39)
Tarnow describes precisely the unholy Left alternative between tragic respect- ability and cynicism.
Tarnow describes precisely the unholy Left alternative between tragic respect- ability and cynicism.
Peter-Sloterdijk-Critique-of-Cynical-Reason
.
I slept with a woman who woke me after an hour to ask me whether my spiritual love for her corresponded to my bodily performance. For without the "spiritual" element, she would feel "soiled. " I had to get dressed very quickly, and while I looked under the bed for my lost shirt button, I explained to her that my soul always lives in those parts of the
515
516 ? POSTCOIT AL TWILIGHT
body that I need at a given moment to carry out a certain activity. Thus, when I go for a walk, in the feet, and so on.
"You're a cynic," said the woman. (Roth, Flucht ohne Ende [1927] (pp. 88-89)
We encounter the man here in his "ancestral" role of the sexual cynic, who thinks he has enough with pure sex and who flees as soon as the woman demands something more. In this flight, a genuinely new motif of matter-of-factness is announced--that evasion into understatement that for the style of eroticism in the twenties is so thoroughly typical. In this area, too, the impulse of the times to dis- pense with superstructures asserts itself. The wave of new matter-of-factness-if this word is apposite here--washes old sexual-romantic jetsam ashore. A new spirit of experience, which is psychoanalytic, treated hygienically within mar- riage, and emancipatively inspired, now pushes toward a more "matter-of-fact" treatment of this entire area, which is so beset by dreams and secrets, tensions and longings. That at the same time, as always, erotic illusionism triumphs in mass media does not change anything in the tendency. The intelligentsia, in any case, already begins to orient itself in things dealing with love, existentially- analytic, reflective, experimental, decisionistic, melancholy, cynical. Musil's play Die Schwdrmer (The enthusiasts; 1921) superbly documents this swelling of a stimulating reflectiveness. One starts to take leave of the cult of pure "ex- perience" and to realize that in our experiences, a kind of grammar of experience and feeling comes into effect. An adult consciousness can only be a consciousness
that takes notice of this. If one puts erotic idealism to one side, firmer contours in personal transactions become visible. The erotic barter comes more clearly to light; the animal, capricious side of sexual energy makes itself felt; the projective components of being in love and the resignative components of fidelity cannot be overlooked in the long run. And like everywhere else where ideals collapse, cyni- cism, which lives out its disappointment by pushing over what is already falling, is not far behind.
The young Brecht moves with a quite special virtuosity and alertness on this terrain. He discovers a new tone for cynicisms of this type --a poetry of the ordi- nary and brutal. It is the language of the Baalian life feeling, which celebrates a cynically vital masculinity. For Baal --poet, eroticist, vagabond, existentialist, and lyrical-instinctual subject--women, the young ones, are nothing other than poetic or hormonal stimuli, nothing other than hole, patch of color, odor, play- thing, animal, white thighs. To be sure, this masculinism is lyrically ennobled by Brecht. It possesses --besides the manifestly cynical aspect --also a kynical, productive, antibourgeois aspect. The powerful nature of the elementary, bril- liant man recalls the "alternative life" that is not mutilated by time allocations and regulations but instead flows on in the stream of moods and energies. Brecht lets
POSTCOIT AL TWILIGHT ? 517
? Otto Dix, Melancholy, 1930.
sexuality and poetry flow into each other in imaginary currents. If Baal has hauled "someone" from the street into his room with the excuse "It's New Year. There has to be something white in this damned hole. A cloud! "-he nevertheless does not accept any resistance from the woman.
"You're a woman like any other. The head is different. The knees are all weak . . . that's the way it is with animals. "
Where Roth's cynicism remains ironically, politely, and melancholically masked, Brecht uses the figure of the powerful genius to openly mount an attack. Under the protection of aesthetic vitalism, sexual cynicism begins the flight to the fore in lyric.
518 ? POSTCOIT AL TWILIGHT
? ? Karl Hubbuch, Lovers' Death in Jager Street, 1922.
Baal's attic room
I
Dawn. Baal and Johanna sitting on the edge of the bed.
JOHANNA: Oh, what have I done! I'm bad.
BAAL: Wash yourself instead! . . .
JOHANNA: Don't you want to open the window?
BAAL: I love the smell. What would you say to a new edition? What's
done is done.
POSTCOITAL TWILIGHT ? 519
JOHANNA: How can you be so mean?
BAAL: [lazing on the bed]: White and washed pure by the Deluge, Baal
lets his thoughts fly, like doves over the black waters.
JOHANNA: Where is my bodice? Like this I can't . . .
BAAL: [holding it out to her]: Here! What can't you do, darling? JOHANNA: GO home. [Lets it fall, but gets dressed. ]
BAAL: [whistles]: A wild tomboy! I feel every bone in my body. Give
me a kiss!
JOHANNA: [on the table in the middle of the room]: Say something! [Baal
is silent. ] Do you still love me? Tell me! [Baal whistles. ] Can't you
say it?
BAAL: [looking at the ceiling]: I've had it up to here.
JOHANNA: What was that then last night? And before that?
BAAL: Johannes might make a row. Emilie too walks around like a scut-
tled sailing ship. I could die of hunger here. You don't lift a finger
for anyone. You always want just one thing.
JOHANNA: [confused, clears the table]: And you --were you never differ-
ent with me?
BAAL: Have you washed? Not an ounce of pragmatism! Haven't you
learned anything about that? Get on with you, go home!
Erich Kastner describes another disturbed lovers' morning in his Fabian. Cornelia, Fabian's lover, has already got up to leave. She knows what awaits her. She wants to get into films, be successful, not be one of the ones without prospects. For this, she allows herself to be bought by a producer. She thinks she has to prostitute herself. Fabian only finds her letter late in the evening:
"Dear Fabian . . . Is it not better that I go too early rather than too late? I was just standing next to you at the sofa. You were sleeping, and you are sleeping now as I write to you. I would like to stay, but imagine what would happen if I stayed! After a couple of weeks you would really be unhappy. You are weighed down not by want but by the thought that want can become important. As long as you were alone, nothing could happen to you, no matter what. It will once again be as it was. Are you very sad?
They want to feature me in the next film. Tomorrow I will sign the contract. Makart has rented two rooms for me. It can't be avoided. He spoke about it as if it were a matter of a hundredweight of briquettes. He is fifty years old and he looks like a retired wrestler who is too well dressed. I feel as if I had sold myself to anatomy.
. . . I will not go under. I will imagine that the doctor is examining me. He likes to occupy himself with me. It has to be so. You only get out of the dirt if you get yourself dirty. And we want to get out!
