Simian vituperation as multi-theatre asset.
‘What, then, does the “coloured” world include? Not only Africa, the Indians – as well as the Negroes and half-breeds – of the whole of America, the Islamic nations, China, and India extending to Java, but, above all, Japan and Russia, which has again become an Asiatic, “Mongolian” State. When the Japanese beat Russia, a ray of hope shot up all over Asia: a young Asiatic State had, by Western methods, forced the greatest power of the West to its knees and thereby destroyed the aureole of invincibility which surrounded Europe. It was as a beacon, in India, in Turkey, even in Cape Colony and the Sahara. So it was possible to pay back the white peoples for all the pains and humiliations of a century! Since then the profound cunning of the Asiatics has been thinking out methods inaccessible to European thought and superior to it. And now Russia, after suffering in 1916 its second great defeat, from the West, has removed its “white” mask, to the mocking satisfaction of its ally England, has again become Asiatic with all its soul, and is filled with a burning hatred of Europe. It took with it the experiences of Europe’s internal weakness and used its knowledge to invent new and crafty methods of fighting, which it has instilled into the whole of the earth’s coloured population, with the idea of a common resistance.’
Oswald Spengler, The Hour of Decision, 1933.
This piece’s quote from Spengler and the mention of Thomas Mann in the right corner really connects in my mind with a short story by Mann that I’m reading right now, “Mario and the Magician.”
Written in 1929, it was lauded in a history class I took on Nazism and World War 2 as “an eerily prescient glimpse into the near future of europe’s encounter with spell-binging totalitarian demagogues.”
My reading of it is entirely different, though. Superficially, it’s about a charismatic circus performer in Italy and his hypnotic sway over the audience. But this menacing figure doesn’t appear until the story’s one-third through. The build-up to it is fraught with the north europen narrator’s (Mann’s too?)
pent-up feelings of Unheimlichkeit amidst crowds of darker complected Italians. He almost puts it that baldly.
“The heat was extreme. It was African….Do you care for that sort of thing? Yes, it is proper to the south, the sun of Homer, and all the rest of it. But after a while it is too much for me…But slowly there makes itself felt a lack: the deeper, more complex needs of the northern soul remain unsatisfied.”
The people dissatisfy him even more. “The beach was still in the hands of the [Italian] middle-class native….We were surrounded by a great deal of very average humanity–a middle-class mob.” Women’s voices were “breathy, full-throated, hideously stressed.”
Things go even further downhill as he and his family make their way to the only available nightly entertainment — the circus. “It [the way to the circus]led , so to speak, from the feudal past the bourgeois into the proletarian, ending between 2 rows of poor fishing huts where women sat mending thir nets.” Before the unnerving episode with the magician, the narrator is fully scarified at the sight of being seated near “rough-and-ready youths” who “wore their hair in a surly dishevelled mop” that “gave” them “an African appearance.”
So here you have it: one short story epitomizing the psycho-racial-socioeconomic angst of engulfment/comtamination of the cultivated european by the dangerously-near lower orders. Not unlike the racial-political terrors of the ape-like figure of “Bolschewismus” in the poster.
Very interesting. The quote is from Magic Mountain, which I love. I know Mann had developed some very unsavory political views around WWI, endorsing the kriegsideologie as a healthy mobilizing spirit for national renewal, but I had always thought that by the mid-20s or so he had gotten that nastiness out of his system. Apparently not!