Doctor Faustus (59 page)

And now imagine (here is the “clear picture” I promised to give) how these gentlemen, scientists themselves, scholars and teachers—Vogler, Unruhe, Holzschuher, Institoris, and Breisacher as well-revelled in a situation which for me had about it so much that was terrifying, and which they regarded as either already in full swing or inevitably on the way. They amused themselves by imagining a legal process in which one of these mass myths was up for discussion in the service of the political drive for the undermining of the bourgeois social order. Its protagonists had to defend themselves against the charge of lying and falsification; but plaintiff and defendant did not so much attack each other as in the most laughable way miss each other’s points. The fantastic thing was the mighty apparatus of scientific witness which was invoked—quite futilely—to prove that humbug was humbug and a scandalous affront to truth. For the dynamic, historically creative fiction, the so-called lie and falsification, in other words the community-forming belief, was simply inaccessible to this line of attack. Science strove, on the plane of decent, objective truth, to confute the dynamic lie; but arguments on that plane could only seem irrelevant to the champions of the dynamic, who merely smiled a superior smile. Science, truth—good God! The dramatic expositions of the group were possessed by the spirit and the accent of that ejaculation. They could scarcely contain their mirth at the desperate campaign waged by reason and criticism against wholly untouchable, wholly invulnerable belief. And with their united powers they knew how to set science in a light of such comic impotence that even the “beautiful princes,” in their childlike way, were brilliantly entertained. The happy board did not hesitate to prescribe to justice, which had to say the last word and pronounce the judgment, the same self-abnegation which they themselves practised. A jurisprudence that wished to rest on popular feeling and not to isolate itself from the community could not venture to espouse the point of view of theoretic, anti-communal, so-called truth; it had to prove itself modern as well as patriotic, patriotic in the most modern sense, by respecting the fruitful
falsum
, acquitting its apostles, and dismissing science with a flea in its ear.

“Oh yes, yes, yes, certainly, one may say so” —thump, thump.

Although I felt sick at my stomach, I would not play the spoilsport; I showed no repugnance, but rather joined as well as I could in the general mirth; particularly since this did not necessarily mean agreement but only, at least provisionally, a smiling, gratified intellectual recognition of what was or was to be. I did once suggest that “if we wanted to be serious for a moment,” we might consider whether a thinking man, to whom the extremity of our situation lay very much at heart, would not perhaps do better to make truth and not the community his goal, since the latter would indirectly and in the long run be better served by truth, even the bitter truth, than by a train of thought which proposed to serve it at the expense of truth, but actually, by such denial, destroyed from within in the most unnatural way the basis of genuine community. Never in my life have I made a remark that fell more utterly and completely flat than this one. I admit that it was a tactless remark, unsuited to the prevailing intellectual climate, and permeated with an idealism of course well known, only too well known, well known to the point of being bad taste, and merely embarrassing to the new ideas. Much better was it for me to chime in with the others; to look at the new, to explore it, and instead of offering it futile and certainly boring opposition, to adapt my conceptions to the course of the discussion and in the frame of them to make myself a picture of the future and of a world even now, if unawares, in the throes of birth—and this no matter how I might be feeling in the pit of my stomach.

It was an old-new world of revolutionary reaction, in which the values bound up with the idea of the individual—shall we say truth, freedom, law, reason?—were entirely rejected and shorn of power, or else had taken on a meaning quite different from that given them for centuries. Wrenched away from the washed-out theoretic, based on the relative and pumped full of fresh blood, they were referred to the far higher court of violence, authority, the dictatorship of belief—not, let me say, in a reactionary, anachronistic way as of yesterday or the day before, but so that it was like the most novel setting back of humanity into medievally theocratic conditions and situations. That was as little reactionary as though one were to describe as regression the track round a sphere, which of course leads back to where it started. There it was: progress and reaction, the old and the new, the past and the future became one; the political Right more and more coincided with the Left. That thought was free, that research worked without assumptions: these were conceptions which, far from representing progress, belonged to a superseded and uninteresting world. Freedom was given to thought that it might justify force; just as seven hundred years ago reason had been free to discuss faith and demonstrate dogma; for that she was there, and for that today thinking was there, or would be there tomorrow. Research
certainly
had assumptions—of course it had! They were force, the authority of the community; and indeed they were so taken for granted as such that science never came upon the thought that perhaps it was not free. Subjectively, indeed, it was free, entirely so, within an objective restraint so native and incorporate that it was in no way felt as a fetter. To make oneself clear as to what was coming and to get rid of the silly fear of it one need only remind oneself that the absoluteness of definite premises and sacrosanct conditions had never been a hindrance to fancy and individual boldness of thought. On the contrary: precisely because from the very first mediaeval man had received a closed intellectual frame from the Church as something absolute and taken for granted, he had been far more imaginative than the burgher of the individualist age; he had been able to surrender himself far more freely and sure-footedly to his personal fantasy.

