuse and exploitation of a mode of thought, certain aspects of which are believed in and shared by the author, just as it is an accusation against Germany written by one who could never be anything other than a German; and since it is the mode of an epoch no longer our own, we can see its limits and its limitation. The negative implications of the idea of the dear purchase show that it is not only a literary theme but also a part of the ruling ideology of the day, and that, being cast in this mode, the novel is firmly anchored in the world it depicts. This gives Mann's book its overall coherence; its use of history does not lie in the discontinuous allegorising of individual episodes and ideas, but in its continuous re-creating of the temper of an age. Of all the writings considered in this study, Dr Faustus provides the most forceful expression of the main theme, by presenting a strenuous life and an intermittent political allegory based on it. But the irremediable tension of this novel ' above reason and with the speaking unspokenness ... of endless lamentation '47 remains unresolved. It too is part of the age.

CHAPTER 7

A deliverance of sorts

LIVING IN THE METAPHOR OF F I C T I O N : THOMAS MANN'S FELIX KRULL I have tried in this book to show that German literature, in the age I have been dealing with, was dominated by a morality or moral theology of strenuousness which also makes its appearance in politics; and to indicate how difficult its greatest writers have found it to move to a different vision of humanity and of what, in humanity, is most valuable. Their attempts to do this have usually ended in bathos and literary disaster. Stefan George's Maximin, Ernst Jiinger's Der Arbeiter or HofmannsthaPs ' Kinderkonig' - a sort of glorified head chorister of the Vienna Boys' Choir - are warning examples of what I have in mind. Thomas Mann made no such awful mistake. Throughout almost his entire work he identifies himself with the ideology of strenuousness. He endorses Adrian Leverkuhn's appeal to 'das Schwere'; he nowhere criticises this aspect of his hero's thinking and his work, nowhere renders its value problematic. He cannot step outside the ideology and view it critically - and yet he, like Rilke at the end of his own life's work, is vouchsafed a deliverance of sorts. But perhaps that is putting it too grandly. Perhaps it is better to say that at the end of his time, in his last major novel, Felix Krull, Thomas Mann is able to cock a snook at the whole business of' das Schwere' and the value-scheme of the 'dear purchase'. In doing so he makes a kind of in-joke at the expense of Friedrich Nietzsche, the church-father of this theology of strenuousness. But the joke of this last joke is that the 382

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farewell to the ideology and temper of an age is enacted in his - in Nietzsche's - terms. These, I know, are dark words, and what follows is meant to elucidate them. 'Only as an aesthetic phenomenon are the world and the being of man eternally justified5 - the sentence occurs three times in The Birth of Tragedy, and Nietzsche comes back to variations of it in almost every one of his later books. This search for an aesthetic theodicy accompanies the sixteen brief years of Nietzsche's thinking; and just so does the search for liberation through a genuinely funny fiction accompany the almost sixty very long years of Thomas Mann's career as a novelist. And an aesthetic redemption - aesthetic in the widest sense of the word - is what, at the end of Thomas Mann's life, Felix Krull is vouchsafed. But what does ' aesthetic in the widest sense' mean ? The first of Nietzsche's purely philosophical writings is a very short essay of 1873, entitled c On Truth and Falsehood in an Extra-Moral Sense', and it gives us an idea of what Nietzsche means by ' the aesthetic'. People, he says there, are constitutionally incapable of a true knowledge of the world around them. All their socalled truths about this world or any other are pure tautologies. (' If someone hides a thing behind a bush, looks for it there and finds it, this seeking and finding isn't much to write home about; but that' - Nietzsche goes on - ' that is what all seeking and finding inside the realm of reason amounts to.') Well, we may ask, if people are entirely incapable of finding out the truth about the world, how is survival possible in this bleak unknown place of alien shapes and forms to which we must remain for ever strangers? To ask this question is to assume what Nietzsche is unwilling to assume, namely that the truth about the world is necessary for our survival in it. He says the opposite: what makes life possible is the fact that the true nature of the world is hidden from us, that we are able to fictionalise and disguise the real world. We create art in order not to perish of the truth (he writes fifteen years later) ;* his entire theory of tragedy rests on the conviction that we create the metaphors of myth in order to be able to bear the reality of the world; and so the artistic activity becomes the creative, life-giving and life-

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protecting activity par excellence. Or, to put it in the terminology of that early essay, the way that we manage to negotiate and survive in the world is by forming metaphors about the world, and fictions are the most sustained of our metaphors. Human language (Nietzsche continues) is totally incapable of saying anything about the real world and does not, he argues, belong to it; the relationship of language with the world is entirely imprecise, approximate, haphazard, almost random — indeed, merely metaphorical: Was ist also Wahrheit? Ein bewegliches Heer von Metaphern, Metonymien, Anthropomorphismen, kurz eine Summe von menschlichen Relationen, die, poetisch und rhetorisch gesteigert, iibertragen, geschmuckt wurden und die nach langem Gebrauch einem Volke fest, kanonisch und verbindlich dunken: die Wahrheiten sind Illusionen, von denen man vergessen hat, dafi sie welche sind.2 What then is truth? A mobile army of metaphors, metonymies, anthropomorphisms — in short, a sum of human relations which, poetically and rhetorically intensified, transposed and adorned, come after long usage to be felt by a people as fixed, canonical and binding on them. Truths are illusions which are no longer recognised as such. I don't propose to inquire whether this is a correct view of language (or, indeed, how a correct or true view of language could possibly be formulated if it is seen as such an arbitrary, shifting structure). But there is no doubt this was Nietzsche's own understanding of language throughout his life as a writer, and that it is consistent with his particular use of language that is, his predominantly and powerfully metaphorical style. The theoretical structure underlying his style goes something like this: Language is related to reality by nothing more precise than metaphor. Metaphors are the only access we have to reality. Metaphors are the creation of artists. Therefore artists are the least misleading, least imprecise users of language; artistic activity is the paradigm or symbol of all positive human activity. Art, in this argument of Nietzsche's, is not oblivion or even ecstasy (as it is in The Birth of Tragedy) but it is involved in the

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creation of that spiderweb of metaphors which alone makes life in the world possible: art is a creation, however, which is accompanied by at least an intermittent knowledge which those who merely use the metaphorical structure without creating it do not possess - the knowledge that the metaphors are not the real thing, that they are indeed only metaphors. Language, Nietzsche claims, cannot designate true causality. The world contains no truth and no undeflected communication; and there is of course no real freedom in the world either. Our only freedom is in the realm of' as if: it is a metaphorical or aesthetic freedom — aesthetic in the wider sense that I have now described. Thomas Mann is the principal heir of Nietzsche's bequest to our age: of both aspects of that bequest. Not only do the major figures of his fiction - from Thomas Buddenbrook through Tonio Kroger, Gustav von Aschenbach, Prinz Klaus Heinrich, Hans Castorp, the magician Cipolla, to Jacob and Joseph, the old Goethe and Adrian Leverkiihn - embody that ideology of strenuousness which I have described; but all his life, though intermittently, Thomas Mann too hoped for a deliverance from that ideology, searching for a way out of this world of existential strain. Throughout his long career he hoped to write, not merely an ironical novel (he had done enough, we might even think more than enough, of that; irony clearly offered no escape), not even a humorous novel, but, speaking up on more than one occasion for the joys of slapstick, what he hoped to write was a funny novel. A novel which would dispel the weigh tiness of the spirit of gravity. And in finally achieving Felix Krull he had his lifelong wish. It would be possible at this point to characterise Thomas Mann's undertaking in this novel in various ways. First and most obviously, there is its very rich autobiographical background - he began working on it in 1910 and the first volume, which is all we have, was not concluded until 1954. Other elements are Mann's parodistic exploration of the Bildungsroman, its modification by the picaresque tradition, the treatment of that' art versus life' theme he had made his own and which has been the standby of every teacher of German literature ever

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since. All these topics have been discussed at length and there is no need to go over them again. Instead I want to turn to a different aspect: the strongly anti-mimetic quality of the work. Whereas Nietzsche's idea of an aesthetic validation of the world remains a speculative proposal — to de-pragmatise, aestheticise or fictionalise the world — Thomas Mann turns the proposal into a reality, that is, into an elaborate fiction. A critical essay makes the point: 'the narrative is governed by a comprehensive metaphoric determination [which] offers an increasingly insistent challenge to its superficial claim to be a "realistic" account of a series of adventures by a participant 5 : 3 that is, its credibility is seriously, and deliberately, impaired. Similarly, there is no satirical intention worth mentioning behind the work, and to see it as a socially conscious critique of Edwardian materialism and morality could only be attempted by someone with a very modest notion of satire. The hero Thomas Mann has created, and who aims above all at lightness of touch, a charming grace and an easy, all-too-easy conscience - that hero is a con-man and a good-for-nothing who will never pass the test of mature, adult and responsible behaviour. The novel in which he has his being is what Nietzsche said all life was: a highly immoral or amoral affair. I do not merely mean that trickery, lechery, mendacity, theft and deceit are here rewarded with worldly goods and pleasure as well as an easy conscience, but that all these vices and villainies are metaphorised: presented under names and in forms designed to cancel out their viciousness. In other words, Felix Krull is a novel without any sustained or consistently held moral judgements, a story enacted in Nietzsche's ' moralinfreie Welt'. 4 This is one of the conditions of its humour: this deliberate and consistent disappointment of our expectations of such judgements is one of the major sources of fun in the book. The tradition of the Bildungsroman is the target of similar treatment. It is the dominant tendency of that genre to see the world in terms of a hero wholly concerned with making use of it, with enriching his experience at the world's expense. This tendency is not criticised or discredited in Felix Krull but guyed, carried to its logical conclusion by turning the hero into a

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confidence trickster and a thief With his magnificent egotism Krull becomes a universal benefactor, for in the very act of exploiting, swindling and stealing from others he cannot fail to give them the benefit, almost the blessing, of his charming, easy, generous, uncalculating personality. He is an artist and a virtuoso, but his instrument is life itself. And the women he plays or practises upon - servant-maid, prostitute, fashionable lady novelist, and finally a Portuguese anthropologist's wife and daughter, with whom he conducts simultaneous affairs - are not inclined to complain. Do we believe him when he says he is a prodigious erotic performer? Selbstverstandlich scheidet hier jede Moglichkeit des Vergleichens aus. Meine private Uberzeugung jedoch, die ich damals gewann und die weder beweisbar noch widerlegbar ist, geht unerschiitterlich dahin, daB bei mir der LiebesgenuB die doppelte Scharfe und SiiBigkeit besaB als bei andern. 5 Of course, any possibility of comparison is out of the question. But all the same, it is my private conviction, which can neither be demonstrated nor disproved, that for me the enjoyment of love was twice as acute and twice as sweet as for others.

It scarcely matters. The erotic here is the pattern of KrulPs attitude to the world at large: he gives pleasure by taking it, the giving and the taking are inseparable, even his boasting is not intended to put others out of countenance but to exhibit his own command of fine words. The words matter, not their truth. The words - Felix KrulPs immense irrepressible grandiloquent flow of them - are not merely descriptive of what has happened in the glorious past (Krull the confidence trickster is writing his memoirs from gaol), they are in and by themselves a consolation drawn from that past and a continuation of it into the melancholy and grim present. The emphasis, throughout the novel, on KrulPs gift of the gab is wholly Wittgensteinian I mean that it is intended to narrow the traditional distinction between words and world, to show words as active in, and a part of, the world. The most brilliant example of this process of de-pragmatising the world by converting it into words, and more specifically into metaphors which stand for other words, and thus for life itself,

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is the farcical medical examination in the course of which Felix Krull feigns an epileptic attack and is turned down by an army medical board. Ten years after the scene was written, a similar ploy was used by Jaroslav Hasek in The Good Soldier Schweik, and forty years later Joseph Heller used a comparable one in Catch 22 - the hero is shown battling against a hostile army bureaucracy and winning his battle by vigorously identifying his aim with that of the enemy. On the basis of his previous study of case-histories, Krull brings his fabulous descriptive powers to bear in order to arouse the army doctor's suspicions and makes him compliant with his desire to be declared unfit for military service. By his constant indignant insistence that he is perfectly well and desperately anxious to become a soldier, Krull eventually works himself into an epileptic seizure which is genuine in every sense except the strictly medical one. His fit is the image, the metaphor, of a fit. Indeed, so perfect is his imitation of it that the category of the 'strictly medical' becomes strictly irrelevant, and so does the idea of dissimulation. The real thing and the pretence or metaphor of the real thing become as one. And this, it may be recalled, leaving aside the question of intention, happens in several other important episodes in Thomas Mann's novels. How ill is Hans Castorp, the hero of The Magic Mountain? How desolate and abandoned is Joseph when his brothers cast him into the well ? How ill is Adrian Leverkiihn, and what exactly is the origin and the nature of his disease; how much responsibility does he really bear for the death of his nephew, the little Johann Nepomuk ? All these questions are raised by Thomas Mann and left deliberately open, as though the figurative statement - the intimation of a refusal to answer the question raised - were all that can be said; as though that aspect of language which provides us with firm distinctions between physical and psychic causes, between illness and health, between pretence and truth (an aspect of language not really covered by Nietzsche's scheme) could not be trusted to convey the full meaning of these scenes; so that resort must be had to another kind of language altogether, which contents itself with presenting events and

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explanations as mere images or metaphors of some ineffable and unworded state of being. So it is with Felix KrulPs epileptic fit, which as I have said is genuine in all but the medical sense - certainly genuine enough to take in the medical commission. When Krull leaves the hall in which he has been examined and scored his triumphant victory (and even here, incidentally, Mann cannot let go without emphasising the tremendous cost, in physical and emotional terms, of KrulPs performance) a sergeant, whose attention he has attracted earlier, says to him ' Too bad about you, Krull!... You're certainly a promising fellow, you might have got somewhere in the army - anyone can see that at a glance!' To this the memoirist himself adds that he soon understood how great an error it would have been to go into the army: I had not, after all, been born under the sign of Mars - at least not in the specific, real sense! For although martial severity, self-discipline and danger have been the conspicuous characteristics of my strange life, its primary pre-condition and basis has been freedom — a condition wholly irreconcilable with any kind of commitment to a crudely factual situation. Thus though I lived in soldierly fashion, it would have been silly of me to believe that I must therefore live as a soldier. Indeed, if one were to define the precious emotional value of freedom, and make that value available to reason, one might say that to live like 3. soldier but not as a soldier, figuratively but not literally, in short to be allowed to live in the symbol, is the meaning of true freedom.6

Here the story comes full circle. 'How really to live in freedom?' asks Krull, 'Where is liberation to be found?' And the answer is, 'To live metaphorically, in the "as if" world of art and the imagination', and this of course is the answer, too, of Nietzsche's aesthetic theodicy (in the essay of 1873):' perhaps to live in art - for instance in the art of language, that mobile, unstable army of metaphors, is the only way.' Nietzsche, as we know, was not greatly interested in the novel as a form of fiction (though he has a good deal to say about a few contemporary French novels as forms of psychological disclosure) . What he is concerned with, from The Birth of Tragedy

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onwards, is tragic myth, and the idea of myth as extended metaphor is another aspect of that legacy which was taken up by Thomas Mann's generation. It is in that book that Nietzsche first and repeatedly states that a healthy national culture needs its life-giving and lifeprotecting myths. His early enthusiasm for Richard Wagner derives from the belief- in which he later finds himself to have been mistaken - that Wagner will give Germany those lifeenhancing myths she needs in order to achieve cultural greatness and national health (in the same way as Aeschylus and Sophocles did for Athens). But myth, for Nietzsche, is instinctive metaphor, the creation of those who 'forget themselves as artistically creative subjects'. There is a difficulty in this argument which Nietzsche cannot resolve and may not even be conscious of: how to make up a myth? How to create, deliberately and purposefully, cultural situations in which instinctive, non-deliberate, purely inspirational myth-makers will arise and appeal to the soul of a people ? When Bayreuth was created, Valhalla did not become a reality, but a limited company was formed and its shares were traded on the Berlin stock exchange. This was when Nietzsche began to doubt the chthonic and genuinely popular nature of it all. Yet although he then turned his back on Wagner, he still believed that an instinctive inspirational myth was what his world needed, and this resulted in the complex edifice of £arathustra and of the Superman - a compound of art nouveau emblematic beasts with vatic pronouncements in the syntax and tone of Luther's Bible (the 'verily, verily' manner). Thomas Mann wrote no ^arathustra. From the late 1920s onwards - when the biblical Joseph stories were conceived - he was drawn to the the idea of building his fiction from the elements of myth, but he was not prepared to sacrifice the articulation of his narrative consciousness or to pretend to an artificial naivety. There is nothing in the least naive about the aesthetic validation of the world which Krull is describing - its validation through symbol and metaphor: the fact that he is describing it makes it the opposite of naive, allows him to be conscious of its artificiality. When the handsome young Felix

