Orbis Litterarum (1982), 37, 122-133

Thomas Mann and the Theory of “Crystalline Beauty”

Claude Gandelman, Ben Gurion University of the Negev, Israel

Chapter I11 of Thomas Mann’s Doktor Fuustus introduces a series of

experiments in the natural sciences, in particular experiments
concerning nonorganic and organic crystallisation.The metaphor of
crystals and crystallisation, far from being a secondary motiv in the
novel, links Doktor Fuustus with the theory of the “crystalline
beauty” which has its roots in Hegel’s lectures on aesthetics but will
later be developed further by art historians like Riegl and W orringer.
Just as, for them, the crystal metaphor was a metaphor for abstrac-
tion in art, it is, for Thomas Mann, a metaphor of the dodecaphonic
music of Adrian Leverkuhn.

From t h e very beginning, Doktor Faustus is placed u n d e r the aegis of crystalline

abstraction.
In early childhood, t h e composer A d r i a n Leverkiihn - Mann’s “Faust” - was
exposed b y his father - t h e “ T e m p t o r ” or Versucher - to t h e beauty o f ice, to t h e
beauty o f t h e non-organic.
First, there were the ice crystals, t h e structure of which so fascinated the
father:

“Ein verwandtes Gefallen fand er an Eisblumen, und halbe Stunden lang konnte er
sich an Wintertagen, wenn diese kristallinische Niederschlage die bauerlich
kleinen Fenster des Buchelhauses bedeckten, mit blossem Auge und durch seine
Vergrosserungsglas in ihre Struktur vertiefen”’

A b o v e all, there w a s the beauty of t h e non-organic arabesques of “sand music”:

“ . . . Wir bekamen zuweilen das Experiment der sichtbaren Musik zu sehen. Zu

den wenigen physikalischen Apparaten, iiber die Adrians Vater verfiigte, gehorte
eine runde und frei schwebende, nur in der Mitte auf einem Zapfen ruhende
Glasplatte, auf der dieses Wunder sich abspielte. Die Platte war namlich mit
feinem Sande bestreut, und vermittelst eines alten Cellobogens, mit dem er von
oben nach unten an ihrem Rande hinstrich, versetzte er sie in Schwingungen, nach
welchen der erregte Sand sich zu erstaunlich prazisen und mannigfachen Figuren
und Arabesken verschob und ordnete. Diese Gesichtakustik, worin Klarheit und
Geheimnis, das Gesetzliche und Wunderliche reizvoll genug zusammentraten,
gefiel uns Knaben sehr.”’
0105-7510/82/020122-12 $02.50/0 0 1 9 8 2 Munksgaard, Copenhagen
Thomas Mann: Theory of “Crystalline Beauty” 123
~ ~~

True, the experiments with the non-organic were not always beautiful.
There was, for instance, the experiment of the “devouring drop”:

“ . . . ein Tropfen, sage ich, ist kein Tier, auch kein primitivstes, nicht einmal eine
Amobe, man nimmt nicht an, dass er Appetit verspurt, Nahrung zu ergreifen, das
Bekommliche zu behalten, das Unbekommliche abzulehnen weiss. Eben dies aber
tat unser Tropfen. Er hing abgesondert in einem Glase Wasser, worin Jonathan
ihn . . . untergebracht hatte. Was er nun tat, war folgendes. Er nahm ein winziges
Glasstabchen, eigentlich nur ein Fadchen von Glas, das er mit Schellack
bestrichen hatte, zwischen die Spitzen einer Pinzette und fuhrte es in der Nahe des
Tropfens. Nur das war es, was jener tat, das Ubrige tat der Tropfen. Er warf an
seiner Oberflache eine kleine Erhohung, etwas wie einen Empfangnishugel auf,
durch den er das Stabchen der Lange nach in sich aufnahm. Dabei zog er sich
selbst in die Lange, nahm Birnengestalt an, damit er sine Beute ganz ein-
schliesse . . . und begann , . . indem er allmahlich sich wieder rundete, zunachst
eine Eiform annahm, den Schellackaufstrich des Glasstabchens abzuspeisen und
in seinem Korperchen zu ~ e r t e i l e n . ” ~

Presented in Chapter 111 of Doktor Faustus, this series o f experiments with the
non-organic is what the “temptation” of “Faust” really consists in.
Jonathan Leverkuhn displayed under the gaze of his son a model for his own
artistic creation, a prototype for his new music to come: the “crystalline” model.
Later Adrian, the “daemonic composer” - as his father had been a “daemonic
experimentator” - would create a music conceived as an image or icon of
crystalline ice and sand arabesques. The crystallometric structure of sand and ice
would, thus, become the very structure of dodecaphonic composition.

