A MAster froM GerMAny: thoMAs MAnn, Albrecht Dürer

Transcription

Oxford German Studies,Vol. 38, No. 1, 2009
A Master from Germany:
Thomas Mann, Albrecht Dürer,
and the Making of a National Icon
Martin A. Ruehl
Published by Maney Publishing (c) W. S. Maney & Son
Trinity Hall, Cambridge
Many critics have commented on Thomas Mann’s allusions to Dürer’s art in Doktor Faustus, but
few have considered its larger symbolic significance for his self-understanding as a German Künstler
and Bürger. One work was of particular importance in this regard: the copperplate engraving known
as Ritter, Tod und Teufel (1513). In the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918), Mann
invokes the engraving as a sign of Nietzsche’s – and his own – attachment to a Protestant, ascetic
worldview and a specifically German, Faustian notion of masterliness. This interpretation of the
image as well as Mann’s subsequent repudiation of it were conditioned by the increasingly nationalist
appropriation of Dürer since the late nineteenth century, but even more so by the novelist’s war-time
confidant and collaborator, the literary historian and Nietzsche scholar Ernst Bertram.
Deutsches Meistertum! Wir wollen es lieben und preisen — aus einer Verbundenheit,
die niemand unterschätzen soll. Die Welt Dürers tut sich auf bei diesem Wort...mit
ihrem Rittertum zwischen Tod und Teufel...ihrem Leidenszug und Kryptenhauch, ihrer
faustischen Melencolia.
Thomas Mann, ‘Vom Beruf des deutschen Schriftstellers’ (1931)
Dem Bild gehören immer nur die stärksten Stunden.
Ernst Bertram, Worte in einer Werkstatt (1938)
For its Christmas edition of 1913, the popular German daily Berliner Tageblatt sent out a
questionnaire to a select group of writers, asking them to comment on the painter who
had most inf luenced their work. In a tellingly curt reply, Thomas Mann, celebrated author
of Buddenbrooks and, most recently, Der Tod in Venedig, confessed that he could not much
relate to modern art, indeed, to art in general. He had been formed entirely, he wrote, by
music and language.1 A little more than forty years later and near the end of his life, Mann
1
Thomas Mann, ‘[Maler und Dichter]’ (1913), in Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke, 13 vols (Frankfurt
a.M: Fischer, 1974) (hereafter GW), xi, 740.
© 2009 W. S. Maney & Son Ltd and the Modern Humanities Research Association
DOI: 10.1179/007871909x429897
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Martin A. Ruehl
again ref lected on his ‘skandalöse Unbildung’ in this regard. For him, as for Schiller, he
told the Hungarian mythographer Karl Kerényi in a letter of December 1954, the world of
the eye had remained an alien world, ‘und im Grunde will ich nichts sehen’.2
Compared to music, the visual arts indeed seem to have played a marginal role in Mann’s
aesthetic universe. Like Nietzsche, he distinguished between ‘Augen- und Ohrenmenschen’
and invariably placed himself in the latter category.3 Most scholars to date have taken these
self-assessments at face value.4 There are hardly any in-depth examinations of Mann as an
‘ocular’ writer and those that exist tend to suffer from an overly technical conception of the
relation between word and image. Hans Wysling’s comprehensive study Bild und Text bei
Thomas Mann is little more than a catalogue raisonné of photographs and paintings on which
the author modelled the characters and settings of his works.5 In a similar vein, Johannes
Elema investigates Albrecht Dürer’s art as a visual source for Mann’s late masterpiece,
Doktor Faustus (1947).6 Elema’s meticulous iconographic detective work reveals that beyond
the few explicit references to Melencolia I (1514) and the early series of woodcuts known as
the Apocalypse (1498),7 the novel contains a large number of oblique allusions to Dürer: the
description of the protagonist’s parents, for instance, is based on the copperplate engraving
of Philipp Melanchthon (1526) and the Venezianische junge Frau (c. 1507), respectively, while
Adrian’s own features are closely modelled on two of Dürer’s self-portraits;8 even the
composer’s study in Schweigestill turns out to be little more than a fictional re-creation
2
Mann to K. Kerényi, 5 December 1947, in Thomas Mann — Karl Kerényi: Gespräch in Briefen, ed. by K.
Kerény (Zurich: Rhein-Verlag, 1960), p. 199.
3
See, e.g., Mann, ‘Der Holzschneider Masereel’ (1948), GW x, 783, and ‘[Maler und Dichter]’, GW xi,
740. Nietzsche makes the distinction in his talk ‘Das griechische Musikdrama’ (1870), in Friedrich Nietzsche,
Sämtliche Werke: Kritische Studienausgabe, 15 vols, ed. by G. Colli and M. Montinari (Munich/Berlin: DTV/
de Gruyter, 1986) (hereafter KSA), i, 518.
4
The bibliography on ‘Thomas Mann und die Musik’ in H. Koopmann (ed.), Thomas-Mann-Handbuch
(Stuttgart: Kröner, 1990) is more than twice as long as that on ‘Thomas Mann und die bildenden Künste’.
But cf. A. Schaller, ‘Und seine Begierde ward sehend’: Auge, Blick und visuelle Wahrnehmung in der Prosa Thomas
Manns (Würzburg: Ergon-Verlag, 1997) and K. Bedenig Stein, Nur ein Ohrenmensch? Thomas Manns Verhältnis
zu den bildenden Künsten (Bern: Lang, 2001).
5
See H. Wysling, Bild und Text bei Thomas Mann: Eine Dokumentation (Bern: Francke, 1975).
6
See J. Elema, ‘Thomas Mann, Dürer und Doktor Faustus’, Euphorion, 59 (1965), 97–117; reprinted
in H. Koopmann (ed.), Thomas Mann (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1975), pp. 320–50.
On Mann and Dürer see also U. Finke, ‘Dürer und Thomas Mann’, in C. Dodwell (ed.), Essays on Dürer
(Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1973), pp. 121–46; W. Rehm, ‘Thomas Mann und Dürer’ in Siegfried
Gutenbrunner and others (eds), Die Wissenschaft von deutscher Sprache und Dichtung: Methoden, Probleme,
Aufgaben (Stuttgart: Klett, 1963), pp. 478–97, and Jürgen Jung, Altes und Neues zu Thomas Manns Roman
Doktor Faustus: Quellen und Modelle. Mythos, Psychologie, Musik, Theo-Dämonologie, Faschismus (Frankfurt
a.M.: UTZ, 1985), pp. 261–88.
7
On the deep thematic affinities between Melencolia I and Mann’s novel see also M. Palencia-Roth,
‘Albrecht Dürer’s Melencolia I and Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus’, German Studies Review 3, 3 (1980),
361–75.
8
See Elema, ‘Thomas Mann’, pp. 325–29. In a late letter to the literary critic Hans Mayer, Mann
confirmed his visual reliance especially on Dürer’s portraits: ‘Mein Kontakt mit Dürer war sehr eng während
der Arbeit an dem Roman [i.e. Doktor Faustus]. Immer wieder sah ich seine Bilder an, namentlich die
Bildnisse, — und so gibt es denn nun wieder was zu entlarven’: T. Mann to H. Mayer, 29 December 1953,
Die Briefe Thomas Manns: Regesten und Register, ed. by H. Bürgin and others, (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer 1987),
iv, 267.
A Master from Germany
63
of Dürer’s Nuremberg studio, a photographic reproduction of which Mann had found in
a recent biography of the artist.9
Helpful as these findings are in elucidating the method of inter-medial montage in Doktor
Faustus, they tell us relatively little about Dürer’s specific significance for Mann and the
complicated place he occupies in the larger historical-ideological framework of the novel.
Dürer’s engravings, woodcuts and paintings represent much more than visual sources; they
belong to a wide and intricate web of meaning that underpins Mann’s politically charged
re-telling of the Faustus myth. At the heart of this web lies, as the half-concealed pictorial
centrepiece, one of Dürer’s most famous creations: the first of the so-called Meisterstiche of
1513–1514, known as Ritter, Tod und Teufel.
Ritter, Tod und Teufel, it will be argued here, represents an iconological key not only to
the German themes of Doktor Faustus, but to the very core of Mann’s Deutschlandbild and
his self-understanding as a German writer. From the beginning of World War I, Dürer’s
engraving functioned as a prism through which he projected a new identity for himself, first
as a national-conservative German master, then as a republican-cosmopolitan humanist.
In a number of writings, from the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918) onwards, Mann
turned Ritter, Tod und Teufel into a mythical symbol that he used in order to define — and
re-define — his position in the fracas with his brother Heinrich, his relation to Weimar’s
New Right, his attitude towards the Renaissance and Reformation, his particular debt to
the philosophy of Nietzsche and, finally, his understanding of Germany’s fateful road to
the Third Reich. Over the thirty-odd years between the publication of the Betrachtungen
and the publication of Doktor Faustus, Dürer’s image provided a crystallization point of his
changing conceptions of Deutschtum at least as powerful as Pfitzner’s Palestrina or Wagner’s
Meistersinger. To grasp the mythopoeic potency of this image for Mann, it is necessary to
brief ly sketch its complicated reception history up to the end of the Great War.10
9
The biography in question is Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Dürer und seine Zeit, 3rd edn (Vienna: Phaidon Verlag,
1936); see fig. VII, facing p. 192.
10
There are now several comprehensive studies on the reception of Dürer’s art in general and Ritter, Tod
und Teufel in particular. The most notable amongst the former are: Wilhelm Waetzoldt, ‘Dürers Gestalt
in der deutschen Dichtung’, Zeitschrift des deutschen Vereins für Kunstwissenschaft, 3 (1936), 127–33; Heinz
Lüdecke and Susanne Heiland (eds), Dürer und die Nachwelt: Urkunden, Briefe, Dichtungen und wissenschaftliche
Betrachtungen aus vier Jahrhunderten (Berlin: Rütten & Loening, 1955); B. Hinz, Dürers Gloria: Kunst, Kultur,
Konsum (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1971), J. Jahn, Entwicklungsstufen der Dürer-Forschung (Berlin: exh. cat.
Staatliche Kunstbibliothek, 1971); K. Andrews, ‘Dürer’s Posthumous Fame’, in Dodwell, Essays on Dürer,
pp. 82–103; Jane Campbell Hutchison, ‘Der vielgefeierte Dürer’, in R. Grimm and J. Hermand (eds),
Deutsche Feiern (Wiesbaden: Verlagsgesellschaft Athenaion, 1977), pp. 25–45; Fedja Anzelewsky, Dürer: Werk
und Wirkung (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1980); Jan Białostocki, Dürer and his Critics, 1500–1971: Chapters in the
History of Ideas (Baden-Baden: Koerner, 1986); G. Bartrum, Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy (London: British
Museum Press, 2004); and Keith Moxey, ‘Impossible Distance: Past and Present in the Study of Dürer
and Grünewald’, The Art Bulletin 86, 4 (2004), 750–63. On the reception of Ritter, Tod und Teufel see esp.
Hans Schwerte’s seminal essay ‘Dürers Ritter, Tod und Teufel: Eine ideologische Parallele zum Faustischen’,
in Schwerte, Faust und das Faustische: Ein Kapitel deutscher Ideologie (Stuttgart: Klett, 1962), pp. 243–78;
R. Grimm, ‘Vom sogenannten Widerstand gegen die Völkischen: Ein Nachtrag zum Thema “Ritter, Tod
und Teufel” ’, in R. Grimm, Ideologiekritische Studien zur Literatur (Bern and Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1975),
ii, 73–84; and Heinrich Theissing, Dürers ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’: Sinnbild und Bildsinn (Berlin: Gebrüder
Mann, 1978).
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Martin A. Ruehl
I. From miles christianus to eques teutonicus: the German ideologies of Dürer’s Horseman
When Mann first invoked it in 1918 as a symbol of his world,11 Dürer’s engraving already
possessed a more general symbolic force, made up of various layers of religious as well
as political meaning. Ritter, Tod und Teufel, as the Swiss art historian Heinrich Wölff lin
(1864–1945) remarked in a lecture of 1921, was perhaps the most famous picture in all
German art, decorating the walls of countless German parlours.12 The primary reason
for this popularity seems to have been its putatively Christian content. Dürer himself had
referred to his engraving simply as ‘der Reuter’,13 but from the beginning commentators
read a religious significance into the horseman and his dark, forbidding surroundings. In
his celebrated history of German art, the Teutsche Academie der Bau-, Bild- und MahlereyKünste, the German painter and writer Joachim Sandrart called the horseman a Christian
knight,14 alluding to the medieval ideal of the miles Christianus, which rested on the biblical
notion that for the Christian believer, life was a struggle (militia) against evil in the armour
of God (Ephesians 6, 13–19).15 For the best part of the eighteenth century, by contrast, the
rider tended to be interpreted either as an allegory of hollow worldly might (vana potentia)
or, indeed, as an emblem of evil:16 a Raubritter (robber-knight) or soldier on horseback,
whose godless business had brought him into the company of Death on the left, and the
Devil on the right, representing the brevity and impiety, respectively, of his life [see figure
1: Albrecht Dürer, Ritter, Tod und Teufel]. In other words, the first master-engraving was
read as a further variation on the memento mori theme, which Dürer had already treated in
earlier works such as Die drei Lebenden und die drei Toten (1497), König Tod zu Pferde (1505)
and Landsknecht und Tod (1510).17
Mann, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918), GW xii, 541.
‘In wie vielen deutschen Stuben hängt der Ritter mit Tod und Teufel an der Wand! Es ist vielleicht das
bekannteste Bild der gesamten deutschen Kunst...’: Heinrich Wölfflin, Albrecht Dürer (Darmstadt: Reichl,
1922), repr. in H. Wölfflin, Die Kunst Albrecht Dürers, 5th edn (Munich: Brückmann, 1926), pp. 1–14
(p. 2).
13
H. Rupprich (ed.), Dürer: Schriftlicher Nachlaß, 3 vols (Berlin: Deutscher Verein für Kunstwissenschaft,
1956–1969), i, 162 and 166.
14
See A. Peltzer, Joachim von Sandrarts Academie der Bau-, Bild- und Mahlerey-Künste von 1675 (Munich:
Hirth, 1925), ii, 3, 64; quoted in Schwerte, Faust, p. 248.
15
On the concept of the miles Christianus in relation to Ritter, Tod und Teufel see P. Weber, Beiträge zu
Dürers Weltanschauung: Eine Studie über die drei Stiche Ritter, Tod und Teufel, Melancholie und Hieronymus
im Gehäus, Studien zur deutschen Kunstgeschichte, 23 (1900), 18–36; and Erwin Panofsky, The Life and Art of
Albrecht Dürer, 4th edn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1955), pp. 151–54. See also M. Lanckoronska,
‘Die zeitgeschichtliche Komponente in Dürers Kupferstich “Der Reiter” ’, Gutenberg-Jahrbuch, (1974),
228–46, and Theissing, Dürers ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’, pp. 33–46.
16
See, e.g., J. C. Füßli, Raisonnirendes Verzeichnis der vornehmsten Kupferstecher und ihrer Werke (Zurich:
Orell, 1771), pp. 74–75; and H. Hüsgen, Raisonierendes Verzeichnis aller Kupfer- und Eisenstiche von Albrecht
Dürer (Frankfurt a.M.: Fleischer, 1778), no. 94. On Dürer’s reception in the seventeenth century see H. Ley,
‘Dürer and the Seventeenth Century’, in Dodwell, Essays on Dürer, pp. 104–20.
17
This reading was revived in the late 1960s by E. Gombrich, ‘The Evidence of Images’, in C. Singleton
(ed.), Interpretation: Theory and Practice (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1969), pp. 35–103. See
also E. Wind, Giorgione’s Tempesta with Comments on Giorgione’s Poetic Allegories (Oxford: Clarendon Press,
1969), p. 27, n. 31; and S. Karling, ‘Riddaren, döden och djävulen: Till tolkningen av Dürers stick’, Konst
historisk Tidskrift, 39 (1970), pp. 1–12; repr. as ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel: Ein Beitrag zur Deutung von Dürers
Stich’, Actes du XXIIe Congrès International d’Histoire de l’Art (Budapest: Akadémiai Kiadó, 1972), i, 731–38.
11
12
Fig. 1. Albrecht Dürer, Ritter, Tod und Teufel (1513)
Courtesy of the British Museum
65
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Martin A. Ruehl
Around 1800, this negative reading of the image changed again. Out of an idealized
conception of medieval spirituality, early German Romantics like Friedrich de la Motte
Fouqué (1777–1843) began to turn the horseman into an embodiment of unassailable,
victorious faith, a knight without fear and reproach, moving calmly through the Valley
of the Shadow of Death towards his salvation, symbolized by the castle on the hill in the
background.18 The wicked worldly soldier was transformed into a heroic ‘Ritter trotz Tod
und Teufel’, as the engraving was later re-labelled by the art historian Ralf von Retberg.19
In the last third of the nineteenth century, it gained extraordinary fame, especially among
German Protestants. For even though few of his works dealt with avowedly Protestant
themes,20 Dürer was traditionally associated with the Reformation, mainly because of his
strong support, from 1519, of Luther’s cause.21 Ritter, Tod und Teufel, completed in 1513, four
years before the Ninety-Five Theses, was interpreted, in unashamedly proleptic fashion,
as an expression of the individualistic faith of Protestantism and a visualization of Luther’s
solitary defiance of the papal hierarchy, expressed in his legendary ‘Hier stehe ich!’ at the
Imperial Diet of Worms (1521), which formed the subject of another iconic image in the
Protestant parlours of the Second Reich [see figure 2: Hermann Freihold Plüddemann,
Luther auf dem Reichstag zu Worms].22 To make the Protestant message of the engraving
even more obvious, many reproductions included a caption quoting the rousing lines from
the third stanza of Luther’s famous hymn ‘Ein’ feste Burg ist unser Gott’ about the faithful
Christians who prevail in this world, even if it were full of devils.23
If the Romantics brought about a religious revaluation of Ritter, Tod und Teufel, they
also launched its nationalization. In his Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders
of 1797 and the posthumously published Phantasien über die Kunst, Wilhelm Wackenroder
(1773–1798) identified Dürer’s naïve piety and meticulous craftsmanship as typically
German traits. It was all for the better, Wackenroder observed, that Dürer had not
18
See F. de la Motte Fouqué, ‘Sintram und seine Gefährten’ (1814), in Fouqués Werke, ed. by W. Ziesemer
(Berlin: Bong, 1908), i, 211–12 and 220; repr. in Lüdecke and Heiland, Dürer und die Nachwelt, pp. 167–68.
19
R. v. Retberg, Dürers Kupferstiche und Holzschnitte. Ein kritisches Verzeichnis (Munich: Ackermann, 1871),
p. 78. On the ideological implications of this transformation see Schwerte, Faust, pp. 250–61.
20
But cf. Panofsky, Dürer, pp. 198–205 for an astute analysis of the ways in which Dürer’s ‘conversion’ to
Protestantism is reflected both in the subject-matter and style of his late art.
21
See, e.g., Moritz Thausing, Dürer: Geschichte seines Lebens und seiner Kunst (Leipzig: Seemann, 1876),
p. 444–71, esp. p. 450: ‘Sie [i.e. the master-engravings] athmen etwas von dem Gewissenskampfe, den das
deutsche Volk eben [in the early 1510s] durchzumachen sich anschickte, der seitdem keinem von uns erspart
blieb. [...] Wir [...] erkennen in jenen Kupferstichen eine Illustration zu den geistigen Strömungen der
Reformationsepoche.’ See also Marcus Zucker, Dürers Stellung zur Reformation (Erlangen: Deichert, 1886)
and Dürer (Halle: Niemeyer, 1900), as well as E. Heidrich, Dürer und die Reformation (Leipzig: Klinkhardt &
Biermann, 1909).
22
At the instigation of Emperor William I, who regarded himself as the patron of all German Protestants,
copies of Plüddemann’s painting were put up in schools all over the new Empire during the 1880s. On
Plüddemann see Ekkehard Mai, Hermann Freihold Plüddemann: Maler und Illustrator zwischen Spätromantik und
Historismus (1809–1868). Ein Werkverzeichnis (Cologne: Böhlau, 2004).
23
See Weber, Beiträge zu Dürer, p. 101: ‘Hat doch [...] Luther das wundervollste Kampflied des christlichen
Ritters gedichtet, das sich wie eine poetische Erläuterung zu dem 10 Jahre früher entstandenen Stiche [i.e.
Ritter, Tod und Teufel] liest: “Ein feste Burg ist unser Gott” ’. See also Waetzoldt, Dürer und seine Zeit, p. 116:
‘In dem durchaus richtigen Empfinden, daß das Ethos, aus dem Dürer sein Blatt geschaffen hat, die gleiche
sittliche Kraft ist, die in gerader Linie zu Luthers Auftreten vor Kaiser und Reich in Worms geführt hat,
wird beim Anblick von “Ritter, Tod und Teufel” gerne das Lutherlied von der festen Burg zitiert, obwohl
es nach Dürers Tod gedichtet worden ist.’
