Mario und der Zauberer

Nervousness and a peculiar malevolence defined the atmosphere from the very beginning of this holiday stay in Northern Italy in the mid-twenties. "These people... were going through something, a state, something like an illness... not very pleasant, but probably necessary." The unsettling feeling will intensify and, not only for the guests, will lead to a tragic yet ultimately liberating conclusion through the all-encompassing presence and effect of the magician Cipolla, "this overly self-assured one." With the observation that "those who know how to obey also know how to command, and vice versa; one thought is included in the other, just as people and leaders are intertwined, but the performance, the extremely strict and exhausting performance, is in any case his, that of the leader and organizer, in which the will is obedience, and obedience is will," this "type of charlatan, the flamboyant trickster" lures and blinds his audience, hypnotizing them into a "drunken dissolution of critical resistance." In Mario, the young waiter, he believes he has finally found a victim to humiliate deeply, even to violate, without having to consider the dignity of a human being. The strength of the "political-moral allusion, expressed nowhere in words," from this narrative, already evident at its first appearance in 1930, is reflected in Julius Bab's review: "If Mussolini understood anything about art, he would have to have this novella banned in Italy.".