March 22, 2015 I’ve always reveled in the German language. Above all, it’s the words that draw me in–the sound of them, the feel of them, their sensuality, their potential for music and profundity. In my teenage years, learning German through a thousand hours of opera and later through a painstaking obsession with literature, I collected vocabulary like so many tiny works of art–toys, really, that I could take out and polish up and delight in.
My favorites: Dämmerung, Lenz, Gesamtkunstwerk, Leidenschaft, pfaublau, Rausch, Ausschweifung, Kastanienbaum, Lust. I can still hear those words in their places in the opera scores, see them on the pages of my battered copies of Musil and Hesse and Mann.
Living in Germany has added a whole new dimension to this loving-of-words. Here, I sit in my Weinstube and wonder at the way that Wein softens into Woi and schön into
It rains all the time in the Rhine Valley. Dripping, foggy, penetrating damp, Tag ein Tag aus–you would take the coldest of Vermont winters over this.
At the same time, though, it makes the sun all the more beautiful. You wake up to bright clear skies one morning and skip out on an entire day of studying to walk in the city, and to find out how the stained glass windows in the churches look with sun behind them.
They look glorious, by the way.
St. Stephanskirche, Mainz
It’s strange, this being in a foreign country. Most of the time it all feels normal, more or less like living at home, but then some little thing happens and the strangeness of it all is brought back to you. Sometimes you go outside in the morning and are shocked that people aren’t speaking your native language. It takes several seconds to remember where you are. You keep forgetting the small things–that lines in the supermarket move 10x faster than they do in America, that no one wants to help you in the clothing store, that you won’t be able to do any banking on Friday afternoons because the German motto is work smarter, not longer.
It’s the different conception of academia that shocks you the most, though. Your university–37,000 students, some 150 institutes–is worlds away from the tiny college you graduated from last spring. Part of it’s good–students in Germany have much more freedom, are treated like adults with the ability to plan their own time and think for themselves. But it’s the apathy that gets you.
For instance: your Herr Dr. Professor–widely published, with his own wikipedia page, applauded by the students at the end of every lecture–is teaching Hamlet. He never smiles in class, seems rather bored by the whole affair. You want to go and shake him at the end of the day and say, “This is a privilege, this! Don’t you see–you are so privileged, so lucky, so blessed to be able to teach this text, to be able to teach at all! The existence of Hamlet is a miracle. The fact that you have a job where you get to read Hamlet every day is also a miracle.”
It’s good, though, too, because you now see what you want to spend the rest of your life fighting against: apathy, boredom, this brand of tired post-modernism that sees the entire world as a deconstruction of a deconstruction of a deconstruction. You want to teach with personality, dammit, in a place where you can sit across the desk from your students and talk about beauty and art like they really matter.
Here in Germany, you have the feeling that the professors think you smile too much in class. But how can one not smile–Hamlet is Hamlet. And apathy aside, it’s good to be here. The cathedrals are still glorious.
So apparently I just graduated from college. And apparently I am leaving for Germany in a month and a half. What??!!
I’ll be in Germany for the next two years, getting my Masters in Comparative Literature as a DAAD-Stipendiatin. For those of you who wish to keep up with my international adventures, I direct you to my travel blog, http://emilysarahabroad.wordpress.com/. The already-existing content is from my month in Würzburg two summers ago.
Various thoughts on the worldviews, music, and endings of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus and The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), inspired by studying for my German Comps. Rather longer and more academic than most posts here. The quotations are from the estimable John Woods translations, with occasional edits of my own.
Thomas Mann is the most unflinching of writers. His works, read from the perspective of early 20th-century Europe, are ideological, painful, inescapably overt. They are remarkable because Mann wrote at a time when it was so easy not to be these things–his was the age of surrealism, absurdism, symbol and neo-Romanticism, and many of his contemporaries were falling away from reality. In contrast, his didacticism is refreshing. He poses questions and he answers them.
Works like Zauberberg and Doktor Faustus, in particular, belong to this vein. They are what my professor calls “test-tube novels”–all the fixations, terrors, questions, and beauties of a new century thrown together, the results brought under Mann’s lazer-sharp analysis. His characters critique and harangue, propose and debunk.
Der Zauberberg and Doktor Faustus, implicitly and explicitly, are works that ask questions about art. What do we do with our artistic past? How do we move forward? Can we create a 20th century work of art–what should it look like? Can we find a solution to the artistic problems of the past century? The novels, I argue, offer two very different sets of answers to these questions.
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But first, Thomas Mann and Richard Wagner–the representative artist, in Mann’s mind, of Europe’s artistic past. He located in Wagner’s operas everything that was disturbingly problematic about German Romanticism–the death-drunkenness, the beauty in perversion, the baroque-colossal aesthetics, the sympathy with the abyss. Wagner was the questionable wizard of the past century, whose vast inner landscapes were in essence sick and impure. The apotheosis of these tendencies, of course, was Tristan und Isolde–the most beautiful opera in the world, the love story that in the end did not have to do with the love of the beloved, but rather with the love of death. Wagner’s art is a superlative, Eduard Hanslick wrote. And there can be nothing beyond a superlative.
