Hans Castorp's snow dream
Hans Castorp's snow dream is one of the highlights in Thomas Mann's novel The Magic Mountain (1924), but remains an interlude . The insertion revokes the otherwise continuous theme of decadence in the novel. At the same time, Thomas Mann said goodbye to a literary motif that he had repeatedly worked on up to then: “Sympathy with Death”.
Thomas Mann described the magic mountain as the transition to the second part of his life's work, which includes Joseph and his brothers , the Goethe novel Lotte in Weimar , Doctor Faustus and the confessions of the impostor Felix Krull .
The blizzard
Hans Castorp , a young man from Hamburg and a patient in the Davos lung sanatorium, which is the setting of the novel, goes on a ski trip into the high mountains one day. There he gets caught in a life-threatening blizzard, loses his orientation and has to wait for the storm in the slipstream of a haystack. He falls asleep after taking a few sips of port , "which immediately took effect" , and dreams. The dream is divided into two parts: into scenic images and a subsequent inner monologue that reflects the dream images. Thomas Mann makes a distinction between “image dream” and “thought dream” .
The dream
Four mythical images
The first picture could be titled “Home”: Hans Castorp sees deciduous trees in full leaf decoration gently rustling with the tops. He breathes her scent and thinks: “Oh homeland breath, scent and abundance of the lowlands, long without.” A shower of rain falls and a rainbow arises, which initiates a change of scene.
The second picture could be titled “Heavenly realms” : the landscape opens up “in increasing transfiguration” . A sea shore opens up, a beautiful bay. "A bliss of light, of deep heavenly purity" . The scene is populated by youth of both sexes: "Sun and Sea Children" . There are well-formed youths who occupy themselves with their horses and practice archery, and beautiful girls, making music, in round dancing. Hans Castorp is deeply impressed by the friendliness and polite consideration with which the sun people treat one another, serious and cheerful at the same time, with “reasonable piety” .
Then his gaze falls on a nursing young mother. The passers-by greet them "with the not too precise suggestion of bending the knees, similar to the church- goer who lightly humiliates himself in front of the high altar " . The figure of the mother and the conventional obeisances are reminiscent of a representation of Mary . Aside (in the text it says: “serenely aside” ) stands a beautiful boy, whose full hair rests on his head like a helmet and who crosses his arms over his chest. He looks back and forth between Hans Castorp and the beach picture. Finally the boy looks past Hans Castorp into the distance. His expression changes, becomes more and more serious, petrified and assumes an unfathomable "closed to death" . It is Hermes that Thomas Mann lets appear again as before in Death in Venice . One of the tasks of this connecting deity was to guide the souls into the world of the dead. In view of this “closed to death” , Hans Castorp comes “the pale horror [...], not without a vague idea of what it means” .
He turns backwards. The third picture opens up. Hans Castorp stands in front of the pillars of an ancient temple. He enters and sees a stone group sculpture: "Mother and daughter, as it seemed" . "When looking at the statue, Hans Castorp's heart became even heavier, more fearful and foreboding for dark reasons . " The Thomas Mann interpretation sees the two women Persephone and Demeter . The third picture thus proves to be Hades . The “paradisiacal fields” give the reader a religious impression. The temple precinct leads into a pre-religious, mythical sphere.
Hans Castorp looks into the interior of the temple chamber through an open door . It's the fourth picture . Castorp is confronted with the personified nature : two gray, shaggy-haired women, half-naked, with "drooping witch breasts and finger-length teats" tear apart and eat a small child over a flickering fire. They are Thomas Mann's allegories of nature. Hans Castorp wakes up with horror, but falls asleep again immediately. Without reaching the initial depth of sleep, he continues to dream, now "no longer in pictures, but in thought" , in loosened associations .
With the picture dream, Thomas Mann takes up the Nekyia myth. It describes the temporary stay of a mortal in the world of the dead. Towards the end of his wandering Odysseus arrives in Hades. The eleventh song of the Odyssey , which describes this, is entitled "Nekyia". The title gave its name to this mythical motif. The term Hell Journey is a synonym for Nekyia.
The sequence of images “Heimat”, “Paradisische Gefilde”, “Hades” and “Natur” illustrates a mythical retrospective, a descent to the primeval. Thomas Mann follows Arthur Schopenhauer's philosophy of the primacy of will, according to which will and nature are the foundations of imagination and spirituality.
life and death
Right at the beginning, Thomas Mann calls his protagonist Hans Castorp a simple young person. On the last page he calls after him: "[...] because you were simple" . But after his return from Hades , Hans Castorp draws profound conclusions half asleep. Life and death are recognized as belonging together. "But whoever recognizes the body, the life, recognizes death." And vice versa: "Because all interest in death and illness is an expression of interest in life" .
