Bindungsroman: Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann 273 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Bindungsroman: Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann Jonas Rosenbrück Amherst College Abstract: This paper proposes that at the end of the Bildungsroman genre in the early twentieth century, the outlines of a different genre can be discerned: the “Bindungsroman.” The latter constitutes, to use one of Thomas Mann’s formulations, a “parodic conclusion” of the former by substituting a logic of binding and unbinding for the developmental logic of Bildung. In particular, the paper argues that sickness constitutes a privileged articulation of this logic of binding: in Mann’s work, the development of infection, contamination, containment, cure, or demise supplies the formal principle according to which any given novel unfolds. The paper further demonstrates how the Bindungsroman intertwines sexuality and spirit as the two poles of the sphere of sickness. This intertwinement approaches certain reflections by Walter Benjamin, which were known to Mann, concerning the bipolar nature of the human being and the temporality that accompanies this bipolarity. Keywords: Bildungsroman , sickness, Thomas Mann, sexuality, Walter Benjamin In his classic The Way of the World: The Bildungsroman in European Culture , Franco Moretti advances the following claim: “If history can make cultural forms necessary, it can make them impossible as well, and this is what the war [World War I] did to the Bildungsroman ” (229). 1 After World War I, the Bildungsroman ’s ability to produce “one of the most harmonious solutions ever offered to a dilemma conterminous with modern bourgeois civilization: the conflict between the ideal of self-determination and the equally imperious demands of socialization ” (15) dissipated; it could no longer provide the “symbolic form” of this new time. This paper proposes that one of the genres that comes after the declared end of the Bildungsroman can be found in a slight but decisive alter- 274 Jonas Rosenbrück DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 ation of its form and its name: the Bildungsroman gives way to the related but new genre of the Bindungsroman . 2 This genre shift can be traced in paradigmatic form in Thomas Mann’s work, which repeatedly draws on the term “Bindung.” Mann explicitly thought of himself as coming at the end point of the Bildungsroman genre, 3 claiming about The Magic Mountain that it “seems to conclude the German Bildungsroman in a parodic manner” (Mann, “On myself ” 81). The schema of this parodic conclusion can be indicated as follows: Instead of offering a normative, teleological process in which the individual’s potentiality and dynamic formlessness are led into a solid form that harmonizes with a social totality of which it becomes an organic part, the Bindungsroman forgoes the ambition to achieve or even be oriented by such a harmonious process of formation-and instead offers a mere parodic simulacrum of the developmental logic known as Bildung . In this simulacrum, the trajectory of the individual is not one of formation but rather a matter of being bound or unbound, constrained or unleashed: Bildung ’s unfolding of a “formative development governed by an inner law” (Boes, Formative Fictions 46), as Tobias Boes defines the process at the heart of the Bildungsroman in his recent study, is replaced by the question of how life’s forces can be intensified (unbound) or contained (bound) and led into a bond with a specific form of life or unbound from another. As this article will show in detail, Bindung ’s parodic simulacrum of the developmental logic of Bildung finds a privileged articulation in sickness. While numerous scholars have argued that sickness is crucial to Mann’s work (in particular in its Romantic inheritance) and that nearly all of his major works can be seen as being generated by a specific sickness (typhoid in Buddenbrooks , cholera in Death in Venice , tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain, syphilis in Doctor Faustus , etc.), 4 it will be shown here more specifically that Mann’s deep interest in sickness is co-extensive with his working out of a parodic substitute for the organizing logic of Bildung. In other words, the logic of infection, convalescence, deterioration, cure, chronic continuance, or eventual demise substitutes for-while looking deceptively similar to-the unfolding of Bildung : sickness structures Mann’s works by producing an unleashing of both life forces and pathogens (an “entbinden,” an unbinding, as Mann himself calls it in Doctor Faustus ), which in turn requires containment (a binding). This article therefore argues that sickness is not just, as most of the scholarship on Mann and sickness has proposed, a thematic focal point or a determining principle of his understanding of the artist and the bourgeois type (and their complex “decadence”), but additionally and, perhaps more decisively, a formal and generic principle: the logic of sickness as (Ent-)Bindung produces the specific form and genre of Mann’s works. 5 DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Bindungsroman : Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann 275 Developing the thought that sickness and form are implicated in each other in the Bindungsroman and that the specificity of each Mannian sickness thus holds insights into the work it is a part of and that it generates, this paper will proceed in three steps. A short first section revisits the much commented on novella Death in Venice to show how the unfolding of the protagonist’s trajectory is determined by the doubled play of binding and unbinding that constitutes the modes of attachment and detachment that produce this novella’s peculiar “sickness unto life.” The second section turns to The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus to more fully develop the logic of the Bindungsroman by showing, among other things, how this notion emerges out of the novels’ own use of “binding” terms, since, as Erich Heller has remarked with only slight exaggeration, each of these novels produces “its own critique, and that in the most thoroughgoing manner imaginable. There is no critical thought which the book does not think about itself ” (278)-and this holds true for the question of bonds and genre too. 6 Continuing with Doctor Faustus , the third section develops more extensively sickness’s counterpart in the logic of the Bindungsroman that was already found in Death in Venice : sexuality. Sexuality’s role in the sphere of sickness further points to certain reflections by Walter Benjamin, whose work was known to Mann, concerning the bipolar and ambiguous ( zweideutig ) character of human life and the temporality that accompanies this ambiguity. Death in Venice tells the story of a great writer, Gustav Aschenbach, who becomes intoxicated by the invigorating beauty of a teenage boy, Tadzio. The progress of this intoxication is intertwined with the spread of cholera through Venice, eventually leading to Aschenbach’s dramatic death at the very end of the novella. This doubled development of the spreading disease and Aschenbach’s continued desire for the boy takes shape against the backdrop of the writer’s bodily state, which is structured by a mutating interplay of sickness and health-an interplay that is structured, in turn, by an alternation of being bound ever more tightly to certain forms of life and their unbinding release. Death in Venice thus begins with a description of Aschenbach’s mundane life in Munich which is marked by two major characteristics: tension and attrition. He leads a “tense [ straffes ] life” under the aegis of a “self-discipline [ Selbstzucht ]” that produces “permanent tension.” For Aschenbach in Munich, life means slowly being worn out, a steady process of becoming threadbare and ground up. He is “the poet of all those who work on the edge of exhaustion, of the overburdened, already worn-down ones” (Mann, Tod in Venedig 512). 