Doctor Faustus (45 page)

While everybody marvelled and laughed and clapped his knees at these irritating remarks, I sought Adrian’s eye, but he would not look at me. As for von Riedesel, he was a prey to sheer confusion.

“Pardon me,” he said, “permit me… Bach, Palestrina…” These names wore for him the nimbus of conservative authority, and here they were being assigned to the realm of modernistic disintegration. He sympathized—and at the same time found it all so unnatural that he even took his monocle out of his eye, thus robbing his face of every gleam of intelligence. He fared no better when Breisacher’s cultural harangue shifted its theme to the field of Old Testament criticism, thus turning to his own personal sphere of origin, the Jewish race or people and its intellectual history. Even here he adhered to a double-faced, a crass and malicious conservatism. According to him, decline, besottedness, loss of every contact with the old and genuine, had set in earlier and in a more respectable place than anyone could have dreamed. I can only say that it was on the whole frantically funny. Biblical personages—revered by every Christian childKing David, King Solomon, and the prophets drivelling about dear God in heaven, these were the already debased representatives of an exploded late theology, which no longer had any idea of the old and genuine Hebraic actuality of Jahve, the Elohim of the people; and in the rites with which at the time of genuine folkishness they served this national god or rather forced him to physical presence, saw only “riddles of primeval time.” He was particularly cutting about Solomon “the wise,” and treated him with so little ceremony that the gentlemen whistled through their teeth and the ladies cheered as well as they could for amazement.

“Pardon,” said von Riedesel. “I am, to put it mildly… King Solomon in all his glory… Should you not—“

“No, Excellence, I should not,” answered Breisacher. “The man was an aesthete unnerved by erotic excesses and in a religious sense a progressivist blockhead, typical of the back-formation of the cult of the effectively present national god, the general concept of the metaphysical power of the folk, into the preaching of an abstract and generally human god in heaven; in other words, from the religion of the people to the religion of the world. To prove it we only need to read the scandalous speech which he made after the first temple was finished, where he asks: ‘But will God indeed dwell on the earth?’ as though Israel’s whole and unique task had not consisted therein, that it should build God a dwelling, a tent, and provide all means for His constant presence. But Solomon was so bold as to declaim: ‘Behold, the heaven and heaven of heavens cannot contain Thee; how much less this house that I have builded!’ That is just twaddle and the beginning of the end, that is the degenerate conception of the poets of the Psalms; with whom God is already entirely exiled into the sky, and who constantly sing of God in heaven, whereas the Pentateuch does not even know it as the seat of the Godhead. There the Elohim goes on ahead of the people in a pillar of fire, there He will dwell among the people, go about among the people and have His shambles—to avoid the thin word ‘altar’ substituted by a later humanity. Is it conceivable for a psalmist to make God ask: ‘Do I then eat the flesh of bulls and drink the blood of goats?’ To put such words in God’s mouth is already simply unheard of, a slap of impertinent enlightenment in the face or the Pentateuch, which expressly describes the sacrifice as ‘the bread’—that is, as the actual nourishment of Jahve. It is only a step from this question, as also from the phrases of Solomon the ‘wise,’ to Maimonides, supposedly the greatest rabbinical scholar of the Middle Ages, actually an assimilator of Aristotle, who manages to ‘explain’ the sacrifice as a concession by God to the heathen instincts of the people—ha, ha! Good, the sacrifice of blood and fat, which once, salted and seasoned with savoury smells, fed God, made Him a body, held Him to the present, is for the psalmist only a ‘symbol’” (I can still hear the accents of ineffable contempt in which Dr. Breisacher uttered the word); “one no longer slaughters the beast, but, incredibly enough, gratitude and humility. ‘Whoso offereth praise,’ is the word now, ‘glorifieth me’! And another time: ‘The sacrifices of God are a broken spirit.’ In short, all that ceased, long ago, to be folk and blood and religious reality; it is nothing any more but weak water-gruel.”

