The Magic Mountain Read Free

there, like a grey-bearded kobold—it gives one an uncanny feeling!
    In the case of Goethe, Mann records, among other things, his sensitiveness to weather conditions:
    It was due to his almost exaggerated sense-endowment; and became positively occult when that night in his chamber in Weimar he felt the earthquake in Messina. Animals have a nervous equipment that enables them to feel such events when they occur and even beforehand. The animal in us transcends; and all transcendence is animal. The highly irritable sense-equipment of a man who is nature’s familiar goes beyond the bounds of the actual senses, and issues in the supra-sensual, in natural mysticism. With Goethe the divine animal is frankly and proudly justified of itself in all spheres of activity, even the sexual. His mood was sometimes priapic—a thing which of course does not happen with Tolstoy.
    Mann contrasts this earthy self-possession with the spiritual ‘shadow-world’ of Dostoevsky (‘exaggeratedly true’) and with Schiller, another ‘son of thought’. Schiller’s essay, ‘On Naive and Sentimental Poetry’ was described by Mann as ‘the greatest of all German essays’. In it Schiller distinguishes between the ‘naive’ poet who has the plastic energy simply to make a world (Shakespeare, Homer), and the ‘sentimental’ poet who can only find a world through his own sensibility and reflections. Mann puts Schiller with Dostoevsky:
    . . . the conflict between contemplation and ecstatic vision, is neither new nor old, it is eternal. And it finds complete expression in, on the one side, Goethe and Tolstoy, and on the other Schiller and Dostoevsky. And to all eternity the truth, power, calm and humility of nature will be in conflict with the disproportionate, fevered and dogmatic presumption of spirit.
    During the war Thomas opposed himself and Heinrich as ‘nature’ and Geist (an untranslatable and essential German word that appears sometimes as ‘mind’ and sometimes, as above, as ‘spirit’. In this essay the oppositions are more subtle, but related. Goethe’s reasonable respect for French culture is given credit. But Mann’s attempt to present the ‘Antaeus’ aspect of Tolstoy and Goethe is surely related to what he hoped to present in Peeperkorn, who exceeds both Settembrini and Naphta, to whom the educated Hans Castorp pays respect. Like Castorp himself, Peeperkorn differs from Mann’s usual heroes in being neither intellectual, articulate nor artistic. Like Tolstoy, according to Mann, but not like Goethe, Peeperkorn understands and has an affinity with the Oriental and the Asian. Tolstoy’s ‘tremendous Orientalism found intellectual expression in this mockery and denial of European progress’. Goethe ‘beyond a doubt hated and despised Asia and has more affiliation with the humanity of Western Europe, which has given the mold to our civilization, than with the shapeless and savage human nature of Half-Asia’. Symbolically both Clavdia and Peeperkorn are related to that shapeless and savage half-Asia, out of which Dionysus advanced on classical Greece, and the cholera crept on in Death in Venice . It is interesting that in another essay, ‘Freud and the Future’, Mann uses Europe’s geographical relation to Asia in a metaphor to describe the spatial relations of Sigmund Freud’s map of the psyche. Europe is the ego, Asia is the id.
    As for the ego itself, its situation is pathetic, well-nigh alarming. It is an alert prominent and enlightened little part of the id much as Europe is a small and lively province of the greater Asia.
    Although Peeperkorn is not an artist, he was partly based, at least physically, on Gerhard Hauptmann, which later became an embarrassment, and may have inhibited Mann’s presentation of him. He should be above all a living presence. He is in fact only the idea of a living presence.
    It is perhaps worth remarking that Hans Castorp’s curious pursuit his contemplative moments which he refers