Colloquia Germanica
cg
0010-1338
Francke Verlag Tübingen
Es handelt sich um einen Open-Access-Artikel, der unter den Bedingungen der Lizenz CC by 4.0 veröffentlicht wurde.http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/61
2008
412
HANS RUDOLF VAGET (ED.): Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 288 pp. $ 29.95.
61
2008
Elisabeth Bartsch Siekhaus
cg4120183
Besprechungen / Reviews 183 der Ästhetik Hegels und dem von ihm in der Moderne identifizierten Konflikt «‹zwischen der Poesie des Herzens und der entgegenstehenden Prosa der Verhältnisse›» (318) ein Modell erfolgreicher künstlerischer Darstellung eines universell interessierenden Individualschicksals entgegenstellt. Achingers Arbeit ist ein Steinbruch und nicht unbedingt dazu angetan, auf einmal gelesen zu werden. Jedes Kapitel allein könnte bereits genug Material für eine Doktorarbeit liefern, und ihre detaillierten und genauen Diskussionen der existierenden Forschungsliteratur weisen sie als gewandte und extrem belesene Literatur- und Kulturwissenschaftlerin aus. Es ist eine Grundsatzfrage, ob Doktorarbeiten, die ebendiese ausführlichen Debatten mit existierenden Positionen zum Thema führen, in dieser Form auch veröffentlicht werden sollten. Achingers exzellente Diskussionen besonders der Problemkreise Liberalismus und «Judenfrage», Nationalismus und Andersartigkeit, und auch ihre sehr genauen und gut nachvollziehbaren Einzeldeutungen von Figuren, Konstellationen und Fragen der Romanästhetik sind so fundiert und gehen weit über den «Aufhänger» Soll und Haben hinaus, dass sie auch ein Publikum ansprechen, das generell Interesse an der Entwicklung eines deutschen nationalen Identitätsbewusstseins im 19. Jahrhundert hat. Die zum Teil langen Diskussionen und Erwiderungen auf Forschungsbeiträge machen es aber eher mühsam, das Interesse nicht zu verlieren (nicht zuletzt auch, da Achingers Prosa extrem wissenschaftlich und damit nicht immer leicht zugänglich ist). So wäre Christine Achinger vielleicht besser beraten gewesen, ihre Arbeit für den generellen Buchmarkt noch einmal zu revidieren, wie es in den USA von Verlegern erbeten wird. Dessen ungeachtet ist Achingers Arbeit beeindruckend und zeigt, dass es möglich ist, Tiefen- und Breitenbetrachtung erfolgreich miteinander zu vereinen und als Resultat eines «close readings» einen Beitrag zu liefern, der die Kultur- und Mentalitätsgeschichte des 19. Jahrhunderts und des deutschen Liberalismus neu beleuchtet und dem es gelingt, am Beispiel nur eines Buches die komplexe Problematik, in die sich das liberale Bürgertum des 19. Jahrhunderts verwickelte, zu beleuchten und historisch differenziert von vorschnellen Kategorisierungen und Urteilen zu befreien. Middlebury College Bettina Matthias H ANS R UDOLF V AGET (E D .): Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain. A Casebook. Oxford: Oxford UP, 2008. 288 pp. $ 29.95. Besides the introduction Hans Rudolf Vaget wrote two essays for this well-balanced volume containing four more original and several previously published essays, all by English-writing authors. He wants to offer «helpful perspectives» and «fresh approaches developed by a new generation» while also revisiting «some of the familiar issues of the literature on the Magic Mountain» (8). Vaget’s essay «The Making of The Magic Mountain» draws on Mann’s letters and the by now published diaries and concludes: «To an astonishing degree [Mann] proceeded […] in an almost improvisational fashion» (16). Mann re-arranged chapters, changed and added characters under the impression of - among many others - his meetings with Georg Lukács and Gerhart Hauptmann, and his readings of Spengler: 184 Besprechungen / Reviews «[A] fortuitous interplay of separate factors, personal and historical, is perhaps the most characteristic feature of the genesis of this book» (23). Martin Travers in «Death, Knowledge and the Formation of Self: The Magic Mountain» takes the reader in medias res: Mann’s preoccupation with death and the relationship between knowledge and sickness. Mann considered the experience of death a necessary stage along the road to knowledge, but undermined any romantic aura surrounding death with naturalistic detail and ironic deflation (32). Mann regarded his novel a parody of the Bildungsroman, with many departures from the earlier classical models. The narrator leaves the question open: What has Castorp actually learned? «It does appear that Castorp has come full circle, to embrace what he always was,» but he dies «knowingly» (43). In «Photography and Bildung in The Magic Mountain» Erik Downing asks: «How does the introduction of the discursive or metaphorical regime