Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann: A Study in the Sociology of Literature by Judith Marcus (review)

Abstract

Book Reviews103 JUDITH MARCUS. Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann: A Study in the Sociology of Literature. Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1987. 235 p. 1 his book is a translation of Marcus' Thomas Mann und Georg Lukács, published in 1982. The bibliography has been revised and the sequence of names in the title reversed. The last two-thirds of the text is devoted to the most detailed and most persuasive analysis yet of the often speculated-on relationship between the fictional figure ofLeo Naphta, in Mann's masterpiece novel, The Magic Mountain, and the Hungarian philosopher-critic and Manninterpreter , Georg Lukács. The first third, taking account ofthe nonspecialist reader, sets the background against which the Lukács-Naphta comparison is drawn. Both parts are based substantially on primary literary and critical material, supplemented by published and unpublished correspondence, sociological and political treatises, memoirs ofcontemporaries, and by personal interviews with, not least, Lukács himself and Katia Mann. The relationship between Lukács and Mann is characterized on the one hand by an all but perfect philosophical, critical, and artistic sympathy and respect for each other, but on the other hand, on the personal level, by a coolness and a distance on Mann's part that could not be bridged. Marcus shows that the issues explored by Lukács in his early essay collection, Soul and Form (1911), for example, the nature of the bourgeois artist, correspond with what emerged from Mann's wrestling with the same issue—such as pervades Death in Venice. No wonder Mann recognized himself in Lukács treatise. As to Lukács' posited primacy of ethics, Mann cheerfully amplifies, "Does [that] not signify the predominance of ethics over aesthetics?" (29). He could truly suggest an "intimate spiritual closeness" (37) between Lukács and himself— and he felt good about it. Why then was Mann unresponsive to overtures by Lukács to establish friendly personal relations? Although they met but twice—when Lukács was in exile in Vienna in January 1922 and then again in Weimar in 1955, a few months before Mann's death—they were in touch by letter and by mutual critical admiration; their paths crisscrossed. Marcus avoids the simplistic answer, by which external circumstances (e.g., World War I) would militate against a rapport, before Lukács' conversion to communism in 1919. And by 1922 he was a communist and thus beyond the presumed pale of friendship for Mann. Marcus suggests rather that Mann, "the very proper German bourgeois writer" (49), was unable to feel at home in the alien, "Eastern" sphere that was Lukács'. As for the 1930s Marcus might have speculated, but does not, on the effect ofthe merciless verbal pillorying that Mann took from such German communist stalwarts and Lukácsian cohorts as Alfred Kurella. Yet, back in the critical realm in the late 1940s, 1949 to be exact, Mann incorporated a critical encomium of Lukács in his Story of a Novel: The Genesis ofDoctor Faustus. In part 2 Marcus moves to her central concern: how much of Lukács does Mann incorporate into the fictional figure of Leo Naphta—Jew, Jesuit, and communist, and the successor and antipode of Settembrini as Hans Castorp's preceptor in The Magic Mountain? Of his physiognomy, not much, at most 104Rocky Mountain Review the gray eyes—although Marcus reports that Lukács' eyes were more blue than gray. Ofhis attire, nothing ofimportance. Naphta was a sharp dresser; Lukács after his turn to communism ceased to worry about how he looked. It is when Marcus, in her long final chapter, proceeds to the category of personality— that ofNaphta and that ofLukács—that she strikes gold, and it centers about the fact that both Naphta and Lukács fall within the rubric, "the stranger par excellence," the "questionable character" (90, 91). Further: "the educator" and indeed "the non-German educator." Finally, both Lukács and Naphta are ascetic communists (as Marcus notes, ascetic fascists are unthinkable). But Naphta—to continue Marcus' line ofthought—is not susceptible to clearcut identification. For example, his ascetic communism is laced with a dollop of the religious—while Lukács in his...