I write: We. Do you understand me? I leave you now in order to stay with you. Will you continue to love me? "
520 ? POSTCOITAL TWILIGHT
Fabian sat quite still. It became progressively darker. His heart ached. He held onto the studs of the armchair as if he were resisting forces that wanted to tear him away. He pulled himself together. The letter lay on the carpet and shone in the dark.
"But I wanted to change, Cornelia," said Fabian, (p. 125)
Chapter 26
Weimar Double Decisions, or: Matter- of-Factness unto Death
Total onlooker--you have been seen through totally. Gustav Wangenheim, Die Mausefalle (1931)
The year is 1932. The cards have been shuffled for the last game. For the insight- ful it is clear that the horizon has already closed. The alternatives from now on will rear up in dull rage or helpless mind games, but events can no longer be averted. The year 1932 is a chaotic, inconceivably complicated one. It forms the last piece of the crisis complex of 1930-32, about which Ludwig Marcuse said rightly that it is more difficult to describe than an entire century would be. This year uses up three chancellors after the cabinet of the Centrist politician, Briining, had collapsed in May. At that time, Goebbels notes in his diary:
[5 May 1932]
It's already beginning. It is really enjoyable. In the party, we must now be absolutely quiet. We have to play at being disinterested. . . .
[13 May 1932]
The crisis goes on according to program. . . .
[30 May 1932]
The bomb has burst. At noon Briining handed over the dismissal of the entire cabinet to the Reich president. The system is collapsing. {Die un- geliebte Republik. Dokumente zur Innen- und aussenpolitik Weimars 1918-1933, ed. W. Michalka and G. Niedhart [Munich, 1980], pp. 327-28)
In both the subsequent cabinets, there are, to be sure, still no Nazis, but all the more "disinterested" and party less politicians, who in earnest already go about depoliticizing politics. Under Papen and Schleicher, the "matter-of-fact
521
522 ? WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
ministers" dominate, who have "freed" themselves from narrow party ties so as to better administer the interest of the "whole"-of course, in close association with German nationals who represent in the governments, if not the interests of the whole, at least of the whole of heavy industry. In 1932, the entire voting popu- lation is called to the ballot box three times, once in April to elect the president and again in July and November for the Reichstag, which staggers on unable to act, especially after the July elections made the Nazis into the strongest party. In the presidential election, the choice is between Hindenburg and Hitler, and the choice, of course, also with the help of the still "sensible" Social Democrat votes, falls on the "lesser evil" that, nine months later, hands over the proclamation of appointment to the greater evil.
The Prussian Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) prime minister, Otto Braun, wrote in Vorwarts, the party organ, on March 10:
For the electors there remains only one alternative: Hindenburg or Hit- ler. Can the choice be difficult? Look at both men. Hitler, this proto- type of the political adventurer. . . . Opposing him, Hindenburg. The embodiment of calm and constancy, of male loyalty and sacrificing duti- fulness for the whole of the people . . . filled with a Kantian feeling of duty. . . . I will vote for Hindenburg and I appeal to the millions of voters . . . Do the same, beat Hitler, vote for Hindenburg.
Braun's appeal is a masterpiece of late-Weimar tactics: doublethink, double
1
roleplay, double decisions. One creates the false impression of having thought
through the situation to the last detail and then votes, with the entire pathos of apparent responsibility, for the purportedly "lesser evil. " No one has analyzed So- cial Democratic ambiguity better than the Social Democrat, Fritz Tarnow, at the Leipzig SPD party congress in 1931.
Well, we stand indeed at capitalism's sickbed not only as a diagnosti- cian but also --now, what should I say? --as a doctor who wants to cure, or as a joyful heir who cannot wait for the end and most of all would like to help things along with a little poison? Our whole situation is ex- pressed in this image. (Dokumente zur Deutschen Geschichte, 1929-33, ed. W. Ruge and W. Schumann [Frankfurt, 1977], p.
39)
Tarnow describes precisely the unholy Left alternative between tragic respect- ability and cynicism. By now, we know these medical metaphors all too well. Had not Hitler repeatedly spoken of a political "tuberculosis" from which the patient does not die immediately but which progresses "stealthily" and uncannily if the "bitter fortune" of the crisis does not bring the sickness to a head? Erich Miihsam, by contrast, had already referred to the double role of the doctor, who simultane- ously operates on and exterminates the patient (chapter 20). Now, because the
WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS ? 523
crisis has surfaced in the most violent form, the double game becomes fully clear even to the players. Tarnow goes on.
We are condemned, it seems to me, to be the doctor, who seriously wants to cure, and nevertheless maintain the feeling that we are heirs who as soon as possible want to receive the entire estate of the capital- ist system. This double role, doctor and heir, is a damned difficult task. We could save ourselves many a quarrel in the party if we were con- tinually conscious of this double role. Sometimes some think that the needy situation of those who rely on the patient getting better demands that we do everything to heal the patient (capitalism); others think that now, when it is already gasping, is the right moment to give it the coup de grace.
Tarnow now gives his vote: He pleads for the role of the doctor and advocates humanitarian, medically respectable tactics, rather than the cynicism of the heir.
It is not so much the patient who arouses our sympathy, but the masses who stand behind it. When the patient gasps, the masses out there go hungry. If we know that and know of a medicine--even if we are not convinced that it will cure the patient but will at least ameliorate its rat- tling, so that the masses out there again get something to eat--then we will give the patient the medicine and, at that moment, not think too much about the fact that we are heirs and await the patient's impending end. (p. 39)
These Social Democratic seesaw tacticians and double role players, however, entered with harsh rhetorics into the defensive alliance against fascism that was formed in 1932 under the dangerous-sounding name "Iron Front" and which was to bring together the SPD, the trade unions, the Reich's Banner, and some repub- lican groups. Already at that time, Ossietzky pronounced that only some sections deserved the epithet "iron," whereas other sections were "made of more pliable stuff and some are no better than pancake batter" (ibid. p. 52).
In 1932, the number of unemployed had risen to over 6 million, of which 3. 8 million were in Prussia, and almost half a million in Berlin alone. The welfare offices had registered seven million needy recipients for winter aid. The crisis had created the scenario in which the role of savior was to be assigned to one among all the deceivers, strategists, double role players, and gamblers with responsi- bility.
The Reich's capital was feverish. Every night, corpses were delivered to the police. Sometimes they bore on their bloody coats the sign of the republican flag, sometimes the Communist Soviet star, sometimes the swastika, sometimes simply the number of the state police. More often, however, they bore only the signs of despair in their faces, that light green, the color given to them by the gas they had gulped. . . .