Philosophically and stylistically, then, Wagner’s was an art without a future. After so much perfection and so much Liebestod, what was left over for the artists of the 20th century?
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This is the question that Mann takes up in Der Zauberberg–what is left over? The novel was published in 1924, almost two decades before the horrors of World War II. Here, the answer Mann suggests is inherently humanistic, forward-looking, even cautiously optimistic.
Philosophically, he separates his hero from Wagner’s Todesrausch in the Schnee (Snow) chapter of the work, when Hans Castorp finds himself alone in a storm in the Alps. He dreams, and in his dream Mann constructs a vision of a world that has renounced all sympathy with death, all of Wagner’s love of abyss and annihilation. Der Mensch soll um der Güte und Liebe willen dem Tod keine Herrschaft einräumen über seine Gedanken. For the sake of goodness and love shall mankind grant death no dominion over his thoughts–there, in the single italicized sentence of the entire work, Mann presents the renunciation and defeat of all of Wagner’s philosophy.
In Der Zauberberg, too, Mann offers us a (possible) stylistic paradigm of the new art, a model for the aesthetics of the 20th century: Schubert’s Der Lindenbaum, the Lied for piano and voice that so fascinates Hans later in the story. The piece has everything that Wagner’s operas lack–classicism, humanism, beauty in smallness, self-restraint, hope. The text of the song, while it deals with the possibility of self-destruction, does not end with death and Liebestod, but rather with the thoughtful return to life of the speaker. In Der Zauberberg, Mann’s description of the Lied matches almost exactly his description of the ideal artwork of the 20th century, as sketched out in a brief essay from 1911. A new classicism must come, he wrote–to the artistic future of Germany belonged a clear-headed and upwards-looking art, whose spirituality would be cool and healthy instead of drunken and bombastic.
Profound but logical, deeply-felt but never excessive, Schubert’s Lindenbaum in Der Zauberberg is thus more hopefully modern than anything by Wagner. Unlike Tristan und Isolde, the Lied transcends Romanticism to look towards a constructive future.
Of course–of course, Thomas Mann–this beautiful image is destroyed in the final pages of the novel, or at least called deeply into question. For all the forward-looking hope and resolution of Der Lindenbaum and all the heroism of the conclusions in the Schnee chapter, Hans’ own story does not end so neatly. He leaves the mountain, and, in the chaos of 1914, disappears from sight on a dark and bloody battlefield. Mann does not reveal whether he lives or dies.
On the final pages of the novel, however, Mann again leaves room for optimism. His response to Wagner and the 19th century this time is less tidy, more cautious—bloody historical circumstances are not as forgiving as idealistic philosophizing or Schubertian artistry. But even so, Mann opens the possibility of transcendence. He closes his 900-page novel with a question, itself inherently forward looking in that it demands an answer from the future: “And out of this world-festival of death, out of this ugly rutting fever that inflames the rainy evening sky all around–will love someday rise up out of this, too?” Mann addresses both love and death in this final sentence, but unlike Wagner he no longer takes it for granted that they belong together. He leaves us not with Hans’ Liebestod—but with the possibility, however gritty, of love’s ultimate resurrection from death.
And in one final touch of hope, Hans sings as he disappears from sight. The music that struggles to rise above the final pages of the book is not Isolde’s Liebestod, not some epic, backward-looking paean to death and transfiguration, butSchubert’s Der Lindenbaum. It is a pieceshot through with death, to be sure, but so is life. What is most important, for Hans and Thomas Mann and Germany itself, is that Schubert does not end with that final surrender.
In the end, what towers above even the most ambiguous passages of the book, as Mann wrote, was “the idea of the human being, the conception of a future humanity that has passed through and survived the profoundest knowledge of disease and death.”* Redemptively humanistic, Mann points to the vital necessity of a spiritual and artistic future where life and love rise above the fascination of death.
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So that is Der Zauberberg. What about Doktor Faustus? The book was composed some twenty years after Der Zauberberg, as Mann watched the self-immolation of his country from exile in America. The story is wrenching–composer Adrian Leverkühn sells his soul to the devil (in the form of intentionally contracted syphilis) for twenty-five years of possessed brilliancy, creates, and loses everything in one torturous final scene. All of this is set down by Serenus Zeitblom, Adrian’s childhood friend–an old man, a teacher of Latin, a humanist, full of sorrow and pity and unspeakable horror at the collapse of Germany that parallels that of his friend.
Doktor Faustus still asks the same questions as Der Zauberberg–how do we grapple with our artistic past, how do we look forward towards the future? The answers Mann gives, however, are very different. If Zauberberg is at least cautiously open to optimism, Faustus is inescapably pessimistic. Serenus’ world is one where all art, and Romantic art above all, is its own parody and a lie. The only response to Europe’s artistic heritage seems to be Adrian’s brand of mocking laughter, and the only valid form of expression is satire of a satire of a satire. Descriptors like “pure,” “classical,” and “genuine” are simply outdated.
