Climbing Stories II: The Problem of Realism

A series on Der Zauberberg

Our apparently rather negative conclusion - that non-rejection of socialism is a sufficient basis for realism - Lukacs, The Meaning of Contemporary Realism

The characteristic feeling that comes from reading a good author: how does he know this about me? A good letter tells of the writer, a good book of the reader - Bloch, Literary Essays

There are two ways to add some necessary context: the one autobiographical, the other intellectual. Of course, one inevitably presupposes the other. After all, Mann was an integral part of the German and European literary-intellectual culture for most of the twentieth century. But it starts with a story set in the Swiss Alps. In 1912, Thomas Mann went to visit his wife, Katia. She was ill and undergoing treatment at a sanatorium in Davos, so Mann went to stay for three weeks to spend some time with his recovering partner. While there, the doctors at the mountain hospital diagnose, just as they do with Hans Castorp, a “moist spot” on one of Mann’s lungs. Mann details all of this quite charmingly in his essay for The Atlantic, pointing out that he almost certainly caught a nasty cold sitting outside on the balcony, taking in the air. Much of the opening of the novel, particularly the chapter “Arrival” seems to be drawn almost exactly from his initial experiences - from the train ride in, to the sumptuous and plentiful food that the residents of the Berghof enjoy, to the constant obsessions with keeping track of one's temperature. The cure for these kinds of disease was a slow one - Mann, in that essay, jokes that just like Castorp he could quite easily have spent years up there.

Initially it seems like The Magic Mountain was meant to have a very different form. Mann went to visit Katia just after the publication of Death In Venice - his excellent short novella about a writer who goes to the city and falls into an obsession with the beautiful boy, Tadzio. It is, in Mann’s own explanation of the story, about death, decay and inchoate desire. Tonally it is rather bleak - an austere engagement with pessimistic themes. It seems then, that this visit to Katia had inspired a counterpoint to Death In Venice - Mann wanted it to be humorous and lighter: a clash between two points of view. Crucially, he’s on record as saying that it was also supposed to be roughly the same length as Death In Venice. However, a couple of things interrupted this plan. The first was Mann realising that the novel was a far richer and more complex set of ideas than initially expected. Again, his essay touches on the composition process, describing a feeling which will be familiar to anyone with a creative outlet - work takes on a life of its own leaving you as the artist to simply write into the dark, following where the work seems to lead. The second point was the outbreak of the first world war.

This is the point at which biographical context meets intellectual context. Thomas Mann had an older brother Heinrich, also a writer and the two disagreed intensely around Germany’s politics. Heinrich was a socialist, and an admirer of both the novelist Emile Zola and the social-democrat revolutionary Kurt Eisner. Heinrich was also virulently anti-war - in fact, seeing the defeat of Germany as necessary to crush the imperial political project (a position we could term revolutionary defeatism). This is in contrast to his younger brother Thomas - an outwardly respectable bourgeois writer who was both far more successful in terms of readership and finances than Heinrich. During the war Thomas published a book called Reflections of A Nonpolitical Man - he calls this his “intellectual military service.” This was an incredibly long treatise on the rightness of German culture, their position in the war and an attack on what he termed Zivilisationsliterat - a collection of Francophile, progressive writers (including his own brother!) who were pro-democracy and anti-war.

It doesn’t take much to see the philosophical and anti-democratic influence of both Schopehnhauer and Nietzsche, who were, for Mann, as for an entire generation of German intellectuals, writers and artists, deeply formative. Personally I’ve never been particularly interested in Nietzsche - he is, ultimately, a writer for teenagers and the young. Though his historicism is undoubtedly influential, it is in those who put his writing to new uses that allow something interesting to emerge (Delueze’s book, Nietzsche and Philosophy being a good example of what I mean).

In the case of Mann though, the influence of Nietzsche on his thought waned, and in the 1920s and 1930s he increasingly took up pro democratic and liberal politics moving from an older Romanticism towards something less conservative. As T.J Reed, author of Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition puts it, he was a “late adoptive child of the Enlightenment” coming to favour the values of humanism that so much of The Magic Mountain spends detail and time exploring. It would be a mistake and an oversimplification to read Mann’s work as inherently reactionary - even if The Magic Mountain particularly was started at a point wherein he was broadly opposed to any kind of democratic and progressive politics. Georgy Lukacs, easily one of the pre-eminent writers on Mann’s work puts things well:

This is not, of course, to defend Mann's war writings. If, as still happens in England and America, later works like The Magic Mountain are interpreted in the light of the Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, the result will inevitably be a reactionary distortion. The problem is rather to realize that Mann's political aberration in the First World War was no accidental stage in his 'search for bourgeois man', but a necessary phase in the disastrous development of German ideology as a whole. - Lukacs, Essays On Thomas Mann

After all, in 1929, a few years after the publication of The Magic Mountain, and at a far more vulnerable political moment, Mann published Mario and the Magician, an explicitly anti-fascist novel in which an authoritarian leader is assassinated. He was increasingly aware of the risks of fascism too, becoming a defender of the Weimar Republic and making increasingly urgent appeals for voters to rally behind the Social Democratic Party as Germany’s political ideology went through that “disastrous development” mentioned by Lukacs. Mann fled Germany for America during the war, making regular antifascist speeches and radio broadcasts.