September 30 Tag* 38-S&. Wocke
524 ? WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
? ? ? ? 21 22 23 24 0<mr! <<>r>>tse Fl-eBas Sonnalmnd aoiwtag
|:. :,," ? p. ;=*J. :
Qi<< Jijgomt I_<<rsln>> und 1 i fT>>>>r*ohS>>ri I
One must have seen the general misery so closely in order to fall prey all too easily to a revolutionary idea. . . . All views were sim- plified to one sentence: It can't go on like this anymore! . . . Every suicide who was carried out of his gas-filled flat seemed to raise himself a last time from the stretcher and point his finger at those standing about. (Gustav Regler, Das Ohr des Malchus [Frankfurt, 1975], pp.
178-79, 182)
The great "joint thinking" now began to bear fruit. Those who had learned to "think in terms of relationships," who had studied the Great Dialectic, had thought through Napoleon's example, and had practiced looking down from the general's hill, now found themselves in the position of the leaf that joins in the ecstasy of the "will to power" that drives the caterpillar to devour. Even one's own defeat then looks like mere tactics. Regler tells of a trade union functionary he met in mid-January 1933: "Just let him come to power," he said regarding Hitler. "In eight months, he will be bankrupt" (ibid. , p. 189). Thinking: And then it's our
to die StMscMl
WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS ? 525
turn. Similar models of thinking are firmly evidenced in the Communist party. In July 1932, the chairman, Thalmann, is outraged when SPD functionaries ask KPD leaders whether they are at all serious about the anti-Fascist united front.
Hitler's pack of officers and princes had declared that it wants to exter- minate, hang, behead and break the Communist movement on the wheel. And in view of this fact, in view of the danger that Germany could become a land of gallows and pyres, we Communists are deemed to be not in earnest about the anti-Fascist, the proletarian united front. (Dokumente zur Deutschen Geschichte, p. 65)
Nevertheless, the question is correctly posed and the answer is not free of hypocrisy. For the questioner as well as the respondent have for a long time been speaking the language of doublethink and know all too well that every politician, in addition to what he says, calculates on a second level. For many Communists, the united front was a respectable fiction they themselves, with a second cynical look, easily saw through. Even its protagonists did not really "believe" in it. Ac- cording to Karl August Wittfogel's report, in the autumn of 1932, a scene was played out in Berlin in which the spirit of strategic cynicism is thrown more luridly into relief than in any satire, no matter how biting. It contains the essence of the whole age: the escalation of strategy into the diabolical; the crystallization of doublethink into perfect cynicism; the everlasting being-in-the-right of the simultaneously iron and nimble tactician in a reality where things always happen differently from how the grand tactician thought.
It was a 7 November celebration in the embassy on Unter den Linden. One of those gala celebrations with caviar and vodka and all that. I stood around with Grosz, Piscator, Brecht--I no longer know if it was them, but anyway, that sort. Suddenly, someone came and said, "Radek is here. " I left the others and looked for Radek, asked him--we knew each other from Malik--: "Do you know what is happening here in Germany? "--"What? "--"If things go on like this, Hitler will come to power and everything will go under. "--"Yes, but you have to under- stand that. That has to come. The German workers will take on two years of Hitler. " (Quoted after Mathias GrefFrath, Wasserzeichen der Despotic Ein Portrait von Karl August Wittfogel, in Transatlantik [February 1981], p. 37)
This says, in effect: Besides the surface propaganda in favor of antifascism, the united front, etc. , Moscow had already thought out a second line that allowed the supertactician, Radek, to bet on Hitler just like someone bets on a catastrophe. Thus, one could fight against him and nonetheless still find something good in his probable victory: that, as it was thought, he was specially suitable to bring about the total bankruptcy of the system. This form of double strategy gives the Com- munists' rhetoric of crisis in 1932 an inflammatory tone-for the worse things get
526 D WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
for the "system," the better it is for those who want to see its end. In the Com- munists' "diagnoses" a positivistic grand-tactical spirit is mixed with malicious joy and open catastrophile gratification. Thus, the Rote Fahne wrote on January 1, 1932:
Storm year 1932!
The capitalist world takes leave of the year 1931 with an annihilating declaration of bankruptcy: with the report of the Special Advisory Committee of the Bank for International Reparation Payments . . . that . . . has investigated Germany's economy and financial position. There is no document from a capitalist pen that, with such unconcealed pessimism, ascertains the downfall of capitalism and outlines its con- tradictions and its manifestations of putrefaction with such somber colors. . . . The financial bankruptcy of Germany, however, will re- bound on the creditor countries and conjure up new worldwide catas- trophes. . . .
But the imperialist bandits who see a way out of the crisis in a new world carnage forget that, with the fury of war, they simultaneously un- leash the powers of the revolution. (Dokumente zur Deutschen Geschichte, pp. 49-50)
Here, a masochistic form of thinking has transformed itself into a strategic consciousness. The leaves feverishly approach the caterpillar in the expectation that they will win something of the caterpillar ego if they only let themselves be devoured patiently enough. What are then "two years of Hitler," if afterward we get our turnl What Rathenau had described as a soothsayer in 1912 (tactics, diplomacy, deception down to the "shopkeeper") has been realized here on a large scale.
In the middle of the crisis, the strategist carousel turns all the more quickly. Every rider outlines from his or her carousel horse a grand view, and from this develops tactics for getting the whole. Social democracy grasps the total scene as one in which it is "condemned" to play the double role of the doctor and the willing heir at the sickbed of capitalism. The Communists interpret the situation as the agony of capitalism, whose death can only be a question of time, so that the collapse will be accelerated by those who, on the one hand, fight against the Fascist healing sorcery, and at the same time, however, bank on the eventuality that fascism will inject the dose of poison into capitalism that puts the "system" out of its misery, leaving the Communist party as the happy heir. One side wants to ameliorate the crisis, and the other wants to push it to the revolutionary extreme.