Oh, yes, force created a firm ground under the feet; it was anti-abstract, and I did very well to conceive to myself, working together with Kridwiss’s friends, how the old-new would in this and that field systematically transform life. The pedagogue, for instance, knew that in elementary instruction even today the tendency was to depart from the primary learning of letters and sounds and to adopt the method of word-learning; to link writing with concrete looking at things. This meant in a way a departure from the abstract universal letter-script, not bound up with speech; in a way a return to the word-writing of earlier peoples. I thought privately: why words anyhow, why writing, why speech? Radical objectivity must stick to things and to them only. And I recalled a satire of Swift’s in which some learned scholars with reform gone to their heads decided, in order to save their lungs and avoid empty phrases, to do away altogether with words and speech and to converse by pointing to the things themselves, which in the interest of understanding were to be carried about on the back in as large numbers as possible. It is a very witty piece of writing: for the women, the masses, and the analphabetic, they it is who rebel against the innovation and insist on talking in words. Well, my interlocutors did not go so far with their proposals as Swift’s scholars. They wore the air of disinterested observers, and as “
enorm wischtisch
” they fixed their eyes on the general readiness, already far advanced, to drop out of hand our so-called cultural conquests
for
the sake of a simplification regarded as inevitable and timely. One might, if one chose, describe it as deliberate rebarbarization. Was I to trust my ears? But now I had to laugh, yet at the same time was amazed when the gentlemen at this point came upon the subject
of
dental medicine and quite objectively began to talk about Adrian’s and my symbolic musical critique of the dead tooth. I am sure I went the colour of a turkey-cock for laughing, while listening to a discussion, pursued with the same intellectual satisfaction as before, about the growing tendency of dentists to pull out forthwith all teeth with dead nerves; since it had been concluded—after a long, painstaking, and refined development in the nineteenth-century technique of root treatment—that they were to be regarded as infectious foreign bodies. Observe—it was Dr. Breisacher who acutely pointed this out, and met with general agreement—that the hygienic point of view therein represented must be considered, in a way, as a rationalization of the fundamental tendency to let things drop, to give up, to get away, to simplify. For in a matter of hygiene it was quite in place to suspect an ideological basis. There was no doubt that in the future, after we had begun to practise a large-scale elimination of the unfit, the diseased and weak-minded, we would justify the policy by similar hygienic arguments for the purification of society and the race. Whereas in reality—none of those present denied, but on the contrary rather emphasized the fact—that the real reason lay far deeper down, in the renunciation of all the humane softness of the bourgeois epoch; in an instinctive self-preparation of humanity for harsh and sinister times which mocked our humans ideals; for an age of over-all wars and revolutions which would probably take us back far behind the Christian civilization of the Middle Ages; in a return to the dark era before it arose after the collapse of the classic culture…

CHAPTER XXXIV (conclusion)

