Zusammenfassung
This essay explores the insinuation of photography into the thematic space traditionally occupied by painting within the Bildungsroman genre. It shows how the new medium alters Bildung - including its mechanisms for identity formation, erotic self-realization, and gendering - by focusing on three features of photography in Mann’s novel: the process of development; the relation of the negative and positive; and the need for a fixative.
Abstract
Der Aufsatz erkundet die Installierung der Photographie in den thematischen Raum, der im Genre des Bildungsromans traditionell durch das Gemälde besetzt ist. Er zeigt, wie das neue Medium den Bildungsprozeß verändert, indem er in Manns Roman drei Eigenschaften der Photographie in den Blick nimmt: den Prozeß der Entwicklung; die Beziehung von Negativ und Positiv; und die Notwendigkeit eines Fixativs.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Literature
Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden, Frankfurt a.M. 1974, X, 291. All parenthetical references to Mann’s published work in this essay are taken from this edition: those without a specified volume number refer to volume III, Der Zauberberg.
Gerhard Kaiser, Friedrich A. Kittler, Dichtung als Sozialisationsspiel: Studien zu Goethe und Gottfried Keller, Göttingen 1978
Jochen Hörisch, Gott, Geld, und Glück: Zur Logik der Liebe in den Bildungsromanen Goethes, Kellers, und Thomas Manns, Frankfurt a.M. 1983; see also
John H. Smith, “Cultivating Gender: Sexual Difference, Bildung, and the Bildungsroman“, Michigan Germanic Studies 13 (1987), 296–325.
A bit further afield, Charles Dickens’s Oliver Twist; or, The Parish Boy’s Progress (1837–39) uses a portrait in a similar way to mark the protagonist’s growing into his destined identity. The text makes a point of distinguishing the portrait from the images of the proto-photographic “machine for taking likenesses” of its time. See Charles Dickens, Oliver Twist, London 1985, 128.
Geoffrey Winthrop-Young, “Magic Media Mountain: Technology and the Umbildungsroman”, in: Reading Matters: Narratives in the New Media Ecology, Ithaca, London 1997, 29–52.
See especially the seminal study by Jochen Hörisch, “Die deutsche Seele up-to-date”, in: Friedrich Kittler (ed.), Arsenale der Seele: Literatur- und Medienanalyse seit 1870, Munich 1989, 13–23, which although not specifically concerned with photography adumbrates several points of this essay. Other recent studies include Winthrop-Young (note 8) and
Karla Schultz, “Technology as Desire: X-ray vision in The Magic Mountain”, in: Stephen Dowden (ed.), A Companion to Thomas Mann’s The Magic Mountain, Columbia, SC 1999, 158–176. A notably early attempt to address the topic can be found in
Winfried Kudszus, “Understanding media: Zur Kritik dualistischer Humanität im Zauberberg”, in: Heinz Saueressig (ed.), Besichtigung des Zauberbergs, Biberach an der Riss 1974, 55–80.
Friedrich Kittler, “The Mechanized Philosopher”, in: Laurence Rickeis (ed.), Looking After Nietzsche, Albany 1990, 195–207; also Grammophon, Film, Typewriter, Berlin 1986; Aufschreibesysteme 1800/1900, Munich 1985. See also
David E. Wellbery, “Foreword“ to Friedrich Kittler, Discourse Networks, 1800/1900, tr. Michael Metteer with Chris Cullens, Stanford 1990, vii–xxxiii.
Jonathan Crary, Techniques of the Observer: On Vision and Modernity in the Nineteenth Century, Cambridge MA 1990.
Roland Barthes, Camera Lucida: Reflections on Photography, tr. Richard Howard, New York 1981, 88.
Mann, “‘Die Welt ist schön’”, X, 901–904. For more on Renger-Patzsch’s book, see Beaumont Newhall, The History of Photography from 1839 to the present, Boston 1982, 193f.
