Chapter 25The IncubatorDIE BRUTMASCHINE
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One day I read a novel by H. M.1 I read it again and again — I was utterly intoxicated by it, I soon knew the loveliest passages by heart. And I believed, according to my own nature, that the man who had written that must become and be my friend. That he was the one man in the wide world fitted for it.
I wrote to him to that effect. The writer was much flattered. This unconditional admiration from an understanding woman's soul did his vanity good; he wrote back to me, longer and ever longer letters. Sometimes he copied out whole chapters of his new novel for me. Or he sent me novellas in manuscript. In one of them I positively revelled. How Italy was understood there, the extract of a landscape given back in a few strokes. I remember, for instance, that he compares the soft ranges of hills around Florence to the swellings of a woman's bosom. — Yes, I took everything in the style and the imagination, in the whole work of H. M., for the highest personal individuality, for the deepest utterances of the whole man. And it was only the contrivance of a decadent of genius — without a trace of personal, innermost human worth. But what pains that insight was to cost me! When I think back today to that time, I no longer understand at all how I could be so foolishly believing and so child-blind after all my hard experiences! Ah — it is no crime to take a homunculus2 seriously — but how many bitter tears it has brought me.
How could I be so blind and foolish? How could I??
But in those days, before I knew him personally, I lived in an intoxication of bliss — I lived as if in a golden cloud! —
At last we arranged a meeting in Tirol. In Bozen we were to make each other's acquaintance and then travel together to Mitterbad by way of Lana, to the little Tyrolean peasants' bath where the cold-water doctor von H. practised his cures3, physician-in-ordinary to H. M.
I shall never forget his first visit to me in Bozen. He was stiff, as if he had swallowed a ramrod, correctly spruced and pressed, with a Haby moustache and pomaded hair. His features did not know how to smile. Everything he said was dry and clipped.
My first thought was: “What am I, a glowing river, to do at this frozen sea?”
On the second day he was to fetch me to Schloss Runkelstein. He brought an acquaintance with him, a student, Christoph von H., the son of his doctor. A handsome, headlong child of nature. Inwardly I was outraged that M. did not come alone. Then the two of them were amused by the medieval frescoes of the Tristan legend on the castle walls, in which Isolde rests now at Tristan's side, now at King Mark's. —
On the third day we climbed together in blazing sun from Lana up to Mitterbad. I came no closer to what was human in my new “friend.”
But — had he not written to me himself: “My personal self will disappoint you. All my soul, my best life, all my longing goes into my books. As a man I am a nought.” Could that be possible? Were the man and the artist not one? How could anyone write what he did not humanly feel and sense, love and hate? Yes, Lou Andreas-Salomé was right to speak of the “preposterous” in me — only slowly could I recognise and grasp the perversity of the decadent, the made and artificial quality of his wonderful images.
If one could no longer believe in the genuine upsurge of the artist's soul, what was still genuine and true in this life? Had M. not sent me his book with the dedication “To her who lives at the same tempo.” How happy it had made me. And on his side those too had been only empty words.
Up in the “Badl” our rooms were, it is true, in the same wing, but I seldom saw the “friend” alone. Mostly we were in the company of the cheerful doctor and his eight children. At table (we did sit side by side) we spoke only of food; that is, he conducted the conversation on what he might and must offer his body so that his intellectual production should go forward. If he had worked less well on a given day, he was convinced it lay in unsuitable nourishment or in too stimulating a conversation. — Once after supper the two of us went walking by starlight. That was a great deal, given his standing fear of catching cold.
Now, I thought, he would at last find a few warm words: that he was grateful to fate that we had found each other, that he was glad of my understanding of his genius, as he had after all said unceasingly in his letters. Once he had even gone so far in them as to confess that our finding each other had shaken him in his theory of the absolutely inescapable inner solitude of every human being.
We walked up and down on the slope. From far off sounded the gramophone the peasant cure-guests were crowding around. Now it must come, I thought: a kind, warm word.