Fig. 2. Hermann F. Plüddemann, Luther auf dem Reichstag zu Worms, 1521 (1864)
Courtesy of the Stiftung Luthergedenkstätten, Sachsen-Anhalt
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Martin A. Ruehl
adopted from Raphael the notion of ideal beauty, for only thus could he become an ‘echt
vaterländischer Künstler’.24 The conf luence of medievalizing tendencies — the so-called
Gothic Revival — and a burgeoning cultural nationalism led to the emergence of a veritable
cult of Dürer, sparked by the celebrations of the third centenary of his death in 1828.25 Art
historians and artists alike now hailed him as an archetypal German master (‘deutscher
Meister’), often ignoring, or at least downplaying, the vital impulses he had received on
his two Italian journeys in 1494–1495 and 1505–1507 from Renaissance artists like Andrea
Mantegna and Leonardo da Vinci.26 Throughout the nineteenth century, Ritter, Tod und
Teufel was consistently singled out as the most powerful expression of Dürer’s ‘Germanness’.27 In his 1860 biography of Dürer, August von Eye (1825–1896), director of the
recently established Germanisches Nationalmuseum in Nuremberg, praised the engraving
as a ‘Versinnbildlichung und Verherrlichung’ of the German national character. It revealed
a dedication to higher ideals as well as a force and courage to strive for the realization of
these ideals that, according to Eye, imbued every true son of German kin.28 A decade later,
Conrad Ferdinand Meyer (1825–1898) mentioned Ritter, Tod und Teufel in his popular epic
poem Huttens letzte Tage (1871) as a symbol of German fortitude and fearlessness — the
same virtues demonstrated in Germany’s recent victory over France, which had so greatly
impressed the Swiss writer.29 For the Viennese art historian Moritz Thausing (1838–1884),
too, the knight’s fearless striving ref lected a deep national sentiment, a relentless idealistic
striving which he called ‘faustisch’.30
In the afterword to the eighth edition of his kulturkritisch best-seller Rembrandt als
Erzieher, first published in 1890, the völkisch prophet Julius Langbehn (1851–1907) added a
racist slant to these nationalist readings by equating the knight’s position between Death
and Devil with Germany’s struggle against a false Western intellectualism on the one hand
Wilhelm Wackenroder, Phantasien über die Kunst für Freunde der Kunst, ed. by L. Tieck (Hamburg:
Perthes, 1799), repr. in R. Taylor (ed.), The Romantic Tradition in Germany: An Anthology (London: Methuen
& Co., 1970), pp. 63–67, and Wilhelm Wackenroder, Herzensergießungen eines kunstliebenden Klosterbruders
(Berlin: Unger, 1797), repr. in Lüdecke and Heiland, Dürer und die Nachwelt, p. 157.
25
See Matthias Mende, ‘Bemerkungen zum Dürer-Kult des 19. Jahrhunderts’, in Nürnberger Dürerfeiern
1828–1928 (Nuremberg: exh. cat., 1971); H. Glaser, ‘Dürer-Feiern: Ein Rückblick auf die Dürer-Jahre 1828,
1871 und 1928’, Gehört, gelesen 18, 2 (1971), 104–20; Karl-Heinz Weidener, Richter und Dürer: Studien zur
Rezeption des altdeutschen Stils im 19. Jahrhundert (Frankfurt a.M.: Lang, 1983); and U. Kuhlemann, ‘The
Celebration of Dürer in Germany during the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries’, in: G. Bartrum (ed.),
Albrecht Dürer and his Legacy: The Graphic Work of a Renaissance Artist (London: exh. cat. British Museum,
2002), pp. 39–60.
26
See Ludwig Grote, ‘Hier bin ich ein Herr’: Dürer in Venedig (Munich: Prestel, 1956); and M. Bonicatti,
‘Dürers Verhältnis zum venezianischen Humanismus’, in Ernst Ullmann (ed.), Albrecht Dürer: Kunst im
Aufbruch (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut VEB, 1973), pp. 143–78.
27
See Schwerte, Faust, pp. 255–68 and Białostocki, Dürer and his Critics, pp. 189–227.
28
A. v. Eye, Leben und Wirken Albrecht Dürers (Nördlingen: Beck, 1860), pp. 355–56.
29
See Conrad Ferdinand Meyer, Huttens letzte Tage: Dichtung, in Meyer, Sämtliche Werke (Munich: Knaur,
1965), pp. 922–23. On Meyer’s politics in the early 1870s see John Osborne, Meyer or Fontane? German
Literature after the Franco-Prussian War 1870/71, Abhandlungen zur Kunst-, Musik- und Literaturwissenschaft,
34 (Bonn: Bouvier 1983).
30
Thausing, Dürer, p. 450: ‘Was...jene Blätter [i.e. the master-engravings] populär macht, ist die tiefe
nationale... Empfindung...aus der sie heraus erzeugt sind. [...] Es ist das faustische Element jener Zeit, das
uns aus diesen Darstellungen...entgegenweht...’ On similar ‘Faustian’ interpretations of Ritter, Tod und Teufel
in the nineteenth century, see Schwerte, Faust, esp. pp. 257, 263–65.
24
69
and Judaism on the other.31 Writing with his friend and disciple, the artist Momme Nissen
(1870–1943), Langbehn returned to Ritter, Tod und Teufel in his 1904 pamphlet Dürer als
Führer, this time in order to defend German art, which the two authors identified with
firm lines, form and graphic clarity, against all foreign inf luences, especially that of French
impressionism. Langbehn and Nissen, however, hailed Dürer not only as a champion
of the German linear style in the fight against the cheap ‘painterly’ brilliance of Degas
and Manet, but also as the incarnation of a specifically German ‘adeliger Kunstgeist’
diametrically opposed to the ‘demokratischer Wühlgeist’ of the French, embodied by
Zola.32 Around 1900, Germany’s intellectual landscape provided a fertile soil for such ideas.
The original version of Dürer als Führer had appeared in 1904 as an article in Der Kunstwart,
a widely circulated cultural journal edited by the writer and critic Ferdinand Avenarius
(1856–1923).33 In 1902, Avenarius had founded the Dürerbund, which together with many
other Dürervereine formed one of the most inf luential reform movements of fin-de-siècle
Germany. Using the Kunstwart as his platform, Avenarius mounted a powerful attack
on the official, materialistic culture of the Wilhelmine Empire. His repeated calls for a
cultural renewal and an aesthetic re-education of the nation through a return to Dürer
made a deep and lasting impression on the educated middle class.34
To be sure, there were other, more sober assessments of the engraving at the time, most
notably from within the academic community. Art historians Hermann Grimm (1828–
1901) and Paul Weber (1868–1930), for instance, emphasized the Christian and humanist
elements in Ritter, Tod und Teufel in their seminal studies of 1875 and 1900, respectively.35
Grimm in particular pointed to Erasmus’ Enchiridion Militis Christiani (1503) as the most
likely inspiration for Dürer’s representation of the horseman. Heinrich Wölff lin, similarly,
sought to de-politicize the image by reminding his readers that its central figure represented
the Christian Everyman and by drawing attention to the various ways in which it ref lected
Dürer’s formal indebtedness to the Italian Renaissance, especially to Leonardo’s studies
for the Sforza monument and Verrocchio’s equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni [see
figure 3: Verrocchio’s statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni].36 Yet even Wölff lin suggested that
31
[Julius Langbehn] Rembrandt als Erzieher: Von einem Deutschen, 42nd edn (Leipzig: Hirschfeld, 1893),
p. 352: ‘Wir müssen ritterlich sein, ob auch der Feind nicht ritterlich ist. Möge die deutsche Jugend dieser
Gesinnung treu bleiben; möge sie in ihr Mann werden. Für jetzt aber wird sie ihres Weges fürbaß zu
ziehen haben zwischen dem Professor und dem Juden — wie Dürers Ritter zwischen Tod und Teufel.’ The
antisemitic propagandist Theodor Fritsch republished this excerpt from Langbehn’s book in his Handbuch
der Judenfrage, 26th edn (Hamburg: Hammer Verlag, 1907), p. 158.
32
Julius Langbehn and Benedikt Momme Nissen, Dürer als Führer (Munich: Müller, 1928), pp. 12, 14.
33
See M. Nissen, ‘Dürer als Führer’, Der Kunstwart: Halbmonatsschau über Dichtung, Theater, Musik, bildende
und angewandte Künste 17 (1903/1904). On the Kunstwart see I. Koszinowski, Von der Poesie des Kunstwerks.
Zur Kunstrezeption um 1900 am Beispiel der Malereikritik der Zeitschrift ‘Kunstwart’ (Hildesheim: Olms, 1985).
34
F. Avenarius, ‘Zum Dürer-Bunde! Ein Aufruf ’, Der Kunstwart XIV, 24 (1901), 469–74. On Avenarius
and the Dürerbund see Gerhard Kratzsch, Kunstwart und Dürerbund Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte der Gebildeten im
Zeitalter des Imperialismus (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1969).
35
See H. Grimm, ‘Dürers Ritter, Tod und Teufel’, Preußische Jahrbücher, 36 (1875), 534–49, and Weber,
Beiträge zu Dürer, pp. 13–37. But cf. ibid., pp. 102–04, where Weber relapses into the traditional National
Protestant patterns of interpretation: ‘Dürer’s herrliches Blatt [i.e. Ritter, Tod und Teufel] [ist] die künstlerische
Verkörperung eines Gedankens, der, national in seinem Ursprung, auch weiterhin als ein in erster Linie
deutsch-religiöses Ideal weiterlebt’.
36
See Wölfflin, Die Kunst Albrecht Dürers, pp. 243–44: ‘Gemeint ist eben der Christ, für den das Leben
ein Kriegsdienst ist und der, gewappnet mit dem Glauben, sich nicht fürchtet for Teufel und Tod. Und das
Martin A. Ruehl
70
Fig. 3. Andrea del Verrocchio, Equestrian statue of Bartolomeo Colleoni (c.1483–88)
Campo SS. Giovanni e Paolo, Venice
71
this indebtedness was at least partly a shortcoming, an abdication of Teutonic depth, as
it were, for the sake of tectonic perfection — thus implicitly reinforcing the Romantic
notion of Dürer’s Nordic-autochthonic imagination créatrice.37 Outside of academe, at any
rate, the engraving largely remained an icon of the secularized, deeply patriotic, and antiLatin strand of cultural Protestantism known as Nationalprotestantismus.38 The National
Protestant idealization of the image reached its erstwhile climax during the celebrations of
the fourth centenary of the Reformation in 1917, when Dürer’s knight was glorified as a
pictorial prefiguration both of Luther’s fight against the Papacy and of Germany’s present
struggle with the Entente.39
At the end of the war, however, a new line of interpretation emerged which in some
ways ran counter to these triumphalist National Protestant readings. As a quick Sieg frieden
appeared ever less likely, Dürer’s rider came to be regarded as a symbol of Germany’s
endurance rather than all-conquering might, a token of her will to hold out against
the odds. This fatalistic take on Ritter, Tod und Teufel was not new. It dated back almost
half a century, to the early writings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Inspired by Schopenhauer’s
anti-eudaimonistic philosophy of the will, the young Nietzsche had argued that it was
Germany’s pessimistic world-view that made her the rightful heir to the tragic spirit of
ancient Greece. Wagner’s music was to be the motor of the future revival of Hellenic culture
and the clarion call of Germany’s battle against the false optimism of French civilization.40
In his first book, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872), Nietzsche cited
the Reformation as a precedent and model for the coming cultural renewal. Following
Wagner’s anti-Latin views on the subject, he claimed that it was Luther and not the
Renaissance humanists who had first re-awakened classical antiquity.41 Until the second
revival occurred, modern Germany was a cultural wasteland in which the protagonists
of the tragic artwork of the future lived estranged, solitary lives. Meanwhile, they had to
stoically accept their lot in accordance with the teachings of Schopenhauer.
Yet these teachings also provided them, paradoxically, with a source of comfort and
hope for the future.42 In chapter twenty, Nietzsche invoked the image of Dürer’s knight
verstand damals jedermann.’ See also ibid., pp. 244–46.
37
Wölfflin, p. 242 and esp. pp. 4–8: ‘ Dürer bleibt der Mann, der, früh von italienischer Kunst angezogen,
ein fremdes Element in die heimische Überlieferung gebracht hat. [...] [F]ür das Pferd des Ritters mit
Tod und Teufel können die Prämissen nicht in der heimischen Entwicklung gefunden werden. [...] Die
germanische Kunst ist eine Kunst des freien und unmittelbaren Ausdrucks...die romanische Kunst gefällt
sich in der gebundenen Form. [...] Man nennt das tektonische Komposition. [...] Die Frontalität und
Rechtwinkligkeit des Reiters mit Tod und Teufel ist... tektonisch... [...] So selbstverständlich diese Bildform
dem Italiener ist, wir Nordländer sind empfindlich dagegen und lehnen sie bald als Starrheit ab.’ But cf. ibid.,
p. 10: ‘Wer dieses [sc. ‘tektonische’] Verlangen nach einem Letzten, Sicheren, Vollendeten als undeutsch
ablehnt, der verkennt einen immer wiederkehrenden Zug der deutschen Geistesgeschichte. Es sind nicht die
Schlechtesten gewesen, die sich an diesem Idealismus verblutet haben.’
38
See Gangolf Hübinger, ‘Protestantische Kultur im wilhelminischen Deutschland’, Internationales
Archiv für Sozialgeschichte der deutschen Literatur, 16 (1991), 174–99, and Kulturprotestantismus und Politik: Zum
Verhältnis von Liberalismus und Protestantismus im Wilhelminischen Deutschland (Tübingen: Mohr, 1994).
39
See, e.g., Max Lenz, Luther und der deutsche Geist (Hamburg: Broschek, 1917). On the nationalist
conscription of Luther during World War I see G. Maron, ‘Luther 1917: Beobachtungen zur Literatur des
400. Reformationsjubiläums’, Zeitschrift für Kirchengeschichte, 93 (1982), 177–221.
40
See, e.g., F. Nietzsche, ‘Der griechische Staat’ (1871), KSA i, 773.
41
Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie aus dem Geiste der Musik (1872), KSA i, 147.
42
KSA i, 131.
72
Martin A. Ruehl
to express the curious mélange of resignation and expectation, pessimism and heroism
that so attracted him to Schopenhauer’s philosophy at this point. The horseman, for him,
represented the courage of Schopenhauer’s unrelenting will to truth, in the full awareness
of its futility.
Da möchte sich ein trostlos Vereinsamter kein besseres Symbol wählen können als
den Ritter mit Tod und Teufel, wie ihn uns Dürer gezeichnet hat, den geharnischten
Ritter mit dem erzenen, harten Blicke, der seinen Schreckensweg, unbeirrt durch seine
grausen Gefährten, und doch hoffnungslos, allein mit Ross und Hund zu nehmen weiss.
Ein solcher Dürerscher Ritter war unser Schopenhauer: ihm fehlte jede Hoffnung, aber
er wollte die Wahrheit. Es giebt nicht Seinesgleichen.43
It was this reference to Dürer that prompted one of Nietzsche’s readers, the Basel patrician
Adolf Vischer-Sarasin, to present the author with a valuable print of Ritter, Tod und Teufel in
1875. He rarely took pleasure in pictorial representations, Nietzsche remarked on receiving
Sarasin’s gift, ‘aber dies Bild “Ritter Tod und Teufel” steht mir nahe, ich kann kaum sagen,
wie’.44
A fragmentary note from 1871 provides further clues to Nietzsche’s interest in Dürer’s
engraving: ‘Der germanische Pessimismus — dabei starre Moralisten, Schopenhauer
und kategorischer Imperativ! [... W]ir brauchen eine besondere Art der Kunst. Sie hält
für uns Pf licht und Dasein zusammen. Dürer’s Bild vom Ritter Tod und Teufel als
Symbol unsres Daseins’.45 These musings partly reiterate the dialectic connection already
suggested, in the Geburt der Tragödie, between Schopenhauer’s philosophy of resignation
and Kant’s rigid Pflichtethik; but they also sound a new note. Affected, perhaps, by the
nation-wide celebrations of the fourth centenary of the artist’s birth in 1871, which
coincided, conveniently, with the foundation of the Second Reich, Nietzsche hailed
Dürer’s engraving as a specifically German symbol for a select group of artists and thinkers
who saw through the shallow optimism of modern civilization and recognized the tragic
core of human existence. The special form of art that he associated with the self-denying
pathos of Schopenhauer’s philosophy, of course, was Wagner’s music drama which for him
represented the ultimate expression of this tragic German Weltanschauung.
Wagner, it seems, shared his young devotee’s admiration for Ritter, Tod und Teufel, perhaps
even drew his attention to it in the first place. In December 1870, Nietzsche told his sister
that it was the composer’s favourite work by Dürer; the following year, he gave him a
print of the engraving as a Christmas gift.46 Wagner, who often sported a f loppy velvet hat
in the so-called ‘old German’ (altdeutsch) style, venerated and imitated Dürer as a German
master [see figure 4: portrait of Richard Wagner].47 If the horseman in the engraving
Ibid.
Nietzsche to M. v. Meysenbug, mid-March 1875, in Nietzsche Briefwechsel: Kritische Gesamtausgabe, ed.
by G. Colli and M. Montinari (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1975–) (hereafter KGB), ii/5, 36.
45
Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente 1871 9 [ 85 ], KSA vii, 305. See also F. Nietzsche to R. Wagner, 22
May 1869: ‘Ihnen und Schopenhauer danke ich es, wenn ich bis jetzt festgehalten habe an dem germanischen
Lebensernst, an einer vertieften Betrachtung dieses so räthselvollen und bedenklichen Daseins.’ KGB ii/1,
9.
46
Nietzsche to F. and E. Nietzsche, 23 December 1870: ‘Meine Geschenke sind diese: für Wagner habe
ich ein von ihm längst gewünschtes Lieblingsblatt von Albr. Dürer “Ritter, Tod und Teufel” das mir durch
glücklichen Zufall in die Hände gekommen.’ KGB ii /1, 170.
47
In Tribschen and especially later in Bayreuth, Wagner was often addressed simply as ‘der Meister’. For
43
44
Fig. 4. Portrait of Richard Wagner
Courtesy of Richard Wagner-Gedenkstätte, Bayreuth
73
74
Martin A. Ruehl
reminded Nietzsche of Schopenhauer, he also emblematized the pessimistic, ChristianProtestant ethos that he prized in Wagner’s music. As he told his friend and fellow classicist
Erwin Rohde (1845–1898) as early as October 1868: ‘Mir behagt an Wagner, was mir an
Schopenhauer behagt, die ethische Luft, der faustische Duft, Kreuz, Tod und Gruft etc.’ 48
A Germanic pessimism, a Faustian will to truth, a self-denying Lutheran faith: these were
the Schopenhauerian ideals that the young Nietzsche projected on to Dürer’s engraving and
that he heard reverberating in Wagner’s operas. In associating Schopenhauer and Wagner
with Dürer’s knight, Nietzsche highlighted the heroic, or what he liked to call ‘muthig’
dimension of their pessimism.49 This heroic pessimism he could appreciate long after he
had left Schopenhauer’s philosophy — and Wagner’s music — behind. His veneration of
Ritter, Tod und Teufel, significantly, outlasted the break with Bayreuth.50 In the Genealogie
der Moral (1887), he still praised Schopenhauer’s courage to espouse the ascetic ideal alone
and in opposition to the world by comparing him to the ‘Ritter mit erzenem Blick’.51
When he departed from Basel, he left his print — framed, rather à la Wagner, in violet
velvet — in the care of his former f latmate and associate, the sceptical Church historian
Franz Overbeck (1837–1905).52 It was Overbeck who first compared Nietzsche himself to
Dürer’s knight. Though prima facie a compliment on the brave mien Nietzsche displayed in
a recent photograph,53 Overbeck’s allusion to the engraving also suggested a certain reserve
vis-à-vis his friend’s increasingly bold philosophizing, some of which verged, as Nietzsche
himself had once remarked with reference to Jacob Burckhardt, on the disquieting.54
Wagner’s veneration of Dürer as a Northern and Protestant artist see R. Wagner, Gesammelte Schriften und
Dichtungen, 10 vols in 6 (Berlin: Bong, [1914(?)]), viii, 36 and 95, as well as Cosima Wagner, Die Tagebücher
1869–1877 (Munich: Piper, 1976), p. 54 (10 February 1869): ‘Abends...die Lektüre des Briefes Albrecht
Dürer’s bei der Nachricht, Luther sei gefangen. Tiefes schmerzliches religiöses Gefühl; wie unterscheidet
sich solch ein Wesen von den heiteren lebensfrohen...italienischen Meistern’. See also ibid., pp. 244, 378,
652, and C. Wagner, Die Tagebücher, 1878–1883 (Munich: Piper, 1977), pp. 315 and 390.