Both draw up their account not only without the innkeeper but also without his parasites. For, on the opposing side, the Fascists and the bourgeoisie, too, the tool and its user, lead each other astray. On the one hand, large sections of Ger- man economic leadership swing around to the Nazi line because they believe that
WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS ? 527
? OlafGulbransson: "I'm sorry, sir, the pure Aryan noses are unfortunately already all sold out. " Simplicissimus, February 26, 1933.
one has to go along with the Hitler course in order to be able to hold onto the course of industry and that of the "general interest" ("taming tactics"). Hitler, for his part, knows that he has to make the industrialists believe that in him they have found the tool that will realize their political goals. Only if they believe that can he, in turn, make them into tools of his global vision, and melt down the "econ- omy" into his "block" and his frequently conjured hard-as-steel "body of the peo- ple," which will climb out of the trenches and the graves of the First World War so as to finally roll over the quickly subdued land as radiant victor. Then Hitler's period as dissimulator would also have an end; then he would finally be able to be completely as he felt himself to be: the chosen one of the "prophecy," the emis- sary of the dead, the double and spirit of revenge. He, the "adventurer" (Braun), the drummer, the charlatan, who was certified by everyone as hysterical and his- trionic, proved himself, on the carousel of tacticians and semirealists, to be the only full realist, that is, the only one who knew how to pursue their aims not only as politician but also as psychologist and dramatist. He not only practiced the art
528 ? WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
? November 1933. New respectability. The lesser evil patronizes the greater evil.
of deception but also saw the necessity of enticing those who were prepared to be deceived with a show of seriousness and idealism. He knew how to handle the collective will to illusion by creating the backdrops before which the people could let themselves be deceived to their heart's desire. The illusion into which the one who is ready to be deceived thinks of falling will serve the defrauded one simul- taneously as an excuse and, in the end, as an explanation why everything had to happen as it did.
Notes
1. ["Double decision" (Doppelbeschluss) was the name given by Helmut Schmidt to his govern- ment's two-pronged decision regarding NATO to (1) continue disarmament talks with the Soviet Un- ion, and (2) simultaneously to "rearm" with new, deadlier missiles. --Trans. ]
Epilogue
The Pleural Shock: On the Archetype of Weimar Laughter
"I know death, I am an old employee of his. People overesti- mate him, believe me. I can tell you, it's almost nothing. . . . We come out of the dark and go into the dark, in the middle lie events, but beginning and end, birth and death, are not ex-
perienced by us. They do not have any subjective character. As processes, they fall entirely within the sphere of the objective.
That is how it is with them. " This was the privy councillor's way of providing solace.
Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg
To the image of Weimar belong spiritual states that perhaps address sarcasm and the sense for irony but not the sense of humor. A nation that has just lost a war and two million killed in action will not find laughing all that easy. That one of the first satirical periodicals after the war, a Dada publication, could call itself Der blutige Ernst (Bloody earnest) indicates the direction of Weimar humorous culture. In the laughter of this decade, gaiety has to step over dead bodies, and in the end, people will laugh about the thought of corpses to come. When Gustav Regler returned in 1929 to Berlin from a trip to France, he heard this new laughter
? Employees' Smiles, 1929.
529
530 ? EPILOGUE
for the first time, with which the master men of 1933 would come into power, that power-through-joy laughter that droned out of the fighting egos and heroic prostheses: Regler saw a hunchback who carried in front of his belly a drum, on which he beat and sang:
"There was once a Communist
who didn't know what a Nazi is,
He went into a brown house,
and, without any bones, he came out! Hahahaha! "
There was scarcely any public laughter in these years that would not have been
laughter about horrors and against enemies, real or imaginary. It belonged either
to the distracted victims who tried to raise themselves with laughter above the
threats, or to those who, in the style of this Nazi newspaper seller, laughed at the
2
victims in advance.
It was Thomas Mann who like no other perceived the challenge of cynical
laughter to humor. Even at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, he tried to penetrate the new Zeitgeist at the end of the bourgeois age and to provide a concept of what it means to live in a "modern" world and "to go with the times" without losing oneself fully in the accommodation to the "bad new world. " In the rarefied air of the Zauberberg (The magic mountain), Thomas Mann settled accounts with the neocynical Weimar Zeitgeist. This has gone unnoticed by many readers who believe that these Davos conversations in the heights are nothing other than the last cultivated bourgeois intellectual niceties without any social binding force. In reality, Thomas Mann wrestled with the task of taking up the spirit of accommo- dation, collaboration, and affirmation, which in this century had been irresistibly caught in cynical waters, and of presenting a "positive conviction" that is not based on the pseudosovereign affirmation of deadly, matter-of-fact givens. On the magic mountain, as if for the last time, images of a humanity flourish, a humanity that remains spiritually alive without becoming cynical. A last positiveness is hinted at that is still not cynical positivism. It is a humanity that can no longer exist in the "low country. " The Davos heights correspond to the psychic zone where the drama of the magic mountain is played out. Here, a humorist tries to climb once more, higher than the highest peaks of cynicism. Of the latter's breathtaking summits, anyone can be convinced who, in the speeches of the grand cynic, the privy councillor Behrens, hears the hounds of death howling. It is he who, in this rarefied atmosphere, leads the way and sets the mood. On the magic mountain, cynicism reigns, and it is due, above all, to the inspired convolutions of Mann's prose that this book has not been understood, as explicitly as it should be, as the decisive dispute between two forms of "sublation" and irony. Here, the older humorous, ironic tradition wrestles with the irony of the modern Hey! - we're-alive syndrome. Instead of the cynical leap into the melee, here, an ironist
1
EPILOGUE ? 531
of the old school tries to raise himself above the tumult. He coquets, to be sure, with the modern "thrownness" and the cynically alert letting-oneself-be-carried- along, for the hero of this story, too, surrenders himself to his adventure on the magic mountain and lets himself be borne by the current of the rarefied air of the times. But in him arises something that is not merely driven along without any anchor but a presentiment of what earlier was called Bildung (cultivation) --a breath of the higher self, of humanity and of the affirmation of life in the face of all the "debauched" temptations toward regression and death.
The physiognomy of Weimar laughter was captured by Thomas Mann at least three times. And every time, it is a laughter that makes itself autonomous and no longer belongs to the one who is laughing. When, as on the mountain of tubercu- losis patients, the horrible and the ridiculous come too close to one another, a laughter breaks out for which we are no longer responsible. We do not laugh this way as long as we can assume responsibility for ourselves. We laugh this way when we are suddenly seized by an understanding that reaches more deeply into us than our civilized ego is allowed to acknowledge. The hero of the story, Hans Castorp, newly arrived, laughs this way when his cousin tells him with the driest of matter-of-factness how the corpses are brought into the valley in winter by bobsled.
"Well, I'll be! " cried Hans Castorp. And suddenly, he was caught in laughter, in a strong, uncontrollable laughter that shook his breast and distorted his face, which was somewhat stiff from the cool wind, into a quietly aching grimace. "With a bobsled! And you tell me that with complete calm? You have become quite cynical in these last five months! "
"Not at all cynical," answered Joachim, shrugging his shoulders. "How so? It's all the same to the corpses . . . By the way, it could well be that one becomes cynical up here with us. Behrens himself is also an old cynic --an excellent chap on the side, an old corps student and brilliant operator, so it seems. You'll like him. Then there's Krokowski, the assistant-a quite clever something. His activity is em- phasized in the brochure. He undertakes a dismantling of the soul with the patients. "
"What does he do?