The idea of a constructive future to follow the 19th century is hardly developed, or even mentioned. There’s one very short conversation towards the end of the novel: as Serenus reports, “The hope was voiced that the youthful 20th century might develop a more elevated and intellectually cheerful frame of mind. The conversation broke apart and exhausted itself in a disjointed discussion of the question of whether there were any signs of that or not.” That is all. There is no hopeful looking-forward, no lofty for the sake of goodness and love. The familiar “20th century as solution” topic fades before it has begun, to the sound of Adrian’s mocking laughter.
And this laughter, this sardonic mockery that permeates the composer’s life and work? This is new response to the artistic past, to Wagner et alia. Irony opposes Romanticism, not pure and lovely “new classicism.” The new creative genius is born of scorn and disease and forever bound to them.
Jose Clemente Orozco, Dartmouth College, from The Epic of American Civilization
Mann’s treatment of humanism is here also very different from Zauberberg. If Goethe’s Faust is post-Christian, Mann’s is post-humanity. Adrian’s universe is barbarously, scientifically vast, and mankind and his values, puny and transient, are just “a drop in the bucket.” In one of the most excruciating chapters of the work (XXVII), even Serenus, the Classicist and lover of belles lettres, is forced to conclude that his “humanistic Homo Dei, this crown of life, along with his spiritual duty, was therefore presumably the product of marsh-gas fecundity on some neighboring star…the flower of evil.” “That mostly blossoms into evil,” Adrian adds. After all, what place can humanism, with its affirmation of the moral and artistic worth of mankind, have in a world where everything exists to be mocked? Where art lies? Where Europe is falling into an abyss of painful self-annihilation? A philosophy where Man and his creations are genuinely worthy of respect and study is a thing of the past, consigned to same rubbish heap as the quaint geocentric theories of the Dark Ages.
Again, compare the above to Der Zauberberg. In a sense, the book is about humanism. Hans’ Bildung (Education) is essentially humanistic, whatever else it may be. There is something redemptively transfigurative about it, in the end. In Zauberberg‘s world, human creation and ideas may be perilous or lead to death, but they are always more than fodder for parody.
Finally–what about the endings of Faustus and Zauberberg? Interestingly enough, Faustus also closes with questions, with a figure vanishing from sight. In the final paragraph, Serenus gives us personified Germany herself, who “plummets from despair to despair…in the embrace of demons, a hand over one eye, the other staring into the horror.” He asks, “When will [Germany] reach the bottom of the abyss? When, out of this final hopelessness, will a miracle that goes beyond faith bear the light of hope?”.
But what sort of questions are these? Do they look towards the future for an answer, or only backwards, on the war that has brought horror and debasement? Are they asked by a man entirely despairing of a hopeful answer? A sort of prayer forms the final sentence of the book: “A lonely man folds his hands and says, ‘May God have mercy on your poor soul, my friend, my fatherland” (534). But the speaker is almost broken by disgust and grief, the friend already consecrated to Satan. What else is left?
Albrecht Dürer, from the Apokalypse
So it all begs the question: is the query at the end of Zauberberg different? Is it somehow more forward-looking, less despairing? The answer is ambiguous, no doubt. But look at the differing backdrops to these final paragraphs, and examine what has come before the questions. In Faustus, there has been no preceding humanistic Bildung, no talk of dying for the future with the word of love on one’s lips–no talk of a future at all, except to express disgust over the travesty of it all. There has been no coming-of-age, but rather its reversal, a descent to madness. Adrian’s forced return to childhood on the final pages is truly worse than death, this rending of soul from body.
And the music in the last chapter of Dr. Faustus is no melancholy but ultimately life-affirming Schubert Lied, no representative of 20th-century classicism. Instead there is Adrian’s own Lamentation of Dr. Faustus, a gargantuan wail in 12-tone serialism for choir and orchestra, a monstrous work that permits “no consolation, reconciliation, transfiguration.” “It ought not be” is its great leitmotif, felt in every measure and cadence. Adrian’s definitive statement on the work comes some thirty pages from the end of the novel, in one of the most heartbreaking passages in modern literature:
“I have discovered that it ought not be.” “What ought not be, Adrian?” “The good and the noble,” he replied, “what people call human, even though it is good and noble. What people have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and what people filled to overflowing have announced with jubilation–it ought not be. It will be taken back. I shall take it back.” “I don’t quite understand, my dear fellow. What do you want to take back?” “The Ninth Symphony,’ he replied. And then came nothing more, even though I waited.
