Centennary
This is the art installation by Christian Kuhn (with the help of a local school) honoring the hundredth anniversary of the armistice, at the Königsplatz in Munich:
Something WWI-related that is on my mind these days isn't just the evil of nationalism being back, but also the divisions within the same nation, which are currently going beyond avarage ideological divides and into stark hatred. Now pre-WWI, the majority of intellectuals and artists in Germany was in the grip of the same fervent nationalism, war fever and bashing of everyone else as in the other European nations, but there were exceptions here, too. And one of them led to our most famous literary family feud. I've translated the three key letters of it for you, shorted, of course, because when I tell you the feuding siblings were the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, you know the original letters were loooong. (But fascinating, I promise.)
Background: Anglosaxons associate Thomas Mann mostly with the later stage of his existence, as the dignified nobel prize winner in exile, recording speeches against Hitler for the BBC. In 1914, by contrast, he was very much pro-war, and singing the same tune as most people: superiority of German culture, decadent shallow France, perfidious Albion etc., you name it, he said it. Meanwhile, his older brother Heinrich was among the minority of writers firmly anti war. In the lead up, he'd written what is still the best satiric novel about Wilhelmian Germany, Der Untertan (translated as Man of Straw and later as The Subject); he'd also written an essay about Emile Zola (focusing specifically on Zola the political journalist, J'Accuse as the centre) which among other things was very much an attack on the increasingly nationalistic output of many other writers of the day. These of course included his younger brother, who was outraged and stopped talking to Heinrich at that point except through the press. (He also wrote Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen - "Contemplations of an Apolitical Man" - in which he attacks the Zivilisationsliterat (guess who) and which is so anti democratic that it's not surprising Thomas in later years prefered not to talk about it.
In the last year of the war, at a point when even the most fervent of war believers had to face the fact Germany was about to lose, Heinrich attempted to get into contact again. So, a hundred years ago, he wrote thusly:
Dear Tommy,
your article in the Berliner Tageblatt was read out loud in my presence. I don't know whether the other listeners had the same impression, but it seemed to me as if at least in some parts it was addressed to me, almost like a letter. Which is why I feel the need to reply to you, although without the press as an intermediary, if only to tell you how unjustified the accusation of fraternal hatred is.
In my public announcements, there is no "I" and hence also no brother. They are addressed to the public at large, disregard - at least this is my intention - my advantage or disadvantage, and are solely focused on an idea. Love for humanity (which is in its political manifestation: European democracy) is indeed love for an idea; but he who can open his heart this way has to be capable of doing it on a smaller scale. (...)
I've been following all your work with the best intention to understand and empathize with it. NOw I've always been familiar with the antagonism of your mind. If your extreme position during the war surprised you, well, I found it predictable enough. This knowledge of you never stopped me from often loving your work, even more often to penetrate it and to praise or defend it publically, and to comfort you, when you were doubting yourself, as my younger brother.
If you hardly ever returned this, I didn't mind. I knew that in order to define yourself you didn't just need self confinement but the active repelling of the other - and thus I coped with your attacks (...) without much effort. I did not return them, or returned them only once, when the issue at hand wasn't a literary preference anymore, or a intellectual knowing-all-ness, but the most basic threat and misery. My essay titled "Zola" was a protest against those who, as I had it see it, were falling over themselves to do damage. Not against solely yourself, but against a legion of writers. (...)
Perhaps my explanation today will be listened to. This could be possible if your newest lament against myself was dictated by pain. If this is the case, please know you need not think of me as an enemy.
Heinrich
Thomas was, shall we say, not in the mood for what he saw as being patronized by his older brother. His reply (Carla and Lula were their sisters):
Dear Heinrich,
your letter finds me at a moment where it is physically impossible for me to reply to its true sense. (...) Besides, I wonder what the point would be of pressing the mental torture of two years into a letter which of necessity would have to be much longer than your own. Oh, I believe your assurance that you don't hate me. After that absolving outburst of a Zola article and given your current circumstances and the way all is well for you, you don't need to anymore. Using the phrase "fraternal hatred" had been meant more generally anyway. (...)
