Word: manne
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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Urge & Inspiration. It is this struggle for harmony that Mann makes the center of most of these essays. From Schopenhauer, Mann first learned the nature of the "frightfully radical duality" of "brains and genitals," of "the Will and the Intellect...
...under his feet to make him let out a hunter's bloodthirsty yell. One evening, out of sheer exuberance of animal spirits, the "elderly prophet" sprang onto his father-in-law's shoulders and perched there grinning. "He probably jumped down again at once," says Author Mann gravely, "but-it gives one an uncanny feeling...
...devil." In Goethe, the elements of passion and discipline were so bafflingly mixed that he could reach the hearts and minds of millions as a poet* and yet, as government official, callously confirm the death sentence of a child-mother convicted of infanticide. "I am not the first," says Mann, "to find [this] almost as shattering as the whole of Faust...
...Composer Richard Wagner, the contradictory elements became part of an even greater tragedy. Wagner, says Mann, was a "voluptuary" whose battle against his own lavish, romantic sensuality was a lost cause from the start, and whose passionate fairy tales suffered the horrible fate of being engorged in a "beetle-browed about-face toward dictatorship and terror." Yet Wagner, too, Mann insists, was an idealist of "the epoch of bourgeois culture," a "man of the people who all his life long . . . repudiated power and money, violence and war." Nazi use of Wagner's "folk and sword and Nordic heroics," says...
...Tolstoy exclaimed, "had only once learned not to judge and think so sharply and decisively, and not always to give answers to questions which are only put in order that they may remain forever questions!" Thomas Mann echoes him: "Even at the risk of being called vacillating, I hold to my policy of the free hand [in a period] which has . . . taken up a position of reaction against classic rationalism and intellectualism." In place of decisive answers, readers of these essays will find a series of rich, undogmatic examinations that rank with the finest of their...