The point from Lukacs brings up the crux of the intellectual context I want to get into - the relationship between Mann and questions of politics, which for Lukacs is inevitably mediated through a formal analysis of his style - realism. The relationship between Lukacs and Mann has been much commented on, but it generally stops at the superficial level - something important to correct here. Lukacs is one of the most impressive literary critics of the 20th century (alongside someone like Eric Auerbach) and was also a revolutionary communist, involved in the Bolshevik struggle in Hungary. There’s a somewhat simplistic intellectual biography that’s often trotted out when it comes to talking about his work. He starts as a Kantian, meets Bloch and reads Hegel. Then in the 1920s came his Hegelian Marxist phase and the publication of the landmark History and Class Consciousness. This eventually runs against the orthodoxy of the day and he publishes some self-criticism to keep himself out of jail and makes what he will later describe as “tactical accommodations” to the Stalinist orthodoxies around literature and philosophy. In the 1930s he published his studies on literary realism and he was forced into retirement by the time of the Hungarian uprising in the late 1950s to work on his final works on social ontology.

It would be easy to see Lukacs as essentially a rigidly dogmatic apologist for Stalinism but this is wildly reductive - simply presupposing an (incorrect) interpretation of his politics to which his aesthetic philosophy is entirely subordinate. Firstly, this ignores the fact that he was arrested in the early 1940s on suspicion of being a Trotskyite agent and secondly, flattens the content of his own philosophical writing about literature to the point of absurdity. The two - politics and philosophy - are entirely inseparable and his writing on realism are bound up within a particular conception of politics that is never simply reducible to the crudities of some defence of socialist realism.

All of this may strike you as interesting, in an abstract, academic sense but perhaps a little remote from the actual content of Mann’s work. But in all of Lukacs’s writing he consistently returns to the work of Thomas Mann, praising him as a high point in the development of critical realism - and why would a Leninist, a Bolshiviek and committed revolutionary spend so much time and effort engaging with the writing of a conservative liberal, solidly bourgeois and capitalist writer like Thomas Mann? A suggestive historical detail comes from the letters of their contemporary, Walter Benjamin. In 1925, Benjamin wrote to his friend Gersholm Scholem that he was reading two exciting books: the first was Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness, and the other was Mann’s The Magic Mountain.

This connection between Lukacs and Mann brings us back to both Mann’s novel and this broader question of realism. Mann said that he based Naptha on Lukacs - at the very least in appearance. In an interview Ernst Bloch, who was at one point Lukacs’s closest intellectual companion, also confirmed that Naptha was based on Lukacs. To this Lukacs responded “so what if I lent him my nose? He has given so much to me - I am happy I could do that little for him in return!” The two knew of each other very well. Though, as Judith Marcus details in her excellent sociological study of the interactions between the two, Mann seems to have regarded Lukacs with a measure of caution. He details their one face-to-face meeting, describing how while talking to Lukacs he couldn’t help but agree with everything he said, but after the fact was left with a terrible sense of “abstractions”

Perhaps this is a good way of getting at Lukacs’s sense of realism. His studies of the 1930s as well as his debates with Bloch around expressionism were attacks on a modernist writing that he saw as a political and aesthetic dead-end. Benjamin’s astute connection between History and Class Consciousness and The Magic Mountain allow for an exploration of Lukacs’s category of reification and what he means by realism. So, reification. The central chapter of History and Class Consciousness is a long essay on this notion of reification - the process by which capitalism permeates all of human society. Through rationalization, and the transformation of the world into a series of objects with use-value and exchange-value, relations between people become mediated through objects, As he puts it:

The essence of commodity-structure has often been pointed out. Its basis is that a relation between people takes on the character of a thing and thus acquires a ‘phantom objectivity’, an autonomy that seems so strictly rational and all-embracing as to conceal every trace of its fundamental nature: the relation between people.

Reification is about the naturalization of a given social structure - solidifying it into something that seems like an inevitable law of the universe. Of course reification is not just something that works on commodities - just as processes of production become ever more rationally calculated, turning humans into mere appendages for the machine, so too the same process is worked out in the superstructures of a given society.