48
F. Nietzsche to E. Rohde, 8 October 1868: KGB i/2, 322. See H. Eisenbeiß, Schopenhauers Einfluß auf
Richard Wagner (unpublished dissertation, Erlangen, 1914).
49
See, e.g., F. Nietzsche, Schopenhauer als Erzieher (1874), KSA i, 348, 352, 359, 371–73.
50
See Nietzsche’s letter to Franz Overbeck of 7 May 1885, in which he calls the engraving a ‘werthvolles
und tapferes Wahrzeichen’ and a ‘Trostmittel’ for his friend: KGB iii/3, 46.
51
Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral (1887), KSA v, 345.
52
This is evidenced by Nietzsche’s letter to Overbeck of 7 May 1885, KGB iii/3, 46. On Overbeck’s
relationship with Nietzsche see Andreas Urs Sommer, Der Geist der Historie und das Ende des Christentums:
Zur “Waffengenossenschaft” von Friedrich Nietzsche und Franz Overbeck (Berlin: Akademie-Verlag, 1996) and
Lionel Gossman, Basel in the Age of Burckhardt: A Study in Unseasonable Ideas (Chicago: University of Chicago
Press, 2000), pp. 413–39.
53
F. Overbeck to Nietzsche, 17 April 1871: ‘Haben Sie vielen Dank für Ihr eindrucksvolles Bildnis, auf
welchem Sie mich an den muthigen Dürerschen Ritter erinnern, den Sie mir einmal zeigten.’ KGB ii/2,
357–58.
54
See Nietzsche to C. v. Gersdorff, 7 November 1870: ‘Ich höre bei [Burckhardt] ein wöchentlich
einstündiges Colleg über das Studium der Geschichte und glaube der Einzige seiner 60 Zuhörer zu sein,
der die tiefen Gedankengänge mit ihren seltsamen Brechungen und Umbiegungen, wo die Sache an
das Bedenkliche streift, begreift.’ KGB ii/1, 155. The — admittedly slim — epistolary evidence suggests
that in the early 1870s at least, Burckhardt and Nietzsche shared a certain penchant for the ‘disquieting’.
In November 1871, both men performed a vinous ‘Dämonenweihe’ in Burckhardt’s apartment. See F.
Nietzsche to C.v. Gersdorff, 18 November 1871, KGB ii/1, 244, 248.
75
What Nietzsche had originally perceived as Faustian and, later, as uncanny in Dürer’s
Ritter, Tod und Teufel,55 Overbeck now identified as Nietzschean.56
This Nietzschean reading, which emphasized the heroic, transgressive as well as
pessimistic aspects of the image, was virtually ignored throughout the Wilhelmine era.
Towards the end of World War I, however, it resurfaced with a vengeance in what was to
become one of the most inf luential interpretations of Ritter, Tod und Teufel in the first half
of the twentieth century: Ernst Bertram’s Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie, published in
late August 1918, just a month before Mann’s Betrachtungen.57 At the time of its publication,
Bertram (1884–1957) was still a relatively obscure poet and Privatgelehrter, specializing in
the German Romantics and Adalbert Stifter. Nietzsche brought him almost instant literary
fame, academic recognition and, soon enough, the chair of German literature at the
University of Cologne, which he held from 1922 until his dismissal in 1946.58
Based on scrupulous research and packed with citations from the primary texts, including
the unpublished papers held at the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar, Bertram’s 400-page study
was an attempt at philology almost as much as mythology. It appeared in the Georg Bondi
Verlag, the ‘house publisher’ of the George Kreis. Bertram had first met Stefan George in
1909 and was in close personal contact with him between 1916 and 1918. Not least because
of his friendship with Thomas Mann,59 however, he never belonged to the Circle’s hard
55
See Nietzsche’s letter to Overbeck of 2 July 1885, in which he thanks his friend for sending the Dürer
print to Elisabeth and her new husband Bernhard Förster as a wedding gift, adding: ‘Möge aber die Zukunft
des jungen Paars sich tröstlicher und hoffnungsvoller gestalten als dies unheimliche Bild zu verstehen giebt!’
KGB iii/3, 61.
56
Nietzsche’s former student Louis Kelterborn drew a very similar parallel in 1879: ‘Wenn ich aber die
beiden Bilder, das aus dem jahrelangen Umgang gewonnene seiner unmittelbaren Persönlichkeit und das aus
dem Studium seiner Werke gewonnene des zu fernsten Höhen emporgedrungenen...Denkers...in Eins zu
vereinen suche, so gedenke ich unwillkürlich an den geharnischten Ritter in Dürer’s berühmten Kupferstich
von dem ein prächtiges Exemplar in violettenem Sammtrahmen Nietzsche’s Zimmer schmückte, ein Bild
das ihm sehr ans Herz gewachsen war und das ich damals schon oft, wenn ich ihn besuchte, mit geheimer
symbolischer Beziehung auf ihn selbst betrachtete, wenn auch nicht gerade in dem Sinne, in welchem
er selbst die Gestalt des Ritters auf Schopenhauer anwandte...aber doch als die Verkörperung einer
unbeugsamen Tapferkeit und Beharrlichkeit, Furchtlosigkeit und Direktheit einer einsamen, unbeirrten
Verfolgung eines fernen...Zieles’: L. Kelterborn, ‘Erinnerungen’ (1901), quoted in Sander L. Gilman (ed.),
Begegnungen mit Nietzsche, 2nd edn (Bonn: Bouvier 1985), pp. 359–60.
57
Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie (Berlin: Bondi 1918). An excellent English translation
is about to be published by the University of Illinois Press: E. Bertram, Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology,
transl. R. Norton (Champaign, IL: University of Illinois Press, 2008).
58
The most comprehensive account to date of Bertram’s life and academic career is Hajo Jappe, Ernst
Bertram: Gelehrter, Lehrer und Dichter (Bonn: Bouvier, 1969). See also R. Gruenter, ‘Ernst Bertram zum
Gedächtnis’, Euphorion, 51 (1957), 489–91; and H. Buchner’s ‘Nachwort’ in Ernst Bertram, Möglichkeiten:
Ein Vermächtnis (Pfullingen: Neske, 1958).
59
George revealed his dislike of Mann on various occasions: see, e.g., his letter to Glöckner of June 1921,
in which he urged the recipient to break off all contact with Mann, ‘einem gemeinen und gefährlichen
kerl [sic]’. S. George to E. Glöckner, 12 June 1921, Stefan-George-Archiv. On George and Mann see H. A.
Maier, Stefan George und Thomas Mann (Zurich: Speer, 1947); F. Marx, ‘Der Heilige Stefan? Thomas Mann
und Stefan George’, George-Jahrbuch, 6 (2006/2007), 80–99; and Robert E. Norton, Secret Germany: Stefan
George and his Circle (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 2002), pp. 621–22. Bertram’s admiration for Mann’s
fiction is already discernible in his early lecture on Königliche Hoheit at the University of Bonn: see Ernst
Bertram, ‘Thomas Mann. Zum Roman “Königliche Hoheit” ’, Mitteilungen der literarhistorischen Gesellschaft
Bonn, 8 (1909). On Bertram and Mann see Inge Jens’s ‘Nachwort’ in her edition of Mann’s letters to Bertram:
Thomas Mann an Ernst Bertram: Briefe aus den Jahren 1910–1955 (Pfullingen: Neske 1960), pp. 293–307.
76
Martin A. Ruehl
core and, unlike his lover Ernst Glöckner, a close associate and — possibly — paramour
of George,60 preserved a critical distance to the Master, as George was reverently called by
his disciples [see figure 5: Ernst Bertram and Ernst Glöckner in 1917].61
Still, insofar as it had been read to, discussed with and, after some hotly debated
alterations, approved by George, Bertram’s Nietzsche was a literary product of the Circle.62
Indeed, alongside Ernst Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (1927),63 it was probably
the most inf luential of the hero-worshipping biographies produced by any of its members,
reaching both a scholarly audience and the wider reading public.64 Like the Hohenstaufen
emperor, Nietzsche was part of the Secret Germany, that select group of historical figures
venerated by George and his followers, who saw themselves as the nucleus of Germany’s
cultural rebirth after World War I. Like Kantorowicz’s Frederick, Bertram’s Nietzsche was
a Faustian character, a tragic yet sublime overreacher imbued with a demonic genius.65
In contrast to Kantorowicz, however, who highlighted the supra-national, in particular
the Latin features of his Hohenstaufen hero, Bertram portrayed Nietzsche as a predominantly
Northern figure.66 Despite his frequently expressed Mediterranean orientation and his
vociferous attacks, after the fall-out with Wagner, on all things German, Nietzsche,
according to Bertram, remained a uniquely typical German figure.67 The anti-German
polemics in Götzen-Dämmerung and Ecce Homo (both written in 1888) were themselves
part of a profoundly German dialectic, the Faustian struggle of two souls dwelling within
Nietzsche’s breast: a late, acquired Southern self and the powerful Northern heritage of
Röcken, Naumburg and Tribschen/Bayreuth. It was this latter, German heritage, Bertram
contended, that determined Nietzsche’s life and, malgré lui, shaped his philosophy, even the
60
See Norton, Secret Germany, pp. 510–11. On the strong homoerotic bond between Bertram and
Glöckner, which lasted till the latter’s death in 1934, see Jappe, Ernst Bertram, pp. 29–44. On the role
of homoeroticism in the George Circle see Thomas Karlauf, Stefan George: Die Entdeckung des Charisma
(Munich: Blessing, 2007), esp. pp. 365–95.
61
On Bertram and George see Jappe, Ernst Bertram, pp. 95–124. As Mann himself after World War II,
‘[d]em Georgekreis hat Bertram, so nahe er ihm stand, nie eigentlich angehört. Sein Protestantismus und
Germanismus wehrte sich gegen die römisch-imperialen und jesuitischen Neigungen des heiligen Cirkels.
Auch waren ihm wohl zu viele Juden darin’: Mann to W. Schmitz, 30 July 1948, in Briefe an Bertram, p.
197.
62
On George’s response to Bertram’s book see B. Zeller and others (eds), Stefan George, 1868–1968: Der
Dichter und sein Kreis (Marbach a.N.: Deutsches Literaturarchiv, 1968), pp. 363–67.
63
E. Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite (Berlin 1927).
64
Between 1918 and 1929, the book ran through no less than 7 editions: see the ‘Werkbibliographie’
in Jappe, Ernst Bertram, p. 350. For its deep impact on Germany’s Bildungsbürgertum in the first half of the
twentieth century see Buchner, ‘Nachwort’, p. 270.
65
A number of direct as well as indirect references suggest that Kantorowicz’s portrait of Frederick II
was indebted to Bertram’s Nietzsche: cf., e.g., Kantorowicz, Kaiser Friedrich, p. 553, and Betram, Nietzsche,
p. 52.
66
Jappe rightly remarks that this Nordic portrayal of Nietzsche suggests the tolerance of George’s
‘censorship’: Jappe, Ernst Bertram, p. 80. But it should be noted that just around 1918, when Nietzsche was
published, key members of the Circle, including, to some extent, the Master himself, began to embrace
more nationalistic, Nordic ideas: see M. Ruehl, ‘ “In this time without Emperors”: The Politics of Ernst
Kantorowicz’s Kaiser Friedrich der Zweite Reconsidered’, Journal of the Warburg and Courtauld Institutes, 63
(2000), 190–96. One of these members was Kurt Hildebrandt, whose Wagner und Nietzsche: Ihr Kampf gegen
das Neunzehnte Jahrhundert (Breslau: Hirt, 1924), also published as a Kreisbuch, closely followed Bertram’s
main points about Nietzsche’s Protestant and Northern nature in section II, chapter 8, entitled ‘Der
protestantische Ritter’, pp. 270–94.
67
Bertram, Nietzsche, p. 82.
Fig. 5. Ernst Bertram (right) and Ernst Glöckner in 1917
Courtesy of the Stefan George Archiv, Stuttgart
77
78
Martin A. Ruehl
late transvaluative ideas. The very act of ‘Entdeutschung’ that Nietzsche performed in the
1880s, in fact, showed him at his most German.68 The disenchantment with Bismarck’s
imperial Germany, similarly, only led him to create an even more German realm within
himself.69 Bertram placed the central arguments for the Northern Nietzsche, strategically,
in the long third chapter which, following a less substantial introductory section and a
genealogy, represented the true beginning of his mythology. This chapter was entitled
‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’.70
In ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’, Bertram brought together, with characteristic philological
f lair, all the textual evidence for Nietzsche’s admiration of Dürer’s engraving. Interpreting
the image, in classic National Protestant fashion, as a product of the Reformation spirit, he
highlighted Nietzsche’s enduring indebtedness to the Northern sphere of his father’s parish
and the Germany of Luther and Dürer.71 That he continued to admire the picture into
the 1880s indicated the limits of his late polemics against Luther. In Bertram’s eyes, this
was another facet of Nietzsche’s Protestant self-hatred and, as such, only further proof of
his deeply divided, Faustian-Nordic character.72 The affinity to Hellas, on the other hand,
so f loridly voiced in Die Geburt der Tragödie, was merely elective. In the end, Nietzsche
remained, as Bertram put it in a no less characteristic mystical-biological turn of phrase,
‘ein Bluterbe des protestantischen Wesens’.73 His thinking was characterized by the same
courage that Luther had shown at the Diet of Worms.74 It was this Lutheran courage that
Bertram could draw on Nietzsche’s own dialectics here, in particular the — deeply self-referential —
admonition from the second volume of Menschliches, Allzumenschliches to the effect that ‘Gut deutsch sein
heißt sich entdeutschen’: Nietzsche, Vermischte Meinungen und Sprüche (1879), KSA ii, 511.
69
Bertram, Nietzsche, p. 80: ‘Das “Reich” schien ihm nicht mehr deutsch; aber sein eigenes Reich war
und wurde nur um so deutscher.’ Bertram seems to allude here both to the famous lines from Luther’s
‘Ein’ feste Burg’ (‘Das Reich muß uns doch bleiben...’) and the George Circle’s notion of a ‘Geheimes
Deutschland’ as a spiritual-cultural, inner realm more genuinely German than the Wilhelmine Empire with
its outward trappings of patriotism.
70
That the chapter ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’ was of particular importance to the author is suggested by the
following passage from Bertram’s correspondence with Glöckner: ‘Vorgestern Abend mit George zu Abend
geschmaust, dann “Ritter, Tod und Teufel” gelesen. Er meinte, dies sei ... ein sehr bewegtes Kapitel und
fand, daß es mich, wie man auch am Vorlesen bemerkte, ganz besonders angehe. Wir sprachen mancherlei
über das Protestantische u. auch anderes bis gegen 11.’ E. Bertram and E. Glöckner, 15 March 1918; quoted
in Zeller, Stefan George, p. 365.
71
Bertram, Nietzsche, p. 182: ‘Es ist das spätgotisch-reformatorische Deutschland, das sich in [Rothen
burg] versinnlicht (eine Generation früher hätte wohl noch mit Wackenroder “Nürnberg” gesagt), das
Deutschland Luthers, Dürers und der ältesten deutschen Musik, das winklig-fromme und zugleich
unbeugsam protestierende Deutschland, aus dem Nietzsche seine ältesten Ahnenkräfte zieht, dem er den
eigentlichen Rhythmus seines theologischen und reformatorischen Blutes verdankt — das meistersingerliche
Deutschland, dem er im Jenseits das schönste Denkmal geformt hat mit der großen Analyse des MeistersingerVorspiels, als eines Gleichnisses deutschen Wesens und im innersten heimlichsten Schatten seiner selbst.’
72
Bertram, Nietzsche, p. 53: ‘Sie [i.e. Nietzsche’s antipathy towards Luther] ist nur Sinnbild eines Bruder
zwists in der eigenen Brust, wie er so wild, so schonungslos gegen sich, so faustisch-überdeutsch, so
unauskämpfbar verhängnisvoll vielleicht nur in einem deutschen Herzen sich zutragen kann.’ Mann high
lighted this passage with an exclamation mark in his private copy of Nietzsche, preserved in the Nachlaß
bibliothek at the Thomas-Mann-Archiv of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule Zürich.
73
Bertram, Nietzsche, p. 126: ‘Nietzsche ist Schüler des Griechentums..., aber Enkel des “Pietismus”, der
nordischen Christlichkeit; ist Wahlerbe des hellenischen, aber Bluterbe des protestantischen Wesens.’
74
68
79
accounted for the radical aspects of his thinking which set him apart from conservative,
‘Erasmian’ types like Overbeck and Burckhardt.75
The knight in the engraving, however, symbolized not just the brave, rebellious spirit
of the Reformation; it also denoted the tragic existence of the solitary, tortured, selfrenouncing Protestant individual, constantly struggling with inner demons. For Bertram,
Nietzsche’s relentless self-overcoming was an extreme form of Protestant self-renunciation,
amounting ultimately to self-destruction.76 He idealized Nietzsche’s breakdown in Italy,
accordingly, as a kind of martyrdom, a Passion and (self-)crucifixion, or alternatively, in
Teutonic terms, as a deadly Römerzug and a repeat of the heroic decline of the Ostrogoths
at Taginae and Mount Vesuvius.77 Nietzsche’s mental collapse in Turin became an allegory
of Germania’s fatal attraction to Italia, the Northerner’s necessary and at the same time
impossible search for fulfilment and completion in the South. According to Bertram,
Nietzsche was well aware of the impossibility of his own Southern quest: his yearning
for Italy was mixed with a consciousness of its dangers (‘Gefahrbewußtes’) and a pride
in confronting these dangers (‘Gefahrstolzes’); it revealed a courage undaunted by death.
Bertram detected a similar courage in Dürer’s horseman who seemed to be on an equally
fateful, impossible quest.78
Beyond Protestant bravery and Germanic fatalism, Dürer’s knight embodied a third
Nietzschean feature: the demonic. Like George and his followers, who, in their turn, drew
on Goethe, Bertram conceived of the demonic as a — potentially sinister — supernatural
force that nonetheless inspired human beings to great political and intellectual feats.79 In
his eyes, the horseman’s proximity to the fiendish figure on the right in Ritter, Tod und
Teufel ref lected Nietzsche’s transgressive genius and Faustian will to self-overcoming.
Citing a remark from the late Nachlaß about the Mephistophelean nature of Frederick II of
Prussia and his even greater namesake, the Hohenstaufen emperor Frederick II,80 Bertram
turned Nietzsche himself into a Mephistophelean type, ‘der letzte und größte Erbe aller
derer, die vom Stamme des luziferischen Trotzes sind [...] der Erbe alles prometheischen
Bertram, Nietzsche, p. 49: ‘ “Erasmus liebt den Frieden mehr als das Kreuz” — das war Luthers
Richterspruch. Und eine gewisse luthersche Ungeduld, die Ungeduld eines Hutten im Anblick der
Erasmusnaturen...glaubt man öfter selbst in der...Haltung Nietzsches den Freunden gegenüber zu bemerken:
gegen Overbeck, den wägenden und klug schweigenden Historiker von Kirche und Christlichkeit; [...]
selbst in der bis zuletzt festgehaltenen Verehrung für Jakob [sic] Burckhardt wird diese Ungeduld spürbar...’
76
See, e.g., Bertram, Nietzsche, p. 119, where Nietzsche’s life is compared to the ‘Calvarienberg mit seinen
sieben Leidensstationen’, and the reference on p. 126 to the ‘tiefe Identität des zerschnittenen Dionysos mit
dem gekreuzigten Christus’. Cf. Mann, Betrachtungen, p. 147: ‘Was war [Nietzsche] denn selbst, wenn nicht
Held, Genie und “Gekreuzigter” in einer Person?’.
77
See Bertram, Nietzsche, p. 251: ‘Den Süden als tödliche Vollkommenheit, als Ergänzung und Gift,
Eroberung und Untergang — dies Gotenschicksal nimmt Nietzsche in seinen Willen auf: amor fati, der
jasagende Wille zum Verhängnis, das ist, das empfindet und formuliert er selbst als seine innerste Natur;
und die sein Fatum trägt...die Fieberzüge des Südens.’ ‘Römerzug’ denoted the military expeditions to the
South undertaken by the German emperors of the Middle Ages in order to enforce their sovereignty in the
Italian peninsular. See, e.g., P. Classen, ‘Der erste Römerzug der Weltgeschichte’, in Helmut Beumann (ed.),
Historische Forschungen für Walter Schlesinger (Cologne: Böhlau, 1974), pp. 325–47.
78
Bertram, Nietzsche, p. 251: ‘Sein Südweh hat etwas Gefahrbewußtes, Gefahrstolzes; ein todesmutiges
“dennoch” ist darin.’
