In his own country, Bohr was feted and given his own Institute of Theoretical Physics in Copenhagen, which became a major centre for the subject in the years between the wars. Bohr’s quiet, agreeable, reflective personality – when speaking he often paused for minutes on end while he sought the correct word – was an important factor in this process. But also relevant to the rise of the Copenhagen Institute was Denmark’s position as a small, neutral country where, in the dark years of the century, physicists could meet away from the frenetic spotlight of the major European and North American centres.
For psychoanalysis, 1913 was the most significant year after 1900, when The Interpretation of Dreams was published. Freud published a new book, Totem and Taboo, in which he extended his theories about the individual to the Darwinian, anthropological world, which, he argued, determined the character of society. This was written partly in response to a work by Freud’s former favourite disciple, Carl Jung, who had published The Psychology of the Unconscious, two years before, which marked the first serious division in psychoanalytic theory. Three major works of fiction, very different from one another but each showing the influence of Freudian ideas as they extended beyond the medical profession to society at large, also appeared.
Thomas Mann’s great masterpiece Buddenbrooks was published in 1901, with the subtitle ‘Decline of a Family.’ Set in a north German, middle-class family (Mann was himself from L¨beck, the son of a prosperous corn merchant), the novel is bleak. Thomas Buddenbrook and his son Hanno die at relatively young ages (Thomas in his forties, Hanno in his teens) ‘for no other very good reason than they have lost the will to live.’46 The book is lively, and even funny, but behind it lies the spectre of Nietzsche, nihilism, and degeneracy.
Death in Venice, a novella published in 1913, is also about degeneracy, about instincts versus reason, and is an exploration of the author’s unconscious in a far more brutally frank way than Mann had attempted or achieved before. Gustav von Aschenbach is a writer newly arrived in Venice to complete his masterpiece. He has the appearance, as well as the first name, of Gustav Mahler, whom Mann fiercely admired and who died on the eve of Mann’s own arrival in Venice in 1 9 1 1. No sooner has Aschenbach arrived than he chances upon a Polish family staying in the same hotel. He is struck by the dazzling beauty of the young son, Tadzio, dressed in an English sailor suit. The story follows the ageing Aschenbach’s growing love for Tadzio; meanwhile he neglects his work, and his body succumbs to the cholera epidemic encroaching on Venice. Aschenbach fails to complete his work and he also fails to alert Tadzio’s family to the epidemic so they might escape. The writer dies, never having spoken to his beloved.
Von Aschenbach, with his ridiculously quiffed hair, his rouge makeup, and his elaborate clothes, is intended by Mann to embody a once-great culture now deracinated and degenerate. He is also the artist himself.47 In Mann’s private diaries, published posthumously, he confirmed that even late in life he still fell romantically in love with young men, though his 1905 marriage to Katia Pringsheim seemed happy enough. In 1925 Mann admitted the direct influence of Freud on Death in Venice: ‘The death wish is present in Aschenbach’s consciousness though he’s unaware of it.’ As Ronald Hayman, Mann’s biographer has stressed, Ich was frequently used by Mann in a Freudian way, to suggest an aspect or segment of the personality that asserts itself, often competing against instinct. (Ich was Freud’s preferred usage; the Latin ego was an innovation of his English translator.)48 The whole atmosphere of Venice represented in the book – dark, rotting back alleys, where ‘unspeakable horrors’ lurk unseen and unquantified – recalls Freud’s primitive id, smouldering beneath the surface of the personality, ready to take advantage of any lapse by the ego. Some critics have speculated that the very length of time it took Mann to write this short work – several years – reflected the difficulty he had in admitting his own homosexuality.49
1913 was also the year in which D. H. Lawrence’s Sons and Lovers was published. Whether or not Lawrence was aware of psychoanalysis as early as 1905, when he wrote about infantile sexuality ‘in terms almost as explicit as Freud’s,’ he was exposed to it from 1912 on, when he met Frieda Weekley. Frieda, born Baroness Frieda von Richthofen at Metz in Germany in 1879, had spent some time in analysis with her lover Otto Gross, a psychoanalyst.50 His technique of treatment was an eclectic mix, combining the ideas of Freud and Nietzsche. Sons and Lovers tackled an overtly Freudian theme: the Oedipal. Of course, the Oedipal theme pre-dated Freud, as did its treatment in literature. But Lawrence’s account of the Morel family – from the Nottinghamshire coalfields (Nottingham being Lawrence’s own home county) – places the Oedipal conflict within the context of wider issues. The world inhabited by the Morels is changing, reflecting the transition from an agricultural past to an industrial future and war (Paul Morel actually predicts World War I).51 Gertrude Morel, the mother in the family, is not without education or wisdom, a fact that sets her apart from her duller, working-class husband. She devotes all her energies to her sons, William and Paul, so that they may better themselves in this changing world. In the process, however, Paul, an artist, who also works in a factory, falls in love and tries to escape the family. Where before there had been conflict between wife and husband, it is now a tussle between mother and son. ‘These sons are urged into life by their reciprocal love of their mother – urged on and on. But when they come to manhood, they can’t love, because their mother is the strongest power in their lives, and holds them…. As soon as the young men come into contact with women, there’s a split. William gives his sex to a fribble, and his mother holds his soul.’52 Just as Mann tried to break the taboo on homosexuality in Death in Venice, Lawrence talks freely of the link between sex and other aspects of life in Sons and Lovers and in particular the role of the mother in the family. But he doesn’t stop there. As Helen and Carl Baron have said, socialist and modernist themes mingle in the book: low pay, unsafe conditions in the mines, strikes, the lack of facilities for childbirth, or the lack of schooling for children older than thirteen; the ripening ambition of women to obtain work and to agitate for votes; the unsettling effect of evolutionary theory on social and moral life; and the emergence of an interest in the unconscious.53 In his art studies, Paul encounters the new theories about social Darwinism and gravity. Mann’s story is about a world that is ending, Lawrence’s about one world giving way to another. But both reflect the Freudian theme of the primacy of sex and the instinctual side of life, with the ideas of Nietzsche and social Darwinism in the background. In both, the unconscious plays a not altogether wholesome role. As Gustav Klimt and Hugo von Hofmannsthal pointed out in fin-de-siècle Vienna, man ignores the instinctive life at his periclass="underline" whatever physics might say, biology is the everyday reality. Biology means sex, reproduction, and behind that evolution. Death in Venice is about the extinction of one kind of civilisation as a result of degeneracy. Sons and Lovers is less pessimistic, but both explore the Nietzschean tussle between the life-enhancing barbarians and the overrefined, more civilised, rational types. Lawrence saw science as a form of overrefinement. Paul Morel has a strong, instinctive life force, but the shallow of his mother is never absent.