Book Reviews

505

in the evocation of the readership for which Mann wrote, of his deep disappointment at
the behaviour of that group when the Nazis came to power, and of the cultural elitism that
is indirectly criticized in the course of Mann’s reckoning with the German past in his
major post-1945 novel, Doktor Faustus (1947). The closing chapters also explain the
elaborate forms of ‘Germanness’ that remained integral to Mann’s conception of himself,
and the various kinds of suspicion and recrimination with which his public statements
were received by certain political groups in the early years of the Cold War, an experi-
ence that helped to firm up his decision not to return to Germany.
Much of this is deftly done. Wherever a specific piece of evidence is key to a fair
appraisal of a particular episode in Mann’s life, an appropriate reference is provided in
an endnote. (The addition of an index would have been helpful for pursuing the connec-
tions between such moments.) But it is disappointing that the presentation of individual
works is often less developed than it could have been. We are told that Tonio Kröger
(1903) is ‘a puzzling text, full of contradictions’, but not given much help to understand
why the emotional ambivalences evoked in that text are significant for Mann’s self-
conception as a literary artist. The slightly later story Wälsungenblut (The Blood of the
Walsungs, 1906) – controversial both at the time and subsequently because of the way it
depicts assimilated Jews in Germany – is said to be ‘one of Mann’s best texts’, but no
supporting argument is offered for that claim. For all their brevity, the accounts of the
major novels tend to be very explicit about what the storyline is and give the impression
that its relation to the themes and issues that have emerged from the biography is une-
quivocal. The ambiguities in Mann’s narratives and the allusive nature of their imagery
are thus often lost from view, and the abstract discussion in an afterword of symbolism,
irony and perspectivism as prevalent features of Mann’s fictions does not adequately
compensate for this. Overall, then, what the volume gives us is not so much a ‘critical
life’ – as the wording on the front cover promises – but the slightly flattened profile of a
great author memorialized.

David Midgley

Of Cosmogonic Eros. By Ludwig Klages. Translated by Mav Kuhn. Edited by David Beth and Jessica
Grote. Munich: Theion Publishing, 2019. Pp. 269. €50.00.

Ludwig Klages (1872–1956), who has enjoyed a revival of interest in the German-
speaking world, is hardly known in the Anglophone sphere, except as a footnote to the
Cosmic Circle of Stefan George. After that youthful extravaganza Klages completed a
doctorate in chemistry but preferred a polymathic path through graphology, psychology,
anthropology, mythography, ecology, phenomenology and metaphysics. That makes him
a difficult subject to digest. A welcome start has been made by Theion, a Munich-based
publisher of ‘sophisticated occultism, metaphysics and gnosis in fine editions’ in offering
the representative monograph Vom kosmogonischen Eros (1922) in clear English, with a
60-page introduction by the Klages scholar Paul Bishop and several appendices. It fol-
lows the same publisher’s reissue in 2015 of a pioneering dissertation: Gunnar Alksnis,
Chthonic Gnosis: Ludwig Klages and his Quest for the Pandemonic All.
506 Journal of European Studies 49(3–4)

Sophisticated as Klages may be, there is nothing of occultism here, still less of the
Satanism suggested by Gustav Doré’s (unattributed) dustjacket illustration of a witches’
sabbath. Klages rejected the dogmas of materialism and religion alike, but not in the way
of esoteric groups such as Theosophy, Anthroposophy, the ‘high magic’ of Julius Evola and
the Ur Group, or the sexual magic of the Ordo Templi Orientis. Though he had no respect
for esoteric traditions, his home-grown metaphysical principles closely bordered on some
of theirs. For instance, Klages’ granting mental images a status superior to that of material
objects is the rationale for ‘high magical’ theory. His insistence that all of nature is alive and
that the microcosm reflects the macrocosm is pure Hermeticism. His concept of the pri-
mary human problem as the tyranny of Spirit over Soul is halfway to esoteric psychology.
The latter concept, which spawned Klages’ massive Der Geist als Widersacher der
Seele (The Spirit as Adversary of the Soul, 3 vols., 1927–32), is sketched out at perhaps
adequate length in the present book. What Klages calls Geist is not ‘spirit’ in the sense of
the highest, transpersonal element that links the human to the divine; nor is it the spiritus
of Renaissance magic, which mediates between soul and body. In plain speech, it seems
to be the individual ego as a rationally thinking and willing force, and as such, the adver-
sary of the ‘real’ world of images that makes up man’s and nature’s soul. Klages’ history
of consciousness, like that of most esotericists, is devolutionist: he sees the spiritual rot
setting in after the Greeks supplanted the ‘Pelasgians’, the archaic peoples of the eastern
Mediterranean. Pythagoras and Plato were agents of this change, and Christianity went
much further with its promise or threat of personal immortality. The result has been a ruin-
ous dominance of the masculine, rational Spirit over the feminine Soul: an idea that
Klages consciously derived from Bachofen and enhanced by a selective reading of Goethe
and the German Romantics. Following them are influences from Nietzsche, George and
Klages’ cosmic colleague Alfred Schuler (who contributes one of the appendices to this
edition). In one of his many selves, Klages was a Naturphilosoph who anticipated deep
ecology and Gaia theory, as well as the matriarchal ‘Old Europe’ of Maria Gimbutas.
In his more mystical self, Klages believed that death brings humans into a state of
timeless presence to their survivors, who know them through primal images: hence his
advocacy for ancestral cults, and incidentally his defence of human sacrifice. His con-
cept of Eros has almost nothing to do with sex, which Klages seems to downgrade as
compared to the gnosis or ecstasy of ‘distance’ and the cosmogonic experience. The
essence of this experience is that one does not own it: ‘The way to life is through the
death of the I’ (p. 120). But this is only halfway to esoteric psychology, in which some-
thing individual does persist after the ego is extinguished.
His erudition and self-importance apart, Klages seems more of a non-theistic nature
mystic than a real metaphysician, surprisingly like his contemporary Jiddu Krishnamurti,
who likewise urged us to lose our trouble-making egos and give ourselves to the direct
experience and enjoyment of nature, or as both of them repeatedly say, to ‘life’. For
Klages that meant the symbiosis of matter and image in which his Pelasgians and primi-
tives happily existed. He doubted that the human race would regain it before destroying
the whole earth, but his summons could only be to the rare individual. The fine produc-
tion and limited appeal of this book are consistent with that.

Joscelyn Godwin