7 This wearing out, in turn, necessitates that he grabs life tightly, strenuously binding himself to it without a moment of lapse or easing up. It is precisely this relentless grip that is adduced as an explanation for a previous episode of illness in Aschenbach’s 276 Jonas Rosenbrück DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 life: “When he fell sick in Vienna around the thirty-fifth year of his life, a fine observer remarked: ‘You see, Aschenbach has only ever lived like this ’ - and the speaker firmly closed the fingers of his left hand to a fist [ Faust ] -; never like this ’ - and he let his opened hand hang comfortably off the armrest of his chair” (TiV 509). This episode emphasizes that Aschenbach leading life like a clenched fist-or as Faust; the German word, of course, carries a certain ambiguity that points to Mann’s position in the German literary tradition 8 -cannot just be read as a matter of decadent ennui or coded depression but rather should be seen as sickening in an emphatic sense. Relaxation, comfort, and, most importantly, openness (“the opened hand”) are excluded from this sickened life that closes in on itself in relentless and strenuous work. Aschenbach’s fictional protagonists similarly embody this: they are marked by a “masculinity” that “clenches teeth” (TiV 511). What they cannot do goes unmentioned but is clearly visible ex negativo : open their mouths to speak or to eat or to kiss or to scream or to lick or to sing. The doubled image of clenched fists and clenched teeth culminates in the designation of Aschenbach’s “favorite word: ” “durchhalten,” which might be translated as “persevering,” “hanging on” or “hanging in there.” This is where Aschenbach begins: in the middle of a life structured by clenched tension and exhausting attrition. In other words, the point of departure of sickness in Death in Venice is thus the ordinary, all too ordinary depletion that results from staying in the fight by holding on for dear life. The novella is then driven forward by a crucial moment of releasing this tight binding to the ordinary life of attrition. Aschenbach has built into his life a modest moment of change, excitement, and release: travel. This “hygienic measure” of switching things up brings him to Venice, establishing, like all of Mann’s treatments of disease, a “pathocartography” (60) as Lauren Berlant has called it: the Mannian text draws up a map of life’s states of health and sickness by distributing them to specific geopoetic locales. Tadzio is similarly introduced as coming from elsewhere: he is Polish, that is, he comes from the East. 9 His striking, tender, and soft beauty has two effects on Aschenbach. On the one hand, Aschenbach’s state of “permanent tension” is, for the first time, released into a “lightest life” (TiV 550). Beauty, in accordance with traditional theories of German aesthetics, calms and indicates conflict-free harmony. Aschenbach is buoyed, floating through life. His will relaxes and, in exact correspondence to the clenched fist that rendered him sick in his mundane life, he even “traced with both of his arms, which were loosely hanging over the armrest of his chair, a slowly rotating and lifting movement, turning his palms forward, as if hinting at an opening and extending of his arms” (TiV 548-9). The fist unclenches; the sickness of mundane life is dissolved. On the other hand, Tadzio triggers “enthusiasm [ Begeisterung ]” (TiV 548), an inspiration that induces at its very DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Bindungsroman : Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann 277 height a release of Aschenbach’s writer’s block and an intensification of his spiritual life: he writes “exquisite prose” of an unprecedented quality; Aschenbach’s work, previously marked by the worn-out character of service at the altar of exhausting habit, finally regains feeling, intensity, and beauty. The tight tangle of tension and attrition -the double character of the sickness of ordinary life-has found its dissolution, its unbinding in an exacting countermovement of relaxation and invigoration . Yet there had already been, during the first close encounter between Aschenbach and Tadzio, a major warning sign that this doubled countermovement embodied by Tadzio is itself dangerous and, in fact, directly related to illness, albeit to a different type of illness. This warning sign can be found in the teeth of the boy: Aschenbach “however had noticed that Tadzio’s teeth weren’t quite pleasant: somewhat jagged and pale, without the enamel of health […] he is sickly, Aschenbach thought. He probably won’t reach old age” (TiV 541). The clenched teeth of the sickness of ordinary life correspond to the sickly teeth of the boy who produces the dissolution of that very sickness. Tadzio, moreover, is not only “sickly” himself but the encounter with him subjects Aschenbach to the second, much more prominent and lethal sickness of Death in Venice : the cholera that sweeps through Venice and becomes progressively more threatening. Aschenbach will contract this disease and succumb to it, even though he is aware of the danger early enough to leave the city and save his life by returning to Munich. But Aschenbach stays: he stays attached to Tadzio, who is not leaving Venice, and thus stays exposed to the disease that will eventually kill him. That which dissolved Aschenbach’s ordinary sickness ensures the contraction of an even more devastating sickness. The structure of Aschenbach’s relationship to this lethal sickness of cholera is deeply tied to the structure of his homoerotic or queer desire for Tadzio. As Robert Tobin has shown in detail in his seminal investigations of the “German discovery of sex,” the Aschenbach-Tadzio relationship is not only shaped by the discourses on homosexual desire in Mann’s time, 10 but also specifically by the early twentieth-century imaginary that linked homosexuality and sickness. This becomes particularly evident in the fact that Venice’s “relationship to the plague is identical with Aschenbach’s relationship to his desire, in that neither he nor the city wants to eliminate the source of the problems” (Tobin 202) and, further, in the fact that Aschenbach wants to keep both-queer desire and cholera-secret, where the two are explicitly interwoven by the narrator of the novella: “this terrible secret of the city that merged with his own-most secret [ das mit seinem eigensten Geheimnis verschmolz ]” (TiV 565). The secrecy of this queer desire, in turn, maintains a double relationship to the social world from which it seeks to hide. On the one hand, it threatens social 278 Jonas Rosenbrück DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 life with dissolution by not acting on the knowledge of the destructive illness and positions Aschenbach as an outcast whose attachment to the boy, especially toward the end, puts him at odds with the normativity of the ordered world of bourgeois society to which he belongs. On the other hand, and paradoxically, Aschenbach can also be seen to “opt[] for the status quo” (Tobin 194) by aligning himself with the authorities’ hiding of the continued spread of the sickness and by hiding his own divergence from the heteronormative order. In this sense, Aschenbach’s desire and the bonds it leads him into echo the doubled character of “queer bonds” as scholarship in queer theory has developed it over the last two decades or so: “what makes these bonds queer,” so a recent overview of developments in the field states, “is a simultaneous adhesion and dehiscence, a centripetal pull toward the social and a radical centrifugal drive away from it” (Weiner and Young 236). If “queer bonds mark the simultaneity of ‘the