of the photograph fundamentally alter the project of Bildung […] ? » (45). Noting Walter Benjamin’s observation that the advent of psychoanalysis coincides with that of photography, Downing shows that each of the two primary pedagogical influences on Castorp «is situated within the metaphorical field of photography and its model of development» (46). Downing thoroughly plows this field, relating Bild to Bildung and Entwicklung to the photographic plate, etc. According to Downing, «Mann makes the connection […] with the photothematics more or less explicit later on […]» (53). «[Castorp] comes to insist on […] a photographic logic […] of ongoing inversion and exchangeability» (58), which allows Downing to conclude: «The Magic Mountain is and is not a Bildungsroman, and Mann […] leaves us in this suspended state, in the endless oscillation between the old and the new, between Bildung and Entwicklung at once» (68). Todd Kontje’s essay «Modern Masculinities on the Magic Mountain» contributes further insights into the Bildungsroman issue. According to Kontje, Mann plays with its generic conventions, assigning his characters «precarious and intrinsically unstable» sexual identities (85). Mann «subverts [this] intrinsically patriarchal genre about the solidification of male heterosexual identity into a story about ambiguous desires and inconclusive debates» (82). Nancy P. Nenno in «Projections on Blank Space: Landscape, Nationality, and Identity in Der Zauberberg» postulates that contested «blank» spaces on the map, Alpine snowscapes, Arctic regions, hostile terrain and war zones provide a screen onto which conflicts surrounding identity, both individual and national, can be projected. «The Alpine regions […] serve as a testing ground for identity, both Hans Castorp’s own and that of Germany» (114). The title of Vaget’s essay «‹Politically Suspect›; Music on the Magic Mountain» is taken from Mann’s statement: «[M]usic has always been suspect, most suspect to those who loved it most deeply, like Nietzsche» (125). Vaget points to the history of «what Germans and almost everyone else considered to be the most enchanting flower of German culture: music» (125), ideologically exploited in «that characteristically German alliance of music and politics» (134). Mann, who regarded the Germans’ emotional attachment to Romanticism as anachronistic, «a sickness» (137), has Castorp stumbling to his death with Der Lindenbaum on his lips, victim of the «shameful Besprechungen / Reviews 185 exploitation of the German people’s romantic impulses» (138). This conclusion leads directly to the next essay of the collection. In «‹Linke Leute von rechts›; Thomas Mann’s Naphta and the Ideological Confluence of Radical Right and Radical Left in the Early Years of the Weimar Republic» Anthony Grenville discusses the postwar confluence of ideological extremes, a «highly unusual combination of revolutionary Marxism with reactionary irrationalism» (145). He sees Romanticism as «the crucial ideological turning-point where many Germans abandoned reason, freedom, humanist individualism for the cult of emotion, instinct, nationalism […]» (163) and attributes the pattern of non-thinking submission to a totalitarian authority to a Nietzschean Lebensphilosophie and Spengler’s organic vitalism which subordinated intellect to will, strength, vitality. Although he finds tendencies «far more related to the extreme reactionary right» (159), he concludes: «Naphta is the dual-purpose totalitarian, the representative of both the left and the right in the Weimar Republic, united by hatred of the center» (165). In «Naphta and His Ilk: Jewish Characters in Mann’s Magic Mountain» Franka Marquart and Yahya Elsaghe argue that Mann’s ambivalence in representing «Jewishness» is a symptom of his inability to «readily and completely […] free himself from the ingrained anti-Semitic notions of his formative years» (175/ 76). They characterize the Jewish Jesuit Naphta as «the embodiment of a long and infamous tradition of amalgamating Jews and Jesuits» (186) and conclude: «Naphta […] becomes the embodiment of all anti-Semitic projections that constitute […] the image of the Jew in the aftermath of Enlightenment, […] the image of the ‹deadly Jew›» (190). Dorrit Cohn in «Telling Timelessness in Der Zauberberg» asks with the narrator: «Kann man die Zeit erzählen, diese selbst, als solche, an und für sich? » (201). It is the narrator’s stated intention to contract mountain years to reflect «the effects [their] hermetic magic has worked on his protagonist’s consciousness» (207). The summary narrative technique (Raffung) inevitably brings the narrator’s voice to