The Dedalus Book of German Decadence (2 page)

What, then, is ‘decadent’ about Mann’s early writing? An aestheticism which renders its practitioners incapable of warm, human feeling, a heightened sensitivity, a paralysing glimpse into the heart of things, the cultivation of a blasé and ultra refined lassitude – and above all an exposure to Wagner, with frequently fatal consequences. The short story
Tristan
portrays a sanatorium where Gabriele Klöterjahn and her unlovely suitor swoon in an illicit enjoyment of the ‘Liebestod’; the novel
Buddenbrooks
describes the nervous exhaustion and collapse of Hanno who surrenders to that same opera (the naturalistic descriptions of typhoid fever do not blind the reader to the inference that it was the Wagner delirium which drew a willing victim to his dissolution). But the finest example of decadence in Thomas Mann is the story
Wälsungenblut
(
The Blood of the Wälsungs
) of 1906. In Thomas Mann’s own words it is ‘the story of two pampered creatures, Jewish twins from an over-refined Berlin-West milieu who take the primeval incestuous relationship of Wagner’s Wälsungen-twins as a model for their own sense of luxurious and mocking aloofness.’ Spoilt and cosseted, Siegmund Aarenhold leads a life of sterile boredom: his days pass in emptiness and narcissistic self-reflection. With his twin sister Sieglinde he has an equal partner in elegant and arrogant refinement, and her fiancé, the hapless von Beckerath, is their equal neither in sartorial nor in intellectual matters. It is he who is the blundering Hunding-figure, and it is inevitable that the twins, without him, should be driven to the opera to see
Die Walküre.
Haughty and blasé in their box they watch the performance and cannot refrain, amidst the consumption of Maraschino cherries, from ironic and condescending remarks on both singers and orchestra. Enthusiasm of any kind is alien to their sense of snobbish superiority, but Siegmund particularly feels the powerful surging momentum of Wagner’s work, and the passionate turmoil of the music excites him, causing doubts and an unsettling perturbation. As Wagner’s twins had defied Hunding and passed through ecstasy and tribulation, so Siegmund Aarenhold, nervously agitated despite his cool exterior, sinks with his sister on to the rug in stammering confusion: the Wagner parallels are obvious. But whereas Wagner created out of passionate inspiration it is Siegmund Aarenhold’s tragedy that what was probably his first spontaneous act should be one of narcissism and perversion, born of defiance and vindictiveness (the cuckolding of the ‘goy’ von Beckerath). It is only Wagner who can stimulate powerful responses in Siegmund, responses which, however, result in an act of crude desecration.

Thomas Mann was closely associated with writers like Kurt Martens and Arthur Holitscher (the latter providing a model for the degenerate aesthete Detlev Spinell in
Tristan
). Martens made his reputation in 1898 with the novel
Roman aus der decadence
(
A Novel from the Age of Decadence
), a title which Thomas Mann had wanted as a subtitle for his own novel
Buddenbrooks.
The novel is set in Leipzig in the years 1896–7 and attempts to capture the fin-de-siècle atmosphere prevalent amongst the intellectuals of that city. The hero, Just, is characterised by an enervating lassitude: his erotic entanglements with Alice, the wealthy daughter of an industrialist, drift into paralysis (he fills his room with wilting foliage and hopes, in vain, for stimulation). His attempts to transform a beggar girl into an Amaryllis, a Salome (Wilde and Gustav Moreau are cited), or a great criminal (des Esseintes had prepared the way) get nowhere. Just has read the obligatory Scandinavian literature (Jonas Lie), and Martens’s autobiography also tells of the influence of Arne Garborg (
Tired Souls
). The decadent climax of the novel is the so-called ‘Festival of Death’: Just’s friend Erich von Lüttwitz, having inherited a fortune, decorates his villa in the latest art nouveau style and invites his colleagues to an orgy, the culmination of which is to be his death. Both von Lüttwitz’s escapades and Just’s exhaustion seem symptoms of some deep malaise; it is no coincidence that the latter – as a good decadent should – seeks refuge in the Catholic Church.

