| Christian fraternity Winfried | TM’s main source for his description of the student fraternity was his correspondence with Paul Tillich, who had been member of a Christian fraternity named “Wingolf” during his years at Halle. |
| | French: “brother and pig.” Idiomatic expression meaning “close friends” in Swiss French. |
| | German has both formal and informal pronouns of address. In early-twentieth-century university settings, virtually all people would have used formal pronouns to address one another, except within the confines of student fraternities, where informal pronouns would have been customary. In keeping with his “cold” and distanced character, L. naturally gravitates towards formal modes of address. |
| walk straight to the piano | L. habit of avoiding interpersonal contact by busying himself with a musical instrument foreshadows his later behavior in Chapter XVI. |
| | The German verb for “to improvise” (phantasieren) can also mean “to hallucinate.” TM is foreshadowing the conversation with the devil in XXV. |
| | |
| | An old-fashioned expression meaning “on foot.” |
| voluntary cutting-back and simplification | The enthusiastic return to “simpler” forms of life described by Z. with some ironic distance in this paragraph spoofs the national-conservative and proto-fascistic tendencies within German youth culture in the early twentieth century. Z.’s willfully archaic idiom contributes to this impression. |
| discussion launched in a barn | The following discussions have become known in German as the Schlafstrohgespräche (“sleeping straw discussions”). TM’s main source, from which he often quotes verbatim in the following pages, was the Winter 1931 edition of the magazine Die Freideutsche Position: Rundbriefe der Freideutschen Kameradschaft, a student newsletter. Hans-Joachim Schoeps (1909–1980), who wrote most of the relevant passages and sent the issue to TM in 1931 as a token of appreciation, later criticized the author’s decision to employ phrases written in the 1930s for a portrait of the early twentieth century; he also characterized his original writings as entirely unpolitical in nature. |
| one’s specific form of life | In Germany, the early twentieth century in general, and the Weimar years in particular, were characterized by an explicit clash of generations, something TM already thematized in his short story “Disorder and Early Sorrow” (1925). The students are debating the validity of generational consciousness, as well as the question of how new collective identities come into the world. |
| | In the German original, L. gets his pronouns of address confused, reluctantly moving from the third person plural (which serves as a formal address but also signifies total separation of subject and object) to the first person plural. |
| | Latin: “what we are proving.” |
| Eisenach and the Wartburg | Sites associated with Martin Luther, wo went to school in Eisenach and later translated the Bible while hiding at the Wartburg Castle. |
| | In keeping with his name, Deutschlin represents the German nationalist position throughout these discussions. |
| our having been a little late | A reference to Germany’s status as a “belated nation”—thus the title of a 1935 book by Helmuth Plessner (1892–1985), which TM almost certainly knew. Germany unified only in 1871, long after most other nation-states in Western Europe. |
| the eternally striving student | In this paragraph TM fuses ideas from Goethe’s Faust with direct allusions to the study Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology (1918) by his erstwhile friend Ernst Bertram (1884–1957). |
| Kierkegaard has […] made us aware | TM had originally planned to include many more allusions to Søren Kierkegaard (1813–1855) in the Halle chapters, but refrained from doing so after Paul Tillich informed him the Danish philosopher was almost unknown amongst German theologians at the time. |
| ride between death and the Devil | An allusion to Dürer’s engraving Knight, Death, and Devil (1513), which exerted a lifelong fascination on TM, who viewed the image as a visual manifestation of Nietzsche’s philosophy (Fig. 4). |
| | L. significantly does not concur with Deutschlin’s nationalist condemnation of all things French; French music will come to exert an important influence on him later in DF. |
| there is no direct access | Deutschlin’s argument in this paragraph is heavily influenced by Max Weber (1864–1920). He and Arzt are articulating alternative visions of how deeper meaning might still be found in modern society with their conflicting spheres of interest; Deutschlin appealing to collective national consciousness, Arzt to religion and social values. |
| | In the German, Teutleben conducts his argument in terms of the völkisch (“folkish”) rather than the “national,” which differentiates his particular brand of chauvinism from that of Deutschlin. |
| | River in Western Germany and center of German heavy industry. |
| | This should be Venusberg (Mountain of Venus), a reference to the Hörselberg, which supposedly hid an entryway to the underground realm of Venus, and which plays a central role in Wagner’s opera Tannhäuser (premiered 1845). Another devil’s reference as well as a sly indictment of the perhaps somewhat impractical nature of the students’ nighttime conversations. |