Doctor Faustus (19 page)

The statement was denied, Hubmeyer and Schappeler contradicted it and Teutleben too demurred. It might be still finer, they ironically said, if only age were to judge youth and youth could only be the subject of outside observation, as though it had no share of objective mind. But it had, when it concerned itself too, and must be allowed to speak as youth about youth. There was something that one called a feeling of life, which came near to being consciousness of self, and if it were true that thereby the form of life was abrogated, then there was no sense of life possible at all. Mere dull unconscious being, ichthyosaurus-being, was no good, and today one must consciously not be wanting, one must assert one’s specific form of life with an articulate feeling of self. It had taken a long time for youth to be so recognized.

“But the recognition has come more from pedagogy, that is from the old, Adrian was heard to say, “rather than from youth itself. It found itself one day presented, by an era that also talks about the century of the child and has invented the emancipation of woman, all in all a very compliant era, with the attribute of an independent form of life; of course it eagerly agreed.”

“No, Leverkühn,” said Hubmeyer and Schappeler, and the others supported them. He was wrong, they said, at least for the most part. It had been the feeling of life in youth itself that by dint of becoming conscious had asserted itself against the world, whether or no the latter had not been quite undecided for recognition.

“Not in the least,” said Adrian. “Not at all undecided. I suppose one only needed to say to the era: ‘I have this and this sense of life,’ and the era just made it a low bow. Youth knocked on an open door.” Moreover there was nothing to say against it, provided youth and its time understood each other.

“Why are you so supercilious, Leverkühn? Don’t you find it good that today youth gets its rights in bourgeois society and that the values peculiar to the period of development are recognized?”

“Oh, certainly,” said Adrian. “But I started, you started—that is, we started—with the idea—“

He was interrupted by a burst of laughter. I think it was Matthaeus Arzt who said: “That was perfect, Leverkühn. You led up to a climax. First you leave us out altogether, then you leave yourself out, then you manage to say ‘we,’ but you obviously find it very difficult, you hard-boiled individualist! ‘

Adrian rejected the epithet. It was quite false, he said, he was no individualist, he entirely accepted the community.

“Theoretically, perhaps,” answered Arzt, “and condescendingly, with Adrian Leverkühn excepted. He talks of youth condescendingly too, as though he were not young himself; as though he were incapable of including himself and fitting in; as far as humility goes he knows very little about it.”

“But we were not talking about humility,” Adrian parried, “rather, on the contrary, of a conscious sense of life.” Deutschlin suggested that they should let Adrian finish what he had to say.

“That was all,” said the latter. “We started with the idea that youth has closer relations with nature than the mature man in a bourgeois society—something like woman, to whom also has been ascribed, compared with man, a greater nearness to nature. But I cannot follow. I do not find that youth stands on a particularly intimate footing with nature. Rather its attitude towards her is shy and reserved, actually strange. The human being comes to terms with his own natural side only with the years and only slowly gets accommodated to it. It is precisely youth, I mean more highly developed youth, that is more likely to shrink or be scornful, to display hostility. What do we mean by nature? Woods, meadows, mountains, trees, lakes, beauty of scenery? For all that, in my opinion, youth has much less of an eye than has the older, more tranquil man. The young one is by no means so disposed to see and enjoy nature. His eye is directed inwards, mentally conditioned, disinclined to the senses, in my opinion.”

“
Quod demonstramus
,” said somebody, very likely Dungersheim—“we wanderers lying here in our straw, marching through the forests of Thuringia to Eisenach and the Wartburg.”

” ‘In my opinion,’ you always say,” another voice interjected. “You probably mean: ‘in my experience.’ “

“You were just reproaching me,” retorted Adrian, “for speaking condescendingly about youth and not including myself. Now all of a sudden you tell me I am making myself stand for it.”

