Doctor Faustus

Mann's attempt at an elegy for German culture following Hitler and a postmortem to extract the inextricable elements in that culture that birthed the NS-zeit. Doctor Faustus doesn't fail, exactly, but it comes uncomfortably close to being an apologia at moments--not for Nazism, but for the abovesaid elements that combining volatilely permitted it. The pretext is a retelling of the Faust myth through the life of the fictional composer Adrian Leverkühn, who is presented as a kind of Schoenberg-analogue in music (the twelve-tone system is his) if not in life, and who makes a deal with the devil for 24 years of unparalleled creative power in exchange for forswearing the capacity and the right to love.

Leverkühn is then a symbol of the show more German genius. It is as ponderous and heavy a genius here as we know it to be of old, with some added convolution or perplexity perhaps from the need to talk around the central shameful act of writing a book about the German genius, in any wise, in the mid-forties. Like, just shut your mouth for a decade or two, Thomas Mann, and then let's talk about how the modern era's most subtle and capacious culture (as it perhaps even really was, for the non-relativists among us) was brought low by its own good and evil. You know? Like, in The Magic Mountain Mann's heart was in the right place and he didn't have an agenda--slowly, carefully, he aired out the chambers and inspected the sores of pre–First World War Europe, a civilization sick in body and spirit. In Doctor Faustus, though, he does have an agenda. He is subtle and capacious in the best spirit of his people, and he does not stoop to, say, decrying the Nazis for their destruction of German culture (because, like, "true" German culture?) as your average sad old guy in the gasthaus without Mann's artistic responsibilities might. But he does, often, evince despair that he has lost the right to do even that decrying. In short, Mann's narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, comes ever-so-close, often, to espousing that the real tragedy of the Second World War and the Holocaust are the stain they left on German honour and the fact that we can no longer hear Bach or read Goethe without an astringent aftertaste. Mann described Zeitblom as a pastiche of his author and of course he was aware of this problem. But I think the lexicon of the "new social movements" is really apt here: he is mansplaining and derailing and not being a good ally. Sucking up all the air in the room. White people.

I think this is part of why so many of the novel-of-ideas parts of this were hieratic and sterile to me (tho I love The Magic Mountain so much): Mann is going into contusions, chasing his tail. (Let it be said now for the record, he is also right, and if he had had his lawyers sit on this manuscript till 1975 it might feel different). It may also be that I'm just too stupid (dummkopf! I mention in passing here that Mann's vision of Germany is seemingly that of a nation of 75 habilitationisten and privatdozente and country doctors and bohemian violinists and philistine colonels who nevertheless keep salons and try to touch the gesicht des Gottes. Although he diagnoses the Nazis with acuity, this still reduces them to the nature of a brain fever suffered by the bourgeois guardians of--not only culture, but history! governance!--who were too too enamoured with a certain politics brut. Where in fact the Nazis were real dudes too. And then the stolid peasant and bürger don't even get a look in--if the Nazis are a condition or affliction, the non-intelligensia are a mere backdrop. It's quiet arrogance, through and through--the kind of pride that comes before a you know what.)

Funny enough for a so frequently forbidding novel, with a high bar of entry and all that, what kept me reading and what accounts for the quite-high-in-the-great-scheme-of-things rating I'm giving the book wasn't the ideas, it was the writing. I don't think of Mann as among the most trippingly beautiful writers, but this is up there with Death in Venice in terms of staging and lyricism. I will remember characters--both Zeitblom and Leverkühn, the unrequited love of the former for the latter, and the greater psychosexual web that humanizes the hieratic--Rudi Schwerdtfeger who finally got Adrian to call him du; Rüdiger Schildknapp who was the only one who could make him laugh; Kretzschmar and Kumpf and divers others of his teachers; poor little Nepomuk or Echo (weep for the beautiful child in fiction, my friends!)--and scenes (operatic influence here, I think)--Kretzschmar's lectures, Leverkühn's fateful trip to the brothel in Bratislava, the ill-fated marriage of Inez Rodde and Helmut Institoris, the campy, magisterial entry-stage-left of der teufel, and Leverkühn's final hideous crescendo, where he hauls himself down to hell like Don Giovanni or somebody only cursed to solitude even to the extent of having to show himself out. They made this a significant experience perhaps best compared to going into your first music lesson, being handled the most beautifully crafted instrument and densely orchestrated score, and expected to keep up with a quartet of virtuosi as they run through the inscrutable last string quartets of a twentieth-century master who fled in ' 39 and ended up teaching composition and theory to prematurely balding young American men with very thick glasses at oh let's say Brown.

