Jacob
T
aubes
FROM CULT TO CULTURE
In chapter XXVIII of
Doctor Faustus
Thomas Mann in–
troduces an interlude on the social life of Adrian Leverkiihn that in
the context of a radical critique of culture shows the hybris that will
eventually overtake the composer. Adrian has just finished a short
symphony called
Marvels of the Universe,
a mock-pathetic title stress–
ing the latent Luciferean element in the piece. This musical sacrilege
is strangely echoed in the salon society of Munich before the outbreak
of the First WorId War by a theory of myth presaging the rise of
a conservative nihilism.
It was in such a society that Thomas Mann himself first came
in contact with the ideas of a revolutionary conservatism. This ide–
ology, first infecting the intellectual avant-garde which carried it into
other circles, had little to do with the traditional conservative pre–
judices and attitudes of an aristocratic society. There was no longer
anything aristocratic in the spirit of an intelligentsia driven by a
revolutionary impetus more disruptive than any liberalism and yet
possessing, as though in mockery, a strong conservative appeal.
Since the turn of the century a decaying aristocracy living off
the rapidly diminishing capital of its old traditions had been seeking
to relate itself to the post-revolutionary conservatism of an intelli–
gentsia revolting against the bourgeois-liberal ethos from the other
end, from the standpoint of novelty rather than tradition. From this
marriage sprang the demons of fascism and Nazism.
It is strange that the intellectual whom Thomas Mann presents
as a model of the ideologues of conservative nihilism should be a
scholar by the name of Dr. Chaim Breisacher. His intellectual know–
ingness and nose for the latest views serve in his case a conservative
ideology. I doubt, however, that such general characteristics would
have induced the author to bring Breisacher, with his" fermenting