79
On the veneration of the demonic in the George Circle see Friedrich Wolters, Stefan George und die
Blätter für die Kunst: Deutsche Geistesgeschichte seit 1890 (Berlin: Bondi, 1930), p. 493; and Edith Landmann,
Gespräche mit Stefan George (Düsseldorf: Küpper, 1963), p. 131.
80
See Nietzsche, Nachgelassene Fragmente April-Juni 1885 34 [ 97 ], KSA xi, 452–53.
75
80
Martin A. Ruehl
Hochmuts, alles prometheischen Willens zum neuen götterlos göttlichen Menschen’.81 For
Bertram, Nietzsche’s Faustian features were intimately related to his Northern, Protestant
provenance, his deep affinity to the world of Luther and Dürer. Dürer’s art revealed the
same demonic genius, the same fateful yearning for the South, the same rigid, heroic
Germanness as Nietzsche’s philosophy. The first master-engraving mirrored these shared
qualities: ‘Was in Nietzsches Philosophie dürerisch, was an Dürers Kunst nietzschisch
erscheint, verkörpert sich in jenem Blatt vom Christlichen Ritter’.82 The final reference to
the miles Christianus was purely nominal, however. Although he cited Wölff lin a number
of times in this context,83 Bertram probably did more than any other interpreter to
separate Ritter, Tod und Teufel from the Renaissance humanist ideals expressed in Erasmus’
Enchiridion. Combining Nietzsche’s own ‘pessimistic’ comments on the engraving with
the classic National Protestant topoi and a good measure of Georgean demonism, he
transformed the picture into a mythic image of Germanness as endless Faustian yearning
and doomed Nordic heroism.
II. The Protestant Ethic vs. the Spirit of Aestheticism: Mann’s Northern Knighthood
of 1918
By claiming Dürer’s engraving as a personal symbol in his Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen
(1918), Mann thus appropriated a highly charged religious and political image. This
appropriation relied heavily, if not exclusively, as we shall see, on Bertram’s Nietzsche. Its
point or force in the Betrachtungen was threefold. The primary purpose of the repeated
references to Ritter, Tod und Teufel was to provide a pictorial framework for his radical
re-interpretation of Nietzsche’s significance as a philosopher and writer. Throughout the
1890s and 1900s, Nietzsche had been monopolized by the Left and the literary avant-garde
as a critic of bourgeois morality, culture and politics.84 Not without some justification, as
Mann conceded in one of the early chapters of his book, an aestheticist Zivilisationsliterat like
his brother Heinrich could claim that Nietzsche had ‘Europeanized’ and ‘democratized’
German literature and that he had laid the foundations for the heightened subjectivism
and immoralism of fin-de-siècle art.85 But this, Mann claimed, was only Nietzsche’s effect.
His true nature was something entirely different.86 By associating him with Dürer’s famous
picture, Mann sought to re-define this essence and thereby to reclaim Nietzsche from his
brother and the decadent movement. Ritter, Tod und Teufel, however, was not just a pictorial
means to revaluate Nietzsche’s philosophy and to mark his distance from Heinrich. It was
also important in Mann’s attempts during World War I to reinvent himself as a German
Meister, that is, to forswear his own decadent beginnings and to fashion a new masculine,
83
See, e.g., Bertram, Nietzsche, pp. 57, 58.
84
See E. Behler, ‘Zur frühen sozialistischen Rezeption Nietzsches in Deutschland’, Nietzsche Studien, 13
(1948), 503–20; William J. McGrath, Dionysian Art and Populist Politics in Austria (New Haven, CT: Yale
Unversity Press, 1974); and Steven Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy in Germany, 1890–1990 (Berkeley, CA:
University of California Press, 1994), pp. 51–85 and 164–77.
85
Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 86–88.
86
Betrachtungen, p. 87.
81
82
81
‘ascetic’ identity as a writer and Bürger.87 Finally, the image served as a national symbol in
Mann’s anti-French and anti-Entente polemics, adding a powerful visual dimension to his
loaded distinctions between North and South, German and ‘Latin’, Kultur and Zivilisation.
If Mann at times described Germany as a universal nation at the heart of Europe and a
bridge between East and West,88 his invocations of Dürer’s engraving revealed the more
stridently nationalistic features of his Deutschlandbild. In each case, Mann’s use of Ritter, Tod
und Teufel was deeply conditioned by Ernst Bertram.
During the writing of the Betrachtungen, between 1915 and 1918, Bertram was
Mann’s most intimate friend.89 Klaus Mann reports in his autobiography that in those years,
Bertram was virtually a family member and spent much of his time during the long summer
vacations at their house in Munich.90 Their correspondence during and immediately after
the war shows not just how close Mann was to Bertram, but more surprisingly, how far
he was ready to accept his younger confidant as adviser and even mentor. Their exchanges
spanned political and cultural as well as personal matters — the course of the war, the
feud with Heinrich, Stefan George — and Mann often adopted Bertram’s point of view,
especially on literature, philosophy and the visual arts.91 He profited much from Bertram’s
critical comments on early versions of the Betrachtungen, which were read and discussed at
their frequent meetings in Poschinger Straße,92 where Mann also became acquainted with
Bertram’s own work-in-progress.
The impact that Bertram’s Nietzsche had on Mann in the final years of the First World
War can hardly be overestimated.93 At a moment of acute intellectual isolation and
87
It should be noted here that the standard English translation of ‘Bürger’ hardly captures the francophobic
and anti-capitalist connotations of the word as Mann employs it in the Betrachtungen, where ‘Bürger’ in fact
almost always — the only exception is GW xii, 142–45 — denotes the exact opposite of ‘bourgeois’: the
un-political conservative, the thorough, even pedantic craftsman, the self-renouncing idealist who puts
Kultur and Geist over any material, utilitarian goals and so on. On Mann’s conception of ‘Bürgerlichkeit’
see Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Epoche-Werk-Wirkung, pp. 44–53 and Michael Zeller, Bürger oder Bourgeois? Eine
literatursoziologische Studie zu Thomas Manns Buddenbrooks und Heinrich Manns Schlaraffenland (Stuttgart: Klett,
1976).
88
See, e.g., Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 54, 111.
89
Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (New York: University of California Press, 1996),
p. 341, calls Bertram Mann’s ‘soul mate’. It seems unlikely, however, that Mann felt romantically attracted
to Bertram, whose facial features Stefan George once described, with characteristic cruelty, as ‘unglaublich
unglücklich’: see Jappe, Ernst Bertram, p. 100.
90
‘Ein Freund, fast ein Familienmitglied, war “Pate” Bertram (er hatte Elisabeth, das “Kindchen”, aus
der Taufe gehoben) — Professor Ernst Bertram aus Köln, der seine langen Ferien meist in München, oft
in unserem Hause verbrachte. Er war weder Virtuose des Amüsanten noch ein Langweiler, sondern ein
sanft gesprächiger Herr, der seine gescheite Rede mit pedantisch-graziösen, professoralen kleinen Gesten zu
begleiten liebte. Wir hörten ihm gern zu, wenn er von feinen, hohen Dingen plauderte — von Hölderlin,
Platen, Nietzsche, gotischen Kathedralen und den Fugen des Johann Sebastian Bach’: Klaus Mann, Der
Wendepunkt: Ein Lebensbericht (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1953), p. 80.
91
See E. Bertram to E. Glöckner, 2 November 1915: ‘Tom [i.e. Thomas Mann] kennt aber auch
erbärmlich wenig [i.e. in the visual arts], er redet sich immer auf den “Ohrenmenschen” hinaus (der vor 1
1/2 Jahren zum 1. Mal die Matth. Passion hörte!!)’; see also E. Bertram to E. Glöckner, 29 January 1916:
‘Tom kennt von Adalbert Stifter noch nichts [...] Bat mich um Rat, was er von ihm lessen sollte, ich diktierte
ihm...’: Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach, Teilnachlaß Ernst Glöckner (hereafter DLM: TnEG).
92
See Mann, Lebensabriß, GW xi, 128: ‘Ernst Bertram war der Vertraute meiner uferlosen politischantipolitischen Grübeleien; ich las ihm vor daraus, wenn er in München war, er...verstand sich auf ihren
Protestantismus und Konservatismus’.
93
See Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, ed. by P. de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer 1979), pp. 4–8.
82
Martin A. Ruehl
disorientation, the book provided him with a new sense of direction and conviction.
While it confirmed and clarified some of the ideas he had begun to develop, it transformed
and radicalized others. In a letter of 21 September 1918, he told Bertram: ‘Wie nahe es
mir ist, wie mein ganzes Wesen beständig darin mitschwingt; wie geschwisterlich es [...]
neben meinem [...] Künstlerbuche steht: Sie wissen es so gut, wie ich, und niemand wird
es je wohl so gut, wie wir beide, wissen.’94 Mann’s repeated references to his own book as
a sibling of Bertram’s conceal the fact that the Betrachtungen were much more indebted to
Nietzsche than vice versa.95 Bertram, the godfather of Mann’s daughter Elisabeth, was also,
to a considerable degree, the godfather of his lengthy war-time confessional. Between 1916
and 1918, he not only read entire chapters of his Nietzsche manuscript to Mann, but also
allowed him to make use of his collection of citations — from Nietzsche, Luther, Lessing
and others. In view of Mann’s ample borrowings in the Betrachtungen, Bertram was rightly
concerned that in the end he would be the one suspected of having plagiarized the book
of his celebrated friend.96
There is evidence, to be sure, that Mann had already formulated some of the ideas he
found elaborated in Nietzsche.97 Even before he came into contact with Bertram’s work, he
had begun to dissociate the early Nietzsche, that is, the Lutheran disciple of Wagner and
Schopenhauer, from the late Nietzsche, the anti-Christian prophet of the Superman —
and to exalt the former over the latter. ‘Ich liebe und bejahe in der Kunst’, he wrote in a
little article for Die Zeit in 1904, ‘mit dem frühen Nietzsche zu reden, die ethische Luft,
den faustischen Duft, Kreuz, Tod und Gruft’.98 At that time, Mann was toying with the
See also B. Böschenstein, ‘Erlösung und Beglaubigung: Thomas Manns Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen
und Ernst Bertrams Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie’, Modern Language Notes, 90 (1975), 424–30. Note
that Mann had already been much impressed by Bertram’s two essays ‘Wie deuten wir uns?’, Mitteilungen
der literarhistorischen Gesellschaft Bonn 10, 1 (1915) and ‘Das deutsche Werden’, Frankfurter Zeitung, 02.05.1915,
which touched on some of the themes — e.g. the ‘danger of the South’ — that would later be elaborated
in Nietzsche: see T. Mann to E. Bertram, 28 March 1915 and 4 May 1915, Briefe an Bertram, pp. 24–25.
94
Mann to E. Bertram, 21 September 1918, Briefe an Bertram, p. 75. See also Briefe an Bertram, p. 76: ‘...
beim Betrachten dieser [scil. Nietzsche’s] geistigen Landschaft, Übersicht des eigenen Lebens...Einblick in
die thematischen Zusammenhänge der zukünftigen Arbeiten... Todesromantik plus Lebensja im Zauberberg,
Protestantismus plus “Griechentum” im Hochstapler’.
95
See Mann to E. Bertram, 3 October 1918, Briefe an Bertram, p. 78: ‘Ihr Buch [i.e. Nietzsche] steht noch
immer ohne Pendant in den Schaufenstern.’ See also T. Mann to E. Bertram, 18 March 1918, Briefe an
Bertram, p. 61: ‘Ich habe mich gewöhnt, Ihr Buch mit meinem nur noch zusammen zu denken.’
96
See E. Bertram to E. Glöckner, 1 March 1918: ‘Ich fürchte fast, es wird der gemeinsamen Zitate zu viel
werden, zumal ich ihm so viele andere (Luther, Matthäuspassion, Dürer etc.) s.Z. auch geschickt hatte.
Schließlich, da Toms Buch gewiß eher herauskommt, stehe ich noch als derjenig da, der alle diese Zitate...
aus Toms Buch herausgegrabscht hat.’ (DLM: TnEG). H. Kurzke, ‘Die Quellen der “Betrachtungen eines
Unpolitischen”: Ein Zwischenbericht’, in Eckhard Heftrich and Hans Wysling (eds), Internationales ThomasMann-Kolloquium 1986 in Lübeck, Thomas-Mann-Studien, 7 (Bern: Francke, 1987), pp. 291–310, impressively
shows the extent to which the Betrachtungen were a patchwork of plagiarized citations. For Mann’s use of
Bertram’s Nietzsche see ibid., pp. 296, 298.
97
See, e.g., Mann’s remark to Rudolf Pannwitz in 1920 that, however much he admired Bertram’s book,
he knew full well ‘daß es [i.e. Nietzsche] ein wenig meiner Bequemlichkeit schmeichelt, indem es Nietzsche
zugleich allzu romantisch und protestantisch nimmt.’ T. Mann to R. Pannwitz, 7 August 1920; quoted in
Zeller, Stefan George, p. 367. For Pannwitz’s interpretation of Nietzsche, which in many ways was no less
Romantic and nationalist than Bertram’s, see Rudolph Pannwitz, Einführung in Nietzsche (Munich: Carl,
1920), esp. pp. 1–10.
98
Mann, ‘Der französische Einfluß’, Die Zeit, 16.01.1904), pp. 32–33. See A. Burkhard, ‘Thomas Mann’s
Appraisal of the Poet’, Proceedings of the Modern Language Association, 46,3 (1931), 915–16.
83
ideal of a new ascetic morality. Savonarola, the crypto-Protestant hero of his play Fiorenza
(1905), was a first literary experiment with this ideal,99 but the notion of asceticism that
Mann projected on his monkish protagonist was based largely on Nietzsche’s late writings,
in particular the essay ‘Was bedeuten asketische Ideale?’ from the Genealogie der Moral.100 It
was only ten years later and through Bertram that he became truly familiar with the young
Nietzsche and the supposedly Protestant, pessimistic continuities in his philosophy.101
Bertram’s interpretation of Dürer’s knight as a manifestation of the inner strength as well
as the self-renouncing ethos of Protestantism provided the main model for the image of
Nietzsche that Mann constructed in the Betrachtungen.102 More than once, he professed that
‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’ was one of his favourite chapters in Bertram’s book.103 Reading
it, he told his friend Philipp Witkop in September 1918, almost moved him to tears.104
Mann was particularly impressed, it seems, by Bertram’s stress on Nietzsche’s Germanness,
which he considered ‘sehr tief und geistreich’.105 The hyphenated adjectives that Mann used
repeatedly in the Betrachtungen to describe Nietzsche’s fundamental intellectual orientation
— ‘nordisch-moralistisch-protestantisch’ — were near verbatim quotations from Bertram
who had labelled Nietzsche’s Schopenhauerian inheritance ‘protestantisch-christlich,
nordisch moralisch’.106
Given its extraordinary popularity, Mann probably knew Dürer’s engraving before he
met Bertram,107 yet his translation of the image into an emblem of Nietzsche’s (and his
own) German world was deeply determined by Bertram. In things art-historical, the self A. Linz-von-Dessauer, ‘Savonarola und Albrecht Dürer: Savonarola, der Ritter in Dürers Meisterstich’,
Das Münster 14 (1961), pp. 1–145, argues that Dürer’s knight was modelled on Savonarola and that the
engraving as a whole was imbued with Savonarola’s theology; but cf. Theissing, Dürers ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’,
p. 34, n. 41.
100
See L. Pikulik, ‘Thomas Mann und die Renaissance’, in Peter Pütz (ed.), Thomas Mann und die Tradition
(Frankfurt a.M.: Athenäum, 1971), pp. 101–29.
101
See I. and W. Jens, ‘Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen: Thomas Mann und Friedrich Nietzsche’,
in Konrad Gaiser (ed.), Das Altertum und jedes neue Gute. Festschrift für Wolfgang Schadewaldt (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1970), pp. 237–56; U. Karthaus, ‘ “Der Zauberberg” — ein Zeitroman (Zeit, Geschichte,
Mythos)’, Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift, 44 (1970), 269–305; and Peter Pütz, ‘Thomas Mann und Nietzsche’, in
Pütz, Thomas Mann und die Tradition, pp. 225–49 (p. 230).
102
Mann possibly read an early version of ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’ as early as April 1917: see Briefe an
Bertram, p. 57. On 4 October 1917, Bertram read the entire chapter to him, as is evidenced by his letter to
Glöckner from 5 October 1917: ‘Gestern...R.[itter] T.[od] u.[nd] T.[eufel] vorgelesen. Tom dankbarster
Zuhörer’ (DLM: TnEG). See also Briefe an Bertram, p. 51.
103
‘Welches Kapitel’, Mann asked himself rhetorically in a letter to Bertram of 21 September 1918, ‘liebe
ich am meisten?’ He went on to list four of them, beginning with ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’: Briefe an Bertram,
p. 76.
104
Mann to P. Witkop, 13 September 1918: ‘Ich...möchte Sie und jedermann sehr aufmerksam machen auf
ein neues Buch, den “Nietzsche” meines Freundes Ernst Bertram, (soeben bei Bondi erschienen). Es giebt
Kapitel darin, wie das “Ritter, Tod und Teufel” überschriebene, bei deren Lektüre die Thränen mir nahe
sind.’ T. Mann, Briefe 1889–1936, ed. by Erika Mann (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1961), pp. 149–50. See also
Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, p. 4: ‘Abends mit Ergriffenheit in Bertrams Buch das Kapitel “Ritter, Tod und
Teufel” gelesen’.
105
Mann, Tagebücher 1918–1921, p. 6: ‘Seine [i.e. Nietzsche’s] Deutschheit sehr tief und geistreich
herausgearbeitet’. See also T. Mann to E. Bertram, 21 September 1918, Briefe an Bertram, p. 77: ‘Tief und
wahr ist übrigens seine Deutschheit herausgearbeitet.’
106
Cf. Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 541, and Betram, Nietzsche, p. 183.
107
The only copy of Ritter, Tod und Teufel to be found in Mann’s papers is a cheap print from a Kunstkalender
of 1922: see Wysling, Bild und Text, pp. 14 and 27.
99
84
Martin A. Ruehl
professed Ohrenmensch relied on the superior knowledge of his learned friend, who proudly
called himself ‘der Protector Ihres Kupferstich-Kabinetts’.108 In one important respect,
however, Mann’s reading of Dürer’s image differed from Bertram’s. For Bertram, as we
have seen, the Faustian and demonic elements of Nietzsche’s philosophy, which he saw
ref lected in Ritter, Tod und Teufel, had a lot to do with his liminal position between North
and South. The South spelt danger and, ultimately, decline for Nietzsche — but it also
gave shape and form to his thought, just as, four hundred years earlier, it had given shape
and form to Dürer’s art.109 Mann, by contrast, chose to interpret Nietzsche’s identification
with the engraving as indicative of his Nordic-German origins, ignoring the Southern
elements in his thinking — and those in Dürer’s engraving.110 While Bertram thus upheld
at least some of the Latin ideals that George, the Catholic Rhinelander, had espoused
before the Great War, Mann used Dürer’s engraving to project a decidedly more Germanic
interpretation of Nietzsche. In the eyes of Bertram (and most members of the Circle),
Nietzsche’s philosophy anticipated the fusion of Northern depth and Southern form in
George’s poetry. It was this synthetic power that conferred upon George the banner — as
well as the beret — of German masterliness [see figure 6: portrait of Stefan George]. Mann,
on the other hand, essentialized Nietzsche as a Northerner, firmly rooted in the spiritual
milieu of Protestant asceticism.
This small interpretative difference notwithstanding, the National Protestant framework
in which Mann approached Nietzsche and Dürer was in large part Bertram’s creation.
He, more than anyone else, inspired Mann’s Protestant awakening during the war,111 a
relatively short-lived, yet intense affair that manifested itself externally in the purchase of
an expensive Luther bust from the Munich sculptor Hans Schwegerle in November 1918.112
And it was Bertram to whom Mann tried to prove his Northern and ascetic credentials
in those years, inviting him to a performance of the St Matthew Passion in Munich
and a special staging of Fiorenza for the German troops at the Théâtre Royal du Parc in
occupied Brussels (March 1917 and January 1918, respectively).113 On 24 June 1917, both
men attended a production of Hans Pfitzner’s Palestrina, an opera that Mann later hailed as
the work of a German Romantic master, full of ‘dürerisch-faustischen Wesenszügen’ and
imbued with the pessimistic ethos of ‘Kreuz, Tod und Gruft’.114 This expression, coined by
See Bertram to Mann, 5 June 1916, Briefe an Bertram, p. 217. Bertram had studied art history as a
Nebenfach (minor subject) at the University of Bonn under Carl Justi’s successor Paul Clemen: see Jappe,
Ernst Bertram, p. 30.
109
See Bertram, Nietzsche, p. 57.
110
See Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, p. 146.