(Listening to the Brandenburg Concertos as I write this, and it does seem clear how their smooth Apollonianisms, filtered through two hundred years of German cultural DNA, might give rise to a sense that something like the twelve-tone system was a supremely rational, and not a complexly alien, next step, in politics as well as music. No one who speaks German could be a bad man! I think Hitler's love of Wagner covers up a lot of complexity regarding the input of modernity into national socialism--an atavistic Kulturismus that sounds a bit like special pleading, of a sort that the Heidegger of "The Question Concerning Technology" would have approved. It's not that anything monstrous was going on or that the Nazis would have transformed Germany and Europe into a twisted surveillance technocracy avec bonfire parties, it's that the Jews and gypsies and communists and homosexuals were totally littering on the pristine mountain paths and we just really care about keeping the mountain paths clean and also they peed in the pure white snow. What I'm saying is that too much listening to Bach could make a certain kind of person at a certain kind of time value mountain paths more than non-German lives and then also see the imposition of twelve tones on music and death camps on Europe as an organic extension of the patternization in Bach. I know that's probably a fucked-up false equivalency, and I can see why Schoenberg hated this book (also because Mann borrowed part of Nietzsche's backstory for Leverkühn too and Schoenberg didn't want the world all thinking he had the syphilis).) show less

There are classics – and then there are Classics. These are the books that you can really pat yourself on the back for finally putting behind you – or should I say “completing,” since books like this never really leave you. This is definitely one of the latter. It is full of everything we associate, good or bad, with the word: meditations on philosophy, art, mortality, music, and everything else under the sun. Needless to say, this isn’t for everyone. In fact, if you even have the slightest hesitation about reading something like this, don’t. If you think you might like it, read the first fifty pages and if you like it, you’ll love the rest because the stylistic pace never changes. I happen to be one of those readers who show more doesn’t mind traveling glacially if I’m given a lot of things to think about, and in that respect, Thomas Mann never fails to deliver.

“Doctor Faustus” takes the form of a biography of Adrian Leverkuhn, the most illustrious German composer of his day, written by his lifelong friend, Serenus Zeitblom. Adrian’s intellect and capacity for ideas are truly astounding, making one wonder whence his interest in the bright yet otherwise rather not very noteworthy Serenus. At a very young age, Adrian makes a pact with the Devil in return for a promise of many years of heightened creativity and inspiration. After purposefully contracting syphilis to add to the allure of romantic genius associated with insanity, he becomes obsessed with the themes of Apocalypse, damnation, and Schoenberg’s achromaticism in his music. In the final scene of the book, Adrian summons all his friends and acquaintances he has made throughout the book and shares his lifelong secret about his satanic pact; the reactions range from revulsion to denial to undying support. Adrian lingers in a syphilitic paralysis for several years until the onset of World War II, at which point Serenus visits him one last time, and he finally dies.

Mann interlards his narrative with German political history from between the wars. He began his life as an ardent conservative, but by the time he wrote this novel in the late 1940s, his faith in the goodness and purity of the German spirit qua German spirit was severely diminished, and he lets this show through the voice of Serenus. He has, as he should, seering words for Hitler, the Third Reich, and what they were doing to his beloved country. One of Mann’s main points, however, is that this political decadence doesn’t remain wholly within the political sphere; it seeps into cultural, philosophical, and aesthetic life. Mann was horrified by the direction Germany was taking in the thirties, but he very well have been more horrified the ramifications this had for the possibilities of German art and thought. As Gyorgy Lukacs mentioned in his book of essays on Mann’s novels, the historical standpoint from which the novel is written – Serenus writing right after World War II – gives the novel a particularly striking sense that German history, maybe History itself, is running headlong into a catastrophe from which even it cannot save itself.

