Religious education - that's one of those things with a man who had to sit through school several times without a high school diploma, but who has, of course, received countless honorary doctorates from several universities around the world (even twice in Bonn) and was an honorary professor in his home town of Lübeck as well as at Princeton University. And so let me prepare you for five parts that will guide us through the narrative work, from the novel "Buddenbrooks" from 1901 to the legend of the sinner Pope Gregorius in the novel "The Chosen One", published half a century later in 1951. It is best to start a few steps from here at the Seerose inn, where a memorial plaque was erected in 2003 on the initiative of the Thomas Mann Forum Munich.
I.
The plaque indicates that in the summer of 1900, after three years of work, the then 25-year-old young author Thomas Mann finished his novel "Buddenbrooks. Verfall einer Familie" here, on the third floor of the house at Feilitzschstraße 5 (today 32). To make the plaque a little more interesting graphically, the artist Joachim Jung and I decided to depict the first three spoken words of the novel, "What is this", and the last three spoken words, "It is so", in Thomas Mann's handwriting. There were good reasons for this. Thomas Mann himself stipulated in an early notebook that his novel should begin with "Was ist das" and end with "Es ist so", i.e. that these six words should form the compositional bracket of "Buddenbrooks". However, as will be shown, this beginning and end of the novel are particularly strongly determined by religion, indeed, they are directly related to religious education!
The first page of the novel, whose manuscript was burnt in Munich during the Second World War, has survived as a fragment of an early version. We see what Thomas Mann defined as the "beginning" in his notebook: "'What is this - what - is this ...'". As readers, we burst into the middle of an exam. In 1835, eight-year-old Antonie Buddenbrook, called Tony, sits on her grandfather's knee and stammers "What is that". There is no question mark, just two dashes and three dots: The little girl fails, she gets out, doesn't know what to do. And her grandfather makes fun of her: "Je, den Düwel ook, c'est la question, ma très chère demoiselle." He conjures up the devil in Low German dialect and leaves the question to his dear lady in the French of the upper classes.
Tony is helped out of the predicament of failure by her mother, who says to her daughter, "Tony (...) I believe that God - ", and then Tony knows what to do, repeats again, "What is that", then speaks slowly, "I believe that God", comes back in and quickly adds, "while her face cleared up: ' - created me and all creatures', had suddenly got on a smooth track, and now, radiant with happiness and unstoppable, purred along the whole article, true to the Catechism as it had just been published, Anno 1835, newly revised, under the authorisation of a high and wise Senate."
We readers are also "enlightened" - Tony's question "What is it?" refers in Dr Martin Luther's Small Catechism with its "Explanatory Sayings" after the first main section with the ten commandments to the second main section "The Christian Creed" and there to the first article "On Creation", which begins: "I believe in God the Father, almighty Creator of heaven and earth."
But not only is this article not quoted, as the manuscript clearly shows, it does not appear at all. "Buddenbrooks" begins with a non-text, with a non-quotation, and if it didn't sound so terribly new-fangled, one would have to speak of a deconstruction, because what else is there here but a dismemberment or dissolution? We could also say that the unspoken or unquoted first article of faith belongs to the invisible pre-history of the narrative, that the beginning is not really a beginning at all in the sense of "Once upon a time", but rather an immediate introduction to a conversation or, as here, to a religious examination.
Tony "purred along (...) the whole article" without any deeper understanding of it. And her grandfather mocks the passage that God has given "clothes and shoes, food and drink, house and farm, wife and child, fields, cattle and all goods" and, as a businessman, asks his granddaughter "how much she would take for the sack of wheat, and [offers] to do business with her". Johann Buddenbrook proves to be an "objective rationalist" and thus corresponds to Pastor Wunderlich, who is responsible for the Buddenbrook house and stands for "Tatchristianity". However, the memorised catechism text and the mockery with which the grandfather comments on the doctrine of faith - together with the "Düwel" or devil hidden in the dialect - are also the first signs of the family's decline.