The “sand music”

The experiment showing this “mimicry” of music by sand was probably culled
from Nietzsche’s works. This is not very surprising, given the fact that Adrian
Leverkiihn, in Mann’s own admission, was modeled after N i e t z ~ c h eActually
.~
the experiment appears in Nietzsche’s early essay, “Of Truth and Lie in the
Extramoral Sense” where it is given its true name “The Chladny Experiment,” by
the name of the Hungaro-German Aufkfiirung scientist and music lover who
invented it in order to show that the communication of vibrations in material
bodies is subject to constant mathematical laws.
Nietzsche used this experiment for totally different purposes. What he wanted
to show was that words designating things or images of things are no more
124 Claude Gandelman

capable of revealing the hidden reality of those things than “sand music” is
capable of informing us about the reality of true acoustic music.
Thus Nietzsche writes:

“Man kann sich einen Menschen denken, der ganz taub ist und nie eine
Empfindung des Tones und der Musik gehabt hat: wie dieser etwa die chlad-
nischen Klangfiguren im Sande anstaunt, ihre Ursachen im Erzittern der Saite
findet und nun darauf schworen wird, jetzt, miisse er wissen, was die Menschen
den ‘Ton’ nennen, so geht es uns allen mit der Sprache. Wir glauben etwas von den
Dingen selbst zu wissen, wenn wir von Baumen, Farben, Schnee und Blumen
reden, und besitzen doch nichts als Metaphern der Dinge, die den urspriinglichen
Wesenheiten ganz und gar nicht entsprechen. Wie der Ton als Sandfigur, so nimmt
sich das ratselhafte X des Dings an sich einmal als Nervenreiz, dann als Bild,
endlich als Laut US."^

In other words, the “sand music” metaphor is used by Nietzsche to show the non-
iconic character of verbal language. Words are no more iconic images of things
than Chladny’s sand arabesques are icons of music. Words are mere indices of
things, just as the “sand music” is an index of violin music.
The novel Doktor Faustus is the description of a veritable reversal of this state
of things:
Father Leverkuhn ‘mistakes’ an index for an icon and regards his sand music
as a true icon of music. Then his son Adrian, Thomas Mann’s daemonic
composer, creates a music conceived as an icon of sand arabesques. The sand
configurations become the denotatum, the model. The new music is an icon of
the crystalline structure of sand.
This crystalline or mineral character of the new music becomes particularly
obvious in C h a p t e r VIII, when A d r i a n declares t h a t he wants t o achieve t h e
creation of “non-organic instrumental tones,” anorganischen Instrumenten-
kliinge,6 ( D F 94) and purports to create a “strict law” of composition in order to
“chill” organic music: “Das Gesetz, jedes Gesetz, wirkt erkaltend und die Musik
hat so vie1 Eigenwarme, Stallwarme, Kuhwarme . . . dass sie allerlei gesetzliche
Abkiihlung brauchen kann . . .
By the time we reach Chapter XXII, Adrian has, indeed, accomplished “the
strict style,” that is “die vollstandige Integrierung aller musikalischen Dimen-
sionen, ihre Indverenz gegeneinander kraft vollkommener Organisation.”’
And he pursues: “Jeder Ton der Gesamten Komposition, melodisch und
harmonisch, miisste sich iiber seine Beziehung zu dieser vorbestimmten Grundreihe
Thomas Mann: Theory of “CrystallineBeauty” 125
[strie] auszuweisen haben. Keiner diirfte wiederkehren, ehe alle anderen erschienen
sind. Keiner diirfte auftreten . . . Es gabe keine freie Note mehr. Das wiirde ich
strengen Satz nennen.”9
And Adrian announces the coming of a new aesthetic in which “musical
organisation” would be “heard”: “Ordnung wiirde man horen, und ihre Wahr-
nehmung wiirde eine ungekannte asthetische Genugtuung gewahren. ’”’
“Ordnung wiirde man horen . . . what an astonishing sentence! But these
”

