| Helene […] breakfast beverage | A likely parody of Book IV of The Odyssey by Homer (ca. eighth century BCE), in which Helen serves her husband Menelaus a drink of nepenthe—the drug that alone makes their fraught marriage bearable. |
| auspicious revival of our submarine war | The information that follows allows us to date Z.’s reflections to October 2, 1943. As in chapter I, Z.’s tone seems to waver between ironic distance to the Nazi regime and begrudging admiration of it. |
| | The distinction between the cosmopolitan ideal of a “European Germany” and the Nazi vision of a “German Europe” recurs in several of TM’s essays and lectures of the time period. |
| kidnapping the fallen Italian | Italian dictator Benito Mussolini (1883–1945) was deposed on July 25, 1943 and “rescued” (or kidnapped) by German paratroopers on September 12. |
| | Kurt Huber (1893–1943), a professor of psychology at the University of Munich and one of the members of the anti-Nazi resistance organization “The White Rose.” |
| | French: “all or nothing.” Z.’s use of this phrase possibly alludes to an apocryphal exchange between Hermann Göring (1893–1946) and Hitler. Discussing plans for the invasion of Poland, Göring is supposed to have said, “we’d better not play va banque,” to which Hitler supposedly replied, “I have played va banque all my life.” |
| | Z. reminds us of a main compositional principle of DF: time of narration and narrated time constantly fuse with one another. This device will become increasingly central in the coming chapters. |
| | In Shakespeare’s Hamlet (ca. 1600). |
| | Nuremberg, which was bombed by the Allies on August 28, 1943. Willibald Pirckheimer (1470–1530) was a humanist and contemporary of Dürer. |
| had done away with its great man | Benito Mussolini, already alluded to on 183/251. |
| The price […] has been paid | An estimated 100,000 German soldiers died at the Dnieper, another 350,000 were wounded. Soviet casualties are believed to be almost three times as high. |
| | Lebensraum was the Nazi term for the conquered territories in the East, which were to be the subject of a giant project of settler colonialism. Z.’s use of the term represents one more example of his ambiguous embrace of Nazi terminology. |
| old and genuine, faithful and familiar | The German des Alt- und Echten, des Treulich-Traulichen parodies lines from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg and Das Rheingold. Z. is drawing a connection between German culture and the crimes of the Nazis. |
| eye-people and ear-people […] the latter | TM himself frequently made this distinction, counting himself, like L., among the “ear-people” (Ohrenmenschen). |
| | Z.’s tangent may indeed seem random, but the color of L.’s eyes was already highlighted on 26/39. |
| | Friedrich Nietzsche spent much of his life in Basel and held a professorship there. The description of the concert that L. attends was heavily influenced by a newspaper article on an actual performance that took place there in 1943. |
| | A particularly expressive style of music characteristic of the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries. With the exception of Dieterich Buxtehude (1637–1707), the composers mentioned in this paragraph all lived during this period. |
| | An allusion to folktales according to which the devil supplied the blueprints for Cologne cathedral. |
| Orchestre de la Suisse Romande | A real orchestra, though not founded until 1918. |
| | |
| | Italian: “basset horn.” A member of the bassoon family, rarely used in music written after about 1840. |
| | The German for “sense” here is Verstand, a term central to post-Kantian philosophy and more commonly translated as “mind.” At stake here and throughout the rest of the paragraph is the question to what extent a modern artwork can still be considered a product of spontaneous inspiration rather than conscious intellectual labor. These reflections were heavily inspired by Adorno’s Philosophy of New Music. |
| he himself aspired to a work | Z.’s worries are not exactly selfless, given that he has been commissioned to arrange the libretto for L.’s opera. |
| Through the night that now envelops | The final two lines of the poem “Abendständchen” (Evening Song) by Clemens Brentano. |
| | The logogram H-E-A-E-Es (or B-E-A-E-E♭) already mentioned on 166/227. The titles of the songs in this paragraph are all drawn from poems by Brentano. |
| | Swiss conductor (1879–1962); an acquaintance of TM from his Zurich years. |
| | Another possible devil figure. |