the fore. Paradoxically the narrator also wants to convey the «figural experience,» «including [Castorp’s] atrophied sense of time» (207). Such mutually exclusive solutions presuppose either an unreliable narrator or a thinking mistake on the part of Mann (213). Cohn points to Mann’s actual resolution, the compromise of alternating summary and scene. She characterizes her findings as inconclusive and invites debate. In «The Magic Mountain. A ‹Humoristic Counterpart› to Death in Venice» Ellis Shookman finds Mann’s notion of humor complicated; «funny,» but also suggesting a «detached, reflective human awareness» (222). Neither is the meaning of «counterpart» (Gegenstück) any more «clear […] or constant» (224). Notwithstanding, the possible comparison of (few) instances of humor and an avalanche of «counterparts» in both works leads to a hunt for correspondences regarding psychoanalysis, knowledge, literary form, soldierly discipline, colors, physical characteristics, the homoerotic, Slavic traits, allusions to Greek gods, monotony, primeval silence, disorientation, resemblances of characters, and more. Shookman’s conclusion: «[T]hese works are alike and different» (227); they «have significantly comparable scenes, subjects, characters, and classical references» (235). 186 Besprechungen / Reviews According to Malte Herwig in «The ‹Magic Mountain Malady›; Der Zauberberg and the Medical Community 1924-2006,» Mann invited responses by the medical profession when delivering realistic descriptions of the disease as well as less than flattering depictions of the medical providers. According to initial reactions Mann was an unqualified amateur who ventured to criticize them and their patients. «Reading this book the layman will think that almost everybody suffering from tuberculosis of the lungs is bound to degenerate spiritually as well as morally» (250). Defending his novel as «genuinely medical» (ärztlich) (246), Mann emphasized the narrative’s «service to life, its commitment to health» (251). Eventually Mann became «idolized and instrumentalized» (258) by parts of the medical community. Mills College Elisabeth Bartsch Siekhaus M ONIKA C ZERNIN : «Jenes herrliche Gefühl der Freiheit». Frieda von Bülow und die Sehnsucht nach Afrika. Berlin: List Verlag, 2008. 383 pp. € 19,90. Monika Czernin, who has studied pedagogy, philosophy, and political science and now works as a journalist, documentary film maker, and independent author, details in the prologue how she first became acquainted with the original materials (consisting of loose leaf diary entries, letters, photos, and newspaper articles) which form the basis for her latest novel. A phone call from a distant cousin of Frieda von Bülow, Earl Friedrich von Hatzfeldt, awakens the interest of Czernin in the life of a writer who is nowadays viewed simultaneously as one of the most influential colonial feminists in Imperial Germany whilst also being deemed anti-Semitic and racist. Most likely, the latter labels have pushed Frieda von Bülow and her writings onto the periphery of serious study. The book is divided into six main chapters, each detailing a particular section of von Bülow’s life in a rather episodic manner. The initial prologue and a timeline of major events in von Bülow’s life, along with a short epilogue and acknowledgement of thanks by Czernin to all the people and experts who have helped her gather information for this book, support the biographical details with factual data. Frieda von Bülow (1857-1909) was born into old Prussian nobility, and her life was both framed and constricted by the hierarchical expectations of this social class. Czernin begins the biography of von Bülow, who was the oldest of five children, with the first chapter entitled «Kindheitsliebe,» but not with the birth of Frieda, as might be expected. Rather, she details receiving the materials of von Bülow’s life in the mail, looking at photographs and reading herself into the life of this woman. Czernin approaches the writing of her biographical novel by first conveying the key experience that she believes has coloured the rest of von Bülow’s life - the death of Frieda’s beloved youngest sister, Margarethe. Margarethe von Bülow, a respected writer in her own right, died of heart failure on January 2, 1884 in Berlin, trying to save a young boy who had fallen through the ice. Czernin does not give a sober, factual account of what happened, but assumes von Bülow’s personality as she imagines Frieda’s emotional turmoil in personally having to witness her sister’s death, even though Frieda was convalescing in Italy during this time. This event affects von Bülow deeply and
