The Kridwiss Circle and the Conservative Revolution (1920–1930)
Mann shows us an admittedly one-sided version of what the intellectual life of this final period looked like in chapter XXXIV, in which a description of the
Apocalipsis is interwoven with Zeitblom’s detailed account of the proto-fascist “Kridwiss Circle” of intellectuals in which he moves during these years.
1In an April 1, 1950, letter to Otto Reeb, Mann used the term “pre-fascist” to refer to the Kridwiss Circle. See Mann, Selbstkommentare, 301. The Kridwiss Circle bears some resemblance to the prewar salons and indeed includes some of the same members. But everything here is much worse, much more grotesque. If the artists who mingled with industrialists at the Schlaginhaufens were mostly puerile and self-absorbed dreamers, the habitués of the Kridwiss Circle are relentless cynics. They not only have lost the interest and energy to defend progress and liberal society, but now actually celebrate its demise. There’s the paleozoologist Dr. Egon Unruhe, who preaches a “sublimated Darwinism” in which “all the things that an advanced humanity had long since ceased to believe became true and real again” (382/527). Or Professor Georg Vogler, transparently modeled on the philologist Josef Nadler (1884–1963), who was the author of an infamous literary history that linked the stylistic particularities of German poets to the Germanic tribes from which they had ostensibly descended and the landscape in which they had grown up. Not surprisingly, this work became quite popular during the Nazi period. Mann reserves most of his satirical venom for the poet Daniel zur Höhe, however, whom he modeled on an old enemy, the poet Ludwig Derleth (1870–1948).
2Mann had already parodied Derleth forty years earlier, in the short story “At the Prophet’s” (1904). Zur Höhe is the author of a “lyrico-rhetorical outburst of voluptuous terrorism” in which he adopts the persona “of an entity named
Christus Imperator Maximus, an Energy who enlisted and commanded troops prepared to die in the cause of subjugating the globe […] and could not get enough of unquestioned, unbounded obedience to his fist-pounding demands” (383/528).
Describing the Kridwiss Circle, Zeitblom notes “that there was a lively sense that the war had disrupted and destroyed what had seemed to be life’s fixed values” (384/529), but also acknowledges that “the war had only completed, clarified, and forged as a common drastic experience something that had long been developing and establishing itself as the basis of a new sense of life” (384/530). Thinking back to Mann’s earlier description of Kaisersaschern, we might realize that this “long development” can be seen as the surface manifestation of an even older tendency. The Kridwiss Circle represents merely the most extreme version of a human propensity towards unreason that has always cast a shadow over the accomplishments of modernity.
Unsurprisingly, then, the members of the Circle not only despise liberal democracy but also mock the bourgeois progressive tradition that led to things like “culture, enlightenment, humanity, and dreams like the improvement of nations through scientific civilization” (384/530). They believe that dictatorship is the only logical response to the chaos of modernity and congratulate themselves on possessing not only the intellectual acuity to have recognized this clearly, but also the moral resolve to hasten its arrival: “Everything ended in dictatorship, in violence, in any case; for with the demolition of traditional forms of government and society by the French Revolution, an age had dawned that […] was moving toward despotic tyranny over atomized, disconnected masses leveled to a common denominator and as powerless as the individual” (385/531).
The Kridwiss Circle offers a satirical summary of the aforementioned current in 1920s intellectual life known as the “Conservative Revolution.”
3See Roger Woods, The Conservative Revolution in the Weimar Republic (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1996). The best-known conservative revolutionaries in the English-speaking world are the novelist Ernst Jünger, the jurist Carl Schmitt, and the philosopher Oswald Spengler, though there were many others. The name given to their movement is a much-discussed paradox, but it accurately identifies the distinctive feature of these reactionary intellectuals, namely their determination to oppose modernity not only by hanging on to traditional values in danger of being erased, but rather by smashing the status quo and building anew. They believed that only a strong dictatorial figure who could count on the same adulation and unquestioned obedience that kings and popes had (supposedly) enjoyed in the Middle Ages could redeem society from its contemporary fallen condition. This combination of backward glance and wish for radical erasure of existing forms is what unites them with Leverkühn’s artistic project during his final years.
Doctor Faustus ends with a grand finale in which nearly all of the figures who have populated the Schlaginhaufen salon and the living room of Sixtus Kridwiss make a pilgrimage to Pfeiffering to listen to a performance of excerpts from Leverkühn’s symphonic cantata, The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus. Over the course of the previous ten years, Mann’s fictional composer has perfected a “strict style” that successfully implements in musical terms much of what the Conservative Revolution strove for. It consists of a radical simplification of musical material, which it subjects to iron-clad control. At the same time, it rolls back a century and a half of homophonic musical innovation, restoring a polyphonic dimension to modern music that Beethoven thought he had successfully overcome. Tellingly, however, the man who presents this innovation to the assembled German artists and intellectuals is not a Christus Imperator Maximus like the one envisioned by Daniel zur Höhe, but rather a gaunt syphilitic whose frail body very much resembles that of the mortal Christ.
With the exception of Zeitblom and a few other faithful hangers-on, the invited guests all flee the scene before Leverkühn even has the opportunity to strike the first chords on the piano. They are unwilling to honestly confront this ghastly realization of their openly voiced wishes, unwilling also to take any responsibility for it. This final scene renders Doctor Faustus a provocative indictment not only of the intellectual abnegation that led to the Third Reich, but also of the refusal to take responsibility that Mann saw everywhere around him when he finished his novel in 1947. When Mann told an American audience that the dark events in Germany were not alien to him, but that he had been “through it all,” he was not merely thinking about long-gone history, the kind of events for which he had to consult thirty-year-old diaries. The long effects of those days were still with him, and they are with us now as well, if we only know where to look.