tones, none of which has any priority over its neighbor, which must be
absolutely “indifferent” or equivalent one to the other in such a manner that only
the Gesamtkonstruktion of the whole system may come to the fore, are they not
veritable icons of the grains of sand?
Indeed, what can be left of a music characterized by the Indifferenz von
Harmonik und Melodik if not the “silicate” beauty of the structure, in the
mathematical or geometrical sense of the word, as the one and only absolute?
Like ice crystals, these “symmetrisch-figurlichen, streng mathematischen und
regelmassigen” creations, Leverkuhn’s “tones,” are strict and symmetrical. They
are also cold (here one thinks of the adjective “cool” as applied to Jazz, or to
MacLuhan’s definition of modern art as a “cool medium”).
One can now understand why Thomas Mann uses the archaic word Tonsetzer
(“setter of tones”) to designate his abstract composer. Although the modern
reader may not be aware of it, this word, in Doktor Faustus, loses its obsolete
overtones and reveals the true character of musical activity as conceived by
Thomas Mann: the “setting” of tones - or rather half-tones, since what is being
described is dodecaphonic music - of equal values in order to construct a “strict
structure,” a strict Gesamtkonstruktionwhose mathematical configuration is the
only element that counts and the only thing which must be “listened to.”
For Adrian, the geometric circumvolutions of Chladny are the concrete
Wesen, being, of a new music which is “non-metaphorical” in the Nietzschean
sense, a pure structure.
Adrian, following the Nietzschean critique of traditional art - to be
condemned as “metaphor” - rejects traditional tonal music as the “camou-
flaged” icon of mathematical relations, as the obsolete disguising of the
“authentic” in music: the underlying mathematical construct.
Adrian’s music is a return to the Struktur seibst, to the “strict” underlying
mathematical framework.
Now, we understand that Adrian was fascinated by his father’s experiment
with “sand music” because he had the sudden intuition of a new music whose
126 Claude Gandelman

correspondence with sand or crystalline particles in general was structural and

isomorphic.
As a matter of fact, such an intuition is not only of Nietzschean origin. We
shall see that it forms a thematic red thread in Germany since Hegel’s Aesthetik
and down to the theory of “crystalline beauty” formulated by Alo’is Riegl.

The theory of cristalline beauty

Doktor Faustus is not the first work in which Thomas Mann presented the non-
organic as a model for art. “The dead beauty of crystals” is present in his work as
early as the “Snow” chapter in his MugicMountain, when Hans Castorp becomes
literally fascinated by the structure of snow crystals:

Sie schienen formlose Fetzchen, aber er hatte mehr als einmal ihresgleichen unter
seiner guten Linse gehabt und wusste wohl, aus was fur zierlichst genauen kleinen
Kostbarkeiten sie sich zusammensetzten, Kleinodien, Ordenssternen, Brillanta-
graffen, wie der getreueste Juwelier sie nicht reicher und minuzioser hatte
herstellen konnen, -ja, es hatte mit all diesem leichten, lockeren Puderweiss, das in
Massen den Wald beschwerte, das Gebreite bedeckte, und iiber das seine
Fussbretter ihn trugen, denn doch eine andere Bewandtnis als mit dem heimischen
Meersande, an den es erinnerte: das waren bekanntliche nicht Steinkorner, woraus
es bestand, es waren Myriaden im Erstarren zu ebenmassiger Vielfalt kristallisch
zusammengeschossener Wasserteilchen, - Teilchen eben der anorganischen
Substanz, die auch das Lebensplasma, den Pflanzen-, den Menschenleib quellen
machte, - und unter den Myriaden von Zaubersternchen in ihrer untersichtigen,
dem Menschenauge nicht zugedachten, heimlichen Kleinpracht war nicht eines
dem anderen gleich; eine endlose Erfindungslust in der Abwandlung und
allerfeinsten Ausgestaltung eines und immer desselben Grundschemas, des
gleichseitig-gleichwinkligen Sechsecks, herrschte da; aber in sich selbst war jedes
der kalten Erzeugnisse von unbedingtem Ebenmass und eisiger Regelmassigkeit,
ja, dies war das Unheimliche, Widerorganische und Lebensfeindliche daran; sie
waren zu regelmassig, die zum Leben geordnete Substanz war es niemals in diesem
Grade, dem Leben schauderte vor der genauen Richtigkeit, es empfand sie als
todlich, als das Geheimnis des Todes selbst, und Hans Castorp glaubte zu
verstehen, warum Tempelbaumeister der Vorzeit absichtlich und insgeheim kleine
Abweichungen von der Symmetrie in ihren Saulenordnungen angebracht hatten.”

