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PARTISAN REVIEW
psychologizing, where so many of his contemporaries have been con–
tent to dwell, have likewise kept him from errors of purely political
perspective. The political movements which so profoundly modified
nineteenth-century Germany have only a muffled repercussion in
Buddenbrooks,
or are limited there to minor local incidents; the War
of 1870
is
but mentioned in passing, in the course of a conversation
about the improved market for wheat. In
The Magic Mountain
the
state of mind which led to the War of 1914, "acute irritability," as
Mann dubs it,
is
conceived of as much like some barometric phe–
nomenon announcing a cyclone, and
is
described in terms more cos–
mic than human. The satire on fascism in
Mario the Magician
is
soon transformed into grim phantasy, where political allusions serve
only as somewhat negligible ingredients in a Hoffmanesque portrayal
of the grotesque and horrible. The massive
joseph
series, though in
composition over the period between 1930 and 1943, does not turn
into an attack upon tyranny, or a plea for the Jewish race, as might
have been expected from a writer more concerned with immediate
actuality. In
Doctor Faustus
the summary of events of the fatal year
1944 forms a rumbling base to the posthumous account of the mu–
sician's life, and doubtless more or less reproduces Mann's own voice
in his role of
praeceptor Germaniae
over the radio from America;
but this commentary on the German catastrophe is merely secondary
to the inner drama, to the tragedy of the man of genius bound over
irrevocably to Evil. The current political scene is less accepted in
Mann, or ignored, or even transcended, than made to take its place
in a series of causes and effects more essential than the political
present itself.
And certainly the ambiguous
Doctor Faustus
seems at first view
something that can be reduced to a relatively simple allegory of the
political condition of Germany between the years 1920 and 1945,
since at the end of the book the central character
is
almost explicitly
identified with the German Fatherland, shattered and dying as the
result of the Nazi adventure. Earlier, we are tempted to think of
Hitler, and the millennium which he promised to National Socialism
in its hour of triumph, when the vulgar, insignificant little man who
incarnates the Spirit of Evil proposes to the tragic hero a pact as–
suring him almost superhuman development of his genius, and
guaranteeing
him
an adequate portion of time before the infernal