“I dreamed,” sums up Hans Castorp, “of the status of man in his polite, discreet and respectful community, behind which the horrible blood meal took place in the temple. Were they so polite and charming to one another, the sun people, with a quiet view of just this hideous thing? That would be a fine and quite gallant conclusion that you would draw. ” What is so lightly expressed here is Thomas Mann's view of the roots of human morality. "Form and morality of an understanding-friendly community and beautiful human state - with a silent view of the blood meal" .
Love and death
Thomas Mann's antinomy of nature and spirit: it is withdrawn, but only here in the novel. Hans Castorp asks himself: “Mind and nature, are they contradictions? I ask: are these questions? No, there are no questions. ” The poetic connection between love and death is also rejected: “ Death and love, that is a bad rhyme, an absurd, a wrong rhyme! ” But in the chapter Abundance of Good Sound , towards the end of the novel , Thomas Mann introduces Hans Castorp's preferred records . Hans Castorp is deeply touched by the final duet in Aida - in which Aida and Radames are united in love and death - and far from recognizing a “bad rhyme” .
Art and death
The personal expectorations in the thought dream are encrypted, but remain messages, for example Thomas Mann's position determination as an artist. “Man is the master of opposites,” says Hans Castorp. But only as an artist is he master of opposites. Thomas Mann's conception of art included that art turns the bipolarity of reality, the “either-or”, into a “both-and-also”, that art accepts contradicting statements and reconciles them credibly through aesthetic design. "Artistic paradox" he called the simultaneity of opposing affects or statements of content.
Thomas Mann sees Homo Dei in the poet . His status is "between continuity and reason - just as his state is between mystical community and windy individuality" . In the poet's esteem as Homo Dei , Thomas Mann follows Goethe. [In the “Prologue in Heaven” (Faust I), “The Lord” legitimizes the poets as the “real sons of gods”. They are supposed to "fix what hovers in fluctuating appearance" "with constant thoughts".]
Man is “more noble than death, too noble for death - that is the freedom of his head. More noble than life, that is the piety in his heart. ” That only makes sense if one again uses“ the artist ” for man and “ suicide ” for death . The artist is “more noble than death, too noble for him - that is the freedom of his head” , because he knows that his work makes him immortal. Thomas Mann bans the alternative of death for the sake of the work, the not yet completed life's work. - Man is “more noble than life” and says: I, artist and son of a Lübeck senator, concerned with representation as a whole, consider chastity ( piety in my heart) to be more noble than living out my homoerotic inclinations.
The cultural and historical background
The fin de siècle
Thomas Mann called the conception of The Magic Mountain “arch-romantic” and assigned it to the genre of decay literature. The subject of decay is taken up again in his late work Doctor Faustus (1947): “I always write stories of decay.” In Doctor Faustus, an artist only achieves the brilliant breakthrough in the feverish syphilitic encephalitis . “Genialization through illness” is a typical motif of decadence ( decadence ). In the Zauberberg , too , illness and nearness to death are described as the “ingenious way” to life.
The leitmotif of The Magic Mountain is “sympathy with death” . Thomas Mann says goodbye to him in the chapter on snow with a resolution that is the only sentence in the novel in italics: "For the sake of goodness and love, human beings should not allow death to rule over their thoughts." It is the dream thoughts of the central figure, the young Hans Castorp , which he forgets again. This turns the chapter on snow into an insert, an internal narrative . The dream faces and thoughts are not linked to the further course of action.
The phrase “sympathy with death” can be found for the first time in a letter to his brother Heinrich Mann from 1913: “A growing sympathy with death, deeply innate to me.” A few sentences earlier it said: “If only the labor force and desire to work accordingly would. But the inside: The ever-threatening exhaustion, scruples, tiredness, doubts, a soreness and weakness that every attack shakes me to the core ” . Looking back on the past winter, he reports "Depression of a really bad kind with completely serious self-abolition plans" .
Decay
“This wonderful Bildungsroman ” , writes Thomas Mann to the German scholar Philipp Witkop , “does not actually lead out of 'decay'” . However, decadence , decadence and romantic “sympathy with death” were no longer up to date after the change of epoch that took place with the First World War , and Thomas Mann did not want to stand back. But he did not want to give up the novel, which had already begun in 1912. That should be one of the reasons for the revocation, which is formulated in the dream of the chapter snow , hard and detailed.