I slept with a woman who woke me after an hour to ask me whether my spiritual love for her corresponded to my bodily performance. For without the "spiritual" element, she would feel "soiled. " I had to get dressed very quickly, and while I looked under the bed for my lost shirt button, I explained to her that my soul always lives in those parts of the
515
516 ? POSTCOIT AL TWILIGHT
body that I need at a given moment to carry out a certain activity. Thus, when I go for a walk, in the feet, and so on.
"You're a cynic," said the woman. (Roth, Flucht ohne Ende [1927] (pp. 88-89)
We encounter the man here in his "ancestral" role of the sexual cynic, who thinks he has enough with pure sex and who flees as soon as the woman demands something more. In this flight, a genuinely new motif of matter-of-factness is announced--that evasion into understatement that for the style of eroticism in the twenties is so thoroughly typical. In this area, too, the impulse of the times to dis- pense with superstructures asserts itself. The wave of new matter-of-factness-if this word is apposite here--washes old sexual-romantic jetsam ashore. A new spirit of experience, which is psychoanalytic, treated hygienically within mar- riage, and emancipatively inspired, now pushes toward a more "matter-of-fact" treatment of this entire area, which is so beset by dreams and secrets, tensions and longings. That at the same time, as always, erotic illusionism triumphs in mass media does not change anything in the tendency. The intelligentsia, in any case, already begins to orient itself in things dealing with love, existentially- analytic, reflective, experimental, decisionistic, melancholy, cynical. Musil's play Die Schwdrmer (The enthusiasts; 1921) superbly documents this swelling of a stimulating reflectiveness. One starts to take leave of the cult of pure "ex- perience" and to realize that in our experiences, a kind of grammar of experience and feeling comes into effect. An adult consciousness can only be a consciousness
that takes notice of this. If one puts erotic idealism to one side, firmer contours in personal transactions become visible. The erotic barter comes more clearly to light; the animal, capricious side of sexual energy makes itself felt; the projective components of being in love and the resignative components of fidelity cannot be overlooked in the long run. And like everywhere else where ideals collapse, cyni- cism, which lives out its disappointment by pushing over what is already falling, is not far behind.
The young Brecht moves with a quite special virtuosity and alertness on this terrain. He discovers a new tone for cynicisms of this type --a poetry of the ordi- nary and brutal. It is the language of the Baalian life feeling, which celebrates a cynically vital masculinity. For Baal --poet, eroticist, vagabond, existentialist, and lyrical-instinctual subject--women, the young ones, are nothing other than poetic or hormonal stimuli, nothing other than hole, patch of color, odor, play- thing, animal, white thighs. To be sure, this masculinism is lyrically ennobled by Brecht. It possesses --besides the manifestly cynical aspect --also a kynical, productive, antibourgeois aspect. The powerful nature of the elementary, bril- liant man recalls the "alternative life" that is not mutilated by time allocations and regulations but instead flows on in the stream of moods and energies. Brecht lets
POSTCOIT AL TWILIGHT ? 517
? Otto Dix, Melancholy, 1930.
sexuality and poetry flow into each other in imaginary currents. If Baal has hauled "someone" from the street into his room with the excuse "It's New Year. There has to be something white in this damned hole. A cloud! "-he nevertheless does not accept any resistance from the woman.
"You're a woman like any other. The head is different. The knees are all weak . . . that's the way it is with animals. "
Where Roth's cynicism remains ironically, politely, and melancholically masked, Brecht uses the figure of the powerful genius to openly mount an attack. Under the protection of aesthetic vitalism, sexual cynicism begins the flight to the fore in lyric.
518 ? POSTCOIT AL TWILIGHT
? ? Karl Hubbuch, Lovers' Death in Jager Street, 1922.
Baal's attic room
I
Dawn. Baal and Johanna sitting on the edge of the bed.
JOHANNA: Oh, what have I done! I'm bad.
BAAL: Wash yourself instead! . . .
JOHANNA: Don't you want to open the window?
BAAL: I love the smell. What would you say to a new edition? What's
done is done.
POSTCOITAL TWILIGHT ? 519
JOHANNA: How can you be so mean?
BAAL: [lazing on the bed]: White and washed pure by the Deluge, Baal
lets his thoughts fly, like doves over the black waters.
JOHANNA: Where is my bodice? Like this I can't . . .
BAAL: [holding it out to her]: Here! What can't you do, darling? JOHANNA: GO home. [Lets it fall, but gets dressed. ]
BAAL: [whistles]: A wild tomboy! I feel every bone in my body. Give
me a kiss!
JOHANNA: [on the table in the middle of the room]: Say something! [Baal
is silent. ] Do you still love me? Tell me! [Baal whistles. ] Can't you
say it?
BAAL: [looking at the ceiling]: I've had it up to here.
JOHANNA: What was that then last night? And before that?
BAAL: Johannes might make a row. Emilie too walks around like a scut-
tled sailing ship. I could die of hunger here. You don't lift a finger
for anyone. You always want just one thing.
JOHANNA: [confused, clears the table]: And you --were you never differ-
ent with me?
BAAL: Have you washed? Not an ounce of pragmatism! Haven't you
learned anything about that? Get on with you, go home!
Erich Kastner describes another disturbed lovers' morning in his Fabian. Cornelia, Fabian's lover, has already got up to leave. She knows what awaits her. She wants to get into films, be successful, not be one of the ones without prospects. For this, she allows herself to be bought by a producer. She thinks she has to prostitute herself. Fabian only finds her letter late in the evening:
"Dear Fabian . . . Is it not better that I go too early rather than too late? I was just standing next to you at the sofa. You were sleeping, and you are sleeping now as I write to you. I would like to stay, but imagine what would happen if I stayed! After a couple of weeks you would really be unhappy. You are weighed down not by want but by the thought that want can become important. As long as you were alone, nothing could happen to you, no matter what. It will once again be as it was. Are you very sad?
They want to feature me in the next film. Tomorrow I will sign the contract. Makart has rented two rooms for me. It can't be avoided. He spoke about it as if it were a matter of a hundredweight of briquettes. He is fifty years old and he looks like a retired wrestler who is too well dressed. I feel as if I had sold myself to anatomy.
. . . I will not go under. I will imagine that the doctor is examining me. He likes to occupy himself with me. It has to be so. You only get out of the dirt if you get yourself dirty. And we want to get out!
I write: We. Do you understand me? I leave you now in order to stay with you. Will you continue to love me? "
520 ? POSTCOITAL TWILIGHT
Fabian sat quite still. It became progressively darker. His heart ached. He held onto the studs of the armchair as if he were resisting forces that wanted to tear him away. He pulled himself together. The letter lay on the carpet and shone in the dark.