It will perhaps be granted that a man labouring to digest such novelties as these might lose twelve pounds’ weight. Certainly I should not have lost them if I had not taken seriously my experiences at the Kridwiss sessions, but had stood firm in the conviction that these gentlemen were talking nonsense. However, that was not in the least the way I felt. I did not for a moment conceal from myself that with an acuity worthy of note they had laid their fingers on the pulse of the time and were prognosticating accordingly. But I must repeat that I should have been so endlessly grateful, and perhaps should have lost only six pounds instead of twelve, if they themselves had been more alarmed over their findings or had opposed to them a little ethical criticism. They might have said: Unhappily it looks as though things would follow this and this course. Consequently one must take steps to warn people of what is coming and do one’s best to prevent it. But what in a way they were saying was: It is coming, it is coming, and when it is here it will find us on the crest of the moment. It is interesting, it is even good, simply by virtue of being what is inevitably going to be, and to recognize it is sufficient of an achievement and satisfaction. It is not our affair to go on to do anything against it.—Thus these learned gentlemen, in private. But that about the satisfaction of recognizing it was a fraud. They sympathized with what they recognized; without this sympathy they could not have recognized it. That was the whole point, and because of it, in my irritation and nervous excitement, I lost weight.

No, all that is not quite right. Merely through my conscientious visits to the Kridwiss group and the ideas to which I deliberately exposed myself, I should not have got thinner by twelve pounds or even half as much. I should never have taken all that speechifying to heart if it had not constituted a cold-blooded intellectual commentary upon a fervid experience of art and friendship: I mean the birth of a work of art very near to me, near through its creator, not through itself, that I may not say, for too much belonged to it that was alien and frightful to my mind. In that all too homelike rural retreat there was being built up with feverish speed a work which had a peculiar kinship with, was in spirit a parallel to, the things I had heard at Kridwiss’s table-round.

At that table had been set up as the order of the day a critique of tradition which was the result of the destruction of living values long regarded as inviolable. The comment had been explicitly made—I do not recall by whom, Breisacher, Unruhe, Holzschuher?—that such criticism must of necessity turn against traditional art-forms and species, for instance against the aesthetic theatre, which had lain within the bourgeois circle of life and was a concern of culture. Yes. And right there before my very eyes was taking place the passing of the dramatic form into the epic, the music drama was changing to oratorio, the operatic drama to operatic cantata—and indeed in a spirit, a fundamental state of mind, which agreed very precisely with the derogatory judgments of my fellow-talkers in the Martiusstrasse about the position of the individual and all individualism in the world. It was, I will say, a state of mind which, no longer interested in the psychological, pressed for the objective, for a language that expressed the absolute, the binding and compulsory, and in consequence by choice laid on itself the pious fetters of pre-classically strict form. How often in my strained observation of Adrian’s activity I was forced to remember the early impressions we boys had got from that voluble stutterer, his teacher, with his antithesis of “harmonic subjectivity” and “polyphonic objectivity”! The track round the sphere, of which there had been talk in those torturingly clever conversations at Kridwiss’s, this track, on which regress and progress, the old and the new, past and future, became one—I saw it all realized here, in a regression full of modern novelty, going back beyond Bach’s and Handel’s harmonic art to the remoter past of true polyphony.

I have preserved a letter which Adrian sent to me at that time to Freising from Pfeiffering, where he was at work on the hymn of “a great multitude, which no man could number, of all nations, and kindreds, and people, and tongues, standing before the throne and before the Lamb” (see Durer’s seventh sheet). The letter asked me to visit him, and it was signed Perotinus Magnus; a suggestive joke and playful identification full of self-mockery, for this Perotinus was in charge of church music at Notre Dame in the twelfth century, a composer whose directions contributed to the development of the young art of polyphony. The jesting signature vividly reminded me of a similar one of Richard Wagner, who at the time of
Parsifal
added to his name signed to a letter the title “Member of the High Consistory.” For a man who is not an artist the question is intriguing: how serious is the artist in what ought to be, and seems, his most pressing and earnest concern; how seriously does he take himself in it, and how much tired disillusionment, affectation, flippant sense of the ridiculous is at work? If the query were unjustified, how then could that great master of the musical theatre, at work on this his most consecrated task, have mocked himself with such a title? I felt much the same at sight of Adrian’s signature. Yes, my questioning, my concern and anxiety went further and in the silence of my heart dealt with the legitimacy of his activity, his claim in time to the sphere into which he had plunged, the recreation of which he pursued at all costs and with the most developed means. In short, I was consumed with loving and anxious suspicion of an aestheticism which my friend’s saying: “the antithesis of bourgeois culture is not barbarism, but collectivism,” abandoned to the most tormenting doubts.