In 1922, Thomas Mann was invited to observe and confirm an experiment in Fernbewegung, or telekinesis, at the Munich mansion of a well known paranormal impressario, Dr. Albert Freiherr von Schrenck-Notzing, in Munich. Schrenck Notzing, the “Spirit baron” as Mann, and the newspapers, called him, had the ability to indulge his quest for the paranormal due to a marriage that made him a wealthy man. He had accordingly fitted up a “laboratory” of sorts in his home. Mann was just one of several celebrities – for instance, Gustav Meyrink (author of The Golem) and Ludwig Klages (an important figure in the science of graphology, and a graphomaniac in the accepted German scholarly style – his book on the divide between intellect and soul, runs to 1,400 closely printed pages, which I’ve save my eyes from toxic myopia and my mind from clutter by never reading) – who made their way to Schrenk Notzing’s Palace on Max-Joseph-Strasse to witness his mediums, his repertoire of paranormals, perform their acts – events that were part experiment, part party spectacle.
The Palace was not very far from Mann’s own residence in
Munich. And Mann, who in his essay on the experiment describes himself as “falling
into the hands of occultists”, was always fascinated by the erotics of the
divide between the here and the beyond – the Diesseits and the Jenseits
Heather Wolfram, in her book The Stepchildren of Science,
about the German interest in the paranormal from the Wilhelmine Empire to the
Nazi era, begins with Mann’s visit as either a dialectical image or a
cautionary tale.
I’d speculate that what piqued Mann’s interest here was that
the medium who was spotlighted for the evening was a young adolescent named
Willy Schneider.
“The aim of this experiment, conducted amidst an eclectic
mix of household items, medical instruments and photographic equipment, was to
observe, record, and analyse the strange psychological and physical phenomena
associated with the experimental subject: an Austrian medium named Willy
Schneider (1903–71). Seated in a semi-circle facing the young man, the
participants held hands, talked and sang, straining their eyes in the dim red
light that enveloped the laboratory in the hope of seeing an ectoplasmic limb
or a telekinetic movement.”
A Tadzio in another Venice completely, where the canals were
filled with ectoplasm and the city hovered above them as a phantom. To complete
the picture, Willy’s contact spirit was named Mina.
In the essay Mann wrote about this experience, he turns to imagery
based on class – in particular, the protoclass of servants. Occultism, in fact,
he labels a “maid’s room metaphysics”, and he notices that few of the spirits
that are conjured up in the rooms where seances are held are plebes. There is
something classical in this. Mann references the famous case of a Mr. Krall in
Ebersfeld, who claimed his horse, Mohammed, could mentally calculate the cube
roots of numbers:
“Is human value a criterium of the truth? In a certain
sense: yes. I overheard a man, whose behavior and costume put him on the border
of the occult region, Herr Krall from Elberfield, he of the calculating horse,
say: “If there are spirits, we have reason to wish ourselves a long life,
because nothing could be more childish, senseless, confused and pitiful as the kind
of existence led by these thing, as we can judge after their supposed
manifestations.” Which is reminiscent of the famous utterance spoken by the
shadow of Achilles on the Cimmerian beach, at the spiritist séance of Odysseus:
“Worthless and senseless the Pelidian calls the existence of the dead, and the
pagan sense likes to always so view the idea of life after death, without at
the same time mistaking this life as a truth, a credo, a fact. Against this,
the innate Christian mindset has a hard time taking on board a beyond in which
everything is dumb, miserable and useless as on our familiar plane: and as it
not infrequently happens that a medium at the table channels an intelligence,
as the spirit of Aristostle or Napoleon Bonaparte, but we are soon satisfied on
the grounds of taste to justify the judgment that this is not Aristotle or
Napoleon at all, but only act, as if they were, which is why human values have
a standing in studying these manifestations.”
Mann’s mind, wandering from the calculating horse to the
poor spirit of Achilles conjured up on the Cimmerian shore, does something to
my mind. It is something that is outside of criticism – it is an act, a brief
act, of falling in love. To fall in love with an image is no argument, no claim
to truth – but it is very much a part of the novelist’s art. This may be why
Mann was willing to see the medium, why he “fell into the hands of the
Occultists”, with all his bourgeois equipment and class prejudices. Mann saw
the relationship between the artist and the rhapsode, shameful as this might be
in the age of mustard gas and movies.
Of course, everything eventually ends up in Mann’s real
work, and so too did the visit to Schrenck-Notzing end up in The Magic
Mountain, in the chapter near the end entitled: Highly Questionable. The sexual
and the beyond, here, eros and Thanatos, Tadzio and Willy Schneider, join hands
here:
“Edhin Krokowski’s lectures had taken an unexpected turn
after all these little years. His researches, dedicated to psychic dissection
and the dream life of his patients, had always had a subterranean character,
the whiff of the catacomb. Of late, however, although the transition had been
so gradual his audience had scarcely noticed, his interests had moved in a new
direction, toward magical, arcane matters; and his fortnightly lectures in the
dining hall—the sanatorium’s main attraction, the pride of its brochure—which
were always delivered from behind a cloth-covered table in an exotic, drawling
accent, to an immobile audience of Berghof residents and for which he always
wore a frock coat and sandals, no longer dealt with masked forms of love in
action or the transformation of illness back into conscious emotion, but with
the abstruse oddities of hypnotism and somnambulism, the phenomena of
telepathy, prophetic dreams, and second sight, the wonders of hysteria; and as
he discussed these topics, philosophic horizons expanded until suddenly his
audience beheld great riddles shimmering before their eyes, riddles about the
relationship between matter and the psyche, indeed, the very riddle of life
itself, which, so it appeared, might be more easily approached along very
uncanny paths, the paths of illness, than by the direct road of health.”
Convalescence – the Nietzschian plunge into illness as the
road to knowledge – takes us to strange places.
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