History, Myth, and Music: Thomas Mann’s Timely Fiction. By Susan von Rohr Scaff. Columbia, S.C.: Camden House, 1998. ISBN 1-57113-190-6. Pp. viii + 185. $55.00.

Drawing on all the relevant sources, both primary and secondary and in German as well as English, Susan von Rohr Scaff has given us a superb study of the major themes of Thomas Mann’s fiction – principally those indicated in the title of her book, but also a number of themes pertaining to Mann’s relation to the Christian tradition. Although the construction of her book might at first seem rather heavily weighted toward only two of Mann’s works, the Joseph tetralogy and Dr. Faustus , Scaff makes a good case for the centrality of these two complementary works to Mann’s searching exploration of the themes that mattered to him most in his mature reflections. Of special interest to readers of Christianity and Literature must be the fact that in the crucial years from 1926 to the defeat of Nazi Germany these reflections gravitated toward the preeminent place of the Judaeo-Christian tradition in the civilization Mann saw as mortally challenged. Before examining the questions this raises about Mann’s relation to Christianity, however, I will discuss the themes that are Scaff’s explicit focus: history, myth, and music.

Any reader of Thomas Mann must be struck by his deep appreciation of the art of music – no writer has ever communicated the effect of musical works with as much perceptiveness and precision as Mann – and by his simultaneous ambivalence toward it. Both attitudes are powerfully exemplified in his references to the music of Richard Wagner. Scaff says that Mann’s conflicting feelings about Wagner paralleled those of Friedrich Nietzsche, except that where Nietzsche swung from adulation to abhorrence, Mann characteristically maintained both attitudes in an ironic balance throughout his life – as he did also with regard to Nietzsche himself. Essentially what the question of music – preeminently that of Wagner but also, by extension, German musicality as such – comes to is the way music has the power both to "abet the death wish" and to "lift the soul to great spiritual heights" (8). The ambiguity of music parallels, in its way, that of the divine, which in Mann’s conception embraces the demonic and can use it to prompt spiritual growth. But, again, I will postpone exploring that theme until the discussion of Mann and Christianity.

The heart of Scaff’s analysis of Mann’s thought is her discussion of his thinking about myth, a theme that came gradually to the fore in his work and became most explicit in Joseph and His Brothers. The theme of myth is grounded in a still more pervasive idea Mann took early on from Nietzsche: the polarity of the Dionysian and the Apollonian. The Dionysian, for Nietzsche, represented energy (which might or might not be conscious) and the Apollonian represented form (which is conscious and rational but may also fall into stasis). Myth participates (as Mann’s theological mentor, Paul Tillich, might have said) in both. Underlying all human thinking are archetypal patterns, the basic human possibilities depicted in myths. In and of themselves, these archetypes are inherently static, and fascination with them can become a deadening fixation, a freezing of potentiality. This is how Mann depicts the mind of the ancient Mesopotamians and Hebrews before Joseph: as people who were mostly lived by their myths rather than who actively lived them. One of the key ideas in Joseph is that of gelebte vita or "lived life." Since the Latin vita refers to the archetype of a life, i.e., to myth, the phrase could also appropriately be translated as "lived myth," a myth that one appropriates intelligently and responsibly and that thus becomes a principle of development rather than of static repetition. A gelebte vita is an archetypal form adapted in the present by active intelligence and decision and thus embodied as living history. Mann’s Joseph reflects explicitly on this potentiality and conceives it as a divine calling.

History, in the sense in which Scaff refers to it in her title, is precisely what happens when the interplay of ancestral tradition and conscious appropriation adapt and modify the forms handed down and thereby infuse them with active life and endow them with new meaning that can nurture in turn the potential meaning of those lives that will follow. Joseph’s forgiveness of his brothers and Christ’s forgiveness of those who rejected him are examples. Joseph prepared in this way for the life lived by Jesus, just as both Joseph and Jesus were typologically foreshadowed and prepared for in Mann’s Joseph by the way Esau forgives Jacob for stealing his birthright and thereby breaks out of an ancient static pattern of retribution. "With such refusals to fulfill age-old expectations," Scaff points out, "Esau disengages himself from the archetype of Cain and Abel and establishes history on a new foundation altogether" (25).

If history is the dynamic appropriation and adaptation of mythic possibilities, a civilization's value and the vitality of its history must depend on the myths it draws on and the mindfulness with which it does so. For Mann, says Scaff, the central myth of our civilization, and one that we ignore at our peril, is the Judaeo-Christian.

This, then, brings us to the subject of Mann’s relation to Christianity. It would probably occur to few readers of Mann, and indeed to few professed Christians, to think of Mann as a Christian writer, but Scaff presents the material for a strong argument that Mann can only be properly understood if he is seen as at least a type of Christian, even if not recognizably a very orthodox one.

It is worth remembering in this connection that Mann’s attitude toward his most powerful philosophical influence, Nietzsche, was as ambiguous as that toward Wagner. Nietzsche was explicitly anti-Christian, advocating a radical revaluation of all values, and especially traditional Christian values. Mann’s own conception of revaluation, however, was quite different. Mann, says Scaff, "insists in Joseph that new values must be based on judicious assumption of the best that tradition has to offer" (60).

This idea is closely parallel both to that of gelebte vita and to Mann’s conception of his own art as a writer: "To narrate," says Scaff, was for Mann "to relate the myths that we live by, and the fate of our civilization hangs on our ability to reformulate our communal stories" (7). Nietzsche tried to annihilate all tradition and to create new human meaning ex nihilo. For Mann this is the basic error of modernity that he depicts in the life of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, his modern Dr. Faustus, who wants to "take back" Beethoven’s ninth symphony and whose 12-tone system of music is an attempt to negate all of musical tradition. (It is significant in relation to the themes mentioned above that Mann treats this as an attempt to replace a dynamic, essentially narrative music with a static system.) Rather than trying to adapt our communal stories judiciously by reformulating them for present life, Nietzsche cut himself off from the potentiality they bear within them. (Again, it is no accident that Mann fills Leverkühn’s biography with explicit parallels to Nietzsche’s.) Nietzsche and modern secular culture both, one might say, have tended to overlook the extent to which they live off of cultural capital. Mann considered his own calling as an artist to be that of recalling this to our attention. And both Joseph and Faustus make clear that "the best that tradition has to offer" is the Christian story and all the archetypal prefigurations that find their fulfillment in it.

But even if Mann’s imagination finds its center in the Christian tradition, what about the fact that he would hardly be anyone’s idea of orthodox? Mann would probably point to the need for creative adaptation of ancestral narratives and say that the idea of orthodoxy itself must be judiciously appropriated, lest it become a static archetype sapping present Christians of the vitality Jesus himself exemplified in his own creative adaptation of the symbols and narratives of ancient Israel.

But what, then, about the strange role Mann gives to the demonic in his mythic theology? The answer here would be similar: the reason God not only allows but embraces and even contains the demonic is that even in its destructiveness the demonic has the power to break open static traditions and widen spiritual horizons. Mann is fully aware that this way of thinking is dangerous, of course – hence his pervasive irony and the ambiguous prayer with which his narrator ends Dr. Faustus, asking whether a miracle beyond the power of belief may bring new life out of Leverkühn’s end and Germany’s.

Still another question might be asked about how to square with Christian theism Mann’s idea of an evolving God and the mutual involvement of the divine and human in "the rotating sphere" of which his Joseph speaks. But all of these questions broach a subject too large in scope for a book review. It is no small praise for Scaff’s fascinating study to say that it stimulates reflections that would require at least a full article for their exploration.

Eugene Webb