We see that Castorp’s fascination was the prefiguration of Leverkuhn’s musical

mimicry of non-organic crystallometric sand.
But no matter whether the idea of a Faustian “crystalline music” was already
in gestation in Mann’s subconscious mind at the time of the composition of the
Zauberberg, the last sentence o f the passage reveals the source of Thomas
Thomas Mann: Theory of “Crystalline Beauty” 127
Mann’s concept of the cold as an artistic Inferno in his work t o come. Clearly, it
is a reference to the work of the Austrian Kunsthistoriker, Alois Riegl, perhaps
even, more specifically, to his Spatromische Kunstindustrie.

“We have discovered a new category of beauty” Riegl writes: [wir haben] eine
andere Art der Schonheit vorgefunden die in der strengsten symmetrischenKomposi-
tion zum Ausdruck gelangt und die wir die kristallinisch nennen durfen, weil sie das
erste und ewige Form-gesetz der leblosen Materie bildet und der absoluten Schonheit
(stofflichen Individualitat), die freilich nur gedacht werden kann, verhaltnismassig
am nachsten steht . . . Freilich ist diese hochste gesetzliche Schonheit keine leben-
dige.’2

Riegl goes on to explain - and it is this explanation which is almost literally

reproduced by Mann in the above-quotation - that the architects of the late
Roman Empire intentionally “broke up” the excessively systematic lines of the
Greek orders whose “strictness” suggested to them the idea of death.
Despite his claim, Riegl is not the discoverer of the crystalline idea in art.
Long before him “art as crystal” can be traced to Hegel’s Aesthetik.
In the second part of the lecture entitled “Die symbolische Kunstform”
section: “Aegyptische Anschauung und Darstellung des Toten Pyramiden,”
Hegel calls the Egyptian pyramids “monstrous crystals,” ungeheure Kristalle,
representing, through their own form “the kingdom of Death and the Invisible,”
das Reich des Todes und des Unsichtbaren.”
For Hegel, the beauty of crystals is the beauty of death. And yet, this idea was
never developed into a coherent theory in the Aesthetik. It remained there as a
mere Motiv and subchapter.
Without recognizing his debt to Hegel, Riegl nevertheless mentions the
Egyptian pyramid as the first prototype of “crystalline beauty,” and tells us that
the pyramid, with its “crystalline architecture” and “crystalline external shape,”
kristallinische Form des Ausseren, is a very appropriate representation of death.
Like Hegel, Riegl constantly emphasizes the “dead character” of kristal-
Iinische Schonheit which is “no living beauty” (sie ist keine Iebendige Schonheit).
Thus, the “mimicry” of non-organic crystallometry by artists is not only
conducive to the creation of “cool” art, it is also a mimicry of death, an imitatio
mortis.
Thus, when Thomas Mann declares, through the lips of Hans Castorp, that
the ice crystal contains the secret of death (das Geheimnis des Todes), he is
certainly exploiting Riegl’s aesthetic discoveries. Riegl’s concepts had in fact
been popularized by Wilhelm Worringer’s Abstraktion und Einfiihlung. This
128 Claude Gandelman

essay, first published in 1908, offered a program for the entire German
Expressionist movement, and it is altogether unlikely that Mann, like all
German intellectuals of the period, should not have known, at least in broad
outline, the thesis it presented.
In fact, certain expressions in the Zauberberg text remind us of Worringer
rather than Riegl. For instance, Mann speaks of the “anti-organic, the life-
denying character” of the crystals (das Widerorganische undLebensfeindliche der
Krystallen) while in Abstraktion und Einfiihlung, Worringer speaks of . . . die
“