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Krull is in bed with the ageing novelist Diane Houpfle, she derives poeticoerotic satisfaction from inviting him to steal her jewellery and so to enact the role of Hermes, the god of thieves. He is only too ready to oblige — again, giving pleasure by taking pleasure. And it is then she discovers he has never heard of Hermes; yet of course it is Krull himself, twenty years after, who reports the scene, one utterly permeated by self-consciousness and conscious, farcical imitation and re-enactment. Thomas Mann is not only writing a fiction and drawing on a myth, but also showing the fictionality of the fiction by letting his hero in on the secret, making him share the author's consciousness of his own devices - by explicitly repudiating the fiction of realism (the single pretence) in favour of the fiction of self-conscious myth (the double pretence). And because the self-consciousness is exploited, is not inadvertent, this device, with its echo of Sterne, comes off. The difference between Nietzsche and Mann here is indicative of the generation that separates them. Mann had abundant occasion to experience what Nietzsche did not - the modern, twentieth-century political uses of the mythopoeic imagination and its products. His consciousness, indeed his literary self-consciousness, is unabating, and it is his glory. He himself says he is creating myth - both in Felix Krull, and in the correspondence with Karl Kerenyi7 about the writing of the novel, there is a great deal on the subject of Hermes, god of messengers, travellers and thieves, and on the way Mann hopes to relate certain episodes in his story to the myth. Reading this correspondence, one is irreverently reminded of two giant ants lugging along a huge, mysterious shape inscribed MYTH - they are unwilling to abandon it but are not quite sure what to do with it. But one of them - Kerenyi - is a good deal more in earnest about it than the other. For in the very act of drawing attention to Hermes and his own mythopoeic intention, Thomas Mann is suspending the distinction between consciousness and the mythopoeic imagination and breaking down the phoney isolation of a supposedly unconscious creativeness. The idea of the aesthetic as we glean it from the works of Thomas Mann's last period is largely, as far as explicit statement

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goes, what it had been for Nietzsche at the time of The Birth of Tragedy: a dream filled with the consciousness of its status as dream, a metaphorical and symbolical freedom which, by being aware of its metaphorical nature, also articulates an awareness of its relative, limited, conditional being - for that, after all, is what all our freedom is. In the end, the philosophy of Thomas Mann's con-man is a thing more modest than the grand aesthetic justification of the world and of being which Nietzsche had envisaged. It is, and is acknowledged to be, an artefact, part of a larger, non-aesthetic world. I have shown how far Nietzsche's explicit statement goes. But it seems to me that the observations on the metaphorical nature of language in Nietzsche's essay of 1873 contain an implicit set of stylistic precepts which he was to follow throughout the sixteen brief years of his working life: precepts for his remarkable philosophy in a new, metaphorical style, which reveals his unchanging determination not to oppose or critically dissolve the metaphoricity of language, but to develop and exploit it. To put it the other way round: what makes Nietzsche the dominant influence on German literature in the twentieth century - and a major influence on English and Scandinavian literature entre deux guerres - is of course his incomparably lucid and concrete style, dominated by metaphors and cast precisely in that 'middle mode' (which in that essay he calls 'jene Mittelsphare und Mittelkraft') halfway between the traditional language of idealist philosophy and figurative narrative prose. Where does this style find its vocabulary, how is it assembled ? The essay of 1873 ends with a description of the creative intellect that has freed itself from all practical considerations and tasks and sets out, disinterestedly, to re-enact the world in images and concepts. So far the young Nietzsche's argument is pure Schopenhauer. But when Nietzsche goes on to show how this creative mind in its freedom takes up the vocabulary of common discourse and the scaffolding of concepts ' in order to dismantle them, break up their order and reconstitute them ironically, bringing together things farthest apart and separating those closest together', for no other purpose than to play with them; and when he concludes that:

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no regular way leads from such intuitions to the land of ghostly abstractions, it is not for them that the word was created; seeing them, man falls silent or speaks in forbidden metaphors and extravagant combinations of concepts, so that by demolishing and by mocking the old conceptual boundaries (if in no other way) he may show himself equal to the impression with which the mighty intuition seized him8

- Nietzsche is giving the most accurate description we have of his own future philosophical and literary procedure. What that image of the artist at work among forbidden metaphors and untoward combinations of concepts suggests is the act of writing as demolition and de-construction; the breaking up of accepted order is manifest in the pointed brevity of each utterance. And with this goes Nietzsche's discovery that his discrete reflections have value and make sense, that discontinuity can be significant, that ' notes for' a philosophy are a philosophy (Bertolt Brecht, Anton von Webern and Jorge Luis Borges made similar discoveries in their media). For a philosopher, it may be said, and for a German philosopher at that, Nietzsche is amazingly readable. And for a novelist, as we surely feel again and again, Mann is remarkably (I won't say: unreadable, but) reflective, philosophical, dominated by concepts and the parody of concepts (which Nietzsche described as ossified metaphors).9 From opposite sides they both challenge the genre theories and tacit assumptions on which French and English forms of discourse are founded - each is for ever being accused of writing 'neither one thing nor t'other', Nietzsche attacked for his excessive reliance on metaphor, Mann for excessive abstractness and reliance on conceptual language. Yet both are concerned with diminishing the difference between the two styles and two ways of coming to terms with the world, and here, finally, they meet: the one presenting life in the discontinuous metaphors of philosophy, the other presenting it in the sustained metaphor of fiction.

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FRANZ KAFKA: JOSEPHINE THE SINGER; OR THE MOUSE PEOPLE Ours is an age in which the state of peace, the threat of war and war itself are contiguous. Perhaps this has always been the case, yet we, from the oldest to the youngest of us, experience this ordinary state of things as something special. Some remarks Kafka made in his diary (25 December 1911)10 are almost the only intimation Kafka left of the story, Josephine,11 he was to write twelve years later, in which the narrator takes us into the midst of a nation that is beleaguered. Obviously the warlike setting and its consequences are of far-reaching importance for an understanding of the story, but I am also struck by the obverse, that is how important the story is for the understanding of a people - any people - in such a predicament. The diary entry is about the function of literature in the life of a small nation, though it originates in observations of the Yiddish actors who were then visiting Prague, and applies in all its details more directly to the Czech literature he knew than to the Yiddish literature he was just becoming acquainted with. Josephine is about a special yet very ordinary human situation; it tells us something special about the relationship between 'das Ubliche' and 'das AuBerordentliche', the ordinary and the special. A literary work of art is what it is for many reasons and by virtue of many causes, and among these reasons is the readiness of a given public to treat it as such, at least to the extent of wanting to confront and consider it in a special way. The designation of the nature and status of a work of art, in certain special conditions (such as 'there's a war on'), or rather in any conditions since any conditions are special - is one of the themes that Kafka's story brings to our attention. It is about more than that, of course, because every consideration of an aesthetic or literary matter, fictional or otherwise, that is worthy of attention is always more than itself; but the status of a work of art is very strikingly its theme. Written in Prague after 17 March 1924,12 Kafka's last story was conceived during the previous eighteen months, the only

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happy months of his later life, when he was living in Berlin with Dora Dymant, a Polish Jewish girl who worked as a nurse in a Jewish children's home; he was learning Hebrew; for reasons I do not understand (and which no biographer has explained) he was also very poor and occasionally hungry, suffering miserably from the cold; on and off he was unwell, too, yet during this respite from Prague he was happy and free. He published the story first in Die Prager Presse on Easter Sunday 1924.13 By the time he was correcting the proofs for publication in book form, he was in a hospital outside Vienna, in the last stages of tuberculosis of the larynx, unable to speak. It is said that he cried a little when he read the proofs. He died there in June 1924This is his most serene - indeed his only serene - story, and it is also his subtlest; it does not fit the c dark side of the moon' interpretation of his work, and perhaps this is the reason critics have neglected it.14 It is concerned with the relationship between Josephine and the public, the mouse nation; her public and her people are one and the same thing. It may be that this is the sort of relationship Kafka himself desired; certainly it is the opposite of what he achieved in his lifetime. There are very few events, or very little action, or whatever you choose to call that of which there is relatively little in German narrative prose. Instead, we are taken by the narrator, who is a member of Josephine's nation-public, on a conducted tour of the various hills and dales of the landscape of this relationship. Around the twentieth paragraph this panoramic survey comes to rest on one aspect of the relationship Josephine's request for special status and recognition - a request that turns into a little bureaucratic scuffle; and then - the story has thirty-four paragraphs - her total or partial disappearance concludes the story. Her disappearance is neither caused by nor yet independent of the perpetual defeat she has suffered in her fight for special status and recognition. It is, as you can see, a mere nothing of a story. Josephine is a singer, the singer of her nation-public. She undoubtedly regards and projects herself as a prima donna. About the quality of her singing there are many doubts - the

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narrator himself, in conveying the doubts of her public, adds some of his own. The narrative and the strategy of its arguments serve the purpose of illuminating every corner of that landscape through which we are conducted, the landscape of a relationship. In the course of these reflective arguments, quality (the quality of her singing) turns into a question of status, of ontology, into the question: Is it song, is it music at all that Josephine presents in front of, and thus to, her nation-public? But while there is this objective doubt about the quality and status - the kind- of her performance, no word of subjective doubt is uttered. Josephine has, as we shall see, a hard time of it, her life is a burden to her (or at least so she says), but self-doubt is not part of the trial she so bravely undergoes. The story asserts a value. And (to anticipate) a part of that value will be found in Josephine's subjective self-assurance and its consequences, in her adamant will. There are three areas to consider: (1) the nature and status of her singing, (2) the character of the nation-public, including the character of the narrator-reporter, and (3) the character of Josephine. In each case something over and above the named thing is implied, not on the whole by way of allegory or symbol, more by way of metonymy. The three areas I have singled out - song, public, performer; or: music, nation, creative individual; or again: expression, reception, leader; or again: art, life, mediator - these three areas are closely interconnected, it is difficult to discuss them separately; there is a tightness in this interlocking structure, of the kind we associate not so much with narrative prose as with poetry. (1) Early on, in §4, we are given the narrator's description of what Josephine's performance is like. He uses a metaphor which, like most metaphors in this story, strikes a note of humility, modesty and humour. But the humour of the story is unlike that of any of Kafka's Central European contemporaries. It is neither satirical (as in Karl Kraus) nor ribald and defensive (as in Jaroslav Hasek); it is not socially determined humour the kind that accompanies the nostalgic view of an extinct society (as in Hofmannsthal or Joseph Roth) or the nostalgic

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view of speech-patterns deviating from accepted linguistic norms (as in Josef Weinheber). It is in a sense purer than any of these. The humour - ' e i n leises L a c h e n ' - i s grounded in the special yet ordinary situation the story explores, and it has an undertone of melancholy - the melancholy we feel in the presence of weakness and transience; or again it is the humour that issues from the dialectical relationship between what things are and what we take them to be, and how what things are in the world is partly determined by what we take them to be. Here then is the metaphor, the way it is explored and applied, and the humour generated by its ordinariness and its movement away from ordinariness, from 'das Ubliche': Es ist aber doch nicht nur Pfeifen, was sie produziert. Stellt man sich recht weit von ihr hin und horcht, oder noch besser, laBt man sich in dieser Hinsicht priifen, singt also Josephine etwa unter andern Stimmen und setzt man sich die Aufgabe, ihre Stimme zu erkennen, dann wird man unweigerlich nichts anderes heraushoren als ein gewohnliches, hochstens durch Zartheit oder Schwache ein wenig auffallendes Pfeifen. Aber steht man vor ihr, ist es doch nicht nur ein Pfeifen; es ist zum Versta ndnis ihrer Kunst notwendig, sie nicht nur zu horen, sondern auch zu sehen. Selbst wenn es nur unser tagtagliches Pfeifen ware, so besteht hier doch schon zunachst die Sonderbarkeit, daB jemand sich feierlich hinstellt, um nichts anderes als das Ubliche zu tun. Eine NuB knacken ist wahrhaftig keine Kunst, deshalb wird es auch niemand wagen, ein Publikum zusammenzurufen und vor ihm, um es zu unterhalten, Niisse zu knacken. Tut er es dennoch und gelingt seine Absicht, dann kann es sich eben doch nicht nur um bloBes Niisseknacken handeln. Oder es handelt sich um Niisseknacken, aber es stellt sich heraus, daB wir iiber diese Kunst hinweggesehen haben, weil wir sie glatt beherrschten und daB uns dieser neue NuBknacker erst ihr eigentliches Wesen zeigt, wobei es dann fur die Wirkung sogar niitzlich sein konnte, wenn er etwas weniger tiichtig im Niisseknacken ist als die Mehrzahl von uns.15 You see, what she produces is not just whistling.16 If you stand a long way away from her and listen, or better still, if you put yourself to the test of trying to pick out her voice when, say, Josephine is singing together with other voices, you will invariably identify no more than a commonplace whistling, which if it stands out at all does so at most by its delicacy and weakness. But when you are standing in front of her it is not just a whistling; to understand her art it is necessary not only to hear her but to see her. Even if it were only our everyday whistling,

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there is anyway something special about a person who solemnly stands up in order to do merely what is usual. To crack a nut is certainly not an art, therefore no-one would dare to call an audience together and crack nuts in front of them by way of entertainment. But if someone nevertheless does so, and succeeds in the intention, then it cannot be a mere matter of nutcracking. Or rather, it is a mere matter of nutcracking, but it turns out that we have been overlooking this art because it was wholly within our powers, and that it has taken this new cracker of nuts to show us the real nature of this art; and the effect might even be increased if the entertainer were just a little less accomplished at cracking nuts than most of us.

Other things are said about Josephine's performance. What we may call its moral and practical functions are ambiguous and self-cancelling, for while the singing gives comfort to the nation-public in moments of danger and war, it also lulls them into a false security and carelessness which results in many deaths. Again and again its relative ordinariness is emphasised; it is not, or only in very few moments, great and profound music - or, we might say, it is not an art with many metaphysical or religious connotations, as the national art - their ancient songs - is said to have been in the distant, immemorial past. And finally, the source of the greatest effect on the more experienced among its listeners is not the music itself; it is the silence to which it gives rise, the moments when it isn't: 1st es ihr Gesang, der uns entziickt oder nicht vielmehr die feierliche Stille, von der das schwache Stimmchen umgeben ist? Is it her song that charms us, or is it not rather the solemn silence that envelops that feeble little voice? And now, completing the metonymy, we recognise that that is how things are always: silence envelops music, music is musicand-silence. Why is so much of what is said about this music so negative, designating all the things it isn't? But then, we may reflect, is that not an attribute of metaphysical and religious language generally, so much of which is couched in negations like mfinite, absolute, immortal, unconditioned, or even transcendent, metaphysical ?

Moreover, these negatives call out for interpretation - the

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nutcracking metaphor in its maddening humility seems directly to point to a humble story, a story about next to nothing such as this one, and by extension (for we are in the realm of metonymy) to Kafka's art as a whole. And when, in §28, the narrator reports that Josephine is proposing to punish her public by shortening the coloratura and claims that she has in fact been doing so although he, the narrator, must confess to having failed to notice this because he hasn't the faintest idea what a coloratura is, we are again bidden to read this as an indication of the vast excess, in works of art, of effort and wrought artefact over the effect noticed and understood, let alone appreciated by the public at large; we are reminded of the famous Flaubertian disequilibrium, the excess of cost over assigned value, reflected on at length by Nietzsche in the third of his Unzeitgemafie Betrachtungen {Untimely Meditations).

