THE GERMAN WORD FOR “DISAPPOINTMENT” IS ENTTÄUSCHUNG, WHICH STRICTLY TRANSLATES as “disillusionment”. It is the word chosen by Thomas Mann as the title of one of his earliest short stories: an encounter with a stranger in the Piazza San Marco. The nameless stranger (“For some reason I mistook him for an Englishman”) is a kind of forerunner of Gustav von Aschenbach, the world-weary protagonist of Mann’s Death in Venice.
In Disillusionment the stranger tells his life story as an unbroken catalogue of disappointments. Contemplating the sea, he asks: “Why a horizon, when I wanted the infinite from life?” He concludes: “And so I dream and wait for death. Ah, how well I know it already, death, that last disappointment. At my last moment I shall be saying to myself: ‘So this is the great experience — well, and what of it? What is it after all?’”
Underlying this story is the oriental concept of the veil of maya, illusion, which is gradually lifted to reveal the meaninglessness of existence. This idea, common to both Hindus and Buddhists, was introduced to Western philosophy by Arthur Schopenhauer, whose pessimism exerted a profound influence on the young Mann. Indeed, the disillusioned stranger in Venice may indeed be a stylised portrait of Schopenhauer himself.
Political disappointment generally falls into this category of disillusionment. That is because politics is always a calculus of expectations, suspended between hope and despair, in which the politicians try to persuade the public that this time, , their promises will prove to be no chimera. By the time voters have had time to be disillusioned, the world has moved
