Thomas Mann's Artist-Heroes

Chapter Seven. The Late Stories

111 CHAPTER SEVEN The Late Stories ’Tis all in pieces, all coherence gone. John Donne “Disorder and Early Sorrow” In Mann’s “Disorder and Early Sorrow” (1925) the characters in one family reflect the calamitous political events in postwar Germany. The Kaiser had been forced to abdicate and flee into exile after the military defeat in 1918, when the monarchy became a republic. Oswald Spengler published his pessimistic and ominous The Decline of the West, in two volumes, in 1918 and 1923. In 1919 the idealistic but short-lived Bavarian Soviet Republic collapsed, and the Spartacist-Communist revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht were murdered. The distinguished German Jewish foreign minister, Walther Rathenau, was assassinated in 1922. In 1923 Hitler staged the abortive beer-hall putsch in Munich, his first violent bid for power, and the French occupied the industrial heartland of the Ruhr after Germany had failed to pay war reparations. The Reichsbank collapsed, causing a severe economic crisis, marked by mass unemployment and wild currency inflation, which wiped out the lifetime savings of the middle class. In Weimar Chronicle, Alex de Jonge wrote that there was a vast “difference between the ‘old’ generation who had scraped and saved carefully in order to acquire the security of a house, and the ‘new generation’ for whom there could be no security any more, who ‘raided capital’ or what was left of it, and were prepared to go to any lengths to enjoy themselves.”1 The focus of the story narrows from the political and economic disorder of the nation, to the social disorder of the guests who gather at the family ’s party, to the private disorder of Professor Cornelius and his daughter Ellie. The characters are clearly based on Mann’s own family in Munich. The older children, who want to be actors, are modeled on Klaus and Erika, who would soon have a successful cabaret act. The younger ones, Ellie and Snapper, are based on Elisabeth—Mann’s favorite—and the ill-tempered Michael. Mann omitted his middle set of children, Monika and Golo. The first paragraph presents a striking contrast to the opening of “The Blood of the Walsungs.” Both stories portray parents and four children—two girls and two boys—and the older children, like Siegmund and Sieglinde, “are fast friends, two souls with but a single thought, and have all their adventures in common.”2 But the Cornelius family’s shabby existence during the postwar austerity is very different from the sumptuous hedonism in “Walsungs.” The contrast is marked by their servants, the Corneliuses’ cheeky and casual Xaver and the Aarenholds’ formal and elegant Wendelin . Mann’s early artist stories, though autobiographical, are ironic and satiric. This later story, by contrast, has much more personal warmth and human feeling. Hemingway, who always wanted to have a daughter himself , greatly admired Mann’s portrayal of domestic turbulence. Mann was a middle-aged fifty when he published the story. Cornelius is forty-seven, but seems older than his years to intensify the contrast between the older and younger generations. As Evelyn Waugh wrote when reviewing a book on etiquette, “In normal civilizations it is the old who are the custodians of the tribal customs. It is their duty to transmit them. The young can enjoy flouting them until they themselves age, when they will find they revert to the conventions they were first taught.”3 But Germany at this stage is not a “normal civilization.” Cornelius, the custodian of traditional customs, doesn’t seem to realize that the militaristic values of the old men, which he cherishes, have led directly to the recent cataclysmic war. Cornelius, a historian, is temperamentally and professionally conservative , especially when warnings of evil and threats of disaster define the precarious political atmosphere. Cornelius, as Malcolm Muggeridge said of George Orwell, “loved the past, hated the present and dreaded the future .”4 He hates the revolution that had convulsed Russia and murdered the royal family in 1917, and mourns the collapse of the German, Austro112 chapter seven Hungarian and Ottoman Empires that followed in 1918. He’s also afraid of the volatile tinder in the German air, especially in Munich—the scene of a recent revolution—which threatens to explode at any moment. He’s an expert on the Spanish king Philip II (the subject of Schiller’s Don Carlos), the arch-reactionary who carried on a hopeless struggle against the...