To Fight Against This Age by Rob Riemen

Author:Rob Riemen
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: W. W. Norton & Company
Published: 2017-04-04T04:00:00+00:00

Command the last fruits that they shall be full;

give them another two more southerly days,

urge them on to fulfillment and drive

the last sweetness into heavy wine.

Who has no house now, will build him one no more.

Who is alone now, long will so remain,

will wake, read, write long letters

and will in the avenues to and fro

restlessly wander, when the leaves are blowing.

—TRANSLATED BY M. D. HERTER NORTON

II. Diary Pages

Instead of returning to the lowlands, I decided that, now that I had the time, I would travel to another hotel, where I would feel more at home than at Grand Hotel Waldhaus, a place where I’d be able to write my “long letters” about the possibility or impossibility of the return of Europa and the future of the European ideal of civilization.

That other hotel, Schloss Waldersee, lies only two hundred kilometers to the northeast of Grand Hotel Waldhaus in a geographical sense, and historically both hotels date from the same period, the early twentieth century. Yet despite their proximity in space and time, Waldersee and Waldhaus are two quite different worlds. Waldhaus has always been an international, cosmopolitan place where artists, writers, and philosophers like to stay. Waldersee, by contrast, is more a sort of worldly monastery, visited in the past mainly by the German academic elite and the old German aristocracy.

Wolfgang Waldersee, the current owner of the hotel, once told me the fascinating history of his name, explaining why he had never used the title count, had scrapped the nobiliary particle von, and had deliberately chosen to use his grandmother’s surname rather than that of his grandfather Johannes.

Honesty compels me to inform the reader that in reality this hotel still bears the name his grandfather gave it, but for all kinds of reasons Wolfgang cannot change that, however much he might like to. For reasons I explain below, the code observed by his circle of friends is such that out of respect for Wolfgang, we should consistently use the name he would have liked to give the hotel: Waldersee.

The name, the family, and the hotel add up to a story that tells of the fatal collision between the German soul and the European spirit. In this respect, it’s fitting that Schloss Waldersee is located at the heart of “Magic Mountain land,” the area of southern Germany where Thomas Mann wrote his awe-inspiring novel The Magic Mountain in the years before 1933 and that also forms the backdrop to Doctor Faustus, a gripping, largely autobiographical narrative about how the German soul, by arrogantly rejecting a European spirit, was transformed from an angel into a devil.

The story of Schloss Waldersee began with Grandpa Johannes, a brilliant Protestant theologian who wanted not only to write books but to evangelize the world by offering people a place, his Schloss, his castle, where they could be united “with the breath of creation.” In practice, this esoteric ideal amounted to a belief that you must strive to forget your own ego, no longer think about yourself, and instead be absorbed into the great whole, the community of God.

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