Lebensunterdriickung, wie sie sich Z.B. in byzantinischen Mosaiken manife~tiert”‘~

or of . . . der Abstraktionsdrang der seine Schonheit im lebenverneinenden
“

Anorganischen, im Kristallinischen findet.”15

Let us also note that in the Zauberberg, the snow crystals are associated and
compared to sand-crystals,16 just as they are in DoktorFaustus. Thus, we see that
a secondary motif in the first novel prefigures what is to become a central theme
in the second.
In the same way, it is almost possible to say that Worringer himself prefigures
the aesthetic attitude of the composer Leverkuhn when he declares that, in the
sphere of abstraction: “das Leben als solches wird als Storung des asthetischen
Genusses empfunden.
The humour that Hans Castorp displays in the passage quoted above is an
intellectual humour that depends to a large extent on a knowledge of the
aesthetic ideas of Riegl and Worringer. For instance, when he is on the point of
renouncing the effort of continuing to walk, and is about to stretch out in the
snow and die, Castorp says to himself that it would be too stupid, after all, to
disappear under an “idiotically symmetrical crystallometry”’8 and to be “buried
in hexagonal crystalline ~ymmetricality.”’~ In these two examples, we feel that
certain passages in Riegl, especially those concerning human and animal forms
that have become “dead” in “falling under the abstract law of crystallisation”20
are not far distant.
In effect, Castorp’s peregrination in snow and ice is a voyage in abstract art.
Further - let us repeat it - it is a voyage that prefigures that of Adrian Leverkuhn
in crystalline abstraction.
It is interesting to observe that Mann never mentions Riegl or Worringer in his
correspondence or in his philosophical and literary essays or, again, in The
genesis of Doctor Faustus (DieEntstehung desDoktor Faustus). However this may
be, we believe that we have given sufficient proof of the writer’s familiarity with
the aesthetic theories of the two art historians - ideas which were substantially a
Thomas Mann: Theory of “Crystalline Beauty” 129
part of the cultural atmosphere in Germany at the turn of the century and until
the coming into power of the Nazis.
In the wake of the books of Riegl and Worringer, the equation of modernity -
and especially of the non-representative in art -with crystalline beauty is almost
universal in Mann’s time, in the German world.
Theodor Daubler, the most outspoken porte-parole of Expressionism, calls
Kandinsky’s first “non-objective” paintings: “Decision-crystals,’’ “ Wahrzeichen-
verglasuren, Entscheidungskristalle.’”’ He also described the paintings of
Munch as “mimicries” of the non-organic, images which “besinnen sich ihrer
Herkunft im stillen Tale der Kristalle . . . Noch fabeln sie zu einander: ‘als ich
Obelisk war’. Einige alte, versponnene, ganz gewitterte Greise unter ihnen sagen,
als Pyramiden waren sie dagestanden. Sie hoffen bestimmt alle miteinander auf das
Tal der Kristalle.”22
And again: “Bei Munch ist vie1 Eisbliimiges . . . Einmal. . . streckt eine Blume
. . . einen schwarzen Kristallsarg hoch empor in die unsichtbar ragenden Kristall-
entfaltungen, von denen wir bloss wissen. ’”’
Painters too, made “crystal paintings,” for instance, Munch’s “In the hand of
Crystals” and Erich Heckel’s “Day of Crystal.”
But it was certainly Paul Klee who wrote the most moving thoughts
concerning modern art as a mimicry of the crystalline. He actually went so far as
to describe the abstract artist as a man engaged in the process of becoming
himself crystal.
In his Tagebiicher, one reads:

“Das Herz welches fur diese Welt schlug, ist in mir zu Tode getroffen . . . Ob nun
der kristallinische Typ aus mir wird?
Ein Bruchfeld von unechten Elementen zur Bildung unreiner Kristalle. So ist es
Heute.
Aber dann: einst blutete die Driise. Ich meinte zu sterben, Krieg und Tod. Kann
ich denn sterben, ich Kristall? Ich Kristall.”
(Entries 950-951 for the year 1915).24

As a matter of fact, it is this literal crystallization of the crystal-mimicking artist

which is the theme of the last part of Doktor Faustus. It is this aspect I am now
going to turn to.