But even this is not the full extent of the metonymous meaning, for surely what all those humble and negative qualities and the emphasis on ordinariness point to is language itself. Our attention is drawn to the fact that the most extraordinary and precious - the most poetic - collocations of language are compounded of the most ordinary and humdrum words; and only within special contexts, framed in a special way and informed with the aesthetic intention of 'let this be a performance, a special public display'- only within such a total context do these very ordinary words cease to be ordinary and become something special. The story itself provides an illustration. Its language is lack-lustre, relaxed, colloquial and full of informal qualifications — it is a composition in the most ' ordinary' language we can think of (and perhaps the contradiction submerged in the phrase 'most ordinary' helps us to make the point at issue). But then, all words, when you come to think of it, are capable of turning into something special. They follow what I shall call the 'Transformation Principle'. And the silence? It accompanies the reader from the first paragraph of the story, where we read that 'the silence of peace is our favourite music'; and this ' solemn silence' which forms a framework around Josephine's weak little voice is the real reason why the older and more experienced members of her

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public find comfort in her performance, for in that silence they can dream their dreams of safety and peace. Again we recall that this extraordinary state of affairs is really nothing of the kind, that it arises from an emphasis on something perfectly ordinary. Not only music but words too would lose their distinctness and thus their meanings were it not for the silence between them, so that the silence or absence of words becomes as it were the metaphysics of words; becomes that which is both beyond them and at the same time one of the things that give them their meaning. And right at the end of the story, when Josephine 'disappears entirely', it is as if she were completing that silence with her own existence, completing that metaphysical meaning, which the ordinary silence between ordinary words had merely intimated, in and through her performance. Perhaps a life, too, like a word or a note in music, is given part of its significance by the silence that follows it. A precarious balance is struck between the life-enhancing and death-bearing qualities of Josephine's performance, and when it is said that the silences are what she, now apparently entirely gone, will be remembered by, this immortality of ' a mere memory' - the memory of mere nothings, 'dieses Nichts an Stimme, dieses Nichts an Leistung' - does not resolve the balance between life and death as the message of her art, but leaves it finally open. Thinking about the quality and kind of Josephine's performance, are we to conclude that in the narrator's or perhaps even in Kafka's view the nature of art (and of literature) is adequately represented by the nutcracker metaphor and, by inference, through the story as a whole? Or is the meaning we are to take more restricted and, like the metaphor itself, more modest? Is Kafka talking merely about his own art, at most about the art of his own time? Every fictional narrative imposes a restrictive context, yet every metaphor used to illustrate the context invites a generalisation. What is given here is not a 'definition of art', and yet it is a general statement. What is perhaps surprising about it, in the face of all the usual solemn talk about' the artist's role in society', is the emphasis on display and performance, which is also the source of the story's gentle humour: and this emphasis is determined by the personal and

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historical context, by Kafka's unsolemn, ironical understanding of his own work and of the literary tradition in which the work is precariously situated. This exclusive emphasis on display may be inappropriate in other contexts (for other writers, at other times). Yet the substance of what is being emphasised h e r e and neglected or ignored in most other literary treatments of the theme of art - seems irrefutable: it is the importance of what Bertolt Brecht called 'Zeigen', 'showing', in which he saw the essence of dramatic art. Similarly, what this story tells us is that there is no art without the intention o f Let there be not talk but performance, not communication but display', and without this intention being acknowledged by those who, whether the performance was intended for them or not, assemble to watch it; or, more briefly: there is no art without the aesthetic intention on the one hand, and those intended on the other. But the organ of every intention is the will, and, for once in Kafka's writing, the will that is presented here is not evil. (2) Many things might be said about Josephine's nation-public - the narrator mentions their childishness, toughness, and resilience, their readiness to protect her and to be sustained by the comfort they take from her. Their lack of a musical gift and lack of history-mindedness are stressed more than once, and so is the hardness of the life they have to lead, their absolute refusal to accede to Josephine's pleas for exemption from the ordinary chores and duties of a nation perpetually at war, or at least perpetually wary and endangered. Among the particular triumphs of the story is the finesse with which the interrelationship between the nation-public and the heroine is worked out,17 whereby she is shown to be a creature of their need; but then again the opposite is equally true, that they are there for her protection and, in their capacity as a public, they are hardly more than an adjunct - uncomprehending and inferior at that - of her art. As all music is music-and-silence, as all discourse is (in the worldly view of it) words separated by silence or (in another, the metaphysical view) silence disrupted by words; so, too, all solitude, including Josephine's solitude, is encompassed by

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society, or (not to mince words, as Kafka's narrator does not mince them) by a community of 'Volksgenossen', 'national comrades'. Any word (the thought should not be lost on us) may be bettered by its context - even a word as strongly associated with nationalism and Nazism as is 'Volk' and its compounds. There is good reason why this is the only story of Kafka's (as I believe) where the word 'Volksgenossen' occurs, for this is the only one of his stories where community is the bearer of a value; the other aspect of that value is represented by Josephine's self-assurance and capacity for self-sacrifice. And with this value-giving - this validation of Josephine through her close contact with her nation-public — we take leave of that long and somewhat mournful sequence of selfreflecting literary themes which punctuate German literature, from Goethe's Torquato Tasso to Mann's Tonio Kroger and beyond (not to mention such frights as Musil's Die Verwirrungen des £oglings Torless), where self-pity and solipsism are fashioned into an accusation against society and its philistine misunderstanding of the artist. In this as in so many other respects, our story offers a marvellous liberation. Of course the people misunderstand Josephine's art: after all, they are said to be totally unmusical; and she is sustained by this, since the more they misunderstand her, the more assured in her achievements she feels and the higher her art soars. However, the point is not, or not only, that she needs them, but that her art needs them; that, whatever the true value of her art, that value and the art itself are nothing without its reception. Not for the psychological reason that an artist cannot live without his public, but for the aesthetic reason that there is no art without its public, that 'music' or 'art' or 'literature' are concepts which belong to, and derive the major part of their meaning from, the cultural and thus social aspect of our experience and vocabulary. This is not, let me emphasise, the egregious Marxist notion of a given public of consumers 'producing' art by their demand, but that both public and creative individual are equally involved in, equally necessary for the process. Nor is this the old tag about 'beauty' (or for that matter art) being 'in the eye of the beholder', but that it is in the will of the performer, where the

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will is taken to be nothing without its object: and the true object of the will is other people. However deluded Josephine may be about the value and function of her art on the one hand and the perceptiveness of her listeners on the other, however much she is sustained by her delusion and by their readiness to jolly her along; however critical the narrator may be of her character and haughty attitudes; and whatever may be the relative proportions between the two determining factors in any given case, the ontological stature of art — its compound nature as a public phenomenon, a showing — is not in doubt. This is an anti-Romantic, intensely human and (dare one say it?) democratic view, in which the ordinariness of art and its special quality are indissolubly combined. The numerous descriptions of Josephine's and her public's mutual relationship call out to us to extend the images, to complete the metonymy and think ofJosephine's nation-public as something wider, more comprehensive than... a nation of mice? At this point a peculiar aspect of the text had better be mentioned. It is that the word ' M o u s e ' - o r rather 'Mause', ' mice' - having occurred in the title, never again occurs in the text;19 not only that - but there is not a word of physical or indeed any other description in the story (fur, sharp teeth, short arms or necks, only Josephine's is longer) which could not be applied either to mice or to many other creatures, among them men and women. So that, once we have entered the story, though we cannot forget the word in the title, yet we cannot substantiate it either. Indeed, Kafka's daring metonymous game goes so far as to describe the public as being ' mauschenstill' (§6)-'as quiet as a mouse'-using an adverb whose unusual literal meaning with its special bearing on the text briefly supplants its ordinary metaphorical meaning, and in the process teasingly hints at the hide-and-seek tactics of the narrative. (And the sound Josephine and the public emit is called ' pfeifen' not ' piepsen' - ' whistling' not ' squeaking' precisely because the human connection is to be retained throughout; though there is a point where other, funnier verbs are used.)

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One recurrent aspect of Kafka's writings is, as I have said, the urgency with which, for one reason or another, they call to us for interpretation, exegesis, deciphering. Here is one such reason: we were told, in the title, that this is a story about the mousenation and then, for pages on end, we are left to ask 'who on earth are they really?' Everything about them fits equally the notion of mice or of men. In his diary-entry about the literature of a small and beleaguered nation, Kafka seems, as I said, to have in mind the Czech literature of his time. On the other hand critics have pointed out, somewhat misleadingly, that in the whole of his literary work the word 'Jew' or 'Jewish' never occurs, from which they have inferred, predictably, that everything he wrote is about Jews. (Moreover, people 'in the know' have said that in his portrayal of Josephine, Kafka had Karl Kraus in mind ;20 since we are explicitly told that Josephine has no enemies this seems less than convincing.) True, many things in this story - bar one attribute - make the 'Jewish' interpretation plausible; and indeed there are certain poignant and almost fervent passages which seem strongly to confirm it. I think especially of the lyrically balanced repetitions in the long sentence about the nation's children in §17: Wir haben keine Schulen, aber aus unserem Volke stromen in allerkiirzesten Zwischenraumen die uniibersehbaren Scharen unserer Kinder, frohlich zischend oder piepsend, solange sie noch nicht pfeifen konnen, sich walzend oder kraft des Druckes weiterrollend, solange sie noch nicht laufen konnen, tappisch durch ihre Masse alles mit sich fortreifiend, solange sie noch nicht sehen konnen, unsere Kinder! We have no schools, but from the midst of our people there emerge, at the shortest of intervals, the countless hosts of our children, merrily chirping and squeaking, as long as they have not yet learned to whistle, rolling along or being bowled along by the pressure behind, as long as they cannot yet run, clumsily swarming and sweeping everything along with them, as long as they cannot yet see - our children! Perhaps Kafka was recalling his visits to the Jewish children's home where his friend Dora Dymant was working at the time when he wrote this story. But again, with a well-known

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affirmation of Shylock's in mind, I would insist on the metonymous status of the Jewish interpretation, and argue — on the mysterious ' Transformation Principle' - that Jews, too, when you come to think of it, are human beings, metonyms of the human race. However, there is one attribute which certainly militates against such an interpretation. We are told, not just once but on three occasions, including the last sentence of the story, that this nation is emphatically not history-conscious.21 And this emphasis on a society which has hardly any historians, and a very defective historical memory, seems to foil a reading of the story as an allegory on a nation which remembers the destruction of its capital city and its temple vividly enough to make it the centre piece of its political consciousness and ideology 1900-odd years after the event. Is Kafka playing a game with us, his readers, and quietly - ' mauschenstill' - putting us off the scent? Perhaps. Or is he suggesting (again like Nietzsche) that a people whose past consists of little more than a series of national disasters is ill served by its history and is well advised to cultivate the unhistorical attitude of fruitful and healthy oblivion? There is then good reason for us not to halt at the partial metonymy of a Jewish interpretation but go the whole way, from mice to men in general. And when we do that, the special place of this story in Kafka's work becomes again manifest, for the central point that emerges is this: the writer who, in the critics' view, invariably figures as the exemplar of alienation, unemphatically and almost involuntarily transports all humanity into that condition, and in doing so modifies it in such a way as to show that there too, in that state of fear and trembling, 'in [ their ] wretched existence amid the tumult of a hostile world', there is community and comfort, thoughtfulness and tact, wry amusement and even laughter. Patriotic sentiments make us blush with embarrassment. Perhaps only a writer like Kafka, confiding in a mode as ironical as this, can validate them for us. For here once again the special - as the object of patriotic sentiments — becomes the ordinary, the common condition of mankind.

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(3) Is there anything to be said about Josephine that is not already contained in the descriptions of her whistling or singing or (as the narrator-critic says, §18, in some exasperation) 'whatever it is she wishes to call it'? She may have 'nothing much of a voice, nothing in the way of artistic achievement', we read (§15), yet when she gets going there is no doubt that a supreme artist is at work. And every aspect of what she is and what she does is considered under this double perspective of the ordinary and the special, all the way down to physical details; as when, in §30, we are told that her limping, apparently caused by an accident, completely disappears after she has concluded a particularly brilliant performance, which 'she actually leaves less tired than when she began, with a firm tread, if her mincing scuttle may be referred to in such terms'. Even the syntactic patterns of individual sentences are put at the service of this double perspective. In her capriciousness and the scorn she has for her audience, in her conviction that they don't understand her art and if they did it wouldn't be art, and in countless small touches, Josephine is represented as the ideal prima donna as well as the solemn guardian of what to her is a sacred art (but the word 'sacred' is not used). The one permanent source of conflict and friction, which I have mentioned already, lies in her unceasing and (we are explicitly told) unrealistic requests for exemption - an artist's ticket of leave — from the chores of her nation-public's daily life, including of course the defensive and warlike activities which are an inescapable part of it. As a matter of fact she knows perfectly well how unrealistic these demands are. After all she is and will always remain a member of that peculiar little nation, whose paramount virtue — the text here reads almost like Hobbes - must be freedom from illusion and a realistic assessment of every emergent situation. So what she really asks for is not exemption from work but recognition of status, her almost sacred status as the nation-public's singer; and her absolute demand too is adamantly and absolutely refused. This emphasis on status derived from the conscious public display or ostension of her art is vitally important to the argument which encompasses the entire story; it subsumes and

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validates the metaphor of art as the cracking of nuts early in the story; in the performance, artist and art are one. When her art is refused the recognition she demands for it, Josephine disappears 'entirely', as the text says. Her raison d'etre is no more. And right to the end, to the opening of the last paragraph, when the prospect of her departure evokes the comment: ' So possibly we shall not be missing very much', this duality of the most ordinary thing in the world being transformed into the most precious and rarest of things is maintained. The full validation of this curious positive metamorphosis I have called the 'Transformation Principle'. It is both the living and the aesthetic principle according to which this story is constructed, and I see it as a profound philosophical and literary insight - a crowning insight, to be found nowhere else in Kafka's work, but validating the claim the work has to a deep humanity, not separate from or opposed to a spiritual value (a separation and opposition which are so often thematic in Kafka), but setting up a continuation and coherence between 'das Ubliche' and 'das AuBerordentliche': between the worldly, the ordinary, the grey-in-grey, and the spiritual, the metaphysical and the religious. Perhaps this principle may be formulated by saying that the grace which we are capable of bestowing on each other is the grace which elevates the ordinary into the special; and that this grace is not in the substance but in the luminous point of view from which the substance is seen. Whether the same principle applies to another kind of grace altogether, we cannot tell with equal assurance; we certainly cannot imagine a dispensation that would be radically different. The story began as inconspicuously as possible, simply because it had to begin somehow; and it ends almost as inconspicuously, in ripples and echoes. For some reason that is never fully disclosed, but is connected with her failure to have her status recognised, her uniqueness accepted, Josephine has gone into hiding; at least, 'she has disappeared, she doesn't want to sing, she doesn't even want to be asked to sing, this time she has left

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us entirely' ('sie hat uns diesmal vollig verlassen'). Which is it to be: ' this time' or ' entirely' ? Does she merely calculate on a triumphant return? She is the prima donna to the end. Has she miscalculated? Or has she spent herself, given her life for the power of her song? Did she really speak the truth when, pleading to be granted the privileges she felt were due to her art, she claimed she was the victim of exhaustion, of self-sacrifice ? She has gone away. Died, perhaps ? The tone of the story is gentle throughout, yet here, right at the end, Kafka is intent on giving it an added strength. One thinks of the words he himself used at the end of his life, when he was afraid that his friends were leaving him alone and called out to them to stay.' I am not going away', one of the friends said. 'But I', said Kafka, and we read that he said it in a strong voice, 'But I am going away!' 22 But then the past tense switches to the future, Josephine is only about to ' go away'. Soon she will 'joyfully lose herself amid the countless hosts of our heroes' of old. And since this is a nation that has hardly any historical consciousness, her liberation or redemption will be redoubled and heightened - ' eine gesteigerte Erlosung': it will be a redemption from the burden of her own life as well as from the perpetuation of that life in the memory of her race.23 She is no more than ' a little episode in the history of our nation', there are hardly any historians to record that episode: the consolations of artistic immortality are viewed as ironically as is her singing. Perhaps there is a point in the life of an artist where the hope of being read, or listened to, by future generations appears as no more than a last vanity to be conquered. But at that point, too, art comes to an end. Fame, Rilke observed, is no more than a wreath of misunderstandings: posterity, Proust wrote, fashions the artist in its own image. If what Josephine will be remembered by are the silences in which her song and voice were enveloped — the silences that enabled her public to dream their dreams of peace — is that not tantamount to being remembered for a mere nothing, to not being remembered at all? Her life, as she tells anyone who cares to listen, has been little more than a burden to her, yet she takes this to be a sure sign of her election; and though he is critical of most of her claims, the

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narrator agrees: she is one of the elect. Whatever may be the ultimate truth about the value of her performance, he tells us (and there is nobody in the story to assess that), the cost of it to her in strenuous effort is absolute:' Sie greift nach dem hochsten Kranz, nicht, weil er im Augenblick gerade ein wenig tiefer hangt, sondern weil es der hochste Kranz ist; ware es in ihrer Macht, sie wiirde ihn noch hoher hangen' (§26; 'She reaches for the highest garland, not because at that moment it happens to hang a little lower, but because it is the highest; were it in her power she would hang the garland higher still'). This final confirmation of the relative value inherent in Josephine's pursuit of an unknown, silent absolute is a move we are familiar with from almost all of Kafka's writings. At this point, where the subjective, relative value of strenuousness is gently yet unambiguously invoked and elevated into something like an absolute, the story I have presented as an exception joins his other stories and meditations, and becomes one with them. Here too the usual and the extraordinary are one.