"But I wanted to change, Cornelia," said Fabian, (p. 125)
Chapter 26
Weimar Double Decisions, or: Matter- of-Factness unto Death
Total onlooker--you have been seen through totally. Gustav Wangenheim, Die Mausefalle (1931)
The year is 1932. The cards have been shuffled for the last game. For the insight- ful it is clear that the horizon has already closed. The alternatives from now on will rear up in dull rage or helpless mind games, but events can no longer be averted. The year 1932 is a chaotic, inconceivably complicated one. It forms the last piece of the crisis complex of 1930-32, about which Ludwig Marcuse said rightly that it is more difficult to describe than an entire century would be. This year uses up three chancellors after the cabinet of the Centrist politician, Briining, had collapsed in May. At that time, Goebbels notes in his diary:
[5 May 1932]
It's already beginning. It is really enjoyable. In the party, we must now be absolutely quiet. We have to play at being disinterested. . . .
[13 May 1932]
The crisis goes on according to program. . . .
[30 May 1932]
The bomb has burst. At noon Briining handed over the dismissal of the entire cabinet to the Reich president. The system is collapsing. {Die un- geliebte Republik. Dokumente zur Innen- und aussenpolitik Weimars 1918-1933, ed. W. Michalka and G. Niedhart [Munich, 1980], pp. 327-28)
In both the subsequent cabinets, there are, to be sure, still no Nazis, but all the more "disinterested" and party less politicians, who in earnest already go about depoliticizing politics. Under Papen and Schleicher, the "matter-of-fact
521
522 ? WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
ministers" dominate, who have "freed" themselves from narrow party ties so as to better administer the interest of the "whole"-of course, in close association with German nationals who represent in the governments, if not the interests of the whole, at least of the whole of heavy industry. In 1932, the entire voting popu- lation is called to the ballot box three times, once in April to elect the president and again in July and November for the Reichstag, which staggers on unable to act, especially after the July elections made the Nazis into the strongest party. In the presidential election, the choice is between Hindenburg and Hitler, and the choice, of course, also with the help of the still "sensible" Social Democrat votes, falls on the "lesser evil" that, nine months later, hands over the proclamation of appointment to the greater evil.
The Prussian Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands (SPD) prime minister, Otto Braun, wrote in Vorwarts, the party organ, on March 10:
For the electors there remains only one alternative: Hindenburg or Hit- ler. Can the choice be difficult? Look at both men. Hitler, this proto- type of the political adventurer. . . . Opposing him, Hindenburg. The embodiment of calm and constancy, of male loyalty and sacrificing duti- fulness for the whole of the people . . . filled with a Kantian feeling of duty. . . . I will vote for Hindenburg and I appeal to the millions of voters . . . Do the same, beat Hitler, vote for Hindenburg.
Braun's appeal is a masterpiece of late-Weimar tactics: doublethink, double
1
roleplay, double decisions. One creates the false impression of having thought
through the situation to the last detail and then votes, with the entire pathos of apparent responsibility, for the purportedly "lesser evil. " No one has analyzed So- cial Democratic ambiguity better than the Social Democrat, Fritz Tarnow, at the Leipzig SPD party congress in 1931.
Well, we stand indeed at capitalism's sickbed not only as a diagnosti- cian but also --now, what should I say? --as a doctor who wants to cure, or as a joyful heir who cannot wait for the end and most of all would like to help things along with a little poison? Our whole situation is ex- pressed in this image. (Dokumente zur Deutschen Geschichte, 1929-33, ed. W. Ruge and W. Schumann [Frankfurt, 1977], p.
39)
Tarnow describes precisely the unholy Left alternative between tragic respect- ability and cynicism. By now, we know these medical metaphors all too well. Had not Hitler repeatedly spoken of a political "tuberculosis" from which the patient does not die immediately but which progresses "stealthily" and uncannily if the "bitter fortune" of the crisis does not bring the sickness to a head? Erich Miihsam, by contrast, had already referred to the double role of the doctor, who simultane- ously operates on and exterminates the patient (chapter 20). Now, because the
WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS ? 523
crisis has surfaced in the most violent form, the double game becomes fully clear even to the players. Tarnow goes on.
We are condemned, it seems to me, to be the doctor, who seriously wants to cure, and nevertheless maintain the feeling that we are heirs who as soon as possible want to receive the entire estate of the capital- ist system. This double role, doctor and heir, is a damned difficult task. We could save ourselves many a quarrel in the party if we were con- tinually conscious of this double role. Sometimes some think that the needy situation of those who rely on the patient getting better demands that we do everything to heal the patient (capitalism); others think that now, when it is already gasping, is the right moment to give it the coup de grace.
Tarnow now gives his vote: He pleads for the role of the doctor and advocates humanitarian, medically respectable tactics, rather than the cynicism of the heir.
It is not so much the patient who arouses our sympathy, but the masses who stand behind it. When the patient gasps, the masses out there go hungry. If we know that and know of a medicine--even if we are not convinced that it will cure the patient but will at least ameliorate its rat- tling, so that the masses out there again get something to eat--then we will give the patient the medicine and, at that moment, not think too much about the fact that we are heirs and await the patient's impending end. (p. 39)
These Social Democratic seesaw tacticians and double role players, however, entered with harsh rhetorics into the defensive alliance against fascism that was formed in 1932 under the dangerous-sounding name "Iron Front" and which was to bring together the SPD, the trade unions, the Reich's Banner, and some repub- lican groups. Already at that time, Ossietzky pronounced that only some sections deserved the epithet "iron," whereas other sections were "made of more pliable stuff and some are no better than pancake batter" (ibid. p. 52).
In 1932, the number of unemployed had risen to over 6 million, of which 3. 8 million were in Prussia, and almost half a million in Berlin alone. The welfare offices had registered seven million needy recipients for winter aid. The crisis had created the scenario in which the role of savior was to be assigned to one among all the deceivers, strategists, double role players, and gamblers with responsi- bility.
The Reich's capital was feverish. Every night, corpses were delivered to the police. Sometimes they bore on their bloody coats the sign of the republican flag, sometimes the Communist Soviet star, sometimes the swastika, sometimes simply the number of the state police. More often, however, they bore only the signs of despair in their faces, that light green, the color given to them by the gas they had gulped. . . .
