Thomas Mann's Unnerving 1929 Novella About Fascist Personalities, "Mario and the Magician"

Mario und der Zauberer (Mario and the Magician) is Thomas Mann's prescient (1929) warning against mass hypnosis by fascists not taken seriously by cosmopolitan humanists. I guess that the novella could be read as a straightforward narrative of parents trying to defend their children from prudish, irrational others who make the mistake of taking the children along to what has been advertised as a magic performance that begins at 9 PM, when the children should already be in bed. The hunchbacked Cipollo turns out to be a hypnotist delighting in humiliating those he hypnotizes '" most especially those who express contempt for him and attempt to resist being hypnotized.

Mann alludes to nationalist fervor corrupting even the usually separate (from adult concerns) world of children. His narrator recalls several incidents of nastiness at the Italian Riviera beach resort of Torre di Venere (the tower is long gone, and venery is not the topic, though sexual longings play a part in the denouement).

The narrator cannot really explain why he did not take his family away earlier (first from the town, then from the unsettling Cipollo performance -- not even during an intermission), "It is indolence that makes us endure uncomfortable situations," he notes, In the instance of the hypnotist humiliating the locals, horrified fascination supplements inertia. Even though they have been sleeping, the children do not want to leave before the end, also.

Hitler was not yet in power when "Mario" was published in 1929, but Mussolini was in power in Italy. Cipollo prefigures Hilter in mesmerizing audiences even better than he stands in for Mussolini. Both were regarded as grotesques, not to be taken seriously by refined Germans and Italians who considered themselves cosmopolitan Europeans. Cipollo presents himself as Will and submission of others as inevitable. Mussolini was notorious for keeping audiences waiting, as Cipollo does.

The vagueness of advertisements that have misled the narrator and the rest of the audience also have resonances from the ruses by which the fascists had and the Nazis soon would gain power -- that would then ruthlessly be exercised with people doing beastly things they would have thought themselves incapable (and managed in most cases to deny). Both in this microcosm and in the macrocosms of the fascist and Nazi states, it is not just that the people obeyed but that they obeyed mindlessly, mechanically, seemingly "pleased to be relieved of the burden of voluntary choice." (This became the theme of the Frankfurt School in works such as Erich Fromm's Escape from Freedom and The Authoritarian Personality written by T. W. Adorno et al.)

Cipollo imbibes heavily during the performance but becomes drunk with power more than disinhibited by brandy.

This demagogue goes too far. Mario represents Resistance that Mann clearly regarded as necessary Mann himself became the prime anti-Nazi German public intellectual, the warning of "Mario und der Zauberer" not being heeded by Germans. In "Mario" he was already showing the complicity of his own kind in allowing the displays of power and abasement. Mann grappled with the responsibility of finding the grotesque fascinating (even "thrilling") on a large scale in his 1947 novel Doctor Faustus, which includes direct (and extended!) meditations on what Germans loving German High Culture allowed to happen, along with an allegorical parallel of betrayal of humane values.

I think that the way Mann set up the background of rising nationalism in the beach resort is brilliant. The domestic drama involving innocent children and adults exercising illegitimate power provides premonitions, not least in the failure of the paterfamilias to take his family away. (Well, he does move them from a hotel in which they are mistreated...)

I'm not convinced that there needs to be quite as much detail about the performance of the hunchbacked hypnotist overcoming any will or freedom of the audience. At the end, I think there could have been more about Mario (who is a waiter) before the night of Cipolla's performance, and I think that the narrator would probably have felt more qualms, had less assurance that the ends justify the means. Nonetheless, I think that this is one of Mann's most powerful works -- and a whole lot more concentrated than The Magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, or the Joseph tetraology. It is even more concentrated on the other degradation in Italy Mann masterpiece, Death in Venice.

Adaptations

The story/novella was adapted into a three-hour-long opera by composer Harry Somers and lyricist Rod Anderson. that premiered in 1992 at the Elgin Theatre, Toronto. Another opera version by composer Francis Thorne and librettist J. D. McClatchy premiered in 2005 at Hunter College in New York City.

There is also a 1994 movie with Klaus Maria Brandauer as Cipolla and Julian Sands as the patriarch, directed by Brandauer. I have seen neither. The novella is available in multiple editions (inluding an overpriced Kindle one) and various collections.