CHAPTER 8

Postscript: the divided self

In Ulrich, the hero of Robert MusiPs The Man without Qualities, we have seen a man seeking an alternative to, and a redemption from, a charmed and yet meaningless life; the qualities he proposes to dispense with are those of which Meister Eckhart speaks as characteristic of that unredeemed self to which men and women cling — qualities which stand as obstacles on their way to God. 'The Other [or the Mystic] Condition' is the name Ulrich gives to the redemption he is seeking from irredeemable triviality. Ulrich's quest has its counterpart in Musil's stylistic task of embodying the disembodied — the attempt, on a much larger scale, to solve the same problem that faced Thomas Mann in the Schopenhauer chapter of Buddenbrooks. In fact, Musil's novel fulfils our expectations of a coherent realistic narrative only so long as it concerns the social and erotic muddles in the shadow of the 'parallel action'. Whenever it abandons this 'action' and moves to that mystic level of narrative-and-discourse called 'the Other Condition', it plunges into fragmentariness. Realism, after all, goes with a world teetering on the verge of meaninglessness, or at least pointlessness; there can be no single concrete world in which the Great Meaning could be revealed as co-existing with what is presented realistically. The fragmented self portrayed by Musil is thus divided between Public Relations as the world of'other people', of the 'collective One', and the intent search for mystical wholeness through love. There may be other ways of attaining that wholeness. War, for example: 'Krieg ist das Gleiche wie aZ, aber (lebensfahig) gemischt mit dem Bosen' ('War is the same as the Other 410

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Condition, only (as a viable way of life) mixed with evil'). It is only one of the possibilities of redemption proposed and not followed up in Musil's novel, but it happens to be the 'redemption' chosen by history for Ulrich and his Germanspeaking contemporaries. Not that Musil subscribes to the glorification of war as a mystical experience, but he provides a singularly accurate portrayal of the mentality of those who do. Ernst Jiinger and his generation use the war, and the collectivity without which it could not have been fought, to paper over the cracks in a national self divided between that Faustian ardour which for Spengler has characterised the postReformation era, and the promise of triumph through modern technology. Having exhausted his war diaries in three books and several essays, Ernst Jiinger emerges from the war with no respect for the individual self (which he condemns as a relic of the bourgeois ideology), and no interest in its representative genre, the novel of European realism. Instead, he now seeks a narrative form that would encompass the theme of collectivity without succumbing to the lure of ideological discourse. And he finds it - though the paradox is lost on him - in the most bourgeois of prose forms, the feuilleton. The Adventurous Heart, which I think is his best and most original book, is a collection of sixty-three short capriccios, multi-coloured and multifaceted reports of dreams, meticulously accurate vignettes or snapshots of botanical, technological, historical and social configurations. The book offers a striking parallel with the work of Husserl and the early Heidegger (Jiinger and Heidegger were friends): the philosophers and the author of these capriccios alike are emphatic in their rejection of the causal approach of individual psychology, which they see as irrelevant to what the modern world is about. The phenomenological method they develop aims at presenting the typical, trans-personal aspects of human conduct, mostly in familiar situations. What Jiinger's capriccios record are parts of the phenomenal world (Husserl calls it 'Lebenswelt'), culled and transfixed in moments of intense observation: the shapes of the implements in a butcher's or an ironmonger's shop: the

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contrasting meanings of the colours of red and green in clothes, in a garden and a city street; the stereoscopic effect of zinnias or of the cinnamon smell of carnations and cloves; the message we read in brooks and stones or in the colouring of tiger-lilies — all these go hand in hand with the newspaper report of a murder; the account of the death of a redstart falling out of its nest blends into a reflection on the state as the provider of law and order and the source of violence; vivid dreams are accurately reported and either left uninterpreted or interpreted in an impersonal way. The individual self is hardly more than what Thomas Buddenbrook had called it, a grave error and a painful journey of wrong turns; silene noctiflora, which opens its chalice for a single hour of night to the minuscule company of winged guests, is a more rewarding object of the passion for cool, accurate prose. In the mimesis of The Adventurous Heart the individual and personal, including the personal attitude of the narrator, are reduced to the episodic and typical. Many ofJiinger's openings remind us of the apostrophes familiar from the maxims of the French moralistes, the prose of his vignettes cares little for the forward-moving narrative of a unique story, and when a story is told, the narrative is shaped so as to emphasise not its uniqueness but its representative, exemplary nature. Some of these vignettes are remarkably like Kafka's diary entries, especially his parables of animal life. The prose of both authors draws on a rich dream-like inner life, both emphasise the functional status of their characters, both write sketches which consist in detailed elaborations of a turn of speech, an idiom or a cliche and neither of them is entirely at home in the extended narrative Nacheinander of the traditional novel. In Jiinger's capriccios the human element, presented in the perspective of a detached narrator's point of view, is the trans-personal world of das Man ('man' meaning 'one') though largely freed from the contempt which Heidegger had attached to it. ' Uns hier unten ist es selten gegeben, den Zweck dem Sinne eingeschmolzen zu sehen ' 2 (' To us on earth it is seldom granted to see [practical] purpose fused with meaning'). This selfreferential metaphysical apergu outlines the programme of The Adventurous Heart. It will help us to understand the book's last

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entry, a tourist's observation placed in the harbour town of Ponta Delgada in the Azores.3 As so often in these capriccios, its paragraphs are structured antithetically, the first and second indicating what in the quotation above was called c the purpose', while the third proposes a tentative 'meaning' to fit that purpose: Die StraBen lagen still im Mittagslicht; nur in der Feme horte ich einen heiteren, oft wiederholten Ruf, und mich befiel die Laune, ihm nachzugehen. Bald traf ich einen zerlumpten Menschen an, der eine Last von schon erstarrten Fischen bergauf, bergab durch die schmalen, ausgestorbenen Gassen trug, die kaum eine Araukarie beschattete. Ich ging hinter ihm her, ohne daB er mich sah, und erfreute mich an seinem herrlichen, vokalischen Ruf. Er rief ein mir unbekanntes, portugiesisches Wort - vielleicht den Namen fur die Fische, die er trug. Es schien mir aber, als ob er dem noch ganz leise etwas hinzufiigte, und daher trat ich so dicht hinter ihn, daB ich wie sein Schatten war. In der Tat horte ich nun, daB er, sowie er seinen weithin schallenden Ruf beendet hatte, noch fliisternd etwas vor sich hinmurmelte - vielleicht ein hungriges StoBgebet oder einen erschopften Fluch. Denn niemand trat aus den Hausern heraus, und kein Fenster offnete sich. So schritten wir lange durch die heiBen Gassen dahin, um Fische auszubieten, die am Mittag niemand verlangt. Und lange horte ich seinen beiden Stimmen zu, dem lauthin tonenden, iippig werbenden Ruf und dem leisen, verzweifelnden Selbstgesprach. So folgte ich ihm mit einer lauschenden Gier, denn ich spiirte wohl, daB es hier nicht um die Fische ging, sondern daB ich auf dieser verlorenen Insel den Gesang des Menschen horte — zugleich sein laut sich briistendes und sein fliisterndes, flehendes Lied. The streets were silent in the midday sunlight; only in the distance I heard a cheerful, repeated cry, and the fancy took me to follow it. Soon I encountered a ragged man who was carrying a basket offish, already stiff and stark, up hill and down dale through the narrow deserted alleys, shaded at most by an occasional araucaria. I followed close on his heels without his seeing me, and took pleasure in his splendidly vocalised cry. He was calling out a Portuguese word I did not know - perhaps the name of the fish he carried. It seemed to me, though, that he was adding something else to it in a very low voice, and this made me keep so close behind him that I was like his shadow. In truth I now heard, as he ended each resounding cry, some added whispered

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sounds - perhaps an involuntary hungry prayer or a curse of exhaustion. For nobody came out of the houses, nobody opened a window. And so we went for a long time down the hot alleyways, offering fish that nobody wants at midday. And for a long time I listened to his two voices, the ringing voluptuously wooing cry and the soft, desperate whisper in which he talked to himself. Thus I followed him listening avidly, for I divined that here more was at stake than the fish; that here on this remote island I was listening to the song of man - his loud flaunting song at the same time as his song of whispered entreaty. As befits a capriccio, the chanciness of this encounter ' on the extreme edge of Europe' is emphasised in the casual opening, the narrator's purpose is guided by his merest fancy. This soon gives way to a hint of uneasy solidarity with the anonymous protagonist. Reduced to guessing the meaning of the unknown language, the narrator must interpret the second, echo-like cry ambiguously, as a hungry fervent prayer and an exhausted imprecation. Again the mood changes: his empathy with the divided self turns the narrator into 'something like' the protagonist's shadow, and he confesses to the avidity ('mit lauschender Gier') with which he follows the cry — the avidity of an eavesdropper in search of meaning, who yet keeps his distance. (Distance and closeness are the necessary conditions of all interpretation, and so they are of this kind of prose.) And then, introduced by that generalising particle ' So schritten wir lange....' ('And so we walked on for a long time ...') which is one of Jiinger's inveterate mannerisms, the last paragraph dissolves the particularity of the event. The resume, 'offering fish that nobody wants at midday', insists on the typical and everyday, das Man, of the scene. What meaning are we to draw from the episode? The deserted harbour streets of the distant island, the hopeless, pointless enterprise, the boasting cry negated by the desperate soliloquy - all these compose a very emblem of meaninglessness. The narrative so far contains no mood and no verbal turn that would be out of place in a passage of modern French or English prose, but a Sartre or a Camus would, I think, end the account with the penultimate paragraph of description. Jiinger's narrator cannot stop here. He seems compelled to go on ('for I

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divined that here more was at stake...'), pressing on us an explicit pointer to the metaphysical meaning of that meaninglessness. This insistence on a validating and consoling explication I take to be characteristic of German prose - fictional and discursive - of the era between the two world wars, including some of its most distinguished achievements. Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse, too, set up situations which seem headed for a final gratuitousness, only to find that they cannot bear to conclude on that note. The details of this scene don't really matter (Jlinger's narrator tells us, as Kafka's could not), what matters is that this is an image of the fragmented self and of the trauma of all mankind. True, we are told this in the same sentence and apparently in the same register in which the narrative was cast. But the syntactic continuity between the narrative and the interpretative discourse which mirrors it doesn't quite work. Again we are reminded of Franz Kafka, of the two pages of exegetic argument with which the chaplain explains to the impatient Joseph K. the parable of the man before the law. But whereas in The Trial we read the exegesis on the same narrative level as we read the parable itself, still caught up in its compounded ambiguity with no encouragement to resolve it in discursive terms (for Kafka, unlike Jiinger, trusts his narrative), here we are made to step back from the narrative and with those deictic words, 'for I sensed that...', we have left the story and are once again in the realm of discourse. Readers of a generation later than Jiinger's will have little difficulty in following the narrator's intention, even perhaps going beyond it. We have no difficulty in reading this story as a symbol of that German predicament which National Socialism offered to resolve. There are really three voices here, as there were in the history of the Third Reich: the brutal braggadocio of 'strength through joy', usurpation and conquest; the suffering voice of vengeful imprecation and doleful entreaty; and the narrator's passive though avid recording of those two voices, including his insistence on drawing some meaning, some validation from it all - these three voices and their meaning are

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as close as can be to the events and temper of the age in which they were written. Why then that turn into the self-referential ? Because the author doesn't trust the reader to provide the interpretation? Because the author doesn't trust anybody or anything, not even his own prose. That self-referential discourse doesn't heal the division in the self, that distrust only perpetuates it. Hugo von Hofmannsthal once wrote that in the work of art form disposes of the problem. Well — sometimes it does, but not always. The literary presentation of the fragmented self is to be found in all genres, including (in Byron's Don Juan) the epic, but it is as much involved in literary realism as it is in any of its numerous alternatives. The portrayal of the collective 'One', das Man, is bound to be a more problematic undertaking. If it is not to plunge into arid abstraction and the contempt which is abstraction's affective analogue, the portrayed 'One' must always intimate, at least by implication, the singular self. The finest of the novels that came out of the Great War, Her Privates We, ends by making the achievement of such a mediation an explicit part of its narrative. Its hero, Private Bourne, has never quite fitted in with the other soldiers in his company. He was considered for a commission, but nothing came of it; he is more thoughtful than the others, has read a few books, seems to have written a few poems, but nothing came of any of that either. When he too is killed, the Sergeant-Major keeps a brief vigil by the dead body that is propped against the side of the trench. [The sergeant-major] moved away, with the quiet acceptance of the fact. It was finished. He was sorry for Bourne, more sorry than he could say. He was a queer chap, he said to himself, as he felt for the dug-out steps. There was a bit of a mystery about him; but then, when you come to think of it, there's a bit of a mystery about all of us.4 Not, we notice, about each of us, but 'about all of us'. All mystery is special. And so, too, there is a bit of a mystery and something special about our theme; but then, when you come to think of it, there is something special about all literature.

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The critical activity, if it is not to degenerate into banal ordinariness, must preserve that mystery; and it can do this only in recognising that there is no such thing as an invariable method of analysis and criticism, and no universal critical theory either; but that literary scenarios have a family resemblance with what used to be called human-existential situations, and with scientific problem-situations too - each requiring (not dictating, only requiring) its appropriate critical response.

Notes

INTRODUCTION 1 'Die Nation als Ideal und Wirklicheit' in Robert Musil, Tagebucher, Aphorismen, Essays und Reden ed. Adolf Frise (Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 1955) p. 608. 2 Culture und Value ed. G. H. von Wright (Blackwell, Oxford 1980) p. 26. 3 Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. Karl Schlechta, 3 vols. (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1966) vol. in, p. 424. 4 Letter to F. W. Oelze, 28 November 1949, in Gottfried Benn, Briefe an F. W. Oelze, 3 vols. (Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden and Munich 1979) p. 269. 5 ' Die Unschuld des Werdens' in Gotzenddmmerung [ The Twilight of the Idols], Werke ed. Schlechta vol. 11, p. 978. 6 The Blue and Brown Books (Blackwell, Oxford 1964), p. 17. 1 THE THEME 1 Matthew 11: 2-10. 2 William Wordsworth,' Residence in London' in The Prelude (1850) VII, line 636. 3 Zur Geschichte des Europdischen Mhilismus (Kroner Verlag, Stuttgart 1930) §594 Bertolt Brecht, Kleines Organonfiir das Theater (Suhrkamp Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1961) §39. 5 ' Paramythien' is the term Herder used to designate those of his and his contemporaries' tales which ' are built on an ancient Greek fable, called "mythos", and which do no more than place a new meaning in the course of its narrative.' J. G. Herder, Sdmtliche Werke, ed. B. Suphan, 33 vols. (Berlin 1877-1913) vol. xvm, p. i27ff. The basic attributes of true myth are anonymous origin, sacred connotations and popular appeal; where none of these apply, I take Herder's term to be the more appropriate. 418

Notes to pages 50-76

419

6 The book was banned early in 1940, by which time Jiinger was back in the army; in 1945, when all his writings were banned by the French (in whose zone of occupation he was living), he characteristically denied that On the Marble Cliffs had any political message. 7 Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, ed. Adolf Frise, 2 vols. (Rowohlt, Hamburg 1978) vol. 1, pp. 379-80. 8 W. V. Quine does much better: how about a logo on melancholy (he asks), depicting a melon and a collie? See Quiddities (Harvard University Press, 1987) p. 1. 9 In a letter to Erhard Buschbeck of 22 February 1917, Rilkes Briefe aus den Jahren 1914-1921, ed. Ruth Sieber-Rilke and Carl Sieber (Insel Verlag, Leipzig 1937). 2

REALITY

1 DasBuch der Freunde (Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1965) p. 86. 2 Even in Section 1 of The Birth of Tragedy we encounter: ' dream reality' ('Traumwirklichkeit'), 'this reality in which we live and are', and 'the reality of being' ('Dasein') against the 'reality of the dream', 'the daytime reality which is only incompletely intelligible', and 'appearance that would deceive us as crude reality'. Die Geburt der Tragodie in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. K. Schlechta, 3 vols. (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1966) vol. 1, passim. 3 The parallel is unfair to Sir Oswald Mosley, but had he become the Fiihrer of Britain, I wonder whether the editors of the Supplement to the Oxford English Dictionary would have held out against including quotations from his speeches. 4 Virginia Woolf, A Room of One's Own (Hogarth Press, London 1929) pp. 165-6. 5 Nietzsche, Werke vol. 1, p. 32. 6 Formulierungen iiber die zwei Prinzipien des psychischen Geschehens, Studienausgabe, 10 vols. with a supplement and concordance (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1982) vol. in. 7 Die Aufzeichnungen des Matte Laurids Brigge, in Sdmtliche Werke, 6 vols. (Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1955-66) vol. vi, PP- 775-6. 8 T. S. Eliot refers to the 'unreal City' in lines 60, 207, 376 of The Waste Land, also written in 1922. 9 Duineser Elegien, 10, Sdmtliche Werke, vol. 1, pp. 722-3.

