The German Genius

were all part of what Peter Gay has called “the community of reason,” an attempt to bring the clear light of scientific rationality to communal problems and experiences. But not everyone believed that cold rationality was the answer.
    One part of what became a campaign against the “cold positivism” of science in Weimar Germany was led by the Kreis (circle) of poets and writers that formed around Stefan George, “king of a secret Germany.” In practice, the Kreis was more important for what it stood for than for what it produced (though a minority always had a high regard for George’s poetry). 12 Several of its writers were biographers—and this wasn’t accidental. Their intention was to highlight “great men,” especially those from more “heroic” ages, men who had by their will changed the course of events. The most successful book of this genre was Ernst Kantorowicz’s biography of the thirteenth-century emperor Frederick II (see Chapter 32). For George and his circle, Weimar Germany was a distinctly unheroic age; science had no answer to such a predicament, and the task of the writer was to inspire others by means of his superior intuition.
    George never had the influence he expected because he was overshadowed by a much greater poetic talent, Rainer Maria Rilke. Born René Maria Rilke in Prague in 1875 (he Germanized his name only in 1897), Rilke was educated at military school. Early in his career, he tried writing plays as well as biography and poetry, but his reputation was transformed by Fünf Gesänge ( Five Cantos/August 1914 ), which he wrote in response to World War I. Young German soldiers took his slim volumes with them to the Front, and his were often the last words they read before they died, making Rilke “the idol of a generation without men.”
    His most famous poems, the Duineser Elegien ( Duino Elegies ), were published in 1923, their strange mystical, philosophical, “oceanic” tone perfectly capturing the mood of the moment. 13 The bulk of the elegies were “poured out” in a “spiritual hurricane” in one week, between February 7 and 14, 1922. 14 After he had finished his exhausting week, Rilke wrote to a friend that the elegies “had arrived.” In the poems he wrestles with the “great land of grief,” casting his net over the fine arts, literary history, mythology, biology, anthropology, and psychoanalysis, exploring what each has to offer to help our suffering. The second elegy reads:
    Earliest triumphs, and high creation’s favourites,
Mountain-ranges and dawn-red ridges,
Since all beginning, pollen of blossoming godhead,
Articulate light, avenues, stairways, thrones,
Spaces of being, shields of delight, tumults
Of stormily-rapturous feeling, and suddenly, singly,
Mirrors, drawing back within themselves
The beauty radiant from their countenance.
     
    S CIENCE , M ODERNITY, AND THE N OVEL
     
    Whereas Rilke shared with Hofmannsthal and Stefan George the belief that the artist can help shape the prevailing mentality of an age, Thomas Mann was more concerned, as Schnitzler had been, to describe that change as dramatically as possible. Though not as famous today (in Germany) as Buddenbrooks , Der Zauberberg ( The Magic Mountain ), published in 1924, did extremely well (it appeared in two volumes), selling 50,000 copies in its first year. It is heavy with symbolism (too heavy in translation), and the English translation has also succeeded in losing some of Mann’s humor, not exactly a rich commodity in his work. Set on the eve of World War I, The Magic Mountain tells the story of Hans Castorp, “a simple young man” who goes to a Swiss sanatorium to visit a cousin who has tuberculosis (a visit Albert Einstein actually made, to deliver a lecture). Expecting to stay only a short time, he catches the disease himself and is forced to remain in the clinic for seven years. The overall symbolism is pretty obvious. The hospital is Europe, a stable, long-standing institution that is filled with decay and corruption. “Like the generals starting the war, Hans expects his visit to the clinic to be short, over in no time.” Like them, he is surprised—appalled—to discover that his whole time frame has to be changed. Among the fellow inmates are rationalists, would-be heroes, and innocents. The inadequacies of science as a form of self-knowledge run through the book, Mann’s goal being to sum up the human condition (at least, the Western condition), aware as Rilke