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PARTISAN REVIEW
II
The negative critique of Chaim Breisacher's propositions
that runs through the pages of chapter XXVIII does not, I believe,
give a full account of the author's fascination with Oskar Goldberg,
whose life and work were his model for the portrait of Dr. Chaim
Breisacher. Not only does Mann's Joseph tetralogy draw heavily on
the work of Goldberg, but his theoretical statements on mythology
are also influenced by that strange historian and philosopher of re–
ligion, who after Johann Jacob Bachofen was the most radical inter–
preter of mythology. He took the language of myth so seriously that
from a historian of mythology he evolved into a philosopher of
mythology.
It is, I think, significant that Thomas Mann chose Goldberg's
theory of mythology for his crucial chapter on myth and humanism.
"One has to take away mythology from intellectual fascism and
switch
it
over into humanism," Thomas Mann writes in 1941, thus
giving a clue to his great critique of Oskar Goldberg in the portrait
of Chaim Breisacher. This "switch-over" of mythology into human–
ism-the major theme of his exchange of letters with Karl Kerenyi,
the Hungarian historian of religion-is preformed by psychology.
It is well known that Thomas Mann's novels on mythical themes
are indebted to Freud's psychoanalysis. Yet psychology and sociology
(and Freud's psychoanalysis is constructed on sociological rather than
on biological premises) are, as Philip Rahv has noted, inherently
anti-mythic.
If
the union of myth and humanism to which Thomas
Mann aspires is to be realized in the coming age, neither a psy–
chology nor a sociology of myth (which can give only an historical
account) can satisfy his intention. Therefore Mann is driven time
and again to the opposite pole, to the work of Oskar Goldberg, who
neither psychologized nor sociologized myth but insisted on the reality
of man's mythical experience: the gods.
Goldberg'S philosophy of myth is the extreme opposite of the
psychoanalytic theory of myth, whose purely formal interpretation is
symptomatic of an unmythical age, which can in no way do justice
to the constitution of myth in its pristine form. Goldberg's mytho–
logical philosophy presented Thomas Mann with the possibility of
arresting the total dissolution of myth. Therefore his work remained