The very opening to "Buddenbrooks" is therefore a lesson in religious education. We could now delve into the comical Jerusalem evenings in the Buddenbrook house, with their "extended morning and evening devotions", or discuss the roles of the various pastors through the four generations, from the tatchristianism of Pastor Wunderlich, the double standards of Pastor Kölling and the greedy "travelling pastors" to the vain actor-pastor Pringsheim. Finally, little Hanno Buddenbrook experiences Christianity as nothing more than a perverse Prussian school drill in the religion lessons of head teacher Ballerstedt, in which "religious instruction is limited to stubbornly listening to biblical cattle statistics from the Book of Job" and the headmaster spreads fear and terror as "the good Lord".
But there is still the final formula, the "It is so"! At the "end of the novel", as it says in the notebook, "eight ladies (...) dressed in black", in mourning, gather in the empty house to say goodbye. At the end, the conversation turns to the many deceased members of the family, and the question arises, or rather the question of all questions: whether they will meet again in the afterlife. Tony, who, as she repeatedly emphasises, has been so badly played by life, is sceptical and says "If it were so...", again with three dots into the indefinite, as at the beginning of the novel with the question "What is it?".
At the table, the teacher Therese, called Sesemi Weichbrodt, "rose as high as she could. She stood on tiptoe, stretched her neck, thumped the plate and the bonnet trembled on her head. "It's like this!" she said with all her strength and looked at everyone challengingly." Whether eschatology or resurrection, there is no question: "It is so" - Sesemi Weichbrodt knows that we will meet again in the afterlife. "What is it?" - that was the catechism question for the first statement of faith. The "It is so" closes the parenthesis of the novel on the certainty of the hereafter and at the same time varies the final word of the catechetical explanation: "It is certainly true."
However, Sesemi Weichbrodt's last three words are not the final words of the novel. They read: "She stood there, a victor in the good fight she had waged throughout her life against the temptations of her teacher's reason, hunchbacked, tiny and trembling with conviction, a small, punishing, enthusiastic prophetess". So "prophetess" is the last word of the novel, and with it Thomas Mann begins a strange series of prophecies.
II.
The next 'prophet' in Thomas Mann's work is the hero Lobgott Piepsam in the grotesque "Der Weg zum Friedhof". He is annoyed by a cyclist driving the wrong way and perverts the image and text programme of the then new Munich North Cemetery in an apocalyptic speech of rage; and so it is no wonder that Lobgott, or rather Schmähgott Piepsam, does not survive his speech. I dealt with the grotesque in detail in the book on The Riddle of the Sphinxes from the North Cemetery.
God of praise Piebsam is followed in Thomas Mann's series of prophets by the fanatical Savonarola imitator Hieronymus in the novella "Gladius Dei". He gets upset in an art shop on Odeonsplatz about a (in his eyes) blasphemous painting of the Madonna and is thrown out. While the sky at the beginning of this novella with the famous opening words "Munich shone" was still a silky blue, by the end it has turned into a sulphur-yellow stormy sky, and Hieronymus sees "a broad sword of fire standing above the Feldherrnhalle", the "Gladius Dei", which is to destroy this godless art, and "with a hidden and convulsive shaking of his drooping fist" he murmurs that this should happen "cito et velociter", soon and quickly!
The novella is a companion piece to Thomas Mann's only theatre play, "Fiorenza", which is set in Medici Florence in 1492. In it, the real Florentine penitential preacher Girolamo Savonarola is the antagonist of the dying Lorenzo de' Medici, known as the Magnificent. Savonarola, secretly in love with Lorenzo's wife, the beautiful Fiore, is regarded as a "prophet" and, according to his own statement, is both an artist and a saint. Above all, however, Savonarola is a fanatic whose sermons are directed against Lorenzo's luxury, against Fiore's beauty and against everything that does not conform to his ideology. He ends up in the fire.