social’ and a space of sociability outside, to the side of, or in the interstices of ‘the social’” (236), then the Bindung attaching Aschenbach and Tadzio to each other is certainly a queer one. 11 This deep ambiguity of queer desire with respect to the social can be broadened to a schematization of the relationship Aschenbach’s queer bonds and his sickness maintain with life. In short, the unfolding of Death in Venice occurs through the presentation of two possible modes of sickness with differing logics: on the one hand, a sickness of exhaustion and attrition that binds to life with a firm, normalizing, and normative grip that simultaneously wears out and keeps alive. Paradoxically this sickness should be called, by drawing on a thinker of considerable significance to Mann, namely Søren Kierkegaard, a sickness unto death. For Kierkegaard, the “sickness unto death,” as he defines it in his book of that title, is “despair,” which in turn is defined as the “inability to die”: [Despair] has more in common with the situation of a mortally ill person when he lies struggling with death and yet cannot die. Thus to be sick unto death is to be unable to die, yet not as if there were hope of life; no, the hopelessness is that there is not even the ultimate hope, death. (Kierkegaard 18) This is the sickness of tension-attrition: for fear of death, it holds on to life so dearly that all it achieves is the hopelessness of unending struggle. For Mann, continued survival is only possible through this first type of sickness: a clenched fist and clenched teeth, a sickness unto death that stays bound to a sick life but to life nevertheless. On the other hand, Death in Venice presents a sickness of passion, queer bonds, and a paradoxical joining of intensification and relaxation. In this sickness, the fist ( Faust ) is dissolved into openness. Within the Mannian universe, this latter should be called a sickness unto life : Aschenbach becomes unbound from and then throws away his (ordinary, mundane) life-but only in DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Bindungsroman : Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann 279 order to gain an even greater life, the intensified life he finds in his queer relation to Tadzio. Relaxing the grip on life and accepting the possibility of death, even welcoming it as a hope greater than life itself, allows life to become invigorated. It is these two modes of development-two diverging modes of being bound or unbound—that structure the progression of the novella. The fundamental question, which can only be briefly indicated here, that subsequently emerges from this Mannian dichotomy-a desperate binding to life that is a “sickness unto death” versus an openness to death that is a “sickness unto life”-is this: can a third option be thought? Can there be a mode of existence that neither desperately clings to life nor recklessly welcomes death? If the answer is “tertium non datur,” then death seems to carry the day in either case. Yet perhaps one could think (whether with Mann or beyond his work is unclear at this point) a sickness unto “life-death,” where this latter term would name a thought in which “life” and “death” are not opposed to each other because they do not constitute distinct, mutually exclusive positions to begin with. 12 Neither opposition, nor identification, life-death would require that sickness be thought otherwise, and it would ask anew about how life and death are bound to each other. The fundamental claim of Death in Venice , namely that for Aschenbach an intensification of life must be purchased at the price of fatal sickness, also structures one of Mann’s most complex and to this day most controversial novels, Doctor Faustus , a novel that takes up the Faust/ fist constellation already in its title and is similarly driven forward and formed by the logic of sickness . The novel’s protagonist, the composer (“Tonsetzer”) Adrian Leverkühn, enters a contract with the devil who accords him twenty-four years of creativity and strength in exchange for contracting syphilis, a disease that will lead to periodic episodes of great suffering and his eventual demise. In a rather exact rephrasing of the concept of “great health” found in Friedrich Nietzsche, 13 whose life Mann partly modeled Leverkühn’s on, the devil argues that “creative, genius-endowing sickness, which jumps in bold [ kühnem ] intoxication from cliff to cliff […] is a thousand times dearer to life than slow-footed health” (Mann, Doktor Faustus 326). 14 The boldness of Lever-kühn’s life (his Leben , as it resonates in the first part of his surname) lies in a daring and agile sickness. Within the economy of Doctor Faustus , this intensification of life, which bestows genius on the sick patient, is opposed to the “mediocre-salutary [ Mittelmäßig-Heilsame ]” (DF 331): mediocrity-being in the middle-cures; extremity sickens but leads to greater life. While the trope of the connection between sickness and genius is rather conventional and can in particular be traced to the Romantics, as Susan Sontag among others has documented, 15 the interest of Doctor Faustus lies in Mann’s choice of syphilis and the integration of this specific disease into the larger 280 Jonas Rosenbrück DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 composition of the novel. The key word in this respect is the untranslatable German word “Erreger,” versions of which are littered throughout the novel. 16 “Erreger” has a triple meaning: in a first instance, as “Krankheitserreger,” it designates a pathogen that renders sick. Secondly, it refers to what excites. An Erreger animates in a strict sense: it enlivens and incites life. Lastly, this excitement has a sexual connotation: Erregung names sexual arousal. Doctor Faustus thus presents an imaginary of disease that links the sickening, the vivifying, and the sexually stimulating: all three are implicated in each other and none can be had without the others. This Erregen , so the devil emphasizes, is not a creation of something new: “We don’t create anything new - that is the business of other people. We only unbind [entbinden] and set free” (DF 318; emphasis added). The wording here is precise: stimulation-sickening unbinds in a putative act of midwifery because it frees from constraints and restrictions, and only thus enables a life activity that exceeds the “mediocre-salutary.” Doctor Faustus thus becomes a novel concerning the need for and frequent failure of a re-binding that would check and control the unbinding of erregen . This is already evident in the form of the Faustian bargain: Leverkühn-Faust is bound to the devil precisely in exchange for an unbinding or unleashing. The devil strips away the constraints that ordinarily, mundanely would restrict the range of the composer’s life activities but he simultaneously imposes the new bonds of the bargain he proposes and enforces. The Faustian binding-unbinding can thus be seen as an elaboration of the basic schema of Death in Venice : Aschenbach’s “attachment” to Tadzio is equally a question of binding and unbinding, of taking away strictures and setting free since this attachment is simultaneously what invigorates him and what ties him to his destruction. Via the new bond of his queer desire, Aschenbach’s previously constrained life forces are unbound and thus heightened but ultimately extinguished. In short, both Aschenbach and Leverkühn seek the jump out of a middling existence into a life unleashed but bound to what unleashes it. With respect to Doctor Faustus , the centrality of binding and unbinding rises to the level of a question of genre (in more than one sense, as will be shown below): in a minute but exacting displacement, this novel can be termed a Bindungsroman that replaces or stands to the side of the genre of the Bildungsroman. 