But he: “I have long wanted to tell you that you completely mistake me. You expect far too much of me as a man. I did write it to you — I live only for my work. For that I guard my whole soul, my whole strength. If I were to divide it between art and life, my art would come off short — for I am not one of the strong, the overflowing — I am a decadent, the last shoot of a tired race. My mother was a Spaniard4. She it was who gave me the glowing imagination. But nothing further. And it becomes ever clearer to me — I can make no use at all of any person who stands in any way closer to me, for that would distract me far too much; at the very most I can make use of ‘agreeable strangers' who help me over an unworkable hour, nothing further.”
“Nothing further,” I repeated quietly, “so you are really not a human being at all, but a work-of-art machine. The food, the nickel, is pushed in5. Then you press the button, and the work of art drops out. You are the opposite of all the great artists in your time and before it, who only through suffering, wrenching and struggling hurl up their creation eruptively, in a thousand pains, as the volcano hurls its glowing lava. You really are the artist of the future. Like the artificial child-incubator, your body is only the artificial incubator for your works.”
“It is so,” he said, “I cannot deny it, only you would never believe it. I am not made to be a friend.”
“Good night,” I said quietly, and crept off to my room. And the days grew ever more desolate. A hundred times I formed the plan of leaving, but I was always too cowardly to carry it out. Could I bear this bitterest solitude? Given over to all the demons of my soul. At last my brain hatched out a book about it. And with racing pulses I wrote it down in a week. That was my salvation of soul! I wrote from early till late. Then I gave it to him to read. “It is a strong book,” he said, “and you must be grateful to me for having helped you to it.” — “Yes, now the ‘agreeable stranger' really has been achieved for you,” I smiled bitterly.
The book was called The Tragedy of Woman and appeared anonymously6. For one winter it became the fashionable book of all Berlin. Then it was forgotten again. πάντα ῥεῖ — all things flow.
But its bitterest I had tested on myself: Threefold curse on the woman whose genius cannot force down its womanhood7. Dying a thousand deaths, she must bleed to death of it.
And another insight came to me, and it cried in me day and night: You have lived in vain — for what you need, the genuine and the deep and the whole, exists nowhere except in you and in your dead one. Everything else is patchwork — little souls — little love — little senses — — separate housekeeping everywhere. — — —
Notes
Sources, identifications, and points where the German carries something English cannot. Added by this project; not in the original.
- ↑a novel by H. M. — Almost certainly Heinrich Mann. Everything in the chapter fits him, and the doctor two pages on settles it: “the cold-water doctor von H.,” physician-in-ordinary to H. M., is Christoph Hartung von Hartungen, who had been Heinrich Mann's doctor since 1893. The chain: H. M. is a novelist of the Decadence whose books are steeped in Italy; he calls himself “the last shoot of a tired race” and says his mother was a Spaniard, which is exactly the formula the Mann family used for Julia da Silva-Bruhns, born in Brazil; the cure is at Mitterbad in the Ultental, where Heinrich Mann took the waters from 1893 and where Thomas joined him in July 1901; and the cold-water doctor with eight children is Christoph Hartung von Hartungen (1849–1917), Heinrich Mann's physician, his friend for life, and the founder of the Riva del Garda sanatorium — his son Christoph is the student who comes along to Runkelstein. Preuschen gives her exploiters initials and her friends full names, and by the end of this chapter he is firmly in the first class. If the identification holds, the letters she quotes — “As a man I am a nought,” “I am not made to be a friend” — are letters of Heinrich Mann's, and her side of the correspondence should be somewhere. (Heinrich Mann)
- ↑a homunculus — The little man made in a flask by Wagner in Faust II — alive, brilliant, and never born of anybody. Her exact charge against him. (Homunculus in Faust II)