Walter Benjamin, “Das Kunstwerk im Zeitalter seiner technischen Reproduzierbarkeit”, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Hermann Schweppenhäuser, Frankfurt a.M 1980, 1, 471–508
Susan Sontag, On Photography, New York 1977.
Siegfried Kracauer, “Die Photographie”, Das Ornament der Masse, Frankfurt a.M 1977, 24–28.
J.-K. Huysmans, A Rebours, Paris 1977, 276
Ernest Hello, L’Homme, Paris 1872, 172–174.
Oliver Wendell Holmes was already referring to photography as a “mirror with a memory“ in 1859: see Newhall (ed.), Photography: Essays and Images, New York 1980, 53–61
Douwe Draaisma, Metaphors of Memory, Cambridge UK 2000, 120. But Hello seems to have been the first to turn the trope around and elaborate a model for memory as a form of photography.
Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man, New York 1964, 177.
Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality. Volume I: An Introduction, tr. Robert Hurley, New York 1980, designates the principle of latency as the most central, constitutive factor in the new construction of subjectivity promulgated by the nineteenth century in general and psychoanalysis in particular: see esp. 66.
Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, ed. A. Mitscherlich et al., Frankfurt a.M. 1982, IX, 571.
Sarah Kofman, Camera Obscura of Ideology, tr. Will Straw, Ithaca 1999, 21–28, analyzes both this and the following two passages from Freud from a very different starting point and to very different ends.
D. A. Miller, The Novel and the Police, Berkeley 1988, 26.
William Faulkner, Absalom, Absalom!, New York 1986, 87f.
Dorrit Cohn, Transparent Minds: Narrative Modes for Presenting Consciousness in Fiction, Princeton 1978, 146.
Roxanne Hanney, “Proust and Negative Plates: Photography and the Photographie Process in A La Recherche du temps perdu”, Romanic Review 74/3 (1983), 342–54: here, 345.
Darwin, too - who has a shadow presence in Settembrini’s rhetoric of “Entwicklung“ - took note of this peculiar quality of the new photographic medium and exploited it for the presentation of his own new notion of the human subject and his “geistig“ or spiritual development. His On the Expression of the Emotions in Man and Animals, New York 1896, avails itself of numerous photographs and “Heliotype Plates reproduced from the original negatives“ in order to illustrate the typical expressions that are his subject. He explains how photos “are much superior for my purpose to any drawing, however carefully executed,“ his purpose being scientific and modern, very much distinct from the earlier regime of Physiognomy, which Darwin links to the earlier psychology and practice of painting (Bronte’s Jane Eyre [1847] might serve as an example of the earlier regime opposed by Darwin). Darwin’s cousin, the eugenicist Francis Galton, took this stereotypical quality of the photograph to its logical extreme in the “Mischphotographie“ of his family portraits, which sought to bring out hereditary likenesses by photographing several faces on the same negative plate, an example Freud would use repeatedly to explain his model for how “Bilder“ how composed, stored, and reproduced in the unconscious memory. See Francis Galton, Inquiries into Human Faculty and its Development, London 1883
cf. Nancy Armstrong, Fiction in the Age of Photography: The Legacy of British Realism, Cambridge MA 1999, 16–22; Draaisma (note 23), 125–129. For Freud’s references to Galton, see Freud (note 27), II, 155; II, 294f.; II, 475; 1,179; IX, 462; and esp. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, chronologisch geordnet, ed. Anna Freud et al., Frankfurt a.M. 1968–78, II/III, 662f.
Henri Bergson, Matière et Mémoire: essai sur relation du corps l’esprit, Paris 1953, 93 f. Bergson’s work has long been recognized as an important source for Mann’s model of memory in this novel. It is also central to Benjamin’s model of photographic memory: cf. Benjamin (note 19), VI, 516; I, 695; I, 608–611.
