Mann act
Michael Hamburger
The Hesse-Mann Letters. Edited by Anni Carlsson and Volker Michels. Translated by Ralph Manheim. (Peter Owen £5.75) Although they had first met in 1904, the correspondence between Thomas Mann and Hermann Hesse began six years later with Mann's reply to a lost letter from Hesse, expressing misgivings about a review Hesse had published of Mann's novel KOnigliche Hoheit (Royal Highness). The review in question is appended to this meticulously edited and annotated edition of the correspondence. (To the German editors' notes Wolfgang Sauerland has added more general ones, evidently intended for American readers — mainly of Hesse? — who are assumed to be totally ignorant of German history and institutions. The intention is honourable, though one may wonder whether those very Hesse fans are the ones who have the wish or the patience to relate their hero to his social and political background.) Hesse's strictures in the review are most relevant to the correspondence, since they bring out differences between the two writers which their later exchange of mutual congratulation and solicitude leaves between the lines. "We should like to read a book by Thomas Mann," Hesse wrote, "in which he doesn't think of the reader at all, in which he makes no attempt to seduce anyone or to make anyone the butt of his irony." He also suggests that it is the philistine reader who is entertained by Mann's mannerisms. Disarmed by the patent honesty of Hesse's response to his work, Mann found it necessary to justify himself: "I sometimes think that what you call my 'playing up to the public' springs from my long, passionately critical enthusiasm for the art of Richard Wagner — that art, as exclusive as it is demagogic, which may have permanently influenced, not to say corrupted, my ideals and artistic strivings . . . I need the unlettered as well. But that is psychology after the fact. When at work, I am innocent and self-sufficient."
With that characteristic psychologising and intellectualising side-step Mann withdrew from what might have become a real meeting or a real combat of minds. Nor did he ever reciprocate by a real criticism of Hesse's works, in the letters or elsewhere, when his objections to some of them must have been as radical as Hesse's to his novel. And by 1931, when the correspondence proper begins, its interest for the reader has shifted mainly to externals of biography and politics. Paradoxically, it is the unworldly Hesse, cultivating his garden in the Ticino, who predicts the events that will make the two men allies as well as colleagues. Explaining his refusal to rejoin the Prussian Academy of Arts, from which he had resigned in 1930, Hesse predicted the "Bolshevisation" of Germany, preceded by "a bloody wave of white terror". That was in December, 1931. As late as December of the following year Thomas Mann wrote: "But the worst is over, I think. The madness seems to have passed its peak" — because the National Socialists had lost thirty-four seats in the latest election.
As a pacifist in the First World War who later
renounced his German citizenship, Hesse had gone into opposition when Mann was at the height of his nationalist and anti-democratic phase. When Mann reversed his position and tried to persuade Hesse to come out in support of the threatened Republic, he found that Hesse was both too deeply disillusioned and too deeply entrenched in his "non-political" neutrality. Hesse's refusal to rejoin the Academy after the temporary, resignation of its nationalistic members was consistent with attitudes to which he stuck until his death in 1962. His letter of 20 February, 1931, sums them up: I distrust the present state, not because it is new and republican, but because to my way of thinking it is insufficiently so. I can never quite forget that the Prussian government and its Ministry of Culture, the patrons of the Academy, are also responsible for the universities and their disastrous intellectual bankruptcy, and I regard the attempt to unite "free" minds in an Academy as in some measure an attempt to hold these often inconvenient critics of officialdom in check.
That difference between the two writers became more acute when Mann had assumed the function of representing German culture in exile, — while continuing to perform his precarious balancing acts, over Wagner, for instance, whom Hesse always rejected in no uncertain terms — and especially when he had come to believe that "nothing that is alive can sidestep politics. Even a refusal of politics is political; it merely abets the politics of evil", as he wrote to Hesse ml 945. Yet this formulation of an important new realisation elicited no more than polite agreement, in principle, from Hesse, who referred as usual to his experiences in 1914. Their failure to hammer out the political difference, as well as the artistic one makes the 'humanism' to which in his foreword Professor Ziolkowski attributes the alliance between the two eminent writers a somewhat woolly cause. Their growing friendship and respect for each other is not in doubt; but what they write about each other's work, whether in private or in public, is little more than a courteous gesture. Mann is genuinely pleased by Hesse's disguised tribute to him in the Glasperlenspiel, signing more than one letter 'Thomas von der Trave'; and Hesse is genuinely touched by Mann's loyalty to him, as attested by Mann's protracted efforts to get him the Nobel Prize, little as he cared for the honour itself or any official recognition of his status.
Excellently introduced, translated, and annotated as it is, the correspondence will be valuable, nonetheless, to readers of either writer, as it will be to anyone interested in the cultural history of the half-century before Mann's death. There are telling details, as when Mann acknowledges a favourable notice by Hesse in these words: "My emotion and joy were great and proved to me once again how profoundly receptive I am to kindness and understanding"; or when Hesse tells Mann of two gifts received from Germany, "a flawlessly constructed and really beautiful passacaglia and fugue on the the theme of my name, by an organist in Halberstadt" and "an in quarto manuscript in Gothic calligraphy of twenty-six of my poems, translated into Gothic, by the students of the Gothic seminar at the Dresden Engineering School" — and those in 1948! With humour, but without irony, Hesse welcomes those gifts as "voices. .. from the Germany of legend' and fairy tale."
Previous page