Calling my behaviour during the war extreme is a lie. Your behavior was extreme, and despicable, completely so. I haven't suffered and struggled for two years, neglected my dearest plans, investigated, tested and contemplated myself, and condemned myself to artistic silence just to sobbingly hug it out with you - after a letter which exudes understandable triumph and was dictated in no line by something other than self righteousness and ethical smugness. (...)
You can't comprehend the rightness and the ethics of my life, because you are my brother. Why didn't either Hauptmann or Dehmel who even praised German horses to the skies or Harden who demanded a preventive war need to feel the insults of the Zola article adressed to them? Why was its entire sensational invective tailored to fit myself? The fraternal Welterlebnis (untranslatable term roughly meaning "way of experiencing the world and life") forced you to do it. (...)
Let the tragedy of our brotherhood complete itself. Pain? Ah, well. One gets hard and numb. Since Carla committed suicide and you broke off relationships with Lula, separation for all time isn't anything new for our community anymore, is it? I haven't made this life. I despise it. One has to live it out as good as one can.
Farewell.
T.
Heinrich drafted a reply:
Dear Tommy,
against such bitterness, I should fall silent. (...)But I don't do separations intentionally, and never forever. (...) I regard myself as a self reliant being. My Welterlebnis is not a fraternal one, it is simply mine. I don't mind you. As far as I can see, you have underestimated what you mean to me emotionally and overestimated your intellectual impact. (...) For example: if you ever wrote something other than childishness about French subjects, I'd be honestly delighted. But you know what you'd do if I suddenly decided to declare myself a follower of old Prussia? You'd throw your notes for a Frederick the Great into the fire. (...)
Don't see my life and actions as being all about you, they are not revolving around you and would be literally the same if you didn't exist.
Your inability to take seriously another life finally births monstrosities. And thus you find that my letter, which was meant as a gesture of simple kindness, "exudes triumph". Triumph because of what? "All being well for me" - i.e. the world smashed to pieces and ten million dead bodies in the ground. What a justification! How promising of satisfaction to the ideologue! But I am not the man to fashion the misery and death of nations after my intellectual pet peeves, not I. I don't believe the victory of any cause is worth discussion at a point where humanity itself is getting destroyed. All that will be left after the last, most terrible ending will taste of bitterness and sadness. I don't know whether any of us are able to help our fellow humans to "live better", but I should hope our literature will never again help them to die more eagerly.
They're still dying. But you, who approved of the war, who still approves of it and calls my attitude (...) "despicable, completely so" can have, God willing, another 40 years to "investigate and test", if not to reclaim yourself. The hour will come, I hope, in which you'll see human beings, not shadows, and then you will see me, too.
Heinrich
In the end, he didn't send it. But three years later, when he fell sick and ended up in the hospital, Thomas showed up with flowers and a "dear Heinrich, get better" note which ended with "let us now continue - together, if your heart feels the same as mine". He's written to his publisher "you may have heard about my feud with my brother - I mean of course the elder; in the higher sense, I only have one brother. The younger one is a nice kid one can't argue with " (so much for poor Vicco, who never taken very seriously by any of his siblings). The feud was now over, but not the brüderliches Welterlebnis; siblings in either brothers' work more often than not get pretty intense. The letters between the brothers have been published since many decades, but when I was in Los Angeles, I had the pleasure to hold the originals of the later years correspondance in my hands when researching at the Feuchtwanger archive (since Heinrich was friends with Lion Feuchtwanger and thus after his death his correspondance ended up with him). Leaving aside my fondness for complicated family relationships, I think one of the reasons why these letters resonate with me the way they do is that they mix the big emotional and intellectual division of their day with personal issues in a way no novelist could improve on. And they were both expert novelists.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1314044.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.