Naom Gabo and Anton Pevsner, “The Realist Manifesto”, in: Russian Art of the Avant Garde: Theory and Criticism, 1902–1934, ed. John E. Bowit, New York 1976, 208–215
see also Bettyann Holtzmann Kevles, Naked to the Bone: Medical Imaging in the Twentieth Century, New Brunswick NJ 1997, 124–138.
See Alexander Nehamas, “‘Getting Used To Not Getting Used To It’: Nietzsche in The Magic Mountain”, Philosophy and Literature 5/1 (Sp 1981), 73–90.
Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflexionen aus dem beschädigten Leben, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann, Frankfurt a.M. 1980, IV, 105.
Roland Barthes, Roland Barthes, tr. Richard Howard, New York 1977, 132. For more on Barthes’s concept of the neutral and the peculiar nature of photographic desire
see Carol Mavor, Pleasures Taken, Durham NC 1995. Oscillation or “Schwanken“ - closely related to Barthes’s ‘neutral ‘- is of course a key quality of the erotic throughout Mann’s novel: cf. the famous description of Clawdia’s kiss (831 f.)
Freud, “Die sexuellen Abirrungen”, Studienausgabe (note 27), V, 56. It is worth pointing out that the same oscillating, ‘neutral ‘sense of the erotic is also at work in scenes that might seem predominantly homoerotic in the narrower sense, such as in “Humanoria.“ Kenneth Weisinger, “Distant Oil Rigs and Other Erections”, in: Dowden (note 9), 177–220, wonderfully analyzes the same-sex play of this chapter; but we cannot discount the part played by the heterosexual in the form of Clawdia’s portrait in generating the scene’s operant homoeroticism. I should add that Hans Blüher’s homosexual model for Bildung, mentioned by Mann in “Über die Ehe“ (X, 196) similarly suffers a breakdown in the face of Mann’s quite differently conceived homoerotic model for “Entwicklung.“ Not only does Bliiher’s model depend on the same sharp division between the homo and the hetero (and the public and private) as traditional Bildung. It also ultimately aims at the same masculine ideal. See Hans Blüher, Die Rolle der Erotik in der männlichen Gesellschaft. Eine Theorie der menschlichen Staatsbildung nach Wesen und Wert, 2 vols., Jena 1917–19.
It is the double androgyny to the female figure and the male protagonist that distinguishes it most radically from the androgyny also at issue in earlier Bildungsromanen, including Wilhelm Meister. Catriona MacLeod, Embodying Ambiguity: Androgyny and Aesthetics from Winckelmann to Keller, Detroit 1998, has definitively explored this trope in the Bildungsroman from Goethe through Keller. To some extent, the photographic androgyny of Mann’s novel is yet another case of “Entwicklung“ not so much opposing as incorporating and refiguring a facet of Bild-ung that was always there, even if not fully supported by the pictorial parallel.
J.W. Goethe, Wilhelm Meisters Lehrjahre, Werke in vierzehn Bänden, ed. E. Trunz, Munich 1981, VII, 505. The sentence continues: “man bekannt sich zwar nicht zu allen Zügen, aber man freut sich, daß ein denkender Geist uns so fassen, ein großes Talent uns so hat darstellen wollen, daß ein Bild von dem, was wir waren, noch besteht, und daß es länger als wir selbst dauern kann.”
For an analysis of the séance scene, see Eric Downing, “Paraphotography and the Entwicklung of Bildung in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg”, The Germanic Review 76/2 (2001), 172–191.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Additional information
Der Tod der Seele durch den Mechanismus wird zweifelhaft in dem Augenblick, wo der Mechanismus sich beseelt. Rede Über das Theater
Rights and permissions
About this article
Cite this article
Downing, E. The Technology of Development: Photography and Bildung in Thomas Mann’s Der Zauberberg. Dtsch Vierteljahrsschr Literaturwiss Geistesgesch 77, 92–129 (2003). https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03375672
Published:
Issue Date:
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/BF03375672