15-4
PARTISAN REVIEW
thought, the Earth-Spirit, the Mothers, the Devil, and Death, a
death more active and more virulent than elsewhere, mysteriously
mingled with life itself, and sometimes endued with attributes of
love. And last, these works are German in their strong symphonic
structure, in the contrapuntal character of their parts as developed
throughout more than half a century. But this Germanic substance
has been permeated, like the country itself, with leaven from other
lands: the heroes of
Death in Venice
and
The Magic Mountain
each
owe their supreme revelation to the Greek Mysteries; Jewish thought,
Talmudic even more than Biblical, impregnates the learned circum–
volutions of the
joseph
tetralogy, and that in a time when the German
government was decreeing destruction to the Jewish race; Hindu
philosophy, with which German thinking often claims affinity, pro–
vides the transcendental eroticism of
Transposed Heads;
fatidic Asia
speaks, in
The Magic Mountain,
through the stammering lips of Myn–
heer Peeperkorn. And furthermore, for the typical German repre–
sented by Frau von Tummler the idealized lover is an Anglo-Saxon,
while for both Hans Castorp and Gustave Aschenbach the beloved
wears Slavic guise.
Such diverse materials as these are worked into a solid mass
more suggestive of some slow geological stratification than of exact,
fully planned architectural construction. Mann's meticulous realism,
that obsession with realistic detail which so often characterizes Ger–
man vision, serves as mother-solution for his crystalline structures of
allegory; it serves also as bed for the nearly subterranean stream of
myth and of dream.
Death in Venice,
opening with the realistic ac–
count of a stroll in the outskirts of Munich, and sparing us thereafter
no detail of timetables for boats and trains, of hotel furniture, or
of bold color in a tie, goes on to fashion the mishaps and vexations
of a journey into an allegoric Dance of Death; far below the surface,
burning but inexhaustible, secret issue of some more ancient sym–
bolism, flows the profound reverie of a man in prey of his own end–
ing, drawing from his very substance his death and
his
love.
The
Magic Mountain
is a highly accurate description of a sanatorium
in German Switzerland about the year 1912; it
is
also a medieval
summa,
an allegory of the City of the World; and last,
it
is a mytho–
logical epic of a Ulysses of the inner depths, captive of ogres and of
larvae, but approaching wisdom within himself as his own modest
Ithaca.
The Black Swan
portrays a German matron of the mid-