So much as a taste of Breisacher’s highly conservative exegesis. It was as amusing as it was repulsive. He could not say enough to display the genuine cult of the real and by no means abstractly universal, hence also not “almighty” and “all-present” God of the people as a magic technique, a manipulation of dynamic forces, physically not without its risks, in which mishaps might easily occur, catastrophic short circuits due to mistakes and failures. The sons of Aaron had died because they had brought on “strange fire.” That was an instance of a technical mischance, the consequence of an error. Somebody named Uzza had laid hands on the chest, the so-called ark of the covenant, as it threatened to slip when it was being transported by wagon, and he fell dead on the spot. That too was a transcendental dynamic discharge, occurring through negligence—the negligence, indeed, of King David, who was too fond of playing the harp, and had no real understanding of’things any more; for he had the ark conveyed as the Philistines did, by wagon instead of on bearing—poles according to the well-founded prescript of the Pentateuch. David, indeed, was quite as ignorant of origins and quite as besotted, not to say brutalized, as Solomon his son. He was too ignorant, for instance, to realize the dynamic dangers of a general census of the population; and by instituting one had brought about a serious biological misfortune, an epidemic with high mortality; a reaction of the metaphysical powers of the people, which might have been foreseen. For a genuine folk simply could not stand such a mechanizing registration, the dissolution by enumeration of the dynamic whole into similar individuals…

It merely gratified Breisacher when a lady interposed and said she had not known that a census was such a sin.

“Sin?” he responded, in an exaggeratedly questioning tone. No, in the genuine religion of a genuine folk such colourless theological conceptions as sin and punishment never occurred, in their merely ethical causal connection. What we had here was the causality of error, a working accident. Religion and ethics represented the decline of religion. All morality was “a purely intellectual” misunderstanding of the ritual. Was there anything more god-forsaken than the “purely intellectual”? It had remained for the characterless world-religion, out of “prayer”—
sit venia verbo
—to make a begging appeal for mercy, an “O Lord,”

“God have mercy,” a “Help” and “Give” and “Be so good.” Our so-called prayer… “Pardon!” said von Riedesel, this time with real emphasis. “Quite right, of course, but ‘Head bare at prayer was always my—“

“Prayer,” finished Dr. Breisacher relentlessly, “is the vulgarized and rationalistically watered-down late form of something very vital, active and strong: the magic invocation, the coercion of God.”

I really felt sorry for the Baron. Here was his aristocratic conservatism outbid by the frightfully clever playing of atavistic cards; by a radical conservatism that no longer had anything aristocratic about it, but rather something revolutionary; something more disrupting than any liberalism, and yet, as though in mockery, possessing a laudable conservative appeal. All that must bewilder the very depths of his soul. I imagined it giving him a sleepless night, but my sympathy may have been exaggerated. Certainly not everything that Breisacher said was correct. One could easily have disputed him and pointed out that the spirited condemnation of the sacrifice is not found first of all in the prophets but in the Pentateuch itself; for it is Moses who bluntly declares that the sacrifice is secondary and lays all the emphasis on obedience to God and the keeping of His commandments. But a sensitive man does not like to disturb another; it is unpleasant to break in on a train of thought with logical or historical objections; even in the anti-intellectual such a man respects and spares the intellectual. Today we see, of course, that it was the mistake of our civilization to have practised all too magnanimously this respect and forbearance. For we found after all that the opposite side met us with sheer impudence and the most determined intolerance.

I was already thinking of all these things when at the beginning of this work I made an exception to my general profession of friendliness towards the Jewish people, confessing that I had run across some pretty annoying specimens, and the name of the scholar Breisacher slipped prematurely from my pen. Yet can one quarrel with the Jewish spirit when its quick hearing and receptivity for the coming thing, the new, persists also in the most extraordinary situations, where the avant-garde coincides with the reactionary? In any case, it was at the Schlaginhaufens’, and through this very Breisacher, that I first came in touch with the new world of anti-humanity, of which my easy-going soul till then had known nothing at all.