10 'Es ist...die Realitat, die man schildert, stets nur ein Vorwand.' ('Zum Selbstbildnis', in Robert Musils Tagebuchern, Aphorismen,

420

11

12 13 14 15

Notes to pages 76-gi

Essays undReden, ed. Adolf Frise (Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 1955) p. 776.) ' Da war nun etwas zum erstenmale wie ein Stein in die unbestimmte Einsamkeit seiner Traumereien gefallen; es war da; da lieB sich nichts machen; es war Wirklichkeit.' (Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, Hamburg 1959) p. 46. Ibid. pp. 110-11. Ibid. p. 112. Ibid. p. 128. ' The critic [of society] can latch on to any form of practical or theoretical consciousness and can develop true reality out of the separate forms of existing reality as their imperative and purpose [ihr Sollen und Endzweck]... It will then become apparent that the world has long possessed the dream of the matter, of which it must only possess the consciousness in order to possess it in reality.' (Marx to Arnold Ruge, May 1843, adapted from the translation by Saul Pad over in The Letters of Karl Marx (PrenticeHall, New Jersey 1979), p. 31.) 3

RELATIVITY

1 Paul Johnson, A History of the Modern World (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, London 1983), p. 13 and p. 4. 2 The ABC of Relativity (Kegan Paul, London 1925) p. 14. 3 Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, 10 vols. with a supplement and concordance (Fischer Taschenbuch Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1982) vol. ix, pp. 35-60. See also Freud's letter to Albert Einstein of September 1932, ibid. p. 271. 4 Die Fackel nos. 376-7 (Vienna, June 1913) p. 21. 5 Jenseits von Gut und Bose in Friedrich Nietzsche, Werke, ed. K. Schlechta, 3 vols. (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1966) vol. 11 p. 661. 6 Der Untergang des Abendlandes, 1 vol. (C. H. Beck, Munich 1963). 7 I have made use of data from Oswald Spengler in seiner £eit by Anton Mirko Koktanek (C. H. Beck, Munich 1968), which provides a fair and sympathetic account of Spengler's life. 8 Der Untergang des Abendlandes p. 815, quoted by Koktanek. Nowhere in Spengler's book is there any mention of Freud. 9 A curious parallel, emerging from a similarly beleaguered (though not lonely) childhood, is the Brontes' world of Angria. 10 Untergang is a good deal more dramatic than 'Decline', das Abendland connotes a traditional cultural value absent from 'the West' and only latent in 'the Occident'.

Notes to pages gi-116

421

11 To Hans Klores, 18 December 1918. Oswald Spengler: Briefe ed. A. M. Koktanek and M. Schroter (C. H. Beck, Munich 1963) p. 111. 12 From the diary of Spengler's sister Hilde Kornhardt, quoted by Koktanek, Spengler p. 441. 13 Friedrich Meinecke, essay on The Decline of the West in the Zurich periodical Wissen und Leben 1923. 14 Untergang des Abendlandes p. 142. 15 Ibid. p. 154. 16 The Revolutions of Civilisation (Harper Bros., New York and London 1911)-

17 Boxing was exempt from this invective, especially after Max Schmeling knocked out Joe Louis in the heavyweight world championship fight in 1936. 18 Meinecke, 1923 essay. 19 Walter Benjamin is even more vehement than Thomas Mann in his rejection of Spengler, yet Benjamin's essay on Goethe's Elective Affinities (1924) is entirely based on the Spenglerian dichotomy of 'facts versus truth', 'Sachgehalt versus Wahrheitsgehalt'. 20 Nietzsche in The Anti-Christ describes Pontius Pilate as the only gentleman in the whole of the New Testament — ' eine einzige Figur...die man ehren muB' Werke vol. 11, p. 1211. 21 Untergang des Abendlandes pp. 814-23. See Koktanek, Spengler p. 51. 22 This is Schopenhauer's phrase, used with political overtones by Thomas Mann in his novella Mario and the Magician (1927). 23 i.e. Nietzsche's amorfati. 24 The phrase, and the substance of the passage as a whole, will be used by Ernst Jiinger in Der Arbeiter (1932), and later by the National Socialists. 25 Untergang des Abendlandes, p. 51. 26 Vermischte Bemerkungen [Culture and Value], ed. G. von Wright (Blackwell, Oxford 1980) p. 79. 27 See Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften (Rowohlt Verlag, Hamburg 1952) p. 92. 28 'Tradition and the Individual Talent' Section m {Selected Essays (Faber, London 1932)). 29 Quoted by Koktanek, Spengler pp. 39-40. 30 Vermischte Bemerkungen, p. 9. 31 Der ^auberberg, 2 vols. (S. Fischer Verlag, Berlin 1925). 32 Tagebucher igi8-2i (S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1979). 33 Last words of Gretchen's brother Valentin, line 3775. 34 Friedrich Nietzsche, ' Vom Nutzen und Nachteil der Historic' in Unzeitgemdfie Betrachtungen [Untimely Meditations], Werke vol. 1, p. 282.

422

Notes to pages 117-36

35 Aus dem Nachlafi der Achtzigerjahre, Werke vol. m, p. 769. 36 ' T h e Novel' in A Study of Thomas Hardy and Other Essays, ed. Bruce Steele (Cambridge University Press 1985) p. 179. 37 Psychopathology of Everyday Life (Standard Edition, Hogarth Press 1981). 38 Three Essays on Sexuality (Standard Edition, Hogarth Press 1981). 39 Der £auberberg vol. 11, p. 164. 40 'An image held us captive'. Philosophical Investigations (Blackwell, Oxford 1953) §115. 41 Der £auberberg vol. 11, pp. 258-9. 42 Uber die Spezielle und Allgemeine Relativitdtstheorie (Braunschweig 43 Hermann J. Weigand, The Magic Mountain: A Study of Thomas Mann's Novel, second edition (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 1964) p. 15, gives an instructive survey of the distribution of narrative time and event time: Hans Castorp's arrival: 26 pages; his first full day: 90 pages; the first seven months (exclusive of the first three weeks): 270 pages; the succeeding term of one year and nine months: 333 pages; the remaining four and a half years: 295 pages. 44 The ABC of Relativity (Kegan Paul, London 1925) p. 14. 45 Mimesis (first published A. Francke, Bern 1946), translated by Willard Trask (Princeton University Press 1953) pp. 433-4. 46 Der £auberberg vol. 11, p. 573. 47 Ibid, vol.i, p. 139. 48 Ibid. vol. 11, pp. 6ooff. 49 Die Geburt der Tragodie, in Werke vol. 1, p. 84. 50 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften [M.o.E. in textual references], ed. Adolf Frise, 2 vols. (Rowohlt, Hamburg 1978); see also Helmut Arntzen's helpful Musil Kommentar zum Roman 'Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften' (Munich 1980). For my translations I have used, and modified, Robert Musil, The Man Without Qualities [WK in textual references] translated with a foreword by Eithne Wilkins and Ernst Kaiser, 3 vols. (Seeker & Warburg, London 1953 onward). This translation, like the novel itself, is unfinished; quotations from the last section {M.o.E. pp. 1067-1651) are in my own English versions. A new complete translation by Burton Pike is planned but publication date is uncertain. MusiPs Diaries are referred to in Tagebiicher ed. Adolf Frise (Rowohlt, Hamburg 1955). The reader may wish to know that I have not thought it necessary to follow Musil's unappetising designation of the scene of the action; his 'Kakanien' is of course identical with the

Notes to pages 136-63

51 52 53 54 55 56 57 58 59

423

' kaiserlich-koniglich' or 'kaiserlich und koniglich' or 'k.u.k.' Austro-Hungarian Dual Monarchy. Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations § 195. For a different account of this non-appearance, see Philip Payne, 'Robert Musil's Reality', Forum for Modern Language Studies^ 12 (1976) pp. 315-16. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Prologue to [Arthur Schnitzler's] Anatol (1892). See J. P. Stern, Hitler: The Fiihrer and the People (Collins, London 1990) Chapter 8. Musil, Tagebiicher p. 36. Auerbach's Mimesis takes as its motto the first line of Andrew MarvelPs 'To his Coy Mistress', 'Had we but world enough, and time...'. Musil, Tagebiicher p. 286. See Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften p. 2123. Cyril Connolly, The Unquiet Grave (Curwen Press, London 1944) p. 1.

60 Musil, Tagebiicher p. 226. 61 ' DaB wir sie iiberschatzen, dazu ward die Vergangenheit unserem Gedachtnis einverleibt.' Hugo von Hofmannsthal, Buch der Freunde (Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1965) p. 47. 62 One of the few Viennese writers to use strong working-class themes, Josef Luitpold Stern, published his poems in Philadelphia. 63 An example of PR at its most accomplished, which Musil would have relished, is the Viennese practice of telling the world that Beethoven was a Viennese and A. Hitler a German. 64 Preface to Wittgenstein's Philosophische Bemerkungen ed. Rush Rhees (Blackwell, Oxford 1964), written in 1930. 65 Actually, these games with causality and time aren't all that 'modern'. They have their antecedents in Mother Shandy's phantom pregnancy, in Uncle Toby's abortive love affair with the Widow Wadman, and in Toby's and Corporal Trim's military campaigns. See Wolfgang Iser, Laurence Sterne: 'Tristram Shandy' Landmarks of World Literature (Cambridge University Press 1988). 66 It can hardly be an accident that the German word for 'commotion', 'Auflauf, means 'souffle' in Viennese. 67 The only exception I can find in pre-Lacanian criticism is Frank Kermode's 'A Short View of Musil', in Puzzles and Epiphanies (Routledge, London 1962) pp. iO5f. 68 'Das Unanstandige und Kranke in der Kunst'; see A. J. Webber, ' Discourse and the Self in the Works of Georg Trakl and Robert

424

69 70 71 72 73 74

75 76

77 78 79

80

81 82

83

Notes to pages 163-78

Musil', unpublished dissertation (University of Cambridge 1987) p. 123. The sexual aspect of the book having been long ignored, Lacanian criticism has predictably swung to ignoring everything else. Webber, 'Discourse', p. 127. Real ' Bedlam' visits, free of charge, were still fashionable in prewar Vienna. Martin Seymour-Smith, Guide to Modern World Literature (Macmillan, London 1985) p. 618. Sigmund Freud, Fragment of a hysteria-analysis (1905), Studienausgabe, vol. vi, p. 124 (my translation). At least, it is consummated in one version (M.o.E. p. 1445), tantalisingly almost so in various plans for another. See Friedbert Aspetsberger, 'Der andere Zustand', in Musil in Focus, ed. Lothar Huber and J. J. White (Institute of Germanic Studies, London 1982) p. 65; cf. also Aspetsberger, Literarisches Leben im Austrofaschismus (Hain, Konigstein 1980) pp. 7gfF. The fountain image seems to be taken from Rilke's poem 'Romische Fontane' in JVeue Gedichte of 1907. In this reading of Lectures 16 and 17 of The Varieties of Religious Experience (New York and London 1961) pp. 298ff. I have modified James's description so as to apply it to mysticism as discourse, and changed the order of his argument. La Pesanteur et la Grace, (Librairie Plon, Paris 1948) p. 126 (my translation). Quoted from James, Lectures p. 311; the first italics are mine. Albrecht Schone, 'Zum Gebrauch des Konjunktivs bei Robert Musil', in Robert Musil, ed. Renate von Heydebrand (Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, Darmstadt 1982) p. 25. This is Schone's view ('Zum Gebrauch' p. 19), which I think is only partly true; the distinction that needs to be made is between subjunctives formed with auxiliary verbs (the predilection for which is indeed Austrian), and those formed from inflected verbal stems (which on either side of the Danube invariably belong to elevated speech). Though it must be added that the only literary work cast entirely in subjunctives (of both kinds), Ernst JandPs enchanting play Aus der Fremde (1980), is nothing if not Austrian. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright (Blackwell, Oxford 1980) p. 16. Maurice Blanchot, 'Recherches', in La nouvelle revue frangaise, quoted from Philip Payne, ' On Reading Robert Musil's Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften\ Sprachkunst, 9 (1978) p. 90. This is Chapter 58 in the Nachlafi part of the volume, pp. 1 i96ff.,

Notes to pages iy8-g4

425

printed by MusiPs publisher in 1937-8, but (ironically enough) withdrawn by Musil at proof stage. 4

T H E G R E A T WAR

1 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Aus dem Nachlqfi, ed. Adolf Frise, 2 vols. (Rowohlt, Hamburg 1978) vol. 11, p. 1932 ' Krieg ist das gleiche wie aZ; aber (lebensfahig) gemischt mit dem Bosen'. 2 Scott's Last Expedition: The Journals of Captain R. F. Scott, arranged by Leonard Huxley (Smith Elder, London 1913) p. 415; the letters are dated 29 March 1912. Italics mine. 3 This opening is quoted from the Berlin 1924 version of Ernst Jiinger's In Stahlgewittern. I have used and modified Basil Creighton's translation: The Storm of Steel (Chatto, London 1929) with an introduction by R. H. Mottram (re-issued New York 1975). This includes Jiinger's 'Preface to the English Edition'. ' Kein schonrer Tod ist in der Welt / Als wer auf griiner Haide fallt...' is the opening of a patriotic song of 1815 by Karl Gottling, echoing one of two hundred years earlier by Jakob Vogel. 4 Ernst Jiinger, Sdmtliche Werke, 10 vols. (Klett, Stuttgart 1960-5) and 18 vols. (1978-84). The book was revised at least five times: in 1922, 1924, 1932-3, 1935, and 1961. For some details of these revisions, see Johannes Volmert, Ernst Jiinger: ' In Stahlgewittern' (Fink, Munich 1985) pp. I5ff. 5 R. H. Mottram, The Spanish Farm [part of a trilogy] (Chatto, London 1924). 6 Der Kampfals inneres Erlebnis (Mittier, Berlin 1922; second [revised] edition 1926); Das Wdldchen 125 [English maps have it as Rossignol Wood] (Mittler, Berlin 1925); translated by Basil Creighton as Copse 125: a Chronicle from the Trench Warfare of igi8 (Chatto, London 1930); Feuer und Blut: ein kleiner Ausschnitt aus einer grofien Schlacht (Frundsberg Verlag, Magdeburg 1926). 7 Unless indicated otherwise, I quote from Sdmtliche Werke vol. 1: Tagebiicher I, Der Erste Weltkrieg (1978). 8 Lines 3292-4 of The Song describe any infantryman's nightmare 'Between [the heathens and the Christians] is neither hill nor vale nor mound / Nor wood. Hiding there is none. / They see each other clearly across the plain.' 9 Ernst Jiinger, Der Arbeiter, in Sdmtliche Werke vol. vm (1981). 10 Der Arbeiter p. 113. 11 Ibid. p. 267. 12 In Stahlgewittern, version of 1925 p. 100; translation p. n o .

426

Notes to pages 194—212

13 Junger read Der Untergang des Abendlandes in 1922, when the second volume appeared. 14 Der Arbeiter p. 42. 15 Ibid. p. 28. 16 e.g. 'Bis zuriick zu Albrecht Diirer / verdankt ihr alles eurem Fuhrer' (roughly translated: 'The whole way back to Albrecht Diirer / For everything you can thank your Fuhrer'): one wonders whether, as Hans Carossa claims, these words circulating in the thirties were really thought of as a joke. See his autobiography, Ungleiche Welten, in Sdmtliche Werke, 2 vols. (Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1962) vol. 11, pp. 675, 681. 17 In Stahlgewittern (last edition) p. 107; for the topic of Jiinger's embattled style, see J. P. Stern, Ernst Jiinger: a Writer of Our Time (Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge 1952 and Yale University Press, New Haven 1983). 18 Carossa, Rumdnisches Tagebuch, Sdmtliche Werke vol. 1, p. 395; see also A Roumanian Diary, translated by Agnes Neill Scott (Martin Seeker, London 1929) pp. gfT. 19 See Curt Hohoff, 'Zum Tode von Hans Carossa', in Uber Hans Carossa, ed. Volker Michels (Insel Verlag, Frankfurt 1979) p. 302. 20 Ungleiche Welten pp. 681, 740. 21 Appropriately enough, the diary has been compared with Goethe's Campagne in Frankreich; see Clair Baier, 'Carossa and Goethe', English Goethe Society, 24 (1955) p. 51. 22 The fact that he was awarded the Iron Cross First Class is not mentioned in the diary. 23 Rumdnisches Tagebuch p. 501; translation p. 251. 24 Hans Carossa, Fiihrung und Geleit: ein Lebensgedenkbuch [1933], Sdmtliche Werke vol. 1, p. 748. 25 Rumdnisches Tagebuch pp. 498f., translation pp. 245f. 26 Ibid. pp. 459-63, translation pp. 157-165. 27 Ibid. p. 462: 'Etwas Geistiges ist uns hier verburgt...'. 28 Max Kommerell, quoted in Frankfurter Allgemeine £eitung, 24 August 1985, p. 19. 29 The early volumes, from 1894 to 1907, were decorated by Melchior Lechter, a graphic artist and painter on glass. See Franz Schonauer, Stefan George (Reinbek bei Hamburg i960) pp. 68ff., and Ernst Morwitz, Kommentar zu dem Werk Stefan Georges (Kiipper Bondi, Diisseldorf 1969) p. 215. Further details on punctuation and versification in Carl August Klein's contributions to Blatterfur die Kunst, ist series (1892-3) pp. 85, 145. All biographical data are taken from H.-J. Seekamp, R. C. Ockenden, M. Keilson: Stefan George: Leben und Werk, eine £eittafel (Castrum Peregrinum: Amsterdam, 1972).