Holitscher’s
Der vergiftete Brunnen
(
The Poisoned Well
) (1900) tells of another villa, owned by one Désirée Wilmoth (née Wulp) where dubious and extravagant fantasies are enacted. Désirée, widow of the wealthy Scot McAllinster whom she had met in Monte Carlo, forms a liaison with the young genius Wilmoth (Melmoth?) who dies in mysterious circumstances. After extensive travels she settles in Munich where a host of
literati
dance attendance: the young poet Sebastian Sasse, from Transylvania, falls under her spell. Désirée is a femme fatale with copper-coloured hair, a deathly pallor and blood-red lips, not far removed from that vision of a sphinx-like creature described by Holitscher thus: ‘She was naked to the hips, sitting rigid and upright in a black armchair in the middle of the room. Her hair was red and, parted in the middle, fell over her shoulders and across the back of the chair  …  Her eyes were of pale turquoise and of a deceptive gleam, her lips were cut of dark-violet amethysts. Her nipples, erectile, were of large rubies; a diamond sparkled in her navel.’ Désirée’s dancing is reminiscent of that of Loїe Fuller: images of fire abound. The presence of Wagner is paramount in the bacchanal that Désirée performs to seduce the hapless poet; the Venusberg music from
Tannhäuser
is meant to overwhelm him, as are lascivious eurhythmics. The performance takes place in an enormous conservatory, choked with rank vegetation. Sasse escapes and flees to Belgium, to a town which is obviously Bruges, where he writes his novel (Bruges, together with Venice, being the decadent town par excellence, indebted above all to Rodenbach’s
Bruges la morte
with its descriptions of swans, brackish water and dark courtyards). He returns, healed, to Munich: he has drunk of the ‘poisoned well’ of life, and survives. Holitscher’s story
Von der Wollust und dem Tode
(
Of Lust and Death
) (Munich, 1902) does not end on such a conciliatory note, however, in its portrayal of a grotesque ‘Liebestod’. The hero can only find sexual release in death, silently cutting his wrists and sinking dead upon his beloved during a rendez-vous.

Munich had been the city in which Désirée Wilmoth’s villa stood, as had Aschenbach’s residence and the attic of the prophet who, in Thomas Mann’s story, had exulted in visions of blood and violence where millennia of human domesticity were to be expunged in a new apocalypse. If decadence also revels in perverse cruelty then Hanns Heinz Ewers may also be included. Ewers was also associated with Munich; he had appeared in cabaret there where his grotesquely satirical humour had been exploited to the full. His first literary success were the two selections of bizarre stories
Das Grauen
(
Horror
) (1907) and
Die Bessessenen
(
The Possessed
) (1908); the novel
Der Zauberlehrling oder die Teufelsjäger
(
The Sorcerer’s Apprentice or the Devil’s Huntsmen
) (1909) shocked by its horrifyingly orgiastic scene in which a pregnant girl is crucified and her unborn child transfixed by a pitchfork. The second novel
Alraune. Die Geschichte tines lebenden Wesens
(
Mandrake. The Story of a Living
Creature
) (1911) was immensely popular (a girl is born from the seed of an ejaculating victim of an executioner which is implanted in a prostitute named Alma Raune – the pun is untranslatable – in a nearby hospital): it reached sales of over a quarter of a million in ten years and was filmed twice, the 1928 version being provided by Henrik Galeen (who also wrote the film script for Murnau’s vampire masterpiece
Nosferatu
).
Vampire
appeared in 1920;
Nachtmahr
(Nightmare), another collection of horror stories, followed in 1922. Ewers considered himself to be the herald of a new fantastic satanist movement that looked back to Poe and de Sade: the stories contain portrayals of stock-in-trade horror (spider women) and various forms of commercial nastiness.
Der Fundvogel
(1928) is a sensational account of an enforced sex change. Ewers was ready and eager to serve the Nazi cause; in 1932 he published an account of the escapades of the
Freikorps
and then, probably on Hitler’s recommendation, the biography of the pimp and martyr Horst Wessel,
Ein deutsches Schicksal
(
A German Destiny
) (1934). His earlier writing, not surprisingly, was found to be incompatible with the promulgation of rude Nordic health and Ewers was pronounced degenerate (‘entartet’). But fascism is fed by some very questionable nourishment; the links between sadomasochism and fascism are natural ones and the eroticization of that movement of which Susan Sontag has written (
Fascinating Fascism,
1974) shows that Ewers, for all his degeneracy, may not have been such a unusual precursor after all.