111
See I. Jens and W. Jens, ‘Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen: Thomas Mann und Friedrich Nietzsche’,
in Konrad Gaiser (ed.), Das Altertum und jedes neue Gute: Festschrift für Wolfgang Schadewaldt (Stuttgart:
Kohlhammer, 1970), pp. 237–56 (p. 241).
112
See Mann to Bertram, 29 November 1918: ‘Gestern habe ich den eisernen Lutherkopf heimgeführt und
sehr schön bei mir aufgestellt’: Briefe an Bertram, p. 82. The maker of the bust, Hans Schwegerle, like Mann a
native of Lübeck, had been professor of art at the University of Munich since 1917. In 1911, he had sculpted
Stefan George. It was Bertram who had drawn Mann’s attention to Schwegerle and the Luther bust. See E.
Bertram to E. Glöckner, 29 August 1917 (DLM: TnEG). On Mann’s Lutheranism during World War I see
Bernd Hamacher, Thomas Manns letzter Werkplan “Luthers Hochzeit” (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1996),
pp. 23–32; and H. Lehnert, ‘Thomas Manns Lutherbild’, in G. Wenzel (ed.), Betrachtungen und Überblicke:
Zum Werk Thomas Manns (Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1966), pp. 286–89, 293.
113
See Briefe an Bertram, pp. 46, 52, 55, 56.
114
Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 407, 408, 427. On returning from the Prinzregententheater, Bertram
108
Fig. 6. Portrait of Stefan George, c.1893
Courtesy of the Stefan George Archiv, Stuttgart
85
86
Martin A. Ruehl
the young Nietzsche to indicate his allegiance to the spirit of Wagner and Schopenhauer,
functioned as a leitmotif in Nietzsche and as a kind of watchword in the correspondence
between Mann and Bertram.115 All of this suggests that Bertram was not just an erudite
but junior conversation partner, who temporarily filled the intellectual vacuum left by
Heinrich.116 It would be more accurate to think of him as an inf luential ally and brotherin-arms who supplied important pieces of the ideological arsenal that would be employed
against Heinrich in the Betrachtungen. Some of the most powerful weapons came from the
chapter ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’.
Mann used Bertram’s interpretation of Dürer’s engraving to highlight three aspects
of Nietzsche’s philosophy that he believed had been ignored by Heinrich and other
aestheticists. The first was Nietzsche’s Protestant asceticism. The aestheticists, Mann
argued, misread Nietzsche as the prophet of an immoral egoism and Dionysian vitalism.
This was the kind of Nietzscheanism that had inspired the hysterical Renaissance dramas
of the fin de siècle, which glorified the ruthlessness and pagan sensuality of Quattrocento
tyrants like Cesare Borgia. In Thomas’s eyes, Heinrich’s trilogy Die Göttinnen (1903), with
its offensive sexualism and ethical nonchalance, belonged to the wave of Renaissancismus
that swept over the stages and salons of imperial Germany around 1900.117 He held up
Ritter, Tod und Teufel as a visual riposte to this vulgar Nietzschean veneration of the brutal
and beautiful life or what he derisively called ‘Renaissance-Ästhetizismus’.118
Following Bertram, Mann argued that Nietzsche’s veneration of Dürer’s engraving
demonstrated his lasting attachment to a restrained, pious Protestant individualism that
was fundamentally opposed to the unfettered egoism idealized by the dramatists of
Renaissancismus. The juxtaposition worked well on the artistic level, too, where the austere
described the mood evoked by the mutual operatic experience as one of ‘Kreuz, Tod und Gruft’: see
E. Bertram to E. Glöckner, 24 June 1917 (DLM: TnEG). On Mann and Pfitzner see J. Newsom, ‘Hans
Pfitzner, Thomas Mann and The Magic Mountain’, Music & Letters, 55,2 (1974), 136–50; and P. Morgan, ‘ “Die Heimat meiner Seele”: The Significance of Pfitzner’s Palestrina for Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus’,
in Christine Magerski and others (eds), Moderne begreifen: Zur Paradoxie eines sozio-ästhetischen Deutungsmusters
(Wiesbaden: Deutscher Universitätsverlag, 2007), pp. 205–19.
115
See Bertram, Nietzsche, pp. 44, 45, 59 and Mann to Bertram, 3 April 1917, in: Briefe an Bertram, pp.
46–47. The phrase became something of a mantra for Mann and appears frequently in his correspondence
during World War I. See, e.g., T. Mann to A. v. Grolmann, 24 April 1917: ‘Ich hörte kürzlich zum zweiten
Male die Matthäus-Passion — ich kann nicht sagen, mit welcher intimen Ergriffenheit, mit welchem
Gefühle seelischen Zuhauseseins. Es wunderte mich, dass der junge Nietzsche sie in Basel in einer Karwoche
2mal hinter einander hörte, und der Briefsatz klang mir im Ohr, den er um jene Zeit an Rohde schrieb (und
der mir, als ich ihn vor vielen Jahren zum ersten Mal las, sofort entscheidenden und unzerstörbaren Eindruck
machte): “Mir behagt an Wagner, was mir an Schopenhauer behagt: Die ethische Luft, der faustische Duft,
Kreuz, Tod und Gruft.” [...] Sie haben da...in einem Satz von recht Nietzsche’scher Musikalität jene Neigung
und Stimmung zusammengefasst, die die Grundneigung und -stimmung auch meines Lebens und der Kern
meiner Liebe und Zöglingsdankbarkeit für jenes “Dreigestirn” ist. Wo ich sie finde und fühle, bin ich zu
Haus. Es ist eine nordisch-protestantisch-ethisch-dürerische Atmosphäre, die Atmosphäre etwa, in der das
Griffelwerk “Ritter, Tod und Teufel” steht . . .’ Quoted in: ‘ “Für Menschen hat er allerdings nicht viel
übrig”: Unbekannte Briefe von Thomas Mann’, Neue Zürcher Zeitung, 11.01.2003.
116
Pace Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Das Leben als Kunstwerk, p. 236.
117
T. Mann to H. Mann, 5 December 1903, in Thomas Mann-Heinrich Mann: Briefwechsel 1900–1949, ed. by
H. Wysling, 2nd edn (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1984), p. 36. In this letter, Thomas subtly identified Heinrich’s
eroticism as an un-German, Latin trait, while emphasizing his own Germanness (‘daß ich dem deutschen
Volksempfinden näher stände’).
118
Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 538–39.
87
graphic style of the engraving as well as the vertical rigidity and angular features of the
horseman contrasted sharply with the rich coloration and movement in which popular
painters like Hans Makart had depicted the voluptuous life of Renaissance Florence.119
Ritter, Tod und Teufel thus represented the pictorial means by which Mann sought to
reclaim Nietzsche as a Protestant, bourgeois moralist from the literary avant-garde of
Wilhelmine Germany which for the past twenty years had cried up the anti-Christian and
anti-bourgeois elements of his philosophy.
With his embourgeoisement and ethical revaluation of Nietzsche, Mann also defended
him against those Entente intellectuals who had attacked him as the prophet of the blond
beast of prey and the philosophical precursor of the war.120 However, unlike his brother,
the progressive, cosmopolitan Zivilisationsliterat, he did not hold up Nietzsche as a good
European and Francophile.121 In this respect too, he felt, Heinrich had misrepresented
Nietzsche’s character, which lacked any genuine attachment to Latin civilization. Even if
his style and method seemed European, Mann contended, by nature Nietzsche belonged
entirely to the German realm. The visual proof for this, again, was Dürer’s engraving:
‘Die seelischen Voraussetzungen...seines Lebens... — wo anders sind sie zu finden, als...
in jener nordisch-deutschen, bürgerlich-dürerisch-moralistischen Sphäre, in welcher das
Griffelwerk “Ritter, Tod und Teufel” steht, und die immer die Heimatsphäre dieser
strengen, durchaus nicht “südlichen” Seele geblieben ist?’122 In stark contrast to Heinrich,
119
Though it preceded the heyday of the movement by about thirty years, Makart’s gigantic tryptich Die
Pest in Florenz (1868) was in many ways the perfect example of the opulent sensualism that characterized
Renaissancismus at the turn of the century. See Hans Makart: Triumph einer schönen Epoche, ed. by Klaus
Gallwitz, 2nd edn (Baden-Baden: Staatliche Kunsthalle, 1972), pp. 44–54. On Renaissancismus see Gerd
Uekermann, Renaissancismus und Fin de Siècle: Die italienische Renaissance in der deutschen Dramatik der letzten
Jahrhundertwende (Berlin: de Gruyter, 1985); and L. Ritter-Santini, ‘Maniera Grande: Über italienische
Renaissance und deutsche Jahrhundertwende’, in Roger Bauer and others (eds), Fin de Siècle: Zu Literatur
und Kunst der Jahrhundertwende (Frankfurt a.M.: Klostermann, 1974), pp.170–205. On Mann’s complex
relation to the Renaissance and Renaissancismus see Martin Ruehl, ‘Death in Florence: Thomas Mann and
the Ideologies of Renaissancismus at the Fin de Siècle’, in S. Marchand and D. Lindenfeld (eds), Germany at
the Fin de Siècle: Culture, Politics and Ideas (Baton Rouge, LA: Louisiana University Press, 2004), pp. 186–227.
For Mann’s rejection of the Italian Renaissance and his preference for the perpendicular Northern style at
the time, see the following assessment of Buddenbrooks in the Betrachtungen, pp. 58–59: ‘Buddenbrooks ist gewiß
ein sehr deutsches Buch...deutsch vor allem im formalen Sinn... Gotik nicht Renaissance.’
120
In his letter to Bertram of 4 May 1915, Mann protested against the tendency abroad to put Nietzsche
in the intellectual company of militarists and warmongers like Heinrich von Treitschke and Friedrich von
Bernhardi: see Briefe an Bertram, p. 25. On the Nietzsche reception in France and England at the time see
C. Forth, Zarathustra in Paris: The Nietzsche Vogue in France, 1891–1918 (Dekalb, IL: Northern Illinois
University Press, c 2001), pp. 175–83; J. Joll, ‘The English, Friedrich Nietzsche and the First World War’,
in I. Geiss and B.-J. Wendt (eds), Deutschland in der Weltpolitik des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts (Düsseldorf:
Bertelsmann, 1973), pp. 287–307; and N. Martin, ‘Nietzsche as Hate-Figure in Britain’s Great War: “The
Execrable Neech” ’, in: F. Bridgham (ed.), The First World War as a Clash of Cultures (Rochester, NY:
Camden House, 2006), pp. 155–75.
121
On Heinrich’s reception of Nietzsche since 1892 see R. Schlichting, Heinrich Mann und Friedrich
Nietzsche: Studien zur realistischen Kunstauffassung im Werk Heinrich Manns bis 1925 (Bern: Lang, 1986); and
W. Rudolf, Friedrich Nietzsche, Jugendstil, Heinrich Mann: Zur geistigen Situation der Jahrhundertwende (Munich:
Fink, 1976); C. Simonin, ‘Heinrich Mann et Nietzsche ou La séduction de l’esthétisme’, Germanica, 26
(2000), 57–68; and R. Werner, ‘Nietzsche revisited. Zu Heinrich Manns “Nietzsche”-Essay von 1939’,
Heinrich-Mann-Jahrbuch, 19 (2001), 141–58.
122
See Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 86–88, 146. See also ibid. p. 85, where Mann observes that ultimately
Nietzsche was ‘ganz ohne Rettung ein Deutscher.’
88
Martin A. Ruehl
who appealed to Nietzsche as a model of his own Erasmian, pacifist standpoint during
World War I, Mann employed Bertram’s National Protestant reading of Dürer’s engraving
in order to present Nietzsche as a Lutheran-Germanic warrior.
Mann was not the first to appropriate Nietzsche for the German cause in World War I.
As early as October 1914, during the celebrations of the seventieth anniversary of his
birthday, Nietzsche had been greeted as the philosopher of the world war who had
educated an entire generation of Germans towards perilous honesty and a heroic contempt
for death.123 A year later, the economic theorist Werner Sombart described the valour that
Germany had revealed in the war as a fusion of ‘Faust und Zarathustra’.124 This image
of Nietzsche as a Faustian ‘Kämpfer’ and solitary hero quickly became a commonplace
during World War I.125 Even if he did not initiate it, Mann nevertheless made a powerful
contribution to Nietzsche’s Germanization in the 1910s and, together with Bertram,
helped to pave the way for his appropriation by thinkers of the radical and völkisch Right
in the interwar period. His emphasis on Nietzsche’s Germanic-Protestant heroism in
some ways anticipated the theme of ‘heroischer Realismus’ that Alfred Baeumler, later to
become the crown philosopher of the Third Reich, made the leitmotif of his Nietzsche
study in 1931.126
Mann’s third and final objection to Heinrich’s Nietzscheanism concerned the question
of pessimism. Like Nietzsche himself, Mann detected Schopenhauer’s features in the
chiselled profile of Dürer’s horseman [see figure 7: portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer and
detail of Dürer’s Ritter, Tod und Teufel], that is to say, he perceived the overall mood of the
engraving as fatalistic, summing it up in his favourite formula ‘Kreuz, Tod und Gruft’.127
Insofar as it threw into relief Nietzsche’s Schopenhauerian pessimism, Ritter, Tod und Teufel
allowed Mann to place the philosopher alongside the other two fixed stars in his intellectual
firmament: ‘der Nietzsche, der mir eigentlich galt und meiner Natur nach erzieherisch am
tiefsten auf mich wirken mußte, war der Wagnern und Schopenhauern noch ganz Nahe
oder immer Nahegebliebene, der, welcher in aller bildenden Kunst ein Bild mit dauernder
Liebe ausgezeichnet hatte, — das Dürer’sche “Ritter, Tod und Teufel”.’128 This Dürereanpessimistic reading of Nietzsche contained a sharp critical edge against Heinrich’s politics.
123
T. Kappstein, ‘Nietzsche, der Philosoph des Weltkriegs: Zu seinem 70. Geburtstag am 15. Oktober’,
Straßburger Post 1028 (1914); quoted in Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, p. 143.
124
Werner Sombart, Händler und Helden: Patriotische Besinnung (Munich: Duncker & Humblot, 1915), pp.
84–85
125
See, e.g., Karl Joël, Neue Weltkultur (Leipzig: Wolff, 1915), pp. 88–89. For the German Nietzsche
reception during the Great War see Aschheim, The Nietzsche Legacy, pp. 128–63.
126
See Alfred Baeumler, Nietzsche der Philosoph und Politiker (Leipzig: Reclam 1931) and, ‘Nietzsche und
der Nationalsozialismus’, in Alfred Baeumler, Studien zur deutschen Geistesgeschichte (Berlin: Junker und
Dünnhaupt, 1937). Cf., however, Baeumler’s critique of Bertram’s Nietzsche in his Nietzsche der Philosoph
und Politiker, p. 86, n. 2. On Mann and Baeumler see M. Baeumler and others (eds), Thomas Mann und
Alfred Baeumler: Eine Dokumentation (Würzburg: Königshausen and Neumann, 1989). On Baeumler’s
‘heroic’ reading of Nietzsche see M. Whyte, ‘The Uses and Abuses of Nietzsche in the Third Reich: Alfred
Baeumler’s “Heroic Realism” ’, Journal of Contemporary History, 43,2 (2008), 171–94.
127
See Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 146–47, 541. Mann cited Nietzsche’s formula three more times in
the Betrachtungen, at pp. 79, 106 and 407.
128
Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 541. See Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 79: ‘Schopenhauer, Nietzsche und
Wagner: ein Dreigestirn ewig verbundener Geister’. On Mann’s continuous attachment to Schopenhauer’s
pessimistic philosophy see E. Reents, Zu Thomas Manns Schopenhauer-Rezeption (Würzburg: Königshausen
and Neumann, 1998).
89
Fig. 7. Portrait of Arthur Schopenhauer, c.1859, and detail of Dürer’s Ritter, Tod und Teufel
90
Martin A. Ruehl
According to Mann, Nietzsche’s pessimism was incompatible with the politically engagé
ethos of the Zivilisationsliterat, his melioristic belief in democracy and his ‘krankhafte
Humanitätsschwärmerei’, as he put it in a rather Nietzschean turn of phrase. Heinrich’s
insistence on Nietzsche’s emancipatory-revolutionary message ignored the pessimistic, in
other words: the acquiescent, conservative, and non-political core of his philosophy.129
Mann’s use of Ritter, Tod und Teufel to question his brother’s Nietzscheanism went hand
in hand with his attempt to fashion a new artistic and bourgeois identity for himself. As he
remarked in the penultimate chapter of the Betrachtungen, Dürer’s engraving encapsulated
Nietzsche’s world as much as his own world which he defined as a ‘nordisch-moralistischprotestantische, id est deutsche [...] Welt’.130 Mann called on these Nordic-moralistic features
of the picture to present his case for a ‘bürgerliches Künstlertum’ in opposition to the
aestheticism that his brother and, to some extent, he himself had embraced around 1900.
He was following Langbehn here, who had contrasted the ‘weiblich-wollüstige Wesenheit’
of the fin-de-siècle décadents with Dürer’s manliness and self-discipline. As Langbehn
put it, ‘Dürer war kein Bohemien: er war Bürger’.131 Like Langbehn, Mann associated
bourgeois art with austerity, dignity, faith and Sittlichkeit. A rigid, self-sacrificing ascete, or
‘Leistungsethiker’, working on the brink of exhaustion,132 the bourgeois artist, he claimed,
moved in the same thin ethical atmosphere as Dürer’s rider, far above the misty marshes of
the aestheticists whose subjectivism and ‘ethische Velleität’ Mann had already denounced
in Der Tod in Venedig (1912).133 In the novella, this act of renunciation had been ironically
undermined by the Northern renouncer’s own moral failure to withstand the temptations
of the beautiful South. The Betrachtungen reiterated some of the thematic dichotomies
underlying the earlier work: Germanness vs romanitas, moralism vs aestheticism, manliness
vs decadence and so on. But this time, the Northern motifs were idealized with much
less ambiguity.134 Crystallized in the figure of Dürer’s horseman, the principles to which
Mann’s alter ego Gustav von Aschenbach had merely aspired — endurance, moral bravery,
composure in the face of adversity and, especially, masterliness –,135 became the myth of a
heroic German Bürgerlichkeit that originated in the radical individualism of the Protestant
Reformation.
The genealogy of Bürgerlichkeit that Mann sketched in chapter five of the Betrachtungen
129
Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 559. For Mann’s appropriation of Nietzsche as a conservative and
anti-democratic thinker see ibid., p. 83: ‘[W]enn Nietzsche’s “großer Lehrer”, Schopenhauer, nur antirevolutionär war — aus pessimistischer Ethik, aus Haß auf den unanständigen Optimismus der Jetztzeitund Fortschrittsdemagogen –, so war [Nietzsche] selbst anti-radikal in einem bis dahin unerhörten...
Sinne und Grade, und in dieser Eigenschaft und Willensmeiniung kam sein Deutschtum zu einem
Elementarausbruch wie in sonst keiner anderen.’ See also ibid., p. 242: ‘Nietzsche war deutsch genug, er
nahm an der Besonderheit und Renitenz Deutschlands ein hinlänglich starkes “conservatives Interesse”, um
dem Nivellierungsprozeß...aufs heftigste zu widerstreben.’
130
Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 541: ‘nordisch-moralistisch-protestantische, id est deutsche...Welt’.
131
Langbehn, Dürer als Führer, pp. 8, 14.
132
Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii,. 145.
133
Mann, Der Tod in Venedig (1912), GW viii, 455.
134
But cf. Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Werk-Epoche-Wirkung, 2nd edn (Munich: Beck 1991), pp.
135–70, and J. Kroll, ‘Conservative at the Crossroads: “Ironic” vs. “revolutionary” conservatism in Thomas
Mann’s Reflections of a Non-Political Man’, Journal of European Studies, 34,3 (2004), 225–46, who emphasize
the ironic ambivalence in Mann’s critique of aestheticism in the Betrachtungen.
135
See Mann, Der Tod in Venedig, GW viii, 451–55. See also T. J. Reed, Death in Venice: Making and
Unmaking a Master (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1994).