17 While the latter narrates the formation and development of an individual oriented by a telos and ordered by a succession of distinct phases (one of which might be a phase of sickness followed by convalescence and regained, stronger health), Doctor Faustus qua Bindungsroman tells the story of the vicissitudes of unbinding and the reverse movement of re-binding because as the devil insists, everything is already “vor-gebildet,” preformed, and the only question remaining is one of intensification and restraint of what is already formed. In such a DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Bindungsroman : Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann 281 vorgebildet context, anything that might look like Bildung is really only its parodic simulacrum. In this logic, the counterterm to “erregen” that structures the Bindungsroman is containment: once the novel is spurred into existence by the pathogen-excitation of a disease, its further course is determined by attempts to contain what has been set free. The trajectory of Doctor Faustus is thus not one oriented by a telos or shaped by a process of Bildung in the strong sense. Rather, the Bindungsroman is structured by a rhythmic pulsation of releasing and recapturing, of an interplay between radicalizing intensification and moderating constraint-a constant replaying of variations on an already set theme. Before more closely analyzing the logic of Bindung that structures Doctor Faustus , a detour through Mann’s other great novel of sickness, namely The Magic Mountain , helps clarify the conceptual usefulness of this term. The position of The Magic Mountain within the constellation of Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus could hardly be more poignant. For one, as quoted above, Mann himself argued that The Magic Mountain constitutes a certain end point of the Bildungsroman genre, stating that his novel “seems to conclude the German Bildungsroman in a parodic manner” (Mann, “On myself ” 81). Furthermore, The Magic Mountain , implausible as it might seem given its final shape of almost a thousand pages, was initially planned as a short, “humorous” companion piece to Death in Venice , a satyr play of sorts (Mann, “Lübeck als geistige Lebensform” 47). And indeed, it poses a similar question to that posed in the novella: why does the protagonist of The Magic Mountain , Hans Castorp, stay attached to illness? Castorp, it will be recalled, travels from his native Hamburg to the mountainous resort Berghof to visit-for a brief three weeks only-his cousin Joachim Ziemßen. The visit turns into a seven-year stay, extending even past the death of his cousin and defying the clean bill of health accorded him by the lead doctor of the sanatorium, Hofrat Behrens. So why does Castorp appear to be bound to Berghof and its atmosphere of clean air and decaying bodies? Many answers have been proposed in the secondary literature, 18 but one in particular is pertinent here: it is the “nihilism” (Mann, “Meine Zeit” 17) of the age that precludes Castorp from returning to the world where he would find nothing worth attaching himself to: we suspect that Hans Castorp would not have transgressed the originally planned period of his stay up here even till the presently reached point if his simple soul had received, out of the depths of the times, a somehow satisfying indication concerning the sense and purpose of life’s service (Mann, Der Zauberberg 319). 19 Castorp is rudderless, aimless, and without purpose. Without a telos toward which he could develop, without a path of true Bildung being available to him, what remains is mere intensification. As Mann himself puts it succinctly: “Hans 282 Jonas Rosenbrück DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Castorp’s story is the story of an intensification [ Steigerung ]” (Mann, “On myself ” 80). This intensification that constitutes the core of Hans Castorp’s story lies in the invigoration-relaxation that the “horizontal existence” on the mountain provides. Castorp is released from his mundane, professional life, which he finds mostly dull and constricting. Correspondingly, versions of the words “erregen” and “vorgebildet” 20 are found throughout the novel. Berghof ’s atmosphere of decay, sickness, and death-what, in short, is known as decadence- incites Castorp to an intensified life of philosophical speculation, scientific inquiry, political discussion, love, friendship, corporeal exploration, spiritual awakening, and paranormal encounters: in other words, Castorp receives an education in and through his illness. “In a sense it is even true to say,” according to Erich Heller, “that his education and his illness are identical” (203), but only if Castorp’s Bildung is removed from its classical concept into the sphere of its simulacra, parodies, and perversions: here, Bildung is not an organicist formation of the individual but rather an epiphenomenon of the underlying sickness that unfolds in its oscillating movement of excitation-containment. This is emphasized by both the setting and the ending of The Magic Mountain : Castorp’s pseudo- Bildung does not lead him into a harmonious existence within a larger social totality but, on the one hand, confines him, for the duration of the novel, to the artificially restricted world of the sanatorium where everyone is similarly marked by sickness and releases him, on the other hand, into the destruction and devastation of war at the end of the novel. The path of a genuine Bildungsroman is foreclosed. Mann explicitly inscribes this constellation of intensification-decay into the question of binding. The Magic Mountain , according to its author, responds to “humanity’s longing for and worrying about new absolute bonds [neuen absoluten Bindungen]” (Mann, “Meine Zeit” 19; emphasis added). Hans Castorp is thrown into a cauldron of decaying civilization where old bonds are fraying (he loses all touch with the “flatlands” from which he emerged), and he is positioned in the middle of various new attachments that are offered up to him. The Jewish-Jesuit communist Leo Naphta, for instance, thus embodies “the iron binding [ Bindung ] by the total state” (Mann, “Meine Zeit” 19). Naphta, and his antagonist the humanist Settembrini, each stand for diverging offers to rebind what has become unmoored. Similarly, Clawdia Chauchat, the Russian patient who becomes Hans Castorp’s obsessive love interest, marks an extreme: he is drawn to “her body, her lax and intensified body, a body monstrously stressed and made into a body once more by the sickness” (Z 319). In correspondence to the extremeness of Chauchat’s existence, Castorp’s love for her lacks all moderation or mediation: his love is “mixed from frost and heat like the condition of a febrile one on a day in October in upper spheres; and what was missing DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Bindungsroman : Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann 283 was indeed a means [ Mittel ] of the soul that would have bound together [ verbunden ] its extreme components” (Z 318). The heart of The Magic Mountain qua Bindungsroman is found in a rotating offering of various extreme options that promise to fulfill the desire for “new absolute bonds.” The full force of the generic form of the Bindungsroman as corrective to the Bildungsroman now comes more sharply into view. Mann’s description of the “new absolute bonds” that humankind longs for in The Magic Mountain continues with a crucial qualification: “humanity’s longing for and worrying about new absolute bonds, as religion once offered it” (Mann, “Meine Zeit” 19). One (seemingly past, old) name for the question of binding is religion. This claim, of course, has a venerable intellectual history rooted in the tradition of tracing the etymology of the word “religion” to “religāre,” as that which binds again . 