Notes to pages 213-23

427

30 Translated by Terence Cave. 31 'Harte Ftigung' is the term first applied to the poetry of August Graf von Platen (which George greatly admired), and then appropriated by the George Circle. See K. Kluncker, Blatterfur die Kunst: die Dichterschule Stefan Georges (Klostermann, Frankfurt 1974) pp. 108, n o . 32 When it was first printed in Blatter fur die Kunst, 2nd series (1895) the poem was entitled 'Nach der Lese' ('After the Harvest'). 33 Quoted from Denis Donoghue, W. B. Teats (Fontana, London 34 In 1917, though, he seems to have toyed with the idea of offering himself as a successor to the Reich Chancellor, BethmannHollweg. 35 Incidentally, Hitler's discovery and adoption of the swastika goes back to his time in Vienna, and had nothing to do with the Circle. 36 Klaus Landfried, Stefan George: Politik des Unpolitischen (Lothar Stiehm, Heidelberg 1975) p. 223, defines 'the Master's' betes noires as 'der Reichsdeutsche, der Leutnant, der Corpsstudent'. 37 Max Weber, Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft (Mohr, Tubingen 1956) p. 663; translated as Economy and Society (Bedminster, New York 1968) pp. 1112-13. 38 The front page of each number contained the caveat 'Die zeitschrift hat einen geschlossenen von den mitgliedern geladenen leserkreis.' ('The journal's readership is limited to those invited to join it by members of the circle.') 39 Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft pp. 664-5, Economy and Society p. 1113. 40 For the conversations, see Schonauer, George p. 152. George and the Circle are mentioned by Weber in Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft p. 142, Economy and Society p. 245. 41 This is Walter Muschg's claim in his remarkable Tragische Literaturgeschichte (Francke Verlag, Bern 1948) p. 101. 42 George himself takes on that role in the first poem of Der siebente Ring, entitled 'Das Zeitgedicht'. 43 Blatter fur die Kunst, 2nd series (1904-5). 44 Translated by Terence Cave. It is, I think, significant that the poem's last word, \..stofit\ is also the word Nietzsche uses in a notorious passage (quoted below, p. 236) in Thus Spoke ^arathustra, part m section 12:' Aber ich sage: was fallt, das soil man auch noch stofien!' (' I say: a thing that is falling should be given a good kick as well!') 45 See Blatter fur die Kunst, 2nd series (1894): 'die Kiirze - rein ellenma'Big - die Kiirze!' 46 Roland Barthes, Fragments anun discours amoureux (Seuil, Paris 1977) p. 189.

428

Notes to pages 225-36

47 They are reproduced in the second volume of Robert Boehringer's Mein Bild von Stefan George (Kiipper Bondi, Diisseldorf, 1968); details of Maximin in vol. 1, pp. 1 igf; also in Werner Kraft, Stefan George (text und kritik, Munich 1980) pp. 175-89; Morwitz, Kommentar pp. 268ff.; Schonauer, George, pp. 1 iofT., reprints some of Maximilian Kronberger's poems and letters. 48 The relevant poems are:' Ihr Ausserste von windumsauster klippe' in Der Stern des Bundes, published in 1914;' Der dichter in zeiten der wirrnis', first published separately in Drei Gesdnge of 1921, and included in Das JVeue Reich of 1928; and the poem 'Der Krieg', which will be discussed below; I have drawn on Werner Kraft's chapter, 'Das Judentum', George pp. 77-85; see also Edith Landmann, Gesprdche mit Stefan George (Kiipper Bondi, Diisseldorf J 963) P. 3349 Theodor W. Adorno,' Rede iiber Lyrik und Gesellschaft', in Stefan George und die Nachwelt: Dokumente zur Wirkungsgeschichte, ed. Ralph-

Rainer Wuthenow, vol. 11 (Klett, Stuttgart 1981) p. 174. 50 This and the following translations are by Dean E. H. Plumptre, The Divina Commedia and Canzoniere (Isbister, London 1886). 51 My translations are taken, with occasional adaptations, from The Works of Stefan George: rendered into English by Olga Marx and Ernst Morwitz (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill 1974) PP- 359-62. 52 The evidence for this interpretation is abundant. Thus Friedrich Wolters (one of the disciples) uses the word 'Blutschande' in a scurrilous diatribe against the French occupation (see Schonauer, George p. 148) while Kurt Hildebrandt, Das Werk Stefan Georges (Hauswedell, Hamburg i960) p. 398, quotes Karl Wolfskehl reporting, in 1914:' He [George] reproaches the French for letting loose the Asiatic hordes on the centre of Europe', by 'Asiatic' meaning Russian] and again, p. 402,' It is a scandal [Schmach] to let yourselves be drowned by a flood of coloured races rather than reach an understanding with your neighbours and found a European community.' 53 Werner Kraft, 'Judentum' p. 81, points out that in Tacitus it is mankind that is the object of the Christians' hatred. 54 The translation at this point offers a curious commentary on the itinerary of Ernst Morwitz, one of its authors, who had been a number of the Circle and had emigrated to the United States. His rendering of' die allbluhende mutter der verwildert / zerfallnen weissen art' as ' the radiant Mother of Caucasians, / divided now and rampant', follows the (still current) parlance of the WASP establishment. Clearly, we are all Caucasians now.

Notes to pages 238-45

429

55 For these observations see George Kearns's Ezra Pound's Cantos, Landmarks of World Literature (Cambridge University Press 1989). 56 Jerome McGann, 'Ezra Pound and Evil', London Review of Books, 7 July 1988, p. 17. 57 Franz Schauwecker, who was soon to become one of the regime's chief poets; quoted from H. M. Klein, 'Weltkriegsroman und Germanistik' Journal of English and Germanic Philology, 84/4 (1985) P- 47758 Landmann, Gesprdche p. 209. My italics. 59 Friedrich Nietzsche, Sdmtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe ed. Colli and Montinari, 15 vols. (W. de Gruyter, Berlin 1988) vol. xn, pp. 46ff. 60 For biographical data see Otto Basil, Georg Trakl (Reinbek bei Hamburg 1966) and Brian McGuinness, Wittgenstein - a Life, 2 vols., vol. 11 forthcoming (Duckworth, London 1988) vol. 1, p. 223.

61 Quoted from Frankfurter £eitung, 7 October 1914, in F. M. Sharp, The Poet's Madness: a Reading of Georg Trakl (Cornell University Press, Ithaca and London 1981) p. 187. 62 Quoted in Basil, Trakl. 63 Text in Georg Trakl, Dichtungen und Briefe ed. Walther Killy and Hans Szklenar, 2 vols. (Miiller, Salzburg 1969) vol. 1, p. 167; facsimile of the poem in Basil, Trakl. 64 This rendering draws on those of R. W. Sheppard, 'Georg Trakl's " Grodek ": the Text and Two Translations', Modern Languages, 52 (1971) pp. 124-32, and Michael Hamburger, 'Trakl in English', in Londoner Trakl-Symposion, ed. W. E. Yuill and W. Methlagl (Miiller, Salzburg 1981) pp. 114-28. 65 Karl Ludwig Schneider speaks of' Reihengedicht' and ' Reihenstil *; see Salzburger Trakl-Symposion, ed. W. Weiss and H. Weichselbaum (Muller, Salzburg 1978) p. 115. 66 See p. 231: Stefan George: 'Der Krieg'. 67 Martin Heidegger, 'Die Sprache im Gedicht', in Unterwegs zur Sprache: Gesamtausgabe 61 vols. to date (Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1977-85) vol. xn, p. 61. 68 See p. 195 above, Ernst Jiinger's The Storm of Steel. 69 e.g. Holderlin's 'Mein Eigentum' contains such a comparative: 'wenn drauBen mir die / Stillere Sonne mein Wirken fbrdert.' 70 Patrick Bridgwater, 'Georg Trakl and the Poetry of the First War', in Londoner Trakl-Symposion p. 108. 71 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright (Blackwell, Oxford 1980) p. 45.

430

Notes to pages 246-60

72 See p. 189 above, The Storm of Steel. 73 This is Leonard Forster's version in The Penguin Book of German Verse, p. 433. 74 Seamus Heaney, The Government of the Tongue (Faber, London and Boston 1988) p. 37. 75 See Londoner Trakl-Symposion p. 118. 76 I leave to one side M. Heidegger's idiosyncratic re-furbishing of 'wesen' as a verb for the purpose of his own 'ontological vision'. 77 Sharp, The Poet"s Madness p. 190. 78 See Bridgwater, 'Trakl and the Poetry of the First War' p. 109. 79 See Michael Tanner, 'The Total Work of Art', in The Wagner Companion, ed. Peter Burbidge and Richard Sutton (Faber, London and Boston 1979) p. 160. 80 See Basil, Trakl p. 76. 81 An earlier version of the poem, now lost, which Trakl read to von Ficker, is said to have included some additional verses in which ' the destiny of the grandsons unborn was elaborated' - in what manner we don't know. See Dichtungen p. 167. 82 This is mentioned by Sharp, The Poet's Madness p. 190. 5

T H E PURCHASE OF P O E T R Y

1 See the illustration in Ingeborg Schnack, Rilkes Leben und Werk im Bild (Insel Verlag, Wiesbaden 1956) no. 156; facing it is a facsimile of Rilke's manuscript of the first page of the poem, written out in lines of prose. Another copy of the stele, which Rilke saw in Naples, is different in some details.

2 My sources are: Pauly-Wissowa, Real-Encyclopadie der classischen 3

4

5

6

Altertumswissenschaft vol. xxxv (Stuttgart, 1939) pp. 12iff; and W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (Methuen, London 1936). 'Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes' in Sdmtliche Werke, 6 vols. (Insel Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1955-66) vol. 1, pp. 542-3. Throughout this chapter Rilke's poems are quoted from this edition; some da tings are taken from Gedichte igo6—ig26 (Insel Verlag, Wiesbaden 1953); both are edited by Ernst Zinn. My translation of the poem follows Angela Hobbs's in Poems, privately printed, pp. 41-4, with some help from J. B. Leishman's translations. Robin Kirkpatrick has suggested Inferno xii (the river of blood), Inferno xiii (the trees of suicides), and Purgatory iv (the steps to the Gate of Purgatory) as possible Dantesque allusions. T. S. Eliot, The Sacred Wood (Faber, London 1920) p. 48, 'Tradition and the Individual Talent.'

Notes to pages 260-go

431

7 'Dis-placed stars' attempts to render Rilke's 'enstellte Sterne': such verbal inventions, and indeed all 'neologisms', follow the same rule as do all our inventions: they lean on - derive some of their meaning for us from - the words we already know. Thus 'enstellt' in this nonce usage of Rilke's derives from the word's ordinary meaning, 'enstellt' (='disfigured'), which is de-etymologised into 'ent-' (= 'dis-' or 'un-') and 'Stelle' or 'stellen' ( = 'place', 'to place'). 8 K. G. Gransden's rendering in Virgil: the Aeneid, Landmarks of World Literature (Cambridge University Press 1990) p. 81. 9 See Peter Lamborn Wilson, Angels (Thames & Hudson, London 1980) e.g. p. 61: 'the Islamic version of the Annunciation differs from the Christian one only in dress'. 10 Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (Oxford University Press 1975) p. 26. 11 This is one of the main historical arguments in Charles Taylor's Sources of the Self: The Making of the Modern Identity (Cambridge

University Press 1989). 12 Briefe an einenjungen Dichter, i.e. Franz Xaver Kappus, written in 1903-4 (Insel-Biicherei No. 406, Frankfurt am Main 1947). 13 Wilson, Angels p. 193. 14 Paul de Man, Allegories of Reading (New Haven and London 1979) Chapter 2. 15 Hans Egon Holthusen, in Rilke: A Study of His Later Poetry (trans. J. P. Stern, Cambridge University Press 1952) p. 25, calls Rilke 'a magician to whom all things animate are present in one moment of time'. 16 Erich Heller, The Disinherited Mind (Cambridge University Press J 952) p. 136. 17 In a lecture on the Second Elegy, Michael Minden singled out this passage for its purity. See also the notes by Rilke's friend, Paul Valery, in 'La Poesie pure' (Pleiade, Paris 1957) vol. 1, pp. 1456-7. 18 Herman Meyer gives an illuminating account of Rilke's deep appreciation of Cezanne, and his tendency to assess everything that came later as decline; see the last two chapters of Meyer's Zarte Empirie (Metzler, Stuttgart 1963). 19 The claim to centrality is attested by the title of Erich Heller's collection of essays on Rilke, JVirgends wird Welt sein als innen

(Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1975), the first of which he concludes, ironically (p. 70), with 'Nicht einmal dort!' ('And not even there!'). 20 The reference is to Alfred Schuler, whom Rilke heard lecture in

432

21 22 23

24

Notes to pages

2go-jij

1915. See August Stahl's Rilke: Kommentar zum lyrischen Werk (Winkler Verlag, Munich 1978) p. 311 (I have used this commentary throughout for the dating of the Elegies), and also Wolfgang Leppmann, Rilke: Leben und Werk (Scherz Verlag, Bern and Munich 1982) p. 358. D. J. Enright, The Apothecarys Shop (Seeker & Warburg, London J 957) PP- 202-3. See J. P. Stern, 'Words are also Deeds' in The Heart of Europe (Blackwell, Oxford 1992) pp. 44-60. Ludwig Wittgenstein, Culture and Value, ed. G. H. von Wright and Heikki Nyman, translated by Peter Winch (Blackwell, Oxford 1988) p. 75: '1st ein falscher Gedanke nur einmal klar und kiihn ausgedriickt, so ist damit schon viel gewonnen.' ('Even to have expressed a false thought boldly and clearly is already to have gained a great deal.') Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Erste Abhandlung, in Sdmtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, ed. Colli and Montinari,

15 vols. (dtv/de Gruyter, Munich and Berlin 1980) vol. v, p. 256. 25 For biographical data and other helpful pointers, see Jakob Steiner, RilkesDuineser Elegien (Francke Verlag, Bern 1969) passim; the letter to Magda von Hattingberg is quoted on pp. 269-71. 26 T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (Faber & Faber, London 1957) pp. 97-8. 27 Gottfried Benn, Gesammelte Werke, ed. Dieter Wellershoff, (Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden 1958-61) p. 320. 28 Many biographical dates and facts are drawn from Walter Lennig, Gottfried Benn (Rowohlt's Monographs, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1962). 29 Catalogue of the Exhibition ' Gottfried Benn 1886-1956', German Schiller Association (Marbach 1986) p. 38. 30 Hans Egon Holthusen, Gottfried Benn (Ernst Klett Verlag, Stuttgart 1986) p. 183. 31 Gottfried Benn, Sdmtliche Erzdhlungen (Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden 1968). 32 Gottfried Benn, Doppelleben (Limes Verlag, Wiesbaden 1955) p. 2333 Holthusen, Benn pp. 226-9. 34 Ibid. p. 233; cf. A. E. Clark-Kennedy, Edith Cavell (Faber, London 1965) p. 225. 35 Ibid. p. 242. 36 Lennig, Benn pp. 126-7. 37 Ibid. p. i n . 38 Exhibition Catalogue p. 198.