September 30 Tag* 38-S&. Wocke
524 ? WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
? ? ? ? 21 22 23 24 0<mr! <<>r>>tse Fl-eBas Sonnalmnd aoiwtag
|:. :,," ? p. ;=*J. :
Qi<< Jijgomt I_<<rsln>> und 1 i fT>>>>r*ohS>>ri I
One must have seen the general misery so closely in order to fall prey all too easily to a revolutionary idea. . . . All views were sim- plified to one sentence: It can't go on like this anymore! . . . Every suicide who was carried out of his gas-filled flat seemed to raise himself a last time from the stretcher and point his finger at those standing about. (Gustav Regler, Das Ohr des Malchus [Frankfurt, 1975], pp.
178-79, 182)
The great "joint thinking" now began to bear fruit. Those who had learned to "think in terms of relationships," who had studied the Great Dialectic, had thought through Napoleon's example, and had practiced looking down from the general's hill, now found themselves in the position of the leaf that joins in the ecstasy of the "will to power" that drives the caterpillar to devour. Even one's own defeat then looks like mere tactics. Regler tells of a trade union functionary he met in mid-January 1933: "Just let him come to power," he said regarding Hitler. "In eight months, he will be bankrupt" (ibid. , p. 189). Thinking: And then it's our
to die StMscMl
WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS ? 525
turn. Similar models of thinking are firmly evidenced in the Communist party. In July 1932, the chairman, Thalmann, is outraged when SPD functionaries ask KPD leaders whether they are at all serious about the anti-Fascist united front.
Hitler's pack of officers and princes had declared that it wants to exter- minate, hang, behead and break the Communist movement on the wheel. And in view of this fact, in view of the danger that Germany could become a land of gallows and pyres, we Communists are deemed to be not in earnest about the anti-Fascist, the proletarian united front. (Dokumente zur Deutschen Geschichte, p. 65)
Nevertheless, the question is correctly posed and the answer is not free of hypocrisy. For the questioner as well as the respondent have for a long time been speaking the language of doublethink and know all too well that every politician, in addition to what he says, calculates on a second level. For many Communists, the united front was a respectable fiction they themselves, with a second cynical look, easily saw through. Even its protagonists did not really "believe" in it. Ac- cording to Karl August Wittfogel's report, in the autumn of 1932, a scene was played out in Berlin in which the spirit of strategic cynicism is thrown more luridly into relief than in any satire, no matter how biting. It contains the essence of the whole age: the escalation of strategy into the diabolical; the crystallization of doublethink into perfect cynicism; the everlasting being-in-the-right of the simultaneously iron and nimble tactician in a reality where things always happen differently from how the grand tactician thought.
It was a 7 November celebration in the embassy on Unter den Linden. One of those gala celebrations with caviar and vodka and all that. I stood around with Grosz, Piscator, Brecht--I no longer know if it was them, but anyway, that sort. Suddenly, someone came and said, "Radek is here. " I left the others and looked for Radek, asked him--we knew each other from Malik--: "Do you know what is happening here in Germany? "--"What? "--"If things go on like this, Hitler will come to power and everything will go under. "--"Yes, but you have to under- stand that. That has to come. The German workers will take on two years of Hitler. " (Quoted after Mathias GrefFrath, Wasserzeichen der Despotic Ein Portrait von Karl August Wittfogel, in Transatlantik [February 1981], p. 37)
This says, in effect: Besides the surface propaganda in favor of antifascism, the united front, etc. , Moscow had already thought out a second line that allowed the supertactician, Radek, to bet on Hitler just like someone bets on a catastrophe. Thus, one could fight against him and nonetheless still find something good in his probable victory: that, as it was thought, he was specially suitable to bring about the total bankruptcy of the system. This form of double strategy gives the Com- munists' rhetoric of crisis in 1932 an inflammatory tone-for the worse things get
526 D WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
for the "system," the better it is for those who want to see its end. In the Com- munists' "diagnoses" a positivistic grand-tactical spirit is mixed with malicious joy and open catastrophile gratification. Thus, the Rote Fahne wrote on January 1, 1932:
Storm year 1932!
The capitalist world takes leave of the year 1931 with an annihilating declaration of bankruptcy: with the report of the Special Advisory Committee of the Bank for International Reparation Payments . . . that . . . has investigated Germany's economy and financial position. There is no document from a capitalist pen that, with such unconcealed pessimism, ascertains the downfall of capitalism and outlines its con- tradictions and its manifestations of putrefaction with such somber colors. . . . The financial bankruptcy of Germany, however, will re- bound on the creditor countries and conjure up new worldwide catas- trophes. . . .
But the imperialist bandits who see a way out of the crisis in a new world carnage forget that, with the fury of war, they simultaneously un- leash the powers of the revolution. (Dokumente zur Deutschen Geschichte, pp. 49-50)
Here, a masochistic form of thinking has transformed itself into a strategic consciousness. The leaves feverishly approach the caterpillar in the expectation that they will win something of the caterpillar ego if they only let themselves be devoured patiently enough. What are then "two years of Hitler," if afterward we get our turnl What Rathenau had described as a soothsayer in 1912 (tactics, diplomacy, deception down to the "shopkeeper") has been realized here on a large scale.
In the middle of the crisis, the strategist carousel turns all the more quickly. Every rider outlines from his or her carousel horse a grand view, and from this develops tactics for getting the whole. Social democracy grasps the total scene as one in which it is "condemned" to play the double role of the doctor and the willing heir at the sickbed of capitalism. The Communists interpret the situation as the agony of capitalism, whose death can only be a question of time, so that the collapse will be accelerated by those who, on the one hand, fight against the Fascist healing sorcery, and at the same time, however, bank on the eventuality that fascism will inject the dose of poison into capitalism that puts the "system" out of its misery, leaving the Communist party as the happy heir. One side wants to ameliorate the crisis, and the other wants to push it to the revolutionary extreme.
Both draw up their account not only without the innkeeper but also without his parasites. For, on the opposing side, the Fascists and the bourgeoisie, too, the tool and its user, lead each other astray. On the one hand, large sections of Ger- man economic leadership swing around to the Nazi line because they believe that
WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS ? 527
? OlafGulbransson: "I'm sorry, sir, the pure Aryan noses are unfortunately already all sold out. " Simplicissimus, February 26, 1933.
one has to go along with the Hitler course in order to be able to hold onto the course of industry and that of the "general interest" ("taming tactics"). Hitler, for his part, knows that he has to make the industrialists believe that in him they have found the tool that will realize their political goals. Only if they believe that can he, in turn, make them into tools of his global vision, and melt down the "econ- omy" into his "block" and his frequently conjured hard-as-steel "body of the peo- ple," which will climb out of the trenches and the graves of the First World War so as to finally roll over the quickly subdued land as radiant victor. Then Hitler's period as dissimulator would also have an end; then he would finally be able to be completely as he felt himself to be: the chosen one of the "prophecy," the emis- sary of the dead, the double and spirit of revenge. He, the "adventurer" (Braun), the drummer, the charlatan, who was certified by everyone as hysterical and his- trionic, proved himself, on the carousel of tacticians and semirealists, to be the only full realist, that is, the only one who knew how to pursue their aims not only as politician but also as psychologist and dramatist. He not only practiced the art
528 ? WEIMAR DOUBLE DECISIONS
? November 1933. New respectability. The lesser evil patronizes the greater evil.
of deception but also saw the necessity of enticing those who were prepared to be deceived with a show of seriousness and idealism. He knew how to handle the collective will to illusion by creating the backdrops before which the people could let themselves be deceived to their heart's desire. The illusion into which the one who is ready to be deceived thinks of falling will serve the defrauded one simul- taneously as an excuse and, in the end, as an explanation why everything had to happen as it did.