91
bore a strong resemblance to Max Weber’s famous study on the religious origins of Western
capitalism. What Mann called ‘Leistungsethik’ hinged on a socio-psychological dynamic
very similar to the innerworldly asceticism Weber had described in Die protestantische Ethik
und der Geist des Kapitalismus (1904/1905).136 Even though Mann maintained that he had
created ascetic, Puritan types like Thomas Buddenbrook and Girolamo Savonarola prior
to and independent of this work,137 his emphasis on the Protestant element in the Nordic,
moralist burgher ethos that he constructed around the symbol of Ritter, Tod und Teufel relied
on Weber.138 Like that other self-doubting scion of the North German haute bourgeoisie, the
cultural historian Aby Warburg, Mann could find in Weber’s book rich resonances of his
own life and read its central concepts — calling, duty, achievement, etc. — as maxims for
a new abstemiousness and rigour.139 In the eyes of his friends and disciples, Weber himself
was an incarnation of these ascetic Protestant ideals. On the occasion of his departure from
Heidelberg in the fall of 1919, a university colleague, Hermann Braus, compared him to
Dürer’s knight. ‘Jeder, der Ihnen nahe stand’, Braus addressed Weber in his farewell speech,
‘hat Ihre Ritterlichkeit und aufrechte Mannhaftigkeit gesehen, hat Ihre unbestechliche
Gesinnungstreue empfunden, wie eine moderne Verlebendigung des Dürerschen Ritters
zwischen Tod und Teufel’.140 Unlike Weber, however, who had focussed his study on
Calvinism,141 Mann identified the leistungsethisch legacy of Protestantism almost exclusively
with Luther and Germany — further evidence of his National Protestant convictions
during World War I. As a token of these convictions, Ritter, Tod und Teufel belonged right
next to the Luther bust he bought in November 1918.
If Dürer’s engraving underlined the Lutheran-ascetic origins of Leistungsethik, it also
served to accentuate what Mann regarded as the masculine features of Bürgerlichkeit.
Perhaps he was alluding to Goethe here, who had applauded the manliness and constancy
of Dürer’s art in his poem ‘Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung’ (1776);142 but the strongly
gendered opposition he established between the rigid morality of Ritter, Tod und Teufel
and the effeminate hedonism of Renaissancismus with its veneration of ‘dick vergoldete
On Mann and Weber see Harvey Goldman, Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and Shaping of the
Self (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1988); Politics, Death and the Devil: Self and Power in Max
Weber and Thomas Mann (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1992), esp. pp. 261–73. On Mann’s
notion of Leistungsethik see Oliver Geldszus, Verzicht und Verlangen: Askese und Leistungsethik im Werk und
Leben Thomas Manns (Berlin: Köster, 1999); and Lothar Pikulik, Leistungsethik contra Gefühlskult: Über das
Verhältnis von Bürgerlichkeit und Empfindsamkeit (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 1984).
137
See Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 145–46.
138
See Mann’s explicit references to Weber in Betrachtungen, GW xii, 145 and 147. Kurzke, ‘Die Quellen’,
p. 296, shows that Mann’s knowledge of Weber was largely second-hand. His main source appears to have
been Emil Hammacher, Hauptfragen der modernen Kultur (Leipzig: Teubner, 1914), which is cited extensively
throughout the Betrachtungen.
139
On Warburg and Weber see B. Roeck, ‘Burckhardt, Warburg und die italienische Renaissance’, Annali
dell’Istituto storico italo-germanico in Trento/Jahrbuch des italienisch-deutschen historischen Instituts in Trient, 17
(1991), 257–96.
140
Marianne Weber, Max Weber: Ein Lebensbild (Heidelberg: Lambert Schneider, 1950), p. 718. Braus
concluded his speech on a decidedly Nietzschean note, describing Weber’s achievements as a reminder that
Dionysos was not dead: ibid.
141
See Max Weber, Die protestantische Ethik und der ‘Geist’ des Kapitalismus (Bodenheim: Athenäum, 1993),
pp. 39–49.
142
‘Hans Sachsens poetische Sendung’, in Goethes Werke, HA 1, p. 136: ‘...die Welt soll vor dir stehn./Wie
Albrecht Dürer sie hat gesehen:/Ihr festes Leben und Männlichkeit/Ihr inner Maß und Ständigkeit’. Mann
(mis)quoted the final lines in his Dürer essay of 1928: see GW x, 230.
136
92
Martin A. Ruehl
Renaissance-Plafonds und fette Weiber’143 suggests that there were also more personal
concerns at stake. As it turns out, the reception history of the engraving contains a
short private chapter that adds an intimate piquancy to Mann’s uses of Dürer in the
Betrachtungen.
In 1913, Alfred Kerr, the notoriously vitriolic literary critic and one-time rival for the
affection of Katia Pringsheim, had called into question Mann’s (hetero-)sexuality in two
damning reviews of Fiorenza and Der Tod in Venedig, respectively.144 A few years later, René
Schickele also made Mann’s manliness the butt of his critical comments. Schickele was a
prominent propagator of expressionism in Germany and editor of the pacifist monthly Die
Weissen Blätter, where Heinrich’s Zola essay had appeared in November 1915. An outspoken
opponent of the war from the start, he sought to unmask the bellicose rhetoric of Mann’s
early Kriegsschriften as the martial posturing of an emasculated décadent. Mann’s panegyrics
on war and the new sense of hardship and adversity it had created,145 Schickele wrote in
a book review for his own journal, were the coquette gesture of a would-be knight, ‘im
Damensattel reitend zwischen Tod und Teufel’, throwing his glove, rather like a medieval
princess, into the rows of soldiers.146
According to Schickele, Mann lacked precisely the demonic, soldierly qualities that he
himself had held up as essential German characteristics in his 1914 essay on the Prussian
monarch Frederick II. At heart, he remained a civilian and an aesthete, a weakling
trumpeting marching songs.147 His uncanny emplotment of Frederick’s life as a medieval
danse macabre, Schickele remarked in another gendered innuendo, was actually bathed in
a pink stage light.148 Read in the context of Schickele’s review,149 Mann’s appropriation
of Ritter, Tod und Teufel signifies a re-appropriation of the masculine valour and martial
prowess he had acclaimed in his earlier writings. In the image of Dürer’s knight, the author
of the Betrachtungen and the ‘Friedrich’ essay tried to re-assert himself as a literary soldier
wielding a mighty knightly sword for the cause of German Kultur.150
The notion of bourgeois art as heroic asceticism that Mann established in the
Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 539.
Kerr’s review of Fiorenza is reprinted in Thomas Mann im Urteil seiner Zeit: Dokumente 1891–1955, ed.
by Klaus Schröter (Hamburg: Wegner, 1969), pp. 61–63. His review of Death in Venice originally appeared
in Pan, 01.04.1913, 635–41. Kurzke speculates that it was Otto Grautoff who revealed Mann’s homosexual
leanings to Kerr: see Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Das Leben als Kunstwerk, p. 221.
145
For Langbehn, a new sense of ‘Not’ was a necessary precondition for Germany’s cultural revival: see H.
Ibach, ‘Langbehn’, in Neue Deutsche Biographie, XIII (1982), 544–45.
146
R. Schickele, ‘Thomas Mann’, Die Weissen Blätter: Eine Monatsschrift, 2 (1915), 925. Schickele cited
Mann’s remark ‘Wir sind in Not, in tiefster Not. Und wir grüßen sie, denn sie ist es, die uns so hoch erhebt’
and then answered his own rhetorical question: ‘Wie hoch? Gerade so hoch, daß der Ritter Thomas Mann,
im Damensattel reitend zwischen Tod und Teufel, seine unsäglich kokette Gebärde hinüberwerfen konnte
wie einen Handschuh in die dampfenden Reihen der Soldaten’.
147
Ibid., p. 927.
148
Schickele, ‘Thomas Mann’, p. 925: ‘so gibt sich der nordische Thomas Mann [in his essay ‘Friedrich
und die grosse Koalïtion’] das Schauspiel eines Totentanzes [...] Das Rampenlicht bleibt rosa, selbst dann,
wenn der Knochenmann wie der Gekreuzigte selbst an der angespannten Schnur hängt.’
149
That Mann had read Schickele’s piece is evidenced by his remarks in Betrachtungen, GW xii, 111.
150
In his autobiographical ‘Lebensabriß’ of 1930, Mann still referred to the Betrachtungen as a form
of military service: ‘[D]ie Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen waren ein Gedankendienst mit der Waffe, zu
welchem, wie ich im Vorwort sagte, nicht Staat und Wehrmacht, sondern die Zeit mich “eingezogen”
hatte’: GW xi, 127.
143
144
93
Betrachtungen was closely related to, but not identical with his concept of masterliness. Like
the Bürger, the master was a product of the Northern, Protestant milieu; like the Bürger,
he was an abstemious and moral figure. Without ever mentioning him by name, Mann’s
idealized description of German Meisterschaft ref lected the image of Dürer, or rather:
the Romantic image of Dürer the pious, industrious craftsman, projected most notably
by Wackenroder. The ‘ethisches handwerkliches Meistertum’ and the ‘innigst-würdige,
national-meisterliche Griffelkunst und Malerei’ practised in the imperial cities of early
modern Germany — allusions, no doubt, to Nuremberg’s most famous Griffelkünstler —
were evidently the model for Mann’s own claims to masterliness.151 Were not his ancestors,
he mused, craftsmen from Nuremberg?152
While he hinted at Dürer here largely in order to distinguish his bourgeois-moral
ideal of masterliness from the subjective-excessive notion of genius embraced by the
aestheticists, Mann intimated brief ly that in a German master like Wagner both aspects
— volcanic, demonic genius on the one hand and fastidious craftsmanship as well as pious
industry on the other — could be reconciled.153 With his later references to Ritter, Tod
und Teufel, Mann returned to and elaborated on this synthetic possibility. The first of the
three Meisterstiche in many ways provided the perfect pictorial foil for these ref lections
on masterliness as a combination of the moral and the demonic. The engraving showed
Dürer’s devoted, meticulous craftsmanship as well as his powerful, sombre imagination
— what Goethe had called, disparagingly, his ‘trübe Phantasie’.154 The figure of the
knight was a similar coincidentia oppositorum, ref lecting Christian renunciation as well as
transgressive pride, moral resolve as well as a reckless sympathy with death. As Mann
remarked, citing Nietzsche, the image exuded both an ethical atmosphere and a Faustian
aura.155 By suggesting that this Faustian aura was an integral part of his bourgeois artistry,
he countered the traditional aestheticist charge against the Bürger as philistine satisfait and
bloodless Biedermann and placed himself among demonic German masters like Wagner
and George.
In addition to the Faustian aura, Mann infused Ritter, Tod und Teufel with a strong national
pathos. To be sure, the conception of Germanness that he invoked in the Betrachtungen
with reference to Dürer’s engraving had little to do with the jingoistic enthusiasm of his
early war-time writings. It also differed markedly from the triumphalism of the National
Protestants who in 1917 still celebrated the German war effort to the tune of Luther’s
‘Ein’ feste Burg’.156 By that time, Mann had already begun to re-assess his national ideas
Mann, Betrachtungen, GW xii, 103, 115.
Betrachtungen, GW xii, p. 114. See also ibid.: ‘Es ist kein Zufall, daß mir, indem ich nach dem Bilde
bürgerlicher Geistigkeit, des bürgerlich-kulturellen Typus trachte, ein mittelalterlich-nürnbergisch Gesicht
erscheint’ — a further allusion to Dürer.
153
Ibid., p. 108.
154
Goethe, Maximen und Reflexionen (no. 485), Goethes Werke, HA 12, p. 485: ‘Albrecht Dürer förderte ein
höchst inniges realistisches Anschauen...ihm schadete eine trübe, form- und bodenlose Phantasie’. Goethe’s
initial admiration for Dürer temporarily gave way to a more critical assessment, not least because of the
artist’s enthusiastic reception by the Romantics. After 1807, however, Goethe revised his judgment again
on seeing Dürer’s marginal illustrations for Maximilian I’s Prayer Book which, in his eyes, showed classical
grace. See Herbert von Einem, ‘Goethe und Dürer’, in idem, Beiträge zu Goethes Kunstauffassung (Hamburg:
Schröder, 1956), pp. 9–45.
155
156
See C. Albrecht, ‘Zwischen Kriegstheologie und Krisentheologie: Zur Lutherrezeption im
151
152
94
Martin A. Ruehl
and to embrace what might be called a heroic-pessimistic patriotism. In holding up the
sombre picture of the solitary knight as a symbol of his German world, Mann signalled
this re-orientation. Composed, grave and proudly defiant of his two demonic companions,
the knight embodied a German heroism quite distinct from the furor teutonicus of Kleist’s
Hermann, say, or the youthful, reckless courage of Wagner’s Siegfried. This was heroism
in the face of defeat, the fatalistic commitment to a perilous, perhaps lethal quest, a
perseverance coûte que coûte that would transcend the present military conf lict, whatever its
outcome. Insofar as the war was Germany’s ‘tragisch-historisches Schicksal’,157 the knight
was not riding down a chosen path, but bravely carrying out a higher, metaphysical duty.
In his letter to the Swedish newspaper Svenska Dagbladet (May 1915), Mann had remarked,
alluding to Luther’s tract on the bondage of the will, that the question whether Germany
had wanted the war raised the vexed issue of free will; a nation revealed its bravery when it
freely accepted the fate thrust upon it.158 Put in the political-theological terms of National
Protestantism, Mann used Ritter, Tod und Teufel to show Germany not as ecclesia triumphans,
but as ecclesia militans, an embattled, isolated nation forever struggling against a hostile
world in its search for salvation.
At the same time, the engraving formed a crucial part of the national heraldry on the
banner under which Mann joined the Franco-German culture wars that accompanied the
fighting in the trenches on the Western front. Since the outbreak of hostilities in August
1914, Europe’s intelligentsia had endowed the military conf lict with a larger spiritual and
cultural significance.159 In a variety of essays, articles and pamphlets, Emile Boutroux,
Anatole France, Maurice Barrès and other French writers presented their country as the
protector of Latin civilization. The French soldier’s higher world-historical task in this
war, they argued, was to protect his country’s classical inheritance against the barbarian
hordes from Germany, a country that had not experienced the civilizing inf luences of
romanitas and Renaissance humanism.160 As long as Italy remained neutral, France saw
itself as the sole bulwark of the classical spirit. When Italy joined the Entente in May 1915,
Jean Cocteau described the newly forged alliance, significantly, as a meeting of Dante
and Marianne.161 As early as 1914, Gabriele D’Annunzio, one of Mann’s most prominent
bêtes noires in the Betrachtungen, had called for Italy’s participation in the war on the side of
France in an ‘Ode to the Latin Resurrection’.162 Writing for the journal La Renaissance in
1917, Auguste Rodin exhorted his fellow artists to preserve the classical traditions and to
resist all German inf luences.163
Reformationsjubiläum 1917’, in Hans Medick and Peer Schmidt (eds), Luther zwischen den Kulturen:
Zeitgenossenschaft — Weltwirkung (Göttingen: Vandenhoeck & Ruprecht, 2004), pp. 482–99.
157
158
Mann, ‘An die Redaktion des “Svenska Dagbladet”, Stockholm’, GW xiii, 547.
159
See Ronald Stromberg, Redemption by War: The Intellectuals and 1914 (Lawrence: The Regents Press of
Kansas, 1982).
160
See, e.g., E. Boutroux, L’Idée de Liberté en France et en Allemagne (Paris: Foi et Vie, n.d.).
161
J. Cocteau and P. Iribe, ‘Saluons l’Italie’, Le Mot 19 (15 June 1915), quoted in Kenneth E. Silver, Esprit
de Corps : The Art of the Paris Avant-Garde and the First World War, 1914–1925 (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1989), p. 93.
162
G. d’Annunzio, ‘Ode to the Latin Resurrection’, quoted in Philippe Jullian, D’Annunzio (New York:
Pall Mall Press, 1973), pp. 252–53.
163
A. Rodin, ‘De l’art français et des influences qu’il ne doit pas subir’, La Renaissance 5,19 (15 September
1917), pp. 17–18: quoted in Silver, Esprit de Corps, pp. 100–01.
95
On the other side of the Rhine, Rodin’s appeal was inverted by conservative as well
as völkisch nationalists who renounced all Latin inf luences on Germany and decried the
Renaissance as the doom of German culture,164 while exulting the early Teutonic origins
of German civilization and Luther’s struggle against Rome in the sixteenth century.
Wittenberg, not Florence, they claimed, was the cradle of modern individualism. Mann’s
silence on the Renaissance elements in Dürer’s engraving was a very eloquent statement
in this context. In order to turn the image into a German Gestalt, he had to erase Dürer’s
artistic debts to Italy. Thus de-Latinized, the picture could serve as an allegory of what
Mann regarded as the higher purpose of the war: the defence of German Kultur against
French Zivilisation. In his shining armour and calm grandeur, the knight embodied not
wanton, barbarian destructiveness, but a manly, militant Sittlichkeit and piety, an inwardness
protected by power.165 For Mann as for Bertram, this inwardness was an autochthonic
Northern quality, a product of the Reformation spirit that infused Nietzsche’s philosophy
as well as the works of the great German masters.
III. From Dürer to Hitler? Re-assessing the Horseman, 1928–1947
If Ritter, Tod und Teufel was a token of Mann’s war-time brotherhood-in-arms with Bertram
and his attachment to some of the so-called ‘ideas of 1914’, his revaluation of the image
after 1918 ref lected the decline of this alliance and Mann’s gradual dissociation from the
nationalist and increasingly völkisch ideologies of the Right. A closer look at his changing
interpretations of the engraving from 1918 on suggests that this process of revaluation and
re-orientation was marked by considerable ambiguities. It took Mann more than ten years
to fully revise the Nordic-demonic notion of German masterliness that he had adopted
from Bertram. Even his late reckoning with Bertram’s mythification of Dürer’s image in
Doktor Faustus, as we shall see, remained curiously indebted to it.
By 1922, Mann, who as late as October 1918 had proudly declared that the survival of
‘das romantische Deutschland’ hinged upon the continuation of the Kaiser’s rule,166 had
made his peace with the Republic and its democratic, cosmopolitan culture. The Protestant
poseur and would-be Northern knight of the Betrachtungen had reinvented himself as a
pacifist and humanist. The figure of Settembrini, which had begun its fictional life in the
early drafts of the Zauberberg during World War I as a caricature of the Zivilisationsliterat,
became the benign, if garrulous, liberal antidote to the inhuman insinuations of the
Savonarolaesque Naphta and Hans Castorp’s own neo-Romantic morbidity in the finished
novel, published in 1924. Ernst Bertram, meanwhile, took a rather different ideological
turn. Like many other members of the Circle, he quickly abandoned George’s pre-war ideal
of a synthesis between North and South and strongly denounced Weimar’s Erfüllungspolitik
164
This was the title of Richard Benz’s notorious anti-Latin polemic Die Renaissance, das Verhängnis der
deutschen Cultur (Jena: Diederichs, 1915).
165
Mann used this expression, critically, to describe Richard Wagner’s increasing acquiescence in the
authoritarian structures of the second German empire in his 1933 speech ‘Leiden und Größe Richard
Wagners’, but it encapsulates his own ideal, in the 1910s, of the non-political artist shielded by the Wilhelmine
Machtstaat. See GW ix, 418–19 ‘Er [Wagner] ist den Weg des deutschen Bürgertums gegangen: von der
Revolution zur Enttäuschung, zum Pessimismus und einer resignierten, machtgeschützten Innerlichkeit’.
166
Mann to E. Bertram, 10 October 1918: ‘Solange der Kaiser noch da ist, ist das romantische Deutschland
nicht völligt ausgetilgt. Und darum handelt es sich doch’: Briefe an Bertram, p. 81.
96
Martin A. Ruehl
as well as the French occupation of the Rhineland.167 Much of his poetry after the Great
War centred on historic German places and ancient Nordic legends.168
Mann’s correspondence with Bertram in the 1920s illustrates his growing alienation
from the former mentor and confidant. While he still applauded Bertram’s defence of the
Rhine against Maurice Barrès in 1921/1922,169 Mann was quick to renounce the Northern
mysticism of the later writings. In a letter of April 1925, he humorously but nonetheless
emphatically objected to the ‘Nord-Aristokratismus’ he detected in Bertram’s collection
of poetry Die Nornen published earlier that year, which reminded him too much, he said,
of the racist ideologist Houston Stewart Chamberlain.170 Though Mann concluded his
letter on a conciliatory note, assuring his friend that he himself was, after all, ‘Nordens
Ton’,171 an ideological chasm had opened up between them. It was precisely the National
Protestantism and heroic pessimism that had once attracted him to the author of Nietzsche
which Mann now singled out for criticism. In a letter to Bertram of March 1926, he
wrote, obviously in response to critical remarks the latter had made about the League of
Nations:
Daß Genf [the seat of the League] stark an den II. Akt ‘Palestrina’ erinnert, steht
fest. Was aber den ‘Protestantismus’ betrifft, so wissen Sie ja, daß ich etwas mehr
Erasmus als Luther bin und also nicht ganz so zum Jubel gestimmt, wie all die, die auf
Pessimismus gesetzt haben, was in menschlichen Dingen ja immer eine recht sichere
Wette ist.172
While the reference to the second act of Pfitzner’s opera, which provided a vivid portrait
of the acerbic factionalism at the Council of Trent (1545–1563), signalled his overall
agreement with Bertram’s critique of the League of Nations, Mann’s exaltation of Erasmus
over Luther and the renunciation of pessimism indicated his new cosmopolitanism and
democratic meliorism. In his much publicized ‘Deutsche Ansprache: Ein Appell an die
Vernunft’ of October 1930, Mann laid part of the blame for the recent electoral successes
of the NSDAP at the door of ‘eine gewisse Philologen-Ideologie, Germanisten-Romantik
und Nordgläubigkeit aus akademisch-professoraler Sphäre’ — a remark that Bertram, not
without some justification, felt was addressed to himself.173 Although the tone of their
167
See K. Mann, Der Wendepunkt, p. 80: ‘Manchmal konnte er [i.e. Bertram] sehr bissig werden, besonders
wenn er die Unterhaltung — was nicht selten geschah — auf die Zustände im besetzten Rheinland lenkte.