21 The Magic Mountain stages the battles of rebinding that arise in the absence of the prior regime of religious bonds. The novel thus could, as Mann suggests, be considered a “religious book” (Mann, “Fragment über das Religiöse” 380). Its religiosity lies strictly in the isomorphism of the logic of religion narrowly conceived, on the one hand, and the logic of the Bindungsroman , on the other. In other words, it is the concern with that which unbinds and the various strategies of rebinding that respond to it that religion and the Bindungsroman share. 22 In a brief but instructive text, titled “Fragment on Religiosity” by his editors, Mann provides a straightforward but useful definition of religion that further elaborates on this centrality of binding. Mann argues “that what is religious in the human being lies in his duality of nature and spirit” (Mann, “Fragment über das Religiöse” 379). Religion supplied (and, certainly, for some continues to supply) rituals, myths, practices, and names for the bond that constitutes the duality of humanity. The Bindungsroman , in turn, takes on the task of articulating those very things when religion narrowly conceived loses its grip. Its generic form responds to a crisis in religiosity, which is at bottom a crisis of binding a duality. A privileged instantiation of this duality-and hence of the task posed to the Bindungsroman genre-in The Magic Mountain is found in love. The “ambiguity [ Zweideutigkeit ] of love” (Z 823), as the narrator puts it, corresponds to the duality of nature and spirit that constitutes the human being, for the word “love” binds together a related duality: “Isn’t it great and good that language has only one word for all the things one can understand by it [the word love], from the most pious to the most carnal-lustful? There is complete univocity [ vollkommene Eindeutigkeit ] in this ambiguity since love cannot be incorporeal in its extreme piety and cannot be impious in its extreme carnal form” (Z 823-4). The unambiguity of love lies precisely in that it is thoroughly ambiguous: “love” always signifies both body and spirit, piety and desire. This duality 284 Jonas Rosenbrück DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 of love echoes and transforms Mann’s recurring interest in the asymmetry of the love relation, where there is always one person who is the more loving one, for whom love is more binding than for the other. Whenever it is a question of love, then, it is a question of how two poles are—or are not—linked, bridged, or mediated, in short, bound or unbound. The great importance of love for Mann’s Bindungsroman derives from this bipolar structure. 23 Love also lies at the heart of Doctor Faustus , albeit under a different sign and thus structured by a different modality of binding . The life of Adrian Leverkühn is driven forward by repeated overtures toward love and corresponding closures that ward off any amorous entanglement. The reason for this lies in the fact that love is the object of the devil’s only and at first glance peculiar interdiction: “Love, insofar as it warms, is prohibited to you. Your life shall be cold - hence you ought not to love any human being” (DF 334). The Faustian bargain turns on the exclusion of love, more precisely, on the exclusion of the warming character of love. From the perspective of the Bindungsroman , a double reason for this odd interdiction can be given. On the one hand, love binds, but it does so in intimacy. Consequently, love precludes containment: love is a mode of binding that opens toward the other and thus establishes a middle of contagion and transmission. On the other hand, the qualification “insofar as it warms” is decisive: warmth, throughout Doctor Faustus and again in a rather exact echo of Nietzsche, is understood as “Stallwärme” (DF 96), the warmth of the domesticated herd and hence of mediocrity. But it is precisely the middling of mediocrity and warmth that is antithetical to the intensifying extremity of Erregen. Warmth is the middle between heat and cold, and Leverkühn’s greatness-like the intensification tempting Hans Castorp-lies in the alternation of these two poles to the exclusion of their middle: “Heat and cold operated [ walteten ] side-by-side in his work, and occasionally, in the most ingenious moments, collapsed into each other [ schlugen sie ineinander ]” (DF 239). In other words, the middling character of love-as what holds in the middle of the loving relation as well as what precludes thermal extremes-undoes both the intensifying erregen and the corresponding containment that structure the bargain underlying Doctor Faustus . Through the prohibition of warmth and the lauding of coldness and heat, Doctor Faustus develops a veritable thermal aesthetics . This, of course, is also an elaboration and reconfiguration of a major theme in The Magic Mountain , in particular the centrality of thermometers (see Martin). Measuring, graphing, discussing, and anxiously attending to the temperature not only of bodies but also the environment constitutes a significant part of the novel. It is through plunging or rising temperatures that actions are triggered or precluded, moods changed and insights produced. Similarly, as discussed above, Castorp’s love for Clawdia Chauchat is marked by thermal extremes. A transformation of this love can be DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Bindungsroman : Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann 285 found in Doctor Faustus when warm, middling love is replaced by “a love from which one has subtracted animalistic warmth” (DF 97). In an exact moment of designation, the name Leverkühn gives to such a cool, chilled love is-“interest” (DF 97). 24 The sphere of sickness emerges as the sphere of interest: the “inter” of interest accomplishes a mode of relational binding that eludes the middling, moderating character of love. In interest, the movement of excitation-containment can be achieved without succumbing to the warming effect of a love that undoes both. The thermal state of the interesting accords with the needs of the Bindungsroman ’s Faustian bargain of intensification and destruction. The bipolar and interesting hot-cold opposition that excludes a middling warmth receives another precise designation in Doctor Faustus : it is “the idea of the demonic” (DF 239). “Demonic,” in turn, must be understood as a name of Zweideutigkeit (ambiguity): 25 Leverkühn’s work is ambiguous to the highest degree, that is, it oscillates between two poles in a way that, at its most ingenious moments, lets them collapse into each other. Yet beyond heat and cold, the specific case of Leverkühn’s disease, namely syphilis, points to a second, more decisive demonic constellation of extremes. On the one hand, syphilis is a Geschlechtskrankheit , a venereal disease. Leverkühn’s contraction of this disease from a sex worker (a reworking of an anecdote from Nietzsche’s life) is produced by a “deepest desire for demonic reception [ Empfängnis ]” (DF 207; emphasis added). This is the first “pole” of the “sphere,” to use a word frequently employed by Mann, of syphilis: it derives from and concerns sexuality. On the other hand, it is primarily the cerebral character of syphilis that interests Mann who, as Thomas Rütten has shown, was intimately familiar with the scientific literature on this disease (147-66): syphilis is “the aphrodisiac of the brain” (DF 333); it is the heightened cerebral state induced by the disease that produces Leverkühn’s ingenious compositions. Spirit and sexus thus constitute the two poles of the sphere of sickness. 