324 Epilogue
Numerous composers concurred that Nietzsche had triggered an
eruption of myticism. In 1896, Richard Strauss composed a symphonic
work called Thus Spoke Zarathustra, and Gustav Mahler originally intend-
ed to name his Third Symphony Gay Science. Architects such as Peter
Behrens and Bruno Taut were inspired by Nietzsche and constructed
spaces for free spirits. It is hardly surprising that Nietzsche's writing was
also set to dance: as he had written in Zarathustra, "we should consider a
day lost if we have not danced at least once" (4,264; Ζ Part 3, "On Old
and New Tablets" § 23). In the 1920s and 1930s, Mary Wigman devel-
oped a so-called Dionysian style of dance, complete with drumbeats and
recitations from Zarathustra.
The "Nietzsche experience" could take myriad forms. For some, it
was just a passing phase; for others, it lasted a lifetime. Thomas Mann
belonged in the latter group. He declared in 1910: "We have from him
our psychological sensitivity, our lyrical criticism, the experience of
Wagner, the experience of Christianity, the experience of modernity"
(Aschheim 37). Mann was spurred on by reading Nietzsche to seek a will
to art that would proudly reject any social, political, or other practical
application and preserve dignity as an end in itself, as well as the mystery
of human existence for art, love, and death. While working on his
Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Non-political Man, 1918),
Mann studied Nietzsche's Untimely Meditations and picked apart nearly
every sentence together with his friend Ernst Bertram, who was writing
a major study of Nietzsche at the same time. For Mann, Nietzsche's idea
that art originated in a Dionysian impulse and was ironically refracted
into an Apollonian form became an essential and indispensable insight
for his own writing. In his lengthy essay on Nietzsche, "Nietzsches
Philosophie im Lichte unserer Erfahrung" (Nietzsche's Philosophy in
the Light of Recent History, 1947), a companion piece to his novel Doctor
Faustus, Mann called him the "most uncompromisingly perfect aesthete"
of intellectual history. He justified this view as follows: "that life can be
justified only as an aesthetic phenomenon applies exacdy to himself, to
his life, his thinking, and his writing... down to his self-mythologizing