“Leverkühn,” Deutschlin commented, “has his own thoughts about youth; but obviously he too regards it as a specific form of life, which must be respected as such; and that is the decisive factor. I only spoke against youth’s discussion of itself in so far as that disintegrates the immediacy of life. But as consciousness of self it also strengthens life, and in this sense—I mean also to this extentI call it good. The idea of youth is a prescriptive right and prerogative of our people, the German people; the others scarcely know it; youth as consciousness of self is as good as unknown to them. They wonder at the conscious bearing of German youth, to which the elder sections of the population give their assent, and even at their unbourgeois dress. Let them! German youth, precisely as youth, represents the spirit of the people itself, the German spirit, which is young and filled with the future: unripe, if you like, but what does unripe mean? German deeds were always done out of a certain mighty immaturity, and not for nothing are we the people of the Reformation. That too was a work of immaturity. Mature, that was the Florentine citizen of the Renaissance, who before he went to church said to his wife: “Well, let us now make our bow to popular error!” But Luther was unripe enough, enough of the people, of the German people, to bring in the new, the purified faith. Where would the world be if maturity were the last word? We shall in our unripeness vouchsafe it still some renewal, some revolution.”

After these words of Deutschlin we were silent for a while. Obviously there in the darkness each young man turned over in his mind the feelings of personal and national youthfulness, mingling as one. The phrase “mighty immaturity” had certainly a flattering ring for the most.

“If I only knew,” I can hear Adrian say, breaking the silence, “how it is we are so unripe, so young as you say we are, I mean as a people. After all, we have come as far as the others, and perhaps it is only our history, the fact that we were a bit late getting together and building up a common consciousness, which deludes us into a notion of our uncommon youthfulness.”

“But it is probably something else,” responded Deutschlin. “Youth in the ultimate sense has nothing to do with political history, nothing to do with history at all. It is a metaphysical endowment, an essential factor, a structure, a conditioning. Have you never heard of German Becoming, of German Wandering, of the endless migratings of the German soul? Even foreigners know our word ‘
Wanderlust
.’ If you like, the German is the eternal student, the eternal searcher, among the peoples of the earth—“

“And his revolutions,” Adrian interpolated, with his short laugh, “are the puppet-shows of world history.”

“Very witty, Leverkühn. But yet I am surprised that your Protestantism allows you to be so witty. It is possible, if necessary, to take more seriously what I mean by youth. To be young means to be original, to have remained nearer to the sources of life; it means to be able to stand up and shake off the fetters of an outlived civilization, to dare—where others lack the courage—to plunge again into the elemental. Youthful courage, that is the spirit of dying and becoming, the knowledge of death and rebirth.”

“Is that so German?” asked Adrian. “Rebirth was once called
renascimento
and went on in Italy. And ‘back to nature,’ that was first prescribed in French.”

“The first was a cultural renewal,” answered Deutschlin, “the second a sentimental pastoral play.”

“Out of the pastoral play,” persisted Adrian, “came the French Revolution, and Luther’s Reformation was only an offshoot and ethical bypath of the Renaissance, its application to the field of religion.”

“The field of religion, there you are. And religion is always something besides archaeological revival and an unheaval in social criticism. Religiosity, that is perhaps youth itself, it is the directness, the courage and depth of the personal life, the will and the power, the natural and daemonic side of being, as it has come into our consciousness again through Kierkegaard, to experience it in full vitality and to live through it.”

“Do you consider the feeling for religion a distinctively German gift?” asked Adrian.

“In the sense I mean, as soulful youth, as spontaneity, as faith, and Dureresque knighthood between Death and Devil—certainly.”

“And France, the land of cathedrals, whose head was the All-Christian King, and which produced theologians like Bossuet and Pascal?”

“That was long ago. For centuries France has been marked out by history as the European power with the anti-Christian mission. Of Germany the opposite is true, and that you would feel and know, Leverkühn, if you were not Adrian Leverkühn—in other words, too cool to be young, too clever to be religious. With cleverness one may go a long way in the Church, but scarcely in religion.”

