Praise of impermanence

Thomas Mann in Weimar, 1949

In Praise of Evanescence is the title of a short radio essay by Thomas Mann , which he wrote on January 31 and February 1, 1952 for a broadcast on the CBS radio series This I Believe . The German text was first published in the Protestant cultural magazine Eckart and then appeared as “A Christmas and New Year's Greetings for our friends 1952/1953” by S. Fischer Verlag .

In the short text Mann touches on philosophical , religious and scientific questions and draws on parts of his novel Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull . In the fifth chapter of the third book , which was recently completed , the paleontologist Kuckuck explains to the protagonist about questions of astronomy , geological history and evolution .

As the title suggests, Mann extols transience and repeats the talkative professor's belief that life should be respected not even though it is finite, but because it is finite. Despite the location as a peripheral "angle asterisk" in the Milky Way that have earth as a place of "spontaneous generation" of the people in the thick of the universe is of central importance.

content

At the beginning Thomas Mann turns against the view that transience is viewed as something sad. Rather, it is “the soul of being” and gives “all life value, dignity and interest”, since it creates time as the highest gift related to the creative. He touches on the evolution and the age of organic life, which unfolded through innumerable mutations up to the human being as his “most awakened child” and covers a period of about 550 million years. It is questionable whether life will have a similar long period of time, because it is resilient, but subject to certain conditions. It began and will end, as the habitability of a celestial body is only an intermezzo in the course of the eons.

He distinguishes three "spontaneous generations" from one another: the emergence of the universe out of nothing, that of life and that of humans, whose material basis does not differ from the rest of beings . The knowledge of impermanence that characterizes human beings, and thus the gift of time, can be used variably, so “that little of it can be much.” So time can be compared with the density of certain celestial bodies, and like a tiny piece of it twenty Can weigh hundreds of pounds, the “time of creative people” also has a “different density” for Thomas Mann than the “easily flowing” majority.

Man has to sanctify time and, with its help, restlessly striving and perfecting himself, “wrest the imperishable from the impermanent.” For the “great science” of astronomy, the earth is a “corner star” on the edge of the Milky Way , but it is exhausting in this correctness is not the truth . In the “Let there be” that brought forth the cosmos, as in the “begetting of life”, it was aimed at man as an attempt, the failure of which would be refuted by creation itself. "Be it like this or not - it would be good if people behaved as if they were."

Emergence

The radio series This I Believe , in which prominent and unknown people were able to present their thoughts to the listener in a few minutes, was initiated by Edward R. Murrow , who later played an important role in the discussion with Joseph McCarthy .

Shortly before, Thomas Mann had thought about a philosophical text. In a diary entry from December 17, 1951, he mentioned both the conclusion of the cuckoo chapter , whose natural-philosophical thoughts he incorporated into the lecture, and an "essay on being".

In further notes dated December 23, he recorded some central thoughts and mentioned that he had read the book “The Universe and Dr. Einstein ”by the American journalist Lincoln Barnett. Everything is connected with each other, has a beginning but also an end and will "be like before in space and timeless nothing". Life itself is an episode, as “perhaps all being is an incident between nothing and nothing”. He asked himself "how and why the first vibration of being" appeared in nowhere and enabled a "turn to life" through a mysterious "addition".

With the invitation from the broadcaster, he was able to implement his ideas the following month. Satisfied, he spoke of an “excellent invitation” that “should not be rejected out of hand” and also mentioned the 600 words that the text should contain.

As Erika Mann said in a conversation with Roswitha Schmalenbach, she had to shorten the original text so that it fit into the scope of the program of just "3 minutes and 27 seconds" and also rehearsed it in English with her father. In preparation for the lectures, he read her his own English text, allowed himself to be interrupted if he made mistakes, and incorporated her notes (on sound and intonation) into his manuscript with phonetic symbols. In this context, numerous sound recordings were made , which Erika did not save except for "This I Believe".

background

Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull , 1954

For the main parts of the lecture, the author resorted to the profound cuckoo conversation in the third book of the fragmentary novel, which had been written only a few months earlier and which was partially reformulated for the lecture into "more forgiving". Felix, now as Marquis de Venosta, is instructed during the train ride from Paris to Lisbon by the “man with the starry eyes” about the “giant scene” of cosmic events, the dancing meteors and moons, comets, nebulae and stars caused by gravity are connected to each other.