Of course Adrian means Beethoven’s Ninth, that forward-looking exposition of joy and humanism, representative of a world purposefully negated in Faustus. As Serenus concludes, “There were years when we children of the dungeon dreamt of a song of joy–Fidelio, the Ninth Symphony–with which to celebrate Germany’s liberation, its liberation of itself. But now only this work can be of any use, and it will be sung from our soul: the lamentation of the son of hell, the most awful lament of man and God ever intoned on this earth, which begins with its central character, but steadily expanding, encompasses, as it were, the cosmos.”
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So that is Doktor Faustus. Where does it leave Thomas Mann? At the end of his life, did he believe in art, his own or anyone else’s? Was Adrian’s world, fought against in Zauberberg, at last fully his own? I certainly have no definitive answer to these sorts of questions. Perhaps a clue, though, can be found in his last book, Felix Krull, only partially complete at his death in 1955. It is a return to high comedy, and a focus on mankind’s ability–if not for high nobility and wisdom, then at least for reason, craft, survival.
And of course, there is the very fact that Mann kept writing. Doktor Faustus was not his last book. That in itself–the creative act–is, I think, the most hopeful, inherently humanistic and forward-looking act of which mankind is capable. “It ought not be,” it seems, was Adrian’s motto and not Mann’s own.
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*From “The Making of the Magic Mountain”–Mann’s own writings on his magnum opus, a must read.
You are pulled in all directions at once. Part of you wants to get out, get out, get out–out of the midwest, the eternal flat, the small-town campus, the Catholicism, the insomnia, the March grayness. The other part of you will be weeping come graduation–no more poetry on Friday nights, no more swing dancing till midnight, no more drawing dragons in the writing center walls, no more of those intensely personal discussions on German literature and philosophy that are changing the way you see the world. The way the sun hits the windows of the faculty building when you walk to your 8am Roman Literature course–blood-orange, in-your-eyes because of the flat horizon. You will miss that. It’s the end of something stunning, this leave-taking of an intellectual community from which you have learned and against which you have fought, and which you have loved for the past four years.
And behind it all is the waiting. Everyone is getting job offers, being accepted to graduate school, making wedding plans and looking at apartments. For you, though, everything is entirely up in the air–applications to grad schools in Germany aren’t even open yet, you have no idea where you will be, you have no idea if you will just end up sitting at home next year with all sorts of failed plans. Those scholarship programs you applied to six months ago are probably going to leave you hanging until you go crazy, and you won’t hear anything positive anyway. You listen to Bach and lots of bad pop music.
And then suddenly, you aren’t waiting any more. The morning that you know you will finally hear something, you take a walk into town in the freezing wind, to try to calm yourself down. Revel in it–these are the last few hours when the possibilities are still infinite.
And then suddenly there’s an email, and it’s not from the Fulbright at all, but from that other program you applied to and really never thought you’d get–the one that will send you to Germany for two whole years, the one that will give you more money than you’ve ever had to get a Masters in Comparative Literature somewhere in Bavaria. That one. And you’ve won it–the highest stipend they give. The possibilities are still infinite. The enigmatic German professor practically starts crying when you tell him, and denies everything when you try to say that he wrote your letter of recommendation and your language evaluation and thus deserves as much of the credit as anyone. The world is insane.
Everything happens very fast–call everyone, cancel the summer job, look at apartment prices, email Germanistik departments, learn more about German geography in a week than you have in the past three years. By the end of the week, you are emotionally exhausted–shocked, overwhelmingly grateful. It still doesn’t seem quite real, but when you call the scholarship office in New York City they know your name.
In exactly three months, you will be flying to Europe.
I’m still trying to sort out Franz Kafka. He was the topic of this semester’s independent literature study–my second-to-last in the on-going project with the enigmatic German Professor, which began three semesters ago with Thomas Mann and Robert Musil. It’s the best thing I’ve done as a student here, this intensely personal investigation of tortuous novels that has expanded to include music, philosophy, aesthetics, and myth.
Franz Kafka is such a different figure than Mann or Musil. His obsessions are different, as are his questions and his solutions. His world is entirely opposed to Thomas Mann’s, all secular humanism and sparkling irony and the brilliant residue of 3,000 years of art–opposed, too, to Musil’s intensely private universe, where the glance shared between two people occupies a dozen pages of metaphor-laden prose. If Mann addresses the relationship between man and his intellectual heritage, and Musil the relationship between man and himself, then Kafka addresses the relationship between man and God. His spirituality is real and aching and, and Camus writes, the questions he poses are those of a soul in quest of its grace. What do we do when we are confronted with the Other-worldly? Is God cruel and absurd, or full of goodness? Can human wisdom and strength win a way to the Divine? Certainly, one can read Kafka as a critique of modern bureaucracy, the industrialization of mankind, etc. etc.–but to me it is the religious nature of his works that transcends.