26 The course of the disease in Doctor Faustus , and hence of the novel itself, can be traced as moving from the genitals to the brain, from the sexual encounter to the purified, spiritual heights of cerebrality. Syphilis, by signifying both poles-by signifying ambiguously -marks the demonic character of human life. 27 More broadly, syphilis thus indexes what Leverkühn calls the “ambiguity of life itself ” (DF 261): life never means just one thing; its meaning oscillates, in this case between sexuality and spirit. This oscillation is another articulation of the need for Bindung : the rudderless floating between two poles solicits the demand for binding. In the face of this generalized demonic ambiguity, the question of Doctor Faustus therefore becomes whether the twofold character of life can be transcended toward Eindeutigkeit , an unambiguous univocity that would constitute a firm bond. Such overcoming of ambiguity would be a Durchbruch , 286 Jonas Rosenbrück DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 a “breakthrough,” one of the most important terms of the novel and one that emerges as the counter term to “durchhalten,” the perseverance that was so crucial to the logic of the mundane sickness found in Death in Venice . According to Leverkühn, this is, in fact, the only problem there is: “Fundamentally, there is only one problem in the world, and it has this name: how does one break through? ” (DF 412). The problem presented by the Bindungsroman is this: the possibility of breaking through the binding that it develops and that constitutes it, a breaking through that Leverkühn labels “redemption.” In Doctor Faustus , such an attempted breakthrough finds several forms, political as well as cultural and musicological. 28 Concerning Leverkühn’s profession as a “Tonsetzer,” the devil’s promise consists in a breakthrough toward pure musicality, a culture without civilization that would combine the highest strictness with new feeling and thus overcome the middling decadence of Leverkühn’s time: “He who could accomplish the breakthrough from spiritual coldness to a daring world of new feeling, he would be called the redeemer of art” (DF 429). Breaking through the ambiguity of civilized art would be the redemption of true art by undoing its free-floating and fickle, that is, its unbound status. It is in the sphere of music that Leverkühn comes closest to accomplishing such a breakthrough. The delineation of a breakthrough in the sphere demarcated by the poles of spirit and sexuality, by contrast, proves considerably more difficult. An indication of what such a breakthrough would be can be found in an enigmatic essay on Karl Kraus written by Walter Benjamin. At the time of the composition of Doctor Faustus , Mann was engaging deeply with Benjamin’s work: in his account of the genesis of Doctor Faustus , he twice mentions Benjamin’s Trauerspielbuch , which he had received from Theodor W. Adorno, and labels it “surprisingly perceptive and profound” (Mann, Entstehung 36). At the heart of the Trauerspielbuch , a book also in large parts concerned with the ambiguous nature of the Satanic, lies the question of an “Umschwung” of Baroque allegory: a jump toward redemption. In his essay on Karl Kraus, Benjamin develops a related notion of an Umschlag or redemptive jump, this time precisely of the two poles of spirit and sexuality: “Night is the switchgear [ Schaltwerk ] in which mere spirit turns [ umschlägt ] into mere sexuality, mere sexuality into mere spirit and these two abstractions hostile to life find calm in recognizing each other” (Benjamin, GS II 354). The crucial question then becomes: what, in the sphere spanned open by syphilis, could allow for such an Umschlag in which the two poles can come to a state of calm and lose their status as “abstractions hostile to life”? 29 In Doctor Faustus, two such attempts can be delineated, both having to do with “genre” in the sense of the generic and of gender-and both ending fatally. The first lies in a modification of love that seeks to evade the interdiction imposed DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Bindungsroman : Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann 287 on it by the excitation-containment the devil triggers: the modification found in homosexuality . The ruse behind this ploy, as hinted at by Leverkühn himself, unfolds according to a logic deeply related to the demonic scene of syphilitic contraction. The sexual encounter between Leverkühn and the prostitute is ambiguous, zwei-deutig , due to the very fact that it is predicated on the bipolar nature of sexual difference. By contrast, in the sexual economy of Doctor Faustus , the homosexual encounter promises a reduction of demonic sexual difference by leading from the twofold “hetero” character of the syphilitic scene of contagion to a onefold “homo” relation that would be safe from ambiguity. Bound to only one pole of the sphere of sexual difference, Leverkühn hopes that he can evade the devil’s interdiction of the middling love that mixes extremes. This, however, proves impossible: the homosexual love interest, the violinist Rudi Schwerdtfeger, after finally having broken through Leverkühn’s shield of solitude, dies. His death indicates that, in the end, homosexual love, too, is predicated on sexual difference and, by extension, is demonic and thus subject to the devil’s interdiction. If it is supposed to indicate sameness, then the “homo” character of homosexual love-as some queer theorists have spelled out in recent work that resonates with Mann’s depictions of homosexuality 30 -is illusory: it covers over the deeper fact that any sexual relation whatsoever is bipolar and ambiguous, and that this ambiguity cannot be located in the purported binary of two genders. The second attempt to delineate a breakthrough, more in line with some of Benjamin’s reflections on this question, ends even more painfully. Toward the end of the novel, Leverkühn’s nephew Nepomuk, a young boy, is introduced to the composer who eventually develops love for him. This, not surprisingly, induces the brutal demise of Nepomuk, who contracts meningitis (an obvious echo of the composer’s cerebral syphilis). Two potential reasons for the necessity of his death, which was never in doubt for Mann, can be indicated: the first is indicated by Nepomuk’s nickname, “Echo,” which is primarily used in the narration. Echo is just that: a reiteration, a reverberation of those who surround him. He does not, after all, introduce something new or something different into Leverkühn’s sphere that could escape from the “ambiguity of life itself.” Secondly, the promise the boy holds with respect to the sphere of spirit and sexus lies in his status as embodying “sexuation without sex” (Fenves 259). He is not yet part of the sphere of ambiguous sexuality but nevertheless, through sexual differentiation, maintains a relationship with that sphere. Youth introduces newness into the sphere of sexuality and thus seems to promise a possible transcendence of the bipolar fissure that marks this sphere. This promise of youth approximates an angelic nature that resonates in Mann’s descriptions of Echo and that Benjamin, in his Kraus essay, designates as the overcoming of the demonic: “Neither purity nor sacrifice has become the master of the de- 288 Jonas Rosenbrück DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 mon; but where origin and destruction find each other, there his reign ends. As a creature of child and man-eater, his conqueror stands before him: […] a new angel” (Benjamin, GS II 367). The overcoming of the demonic, the breakthrough going beyond ambiguity, would be found in an angelic figure that is new and “ephemeral.” It would be the rising up of always new voices-voices that, due to their perpetual newness, dissolve as quickly as they arose, never lasting long enough to give rise to the demonic. The crucial reason for Nepomuk’s failure to overcome demonic ambiguity and truly figure such an angelic breakthrough thus lies in a basic temporal feature of this figure: the boy, like all boys, must grow up. That which makes him special is a merely transitory and thus transient feature-at least within the narrative form of Doctor Faustus. This is, perhaps, the deeper reason for why Mann’s novel never delineates a dissolution of the demonic sphere and instead must inevitably lead toward death: the temporality of Mann’s Bindungsroman does not enable a time in which redemptive dissolution would be possible. Benjamin had given two indications in this respect. On the one hand, the time of Umschlag is a time of the in-between, of the inter and of the middle: “the hour between sleep and waking, the vigil, the middle part [ Mittelstück ] of his threefold loneliness” (Benjamin, GS II 354). On the other hand, and relatedly, it is a time of ephemerality: Kraus’s writing is that of a “quickly vanishing [ verfliegenden ] voice.” Mann’s novel qua Bindungsroman seems unable to accommodate either of these temporalities: his literature is meant to be monumental and lasting, thus disallowing the time of Nepomuk qua youth and the time of Umschwung . 