CHAPTER XXIX

T
he Munich carnival season, that period between Epiphany and Ash Wednesday, was celebrated by common consent with dance and mirth, with flaming cheeks and flashing eyes, and with all sorts of public and private entertainments. The carnival of 1914, in which I, the still youthful academy professor from Freising, alone or in company with Adrian, took part, has remained in my memory, a vivid or rather a portentous image. It was indeed the last carnival before the beginning of the four-year war which has now been telescoped with the horrors of today into one historical epoch; the last one before the so-called “first World War,” which put an end for ever to the idyl of aesthetic guilelessness in the city on the Isar and its dionysiac easy-goingness—if I may put it like that. And it was also the time in which certain individual destinies in our circle of acquaintance unfolded before my eyes, and, almost unheeded outside our circle, led up to naked catastrophe. I go into it in these pages because what happened did to some extent touch the life and destiny of my hero, Adrian Leverkühn; yes, in one of them, to my actual knowledge, he was involved and active in an obscure and fatal way.

I am not referring to the case of Clarissa Rodde, the proud and flippant blonde who toyed with the macabre. She still lived among us, in her mother’s house, and shared in the carnival gaieties. Soon afterwards, however, she prepared to leave town and fill an engagement as
jeune premiere
in the provinces, which her teacher, who played father parts at the Hoftheater, had got for her. The engagement proved a failure; and her teacher, a man of experience named Seiler, must be absolved from all responsibility for it. He had written a letter one day to the Frau Senator saying that his pupil was extraordinarily intelligent and full of enthusiasm, but that she had not enough natural gift for a successful career on the stage. She lacked, he said, the first requisite of all dramatic art, the instinct of the play-actor—what one calls theatre blood; and in all conscience he felt constrained to. advise against her continuing. This had led to a
crise de nerves
, an outburst of despair on Clarissa’s part, which went to the mother’s heart, and Seiler had been asked to terminate the training and use his connections to get her a start as a beginner.

It is now twenty-four years since Clarissa’s lamentable destiny fulfilled itself, as I shall relate in its proper place in my story. Here I have in mind what happened to her delicate and suffering sister Inez, who cultivated the past and its regrets—and to poor Rudi Schwerdtfeger, of whom I thought with horror when I mentioned just now, almost involuntarily, the share of the recluse Adrian Leverkühn in these events. The reader is already used to my anticipations and will not interpret them as muddle-headed-ness and disregard of literary conventions. The truth is simply that I fix my eye in advance with fear and dread, yes, with horror on certain things which I shall sooner or later have to tell; they stand before me and weigh me down, and I try to distribute their weight by referring to them beforehand, of course not comprehensibly to anybody but myself. I let them a little way out of the bag and hope by this means to make the telling more tolerable to myself, to take out the sting and mitigate the distress. So much in excuse of a “faulty” technique of narration and in explanation of my difficulties. I scarcely need to say that Adrian was remote from the beginnings of the events I shall speak of here, being aware of them only to a certain extent and that only through me, who had much more social curiosity or shall I say human sympathy.

As I mentioned earlier, neither of the two Rodde sisters, Clarissa and Inez, got on particularly well with their mother, the Frau Senator, and they not seldom betrayed that the informal, slightly lax and bohemian air of her salon, the uprooted existence, upholstered though it was with the remnants of upper-middle-class elegance, got on their nerves. They strained away from the hybrid milieu, but in different directions. The proud Clarissa reached outwards towards a definite career as an actress, for which, as her master had finally been forced to say, she lacked a real calling. While, on the other hand, the refined and pensive Inez, who was at bottom afraid of life, yearned back to the refuge, the psychological security of an assured bourgeois position, the route to which was marriage, for love if possible, but in God’s name even without love. Inez walked this road, of course with the cordial approval of her mother, and came to grief, as her sister did on hers. It turned out tragically enough that this solution was not the right one: that neither for Inez personally, nor for her circumstances in view of the times she lived in, this upsetting and undermining social epoch, did it hold out any hope of satisfaction.

At this time there approached her a certain Dr. Helmut Institoris, instructor in aesthetics and the history of art at the Technical Institute in Munich, where he lectured on esthetic theory and the history of Renaissance architecture and handed round photographs in class. He had good prospects of being called one day to the university, of becoming professor, member of the Academy and so on; especially when he, a bachelor from a solid Würzburg family, in expectancy of a good inheritance, should have enhanced his dignity by setting up a household of his own where he could gather society about him. He went courting, and he did not worry about the financial situation of the girl he courted. On the contrary, he belonged to those men who prefer in marriage to have all the economic power in their hands and to have their wives dependent on them.