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Leaving philosophy aside, what about the writing itself? To me, perhaps the most pressingly disturbing aspect of Kafka’s prose was its lack of a Bezugsrahmen–a frame of reference or allusion, an overt dialogue between the author and the art and thought of the past three millennia. Kafka’s world exists apparently in a vacuum, in a universe of isolation that is as cultural and intellectual as it is personal. His characters don’t hang pictures from Dürer or Caspar David Friedrich on their walls; they don’t read books by Schopenhauer or Plato. There are no direct references in the novels (Schloss, Prozess) to Shakespeare or to Nietzsche or Antiquity–as readers, we are hardly aware that such things exist. If there is a dialogue between Kafka’s figures and their intellectual forebears, it is hidden.
This utter lack of reference to a greater intellectual tradition is especially unsettling to me, because I revel in The Dialogue, locate great spiritual and intellectual meaning in my ability to connect to three thousand years of thought. To have these connections ripped out from under my feet is intensely disorienting. How different, again, from Thomas Mann! His books are dialogues in essence–long, heady, sometimes tortuous conversations between the ideas and worldviews and artworks of human civilization. And as a result, none of his figures are ever truly isolated. Certainly, they are sometimes despairing, desperate, lonely. In spite of it all, though, they always partake of and above all believe in an intellectual and artistic tradition that is greater than any individual–a tradition that offers, I think, a sort of transcendence, a consolation.
In Kafka there is no such consolation. There is none of Coriolanus’ there is a world elsewhere, no sense that Kafka’s figures can find redemption by situating their own struggles within a philosophical or aesthetic framework that has existed for millennia and will carry on after they are gone. Joseph stands before the court in The Trial and never thinks, “Ah, so it was with Socrates in Athens. I understand now; this is what I am to do.” K. fights unceasingly to gain entrance in the castle, but he does so without the great dictum of Goethe’s Faust: Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, den können wir erlösen. Whoever strives with all his might–that man can we redeem. He remains isolated, intellectually as well as physically.
But in the end, isn’t this lack of a Bezugsrahmen infinitely fitting to Kafka’s universe? The lack of a Dialogue, the emptiness, the intellectual silence all serve to emphasize aloneness of the characters. Their hermetic solitude is perhaps the tragedy of the novels.
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Kafka’s world is also disturbingly free of humanism. Humanism tells us that men and women can move forward on their own strength, can become wiser and better and more farsighted in ways that accomplish things, in ways that lead to creation or beauty or salvation. Kafka takes these ideas and turns them upside down.
He does this above all in Before the Law, the page-long parable at the end of The Trial. In the story, a nameless man seeks in vain to gain access to the Law (grace, God, heaven?). There are a series of gates in his way, and a door-warden who rebuffs all of his attempts to enter even the first. The man sometimes sees a gleam of light through the passageway beyond the door, but dies at the end of the story without ever having set foot inside.
The story, I believe, is fundamentally a-humanistic. The seeker doesn’t become stronger through all his questioning, striving, learning, believing–but rather the opposite.
Kafka becomes anti-Goethe. Whoever strives with all his might–that man dies of exhaustion.
In this light, perhaps the most tragic sentence in the novels is the door-warden’s final statement to the man, in his last moments of life: “Der Eingang war nur für dich bestimmt. Ich gehe jetzt und schließe ihn.” The entrance was only meant for you. I am going now and closing it. That is our torture, our tragedy–that we are wise enough to know such an entrance exists, and wise enough to seek it with all our strength–but too limited, physically and spiritually, to ever gain entrance on our own strength. Humanity finds itself in an impossible position.
In this way, I think, Kafka’s is a world that the ancient Greeks would have recognized–where human beings are fundamentally weak, where their limitations are at the forefront of human existence. The divine realm exists, sends messengers, is tangible and present–but is ultimately careless and inscrutable.
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There is one more thing about Kafka’s characters, however, at the end of it all: wherever they are, in whatever circumstances, despite all confusion and weakness–they are always going to a window and opening it, and looking out. I like to imagine that this throwing-open of windows, repeated again and again throughout the novels, is itself a sort of human victory. It doesn’t matter that the world beyond the windows is often dark and snow-filled. It’s the action that counts.
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If I had finished this post five days ago, I would have ended it there. Kafka’s books are superb because they are so unbearably, unflinchingly bleak. Reading him is fascinating and compelling and cathartic in the same way reading Greek tragedy is, because we are presented with a world in which there is no out. A few open windows, a gleam of light through a impenetrable gate–what’s that, really? The works end with human limitation writ large.
Now, however, I’m entrenched in Søren Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, and it’s throwing all of Kafka into a very new light.
Per Kierkegaard, Kafka is drawing our attention not to human weakness, but to mankind’s incredible, defiant potential for perseverance, for real and tangible hope. His characters are the greatest of heroes because they are heroes of faith. They have looked into the absurd and comprehended the paradox and have chosen to believe.
But that’s all still half-formed, still confused in my own mind. There will be more to come later. In the end, Kafka is the sort of author who shifts over time–and that, I think, is why we read him.
As a teenager, my two greatest aspirations were to be manly and intellectual.
