HEINRICH ZIMMER
449
Following trails blazed in the nineteenth century by Delacroix, Melville,
Rimbaud, and Gauguin, many Western artists have been led to the
distant springs, sometimes directly through travel, more often, how–
ever, through the writings of the scholars and exhibits of the anthropo–
logical museums.
Hence it was not by chance that Thomas Mann, the first con–
temporary novelist to sense the promise of a spiritual revivification of
the West through a reintegration of truths known from antiquity,
founded his youthful
Buddenbrooks
(1901) on Schopenhauer, who al–
ready in the 1820s had noted the analogies between Vedantic and
Kantian metaphysics; in
Tristan
(1902) and
Tonio Kroeger (1903)
turned to Nietzsche, who in the 1870s had translated metaphysics into
modern psychology; in
T he Magic Mountain
(1924) drew on Freud
and Jung; and with
The Transposed Heads
(1940) discovered Zimmer.
Nietzsche's vision, announced in
The Birth of Tragedy
and echoed by
Castorp's snow dream in
The Magic Mountain,
of man's regeneration
through an experience and courageous integration of a time-and-space–
shattering insight into the ground of being, Zimmer had perfectly
matched with
an
elucidation of a collection of Indian stories, the
Vetalapanchavinshati,
"Twenty-five Tales of the Ghost in a Corpse."
And Mann, ever enchanted by life's promise of a transcendent knowl-
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