He is joined by another fanatic in the novella "Beim Propheten". In an attic room in Destouchesstrasse in Schwabing, "proclamations" by a certain Daniel (referring to the Schwabing 'cosmicist' Ludwig Derleth) are read aloud. The religious fanaticism, who wants to conquer the world and who, as a "feverish and irritable ego", becomes obsessed with "megalomania", seems like a synthesis of Piepsam, the god of praise, and Jerome:
"There were sermons, parables, theses, laws, visions, prophecies and daily command-like appeals that followed one another in a colourful and incalculable series in a mixture of Psalter and Revelation tones with military-strategic and philosophical-critical technical terms. A feverish and terribly irritated ego stretched out in solitary megalomania and threatened the world with a torrent of violent words. Christus imperator maximus was his name, and he recruited troops ready for death to subjugate the globe (...). 'Soldiers!' he concluded, at the very end of his strength, with a failing voice of thunder: 'I hand you over for plunder - the world!"
Another strange religious fanatic. In "Gladius Dei", Jerome had muttered his wish for destruction "with a hidden and convulsive shaking of his drooping fist", and now we hear this "failing voice of thunder" from his Schwabing prophet colleague.
None of the audience in the Schwabing attic chamber commented on these religious flights of fancy with their pre-fascist tenor. This only happens in Thomas Mann's exile novel "Doctor Faustus", where the scene "At the Prophet's" is reprised.
In Chapter 34 "(continued)", a circle of intellectuals and artists in Munich after the First World War discuss the disastrous political strategy of violence, dictatorship and stultification and laughingly approve of it. With "Daniel Zur Höhe", the poet of the proclamations, the aforementioned Ludwig Derleth, who was once both locally in the Schwabing attic chamber and thematically 'unhinged', reappears there.
These ludicrous sentences are now categorised as "a lyrical-rhetorical expression of indulgent terrorism". For the novel's narrator, high school professor Serenus Zeitblom, they are an irresponsible joke, "the steepest aesthetic nonsense" he has ever come across. For a long time, it was unimaginable that this nonsense could ever be taken seriously and become a bloody reality. Yet it continues to this day as religiously motivated terrorism.
III.
But back to the topic of religious education. In Thomas Mann's novel "The Magic Mountain" (1924), it is always somewhat in question. Two pedagogues, the western humanist Lodovico Settembrini and the eastern Jesuit Leo Naphta, compete for the favour of the cousins Hans Castorp and Joachim Ziemßen. Lodovico Settembrini advocates humanism and the social service of life, while Leo Naphta is in favour of inquisition and war, obedience and the death penalty, and propagates the "theocracy", or even better - after the "bourgeois-capitalist rot" - the "communist theocracy", the "world domination of the supernatural".
Leo Naphta's theses "On the theocracy and evil redemption", as the section in Chapter Six of "The Magic Mountain" is titled, are now part of the "catalogue of virtues of international terrorism". This was vividly demonstrated by the German-American Germanist Frederick Lubich in an article for the FAZ shortly after 11 September 2001. Religion as a prerequisite or even justification for terror and the ideology of destruction, the perversion of faith, the message of peace and love of neighbour - the topic is more topical today than ever and would be worth discussing in a conference of its own.
"But what is the religious?" So asks Thomas Mann in his contribution to the volume "Dichterglaube. Voices of Religious Experience" (Berlin 1931). Thomas Mann's answer is revealing: "The thought of death", that is what is religious. He saw his father die, he knew that he himself would die, and this thought was "the most familiar" to him. The thought was behind everything he "thought and wrote, and the tendency to see all things in its light and sign" also led to the "final sentence" of his last novel "The Magic Mountain".
This sentence reads: "For the sake of love and goodness, man should not allow death to have dominion over his thoughts". What does that mean? It is the synthesis of the romantic "sympathy with death" and the practical "service to life". One is inconceivable without the other, cannot be lived. It is, according to Thomas Mann, the "contrast of the religious and the ethical", the world of faith and the "world of duties" and thus, Thomas Mann continues, his "most personal spiritual experience".
This also leads to Thomas Mann's definition of "faith" and also "God". God, what is that? Is it the universe in the Einsteinian sense? Or is it the ruling authority to which we are subject? Either way, man "in his duality of nature and spirit (...) is the great mystery, and the religious problem is the human problem, man's question about himself".
