Thomas Mann's Artist-Heroes

Chapter Five. Schiller’s Don Carlos and The Magic Mountain

89 CHAPTER FIVE Schiller’s Don Carlos and The Magic Mountain I Several nineteenth-century writers and composers were seriously interested in Friedrich Schiller. Coleridge wrote a sonnet on the dramatist and translated Don Carlos in 1800; Carlyle published a Life of Schiller in 1825; and Verdi’s opera Don Carlo (1867) was more popular and artistically successful than the operatic play. Later on, in a sly dig at the occasionally pompous playwright, Nabokov has Lolita, after her marriage, become Mrs. Richard F. Schiller (the “F.” is significant). But no author was more passionate about Schiller, from his schooldays to old age, than Thomas Mann. In his early story “A Weary Hour” (1905) Mann portrayed the physical illness, creative exhaustion and artistic triumph of the unnamed Schiller. In “Goethe and Tolstoy” (1922) Mann contrasted him with the healthy Goethe and associated Schiller with disease: with “the subjective, the pathological, the romantic.”1 In Doctor Faustus (1947) the choral ending of Adrian Leverkühn’s last work, The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus, “takes back” and grimly reverses Schiller’s “Ode to Joy” at the end of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. The German Don Carlos (1787) played an important thematic role in “Tonio Kröger” (1903) and The Magic Mountain (1924). Like Anton Chekhov, whom Mann also wrote about in Last Essays (posthumously published in 1959), Schiller had an engaging and sympathetic character. Mann’s last, ninety-five-page work, “On Schiller” (1955), quoted a phrase from the second line of Don Carlos, “königliche Hoheit,” which he’d used as the title of his early novel Royal Highness (1909). The eighty-year-old author also recalled his youthful infatuation with the play: “Don Carlos— how shall I ever forget the first passion for language kindled in me by its glorious verse when I was a boy of fifteen? . . . What address, what fluency, what courtly polish, agility, scintillating noblesse and dramatic vigor of poetic line are found in this work by a young man of twenty-five!”2 Mann was particularly interested in five aspects of the unusually long and complicated Don Carlos: the ceremonial rituals of the Spanish court under King Philip II, the great rival of the English Queen Elizabeth (the play takes place in 1568); the intense friendship between Philip’s son, Prince Don Carlos, and his childhood companion, the Marquis de Posa; the theme of incest; the dramatic climax in which King Philip weeps; and the portrayal of the Spanish Inquisition. The scene in which the king reads a stolen letter and wrongly believes his wife, Elisabeth, has betrayed him— “‘Love—unrestrainedly / And the long sufferer a fair reward.’ / Demonic treachery!”3 —suggested to Mann the long-awaited and finally consummated love of Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat when the demons are let loose in the “Walpurgis-Night” chapter of The Magic Mountain. A fragment in Schiller’s journal Thalia gives the stage directions to act 1, scene 9, as “all stiff customs of Spanish ceremony [alle Steifigkeiten des spanischen Zeremoniells].”4 The emotional friendship of Carlos and Posa, the very core of the play, has a powerful impact on Carlos’ love for Philip’s queen, his troubled relations with Philip and his idealistic quest to free the Spanish Netherlands from Spanish oppression. The friendship also has fatal results when Posa sacrifices himself to save Carlos. Erich Heller wrote that as a schoolboy Schiller “was devoted to a fellow-pupil, the hero of some of his earliest poems. But the passionate friendship came to an end: the friend gave notice. He found he could not believe any more in Schiller.”5 Similarly, as Anthony Heilbut noted, “When he was fourteen, Thomas fell in love with a classmate, Armin Martens. His feelings persisted for at least two years. . . . When he was in his seventies, he could recall it as the most ‘delicate, blissfully painful’ time of his life.”6 Just as Schiller transformed his boyhood friendship into the intense relations of Carlos and Posa, so Mann transformed his feelings into Tonio Kröger’s love for Hans Hansen. 90 chapter five In Don Carlos the eponymous hero had once been betrothed to Elisabeth , who was married to his father for reasons of state and became his young stepmother. Carlos emphasizes the incest theme by constantly referring to Elisabeth as his mother and by stating, “I love, desire my Mother,” to which she responds, “This is lunacy, / And...