Manly and intellectual–because to be intellectual is to be manly, of course, I thought, and vice versa. That’s just the way things go. Men are the scholars, men write the books, men are the philosophers and composers, men are the thinkers.
Before I left for college, this never really bothered me. I loved men–their thoughts, their art, their history (I still do). I had nothing against women; I just wasn’t interested in adopting their usual aspirations. When I was younger, I wanted to be the men I read about–I was Robin Hood, or Lewis and Clark, making wooden swords and killing monsters and obsessing over The Hardy Boys and Jules Verne. I picked out books from the library because they looked masculine, and therefore scholarly. The old editions, heavy, with gilt lettering and no pictures. That was cool.
And all my literary heroes were men–Socrates, Hector, Don Quixote, Werther, Faust, Hamlet, Hans Castorp. The men who think about things, the men who love words. It was their image I wanted to cultivate for myself, was in love with. It was what I wanted for my future adult self, both as a way-of-being and as a career. I had intellectual aspirations in highschool, read my Latin and Greek and listened to inordinate amounts of German opera. I was going to be a professor, and a thinker like all those men in my books. I was going to have a book-lined study and wear patched tweed jackets. I was going to live the [masculine] life of the mind.
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But then I went to college and became a reluctant feminist, and suddenly the image I loved (or rather, my love for that image) became deeply disturbing. Perhaps I had the makings of a scholar–but I was not, after all, a man.
The question was unavoidable: what happens when one is a scholar, but not a gentleman? Because it is only the men, who are portrayed as capable of devoting themselves to the stringent, lonesome, heady, wonderful world of the intellect and academia. That’s what the media tells us, that’s what 3,000 years of art tells us. Think: name one film, one book, that portrays it otherwise. The intellectual, the aging male professor, in a dusty study surrounded by books, the pipe-smoke, the tweed jackets, the unkempt hair. Faust in his dumpfes Mauerloch, Socrates pattering about Athens in rags, Prospero with his scrolls and spells, Robin Williams in Dead Poets Society. This is the image we know and expect, in all its variations over the past millennia. Scholarship, reason, dialectic, debate–all these are somehow masculine traits. The archetype of intellectuality–the life of the mind–belongs to men.
I knew all this in highschool, at some level. But somehow I never saw any obstacles to my desire to take up the role and adopt the image for myself. Now it all seemed insurmountably problematic. I was female, after all–but the woman intellectual just didn’t fit the mold, didn’t have a place in three thousand years of art. She didn’t have an image, a reflection somewhere in the collective consciousness.
I wasn’t going to give anything up, because I loved my dreams, loved the archetype of the (male) academic. The rigor, the Word, the devotion to thought, the study and the books–it was in this universe that I was most joyful. But–did my pursuit of the life of the mind, as a career and a way-of-being, imply a betrayal of femininity? Had I already done that? Or, conversely–was the image that I loved one I, as a female, was even allowed to participate in?
How do I be female (let alone feminist)–I asked–while pursuing an image that is so overtly male? What heroes do I take, what scholarship do I produce?
Yes, there are people (and ever more of them!) like the new young Classics professor in my school’s department. She is tenure-track, publishes widely on Platonic philosophy, has the book-lined study–and is also married and pregnant, and is teaching an entire semester of Myth in heels and power suits. She is doing it all, with intelligence and grace. But–what is she drawing on? Where are her heroes, her archetypes? Even her presence in my life, for which I am incredibly grateful, doesn’t do a thing to fill the void of the past 3,000 years.
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And yet–and yet–I am beginning to see how one might revel in the ambiguity, in the silence of art, in the lack of a self-reflection in mainstream literature and film. Isn’t it all incredibly freeing, after all? As a woman and hopeful future scholar, I have no archetypes, no image that belongs rigidly to me–and so I can create! I can make a new idiom, new tropes, and let go of the idea that I have to adhere to the old ones.
In this way, female intellectuals and academicians have much more freedom than their male counterparts–their existence is fluid, flexible. To steal another lovely German word, they are Mischwesen. Mixed beings. They are between two worlds, and they can move between them.
I can move between them. And I do. I wear skirts and heels to class one day, tweed jackets and button-downs the next. I can produce real scholarship, maybe write that book on metaphor one day, and still want to be a mother and a wife. I can write on “Women’s Issues” if I wish, or not. I can still hold on to all those old male heroes, but realize that they only tell half the story.
“You’ll never be a cult figure,” says the young Classics professor, when I stop by her office to thank her for three years of good teaching. “That’s just not how students relate to female professors.” I think about the dozens of freshmen I work with in the Writing Center, all breathless with adulation for their male Heritage and Lit professors. Can I let that go? Yes, I think so. Did I even want it in the first place? Perhaps not. No human being deserves worship. I will be content with (and honored for!) the chance to earn respect in the classroom, to create and participate in dialogue, to think and write about beautiful things.