It's all a bit mysterious, but how could it be otherwise? At the end of this statement on religion, Thomas Mann says that The Magic Mountain is almost "a religious book". And inevitably comes to the conclusion that the "history of religion and myth" is currently the "subject" of the very new novel he is currently writing. This refers to the four-part novel "Joseph and his Brothers", in which the religious education of the main character in the second volume, "Young Joseph" (1934), plays a major role.
IV.
"Young Joseph" is 17 years old when old Eliezer, who is said to be "like Abram in countenance", introduces him to "the sciences" or rather: familiarises him with God's creation down to the smallest detail. Joseph learns "in the shade of the tree of instruction" why God only created man "'last of all plants and animals'". "Then Joseph had to answer: 'God created man last of all, firstly so that no one could say that he had been involved in the works, secondly for the sake of man's humiliation, so that he could say to himself: 'The blowfly went before me', and thirdly so that he could sit down to eat as soon as possible, as the guest for whom all preparations had been made." / To this Eliezer replied with satisfaction: 'You say it', and Joseph laughed."
Eliezer teaches Joseph the divine world order in numerical proportions, shows him where "His finger" shows itself, and how good it is to "understand what is necessary and to penetrate God's mind". Even here, i.e. before we readers learn in the following second main section, "How Abraham discovers God", Eliezer shows how God "gave man olâm in his heart, namely the ability to think the eons and thus in a certain sense also to become their master". Joseph writes all of this down, using "the scripture of God (...), the scripture of the law, of doctrine and of tales", but in doing so elevates himself above his brothers, entirely in the spirit of his father and his father's arbitrary "election of heirs", and arrogantly sows discord early on.
Joseph's religious education has to do with his chosenness. Firstly, his father found it "useful and desirable (...) that the blessed man should also be a student" in order to be ahead of his brothers. The second reason has to do directly with Joseph's personality, with his nature, which is pathologically jeopardised between ecstasy and "prophetic spasm", with his tendency to dreams and visions.
In order to secure Joseph's "salvation and religious health", to prevent him from becoming one of these "oracleallers" who roam the land as "holy fools, droolers, God-obsessed" in order to "proclaim truth in a foaming state", in other words, to protect Joseph from this foolishness in which "the mind of God went to pieces and lustful frenzy took its place", Jaakob has his son taken "under close discipline". The climax of the instruction is then reached when Eliezer introduces Abraham to Joseph as the man "who had discovered God".
This passage is a centrepiece of the novel "The Young Joseph". Joseph's instruction is at the same time a look back to the oldest times of the past, or rather, the mutual realisation of man and God in the time of myth. This is not a linear look back at the origins of religious thought, but rather the description of "How Abraham discovered God" is focussed on Joseph and his understanding of the world and God in such a way that he, Joseph, the arrogant one, the "dreamer of dreams", as his brothers call him, the favoured and especially educated one, that he, and perhaps only he, can and should understand what happened with this discovery of God. For arrogance and chosenness - surprisingly, they were mutually present, both in God and in Abraham, who had set himself this great task "almost arrogantly and overheatedly".
The "cunning of God", according to the narrator Eliezer, "the cunning of God" was "to glorify himself in Abiram and to make a name for himself through him". In return, "Abraham had discovered God out of a desire for the highest, had further moulded and developed him through teaching and had thus done everyone involved a great favour: God, himself and those whose souls he won through teaching." Abraham's achievement was to have transformed polytheism into monotheism. He had "gathered the powers together in might and called them the Lord" and aimed to ensure that "only He, the ultimate God, (...) alone could be man's true God and who was infallible for man's cry of distress and song of praise". But the relationship between God and Abraham was mutual and existential, one was unthinkable without the other, and from a creaturely point of view Abraham was even "God's father". What did that mean again?
It said: "God's mighty attributes were indeed something factually given apart from Abraham, but at the same time they were also in him and from him". God was everything, was blessing and curse, was "benevolent silence", was "not the good, but the whole. And he was holy! Holy not with goodness, but with vitality and survival, holy with majesty and terribleness, sinister, dangerous and deadly" - all in all, this was the mutual existential destiny: "God was there, and Abraham walked before him, sanctified in his soul by his closeness to the outside." The distance created closeness, "for Abraham was only a human being, a mere earthling, but connected to Him through knowledge and sanctified by God's sublime You[being] and being there". This was the prerequisite for the making of the covenant as well as for the breaking of the covenant.