"Death romance plus Lebensja"
In encrypted form, the chapter, written in 1923, contains a very serious decision by 48-year-old Thomas Mann: to cope with his recurring thoughts of suicide with the life command not to allow death to rule over his thoughts.
The magic mountain was created between 1912 and 1924, the long period of creation is explained by interruptions, as the author devoted himself to essayistic works during this time. Originally he had planned a novella. After Death in Venice, Thomas Mann wanted to write something cheerful, a parody of the mood and fascination of death. After 1918 he expanded the concept to include the romance of death plus Lebensja . "Ultimately, it is about criticizing and overcoming the romanticism understood as the fascination of death in favor of the idea of life and a new sense of humanity" . Nonetheless, depraved, romantic falling into death - in a mixture of comedy and horror - remains the basic tendency of the novel.
The Germanist Michael Neumann states that "this novel, like Janus' head, has two faces that look in opposite directions." The chapter “Snow” is great literature in itself, but remains an insert. The interlude fulfills its purpose: In the novel, Thomas Mann can describe a decay of death, since with this retraction he has dismissed romance and decadence as yesterday. This revocation of death and the affirmation of life even had important political implications for Thomas Mann: Conservative by nature and a supporter of the Wilhelmine authoritarian state, Thomas Mann turned into a supporter and defender of the Weimar Republic and later an opponent of National Socialism after the First World War .
The secret identity of the author and the legendary hero
At the end of the thought dream, Hans Castorp gives himself the “life order” (E. Heftrich) not to allow death to rule over his thoughts. And "I wake up with it, because that's how I dreamed to the end" . The blizzard has stopped. Hans Castorp drives back into the valley, to his sanatorium. And already during the evening meal his dream thoughts begin to fade. "What he was thinking he didn't quite understand that evening . " Hans Castorp had to forget his dream knowledge. It was not he who dreamed the thought dream, but its author. Thomas Mann had borrowed the young man's personality and linguistic peculiarity from a few pages of the novel, the author had sat in on his fable hero.
Thomas Mann in his 50th birthday speech in 1925: “If I have one wish for the fame of my work, it is to say that it is life-friendly, although it knows about death. Yes, it is linked to death, it knows about it, but it wants life to be good. There are two kinds of friendliness to life: one that knows nothing about death; she is very simple-minded and robust, and another who knows about him, and only this one, I think, has full spiritual value. It is the friendliness of the artist, poet and writer ” .
literature
- Hans-Peter Haack: Thomas Mann's coping with his “sympathy with death” . In: Despair as a creative challenge . Edited by H. Kick and G. Dietze. Lit-Verlag, Münster 2008, pp. 157-168, ISBN 978-3-8258-0902-7 .
radio play
Hans Castorp's snow dream. Vacation from life: The Magic Mountain (Part 7) by Thomas Mann. Radio play, broadcast on July 9, 2013 on Deutschlandradio , duration 53'10. Editing: Valerie Stiegele, director: Ulrich Lampen, composition: Michael Riessler. Speakers included Udo Samel , Konstantin Graudus , Hans-Werner Meyer and Felix von Manteuffel .
Web links
- Online publication: archive server of the National Library
- Stefan Beyst: Word, image and time in Thomas Mann's 'Schnee'
Individual evidence
- ^ Thomas Mann to Hermann Ebers on March 29, 1949.
- ^ Thomas Mann to Karl Kerényi on August 2, 1947.
- ↑ Thomas Mann on May 25, 1926 to Ernst Fischer.
- ^ A b Thomas Mann to Philipp Witkop on December 14, 1921.
- ^ Thomas Mann on December 26, 1947 to Max Brantl.
- ^ Thomas Mann to Heinrich Mann on November 8, 1913.
- ^ Thomas Mann on August 30, 1925 to Helmut Ulrici.
- ↑ Michael Neumann: The Irritations of Janus or "The Magic Mountain" in the field of modernity. In: Thomas Mann Yearbook. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2001, p. 83.
- ↑ Thomas Mann: Speech at the celebration of the fiftieth birthday. In: Almanach 1926 . S. Fischer, Berlin 1925, p. 18.
- ↑ Hans Castorp's Snow Dream in: Deutschlandradio, July 9, 2013.