“Many thanks, Deutschlin,” laughed Adrian. “In good old German words, as Ehrenfried Kumpf would say, you have given it to me straight, without any mealy-mouthing. I have a feeling that I shan’t go very far in the Church either; but one thing is certain, that I should not have become a theologian without her. I know of course that it is the most talented among you, those who have read Kierkegaard, who place truth, even ethical truth, entirely in the subjective, and reject with horror everything that savours of herd existence. Cut I cannot go with you in your radicalism—which certainly will not long persist, as it is a student licence—I cannot go with you in your separation, after Kierkegaard, of Church and Christianity. I see in the Church, even as she is today, secularized and reduced to the bourgeois, a citadel of order, an institution for objective disciplining, canalizing, banking-up of the religious life, which without her would fall victim to subjectivist demoralization, to a chaos of divine and daemonic powers, to a world of fantastic uncanniness, an ocean of daemony. To separate Church and religion means to give up separating the religious from madness.”

“Oh, come!” from several voices. But: “He is right,” Matthaeus Arzt declared roundly. The others called him the Socialist, because the social was his passion. He was a Christian Socialist and often quoted Goethe’s saying that Christianity was a political revolution which, having failed, became a moral one. Political, he said now, it must again become, that is to say social: that was the true and only means for the disciplining of the religious element, now in danger of a degeneration which Leverkühn had not so badly described. Religious socialism, religiosity linked with the social, that was it; for everything depended on finding the right link, and the theonomic sanction must be united with the social, bound up with the God-given task of social fulfilment. “Believe me,” he said, “it all depends on the development of a responsible industrial population, an international nation of industry, which some day can form a right and genuine European economic society. In it all shaping impulses will lie, they lie in the germ even now, not merely for the technical achievement of a new economic organization, not only to result in a thorough sanitation of the natural relations of fife, but also to found new political orders.”

I repeat the ideas of these young people as they were uttered, in their own terminology, a sort of learned lingo, quite unaware how pompous they sounded, flinging about the stilted and pretentious phrases with artless virtuosity and self-satisfaction. “Natural relations of life,”

“theonomic sanctions,” such were their preciosities. Certainly they could have put it all more simply, but then it would not have been their scientific-theological jargon. With gusto they propounded the “problem of being,” talked about “the sphere of the divine,” “the political sphere,” or “the academic sphere”; about the “structural principle,” “condition of dialectic tension,” “existential correspondences,” and so on. Deutschlin, with his hands clasped behind his head, now put the “problem of being” in the sense of the genetic origin of Arzt’s economic society. That was nothing but economic common sense, and nothing but this could ever be represented in the economic society. “But we must be clear on this point, Matthaeus,” said he, “that the social ideal of an economic social organization comes from autonomous thinking in its nature enlightening, in short from a rationalism which is still by no means grasped by the mighty forces either above or below the rational. You believe you can develop a just order out of the pure insight and reason of man, equating the just and the socially useful, and you think that out of it new political forms will come. But the economic sphere is quite different from the political, and from economic expediency to historically related political consciousness there is no direct transition. I don’t see why you fail to recognize that. Political organization refers to the State, a kind and degree of control not conditioned by usefulness; wherein other qualities are represented than those known to representatives of enterprises and secretaries of unions; for instance, honour and dignity. For such qualities, my dear chap, the inhabitants of the economic sphere do not contribute the necessary existential correspondences.”

“Ach, Deutschlin, what are you talking about?” said Arzt. “As modern sociologists we very well know that the State too is conditioned by utilitarian functions. There is the administration of justice and the preservation of order. And then after all we live in an economic age, the economic is simply the historical character of this time, and honour and dignity do not help the State one jot, if it does not of itself have a grasp of the economic situation and know how to direct it.”

Deutschlin admitted that. But he denied that useful functions were the essential objects and raisons d’etre of the State. The legitimacy of the State resided, he said, in its elevation, its sovereignty, which thus existed independent of the valuations of individuals, because it—very much in contrast to the shufflings of the Contrat Social—was there before the individual. The supra-individual associations had, that is, just as much original existence as the individual human beings, and an economist, for just that reason, could understand nothing of the State, because he understood nothing of its transcendental foundation.