Something WWI-related that is on my mind these days isn't just the evil of nationalism being back, but also the divisions within the same nation, which are currently going beyond avarage ideological divides and into stark hatred. Now pre-WWI, the majority of intellectuals and artists in Germany was in the grip of the same fervent nationalism, war fever and bashing of everyone else as in the other European nations, but there were exceptions here, too. And one of them led to our most famous literary family feud. I've translated the three key letters of it for you, shorted, of course, because when I tell you the feuding siblings were the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, you know the original letters were loooong. (But fascinating, I promise.)
Background: Anglosaxons associate Thomas Mann mostly with the later stage of his existence, as the dignified nobel prize winner in exile, recording speeches against Hitler for the BBC. In 1914, by contrast, he was very much pro-war, and singing the same tune as most people: superiority of German culture, decadent shallow France, perfidious Albion etc., you name it, he said it. Meanwhile, his older brother Heinrich was among the minority of writers firmly anti war. In the lead up, he'd written what is still the best satiric novel about Wilhelmian Germany, Der Untertan (translated as Man of Straw and later as The Subject); he'd also written an essay about Emile Zola (focusing specifically on Zola the political journalist, J'Accuse as the centre) which among other things was very much an attack on the increasingly nationalistic output of many other writers of the day. These of course included his younger brother, who was outraged and stopped talking to Heinrich at that point except through the press. (He also wrote Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen - "Contemplations of an Apolitical Man" - in which he attacks the Zivilisationsliterat (guess who) and which is so anti democratic that it's not surprising Thomas in later years prefered not to talk about it.
In the last year of the war, at a point when even the most fervent of war believers had to face the fact Germany was about to lose, Heinrich attempted to get into contact again. So, a hundred years ago, he wrote thusly:
Dear Tommy,
your article in the Berliner Tageblatt was read out loud in my presence. I don't know whether the other listeners had the same impression, but it seemed to me as if at least in some parts it was addressed to me, almost like a letter. Which is why I feel the need to reply to you, although without the press as an intermediary, if only to tell you how unjustified the accusation of fraternal hatred is.
In my public announcements, there is no "I" and hence also no brother. They are addressed to the public at large, disregard - at least this is my intention - my advantage or disadvantage, and are solely focused on an idea. Love for humanity (which is in its political manifestation: European democracy) is indeed love for an idea; but he who can open his heart this way has to be capable of doing it on a smaller scale. (...)
I've been following all your work with the best intention to understand and empathize with it. NOw I've always been familiar with the antagonism of your mind. If your extreme position during the war surprised you, well, I found it predictable enough. This knowledge of you never stopped me from often loving your work, even more often to penetrate it and to praise or defend it publically, and to comfort you, when you were doubting yourself, as my younger brother.
If you hardly ever returned this, I didn't mind. I knew that in order to define yourself you didn't just need self confinement but the active repelling of the other - and thus I coped with your attacks (...) without much effort. I did not return them, or returned them only once, when the issue at hand wasn't a literary preference anymore, or a intellectual knowing-all-ness, but the most basic threat and misery. My essay titled "Zola" was a protest against those who, as I had it see it, were falling over themselves to do damage. Not against solely yourself, but against a legion of writers. (...)
Perhaps my explanation today will be listened to. This could be possible if your newest lament against myself was dictated by pain. If this is the case, please know you need not think of me as an enemy.
Heinrich
Thomas was, shall we say, not in the mood for what he saw as being patronized by his older brother. His reply (Carla and Lula were their sisters):
Dear Heinrich,
your letter finds me at a moment where it is physically impossible for me to reply to its true sense. (...) Besides, I wonder what the point would be of pressing the mental torture of two years into a letter which of necessity would have to be much longer than your own. Oh, I believe your assurance that you don't hate me. After that absolving outburst of a Zola article and given your current circumstances and the way all is well for you, you don't need to anymore. Using the phrase "fraternal hatred" had been meant more generally anyway. (...)