Notes to pages 313-46 39 40 41 42 43 44 45 46 47 48 49 50 51 52 53 54 55 56 57

58 59

433

Ibid. p. 204. Ibid. p. 233. Gesammelte Werke, p. 188. Dieter Wellershoff, Gottfried Benn p. 16. From Benn's address to the poetry section of the Prussian Academy of Arts on the occasion of his becoming a member, 5 April 1932. Quoted in Lennig, Benn p. 105. Doppelleben, pp. 91 and 97. Ibid p. 50. First published in Statische Gedichte (Verlag der Arche, Zurich 1948). 'Der Ptolemaer', Sdmtliche Erzdhlungen p. 202. Siegbert Prawer, Seventeen German Poets (Oxford University Press 1970Dichter iiber ihre Dichtungen: Gottfried Benn ed. Edgar Lohner (Heimeran, Munich 1969) p. 92. Rainer Maria Rilke, Die Aufzeichnungen des Malte Laurids Brigge, Sdmtliche Werke, 6 vols. (Insel-Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1966) vol. vi, p. 796. See John Willett, Brecht in Context (Methuen, London 1984) and my review of this book in the Sunday Times of 12 February 1984. Bertolt Brecht, Stiicke, 12 vols. (Suhrkamp, Berlin & Frankfurt am Main 1962) vol. in, pp. 138-40. Bertolt Brecht, Gesammelte Gedichte, 4 vols. (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1976) vol. 1, pp. 169—263. Gesammelte Gedichte vol. 1, p. 261. K. L. Ammer, Gedichte Frangois Villons (Berlin 1930). Gesammelte Gedichte vol. 1, p. 176. Erich Auerbach, Mimesis (2nd edition, Francke Verlag, Bern 1959) pp. 458-9. 'Die ernsthafte Behandlung der alltaglichen Wirklichkeit, das Aufsteigen breiterer und sozial tieferstehender Menschengruppen zu Gegenstanden problematisch-existentieller Darstellung...' See 'The Rise and Fall of Random Persons', in Stern, The Heart of Europe pp. i23ff. Bertolt Brecht, Traktat iiber die Mangel unserer Sprache im Kampf gegen den Faschismus, Gesammelte Werke, 8 vols. (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1967) vol. vm, p. 652. Gesammelte Gedichte vol. 11, p. 722. 6

RENDERING ACCOUNT

1 Letter to F. W. Oelze, 28 November 1949, quoted in the Introduction, p. 12 above.

434

Notes to pages 346-56

2 J. P. Stern, A Study of Nietzsche (Cambridge University Press 1979) pp. 141 ff. 3 Franz Kafka, Der Prozefl (New York 1946) 'Im Dom', p. 222. 4 The sentence is repeated almost verbatim three times: Die Geburt der Tragodie §§5 and 24, *5 of the preface of 1886. 5 Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus: das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkuhn, erzdhlt von einem Freunde (Bermann-Fischer, Stockholm 1947) p. 760. The subtitle may be translated as: 'The Life of the German composer... recounted by a friend'. 6 The title of the English translation by Mervyn Savill, Magister Ludi (London 1949), is misleading. Hesse's title is Das Glasperlenspiel, and his subtitle, Versuch einer Lebensbeschreibung des Magister Ludi Josef Knecht / samt Knechts hinterlassenen Schriften / herausgegeben von Hermann Hesse (Sketch for a Biography of the Magister Ludi Josef Knecht, together with Knecht's posthumous writings, collected by Hermann Hesse), sets the same kind of archaic fictional framework as does Thomas Mann's. Critical attention has created an imbalance by concentrating on the figure of Joseph Knecht. 7 Das Glasperlenspiel (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1973) p. 15. 8 Materialien zu Hermann Hesse's 'Das Glasperlenspiel', ed. V. Michels, 2 vols. (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1973) vol. 1, p. 277. 9 Doktor Faustus p. 754. 10 Die Welt als Wille und Vorstellung vol. 1, Book 3, §52 and vol. 11, §39. 11 See R. W. Meyer, Leibnitz and the Seventeenth Century Revolution, trans. J. P. Stern (Bowes & Bowes, Cambridge 1953) pp. n iff; for a correction of the current terminology, see Giinther Patzig, 'Leibniz, Frege und die sogenannte "lingua characteristica universalis "', in Akten des International Leibniz-Kongresses, Hanover 14-19 November 1966 (Niedersachsische Landesbibliothek, Frankfurt 1969) pp. 103-12. 12 Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (Kegan Paul, London 1933) §§ 1 and 4-12. 13 8 April 1945, in Hermann Hesse — Thomas Mann Briefwechsel ed. Anni Carlsson (S. Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1968) pp. 104-5 and 224-5. 14 As Ralph Freedman's Hermann Hesse: Pilgrim of Chaos (Jonathan Cape, London 1979) repeatedly demonstrates, it was his unwavering personal decency rather than any real insight which determined Hesse's political attitudes. 15 See Martin Swales, The German Bildungsgroman (Princeton University Press 1978) last chapter; Swales also convincingly refutes the view that this change in design is caused by the novel's long gestation.

Notes to pages 357-66

435

16 Das Glasperlenspiel p p . 68ff. 17 Cf. J . P. Stern, 'Der JVachsommer und Das Glasperlenspiel: Probleme der asthetischen Provinz', in Stifter Symposion (Linzer Veranstaltungsgesellschaft 1978) pp. 80-4. 18 From a note on the novel by Sheila Stern. 19 See Materialien, vol. 1, p. 215. Hesse is pleased to be able to quote a Danish scholar's opinion to the effect that 'had someone given me your book and told me that it was written in the 1930s I would have laughed and not believed him...'; and another reader: 'What you have created, in this dreadful age and running counter to [it]... is an alternative magic world - a world that is both new and ancient.' 20 Hesse's elaborate negotiations (see Freedman, Hesse pp. 3656°.) with Peter Suhrkamp in Berlin about publication of The Glass Bead Game are a case in point. As late as May 1942, Hesse fully expected that the novel would be published in Germany, and in 1943^ when his writings were at last banned, he received the news with mixed feelings of resentment and surprise. It would not be the wisdom of hindsight to suggest (Freedman does not) that Hesse's attitude showed at best a deeply muddled understanding of what was happening in Germany. 21 Das Glasperlenspiel pp. 434-5. 22 Ibid. p. 439. 23 Ludwig Wittgenstein, Vermischte Bemerkungen, ed. G. H. von Wright (Surhkamp, Frankfurt am Main 1977) p. 161. 24 Materialien vol. 1, p. 278, written in 1947:' Ich habe Josef Knecht bis zu seinem Opfertod gefuhrt' ('I had led Josef Knecht to his sacrificial death'). Again later, ibid. p. 288, written in April 1950: 'Der Ruf, der ihn in die Welt zieht, ist ein Ruf des Gewissens, aber auch des Todes' ('The call that summons him into the world is the call of conscience, but also of death'). 25 Freedman Hesse pp. i84ff. 26 ' Auf der Grantze liegen immer die seltsamsten Geschopfe.' Georg Christoph Lichtenberg, Schriften und Briefe, ed. Wolfgang Promies, 4 vols. (Hanser Verlag, Munich 1968—72) vol. 1, p. 254. 27 Page references are to the first edition (see n. 5 above). 28 The Artisfs Journey into the Interior and Other Essays (Random House, New York 1965) p. 41. 29 For the sources of the novel see Gunilla Bergsten's account in Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus: Untersuchungen zu den Quellen und zur Struktur des Romans (Bermann-Fischer, Stockholm 1963) pp. 74f. 30 See The Dyer's Hand and Other Essays (Faber, London 1963) p. 387. 31 The personal character of Serenus Zeitblom, as well as his function

436

32

33 34 35

36 37

38 39 40 41

42 43

Notes to pages 366-78

in the novel, show a close parallel to those of Karl Krumhardt, the narrator of Wilhelm Raabe's Die Akten des Vogelsangs [Documents of the Birdsong District] (1895); and there is an equally close parallel between the heroes of the novels, Leverkiihn and Velten Andres. Thomas Mann was not at all interested in Raabe's work, and it is hard to tell whether the similarities are accidental; see J. P. Stern, Idylls and Realities (Methuen, London 1971) pp. 16iff. 'Denen werde ich einen Teufelstrank brauen!' (Til brew them up a devil's potion!') This was Hitler's reaction on hearing of Chamberlain's assurances to Poland in March 1939. See Max Domarus, Hitler: Reden und Proklamationen igj2-ig4§ (R. Lowit, Wiesbaden 1973) p. 118. Sunday Times, 15 May 1949. The German Tradition in Literature 1871-1945 (Cambridge University Press 1965) p. 223. The distorted image of Luther which Thomas Mann shared with his contemporaries until after Doktor Faustus was written is described by Herbert Lehnert in the third part of his Thomas Mann: Fiktion: Mythos: Religion (Kohlhammer, Stuttgart 1965). The Fortunes of Faust (Cambridge University Press 1952) p. 336. Thus Zeitblom comments on his own arduous task (p. 12), describes the high demands Beethoven's later works make on his public (p. 91), and records Leverkiihn's conviction that art in his day has become too difficult: ' daB die Kunst stockt und zu schwer worden ist...' (p. 757). 'East Coker II.' Kleines Organonfur das Theater (1948) section 39. Facsimile reprint of Luther's Bible, 2 vols. (Rogner und Bernhard, Munich 1972) vol. 1, p. 1128. Martin Luthers Briefe, ed. R. Buchwald, vol. 11 (Leipzig 1909) p. 90. (See also Bergsten, Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus p. 41.) The Latin original is in Luthers Briefwechsel [Correspondence], Weimar edition, vol. v (1883) P- 4 ! 3 : Sed e s neh3t:: "Altiora ne te quaesiris", et: "Scrutator maiestatis opprimetur a gloria" seu, ut Hebraeus habet: "Scrutans graviora gravatur." Hoc te pertinet.' See Luthers Briefwechsel p. 413. The Reverend A. A. Macintosh was kind enough to answer my questions on this passage with an illuminating ' Note on Proverbs 25: 27' in Vetus Testamentum vol. xx (Brill, Leiden 1970) rjp. 112-14.

44 The next and last verse of the chapter bears this out:' He that hath no rule over his own spirit is like a city that is broken down, and without walls.'

Notes to pages 38o-gj

43 7

45 Franz Werfel, £wischen oben und unten (Bermann-Fischer, Stockholm 1946), ' Theologumena' §26: 'Unter dem amiisiert emporten Gelachter einiger Philister waren wir die unansehnlichen Vorheizer der Holle, in der nun die Menschheit brat.' 46 See Goebbels's address on Radio Werwolf during the last days of the War, quoted by H. R. Trevor-Roper in The Last Days of Hitler (Macmillan, London 1971) p. 58. 47 Dr Faustus translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter (Penguin Books, London 1968) p. 471. 7

A D E L I V E R A N C E OF S O R T S

1 Der Wille zur Macht (Kroner's Taschenausgabe, Stuttgart 1930) vol. LXXVIII, p.

554.

2 Uber Wahrheit und Luge im aufiermoralischen Sinn (Kroner's Taschenausgabe, Stuttgart 1930) vol. LXXI, p. 611. 3 Michael Beddow, ' Fiction and Meaning in Thomas Mann's Felix Kruir, Journal of European Studies, 10 (1980) p. 80. 4 ' Wiederherstellung der Natur: moralinfrei' (' The restoration/recovery of Nature: free of moralin' - a coinage on the analogy of aspirin'); Nietzsches Nachlafi ed. Karl Schlechta (Carl Hanser Verlag, Munich 1966) p. 739. 5 Felix Krull (Fischer Verlag, Frankfurt 1954) Book One, Chapter 8, p. 62. 6 Ibid. Book Two, Chapter 5. 'War ich doch nicht im Zeichen des Mars geboren - wenigstens nicht im besonderen und wirklichen Sinn! Denn wenn freilich kriegerische Strenge, Selbstbeherrschung und Gefahr die hervorstechendsten Merkmale meines seltsamen Lebens bildeten, so beruhte es doch in erster Linie auf der Vor- und Grundbedingung der Freiheit - einer Bedingung also, welche mit irgendwelcher Einspannung in ein plump tatsachliches Verhaltnis schlechterdings unvereinbar gewesen ware. Lebte ich folglich soldatisch, so ware es doch ein tolpelhaftes MiBverstandnis gewesen, wenn ich darum als Soldat leben zu sollen geglaubt hatte; ja, wenn es galte, ein so erhabenes Gefuhlsgut wie dasjenige der Freiheit fur die Vernunft zu bestimmen und zuzurichten, so lieBe sich sagen, daB dies eben: soldatisch, aber nicht als Soldat, figurlich, aber nicht wortlich, daB im Gleichnis leben zu diirfen eigentlich Freiheit bedeute.' 7 Thomas Mann's correspondence with Kerenyi, Gesprdch in Briefen (Rhein Verlag, Zurich i960) passim. 8 'Von diesen Intuitionen aus fuhrt kein regelmaBiger Weg in das Land der gespentischen Schemata, der Abstraktionen: fur sie ist

438

Notes to pages 393—401

das Wort nicht gemacht, der Mensch verstummt, wenn er sie sieht, oder redet in lauter verbotenen Metaphern und unerhorten Begriffsfugungen, um wenigstens durch das Zertrummern und Verhohnen der alten Begriffsschranken dem Eindrucke der machtigen gegenwartigen Intuitionen schopferisch zu entsprechen.' Uber Wahrheit und Luge p. 620. 9 Ibid. p. 617. 10 Franz Kafka, Tagebiicher igio-ig2j, in Gesammelte Werke (S. Fischer, Frankfurt am Main 1976) vol. vn, pp. 151-3. 11 Josefine, die Sdngerin in Franz Kafka, Die Erz&hlungen (Schocken Books, New York 1953). 12 For biographical details, see e.g. Chris Bezzel, Kafka-Chronik (Hanser Verlag, Munich, Vienna 1975), pp. 192-4. In midJanuary 1924 Kafka writes to Max Brod that he will have to quit his lodgings because he cannot pay his rent, although at the time the Czech crown was a hard currency and the most modest remittance from Prague would have provided abundant funds. 13 Die Prager Presse, Sunday supplement, 20 April 1924, pp. iv-vii; publication details in Joachim Unseld, Franz Kafka: ein Schriftstellerleben (Hanser Verlag Munich, Vienna 1982), passim. The first book-edition in Ein Hungerkunstler: vier Geschichten [Die Schmiede, Berlin 1924). For my quotations I have used the newspaper publication, which is the better text, and am grateful to Gerhard Neumann for putting a copy of it at my disposal. 14 Some exceptions: Heinz Politzer, Franz Kafka: Parable and Paradox (Cornell University Press, Ithaca, N.Y. 1962) pp. 308-12, and in Franz Kafka der Kilnstler (S. Fischer, Giitersloh 1965) pp. 437-51; C. R. Wodding, 'Josephine the Singer', in Franz Kafta Today, (University of Wisconsin Press, Madison 1958) pp. 72fF.; Wilhelm Emrich, Franz Kafka (Athenaum Verlag, Frankfurt am Main 1970) pp. 167-72; see also below, notes 17 and 21. 15 pp. 187-8. 16 Often mistranslated as 'squeaking'. See Kafka's letter to Felix Weltsch, Ziirau, mid-November 1917: 'eine Mausenacht, ein schreckliches Erlebnis... Was fur ein schreckliches stummes larmendes Volk das ist...Auf die Kohlenkiste hinauf, von der Kohlenkiste hinunter, die Diagonale des Zimmers abgelaufen, im Ruhen leise gepfiffen und immer das Gefuhl der Stille' ( c - a night of mice, a frightful experience... What a terrible dumb noisy people they are... Up the coal-box, down the coal-box, running diagnonally across the room, softly whistling as they rest, and all the time the feeling of silence'). 17 On one of the ' conversation papers' which Kafka used in order to

Notes to pages 403—13

18

19

20

21

22

23

439

communicate with his visitors when speaking became too painful, he writes to Max Brod, 11 or 12 May 1924: 'Die Geschichte bekommt einen neuen Titel/Josefine die Sangerin/oder/das Volk der Mause/Solche Titel sind zwar nicht sehr hubsch, aber hier hat es vielleicht einen besonderen Sinn, es hat etwas von einer Waage' (quoted from Unseld, Kafka) ('The story is to have a new title/Josephine the Singer/or/the Mouse People/I know titles like this are not very attractive, but here perhaps it has a special meaning, suggesting balance on a pair of scales'). See also Max Brod, Franz Kakfa, eine Biographie (Shocken Books, New York 1937) p. 348: 'Einordnung des Einzelnen in das Schicksal eines Volkes' ('Integration of the individual in the fate of a people'). See Immanuel Kant, Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten, §2, in Gesammelte Schriften, 8 vols. (Reimer, Berlin 1911-12) vol. iv, p. 417. See Benno von Wiese, 'Franz Kafka: ein Hungerkiinstler', in Die deutsche Novelle von Goethe bis Kafka (Bagel, Dusseldorf, 1956) vol. 11, P- 333The origin of this attribution may be Kafka's hilarious letter about Karl Kraus to Max Brod, Matljary, June 1921. For the 'Jewish' interpretation see Brod, Kafka. In his diary entry of 25 December 1911 (T 151-3) Kafka writes: 'Dieses Tagebuchfuhren einer Nation [i.e. the current literary production of a small nation] das ist etwas ganz anderes als Geschichtsschreibung.' Kafka to Robert Klopstock: 'Gehen Sie nicht fort.' Klopstock: 'Ich gehe ja nicht fort.' Kafka: 'Aber ich gehe fort.' Quoted from Bezzel, Kafka-Chronik p. 198. Will she really be 'personally forgotten but immortal in her contribution to the survival of her folk'? This is Roy Pascal's view in the last, unfinished chapter of his last book, Kafka's Narrators, A Study of his Stories and Sketches (Cambridge University Press 1982) p. 231. Even that, I think, goes beyond the limits of meaning imposed on us by the text: she will be part of our history, certainly, but we don't go in for history, 'da wir keine Geschichte treiben...' 8

P O S T S C R I P T : T H E D I V I D E D SELF

1 Robert Musil, Der Mann ohne Eigenschaften, Aus dem Nachlqfi, ed. Adolf Frise, 2 vols. (Rowohlt, Hamburg 1978). 2 Ernst Jiinger, Blatter und Steine [Leaves and Stones], second edition (Hanseatische Verlagsanstalt, Hamburg 1942) p. 121. 3 Ernst Jiinger, Das abenteuerliche Herz; the first edition of 1929 was

440

Notes to pages 413-16

withdrawn by the author. I quote from the reprint of the second edition of 1938 (Vittorio Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 1950) pp. 206-7, omitting the first paragraph. 4 'Private 19022', i.e. Frederick Manning, Her Privates We (Peter Davies, London 1930) p. 435.

