ACADEMIC
39
that appears and disappears among the clouds of the spirit. It is the
old
Civitas Dei,
though semi-secular, and in the modern style. It is to
be built by Religion
~nd
Socialism - Religion without the church,
Socialism without Marx-working through the humanist good sense
of "many people in many lands."
Here on earth, meanwhile, geographical and productive limits
stifle the creative life of capitalist nations. Cumulative development,
"conservative revolution," is cut down to the vanishing point and re–
verses itself into a regressive plunge towards the abyss. The
limit,
far
from undergoing a "logical-mathematical destruction," closes in on
the man of peace and moral ideals. The social contradictions, which
a few decades ago seemed to flow in and out like pistons of
progress, clash in a wild disorganization of the machinery of society.
The mind of man is thrown into violent extremes: the mechanical,
utopian, scholastic radicalism of the Communist Party of Germany
swings over to the death-radicalism of the National Socialists... And
in the midst of these terrifying oscillations, this political Witches' Sab–
bath, Thomas Mann clamors, not for the breaking of the old inner
bonds and the release of the creative forces of German life, but for the
restoration of peace and equilibrium, for a moratorium on "radical
terminology." And as the resolution draws nearer and events break
through one layer after another of his illusions of peace, the "penny
pipe" of cultural progress which Mann borrowed from his own Set–
tembrini rises to a shrill cry among the war drums. Here, indeed, the
celebrated ironist of Spirit and NatureiS caught in the fearful irony of
the history of man.
Academic
The stethoscope tells what everyone fears:
You're likely to go on living for years,
With a nurse-maid waddle and a shop-girl simper,
And the style of your prose growing limper and limper.
THEODORE RoETHKE