Von den farbigen Truppen sprach er mit Haß und Hohn, nannte sie “äffisch” und “obszön”; auch für die
Franzosen hatte er nicht viel übrig. Der Nationalismus nahm bei ihm in den späteren Jahren den Charakter
einer Obsession an.’
168
See, e.g., Ernst Bertram, Straßburg: Ein Kreis (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1920), Der Rhein: Ein Gedenkbuch
(Munich: Georg-Verlag, 1922), Das Nornenbuch (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1925), and Wartburg: Spruchgedichte
(Leipzig: Insel-Verlag, 1933).
169
E. Bertram, ‘Le génie du Rhin. Anmerkungen zu einer akademischen Vortragsreise von Maurice
Barrès’, Die Westmark 1,6 (1921), pp. 542 ff. For Mann’s positive reaction to Bertram’s article see Briefe an
Bertram, pp. 98, 115.
170
Mann to Bertram, 30 April 1925: ‘Im Übrigen feiert in dieser Gegend [i.e. the more political pieces of
the Nornenbuch] Ihr Nord-Aristokratismus doch gar zu Chamberlain’sche Orgien,– ich kann, trotz Anrufung
Tonio Krögers...nicht so recht mit, und meine Frau sagt auch, sie wird Ihnen noch das Patchen wegnehmen,
wenn Sie noch lange über “Lehm” und “Asche” lamentieren’: Briefe an Bertram, p. 138.
171
Briefe an Bertram, p. 139.
172
Mann to Bertram, 4 March 1926, in Briefe an Bertram, p. 150.
173
Mann, ‘Deutsche Ansprache’, GW xi, 878. Bertram excerpted this comment from a published version
of Mann’s speech and sent it to Ernst Glöckner with the following, rather cryptic note: ‘Enzikaun [i.e.
97
correspondence remained friendly, even affectionate — at least until 1933 –, Mann was
evidently trying to draw a line beneath their literary joint venture of 1918, the Protestantpessimistic pas de deux performed in Nietzsche and the Betrachtungen, under the sign of
Dürer’s knight.
Despite his increasing distance from Bertram in politicis, however, Mann continued
to uphold the latter’s interpretation of Ritter, Tod und Teufel. Presented on the occasion
of the fourth centenary of the artist’s death in 1928, Mann’s Dürer essay hailed the first
master-engraving, à la Bertram, as the expression of a masculine asceticism and a rigidly
ethical, Protestant worldview that Dürer shared with Goethe, Schopenhauer, Wagner
and, especially, Nietzsche.174 The ‘nordisch-deutsche, bürgerlich-dürerisch-moralische
Sphäre’ of Ritter, Tod und Teufel, Mann wrote, citing Bertram’s Nietzsche as well as his
own Betrachtungen, remained ‘auf allen Fahrten die Heimatsphäre seiner [i.e. Nietzsche’s]
Seele’.175 As in 1918, Mann completely occluded the Southern inf luences that had shaped
both Nietzsche’s thought and Dürer’s art. By the 1920s, Dürer’s debts to the Italian
Renaissance had been firmly established in the scholarly literature, especially by Heinrich
Wölff lin and Erwin Panofsky, whose 1921 essay on ‘Dürers Stellung zur Antike’ forcefully
refuted the Germanic readings of Dürer still popular amongst right-wing intellectuals and
art historians.176
Mann, however, like Langbehn twenty years earlier, saluted Dürer as the epitome
and patron saint of the German linear style or what he called ‘das graphisch Deutsche’:
‘denn die Liebe des deutschen Künstlers, bildend oder redend, gehört nicht der Farbe,
sie gehört der Zeichnung’.177 Perhaps as a response to the neo-conservative publicist and
Schopenhauer scholar Arthur Hübscher, who in August 1927 had denounced the purged
and toned-down re-edition of the Betrachtungen in the Gesammelte Werke as an attempt to
whitewash the national-conservative dimension of the book, Mann thus reiterated his
earlier, chauvinistic reading of Dürer’s art.178 Ritter, Tod und Teufel for him remained a
symbol of Dürer’s (as well as Nietzsche’s) essentially Germanic ‘Meisterlichkeit’,179 which
combined traditionalism, self-denying perfectionism and ‘sittlich-geistige Führerschaft’ as
Bertram], aus Neuem Reich [i.e. the George Circle] und Deutscher Vernunft [i.e. Mann’s republican world]
gleicherweise ausgetrieben, flüchtet sich zum lieben Vogel [Glöckner?] ins künftige Käunerhäuschen, wo er
nie vertrieben wird.’: quoted in Jappe, Ernst Bertram, p. 323, n. 22.
174
Mann, ‘Dürer’, GW xi, 230.
175
Mann, ‘Dürer’, GW xi, p. 231.
176
Erwin Panofsky, ‘Dürers Stellung zur Antike’, Wiener Jahrbuch für Kunstgeschichte, 1 (1921), 43–92,
reprinted in Panofsky, Meaning in the Visual Arts: Papers in and on Art History (Garden City, NY: Doubleday,
1955), pp. 236–94, esp. pp. 236–38 and 244. According to Panofsky, Dürer was the ‘first Northern artist’
who showed a genuine historical awareness of his own estrangement from the ancients, an awareness that
Panofsky labelled, adopting a Nietzschean expression, ‘pathos of distance’ (‘Pathos der Distanz’), p. 236. For
the debates about Dürer in the 1920s see Białostocki, Dürer and his Critics, pp. 239–40, 312–13, 352, 361.
177
Mann, ‘Dürer’, GW x, 232. See also Mann, ‘Der Holzschneider Masereel’, GW x, 783: ‘Einmal, als die
Gelegenheit es wollte, habe ich Albrecht Dürer eine knappe, aber ernstlich gefühlte Huldigung dargebracht:
also dem Graphisch-Deutschen.’
178
See Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Das Leben als Kunstwerk, pp. 360–62. The controversy with Hübscher
escalated in the summer of 1928, just as Mann was preparing his essay on Dürer, which first appeared in the
Hamburger Nachrichten (28 June 1928): see H. Bürgin and H.-O. Mayer, Thomas Mann: Eine Chronik seines
Lebens, (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1974), pp. 92–93.
179
See Mann, ‘Dürer’, GW x, 232: ‘Der Begriff the Meisterlichkeit selbst, kommt er nicht von [Dürer]
— das edelste nationale Begriffsgut unter allen...’
98
Martin A. Ruehl
well as demonic genius, Faustian ‘Verwegenheit’ and an unconditional will to go ‘bis zum
Äußersten’.180
Three years later, Mann returned to the subject of German masterliness in a laudatio
on his brother Heinrich, delivered before the Prussian Academy of the Arts on the
occasion of the latter’s sixtieth birthday. Again Mann drew on Bertram’s interpretation of
Ritter, Tod und Teufel to idealize Dürer and his German successsors (Goethe, Wagner and
Nietzsche) as valiant ascetes. Again he exalted ‘das Graphische’ over ‘das Koloristische’.
Again he evoked Dürer’s typically Germanic qualities — his Faustian melancholy and his
‘Rittertum zwischen Tod und Teufel’.181 And yet in 1931, these references to Dürer served
a decidedly different purpose. In order to extend the line of masterly descent from Dürer,
via Goethe to Wagner and Nietzsche so that it would include the addressee of the speech,
his notoriously Francophile and Latinate brother, Mann for the first time took account
of the Southern elements in Dürer’s art, in particular his indebtedness to Mantegna and
Venice.182 Dürer’s Italian journeys, he argued, were symbolic of an expansive Germanness,
a yearning for the limpidity and lightness of the South which Dürer shared with Goethe.
Bertram, as we have seen, had described this yearning as an elementary, but dangerous and,
ultimately, pernicious predisposition of the Northerners in his mythologized account of
Nietzsche’s Gotenschicksal. Mann, by contrast, presented Italy as a form of completion and
redemption for the German artist, thus replacing Bertram’s Gothic myth of the doomed
Nordic hero with the Goethean myth of the Olympian-European artist who transcended
the old dichotomy between North and South.183 In 1931, as the Weimar Republic entered a
second year of acute political and economic crisis and the revanchist rhetoric of the Right
became ever more vociferous, Mann’s cosmopolitan definition of German masterliness
was a resonant revaluation of the Nordic mythologies he had once adopted from Bertram’s
Nietzsche and turned against his brother in the Betrachtungen.
This process of revaluation culminated in Doktor Faustus, Mann’s ideologicaldemonological analysis of the ‘deutsche Katastrophe’.184 On the ideological side, the
novel represented not just a reckoning with the various neo-Romantic and conservativerevolutionary movements since the fin de siècle that prepared the ground for the rise of
National Socialism, but also critically examined the intellectual legacies of the Reformation
period which, in Mann’s eyes, had set Germany on a disastrous anti-Western trajectory. At
the same time, it was a subtle self-critique, an oblique account of Mann’s own contribution
to the German trahison des clercs during World War I. Ritter, Tod und Teufel represents the
novel’s background image where the three parallel strands of Mann’s argument converge.
In the text itself, Dürer’s engraving is mentioned but once, in chapter fourteen, which
recounts the theological-philosophical discussions, the so-called ‘Scheunengespräche’
180
‘Das Reputierliche vereinigt sich in diesem Gedanken [i.e. the notion of German masterliness] mit
jenem Zug von Verwegenheit, den Goethe jedem Künstlertum zuschreibt. [...] Geduld und Heldentum,
Würde und Problematik, Überlieferungspflege und Zumutung des Ungeahnten, das geht zusammen hier,
das wird eins. [...] Philisterei und Pedanterie, grübelnde Mühsal, Selbstplage...in eins fließend mit jener
Unbedingtheit...Hochbedürftigkeit, welche die Tapferkeit zeitigt’: ibid., p. 232.
181
Mann, ‘Vom Beruf des deutschen Schriftstellers in unserer Zeit: Ansprache an den Bruder’ (1931), GW
x, 310.
182
GW x, 311: ‘Wir kennen die Rolle, die Mantegna und Venedig in Dürers Leben gespielt haben’.
183
GW x, 313–14.
184
See Friedrich Meinecke, Die deutsche Katastrophe: Betrachtungen und Erinnerungen (Wiesbaden: Brockhaus,
1946).
99
or ‘Schlafstrohgespräche’, between the members of Adrian’s students’ society on their
wanderings outside Halle in the mid-1900s. These conversations are dominated by one
Konrad Deutschlin who — nomen est omen — expounds a Romantic-vitalistic conception
of Germanness.185 In a series of passionate statements, Deutschlin identifies ‘das deutsche
Wesen’ with youthfulness and immaturity. ‘Streben’ and ‘Werden’, he claims, are the
features that distinguish the German ‘Volksgeist’.186 In addition to these qualities, he
singles out a religious, more specifically: a Protestant courage to experience the demonic
dimensions of life to the full. When Adrian interrupts to inquire whether he takes
religiosity to be a specifically German trait, Deutschlin replies: ‘In dem Sinne, den ich ihr
gab, als seelische Jugend, als Spontaneität, als Lebensgläubigkeit und Dürer’sches Reiten
zwischen Tod und Teufel — allerdings.’187
The allusion to Dürer’s engraving, in this context, evokes a complex of associations,
all closely related to the major thematic strands of the novel. First and foremost,
Deutschlin’s ‘Dürerean riding’ connotes the late medieval Gothic world in which the
engraving was created and which, in its fictional manifestation Kaisersaschern, forms the
backdrop to Adrian’s over-reaching as Faustus redivivus. It also hints at the period of the
Reformation, which Deutschlin hails as one of the greatest historical achievements of
German immaturity, the genesis of a purified, deep and vital religiosity. Finally, ‘riding
between death and devil’ alludes to Nietzsche’s early Schopenhauerian pessimism as well
as his later ideal of living dangerously.188 Ritter, Tod und Teufel thus functions as another
subtle link between Adrian’s fictional vita and Nietzsche’s biography; but it also serves
as a comment on the palingenetic, Nietzschean nationalism — ‘das Wissen um Tod und
Wiedergeburt’,189 as Deutschlin calls it — that informed the German youth movement
at the turn of the century. Yet even more reverberates in Deutschlin’s reference to the
engraving: the National Protestant belief in Germany’s special calling, her elevated status
amongst the nations as an eternally ‘werdendes’ Volk, the restless unredeemed redeemer of
European civilization;190 the Romantic fascination with dark chthonic forces, the uncanny,
the supernatural; a reckless amor fati, wild courage and a Schopenhauerian Todessehnsucht.
Here Mann was passing judgment on ideals that he himself had projected on to Dürer’s
image not so long ago: the Nordic-heroic pathos of the Reformation, the sympathy with
death and the devil, the glorification of the German master’s demonic forces.191
We have seen that Mann continued to associate these ideals, positively, with Ritter,
Tod und Teufel well into the 1920s. As late as 1931, he still applauded Freud’s bold forays
185
H. J. Schoeps, ‘Bemerkungen zu einer Quelle des Romans “Doktor Faustus” von Thomas Mann’,
Zeitschrift für Religions- und Geistesgeschichte, 22 (1970), 324–55 detects a connection between the ‘barn
conversations’ and a 1931 circular from the so-called bündisch movement.
186
Mann, Doktor Faustus (1947), GW vi, 158–59.
187
GW vi, 160 .
188
See, e.g., F. Nietzsche, Die fröhliche Wissenschaft (1882), KSA iii, 526.
189
Mann, Doktor Faustus, GW vi, 159.
190
For proto-fascist and fascist abuses of this concept of ‘deutsches Werden’ see the racialist monthly
Deutschvolk. Monatsschrift für deutsches Wesen und Werden, first published in 1928/29, as well as Otto Schulz,
Deutsches Werden: Gestalten. Taten. Schicksal. Vom Dichter geschaut (Leipzig: Quelle & Meyer, 1938). On
palingenesis as a feature of fascist ideology see Roger Griffin, The Nature of Fascism (London: Pinter, 1991).
191
As Mann had remarked in his speech ‘Deutschland und die Deutschen’ (1945), there existed a ‘geheime
Verbindung des deutschen Gemüts mit dem Dämonischen’, a connection, he added, that was ‘eine Sache
meiner inneren Erfahrung’: GW xi, 1131.
100
Martin A. Ruehl
into the unconscious as a knightly riding ‘zwischen Tod und Teufel’.192 By the time he
published Doktor Faustus eleven years later, however, Mann’s assessment of the first masterengraving had changed. While he still regarded it as an expression of typical German
traits — inwardness, depth, striving, fatalism, a doomed metaphysical quest, demonic
genius — he now condemned these traits, with the hindsight of Hitlerism, as proto-fascist
predispositions. Deutschlin’s ‘Dürer’sches Reiten zwischen Tod und Teufel’ referred to
the Faustian mythologies that Romantics and neo-Romantics had projected on to the
image, their invention of an anti-rational, anti-Western German tradition that made the
Bildungsbürgertum so susceptible to the völkisch tunes of the Nazis. In World War I, Mann
had invoked Dürer’s knight as an icon of Germany’s heroic destiny, her pursuit of a higher
mission on a dark, narrow path; thirty years later, he reinterpreted this path as her road
to perdition.
The many allusions to Dürer in Doktor Faustus intimate that for Mann this German
special path reached back further than the fin de siècle: there was a connection between
the ascetic-demonic world of the early modern German masters and the mythological
re-construction and ideological appropriation of this world at the beginning of the
twentieth century. Ritter, Tod und Teufel was the visualization of this connection, a kind
of pictorial bridge that allowed Mann’s narrative to move swiftly back and forth from
Gothic Nuremberg, the city of Dürer and Hans Sachs, to Nazi Nuremberg, the city of the
Reich Party Rallies and the Race Laws.193 Luther’s role in Mann’s drawn-out genealogy
of National Socialism is well-known.194 Following a line of argument quite common in
the 1940s, especially among Anglo-American analysts of the German question, Mann
interpreted the Reformation as the beginning of Germany’s disastrous withdrawal from the
humanist, rationalist legacy of the West.195 The place he assigned to Dürer in this process
was a little less clear. His tribute to Heinrich indicates that in the early 1930s, Mann had
already begun to see Dürer as a more universal figure who successfully combined North
and South. In his later writings, too, he almost always portrayed Dürer as a representative
192
See Mann, ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’ (1931), GW x, 465: ‘Ja, er [i.e. Freud] hat viel von Dürers Ritter
zwischen Tod und Teufel, auf den Nietzsche anzuspielen scheint, wenn er von einem Verwandten Freuds,
von Schopenhauer sagt: “Ein Mann und Ritter mit erzenem Blick, der den Mut zu sich selber hat,
der alleine zu stehen weiß und nicht erst auf Vordermänner und höhere Winke wartet”.’ By associating
Ritter, Tod und Teufel with a Viennese Jew, especially at this particular juncture, Mann also continued his
Europeanization of the image, begun in the 1931 laudation on Heinrich. Freud himself had added a heroic
note to his exploration of the unconscious with the Virgilian motto to the Interpretation of Dreams: see Jean
Starobinski, ‘Acheronta movebo’, in Starobinski and others (eds), Hundert Jahre ‘Traumdeutung’ von Sigmund
Freud (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1999), pp. 7–34.
193
Ritter, Tod und Teufel is the only image that performs this synthetic function in Doktor Faustus. The
references to Melencolia I or the Apocalypse, by contrast, lack the ideologiekritisch dimension.
194
See, Gunilla Bergsten, Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus: Untersuchungen zu den Quellen und zur Struktur des
Romans, 2nd edn (Tübingen: Niemeyer, 1974); P.-P. Savage, ‘Zum Bild des Luthertums in Thomas Manns
Doktor Faustus’, Sinn und Form: Sonderheft Thomas Mann (1965), pp. 347–56; and M. Doerne, ‘Thomas
Mann und das protestantische Christentum’, Die Sammlung, 11 (1956), 407–25 (410): ‘Theologie und Musik,
weltscheue Innerlichkeit und intime Vertrautheit mit dem Tod wie mit dem Teufel fallen in diesem [i.e.
Mann’s] Luther-Mythos in eines, beispielhaft und charakterprägend für den Deutschen bis zum dunklen
Heute’.
195
See Mann, ‘Deutschland’ (1941), GW xii, 907, ‘Deutschland und die Deutschen’, GW ix, 1131–32, and
Leiden an Deutschland, GW xii, 750: ‘ “Wiederkehr” gibt es in der Tat, insofern der antirationale und antihumane, auf Blut und Tragödie versessene Nationalismus [of the Nazis] die...blutige Rolle des Luthertums
wieder zu spielen sich anschickt.’
101
of the ‘good Germany’, that is, the classical, supra-national Germany of Bach, Goethe, and
Beethoven.196
Mann could have found scholarly support for his ‘classical’ Dürer in Erwin Panofsky’s
magisterial biography Dürer: His Life and Art (1943),197 which strongly emphasized Dürer’s
humanist heritage. During his two and a half years in Princeton (September 1938 — March
1941), Mann had been on friendly terms with the émigré art historian, despite attacks by
the latter’s evil poodle.198 The image of Dürer in Doktor Faustus, however, bore hardly
any resemblance to Panfosky’s Renaissance man. Apart from a passing comment on the
destruction of Nuremberg, the home of ‘Dürer und Willibald Pirckheimer’,199 in an air
raid, Dürer’s humanist background was ignored. Throughout the novel, Mann seemed
to associate Dürer with the Gothic, backward, diabolical sphere of the North, which, for
him, carried the seeds of Germany’s later undoing. It seems to be no coincidence that
the devil, when he finally engages Adrian in chapter twenty-five of the novel, speaks an
archaic ‘Dürerean’ German and refers to the artist in very intimate terms as the much
learned ‘Meister Dürer’.200 The consistent use of Dürerean images as means of visualizing
the intellectual development of the novel’s Faustian hero and the fact that Adrian’s
countentance was modelled on two of Dürer’s self-portraits reinforced these associative
links between the early modern master and the twentieth-century musical overreacher
whose pact with the devil mirrored Germany’s fatal alliance with Hitler.