The crystallization of the mimic

Abstract artistic creation, the creation of dodecaphonic music is described in
130 Claude Gandelman

terms of a “cooling” of the artist to the point of his becoming “ice.” This is done
in the “Mephisto” chapter of Doktor Faustus, Chapter XXV.
It is Mephistopheles - the Mephistopheles within Doctor Faust - which
explains the process at work within the artist: “Cold we want you!”, “Kaltwollen
wir dich . . . Liebe ist dir verboten insofern sie warmt . . . Kalt wollen wir dich, dass
kaum die Flammen der Produktion heiss genug sein sollen, dich darin zu warmen. In
sie wirst du fliichten aus deiner Lebenskalte . . , ” (332-333).
Seen in terms of thermodynamics, one could say that the Doktor Faustus is a
reversal of Goethe’s Faust. In the latter, we have an old man who “exchanges” his
coldness for the warmth of a young body, whereas in the former, we have a
young man who swaps the warmth of youth for the cold of abstract musical
creation.
As a matter of fact, the “becoming ice” of the composer is the perfect
punishment for the creator of crystalline “sand music.”
For mimics must be punished, as, indeed, they are punished - by death - in
other works of Thomas Mann, such as Der Tod in Venedig or Die Betrogene.
And there is a philosophical and aesthetical reason for this punishment ofthe
artist-mimic. In Doktor Faustus what must be punished is the deshumanisation
of abstract art, “la deshumanizacih del arte,” to borrow Ortega’s phrase.
A well-known thesis of Thomas Mann in his Faustus is that there is a causal
relation between aesthetic “deshumanisation” or “desanthropomorphisation”
of artistic products and political deshumanisation - that of Nazi Germany.
He who eliminates the human element - be it as “reference” - in his work, is
bound to eliminate the human in his emotions, in himself. What is left, then, is
the “strict organisation,” (“der strenge Satz”), the “mystic of mathematics” or
Zahlenmystik, that characterize the abstract artist. This is what Serenus
Zeitblom, Adrian’s friend, calls “the preparation of barbarity in oneself,” die
Vorbereitung der Barbarie in sich ~elbst.~’
Of course, the condemnation and punishment of Adrian Leverkuhn is also a
condemnation of Thomas Mann by Thomas Mann himself. The “confession”
aspect of the novel is well known.26
Thus, the mimicry of the crystalline is punished by the internal crystallization
of the composer himself.
In Doctor Faustus, not only does the composer of crystalline abstractions
become “cold”(“Cold we want you to be . . . ,” etc.), but his conscious mimicry of
the crystallometry of sand and ice, in composing his music, is punished by the
internal morbid crystallization of his own nervous system.
Thomas Mann: Theory of “Crystalline Beauty” 131
Thus the syphilitic process in him is actually described by Thomas Mann in
terms of a mimicry of crystals. For instance, the L~mbalwanderungen’~of the
spirochaetes in the body of the composer “ape” the “devouring drop,” the
fressende Tropfen, of non-organic liquid shown him by his father.
Similarly, the osmotic progress of the germs inside the brain of Adrian
Leverkuhn are described as mimicries of the osmotic process within the non-
organic world as presented by his father in the “Temptation” chapter, Chapter
111. When told of the syphilitic infection which progresses in him by Mephisto-
pheles, Adrian exclaims: “Auch eine Verkiindigung. Ich werde osmotische
Gewachse ziehen.”28
Yet, the reader knows that the first “Annunciation” already took place in the
“Temptation” chapter.
As a matter of fact, allusions to this chapter are explicit in Mephisto’s speech
in Chapter XXV:

“ D a werden dir sine pudore aus der Apothekensaat osmotische Gewachse

spriessen . . . um Osmose, um Liquordiffusion, um den Proliferationsvorgang
handelt sichs bei dem ganzen Zauber. Ihr habt da den Lumbalsack mit der
pulsierenden Liquorsaule darin, der reicht ins Zerebrale, zu den Hirnhauten, in
deren Gewebe die Schleichende venerische Meningitis am leisen, verschwiegenen
Werke ist . . . ’r29

The allusion to the father’s experiment with crystals (“the apothecary’s

sowings,” “osmotic growths,” etc.) is unmistakable. We have reached the end,
when he who gave in to “temptation” and dealt in the crystalline mimicry of
music must be punished.
At the end, the mimic himself becomes the thing he was mimicking. The
creator of crystalline abstractions is rewarded by the actual crystallization of his
own organs.
Like Klee, Adrian Leverkiihn might have uttered the agonized cry: “Zch
Kris tall!”