But I still have a long way to go. In the meantime, I revel in this in-between area. There’s something incredibly playful about it all, in the end. It is the space, the vacancy, and the silence that allow for real creativity.
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Perhaps someday the image of the female intellectual will start making it into the collective consciousness, into mainstream art and film and literature. Perhaps someday there will be a new type. But maybe, I think, I don’t even want that to happen. Archetypes and images are comforting, but in the end they imply restriction, a lack of freedom.
In the moment, I like falling through the cracks.
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This article from thehumanist.org has many fascinating things to say on women in academia.
The photo was taken outside the Pinakothek der Moderne in Munich. The sign reads “Women, women, women.”
Was Gott ist, weiß man nicht. Er ist nicht Licht, nicht Geist,
Nicht Wahrheit, Einheit, Eins, nicht was man Gottheit heißt.
Nicht Weisheit, nicht Verstand, nicht Liebe, Wille, Güte,
Kein Ding, kein Unding auch, kein Wesen, kein Gemüte.
Er ist, was ich und du und keine Kreatur,
Eh wir geworden sind, was er ist, nie erfuhr.
*
The Unknown God
No one knows what God is. He is not Light, not Spirit,
Not Truth, Unity, One, not anything one calls Divinity.
Not Wisdom, not Intellect, not Love, Will, Goodness,
No Entity, no Nonentity either, no Being, no Spirit.
He is what neither I nor you nor any other creature,
until we have become what he is, can know.
*
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The 17th century German mystic Angelus Silesius on God, in preparation for upcoming posts on Franz Kafka. Is this not Das Schloss in six lines? I think so, anyway.
Photography from my sister, as ever. Translation my own.
The famous final scene of Götterdammerung, Bayreuth 1976
French director Patrice Chéreau died yesterday from lung cancer, at age sixty-eight. I knew him mostly for his groundbreaking productions of Wagner’s operas, which, in my opinion, have come closer to bringing the composer’s universe onto the stage than any others I have seen. It’s hard to think of a single contemporary director today who has done as much, with such consistency, over a career spanning so many decades.
Chéreau’s 1976 Bayreuth Ring, in particular, shatters every preconceived notion about what it means to perform Wagner. In a time and place given over to conservatism and literalism, Chéreau dared to interpret Wagner symbolically rather than literally, dared to remove him from the world of Medieval myth and place him in our own, and, above all, dared to demand that his performers be equal parts actor and singer. His work is gritty, moving, often beautiful, always shattering. Requiescat in pace, Sir.
Unfortunately, I’ve been doing all the reading and discussing and thinking and writing about him in German, and most of my thoughts haven’t yet sorted themselves out into English. Strange, this business of finally beginning to know another language. It’s freeing, though, too–there are topics I can only really discuss in German, in this language that is so new to me and thus carries with it none of the baggage and associations of my mother tongue. At any rate, I apologize to any readers (Jim!) who have been waiting for thoughts on Kafka, and promise to get something up in English quite soon.
In the meantime, here is a small essay in German, on the potential of a theological interpretation of The Castle. I’m rather proud of it, actually–the enigmatic German professor, usually reticent in his praise, said it was good and well written. And if any of my German-speaking readers would like to correct my syntax and grammar, please have at it!
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Es ist allzu leicht, glaube ich, Kafkas Werke als reine Allegorien zu deuten. Der Mangel an absichtlich ideologische Aussagen des Autors lädt dem Leser ein, selbst eine umfassende Bedeutung in einen Roman oder eine Novelle hineinzulesen. Allegorische Interpretationsweisen sind bestimmt wertvoll, aber nur insofern als sie nie als die einzige Deutung eines Werkes gelten. Vielleicht sind Kafkas Werke nur Träume, die wir einfach als ästhetische Ereignisse annehmen sollen.
Wenn es aber eine allegorische oder symbolische Interpretation von Das Schloss gibt, dann ist sie mit dem Theologischen tief verbunden. Es ist einfach genug, eine religiöse oder metaphysische Deutung des Werkes zu entwickeln: das Schloss repräsentiert den himmlischen Bereich oder die Gottheit selbst und K. der Alltagsmensch, der dringend versucht, sich in dieser Welt (und in der Sicherheit, Gemeinsamkeit, und Verständnis, die sie ihrer Eingeweihten anbietet) einzuwurzeln. Aber wenn das Schloss ein Symbol für das Metaphysische oder Theologische ist–wenn K.s Kampf um Eingliederung in die Gesellschaft auch ein religiöser Kampf ist–dann ist das Porträt der Religion, das Kafka uns hinterlasst, sehr zynisch. Kafka zeigt uns die dunkle, unmenschliche Seite der Religion, und die Tragödie oder sogar die Qual eines Menschen, der vergebens nach einer sinnvollen Verbindung mit seinem Gott sucht.