31 The time of Doctor Faustus is explicitly progressive and extended. Put differently, due to its status as a parodic simulacrum of the Bildungsroman , the Bindungsroman ’s temporal structure is still too similar to the time of Bildung. This is embodied most clearly in the narrator, Serenus Zeit blom, a humanist from the world of Bildung . The time he narrates is precisely not an ephemeral blossoming or blooming as his name would indicate but rather a time of progression, unfolding, and development. As Mann indicates, these bonds to the world of Bildung are precisely what enables the narrator to be an apotropaic interface between Mann and Leverkühn, as well as between Leverkühn und the reader. This “undemonic” figure-pushed between the reader and the genuine problem of the Bindungsroman like a screen imported from the world of the Bildungsroman- thus precludes the delineation of a solution to the demonic problem precisely because he does not fully enter the sphere in which the problem poses itself. Consequently, at the end of Doctor Faustus , all that is left is yet another dichotomy: on the one hand, a continued attachment to the “ambiguity of life itself,” which sickness indexes but cannot dissolve; on the other hand, death. DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Bindungsroman : Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann 289 Notes 1 A first, significantly shorter and different version of this paper was given at the conference Living with Plagues , organized at Northwestern University in collaboration with the École Normale Supérieure (Paris) in May 2022. I thank the main organizers (Sam Weber, Marc Crépon, and Michael Loriaux) as well as the participants (in particular Isabelle Alfandary) for their encouraging and helpful comments. I equally thank the two anonymous reviewers for Colloquia Germanica for their feedback. 2 This paper’s central concept can thus be compared to the “Institutionenroman,” as it has recently been developed by Rüdiger Campe as an organizing genre term that succeeds the Bildungsroman . While the novel of the institution, according to Campe, takes leave from the individual life as the organizing device of the novel in favor of the life and death of the institution, the Bindungsroman performs a similar departure but asks about the binding forces of human life as they sometimes but not always crystalize into institutions; consequently, its driving force is not the trajectory of the institution but, as will be shown, the unfolding of sickness. See Campe, Die Institution im Roman . 3 On the question of Mann and the Bildungsroman , see, among others, Heller (213-4); Swales (61); Boes ( Formative Fictions 155-81). 4 Anja Schonlau thus states: “Die stärkste Denkfigur des Mann’schen Gesamtwerkes ist die Wechselbeziehung von Kunst und Krankheit” (314). For some of the most pertinent investigations of sickness see: Hoffmann, Thomas Mann als Philosoph der Krankheit ; Travers, “Sickness, Knowledge and the Formation of Self,” which directly links the question of sickness to the question of the Bildungsroman , albeit in a way differing from this paper’s approach; Albracht, “Über das Leid sprechen: Krankheit und Tod in ausgewählten Werken Thomas Manns” and, for some specific analyses concerning Mann’s relationship to illness and the medical sciences, the articles collected in the 39 th volume of the Thomas Mann Studien: “Was war das Leben? Man wusste es nicht! ” Thomas Mann und die Wissenschaften vom Menschen , ed. Thomas Sprecher. 5 In his extensive study Thomas Mann als Philosoph der Krankheit , Fernand Hoffmann demonstrates how sickness in Mann can be seen as a “formal principle” (79); Hoffmann, however, only applies this to the sick protagonists themselves not to the level of the work. Martin Swales has pointed out that sickness is explicitly presented as an issue of form in The Magic Mountain : “Castorp has learnt in his medical inquiries that the preservation of organic form is what distinguishes living from dying. Form is also central 290 Jonas Rosenbrück DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 to the medical profession itself - doctors formalize by means of latinate categorizations the multifarious possibilities of sickness” (56). 6 In this sense, the Bindungsroman is also a “self-productive reflexivity” (x) as Marc Redfield has shown for the Bildungsroman in his Phantom Formations . 7 Hereafter cited as TiV. Lauren Berlant has used the term “slow death” for this phenomenon and investigated the variegated modes of attachment that it produces and that produce it: “where that experience is simultaneously at an extreme and in a zone of ordinariness, where life building and the attrition of human life are indistinguishable” (Berlant 96). 8 Both the Faust theme and the question of the Bildungsroman , of course, refer the reader to Goethe and to Mann’s complicated stance vis-à-vis the Goethean corpus. In this respect it is instructive that Mann, when asked to choose a Goethean novel for reissuance in the “Epikon” series published by the List Verlag, chose Elective Affinities over and against the classic Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meister . In Mann’s introduction to the novel (see Mann, “Zu Goethes Wahlverwandtschaften ”), which justifies this choice, glimmers of an account of Elective Affinities as concerned with Bindung in an outstanding sense can be discerned, especially in the novel’s chemical vocabulary that is crucial to Mann (and also to Walter Benjamin who will be important below). I thank Peter Fenves for drawing my attention to this essay’s relevance. The chemist Henning Hopf has, in fact, used the term “Bindungsroman” in reference to Goethe’s Elective Affinities , specifically with respect to the role of chemical bonds (Hopf 44). (I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this reference.) 9 From here one could develop and critique the racializing imaginary of Mann’s work, which is tied, in part, to Mann’s insistence that Germany lies in the “middle” of Europe, an idea that will become crucial below. 10 Tobin sees Death in Venice as driven by a dialectic between Aschenbach’s relationship to homosexuality (which echoes in many ways Mann’s own professed opinions on the topic), on the one hand, and the narrator’s starkly divergent position, on the other: “ Der Tod in Venedig accepts the masculinist, Grecophilic belief that Aschenbach’s love is culturally productive, but also affirms the liberal position that this love is specific to a particular type of person with a specific homosexual identity. It resolves the conflict between the two positions by arguing that the homosexual is a prototypically modern entity, buffeted by social and political forces that restrict him to a specific, less than Greek, identity. All moderns can identify with the fragmentary existence of the homosexual artist” (208). 