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535 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1947
All about him was coldness – and how do I feel, using this word, which he himself, in an uncanny connection, once also set down? Life and experience can give to single syllables an accent utterly divorcing them from their common meaning and lending them an aura of horror, which nobody understands who has not learned them in that awful context.
…that is the sound, almost lost in space, the cosmic ozone of another poem, wherein spirits in golden barks traverse the heavenly sea and the ringing course of gleaming songs wreathes itself down and wells up again…
This is what I think: that an untruth of a kind that enhances power holds its own against any ineffectively virtuous truth. And I mean too that creative, genius – giving disease, disease that rides on high horse over all hindrances, and springs with drunken daring from peak to peak, is a thousand times dearer to life than plodding healthiness.
THE LAMENTATIONS OF THE HUMANIST NOVEL
Damn, damn those corruptors who taught their lessons in evil to an originally honest, law-abiding, but all too docile people, a people all too happy to live by a theory! A patriotism, however, that would boldly proclaim that the bloody state whose gasping agonies we are now experiencing, that "saddled itself" (to use Luther's expression) with untold crimes […]—a patriotism that would proclaim that such a state was forced upon us as something without roots in our nature as a people, something totally alien to us, such a patriotism would, so it seems to me, be more high-minded than conscientious. Was not this regime, both in word and deed, merely the distorted, vulgarized, debased realization of a mindset and worldview to which one must attribute a characteristic authenticity and which, not without alarm, a Christianly humane person finds revealed in the traits of our great men, in the figures of the most imposing embodiments of Germanness? I ask-and am I asking too much? (p. 506)His tragic hero Leverkühn, embodying much of it, resigns to his own answer: as you must know, man is made and predestined for bliss or for hell, and I was born for hell (p. 523), that is, the seeds were already there… but no! As a reader, I could not accept it. Numerous musical references took me on listening journey of the German classics, especially Beethoven as his music figured prominently early on in the novel and I could not escape the sense of how much his piano sonatas and his symphonies were German in a beautiful way that they transcended the confines of nationality to speak universally to this day.