Sadism  …  masochism – any account of what decadence was, must needs deal with these terms. The writers of French decadence, as Mario Praz has told us, were well aware of the ‘divine Marquis’, and cruelty and perversion abound in Huysmans, Octave Mirbeau, Jean Lorrain and others. Our concern here is with Leopold Sacher-Masoch whose relationship with decadence is oblique but whose name, thanks primarily to Richard von Krafft-Ebing, is redolent of an eccentric and perverse sexuality. This Ruthenian writer published his best known novel
Venus im Pelz
(
Venus in Furs
) in 1869, some fifteen years, that is, before
A rebours :
it was meant to be part of a cycle known as
Das Vermächtnis Kains
(
The Legacy of Cain
). The brutality of de Sade is rarely found in Sacher-Masoch, who prefers the fetish, the artificial and the blurring of the human and the image, the statuesque and the atmospheric: the shrill confrontation of light and darkness in de Sade’s castles gives way to hotels, sanatoria and heavy curtains where Venus-Wanda holds sway. Sacher-Masoch was fêted by the literary establishment when he visited Paris in 1886 and certain of his stories (including
Femmes slaves
) were published in 1889 and 1890 in
La revue des deux monies.
Rachilde’s
Monsieur Vénus,
a novel which, on its appearance in Brussels in 1884, was greeted by a fine of two thousand francs and a two year prison sentence, owes much to Sacher-Masoch (the heroine, Raoule, delights in humiliating Jacques, her ostensible lover: after his death she transforms him into a wax doll in which his hair, nails, eyelashes and teeth have been implanted). Sacher-Masoch is in the curious situation of having his work virtually ignored whilst his name became universally known and vulgarised. There is no reference in German decadent literature to his work; a later echo, however, is found in Franz Kafka, particularly in his masterpiece
Die Verwandlung
(
The Metamorphosis
), with its picture of a lady in fur, the name ‘Gregor’ and numerous punishment fantasies. Kafka’s fearful machine (
In der Strafkolonie
(
The Penal Colony
)) may also have its precursor im Sacher-Masoch’s
Jungbrunnen
(
The Fountain of Youth
), whose heroine uses an ‘iron virgin’ to torture her lovers. The tension between debility, power and desire was one which Kafka well understood.

In 1874 Sacher-Masoch published a somewhat titillating account of the depravities and perversions of Viennese aristocratic ladies in
Die Messalinen Wiens.
It was in Vienna that Hermann Bahr, as we know, analysed the new direction in the arts: his novel
Die gute Schule
exulted in portrayals of accidie and excess. Bahr emphasised the role played by ‘nerves’ in French decadent literature (Paul Bourget); ‘neurasthenia’ seemed to be a common disorder, a modern epidemic. It was Hofmannsthal who formulated the Wildean statement ‘To be modern means to like antique furniture – and youthful neuroses’. A cult of the ‘soul’ is adumbrated, also the cult of the artist-figure whose nerves are so finely tuned that he can pick up private sensations and transmute them into art. Aestheticism, the conscious refinement of the senses (and also of the personality itself) is very much in evidence. But whether this necessarily can be equated with decadence is another matter; impressionism would seem to be a more appropriate label for this narcissistic introspection, these exquisite rêveries. A writer like Felix Dörmann strove to love ‘all things abnormal and sick’, but the pose is unconvincing.

What, then, was specifically decadent about the Vienna of this time? Certain aspects of the painting of Klimt (
Judith
), Bahr’s sensational novel, Mahler’s morbidity and fascination with death and transience (despite the desperate attempts at life-affirmation), the obsession with sexuality in its stranger forms and an awareness of sterile refinements. Was it a city of neuroses? It was a world analysed by Sigmund Freud and observed with detachment by Freud’s
Doppelgänger
Arthur Schnitzler whose work frequently reflects a world of repression, sexual tension and guilt. But Schnitzler’s self-deprecating irony and gentle scepticism preclude any attempt to label him as ‘decadent’. (The famous
Traumnovelle
certainly dabbles with the accoutrements of decadence – black silk, naked nuns, crucifixion – but the dreams and visions are not simply there to give a
frisson
; they represent the working out of a married couple’s repressed feelings of guilt.) There is no preoccupation with degeneration in Schnitzler, albeit mental illness is frequently encountered in his writing; there is a humour which is sadly lacking in the purveyors of the
outré
and the abnormal. Schnitzler recorded the poses of the coffee-house
literati
with wry amusement: he did not castigate them as did the satirist Karl Kraus. Worthy of mention is the Salzburg writer Georg Trakl who lived sporadically in Vienna and Innsbruck before enlisting in 1914 and dying by his own hand in a psychiatric hospital in Cracow later that year. Trakl was much indebted to the French in his early poetry, and the prose narrative
Verlassenheit
(
Desolation
) with its portrayal of the Count who silently awaits his own dissolution brings Roderick Usher forcibly to mind, Poe filtered, as it were, through Mallarmé. Usher’s passive assent to his own decline and his bizarre relationship with his sister fascinated many of the artists of fin de siècle France (Debussy had made sketches for an opera on their story): the minute yet ubiquitous fungus that covers the whole of the house in
Usher
and the evil water of the adjacent lake are also found in Trakl’s obsession with putrefaction. The overwrought, over-ripe passages in Trakl, the poisoned plants, sultry Catholicism and, above all, the theme of incest – the decadent sin par excellence, sweet and accursed – put Trakl very much within the decadent camp, as does the sadomasochism of
Blaubart.
But Trakl did not remain a Felix Dörmann; the prurience of decadence and the effulgence of symbolism are transcended in the last utterances, which point to a mystical Expressionism.