The daemonic emerges from below, from within. Its sublimation, its “transfiguration and taming through style,” its organization of form and shape, obviously involves taste and intellect. It is from this fusion that Mann envisions “A sphere that is undoubtedly superior to the state and to political life, to which art, religion, the humanities, and all deeper morality belong,” but which has arisen from this daemonic. And it is the daemonic, the genius, of a particular people that constitutes a national culture and is infused in its daily, Bürgerlich way of life, its default ways of thought. Thus, the war then in its early stages was for Mann one being fought for a “suprapolitical, supraindividual” idea, for “the intellectual-artistic-religious product that one calls a national culture.” And he deeply felt that the German national culture, with its lofty accomplishments in philosophy, literature, and music, yet grounded in the Bürgerlich virtues, was an absolute necessity to the world, that its vanquishment and absorption into “civilization” would be a tragedy for humanity.

Mann believed that all life should be organized according to the principles of this higher sphere, that the state and politics should be subservient to it. (In a monarchical system, we note, politics in any popular, participatory sense are eliminated—issues are resolved, economic and social decisions arrived at, from above.) He despised politics for its debasement of the intellect; as soon as intellect is entangled with questions of power, it is hopelessly corrupted. He feared democracy not only because of a general distrust of an empowered demos and a corrupted intellect to make decisions of any sort, and for its pressure toward a leveling and homogenization, but for what it threatened with respect to the place—or very existence—of this higher sphere, for its bent toward a “state without a culture.” He saw the rise of science, the spreading habit of analysis of everything, as inimical to art. He worried about the “progressive-destructive” impact of psychology, for art and the artist become impossible “when they are seen through.” He believed in the moral content of art, but not in the use of art to some “virtuous” end. He quotes Goethe: “A good work of art can and will have moral consequences, but to demand moral intentions from the artist is to ruin his work.”

As I scan our political condition now—the state of our own nation, the position of anything resembling a cultural sphere in it, and what the wartime Thomas Mann might see in it—it occurs to me that he could find good cause for pointing first here, then there, and saying “I told you so.” But he would no doubt refrain, being a man of both culture and civilization, and having, as early as 1922, come to the stance he found himself taking in On the Weimar Republic. This essay was first published in an issue of the cultural journal Neue Rundschau devoted to Gerhart Hauptmann, but originated as an address given in Berlin in celebration of that writer’s 60th birthday. While I honor Mann’s protest against accusations of betraying his own recent understanding (in effect, “I haven’t changed; the world has”), it is in practical terms quite a turnaround, quite an adaptation. He has come through to the other side, and finds himself admonishing German youth against taking to the streets not in the name of a revolutionary liberalization, but in the name of a movement to overthrow the Republic in favor of restoring the monarchy. The great wrestling with the daemon he had been through was even then undergoing its sublimation into The Magic Mountain. In the preface to that work (published 1925), he writes: ” . . . our story is much older than its years . . . it does not actually owe its pastness to time [but to] its having taken place before a certain turning point, on the far side of a rift that has cut deeply through our lives and consciousness . . . is not the pastness of a story that much more profound, more complete, more like a fairy tale, the tighter it fits up against the ‘before?’ ” Then, in the captivating opening chapter of the novel, which relates the rail journey of Hans Castorp down from Hamburg to the Swiss Alpine town of Landquart, and from there up “the steep and dogged ascent that will never end, it seems” to the sanitarium (at Davos!), his everyday life falling away behind him with every foot gained, Mann writes of this falling-away that “Space, as it rolls and tumbles away between him and his native soil, proves to have powers normally ascribed to time . . . Space, like time, gives birth to forgetfulness, but does so by removing an individual from all relationships and placing him in a free and pristine state . . . Time, they say, is water from the river Lethe, but alien air is a similar drink, and . . . it works all the more quickly.” Not quite Schopenhauer, or Gurnemanz on his way to the Temple of the Grail—but close.