FROM CULT TO CULTURE
391
for Mann fascinating and repulsive at the same time; fascinating,
because Goldberg's philosophy could be set over against Freud's ide–
ologization of myth; repulsive, because Mann became aware of its
regressive nihilistic implications. Mann tried (with poetic license)
to steer a course between these alternatives in his interpretation of
mythology. Still, in 1937, when Thomas Mann together with Konrad
Falke started to publish a journal
Mass und Wert
(dedicated to "free
German culture") he invited Oskar Goldberg to contribute.
Goldberg's major work,
Die Wirklichkeit der Hebriier
(Berlin
1925), which presents itself as "an introduction to the system of the
Pentateuch," puts the problem of the "mythical reality" into an en–
tirely new perspective. Only one volume of this work was published,
and it is doubtful
if
now after the author's death a second volume
will ever appear. The book, though published in 1925, is derived
from lectures given in private circles between 1903 and 1908. These
dates are not without significance, for they provide us with a clue
to the author's cultural "location." Bergson's philosophy, which in–
fluenced Sorel's political theory of myth, is also traceable in the con–
ceptual apparatus of Goldberg's theory of mythology.
Yet Goldberg's philosophy of mythology should not be confused
with the fabricated mythology so much in vogue in political groups
and literary circles since Nietzsche and Sorel. Goldberg understood
that Socrates represented a caesura dividing the history of mankind
into an
ante
and
post
which cannot be eradicated at will. In fact,
for him Socrates w.as much more to the point than Nietzsche, since
the Greek rationalist understood that a society cannot artificially
prolong the life of a myth. When, according to Goldberg, does
mythology degenerate into a mere literary product? When the pan–
theon of gods no longer stands behind the myth. Nietzsche, in pro–
testing against Socrates and attempting to return to the ecstasy of
tragic greatness, necessarily paved the way for Sorel's literary and
political apotheosis of mythology and for the ominous "myth of the
twentieth century" culminating in a manipulated mass-hysteria of
nations and classes.
The way to a new mythical age must follow the road of Socrates,
the road of philosophy. The coming mythical age will be discovered
by reason. Goldberg's philosophy of myth presents a classical case for
the dialectic of reason that destroys itself "reasonably" and calls for