Calling my behaviour during the war extreme is a lie. Your behavior was extreme, and despicable, completely so. I haven't suffered and struggled for two years, neglected my dearest plans, investigated, tested and contemplated myself, and condemned myself to artistic silence just to sobbingly hug it out with you - after a letter which exudes understandable triumph and was dictated in no line by something other than self righteousness and ethical smugness. (...)
You can't comprehend the rightness and the ethics of my life, because you are my brother. Why didn't either Hauptmann or Dehmel who even praised German horses to the skies or Harden who demanded a preventive war need to feel the insults of the Zola article adressed to them? Why was its entire sensational invective tailored to fit myself? The fraternal Welterlebnis (untranslatable term roughly meaning "way of experiencing the world and life") forced you to do it. (...)
Let the tragedy of our brotherhood complete itself. Pain? Ah, well. One gets hard and numb. Since Carla committed suicide and you broke off relationships with Lula, separation for all time isn't anything new for our community anymore, is it? I haven't made this life. I despise it. One has to live it out as good as one can.
Farewell.
T.
Heinrich drafted a reply:
Dear Tommy,
against such bitterness, I should fall silent. (...)But I don't do separations intentionally, and never forever. (...) I regard myself as a self reliant being. My Welterlebnis is not a fraternal one, it is simply mine. I don't mind you. As far as I can see, you have underestimated what you mean to me emotionally and overestimated your intellectual impact. (...) For example: if you ever wrote something other than childishness about French subjects, I'd be honestly delighted. But you know what you'd do if I suddenly decided to declare myself a follower of old Prussia? You'd throw your notes for a Frederick the Great into the fire. (...)
Don't see my life and actions as being all about you, they are not revolving around you and would be literally the same if you didn't exist.
Your inability to take seriously another life finally births monstrosities. And thus you find that my letter, which was meant as a gesture of simple kindness, "exudes triumph". Triumph because of what? "All being well for me" - i.e. the world smashed to pieces and ten million dead bodies in the ground. What a justification! How promising of satisfaction to the ideologue! But I am not the man to fashion the misery and death of nations after my intellectual pet peeves, not I. I don't believe the victory of any cause is worth discussion at a point where humanity itself is getting destroyed. All that will be left after the last, most terrible ending will taste of bitterness and sadness. I don't know whether any of us are able to help our fellow humans to "live better", but I should hope our literature will never again help them to die more eagerly.
They're still dying. But you, who approved of the war, who still approves of it and calls my attitude (...) "despicable, completely so" can have, God willing, another 40 years to "investigate and test", if not to reclaim yourself. The hour will come, I hope, in which you'll see human beings, not shadows, and then you will see me, too.
Heinrich
In the end, he didn't send it. But three years later, when he fell sick and ended up in the hospital, Thomas showed up with flowers and a "dear Heinrich, get better" note which ended with "let us now continue - together, if your heart feels the same as mine". He's written to his publisher "you may have heard about my feud with my brother - I mean of course the elder; in the higher sense, I only have one brother. The younger one is a nice kid one can't argue with " (so much for poor Vicco, who never taken very seriously by any of his siblings). The feud was now over, but not the brüderliches Welterlebnis; siblings in either brothers' work more often than not get pretty intense. The letters between the brothers have been published since many decades, but when I was in Los Angeles, I had the pleasure to hold the originals of the later years correspondance in my hands when researching at the Feuchtwanger archive (since Heinrich was friends with Lion Feuchtwanger and thus after his death his correspondance ended up with him). Leaving aside my fondness for complicated family relationships, I think one of the reasons why these letters resonate with me the way they do is that they mix the big emotional and intellectual division of their day with personal issues in a way no novelist could improve on. And they were both expert novelists.
This entry was originally posted at https://selenak.dreamwidth.org/1314044.html. Comment there or here, as you wish.