Notes
1. ["Double decision" (Doppelbeschluss) was the name given by Helmut Schmidt to his govern- ment's two-pronged decision regarding NATO to (1) continue disarmament talks with the Soviet Un- ion, and (2) simultaneously to "rearm" with new, deadlier missiles. --Trans. ]
Epilogue
The Pleural Shock: On the Archetype of Weimar Laughter
"I know death, I am an old employee of his. People overesti- mate him, believe me. I can tell you, it's almost nothing. . . . We come out of the dark and go into the dark, in the middle lie events, but beginning and end, birth and death, are not ex-
perienced by us. They do not have any subjective character. As processes, they fall entirely within the sphere of the objective.
That is how it is with them. " This was the privy councillor's way of providing solace.
Thomas Mann, Der Zauberberg
To the image of Weimar belong spiritual states that perhaps address sarcasm and the sense for irony but not the sense of humor. A nation that has just lost a war and two million killed in action will not find laughing all that easy. That one of the first satirical periodicals after the war, a Dada publication, could call itself Der blutige Ernst (Bloody earnest) indicates the direction of Weimar humorous culture. In the laughter of this decade, gaiety has to step over dead bodies, and in the end, people will laugh about the thought of corpses to come. When Gustav Regler returned in 1929 to Berlin from a trip to France, he heard this new laughter
? Employees' Smiles, 1929.
529
530 ? EPILOGUE
for the first time, with which the master men of 1933 would come into power, that power-through-joy laughter that droned out of the fighting egos and heroic prostheses: Regler saw a hunchback who carried in front of his belly a drum, on which he beat and sang:
"There was once a Communist
who didn't know what a Nazi is,
He went into a brown house,
and, without any bones, he came out! Hahahaha! "
There was scarcely any public laughter in these years that would not have been
laughter about horrors and against enemies, real or imaginary. It belonged either
to the distracted victims who tried to raise themselves with laughter above the
threats, or to those who, in the style of this Nazi newspaper seller, laughed at the
2
victims in advance.
It was Thomas Mann who like no other perceived the challenge of cynical
laughter to humor. Even at the beginning of the Weimar Republic, he tried to penetrate the new Zeitgeist at the end of the bourgeois age and to provide a concept of what it means to live in a "modern" world and "to go with the times" without losing oneself fully in the accommodation to the "bad new world. " In the rarefied air of the Zauberberg (The magic mountain), Thomas Mann settled accounts with the neocynical Weimar Zeitgeist. This has gone unnoticed by many readers who believe that these Davos conversations in the heights are nothing other than the last cultivated bourgeois intellectual niceties without any social binding force. In reality, Thomas Mann wrestled with the task of taking up the spirit of accommo- dation, collaboration, and affirmation, which in this century had been irresistibly caught in cynical waters, and of presenting a "positive conviction" that is not based on the pseudosovereign affirmation of deadly, matter-of-fact givens. On the magic mountain, as if for the last time, images of a humanity flourish, a humanity that remains spiritually alive without becoming cynical. A last positiveness is hinted at that is still not cynical positivism. It is a humanity that can no longer exist in the "low country. " The Davos heights correspond to the psychic zone where the drama of the magic mountain is played out. Here, a humorist tries to climb once more, higher than the highest peaks of cynicism. Of the latter's breathtaking summits, anyone can be convinced who, in the speeches of the grand cynic, the privy councillor Behrens, hears the hounds of death howling. It is he who, in this rarefied atmosphere, leads the way and sets the mood. On the magic mountain, cynicism reigns, and it is due, above all, to the inspired convolutions of Mann's prose that this book has not been understood, as explicitly as it should be, as the decisive dispute between two forms of "sublation" and irony. Here, the older humorous, ironic tradition wrestles with the irony of the modern Hey! - we're-alive syndrome. Instead of the cynical leap into the melee, here, an ironist
1
EPILOGUE ? 531
of the old school tries to raise himself above the tumult. He coquets, to be sure, with the modern "thrownness" and the cynically alert letting-oneself-be-carried- along, for the hero of this story, too, surrenders himself to his adventure on the magic mountain and lets himself be borne by the current of the rarefied air of the times. But in him arises something that is not merely driven along without any anchor but a presentiment of what earlier was called Bildung (cultivation) --a breath of the higher self, of humanity and of the affirmation of life in the face of all the "debauched" temptations toward regression and death.
The physiognomy of Weimar laughter was captured by Thomas Mann at least three times. And every time, it is a laughter that makes itself autonomous and no longer belongs to the one who is laughing. When, as on the mountain of tubercu- losis patients, the horrible and the ridiculous come too close to one another, a laughter breaks out for which we are no longer responsible. We do not laugh this way as long as we can assume responsibility for ourselves. We laugh this way when we are suddenly seized by an understanding that reaches more deeply into us than our civilized ego is allowed to acknowledge. The hero of the story, Hans Castorp, newly arrived, laughs this way when his cousin tells him with the driest of matter-of-factness how the corpses are brought into the valley in winter by bobsled.
"Well, I'll be! " cried Hans Castorp. And suddenly, he was caught in laughter, in a strong, uncontrollable laughter that shook his breast and distorted his face, which was somewhat stiff from the cool wind, into a quietly aching grimace. "With a bobsled! And you tell me that with complete calm? You have become quite cynical in these last five months! "
"Not at all cynical," answered Joachim, shrugging his shoulders. "How so? It's all the same to the corpses . . . By the way, it could well be that one becomes cynical up here with us. Behrens himself is also an old cynic --an excellent chap on the side, an old corps student and brilliant operator, so it seems. You'll like him. Then there's Krokowski, the assistant-a quite clever something. His activity is em- phasized in the brochure. He undertakes a dismantling of the soul with the patients. "
"What does he do?