It cannot be stressed enough the degree to which this is truly a novel of ideas. Mann’s knowledge of philosophy, theology, and especially music are on full display. At one point earlier in the novel, he goes on for several pages about why Beethoven’s last piano sonata, No. 32, Op. 111 has only two movements, and the profound philosophical implications this has for the history and direction of music. This is my manna, but I realize it is an acquired taste. For those who love humoring the playful intellect of someone like Mann for over 500 pages, this is pure mind candy. show less

When I was about sixteen, I had one of those moments of mad inspiration and decided that I was going to sort out German literature once and for all. I got a pile of German books out of the library, made it as far as page 5 of Doktor Faustus, and gave up in despair before even starting on Broch...(*) So, there's a feeling of relief at finally having overcome that hurdle. It took me seven months, on and off, this time, but I think it was worth it.

It is, definitely a difficult book. Mann's prose is beautiful to read, but you have to keep your wits about you to follow the winding path of his long sentences. And he's not someone to use an image where a concept will do: there are more abstract nouns here than in a moderate-sized philosophy show more library. You have to be ready for long, theoretical discussions about aesthetics, musicology, cultural history, theology, and all the rest. But there is a story under all that, and it does have enough purely narrative interest to carry you through the theory and start to get an inkling of how it all fits together.

It's clearly a book you can read on different levels. It's looking at the Faust legend, it's delving into what we mean by artistic creativity, it's investigating the transition from humanism to modernism, it's playing around with the boundaries of madness and inspiration, it's trying to find a Mercator system that will project music onto literature in a meaningful way. All of those things (and no doubt a lot of others I failed to pick up explicitly) are interesting and important, but the thing that comes over most vividly to me is the way that the book acts as a kind of colloquium on what "Germanness" means to someone living in 1947, at a time when Germans should expect the whole world to be condemning Germany and everything associated with it. Mann, or rather his narrator, Serenus, seems to be addressing the rest of the world, not really being able to envisage a time when Germans will be printing and reading books again. Mann, of course, is writing from exile, but he puts Serenus in the middle of the destruction. Seen from that point of view (and oversimplifying Mann's complex structure almost to the point of absurdity) you could see the story of Serenus and Leverkühn as a confrontation between the reasonable, ordered, liberal-humanist side of German culture and its wilder, more intense and creative, but also vastly more dangerous, self-destructive gothic aspects. Leverkühn buys 24 years of spectacular creativity from the devil (or from an untreated syphilis infection, according to which reading you prefer) and destroys himself; Serenus never explicitly draws the parallel, but I think we are supposed to work out for ourselves that the Nazis get the same amount of time (offset a bit) from their Faustian bargain and end up destroying Germany.

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(*) Fortunately, I then took advice, and started again a little later with something more approachable. show less

Doktor Faustus is – besides Zauberberg and the Josef novels – one of Thomas Mann’s great novels (and yes I’m aware that most people would add Buddenbrooks to that list or even have it solely consist of that novel – for my part, however, I think it is very overrated and one of Mann’s lesser efforts) – and has a reputation of being inaccessible even by his standards. This reputation is not completely undeserved, it is a complex and difficult book and takes some effort to get into – on the other hand, however, the rewards for making that effort are exceptionally great.

One reason for this difficulty is that Doktor Faustus is not really a novel but a fictional biography, and Thomas Mann takes this form seriously, presenting show more us with a proper biography (albeit on a fictional subject) and not just a thinly disguised novel. As a result, there is no unfolding plot, no overarching narrative, no colourful descriptions, making this even more abstract than Thomas Mann’s other works; and it does not help that there is (also in keeping with the biography form) a marked prevalence of telling over showing. And, as a biography, it is not even a good one – Serenus Zeitblom, the biography’s author, gets far too easily distracted from his supposed subject, the life story of his lifelong friend, the composer Adrian Leverkühn, pushing it into the background and instead telling the reader about himself, and the circumstances under which he is writing his book.

But (and any reader of Doktor Faustus had better get used to twist and turns like this one, as the novel is full of them) what makes for a bad biography makes for an excellent novel, and the reader of the latter watches as Thomas Mann unfolds the parallel stories of the life of Adrian Leverkühn and of the downfall of the Third Reich as experienced by Serenus Zeitblom several decades later, not only mirroring the two stories in each other but also showing how the seeds for the German crimes were already being sown during Leverkühn’s lifetime. And Germany is as much at the centre of this novel as Leverkühn is, the Faustian pact with the devil is one that was not made by just an individual but by a whole nation.

