Literature – Thomas Mann: After the abyss is before the abyss

These are 1,000 pages about time, but that time, according to Thomas Mann, “is not of the type of station clocks.” But if not this one, then what kind? We know that the first public clocks were those on church towers; But they often got it wrong, and so in the Middle Ages every town and every village had its own time, which no one noticed much.

This only changed in the 19th century with the railway, which ran from place to place – and it was an advantage if the clocks showed the same time everywhere, to the minute. That was already countable progress. Then in the 20th century came the atomic clocks, which were much more precise, and so on – but today one often has the impression that the trains are again running (or stopped) according to some church tower clocks from past centuries. The minutes don’t count at all, the hours count little.

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So does time circle, does it mean that conditions that were long thought left behind return? The fatal, ideological talk of the “turning point” suggests that we are the ones who can determine how the clocks tick. One of Martin Heidegger’s cleverer and clearer ideas was that of the “time turning.” It’s not just someone turning the clock – megalomaniacal, drunk on conquest – but rather time itself is reversing: suddenly it goes back instead of forward.

Many people today have this feeling of regression, not unlike horror. Weren’t we already past that? No, obviously not, or something has returned as a ghost from a long-forgotten corner of the past. Is time perhaps completely “out of control,” as Shakespeare suggested in Hamlet?

That’s what “The Magic Mountain” is about, which was published 100 years ago. An upscale society that does not yet know that it is already a thing of the past, but dimly senses it as a vague feeling of illness, gathers in the international sanatorium “Berghof” in Davos. At high altitude, the clocks run differently again – similar to Dalì’s “soft clocks”, they always seem slightly feverish in a drunken way. “You change your terms here,” we read right at the beginning of the novel.

The word “neurasthenia” was in vogue back then, says Meike Rötzer in her large-scale retelling, which affords the luxury of not simplifying the complicated, but rather conveying it to the listeners in a very vivid way in oral speech. What was meant was a mixture of depression and hysteria. With the “Zauberberg”, which she has in the program of her recently founded story book publishing house, she just performed in the large broadcasting hall in the Berlin Haus des Rundfunks with a symphony orchestra, live for almost four hours, including the music that was also used by Mann in the chapter “Fullness of euphony” became the determining factor – but then it came from the gramophone.

Being a spa guest was obviously in time. Hermann Hesse wrote – also 100 years ago – his “Kurgast”, a fascinating personal book about how an urgently awaited cure instead of making him healthier only made him sicker and sicker. In 1923, Knut Hamsun also wrote “The Last Chapter,” a novel about a sanatorium – but for him, who was full of hatred for the bourgeois world, it burned down and most of the noble guests died in the flames. Thomas Mann doesn’t want to see it that drastically – for him, the slow decline, similar to the infirmity of tuberculosis, definitely has its morbid charm, which one could almost call an eroticism of death. The torturous cough connects rich and poor.

Thomas Mann’s double approach to the “Magic Mountain” lies in the parallels between personal illness and the illness of the time, which is particularly evident “down in the valley”. From the privileged standstill up here, he takes us straight into the trenches of the First World War in the summer of 1914: a world in delirium that also drags Hans Castorp into its daze, the danse macabre of an old world. Thomas Mann calls after him: “Your prospects are bad; The bad dancing you got into will last for many years, and we don’t want to bet that you’ll get away with it.”

When Thomas Mann received the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, he was shocked and even insulted. Not without reason, because he got it expressly for the “Buddenbrooks” from 1901. A prize for a book that is almost 30 years old! And that when the “Magic Mountain”, which is just five years old, is causing a sensation worldwide. This is the subtle malice of committees, including the Nobel Prize Committee.

The time diagnosis from the new book was in no way considered worthy of an award. Meike Rötzer, on the other hand, celebrates in her free retelling the intellectually exciting duel between the Italian humanist Settembrini and the Jesuit Naphta, the fight for the soul of their shared pupil Hans Castorp, who, however, does not really understand why the dispute between his two surrogate fathers suddenly becomes so bitterly serious – and in the end it leads to a duel and Naphta’s effective suicide.

Naphta is an almost demonic figure who stands at odds with everything zeitgeist and that is precisely why she is still able to fascinate with her dramatic fury. The model for Naphta was, of all people, Georg Lukács, not a Jesuit of course, but who had just become a communist party theorist with his 1923 book “History and Class Consciousness.” His antitheses to the present are tough. Thomas Mann has him say that every rich person is a thief or the son of a thief. And what is freedom without obedience to a higher law? He brings it to the very contemporary point: “Freedom is a problem, not a nice gesture.”

One has to give Thomas Mann credit (who was financially secure through his marriage to Katia Pringsheim, who came from a wealthy family) that the problem of survival of free artistic and intellectual existences was definitely important to him. So, due to lack of money (due to persistent illness), he lets Settembrini leave the expensive sanatorium “Berghof” and live privately in the village, just like Naphta, while the factory owners or factory owners’ relatives who remain in the “Berghof” with “wet spots” on their lungs, year after year throwing horrendous sums of money down the throats of the spa business. But those who, as Brecht said, put their own skin on the market every day, get less and less for it. There is a risk of becoming a beggar if a saving inheritance doesn’t come along soon or you quickly land a position in some authority. Are we talking about the 1920s or today?

In 1926, Gottfried Benn wrote for “Die Weltbühne” in “Summa summarum” about his income from the poetic work for which he was described as “one of the greatest of our time”. Compared to permanently employed actors, directors, editors-in-chief, Bayreuth Wotan singers or bank presidents who receive a monthly salary of several thousand marks, “one of the greatest of our time would be in a decidedly unfavorable position with four marks fifty per month.” That’s how Benn had calculated it meticulously. It was probably also because of these precarious circumstances that he enlisted in the Nazis in 1933, but (luckily for him) they immediately chased him away as a “degenerate element.”

What remains of the “Magic Mountain” today? Anyone who wants a “war-ready” army immediately (according to the SPD’s offensive Defense Minister Pistorius) no longer has any money for dispensable things like education and art. The ominously aggressive atmosphere of war is in the air again today. Meike Rötzer, who earns little from her storybook publishing house (almost everything goes to the Internet platforms, she says), advocates for a reassessment of intellectual performance. If this doesn’t happen, then the sloping level on which we are still balancing will very quickly become a steep wall. Once you’ve crashed, you won’t come back.

Meike Rötzer tells the “Magic Mountain” with the Berlin Radio Symphony Orchestra on November 23rd and 30th. (in two parts) on RBB’s Radio 3. You can also listen to it in the ARD audio library.

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