In his novel The Magic Mountain , Hans Castorp had already speculated about the conditions and beginnings of life and referred to similarities between the microcosm and the macrocosm , a topic that Thomas Mann took up several times and that did not let go of him even in old age. What the indignant narrator Serenus Zeitblom described in Doctor Faustus as the “horror of physics” appears in his picaresque novel in the lighter character of the light-filled festival .

There are no explicit statements about the afterlife in the short text. Thomas Sprecher sees an immanent religious reference in that one can not praise this world without tacitly saying something about the other area and evaluates this attitude as an agnostic "piety about existence" which neither asserts nor excludes the existence of the "other reality". Thomas Mann is taking up the "worldly piety" again, which is already the basic attitude at the beginning of the novel, in the section in which Felix, while "brooding", confesses his belief, "to take things and people as fully and important" and to see "something great, wonderful and important" in everything.

In view of the short lifespan of humans, Thomas Sprecher rates the statements about striving for self-perfection as ironic and raises the question of why the author praises the transience that also encompasses his works. However, finiteness can stimulate the artist to be creative and to fill the short life span as well as possible, especially since transitoriness should not be confused with futility. The finiteness of works of art is also relative, in that some works that have existed for decades or even millennia have already justified their existence.

literature

• Hermann Kurzke : The angle star In: Thomas Mann. Life as a work of art. Beck, Munich 2006, ISBN 3-406-55166-1 , pp. 359-360
• Thomas Speaker: Thomas Mann's praise of impermanence. In: Thomas Sprecher (Ed.): Magic of life and death music. On Thomas Mann's late work. The Davos Literature Days 2002. Thomas Mann Studies. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-465-03294-2 , pp. 171-182

Individual evidence

1. ↑ Thomas Mann: Praise of Evanescence. In: Hermann Kurzke, Stephan Stachorski (Ed.): Essays, Volume 6. My time. 1945–1955, Fischer, Frankfurt 1994, p. 219
2. ↑ Thomas Mann: Praise of Evanescence. In: Hermann Kurzke, Stephan Stachorski (Ed.): Essays, Volume 6. My time. 1945–1955, Fischer, Frankfurt 1994, p. 220
3. ↑ Thomas Mann: Praise of Evanescence. In: Hermann Kurzke, Stephan Stachorski (Ed.): Essays, Volume 6. My time. 1945–1955, Fischer, Frankfurt 1994, p. 221
4. ↑ Thomas Mann: Praise of Evanescence. In: Hermann Kurzke, Stephan Stachorski (Ed.): Essays, Volume 6. My time. 1945–1955, Fischer, Frankfurt 1994, p. 221
5. ↑ Thomas Mann: Diaries 1951-1952, December 17, 1951. Fischer, Frankfurt 1993, p. 150
6. ↑ Thomas Mann: Diaries 1951-1952, December 23, 1951. Fischer, Frankfurt 1993, p. 153
7. ↑ Thomas Mann: Diaries 1951-1952, December 23, 1951. Fischer, Frankfurt 1993, p. 152
8. ↑ Quoted from: Thomas spokesman: Thomas Mann's praise of transience. In: Magic of life and death music. On Thomas Mann's late work. The Davos Literature Days 2002. Thomas Mann Studies. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 178
9. ↑ So Erika Mann: My father, the magician. Edited by Irmela von der Lühe, Uwe Naumann. Rowohlt, Reinbek bei Hamburg 1996 pp. 44–45
10. ↑ Notes on Thomas Mann's Praise for Transience. In: Hermann Kurzke, Stephan Stachorski (Ed.): Essays, Volume 6. My time. 1945–1955, Fischer, Frankfurt 1994, p. 521
11. ^ Hermann Kurzke : Pein and Shine. The angle star In: Thomas Mann. Life as a work of art. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 556
12. ^ Hermann Kurzke: Pein and Shine. The angle star In: Thomas Mann. Life as a work of art. Beck, Munich 2006, p. 557
13. ↑ Thomas speaker: Thomas Mann's praise of transience. In: Magic of life and death music. On Thomas Mann's late work. The Davos Literature Days 2002. Thomas Mann Studies. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 180
14. ^ Thomas Mann: Confessions of the impostor Felix Krull. The first part of the memoir. Collected works in thirteen volumes, Volume VII, Fischer, Frankfurt 1974, pp. 274–275
15. ↑ Thomas speaker: Thomas Mann's praise of transience. In: Magic of life and death music. On Thomas Mann's late work. The Davos Literature Days 2002. Thomas Mann Studies. Klostermann, Frankfurt am Main 2004, p. 179