As all of Mann’s major works, Doktor Faustus is a novel of ideas, and the idea, or rather the problem that drives it is how – and if – it is possible to reconcile a deep and lasting love for German art and culture with the atrocious crimes committed by Germans during the Nazi reign. The easy way out of this dilemma is to claim that the Third Reich was a regress into “barbarism” that had nothing to do with the “real” Germany and was nothing but a deviation from pure and unsullied German culture which doesn’t really have anything in common with those people. Apart from the rather striking similarities this argument bears to the antisemitic rhetoric of the Nazis by presupposing a supposedly “pure” Germany, it also neatly exculpates Germany and the German from any relation with National Socialism (which, in the context of this way of thinking, very often tends to shrink down to evil Hitler and a handful of his followers) – undoubtedly the reason why this way of thinking has been consistently popular from 1945 until today (in fact, I seem to see it pop up more frequently again in recent years).

This is emphatically not the road Thomas Mann takes, however. Even though he used to be a right-wing nationalist himself in his youth (he wrote something of a manifest of that movement with his book-length essay Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen), by the time he wrote Doktor Faustus (while in exile in the United States) he had come to the conclusion that something must have gone wrong with Germany and German culture in general if it led up to the Nazis. Hence, there is one level in Doktor Faustus where Mann explores the genesis of national socialist ideas from the intellectual debates at the beginning of the twentieth century and the early Weimar Republic, showing meticulously how moral standards are becoming eroded under the weight of arguments that originally are put forth just for the sake of appearing intellectually audacious and unconventional but take on an increasingly sinister turn when people get used to them and start taking them seriously. One can assume that Mann was familiar with similar debates first hand, and even if Doktor Faustus did not go beyond this, it would already be a brilliant depiction of the intellectual atmosphere in pre-fascist Germany.

But of course the novel does not stop with this, this is barely the beginning of what Mann is undertaking here. The subject of the novel’s fictional autobiography is the composer Adrian Leverkühn, and while it is never explicitly stated, it is very obvious that his fate mirrors that of Germany. Any lesser writer would probably have focused on drawing a parallel between Leverkühn’s life and the rise of Nazism, and not bothered much with the music, maybe used the works of some other composer as model.But again, Thomas Mann shirks the easy way and instead makes Leverkühn’s compositions an essential part of the novel. Drawing on Schönberg’s Zwölftonmusik (the theory, mind you, not specific works) and the musical philosophy of young Adorno (who he had met in the US where he also was in exile), Doktor Faustus is at the height of musical theory of its time and presents the reader with a very detailed (and very demanding) description and analysis of Adrian Leverkühn’s fictional oeuvre (and some actual compositions by actual composers – mainly Beethoven – along the way).

Doktor Faustus thus becomes a novel about music as much as it is one about Germany. However, Thomas Mann was not content with this either, but added another turn of the screw by making those two subjects mesh with each other, and the link between them is the satanic pact. Corresponding to the two temporal strands of the novel there are also the dual characters of their respective protagonists – Serenus Zeitblom is a rational humanist, who believes in reason and moderation in all things, while Adrian Leverkühn is very Nietzschean, a driven genius, believing that true excellence can only be achieved in extremes (any readers of Der Zauberberg will of course be very familiar with this opposition, and indeed Mann reprises here one of his earlier themes). And it is this which drives Leverkühn to make a pact with the devil (or get himself infected with syphilis – the novel leaves it open what exactly happens, in fact this very ambivalence is part of the dichotomy between humanism and the irrational) as the only means he can conceive of to transcend his limitations and become a great composer – just like Germany thought it had to leave the limitations of ethics and morality behind to become a great nation.

However, as the reader proceeds through the novel and follows the development of Adrian Leverkühn as a composer, it becomes increasingly clear that his compositions follow a consistent inner logic, that they are highly intellectual affairs which follow a strict systematics and that there does not appear to be any need for any outside intervention – whether it is ascribed to demonic forces or disease, possibly not even inspiration, in any case, the irrational – at all. One might see this as a weakness of the novel, because it threatens to make the whole plot around the devil / syphilis and Leverkühn’s descent into madness if not superfluous, then highly unmotivated. For my part, I think that this was intentional on Thomas Mann’s part, that this very superfluousness even constitutes the tragic turn for Leverkühn (and, by extension, for the German people): that he does not need to strike a deal with the devil, but only thinks he does because of a misguided belief that true greatness simply has to be irrational – or that he possibly even wants to ally himself with the demonic because he is secretly in love with his own downfall, wishes for his own personal Götterdämmerung.

