In The Magic Mountain, Thomas Mann saw in World War I the breaking of the culture of Europe based on the Enlightenment. It began the century of crisis that became our world.
Thomas Mann. THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN. Tr. John E. Woods. New York: Knopf, 1995. Originally published in German in 1925. Ursinus College Myrin Library, 833.91/M316/mg2.
Now that the 20th century is all but over, we may hear its litany more clearly and understandably.
Anyone over twenty-five knows that litany from a thousand voices. From newspapers and textbooks. From movies and novels. From pulpits and TV screens. The core message always has been the same. We live in a time of world crisis, where a center that once held in Western culture no longer holds.
This litany has moderated with the end of the Cold War, the rise of a global business community, and a new embrace of multicultural difference. Doom does not seem to weigh quite as heavily on our mornings.
Still, we feel the lack of a certain center. Philosophically, we remain in twilight. The broken Enlightenment chain of meaning remains broken. Our brightest minds are still trying to fix the philosophical fracture of the West. Some would like to forge a wholly new chain from scratch.
Meanwhile, conflict in the Balkans and the Middle East and thuggery in the former Soviet Union give us disturbing reminders. Such political realities continue to reflect the fracture of a concept of a viable Western culture.
People of a certain age, whose peak years occurred during the height of the century's conflicts, probably will never quite believe that the world is not continuing to be in total crisis. It has been the energizing idea of our lifetime. It is hard for us to give it up now.
Indeed, with newly gained perspective, we can perhaps see the dark escarpments on the landscape of our dying century with greater curiosity, perhaps even greater clarity. It happens when we turn over old 20th century artifacts of crisis--the spent shell casings, as it were, of the skirmishes to understand what was happening to European culture.
I felt that I understood the century a little better by the time I finished reading Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain. It took many pages, though, for it to have that effect. The detailed description of Hans Castorp's life at a fashionable tuberculosis sanitarium high in the Alps almost put me off. Only gradually did I see that Mann was constructing the sensibility of European culture at just that moment before it disintegrated into World War I.
Mann's strategy was to immerse himself and us in the seemingly narcissistic regimen of patients up on the mountain, far removed from the flatland. By stages I came to see that he was planning all along to close the distance between a hermetic world of personal illness and the panorama of all Europe in its last seven years before 1914.
The small band on the mountain finally did come to represent the conflicting world below. The arguments between Hans's intellectual friends gave voice to the clashing ideologies of Europe as the 20th century began. Settembrini was the militant man of reason and progress. Naphta was the Jesuit voice of deep-rooted experience and ontological terror.
In their climactic duel, Settembrini lacked the conviction to shoot; Naphta, wanting to die by the gun of his adversary, had to shoot himself instead. Their resort to bloody action climaxed the insanity of their final arguments. All reason and all logic failed. In short order, Hans left the mountain, responding to the mobilization of troops for the war.
I heard from the mountain the 20th century message: Neither progressive reason nor conservative traditionalism had the persuasive coherence to save the world from war. The Enlightenment foundations from the eighteenth century, the Romanticism of the nineteenth century, the older organizing threads from the Middle Ages--nothing was conceptually powerful enough to prevent the destruction. So the European powers blundered mindlessly into the great "unnecessary" war--the war that "destroyed the benevolent and optimistic culture of the European continent," in the words of John Keegan, author of the new book, The First World War (Knopf, 1999).
The Magic Mountain reminded me how lengthy has been the life of the message of crisis. It arose first and most harshly when the century had barely started; it moderated only within the last decade. The message of crisis spanned just about the entire hundred years.
Because the participants in WWI are nearly all dead, they lack the power to keep us focused on that starting point of the angst of our lifetimes. People like me tend to see the crisis primarily in the Cold War aftermath of WWII or the upheavals of the 1960s because we can remember them. Reading Mann's story at century's end had the virtue of extending memory: the crisis of the 20th century through which I have lived was the crisis whose Big Bang was WWI--the Great War.
"Where are we?" the narrator asked toward the end of The Magic Mountain. This was Mann's transition to the final scene of hell in battle, where the reader last saw Hans Castorp. He went into battle singing to himself Schubert's Lindenbaum. It was a bitterly ironic echo of a song he associated with life on the mountain.
"Where are we?" the West has asked itself ever since. It was the question addressed by Paul Fussel in his book, The Great War and Modern Memory. It was the question addressed by Ernest Hemingway in The Sun Also Rises, which appeared soon after Mann's novel--and many lesser Hemingways. Erich Maria Remarque gave an answer to the question in his accounts of the dispirited and defeated German trench soldiers in All Quiet On the Western Front and The Road Back: we are nowhere. It was the question that members of an entire generation on both sides of the lines asked. They now are all dead.
What was modern civilization all about in view of its collapse into a four-year nightmare of war in 1914? What was the worth of Western civilization if it could not defend itself against its own inner conflicts--the conflicts between reason and power, between the lightning clarity of its rational probes and the dark forces of human embodiment?
These were Mann's questions, expressed before most people now living were born. They still haunt voices at the century's end.
Mann wrote of the conflict of the Western mind in medias res, in the thick of it. He was trying to express his sense of WWI even as WWII was hatching in Munich beer halls, in the Bolsheviks' murderous consolidation of power in the Kremlin, and in the jitters of the Jazz Age. Looking back through the prism of his novel, I see it all as our inheritance. Our sense of anomie, alienation, our ironies and post-ironies, the waning of our affect, the large curve of thought from Settembrini-esque modernism to Derridean postmodernism--it all connects to the terror that descended on a vulnerable bourgeois Europe in 1914. And it connects to its microcosmic representation of a fictitious band of sick people high in the Alps.
The height of bourgeois culture in the decade just before 1914 looked in Mann's rendering vaguely like the precious court culture of old Japan, separated from reality by artful custom. How clearly Mann helped us see that its apparent reasonableness belied its underlying instability. How well he helped us see how it all could vanish.
For us at the century's end, thrice vanished. But in the mid-1920s, Mann was close to that culture's preciousness and vulnerability. Even his imaginative powers could not render the full consequences of what was happening. That took many minds at work through the rest of the century. It was not for Mann to reduce the tragedy to semiology or the constructs of power relations as the French thinkers of the 1960s were to do. Now, we have the perspective to incorporate even them among the efflorescences of the crisis that exploded in 1914.
Reading Mann gave me a vehicle back to the events that broke the European world and created the cultural inheritance that would be mine. Mann's question is still our question: "Where are we?" But time has passed since he captured its feeling in a community of sick people high in the Alps. That gap of time may confer helpful perspective on our sightings. Maybe we still do not know where we are. We may know a bit better where we began. That may give us a tool, however fragile, for searching where we might be going.
Renewed appreciation of World War I as the source of our century's crisis appeared during the 1999 summer, when I was mountain climbing with Thomas Mann: (1) John Keegan. The First World War. New York: Knopf, 1999. (2) Niall Ferguson. The Pity of War. New York: Basic Books, 1999.
I read useful reviews of Keegan by Paul Kennedy (The New York Review of Books 12 August 1999: 36), and by John Eisenhower (The American Scholar Summer 1999: 137). Kennedy's article also reviews Ferguson. Ferguson is particularly interesting because of his strident argument that Britain's decision to enter the war was decisive in creating the "unnecessary" debacle of Western civilization.
Writing this essay review led me to write further thoughts on the way WWI influenced modern sensibility in a follow-up essay: It Comes Down To How You Feel: Modern Sensibility and World War I.
2 September
1999; last modified 26 October 1999 Copyright © 1999 Richard P. Richter