11 These queer bonds, as will become clearer in the section on Doctor Faustus below, also involve “queer chronologies,” as they have been developed in DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Bindungsroman : Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann 291 the work of José Esteban Muñoz, Jack Halberstam, or Elizabeth Freeman. The latter’s work, in particular in Time Binds , resonates with the argument proposed here. In Time Binds , Freeman thus argues that “‘binding’ is a way to manage excess; yet this very binding also produces a kind of rebound effect, in which whatever it takes to organize energy also triggers a release of energy that surpasses the original stimulus” (Freeman xvi). I thank one of the anonymous reviewers for encouraging me to spell out these connections to queer theoretical work. 12 For the term “life-death,” see the recently published seminars given by Jacques Derrida: Derrida, Life Death. 13 Nietzsche’s “great health,” which draws its strength from “exposure” ( preisgeben ), would not be opposed to sickness; see in particular Die fröhliche Wissenschaft, aphorism 382, and Nietzsche contra Wagner . Nietzsche here responds to the Romantic concept of sickness and genius and its legacies. 14 Hereafter cited as DF. 15 The notion of sickness producing genius, as an “individualizing” force that makes one “interesting,” can in particular be found in Novalis; for an extensive account of the Romantics’ relationship to this sickness-genius trope, with continuous reference to Mann, see Sontag, Illness as Metaphor. 16 See, for some of the more poignant uses, DF 67, 68, 200, 232, 236, 469, 470, 514, 636; all told, versions of “erregen” appear more than 50 times in Doctor Faustus . 17 As Tobias Boes has summarized it, “a long-standing debate in the critical literature has raged around the question of whether Doctor Faustus is best read as a humanist Bildungsroman , or as a literary adaptation of the “apocalyptic” compositional technique invented by Adrian Leverkühn (Boes, Formative Fictions 158); the proposal here is to think Doctor Faustus ’ Bindungsroman character as a compromise formation of these two opposing tendencies. 18 See, for instance, Travers who traces Castorp’s fascination with death to his observation of his dying grandfather (62) and Albracht who argues that Castorp, through his illness, “gewinnt als einziger auf dem Zauberberg eine Erkenntnis, die ihn eine humanistische Gesamtschau des Menschen begreifen lässt” (366). 19 Hereafter cited as Z. 20 “Vorgebildet,” for instance, can be found in the context of the relationship between the generations (Z 34, 39) and, most importantly, in the relationship between Castorp’s childhood sickness and his sickness as an adult patient, which is mirrored in the “vorgebildet” character of Clawdia Chauchat and the little schoolboy who lends him a pencil. Again, no true Bildung - here emphasized by the pedagogical setting-is possible. 292 Jonas Rosenbrück DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 21 This etymological claim can be traced to early Christian authors. The competing etymology derives from Cicero according to whom “religion” comes from “relegere,” to reread. 22 With respect to Leo Naphta and the political ideas he embodies, Mann can thus claim that “the totalitarian statesman is a founder of a religion” (Mann, “Meine Zeit” 20). The link between totalitarianism and religiosity, or between totalitarianism and (re)binding of course gains unprecedented urgency in the writing of Doctor Faustus. The novel thus presents the political problem of National-Socialism in precisely these terms, where “the national” and “the social” (DF 166) are the only two options for rebinding the German people (see in particular chapter XIV). This problem of Doctor Faustus ’s account of the German character and the catastrophe of Nazi Germany, including the role of syphilis in (antisemitic) Nazi propaganda, will be bracketed here. 23 Love in The Magic Mountain is also explicitly linked to sickness by Doctor Krokowski, a Freud figure, who gives extensive, esoteric lectures that culminate in the claim that “all sickness is transformed love” (Z 179). 24 “Interesting,” of course, is a crucial term for the Romantics and their thinking of sickness. For an extensive account of the “interesting” as being “cool” in contemporary aesthetics, see Ngai, Our Aesthetic Categories. 25 Whence Mann’s invocation of the theological figure of the devil: the latter indexes that the sphere of sickness that Leverkühn moves in is the ambiguous sphere of the demonic. (The famous chapter XXV that relates Leverkühn’s encounter with the devil and also contains some of the most important passages concerning love, sickness, and Durchbruch , is set up by a scene of Leverkühn reading Kierkegaard (DF 300), whose work, of course, also knows the term “demonic,” for instance in Sickness unto Death. ) For useful analyses of the extremely complex intellectual history of the term “demonic,” see Wetters, Demonic History and Friedrich, Geulen, Wetters, Das Dämonische , especially the latter’s chapter on Mann and Spengler. The term will here be used primarily with reference to the “ambiguity” of the demonic that is so important to Goethe, Mann, Benjamin, and others. 26 Walter Benjamin articulates the general idea underlying this claim succinctly in the “Schemata zum psychophysischen Problem”: “Geist und Sexualität sind die polaren Grundkräfte der ‘Natur’ des Menschen” (GS VI 81). He further describes the encounter of literature and prostitution in related terms: “Das Literatentum ist das Dasein im Zeichen des bloßen Geistes wie die Prostitution das Dasein im Zeichen des bloßen Sexus” (GS II 353). 27 Doctor Faustus makes this most explicit in a description of the only other syphilitic in the novel who also entered into a contract with the devil: “Das DOI 10.24053/ CG-2024-0013 Bindungsroman : Sickness, Sexuality, and Ambiguity in Thomas Mann 293 Geschlechtliche amüsierte ihn in einem literarischen Sinn; sexus und Geist hingen ihm eng zusammen, -was an sich nicht falsch ist” (DF 347). 28 For an analysis of why music became so crucial to the Faustus theme, in particular in the context of Mann’s exile from Germany in 1933, see Vaget (444-7). Regarding this theme’s political version: The term “Durchbruch” played a crucial role in German politics of the first half of the twentieth century, for instance in Hindenburg’s attempt to “breakthrough” during World War I. The term then carries over into the Nazis’ endeavor to gain Lebensraum. For some remarks on the “affinities between Leverkühn’s project and the aesthetics of German fascism” as the shared use of the term “Durchbruch” indicates it, see Boes, Thomas Mann’s War (236-7). 29 For a somewhat divergent but related approach to the question of Umschlag in Mann, see Hoffmann (188-98) who rightly points out that was is at stake here is “nicht die höchste Stufe eines evolutiven Steigerungs- und Vergeistigungsprozesses, sondern etwas vollkommen Neues, das sich keineswegs aus dem Vorhergehenden ergibt. Es kann sich nur in der paradoxen Möglichkeit eines Umschlags ereignen” (188-9). 30 See, for instance, Sara Ahmed’s Queer Phenomenology , which reconstructs “this association between homosexuality and sameness” (96) and shows how this alleged sameness relies on the “fantasy” that all women are “the same,” just as all men are “the same.” Mann’s work already undoes this fantasy by inscribing an ineluctable, sexual difference and indeed asymmetry within each “one” gender. 31 It is an open question-and one worth pursuing-whether different moments in Mann’s oeuvre can be identified for which this verdict does not hold, moments, as it were, that break through the general tendency of Mann’s narrative art. Works Cited Ahmed, Sara. Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others. Durham: Duke University Press, 2006. 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