In Kafkas Universum wird das Schloss (und der religiöse Bereich, den sie repräsentiert) immer unbestimmter, je näher man sie anschaut. Am Anfang des Romanes scheint das Schloss ein Teil einer handfesten, vertrauenswürdigen Welt zu sein. Das Gebäude liegt “deutlich umrissen in der klaren Luft und noch verdeutlicht durch den alle Formen nachbildenden, in dünner Schicht überall liegenden Schnee” (486). Es wird ganz leicht sein, glaubt K., direkte Kontakt mit so einer Institution herzustellen–er hat schon einen Aufnahmebrief von Klamm und die telefonische Zusage des Schlosses selbst. Nach und nach aber wird das Schloss immer unerreichbarer. Das Gebäude verschwindet in der Dämmerung (568) und K. findet endlich heraus, dass alle Verbindungen mit den Schlossbeamten höchst betrügerisch sind. Auch der Telefonanruf des ersten Kapitels war vielleicht nicht mehr als der bedeutungslose Scherz eines “übermüdeten Beamter” (544). Es wird K. immer klarer, dass das Schloss für ihn nur auf unverständliche Weise zugänglich sei, wenn überhaupt. Jedem menschlichen Versuch, Eingang zu finden, setzt es sich wider.
Die Welt des Schlosses steht dem Humanismus entgegen. Ihr Bereich liegt außerhalb (oder jenseits?) der Vernunft und des Verstandes. K.s Humanismus und Demokratie nutzen hier nicht. Er will als Mensch behandelt werden, sagt er, er will “immer frei sein” (485), er will sein Recht (546). Er will Antworten auf seine Fragen bekommen, und sofort. Er hat keine Zeit für Aberglaube und Zeremonie und haltet es als Gewinn, “frei vor einem Mächtigen [ie. Klamm] gesprochen zu haben” (524). Sinnvolle Forderungen–aber in Kafkas Welt hat der Weg nach oben, die Verbindung mit der Gottheit, nur wenig mit Vernunft und Rationalität zu tun. Hier gibt es nur Tyrannie und Verwirrung und Ambiguität. Die offizielle Vertreter des Schlosses gehören auch zu dieser Welt–der Sekretär Klamms ist sinnlos und verwirrend, die Gehilfen absurd und lächerlich, Klamm selbst geheimnisvoll und unerreichbar. K. erkämpft seine Autonomität, gewiss, aber nur, als er endlich zugibt, “als gäbe es gleichzeitig nichts Sinnloseres, nichts Verzweifelteres als diese Freiheit, dieses Warten, diese Unverletzlichkeit” (575).
Vielleicht der tragischste Moment K.s Suche findet sich im achtzehnten Kapitel, als K. endlich zu einem Sekretär gerufen wird. Im Herrenhaus trifft er zufällig auf einen Beamten namens Bürgel, der anscheinend bereit ist, K.s Fragen zu beantworten. K. hat zum ersten Mal eine wirkliche Chance, echte Erklärung zu gewinnen–aber hier, fast am Ende des Romanes, ist er zu müde, diese Gelegenheit zu nutzen. Er schläft in Bürgels Buro ein, “abgeschlossen gegen alles, was geschah” (721), und verpasst völlig seine Rede. Scheinbar hört K.–der bisher nie nachgegeben hat–völlig auf, weiter zu kämpfen. Er hat kompromisslos nach einer Verbindung mit dem Schloss gesucht und jetzt ist endlich imstande, Hilfe und Antworten zu finden und etwas Echtes zu erreichen. Aber wenn er eine echte Möglichkeit hat, sich seinem Ziel wirklich zu nähern, ist er zu schwach, seiner eigenen Erschöpfung zu entgehen. Der menschliche Körper versagt ihm. Wer immer strebend sich bemüht, sagt Kafka, stirbt an Entkräftung.
Kafkas Darstellung der theologischen Welt ist am Ende völlig pessimistisch: die Gottheit ist unbestimmt und unnahbar, ihre Methoden liegt im Bereich der Irrationalität, und der Weg nach oben führt zur Erschöpfung. Wenn es Gnade irgendwo gibt, dann ist sie dem normalen Menschen scheinbar nicht zugänglich. K. wird gerufen–oder mindestens glaubt er, dass er gerufen worden ist–aber dann ist es ihm unbegreiflicherweise nicht erlaubt, weiter zu gehen und etwas aus diesen Ruf zu machen. Der Mensch, oder das Wesen, oder die Täuschung, die ihn gerufen hat, bleibt vollkommen unkennbar, unbestimmt, und fabelhaft. Und weiterhin endet der Versuch, diese Verwirrung zu überwinden, mit Erschöpfung und Versagen. In Kafkas Welt ist der Mensch gleichzeitig weitsichtig und schrecklich limitiert–er ist klug genug, eine Verbindung mit dem Schloss zu suchen, aber zu beschränkt, sowohl geistig als auch physisch, den richtigen Weg dahin zu finden.
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Zitate aus Franz Kafka: Die Romane, S. Fischer Verlag, 1966.
November 14, 2015 
thoughtenchanted 