The transformation of the commodity relation into a thing of ‘ghostly objectivity’ cannot therefore content itself with the reduction of all objects for the gratification of human needs to commodities. It stamps its imprint upon the whole consciousness of man; his qualities and abilities are no longer an organic part of his personality, they are things which he can ‘own’ or ‘dispose of’ like the various objects of the external world. And there is no natural form in which human relations can be cast, no way in which man can bring his physical and psychic ‘qualities’ into play without their being subjected increasingly to this reifying process.

The problem here is that reification as imprinted on the whole consciousness of man represents a problem - how does one find a way out? The solution to this problem (and here you can see the influence of Ernst Bloch on Lukacs’s theory of consciousness) is the class consciousness of the proletariat which exists as an objective possibility, produced by the contradictions of capitalist rationality itself.

This is where realism starts to come in for Lukacs as a politically significant form, and his definition is a little different from older definitions. Take George Eliot in Adam Bede, where she details her attempt to “give a faithful account of men and things as they have mirrored themselves in my mind.” For Lukacs, this is necessary for realism, but not sufficient. After all, in a reified capitalist society, riven by the antinomies of bourgeois ideology, things as they appear are just that - appearances. Rather, the realist writer is the one who has the ability to reveal the true structures of a society that is invisible to everyday consciousness. In other words, the realist novel takes on the possibility of de-reification. At its very best, realism allows for the grasping of the true historical forces of a given moment. It is here that Mann’s importance as a novelist for Lukacs starts to become clearer.

It was this understanding of realism that motivated his critique of modernism. Take his long essay “Franz Kafka or Thomas Mann?” For Lukacs, modernist writers like Kafka and Joyce, for all their technical ability, were falling into a trap, namely that “subjective experience constitutes reality as such.” Over the course of many pages Lukacs outlines his position that modernist subjectivism is essentially a mistake of reification, forsaking the shared social world of human beings, and more problematically, forsaking the idea that perspective and characterization are all necessarily informed by the problem of history.

In contrast, critical realist writing (and for Lukacs, Mann is the foremost example) does what the modernist like Kafka and Beckett not only choose not to do, but cannot do - understand subjectivity as a part of a dynamic historical process. For Lukacs, the modernists have made beautiful images in their literature, but they do not move and thus were cut off from both the view of human subjectivity as essentially social, and the concept of historical change. Now, this criticism may strike some as unfair and unreasonable (certainly it did for someone like Brecht) but it’s this that leads to Lukacs to his rather audacious claim, “the proposition that no writer of the past century, asking himself to what goal history is moving, has been able to ignore socialism.” Lukacs is often accused of establishing some fairly simplistic binaries in his argumentation but his point here is not that one can have socialist realism on the one hand vs. decadent modernism on the other. He doesn’t even seem to think that a writer needed to be a socialist at all but simply had to acknowledge and understand socialism as a potential aspect of the historical process into which they wrote.

It is enough that a writer takes socialism into account and does not reject it out of hand. But if he rejects socialism - and this is the point I want to make - he closes his eyes to the future, gives up any chance of assessing the present correctly, and loses the ability to create other than purely static works of art.

So, the obvious question - does Mann acknowledge socialism, does this solid middle class bourgeois writer see it as a possibility or have they too accepted the reifications of a capitalist economy. Well, as Mann writes about his own novel:

Such institutions as the Berghof were a typical pre-war phenomenon. They were only possible in a capitalistic economy which was still functioning well and normally. (my emphasis) Only under such a system was it possible for patients to remain there year after year at the family’s expense. The Magic Mountain became the swan song of that form of existence. Perhaps it is a general rule that epics descriptive of some particular phase of life tend to appear as it nears its end. The treatment of tuberculosis has entered upon a different phase today; and most of the Swiss sanatoria have become sports hotels.

Not only this but so much of the dialogue in the novel is about the economic and political situation - as I’ll get on to in another piece. It also engages with an understanding of history as a dynamic princess and the questions of the future - what a world might become - all of these issues are key to grasping the novel’s importance. Sometimes, the long attention testing digressions and conversations between Settembrini and Naptha, or Hans Castorp’s autodidacticism and research into physiology give the novel a reputation for abstract intellectualism, removed from the passion of human emotion. But Mann is making a serious point: the struggle over ideas is the site of human passions, ideas matter and they are the very stuff for which human beings both live and die.

To describe something as “merely” intellectual is to make a strange split between the various layers of human existence itself. Lest this all get too abstract it's important to emphasize that Lukacs explicitly argues that this point about socialism and a critical realism holds true for certain concrete historical situations. Of course this novel is written in the midst of a great crisis - in short order Europe saw the publication of Spengler’s Decline of the West, Ernst Bloch’s The Spirit of Utopia, Lukacs’s History and Class Consciousness and finally this novel, The Magic Mountain - all of which are wrestling with these questions of a world that is yet to come. It is this struggle within the novel that the next part of this series will cover, as Settembrini argues with Naptha and Hans Castorp falls for the beautiful Claudia.