Whereas Rilke shared with Hofmannsthal 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. Mann’s most famous novel was published in 1924. The Magic Mountain did extremely well (it was published in two volumes), selling fifty thousand copies in its first year. It is heavily laden with symbolism, and the English translation has succeeded in losing some of Mann’s humour, not exactly a rich commodity in his work. But the symbolism is important, for as we shall see, it is a familiar one. The Magic Mountain is about the wasteland that caused, or at least preceded, The Waste Land. Set on the eve of World War I, it 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 Alfred Einstein actually made, to deliver a lecture).44 Expecting to stay only a short time, he catches the disease himself and is forced to remain in the clinic for seven years. During the course of the book he meets various members of staff, fellow patients, and visitors. Each of these represents a distinct point of view competing for the soul of Hans. The overall symbolism is pretty heavy-handed. The hospital is Europe, a stable, long-standing institution but 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.45 Like them, he is surprised – appalled – to discover that his whole time frame has to be changed. Among the other characters there is the liberal Settembrini, anticlerical, optimistic, above all rational. He is opposed by Naphta, eloquent but with a dark streak, the advocate of heroic passion and instinct, ‘the apostle of irrationalism.’46 Peeperkorn is in some ways a creature out of Rilke, a sensualist, a celebrant of life, whose words come tumbling out but expose him as having little to say. His body is like his mind: diseased and impotent.47 Clawdia Chauchat, a Russian, has a different kind of innocence from Hans’s. She is self-possessed but innocent of knowledge, particularly scientific knowledge. Hans assumes that by revealing all the scientific knowledge he has, he will possess her. They enjoy a brief affair, but Hans no more possesses her mind and soul than scientific facts equal wisdom.48 Finally, there is the soldier Joachim, Hans’s cousin, who is the least romantic of all of them, especially about war. When he is killed, we feel his loss like an amputation. Castorp is redeemed – but through a dream, the sort of dream Freud would have relished (but which in fact rarely exists in real life), full of symbolism leading to the conclusion that love is the master of ad, that love is stronger than reason, that love alone can conquer the forces that are bringing death all around. Hans does not forsake reason entirely, but he realises that a life without passion is but half a life.49 Unlike Rilke, whose aim was to transform experience into art, Mann’s goal was to sum up the human condition (at least, the Western condition), in detail as well as in generalities, aware as Rilke was that a whole era was coming to an end. With compassion and an absence of mysticism, Mann grasped that heroes were not the answer. For Mann, modern man was self-conscious as never before. But was self-consciousness a form of reason? Or an instinct?
Over the last half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth, Paris, Vienna, and briefly Zurich dominated the intellectual and cultural life of Europe. Now it was Berlin’s turn. Viscount D’Abernon, the British ambassador to Berlin, described in his memoirs the period after 1925 as an ‘epoch of splendour’ in the city’s cultural life.50 Bertolt Brecht moved there; so did Heinrich Mann and Erich Kästner, after he had been fired from the Leipzig newspaper where he worked. Painters, journalists, and architects flocked to the city, but it was above all a place for performers. Alongside the city’s 120 newspapers, there were forty theatres providing, according to one observer, ‘unparalleled mental alertness.’51 But it was also a golden age for political cabaret, art films, satirical songs, Erwin Piscator’s experimental theatre, Franz Léhar operettas.
Among this concatenation of talent, this unparalleled mental alertness, three figures from the performing arts stand out: Arnold Schoenberg, Alban Berg, and Bertolt Brecht. Between 1915 and 1923 Schoenberg composed very little, but in 1923 he gave the world what one critic called ‘a new way of musical organisation.’52 Two years before, in 1921, Schoenberg, embittered by years of hardship, had announced that he had ‘discovered something which will assure the supremacy of German music for the next hundred years.’53 This was what became known as ‘serial music.’ Schoenberg himself gave rise to the phrase when he wrote, ‘I called this procedure “Method of composing with twelve tones which are related only with one another.” ‘54 ‘Procedure’ was an apt word for it, since serialism is not so much a style as a ‘new grammar’ for music. Atonalism, Schoenberg’s earlier invention, was partly designed to eliminate the individual intellect from musical composition; serialism took that process further, minimalising the tendency of any note to prevail. Under this system a composition is made up of a series from the twelve notes of the chromatic scale, arranged in an order that is chosen for the purpose and varies from work to work. Normally, no note in the row or series is repeated, so that no single note is given more importance than any other, lest the music take on the feeling of a tonal centre, as in traditional music with a key. Schoenberg’s tone series could be played in its original version, upside down (inversion), backward (retrograde) or even backward upside down (retrograde inversion). The point of this new music was that it was horizontal, or contrapuntal, rather than vertical, or harmonic.55 Its melodic line was often jerky, with huge leaps in tone and gaps in rhythm. Instead of themes grouped harmonically and repeated, the music was divided into ‘cells.’ Repetition was by definition avoided. Huge variations were possible under the new system – including the use of voices and instruments in unusual registers. However, compositions always had a degree of harmonic coherence, ‘since the fundamental interval pattern is always the same.’56
The first completely serial work is generally held to be Schoenberg’s Piano Suite (op. 25), performed in 1923. Both Berg and Anton von Webern enthusiastically adopted Schoenberg’s new technique, and for many people Berg’s two operas Wozzeck and Lulu have become the most familiar examples of, first, atonality, and second, serialism. Berg began to work on Wozzeck in 1918, although it was not premiered until 1925, in Berlin. Based on a short unfinished play by Georg Büchner, the action revolves around an inadequate, simple soldier who is preyed upon and betrayed by his mistress, his doctor, his captain, and his drum major; in some ways it is a musical version of George Grosz’s savage pictures.57 The soldier ends up committing both murder and suicide. Berg, a large, handsome man, had shed the influence of romanticism less well than Schoenberg or Webern (which is perhaps why his works are more popular), and Wozzeck is very rich in moods and forms – rhapsody, lullaby, a military march, rondo, each character vividly drawn.58 The first night, with Erich Kleiber conducting, took place only after ‘an unprecedented series of rehearsals,’ but even so the opera created a furore.59 It was labelled ‘degenerate,’ and the critic for Deutsche Zeitung wrote, ‘As I was leaving the State Opera, I had the sensation of having been not in a public theatre but in an insane asylum. On the stage, in the orchestra, in the stalls – plain madness…. We deal here, from a musical viewpoint, with a composer dangerous to the public welfare.’60 But not everyone was affronted; some critics praised Berg’s ‘instinctive perception,’ and other European opera houses clamoured to stage it. Lulu is in some ways the reverse of Wozzeck. Whereas the soldier was prey to those around him, Lulu is a predator, an amoral temptress ‘who ruins all she touches.’61 Based on two dramas by Frank Wedekind, this serial opera also verges on atonality. Unfinished at Berg’s death in 1935, it is full of bravura patches, elaborate coloratura, and confrontations between a heroine-turned-prostitute and her murderer. Lulu is the ‘evangelist of a new century,’ killed by the man who fears her.62 It was the very embodiment of the Berlin that Bertolt Brecht, among others, was at home in.