NOTES
1. Quotations from the Doktor Faustus are taken from the 1956 (S. Fischer Verlag)
edition.
2. pp. 30-31.
3. p. 28.
4. References to Nietzsche are numerous in Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus
(Bermann-Fischer, 1949). Several critical studies deal with this matter. See,
132 Claude Gandelman

particularly, G. Bergsten: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Source and Structure
of the Novel (Chicago and London, 1969) esp. pp. 55-60.
5. See Nietzsche essay: “Ueber Wahrheit und Luege im aussermoralischen Sinne,”
Werke X (Kroner, Stuttgart, 1917-1926) p. 194.
6. Doktor Faustus p. 94.
7. Ibid., p. 94.
8. Ibid., p. 255.
9. Ibid., p.255-256.
10. Ibid., p. 257.
11. Der Zauberberg (Fischer, Berlin, 1925) pp. 231-232.
12. Cf. Die Spatromische Kunstindustrie (Druck- u. Verlagsanstalt der osterr. Staats-
druckerei, Wien, 1927) pp. 90-91. The first and second edition of this work appeared
respectively in 1901 and 1905.
13. Cf. Vorlesungen ueber die Aesthetik (Suhrkamp, 1970) pp. 458-460.
14. Cf. Abstraktion und Einfiihlung (6. Auflage, Piper, Munchen, 1918) p. 18. The first ed.
appeared in 1908.
15. Ibid., p. 4.
16. Indeed, the snow crystals suggest to Hans Castorp “den heimischen Meersande” (Der
Zauberberg, p. 23 1).
17. Abstraktion u. Einfiihlung, p. 31.
18. Der Zauberberg p. 240: “bedeckt werden durch blodsinning regelmassig Kristallo-
metrie,” p. 240.
19. Ibid., 240 : “zugedeckt werden durch hezagonale Regelmassigkeit.”
20. “ . . . unter das absolute Gesetz des Kristallinismus gebeugt.” Die Spatrom. Kunst-
industr.. p. 227.
21. Cf. T. Daubler, Dichtungen u. Schriften, Hrsg. F. Kemp (Miinchen, Kosel, 1956) p.
835. The essays on Kandinsky, Munch, Klee, Chagall and others originally appeared
in the Neue Rundschau (27-1916) then in bookform: Der neue Standpunkt (Dresden,
1916).
22. Ibid., p. 837.
23. Ibid., p. 842.
24. P. Klee, Tagebiicher (DuMont Schauberg, Cologne, 1957) p. 323, entries 950,951 for
1915. Incidentally, Klee, too, was a “temptor,” ein Versucher. According to Jurgen
Spiller “Klee possessed a collection of natural objects that he used in studying the
nature, appearance, and structure of the most diverse organisms. He collected
algae . . . He brought sea-urchins, sea-horses, corals and molluscs from Sicily . . . He
collected butterflies and stones, crystals and petrified plants, amber, calcite crystals
on colored sandstone, quartzes and mica.. . ” The ThinkingEye(Lond0n 1961) p. 24.
25. Doktor Faustus, p. 495.
26. On the “confession” aspect of Doctor Faustus, see B. A. Ssrensen, “Thomas Mann’s
Doktor Faustus. Mythos und Lebensbeichte,” Orbis Litterarum, 13, (1958) pp. 81-97.
27. Doktor Faustus p. 313; transl. p. 235.
28. Ibid., 323: “Auch eine Verkundigung. Ich werde osmotische Gewachse ziehen.”
Transl., p. 242.
29. Ibid., p. 313.
Thomas Mann: Theory of “Crystalline Beauty” 133
Acknowledgement

The author expresses his thanks To the Commission for Basic Research of the Israel
Academy of Science for a research grant which made this article possible.

Claude Gandelman. Born 1936. Ph.D. Associate Professor (Comparative Literature)

Ben Gurion University, Israel. Has published articles on Kafka, Joyce and semiotics.