- ↑the cold-water doctor von H. practised his cures — Christoph Hartung von Hartungen (1849–1917), who supervised the cure at Mitterbad in the summers and ran the reform sanatorium at Riva del Garda in the winters — the “other magic mountain,” whose guests included both Mann brothers, Kafka and Christian Morgenstern. It is this doctor who identifies H. M. Heinrich Mann first consulted Hartung von Hartungen in 1893 and was sent to Mitterbad; he remained a regular until 1908, called the doctor a friend for life, and arranged his cremation when he died in 1917. Thomas Mann came to Mitterbad in July 1901 on his brother's recommendation and worked there on Buddenbrooks. The eight children Preuschen sits among at table are the doctor's eight; the student who comes to Runkelstein, “Christoph von H., the son of his doctor,” is Christoph Hartung von Hartungen the younger, who later helped his brother Erhard run the Riva sanatorium. (Christoph Hartung von Hartungen)
- ↑the last shoot of a tired race. My mother was a Spaniard — Two sentences that name him. The decline of a merchant family through to an artist too fine to live is the Buddenbrooks myth the Manns told about themselves — and “a Spaniard” is the family's own formula for Julia Mann, born in Brazil to a German father and a Brazilian mother, whose descent the sons habitually rendered as Spanish or Portuguese. Julia da Silva-Bruhns (1851–1923) was born at Paraty in Brazil and brought to Lübeck at seven. Her sons put her Romance and her Brazilian inheritance to opposite uses — Thomas mentioning Brazil in answer to an antisemitic attack, Heinrich writing Zwischen den Rassen (1907) out of her; and in company the family Europeanised it, as here, into Spain. Preuschen is reporting a sentence she had no reason to invent and every reason to remember, since it was offered to her as the explanation of why she could not be his friend. Taken with the Mitterbad cure, the doctor and the Italian novellas, it puts the identification beyond reasonable doubt.
- ↑a work-of-art machine. The food, the nickel, is pushed in — The coin-operated automat had arrived in Berlin in 1895 and was the wonder of the decade: push in a nickel, press the button, out comes the food. She turns it inside out — the food goes in and the art comes out. Her two machines are both 1890s novelties, and both are machines that replace a body. The automat restaurant did away with the waiter; the infant incubator — “Kinderbrutmaschine,” literally child-hatching-machine — did away, for a while, with the mother, and was shown to paying crowds at the Berlin Trade Exhibition of 1896 and at every world's fair after it. So the image she reaches for to insult him is a technology of birth without a mother: he produces without carrying anything. Given that the book she then writes in a week is called The Tragedy of Woman, and that this chapter's last lines are about a woman whose genius cannot force down her womanhood, the choice is not casual. It is also the title of the chapter.
- ↑The Tragedy of Woman and appeared anonymously — A book of hers that no bibliography of her records, because it went out without her name. A “Tragödie des Weibes” is announced in the Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel of 17 September 1904. That does not date the Tyrol summer: a book announced that September could have been written after the summer of 1903, and the Corfu stay that follows it is January 1904. She names it, dates it by a Berlin season, and says nothing else about it — an entire book, written in a week, a talking point for one winter, and then dropped out of her own list. If the 1904 announcement is this book, it means the anonymous fashionable novel of that Berlin winter was by a painter better known for her pictures. There is a copy catalogued at the University of Chicago. Finding it, and finding whether the anonymity was ever pierced at the time, is the most concrete thing in the memoir to go looking for. (Börsenblatt für den deutschen Buchhandel, 17 Sept 1904)
- ↑whose genius cannot force down its womanhood — “dessen Genie nicht sein Weibtum niederzwingen kann” — in German the possessive belongs to Genie, which is neuter, so it is the genius's womanhood, and the sentence changes gender twice in nine words before ending on “sie.” This is the sentence the whole memoir has been walking towards, and it only works in German. Genie is neuter and has no feminine form — the one professional word the language cannot mark as female, which is the argument of her 1896 lecture Über das künstlerische Studium der Frau. So the curse falls on das Weib, the genius is a neuter it, the womanhood the genius fails to subdue is grammatically the genius's own, and the last clause returns to sie, she, who bleeds. English can render either the neuter or the sense, not both: “its womanhood” keeps the grammar and sounds strange, “her womanhood” reads smoothly and deletes the argument. The strangeness is kept here on purpose. What she is saying is not that womanhood defeats genius, but that a genius which cannot conquer its own womanhood destroys the woman — and she has just spent a chapter with a man whose whole method was to conquer his own humanity, and been told he was right.