Index

Adorno, Theodor W., 54, 56, 108 Aeschylus, 224, 316, 390 Alexis, Willibald, 52 Ammer, K. L., 331 Andreas-Salome, Lou, 282 Annunzio, Gabriele d', 14, 219 Aristotle, xv, 171, 278 Auden, W. H., 366 Auerbach, Erich, xv, 18, 52, 125, 334, 423, 433 Bach, Johann Sebastian, 98, 108 Bacon, Francis, 52 Balzac, Honore de, 147 Barlach, Ernst, 308 Barthes, Roland, 427 Becher, Johannes, R., 311 Beckett, Samuel, 55 Beethoven, Ludwig van, 98, 365, 373, 423 Benjamin, Walter, 56, 108, 212, 421 Benn, Gottfried, xxii, 1, 7, 11, 12-13, 16, 55> 59> 223, 252, 263, 304-26, 336, 346, 377 Bethmann-Hollweg, Theobald von, 427 Bismarck, Otto von, 217 Blanchot, Maurice, 177, 181 Bloch, Ernst, 12, 56, 81, 108 Bly, Robert, 248 Boehme, Jakob, 58, 62 Borges, Jorge Luis, 393 Boyle, Nicholas, xxii Brecht, Bertolt, 1, 7, 12, 13, 16, 37-45, 5 4 . 5 5 . 5 9 J 8 1 > 199,212,237,311,

315, 321-3, 326-45, 354, 377, 393, 401 Bridgwater, Patrick, 245 Broch, Hermann, 152, 310

Brod, Max, 32, 59, 438, 439 Bronnen, Arnolt, 50 Brontes, 420 Biichner, Georg, 165 Burckhardt, Jacob, 354 Burnham, James, 189 Butler, E. M., 373 Byron, George Gordon, Lord, 416 Cacciaguida, 228-9 Caesar, 217, 225 Calderon de la Barca, Pedro, 149 Camus, Albert, 126, 346, 414 Canetti, Elias, 50-1 Carlyle, Thomas, 96 Carossa, Hans, 198-211, 227 Cavell, Edith, 308, 309 Celan, Paul, 252 Cervantes Saavedra, Miguel, 365 Cezanne, Paul, 431 Chamberlain, Houston Stewart, 250 Chamberlain, Neville, 435 Chopin, Frederic, 313 Christ; Christianity, 11-12, 27-8, 33, 38, 41, 47, 54, 59, 86, 96-7, 103-4, 236-7, 242, 247, 268, 278, 325, 327, 33i.333-6.339.36o»377.379 Connolly, Cyril, 423 Dante Alighieri, 45-8, 68, 74, 219, 225, 227, 228-30, 236, 237, 256-7, 297, 338, 43° Deussen, Paul, 364 Dickens, Charles, 370 Dix, Otto, 308 Doblin, Alfred, 79 Doderer, Heimito von, 79, 152 Dollfuss, Engelbert, 161

441

442

Index

Donoghue, Denis, 426 Dostoevsky, Fyodor, 36, 206, 363, 364, 372 Duhamel, Georges, 200 Dymant, Dora, 395, 404 Eckhart, Meister, 62, 410 Eddington, Arthur, 86 Eichendorff, Joseph von, 197 Einstein, Albert, 85, 86, 113, 117, 120, 122-3, I24> I25> J 5 ^ Eisner, Kurt, 113 El Greco, 242, 251, 301 Eliasberg, Alexander, 372 Eliot, George, 65, 96 Eliot, T. S., 6, 109, 267, 270, 272, 276, 278, 280, 297-8, 304, 375, 419, 430 Empson, William, xv Enright, D. J., 431 Euripides, 246 Ezekiel, 229 Ferdinand, King of Romania, 198 Ficker, Ludwig von, 240 Flaubert, Gustave, 148 Fontane, Theodor, 4, 52 Forster, E. M., 32, 353 Forster, Leonard, 429 France, Anatole, 370 Franz Joseph, Emperor of Austria, Frege, Gottlob, 350 Freud, Sigmund, 16, 59, 69, 85, 86, 100, 117, 118-19, 162-3, 166, 250, 281-2, 310 Freytag, Gustav, 96 Frye, Northrop, 108 Galileo, 117 George, Stefan, 1, 16, 47, 48, 59, 98, 196, 211-40, 242-3, 246, 248, 251, 290, 306, 315, 336, 377, 382 Gide, Andre, 143 Gobineau, Joseph de, 250 Goebbels, Joseph, 12, 50, 92, 201, 239, 315,380,437 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, xviii, 4, 5, 26, 39, 63, 94, 98, 102, 108, 114, 145, 147, 200-1, 266, 321, 332, 353, 363, 373, 402, 426 Gogol, Nikolai, 364 Gombrich, E. H., 227

Goncharov, Ivan, 147 Gottling, Karl, 425 Gray, Ronald, xv-xvi, 371 Gregory VII, Pope, 102 Grimm, Jakob and Wilhelm, 67 Gris, Juan, 321 Grosz, George, 308 Griinewald, Matthias, 36 Gryphius, Andreas, xi, 27-8 Gundolf, Friedrich, 216 Hahn, Kurt, 355 Hamann, Johann Georg, 7 Hamburger,* Michael, 248 Hampton, Christopher, 144 Hardy, Thomas, 66 Hasek, Jaroslav, 388, 396 Hattingberg, Magda von, 301 Hauptmann, Gerhart, 39, 43, 89, 113, 115 Hauser, Kaspar, 165 Hayek, F. A., 107 Hegel, G. W. F., 58, 63-4, 65, 66, 71, 279> 294 Heidegger, Martin, 56, 58, 62, 167, 179, 244, 263, 310, 317,411,412,430 Heine, Heinrich, 226 Heisenberg, Werner, 87 Heller, Erich, xiii, xv, 5, 59, 363, 431 Heller, Joseph, 388 Hellingrath, Norbert von, 219 Heraclitus, 65 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 7, 9, 255, 418 Hesse, Hermann, 1, 55, 79, 145, 346-63, 415. 434-5 Himmler, Heinrich, 379 Hippocrates, 82 Hitler, Adolf, xii, xiii, xvi, xvii, 4, 6-12, 14-15, 40, 53-4, 67, 81, 91, 92-3, 106, 146, 154, 161, 166, 192, 195, 197, 239, 3l^-H, 3i5>352, 368, 379, 423, 427, 435 Hobbes, Thomas, 70, 323, 406, 167 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 1, 48, 55, 59, 65, 67, 143, 150, 152, 200, 219, 223, 271, 275, 292, 377, 382, 396 Holderlin, Friedrich, 108, 196-7, 219, 245, 247, 250, 266, 268, 429 Holthusen, Hans Egon, 431, 432 Homer, 322-3 Husserl, Edmund, 179, 227, 310, 411

Index Ibsen, Henrik, 43, 219 Isaiah, 109 James, Henry, 127, 128, 134 James, William, 170-1, 424 Jandl, Ernst, 424 Jaspers, Karl, 310 John, Saint, 68 Johnson, Daniel, xv Johnson, Paul, 420 Joyce, James, 132, 323, 365 Jung, Carl Gustav, 282, 363 Jiinger, Ernst, xiv-xv, xvi, xix, 1, 11, 47, 48, 49-50, 56, 107, 108, 127, 183-98, 199, 200, 207, 209, 244, 310, 382, 411-15, 418-19 Jiinger, Friedrich Georg, 31 o Kafka, Franz, xvi, xix, 1, 11, 31-7, 42~3> 51* 55> 59> IOO> I03> IJ4> l7l> 182, 223, 373 Kant, Immanuel, xviii, 63, 69, 98, 117, 294 Kappus, Franz Xaver, 431 Kerenyi, Karl, 391 Kermode, Frank, 423 Kierkegaard, Seren, 59, 366 Kipling, Rudyard, 75 Kippenberg, Anton, 200 Kisch, Egon Erwin, 311 Klee, Paul, 287, 291 Klopstock, Friedrich Gottlob, 196, 250, 266 Klopstock, Robert, 439 Knittel, Else, 93 Kokoschka, Oskar, 287 Kommerell, Max, 426 Kraus, Karl, 1, 14, 38, 53, 54, 55, 86, 310,396,404,439 Kronberger, Maximilian, 225-6 Kundera, Milan, 126 Lacan, Jacques, 163, 167,423 Lasker-Schiiler, Else, 310 Laughton, Charles, 42 Lawrence, D. H., 55, 82, 117-18 Leavis, F. R., xv Lechter, Melchior, 426 Lehar, Franz, 149 Lehnert, Herbert, 436 Leibniz, Gottlieb Wilhelm von, xiv, 62-3, 94, 98, 350

443

Lenz, J. M. R., 332 Lessing, Gotthold Ephrahim, 63, 124, 280 Lichtenberg, G. C , xiii-xiv, xv, xvii, 172, 214, 363 Liebermann, Max, 312 Liebknecht, Karl, 38, 113 Louis, Joe, 421 Ludwig, Otto, 64-5 Lukacs, Georg, 113, 115, 121 Luther, Martin, 12, 47, 68, 294, 307, 329, 348, 366, 371-2, 378-9, 390, 436 Luxemburg, Rosa, 38, 113 Mach, Ernst, 120-1, 122, 146 Macintosh, A. A., 436 Mackensen, August von, 198 Malraux, Andre, 126 Mann, Heinrich, 89, 91, 111, 113, 115, 312 Mann, Katia, n o Mann, Klaus, 313-14 Mann, Thomas, xi, xix, 1, 7, 29-31, 43, 48, 51, 56, 78, 84, 85, 87, 91, 98, 108, 110-35, ! 44J l4&t 181-2, 210, 222, 313, 316, 347-9, 352, 354, 355, 363-81, 382-93, 402, 410, 412, 415 Manning, Frederick, 49, 416 Marcuse, Herbert, 115, 121 Marie, Queen of Romania, 198 Marvell, Andrew, 423 Marx, Karl; Marxism, Marxists, 8, 37-40, 43, 45, 59, 61, 72, 81, 85-6, 113, 128, 311, 315, 326-7, 335, 402, 420 Masaryk, Thomas Garrigue, xii Mauthner, Fritz, 292 Maximilian von Baden, Prince, 188 Meinecke, Friedrich, 102 Melanchthon, Philipp, 378 Melville, Herman, 351 Merezhkovsky, Dmitri, 206, 372 Michelangelo, 211 Miller, Jonathan, 156 Moeller van den Bruck, Arthur, 310 Molotov, V. M., 40 Morwitz, Ernst, 428 Mosley, Oswald, 419 Mottram, R. H., 186, 425 Miiller, Friedrich ('Maler'), 332 Muschg, Walter, 427

444

Index

Musil, Robert, i, 4, 56, 57-8, 75-9, 83, 85, 86, 87, 107, 117, 118, 125, 135-82, 183, 193, 223, 226, 402, 410-11 Napoleon, 217 Neumann, Gerhard, 438 Newman, Ernest, 365, 371 Newton, Isaac, 117 Nicholas I, Pope, 102 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xi, xvi, xviii, xix, 2, 5, 12-17, 22, 30, 32, 42, 45, 47, 54, 57-9, 61, 65-71, 73, 77, 85-7, 96, 99, 108, 116-17, 127, 132, 144, 157, 161, 178, 180, 193, 201, 215, 218-19, 223-4, 226, 235-6, 239, 250, 267, 270, 280, 283, 290-1, 295, 296, 3°3> 3IO> 3H, 3 l 6 , 323-5» 33 1 , 337> 34&-7> 348-9, 352, 359-6°, 362-5, 382-5, 388-93, 399, 405 Novalis (Friedrich Leopold von Hardenberg), 60 Oakeshott, Michael, xiv, xv, 7 Osborne, John, 275 Parmenides, 127 Pascal, Blaise, 172 Pascal, Roy, 439 Paul, Saint, 362, 378, 379 Peter, Saint, 334 Petrie, Flinders, 99 Picasso, Pablo, 33, 283, 296, 321, 375 Pindar, 254 Pirandello, Luigi, 100, 271 Pissarro, Camille, 138 Pius II, Pope, 150 Platen, August Graf von, 266, 427 Plato, 63, 64, 226, 255, 273, 279, 323, 352 Pontius Pilate, 103-4, n o , 421 Pound, Ezra, 237-8, 297-8 Prawer, Siegbert, 317 Proust, Marcel, 173, 285, 408 Ptolemy, 320-1 Quine, W. V., 419 Raabe, Wilhelm, 435 Racine, Jean, 43 Rathenau, Walther, 113, 155 Reimarus, Hermann Samuel, 63

Remarque, Erich Maria, 185 Rembrandt, 108 Rhodes, Cecil, 105 Ribbentrop, Joachim von, 40 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 1, 5-6, 25-9, 33, 36, 42, 5 1 , 55, 59, 60, 72-5, 78, 100, 170, 184, 206-7, 219, 223, 247, 254-3O3, 3°4, 3*5, 322, 336, 339, 343, 345, 375, 377, 382, 408 Robertson, Ritchie, xii Rosenberg, Alfred, 250, 379 Roth, Joseph, 152, 396 Roth, Mathias, 241 Roubiczek, Paul, xv Russell, Bertrand, 85, 125 Salten, Felix, 163 Sarraute, Nathalie, 132, 366 Sartre, Jean-Paul, 346, 414 Schauwecker, Franz, 428 Schiller, Friedrich, 39, 63, 64, 65, 250, 266 Schmeling, Max, 421 Schnack, Ingeborg, 430 Schnitzler, Arthur, 162 Schonberg, Arnold, 365 Scheme, Albrecht, 424 Schonerer, Freiherr Georg von, 161 Schopenhauer, Arthur, xviii, 29, 53, 54, 55, 78, 93, i33» 323, 35O, 360, 392, 410, 421 Scott, Robert Falcon, 183-4 Seymour-Smith, Martin, 423 Shakespeare, William, 65, 68, 135, 219, 271,340,343 Sharp, F. M., 429, 430 Shaw, G. B., 16, 38 Silesius, Angelus, 26 Silk, Michael, xvi Smetana, Bedfich, 33 Socrates, 70, 131, 132, 216, 227 Solomon, 379 Sophocles, 224, 316, 390 Sorel, Georges, 366, 369 Sorley, Charles, 245 Spengler, Oswald, xviii, 84, 85, 86, 87, 88-110, 113, 135, 187, 194-5, 209, 222, 310, 320, 366, 370 Stadler, Ernst, 307 Stalin, Joseph, 8 Stampa, Gaspara, 274-5, 276, 289 Statius, 46

Index Stauffenberg, Claus Schenk, Graf von, 7> 239 Stendhal (Henri Beyle), 158 Stern, Josef Luitpold, 423 Stern, J. P., xi-xix, xxi-xxii A Study of Nietzsche, xvi, 13-14 Ernst Ju'nger: A Writer of Our Time, xiv-xv, xvi G. C. Lichtenberg: A Doctrine of Scattered Occasions, xv Hitler: The Fiihrer and the People, xii,

xvi, 8-9 Idylls and Realities, xv Nietzsche on Tragedy, xvi On Realism, xvi Re-interpretations, xii, xv, 6 The Heart of Europe, xi, xii, xiii, xvii, xviii The World of Franz Kafka, xvi Sterne, Laurence, 122, 127, 134, 172, 191, 366, 391, 423 Sternheim, Carl, 89 Stifter, Adalbert, 197, 351, 352, 358 Stramm, August, 243 Strauss, Richard, 275, 374 Stravinsky, Igor, 366 Swales, Martin, 434 Swedenborg, Emanuel, 180-1 Swinburne, A. C , 330 Tacitus, 236, 428 Tauler, Johannes, 62, 65 Tchaikovsky, Peter, 365 Thomas, Dylan, 247 Thurn und Taxis-Hohenlohe, Princess Marie von, 265 Tolkien, J. R. R., 90 Tolstoy, Leo, 79 Trakl, Georg, 1, 9, 50, 55, 59, 60, 240-53 Trilling, Lionel, xv Tucholsky, Kurt, 310 Unger, Hermann, 50

445

Uxkull, Graf Bernhard, 235 Valery, Paul, 431 Victoria, Queen, 198 Villon, Francois, 329-31 Virgil, 255, 256, 257, 260 Vogel, Jakob, 425 Wagner, Heinrich Leopold, 332 Wagner, Richard, 54, 224, 250, 366, 39O Wagner, Winifred, 93 Weber, Alfred, 56, 320 Weber, Carl Maria von, 365 Weber, Max, 56, 217-18, 232 Webern, Anton von, 393 Weigand, Hermann J., 422 Weil, Simone, 12, 170-1 Weill, Kurt, 337 Weinheber, Josef, 152, 397 Weininger, Otto, 163 Weltsch, Felix, 438 Werfel, Franz, 79-80, 380, 437 Whitman, Walt, 171 Wilhelm II, German Emperor, 91, 152 Wilson, Peter Lamborn, 431 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xiv, xv, xviii, 12, 14, 18-22, 106, n o , 116, 120, 122, 139-40, 158, 159, 162, 172, 176-7, 240-1, 291-2, 293, 294, 351, 360, 387 Wolf, Hugo, 365 Wolff, Christian, 63 Wolfskehl, Karl, 217, 225, 428 Wolters, Friedrich, 428 Woolf, Virginia, 55, 69 Wordsworth, William, 278, 418 Wright, James, 248 Yeats, W. B., 16, 183, 215,268 Zweig, Arnold, 185 Zweig, Stefan, 372