Mann’s negative re-assessment of Dürer in Doktor Faustus may have been conditioned by
his awareness of the artist’s positive reception in the Third Reich. Between 1943 and 1944,
he closely studied Wilhelm Waetzoldt’s 1935 biography of Dürer, scanning its numerous
illustrations in search of models for his Kaisersaschern physiognomies. The narrative part
of Waetzoldt’s book, which strongly emphasized the Germanic and heroic elements in
Dürer’s art, not least in the first master-engraving,201 gave him an idea of how Dürer
was being appropriated by the Nazis. ‘Gelesen über Dürer und Luther in dem entsetzlich
nationalistischen Buch von Waetzoldt’, he noted in his diary on 21 April 1941.202 Mann
196
See, e.g., ‘Deutsche Hörer’ (December 1940), GW xi, 992: ‘...die herrlichen Beiträge, die der deutsche
Geist für die abendländische Kultur und kraft ihrer geleistet: das Werk Dürers und Bachs...Goethes
“Iphigenie”...die Neunte Symphonie’. See also GW xi, 1011–12, 1057 and GW xiii, 700.
197
See Erwin Panfosky, The Life and Art of Albrecht Dürer, 2 vols (Princeton: Princeton University Press,
1943).
198
See Tagebücher 1940–1943, ed. by P. de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1982), p. 5.
199
Mann, Doktor Faustus, GW vi, 231. Pirckheimer (1470–1530) was one of Germany’s foremost humanists
at the beginning of the sixteenth century and a close associate of Dürer: see Niklas Holzberg, Willibald
Pirckheimer: Griechischer Humanismus in Deutschland (Munich: Fink, 1981).
200
Doktor Faustus, GW vi, 303: ‘Außerordentlich Dürerisch liebt Ihrs...’ and p. 309: ‘...wie Meister Dürer
es gar wohlbelehrt gezeichnet hat...’. Dürer is also mentioned (p. 302).
201
See Waetzoldt, Dürer, p. 117: ‘Der Stich “Ritter, Tod und Teufel” bleibt für uns der bildliche Inbegriff
des soldatischen Menschen voll ritterlich-männlicher Haltung und kämpferischer Gestimmtheit. Es
ist der Mann, der erzenen Blickes, mit offenem Visier reitet, taub gegen die Stimme der Feigheit und
blind gegenüber dem Zugriff der Gemeinheit. Dürers Ritter, Tod und Teufel war Friedrich Nietzsches
Lieblingsblatt.’
202
Thomas Mann, Tagebücher 1944–1.4. 1946, ed. by Inge Jens (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer, 1986), p. 47 (21
April 1944). See also Mann, Tagebücher 1940–1943, ed. by Peter de Mendelssohn (Frankfurt a.M.: Fischer,
1982), p. 565 (19 April 1943). Mann was probably referring to passages like Waetzoldt, Dürer, p. 116: ‘In der
Vorstellung vom “eques christianus” verkörpert sich ein Mannesideal, an dem Urinstinkte der germanischen
Rasse, deutsche Mystik und nordische Renaissancegesinnung mitgeformt haben. Der christliche Ritter ist
ein Siegfried, der zum Manne wurde’. See also ibid., p. 223: ‘In der Ahnenreihe deutschen Soldatentums ist
102
Martin A. Ruehl
would have been even more appalled by Waetzoldt’s little pamphlet Dürers Ritter, Tod und
Teufel (1936), which made an explicit connection between the heroism of the first masterengraving and the heroic turn in German history brought about by the National Socialist
revolution. Adapting Langbehn’s notion of Dürer as a ‘Führer’, Waetzoldt held up the
knight in the engraving as a model and inspiration for the new Germany. Ritter, Tod und
Teufel was an image fit for heroes, he wrote, and had always been appreciated by heroic
souls like Nietzsche and Adolf Hitler.203
In his völkisch cultural history of 1920, entitled Ritter, Tod und Teufel: Der heldische Gedanke,
Hans F.K. Günther, later to achieve sad notoriety under the epithet ‘Rassegünther’ as one of
the chief racial ideologists of the Third Reich, had laid the foundations for the racist reading
of the image that became an interpretative orthodoxy after 1933.204 The most celebrated
pictorial appropriation of Dürer’s image was arguably Hubert Lanzinger’s painting Der
Bannerträger, which showed Hitler as a knight on horseback, in shining armour [see figure
no. 8].205 Lanzinger’s portrait was prominently displayed at the second Great German Art
Exhibition in Munich in July 1938 and frequently reproduced on postcards.206 Alongside
obvious allusions to Wagnerian opera (Lohengrin, Parsifal, Siegfried) and the legend of the
Grail, Der Bannerträger contained powerful visual parallels to Ritter, Tod und Teufel: Hitler’s
der “Reiter” ein Nachfahre aus den nordischen Heldensagen, ein Vorfahre der preußischen Offiziere’.
203
Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Dürers Ritter, Tod und Teufel (Berlin: Stilke, 1936), p. 23: ‘Die heroischen Seelen
lieben diesen Kupferstich — wie Nietzsche es getan hat und wie Adolf Hitler es tut’. Schwerte, Faust, pp.
273 and 353, n. 102, downplays Waetzoldt’s ideological proximity to National Socialism. Hitler’s appreciation
of Dürer’s engraving seems to have been well-known: at the 1936 Reich Party Rally in Nuremberg, he was
presented with a valuable re-print. See A. Faust, ‘Wesenszüge deutscher Weltanschauung und Philosophie’,
Zeitschrift für deutsche Kulturphilosophie 8 (1942), 163; quoted in Joseph Wulf (ed.), Die Bildenden Künste im
Dritten Reich: Eine Dokumentation (Gütersloh: Mohn, 1966), p. 193. Göring gave Hitler no less than 28
drawings by Dürer: see Jonathan Petropolous, Art as Politics in the Third Reich (Chapel Hill: University of
North Carolina Press, 1999), pp. 268–69. According to Otto Thomae, Die Propaganda-Maschinerie: Bildende
Kunst und Öffentlichkeitsarbeit im Dritten Reich (Berlin: Gebrüder Mann, 1978), p. 382, Hitler personally
supported the ‘Albrecht-Dürer-Stiftung’ in 1939 and 1940.
204
See H. F. K. Günther, Ritter, Tod und Teufel: Der heldische Gedanke, 5th edn (Munich: Lehmann, 1937),
esp. pp. 133–34 for Günther’s glorification of Dürer as a ‘Nordic master’. Ritter, Tod und Teufel mainly served
as a pictorial motto for the book, but Günther’s references to Luther (p. 10) and Hutten (p. 8) as well as the
invectives against impressionism (pp. 127–30) suggest that he was familiar at least with certain chapters of its
German Rezeptionsgeschichte. See H. F. K. Günther, Rasse und Stil (Munich: Lehmann, 1926), pp. 7–12, for a
more explicitly racialist interpretation of Dürer as an ‘Aryan’ artist. For an early ‘Faustian’ take on Dürer in
Nazi Germany see I. Fiebig, ‘Deutsche Kunst’, Berliner Lokal-Anzeiger, 31.08.1933: ‘Der nordisch-germanische
Mensch verbindet den Drang nach Wahrheit, nach Erkennen, mit der mystischen Verbundenheit, mit den
naturhaft-metaphysischen Kräften. Er ist zugleich tief religiös wie tief erkenntnisdurstig, er ist — Sinnbild
deutschen Wesens — faustisch. So sind seine Kunstwerke — wie die des deutschesten Menschen: Dürer’
(quoted in Wulf, Die Bildenden Künste, p. 209). See also Faust, ‘Wesenszüge’, p. 163, quoted in Wulf,
p. 193: ‘Wenn ich ein Symbol aufstellen sollte für die weltanschauliche Grundhaltung und für den Weg des
deutschen Geistes durch die Geschichte, so wüßte ich kein besseres zu nennen als Albrecht Dürers “Ritter
mit Tod und Teufel”. [...] Schon Nietzsche bezeichnet ihn als “Symbol unseres Daseins”. Illusionslos und
doch tapfer, unbeirrt dem “Bösen” begegnend mit offenem Visier und geradem Blick, auch im Bewußtsein
des eigenen Untergangs seinen Weg unbeirrt fortsetzend, so reitet der Dürersche Reiter unbeirrt duch die
unwirkliche Welt’.
205
For other variations on the theme of Dürer’s ‘Rider’ in National Socialist art see the respective
engravings by Wilhelm Petersen and Georg Sluyterman von Langeweyde in Mortimer Davidson, Kunst
in Deutschland, 1933–1945: Eine wissenschaftliche Enzyklopädie der Kunst im Dritten Reich (Tübingen: Grabert,
1992), II.1, no. 1034; and II.2, no. 1286.
206
See Frederic Spotts, Hitler and the Power of Aesthetics (London: Hutchinson, 2002), p. 174.
Fig. 8. Hubert Lanzinger, Der Bannerträger (1934/36)
Courtesy of the U.S. Army Center of Military History, Washington DC
103
104
Martin A. Ruehl
rigid posture on the horse, his manner of holding the reins and his full-body armour all
seem to be modelled on Dürer’s knight. Most notably, perhaps, Lanzinger depicted Hitler
with the same steely gaze that Nietzsche had found so fascinating in the horseman. While
Lanzinger accentuated inf lexible and unassailable will power, other Nazi intellectuals
chose to highlight the fatalistic aspects of the knight’s heroism. Thus the literary historian
Hans Naumann depicted Dürer’s image as a ref lection of the German conception of
life as a solitary journey and endless knightly duty.207 In a public lecture of 1944, Hans
Kauffmann, professor of art history at Cologne University and one of the leading German
authorities on Bernini after World War II, singled out its manly courage and noble fatalism
as characteristic of the ‘völkische Substanz’ of Dürer’s art.208 Twenty-five years later, Ernst
Gombrich recalled how Goebbels and other Nazi propagandists appealed to Dürer’s knight
as a ‘symbol of heroic defiance’ in their desperate appeals to the German people at the end
of the war ‘to stand united “against death and devil”.’ 209
Even though he could not possibly have been aware of all its uses and abuses after 1933,
Mann knew, through his reading of Waetzoldt and possibly also from Panofsky, that Ritter,
Tod und Teufel, along with many other works by Dürer, had been exalted into the Nazi
pantheon of German art.210 This knowledge undoubtedly contributed to his revaluation
of the image in the 1940s. A no lesss important factor in this context seems to have been
Ernst Bertram’s espousal of National Socialism. Mann’s correspondence with Bertram
between 1933 and 1937 as well as Bertram’s own statements from this period betray the
extent to which the author of Nietzsche viewed National Socialism through the lens of
his Germanic-Protestant ideology.211 In a much publicized speech of May 1933, delivered
207
Hans Naumann, Der staufische Ritter (Leipzig: Bibliographisches Institut, 1936), pp. 143–44. Brief
sketches of the reception history of Ritter, Tod und Teufel in the Third Reich can be found in Schwerte,
Faust, pp. 271–75, Białostocki, Dürer and his Critics, pp. 239–41, George Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology:
Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich, (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1964), pp. 204–09, and Kuhlemann,
‘The Celebration of Dürer’, pp. 56–57. In his speech on the occasion of the monumental Dürer exhibition
at the Albertina in 2003, the German Foreign Minister reminded his audience of how the engraving
had been ideologically abused between 1933 and 1945: ‘Den Nazis galt er [Dürer] als Säulenheiliger —
Hitler selbst verehrte Dürersche Druckgraphik und sah im Meisterstich “Ritter, Tod und Teufel” sein
Programm, wie er es selbst niedergeschrieben hatte, bildlich umgesetzt...’: J. Fischer, ‘Rede anläßlich der
Eröffnung der Albrecht Dürer-Ausstellung in der Albertina, Wien, am 04.09.2003 in der Wiener Hofburg’,
Bulletin der Bundesregierung Nr 69–1 vom 8. September 2003/BMAA, p. 3; http://archiv.bundesregierung.de/
bulletin/10/524910/attachment/524909_0.pdf [accessed 20 September 2008].
208
H. Kauffmann, ‘Albrecht Dürer als denkender Künstler’, Kriegsvorträge der Rheinischen Friedrich-WilhelmsUniversität Bonn 86 (1944), pp. 7 and 15.
209
Gombrich, ‘The Evidence of Images’, p. 98.
210
On the Nazi appropriation of Dürer see Thomae, Die Propaganda-Maschinerie, who observes that Dürer
was ‘einer der meistbehandelten alten [deutschen] Künstler’ in the Third Reich (p. 212). See also Białostocki,
Dürer and his Critics, pp. 313- 15 and 324–25, and Kuhlemann, ‘The Celebration of Dürer’, pp. 54–56.
211
See Mann’s letter to a student of Bertram’s, who in the summer of 1948 had asked the emigré novelist
to speak out against his teacher’s dismissal by a denazification tribunal: ‘Was uns [i.e. Bertram and Mann]
zu meinem Kummer immer mehr entfremdete, war das politische Virulentwerden seines GermanistenRomantismus, seiner Ergebenheit an einen Blondheitsmythos und Edel-Nationalismus, — mit anderen
Worten: sein begeisterter Glaube an das heraufziehende “Dritte Reich”. [...] [S]eine Zartheit begrüßte
den Barbaren-Einfall von innen, da es von außen keinen mehr gab. Er erwartete von ihm die Erneuerung
der Kultur, die Reinigung, Erhebung, Verherrlichung des Vaterlandes’. Mann to W. Schmitz, 30 July 1948,
in Briefe an Bertram, p. 195. The account of Bertram’s relation to National Socialism in Jappe, Bertram,
pp. 201–45, is largely apologetic; cf. K. O. Conrady, Völkisch-nationale Germanistik in Köln: Eine unfestliche
Erinnerung (Schernfeld: SH-Verlag, 1990) for a much more critical analysis. The most balanced assessment to
105
before students at the University of Cologne, Bertram hailed the brown revolution as
a new chapter in the history of the emancipation, purification and rejuvenation of the
Nordic spirit, which began with the Reformation and reached its erstwhile apogee in
the Wars of Liberation (1813–1815).212 Five years later, he wrote an article for the chief
Nazi newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, which juxtaposed the strength and warrior-like
nature of the new German man, rooted in the soil of his fatherland, with the decadence
and effeminacy of the deracinated Western intellectual. The new Teutonic type, Bertram
declared, embodied the endless yearning of Faust as well as the manly boldness of the
knight in Dürer’s engraving.213
Deutschlin’s discourses on the German national character in Doktor Faustus resonated
with allusions to Betram. His comments on Germany as a nation in a permanent state
of ‘Werden’ echoed the fourth chapter of Bertram’s Nietzsche, entitled ‘Das deutsche
Werden’.214 Similarly, his redolent remark to the effect that after the Reformation Germany
would yet bestow upon the world many a further renewal 215 could be interpreted as a
reference to Bertram’s Cologne speech, which was filled with the palingenetic vocabulary
of National Socialist ideology. Filtered through Zeitblom’s sceptical ‘Erasmian gaze’216 and
placed strategically in the novel’s larger critical-genealogical review of the proto-fascist
currents in Wilhelmine Germany, Deutschlin’s mention of Ritter, Tod und Teufel, therefore,
could be read as a critical reference to Mann’s former friend and an implicit denunciation
of the National Socialist nucleus in his National Protestant mythology of 1918. By slightly
extending Bertram’s heroic Germanic trajectory ‘from Luther to Nietzsche’, Mann turned
it into the negative master teleology of Doktor Faustus: ‘from Luther via Nietzsche to
Hitler’.
The passing reference to Ritter, Tod und Teufel in chapter fourteen barely betrays the
centrality of Bertram’s Nietzschean mythology to the ideological infrastructure of Mann’s
novel. That the protagonist’s life parallels Nietzsche’s is well known, of course; the extent
to which it echoes Bertram’s particular interpretation of this life, however, has been largely
ignored in the critical literature.217 Mann’s ambivalent portrait of Adrian’s personality —
date is Ralph-Rainer Wuthenow’s brief, but astute ‘Nachwort’ in Ernst Bertram, Zwischenland: Ausgewählte
Gedichte, 1911–1955 (Aachen: Rimbaud, 1988), pp. 73–84.
212
Bertram, ‘Deutscher Aufbruch’ (Rede an die akademische Jugend), Westdeutsche akademische Rundschau
III (1933); repr. in Deutsche Zeitschrift (=Der Kunstwart 46, 10), (1933). See also Ernst Bertram, Deutsche
Gestalten (Leipzig: Insel Verlag, 1934).
213
Völkischer Beobachter, (Wiener Ausgabe) 261, 3.12.1938.
214
Bertram, Nietzsche, pp. 64–91. See also Ernst Bertram, ‘Das deutsche Werden’, Frankfurter Zeitung,
02.05.1915, which, as we have seen (n. 97), was known to Mann.
215
Mann, Doktor Faustus, GW vi, 158.
216
See A. U. Sommer, ‘Der mythoskritische “Erasmusblick” : Doktor Faustus, Nietzsche und die
Theologen’, Thomas-Mann-Jahrbuch, 11 (1998), 61–73, convincingly argues that the narrator of Doktor
Faustus, Serenus Zeitblom, was at least partly modelled on Franz Overbeck.
217
The recent analyses of Doktor Faustus by R. Robertson, ‘Accounting for history: Doctor Faustus’, in David
Midgley (ed.), The German Novel in the Twentieth Century (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1993),
pp. 128–48, and S. von Rohr Scaff, ‘Doctor Faustus’, in Ritchie Robertson, The Cambridge Companion to
Thomas Mann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), pp. 168–84, do not even mention Bertram.
See also Michael Beddow, Thomas Mann: Doctor Faustus (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994).
But cf. B. Sørensen, ‘Thomas Manns “Doktor Faustus”. Mythos und Lebensbeichte’, Orbis Litterarum, 13
(1958), 81–97, and Bernhard Böschenstein, ‘Ernst Bertrams Nietzsche — eine Quelle für Thomas Manns
Doktor Faustus’, Euphorion 72, 1 (1978), 68–83.
106
Martin A. Ruehl
sinful self-sufficiency and aristocratic pathos of distance on the one hand, heroic striving
for an artistic ‘Durchbruch’ and Christ-like martyrdom on the other — relied closely
on Bertram’s account of Nietzsche’s Passion against the sombre background image of
Ritter, Tod und Teufel. One of the principal thematic links underlying Mann’s novel, that
between Nietzsche, Protestantism and the legend of Faust, was also prefigured in Bertram’s
Nietzsche. Most importantly, perhaps, it was Bertram who first drew Mann’s attention to
Nietzsche’s significance as symbol and myth.218 His depiction of Nietzsche as an emblem
of Germanness in the chapter ‘Ritter, Tod und Teufel’ in many ways anticipated Mann’s
use of Adrian’s life as an allegory of Germany’s disastrous historical development since the
Reformation and her Faustian soul. But if Mann’s reliance on Bertram strengthened the
allegorical framework of Doktor Faustus, it also blunted the novel’s critical edge. Adopting
Bertram’s interpretation of Nietzsche, he reiterated and, ultimately, reinforced precisely
those Faustian self-mythifications that he sought to unmask as proto-fascist. Within his
literary investigation into the intellectual origins of the Third Reich, the knight-deathand-devil myth of Nietzsche was both a lynchpin and a Trojan horse. In this sense at
least, Mann’s remark that Dürer’s engraving denoted forever Nietzsche’s intellectual
‘Heimatsphäre’ could equally be applied to himself. Even in Doktor Faustus, he did not
manage to fully detach himself from that sphere.219
Between 1918 and 1947, Ritter, Tod und Teufel provided a rich reference point for Mann’s
ref lections on his national and artistic identity. Drawing on Ernst Bertram’s Nietzsche as well
as on earlier Romantic and National Protestant interpretations, Mann used the engraving
in the Betrachtungen to endow his newly created bürgerlich and patriotic persona during
World War I with a heroic, ascetic genealogy that included Nietzsche, Luther and Dürer.
Through Bertram, he came to view Dürer’s horseman as a mythic symbol embodying the
‘ethical’ as well as the demonic aspects of German masterliness and, indeed, Germanness
itself. While Mann’s assessment of this symbol changed dramatically over time, its various
National Protestant and Nietzschean components remained remarkably constant. As we
have seen, the central allegorical nexus in his late opus magnum — Nietzsche, Luther,
Faust, Germany — was essentially the same that had informed the Dürer essay of 1928
and, a decade earlier, the Northern-Protestant-ascetic self-fashioning in the Betrachtungen.
In the light of these continuities, it is perhaps only a slight exaggeration to call Doktor
Faustus the last literary adaptation of an image that for thirty years exerted a most powerful
mythopoeic charm on this German master who did not want to see.
See Reed, Thomas Mann, pp. 327–29.
See J.M. Fischer, ‘Die ethische Luft und der faustische Duft. Zur kommentierten Neuausgabe von
Thomas Manns “Doktor Faustus” ’, Süddeutsche Zeitung, 03.11.2007.
218
219

A MAster froM GerMAny: thoMAs MAnn, Albrecht Dürer

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