According to Eliezer, there was nothing to "tell" about God himself; the narrative of Genesis, from the first human couple and the fall of man on the tree of knowledge to the end of the world on Judgement Day, had no other purpose than to praise God, he who was everything, he, "Lord of destruction, Lord of creation". But what Abraham intended to do with this Lord as the "God of the future", and "whether and to what point there is a similarity of essence between this Adon and Abraham's Lord", remains such an open question at the end that God himself, through Eliezer, intervenes in the instruction and, as a conclusion, unctuously returns Abraham's knowledge of God to him: "But God had kissed his fingertips and, to the secret annoyance of the angels, called out: 'It is incredible how far this earthly dumpling recognises me! Am I not beginning to make a name for myself through him? Truly, I will anoint him!"
More religious education is not possible, one might think, in this God-discovery story presented with a lot of subtlety and a pinch of humour. But there is more - Joseph continues the God game with his brother Benjamin in the Adonis grove. He passes on his religious education to his little brother, and in doing so also connotes the life, death and resurrection of Jesus Christ. The myth lives, or, to use the words from these chapters, "the sphere rolls", the play of God continues the story of God, everything has been said, Joseph is the favoured one, but not the chosen one, he will have to die twice symbolically in order to be resurrected twice for new, higher tasks. And there is a second more, when Jaakob explains the religious world to the "seeker" Thamar on "a root of the tree of instruction".
Downfall and exaltation, twofold descent into Hades and twofold triumph over death - this story of extreme contrasts is based not least on lies and deceit, in short on deception. And so the narrator reserves the right, literally until the last sentence, to describe Abraham's discovery of God as what it was not only for the biblical ancestor, but also for the narrator of the four novels, "the beautiful story and invention of God by Joseph and his brothers". With the last word, the narrator reduces the four novels to the language game that was played here, in all accuracy and fidelity, but nevertheless as a game of the words "discovery" and "invention".
V.
Thomas Mann also uses the mythical narrative of the Joseph novels in the Moses novella "The Law", which is to be understood as a sequel to the Joseph novels. The novella brings us closer to the biblical figure of Moses just as realistically as was the case with Joseph.
Similarly, in the next novel, the medieval figure of "Doctor Faustus" from the popular book of 1600 becomes a modern man, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, who devotes himself to the devil just as fatally as his country, Germany, has devoted itself to the "Führer" and only a few years after him, who dies in 1940, also perishes in May 1945.
Born in 1885, he first studied theology in Halle, then switched to music and became a pioneer of the New Music of the 1920s. The novel has a total of 47 chapters. Chapters 11 to 15 are relevant for us, in which the narrator, Leverkühn's school friend, the pedagogue Serenus Zeitblom, accompanies Leverkühn's theology studies in Halle as an observer. The theology student's timetable, with its "emphasis" initially "on exegetical and historical subjects, i.e. biblical studies, church and dogmatic history, denominational studies", leads Adrian Leverkühn straight to criticising "liberal theology", which he calls "a wooden iron", a "contradictio in adjecto", as its "scientific superiority" only conceals the fact that "its theological position (....) is weak", "because their moralism and humanism lack insight into the demonic character of human existence". What does that mean again?
The first clarification comes from a discussion in the seminar of the private lecturer Schleppfuß. Theology tends "by its very nature (...) to become demonology at any time". And what does that amount to? "Of course, the dialectical connection of evil with the holy and the good played an important role in theodicy, the justification of God in the face of the presence of evil in the world (...). Evil contributed to the perfection of the universe (...), therefore God allowed it, because he was perfect and therefore had to want perfection".
Evil is the crux of the matter - the theology student Leverkühn is far less interested in proving God than in proving the devil, and music will become the medium for this. Leverkühn would later confess that his "Lutheranism" saw "neighbouring, closely related spheres in theology and music", whereby music, close to the "alchemists and black artists", had always been the epitome of "apostasy, not from faith, that was not even possible, but in faith; apostasy is an act of faith, and everything is and happens in God, especially apostasy from him".
Doctor Faustus" is thus the direct counterpart to the God-seeker, or rather God-discoverer, if not God-inventor Abraham! But "Doctor Faustus" himself is once again given a counter-figure in the main character of Thomas Mann's last novel "The Chosen One".
If "Doctor Faustus" tells of exaltation and fall, then "The Chosen One" tells of sin and exaltation! There are no more quibbling theological discussions here, the role of religion is clearly defined. Here, too, there is a narrator, Clement the Irishman, a Benedictine monk, who writes down the story of the sinner Pope Gregory. Together with his patron, he has a clear and firm opinion on religion: "With our Abbot Kilian, I am of the well-tested opinion that the religion of Jesus and the cultivation of ancient studies must go hand in hand in the fight against cruelty".
Education serves as a defence of Christianity. And grace is the equivalent of sin. A "religious humour", as Thomas Mann himself explained in 1950, pervades the novel, from the language to the smallest details, which is an integral part of grace. Thomas Mann states: "I would never presume to call myself a homo religiosus and admit that in the Joseph stories Christianity is relativised and dissolved into the world-mythical. Nevertheless, following Goethe and Nietzsche, I certainly feel like a Protestant Christian (...). In the late modern remodelling of the much-told Gregorius legend, the theme of sin, repentance and election is once again cloaked in coy jest."
Coy jest - this is far more than Thomas Mann's much-quoted irony. Rather, it addresses a fundamental trait of humanity, the secret humour with which everything concerning religious education in Thomas Mann's narrative work should be viewed and considered.
It is therefore not surprising to find direct or indirect references to this theme in Thomas Mann's work. A good example of this is the end of "The Chosen One". It is a double ending. Firstly, the characters' lives come to an end, the sinful main characters reach an old age, Sibylla dies at the age of eighty, Gregorius, her "brother's son, the Pope", turns ninety - their children and grandchildren live on happily: "But how long they too, like the leaves of a summer, and fertilised the ground, on which new mortals greened and yellowed. The world is finite and eternal only in God's glory." That is one end.
The other is the narrator Clemens' thanks to the readers for their "attention" in the penultimate paragraph. We should not draw a "false moral" from the story and perhaps even want to imitate the wicked. A penance such as adding "seventeen years on a stone" and then bathing "the wicked for more than twenty years" is no "fun". But it is "wise" to "foresee the chosen one in the sinner", and it is "also wise for the sinner himself. "And in the last paragraph, the narrator asks his readers for a "favour" as a "reward for warning and advice", that they may "include" him in their "prayer" so that "we may all meet again one day with them, of whom I said, in paradise".
As the annotated edition of "The Chosen One" notes, the wish that we may "meet again in paradise" is "a precise analogy to the final prayer" of the narrator Serenus Zeitblom at the end of "Doctor Faustus": "'God have mercy on your poor souls, my friend, my fatherland'." However, this overlooks the fact that Clemens' wish goes back much further in a genuine analogy.
As eternal as God's glory is, the certainty of the afterlife is just as certain for Clemens. And we already know this from the energetic appearance of the teacher Sesemi Weichbrodt as the "small, punishing prophetess" at the end of "Buddenbrooks" with her "It is so!".
Our conclusion could therefore be: In "Buddenbrooks", the relationship to religion between "What is this" and "It is so" reflects the "decay of a family". The prophets in Thomas Mann's work, from Sesemi Weichbrodt to the god of praise Piepsam, Savonarola and Daniel zur Höhe, can be seen as forerunners of the religious fanatics of our day, especially in view of Leo Naphta's theses in "The Magic Mountain". Gustav von Aschenbach's patron saint, Saint Sebastian, can be recognised in "Death in Venice", as well as in the figure of the dog "Bauschan". The discussion of myths in the "Joseph" novels forms the sum of all these aspects, with a proof of God that places all transcendence in man himself: The finding of God is nothing other than the invention of God. In the end, the devil's pact in "Doctor Faustus" and the fall of the "Chosen One" form the opposites in the question of how grace can be ordered.