And it is no surprise that this is what both Germany and Leverkühn get in the end. I wrote above that Doktor Faustus is very abstract even for a novel by Thomas Mann, but this is only true for the first three-quarters of the work. The last 200 pages or so, comprising the fate of Rudolf Schwerdtfeger and even more so little Nepomuk Schneidewein, however, might very well be the most emotionally intense and harrowing piece of literature to have been produced by literary modernism. Even at the fourth reading of the novel, that final part left me not only in tears but quite shaken as well. And it does take the many hundred pages of intellectual debate and abstract thought (which, don’t get me wrong, are fascinating reading – but not what anyone would call emotionally engaging) to build the momentum which then comes crashing down in an overwhelming emotional rush in the novel’s final parts.

But what is probably most astonishing about Doktor Faustus, is the way that for everything that happens in the novel in the way of plot there is not only some corresponding literary formal element, but a musical one in the fictional oeuvre of Adrian Leverkühn as well. So it is an often reiterated theme in Leverkühn’s musical theory that one needs to pass through the strictest formalism to regain free expression in music, and it is easy to see how this corresponds the emotional payoff I just described and to the novel’s movement from debating abstract ideas to narrating deeply emotional events. The reader can follow this kind of correspondence and interpenetration on almost every single plot or thematic element and this is what makes this such a dense novel – it is impossible to just pick up a just single thread from its texture, but one always finds it interwoven with many others that seems to form a confusing tangle at first sight but upon closer scrutiny turn out to form an intricate pattern. And, almost needless to mention at this point, of course this has its correspondence in Leverkühn’s music, too, when in his later work all elements relate to all other elements in some way and everything becomes a theme. I can certainly why some people have difficulties with Doktor Faustus even if they enjoy other works by this author beyond Buddenbrooks – it is a difficult work and still poses a challenge even almost 70 years after its publication, but I for one think it remains one of the most exciting novels of the twentieth century and is well worth the effort it demands. show less

This book is a continuation of my post-election reading program; it turned out to be another appropriate choice, written as it was when the world stood “in Endes Zeichen,” as the narrator expresses it. I first tried to read this nearly a half-century ago, in the translation of H. T. Lowe-Porter, but didn’t get very far; the book was beyond me then. I lacked the knowledge of theology, philosophy, and music theory to appreciate it fully. But more than that, I’m glad I waited so that I could read it in German and savor both Mann’s convoluted style as well as his pastiche of archaic vocabulary.
Thomas Mann seems to be an old-fashioned writer. Certainly, he is less modernistic than contemporaries such as Joyce. In his way, however, show more he is inventive, particularly in the way he gives the impression that the book is not a novel by having an obtrusive narrator as one of the characters.
Doktor Faustus treats Mann’s familiar theme, artistic genius and its relation to illness and madness, in this case, even the demonic. It is a variation on that theme, though. In many of his earlier works, the protagonist is divided: too bourgeois, he fears, to truly be successful as an artist, with a related fastidious alienation from artistic circles, yet too attracted to art to fit in as a solid burgher. Here, by contrast, the traits of each are apportioned to two characters, the composer Adrian Leverkühn and the narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, a pedantic, small-caliber scholar whose name suggests the transient nature of the decayed humanist tradition he personifies and is powerless to defend.
Another way in which this story of an artist’s life varies from Mann’s earlier works is the way in which Leverkühn’s life and fate correspond to that of Germany in the first half of the 20th century; in a way, it serves as a parable of it. This correspondence is underlined by the way the narrator repeatedly sidetracks himself to ruminate on the course of the war at the time of composition (1943—45). This juxtaposition of two timelines, that of Leverkühn’s life and that of the composition of the narrative is one of the skillful ways Mann suggests the impression of a factual account, rather than a novel.
The title takes its name from the composer’s final work, The Lamentations of Doktor Faustus, a work the narrator describes as simultaneously one of extreme calculation and pure expressivity. This pairing of polar opposites is characteristic of Mann’s recurring preoccupations.
As Leverkühn declares, this cantata, based on the enduring proto-German Faust legend, is nothing less than the retraction of Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. That work’s famous closing choral movement, Ode to Joy, celebrates the humanistic ideals of brotherhood and enlightenment, ideals that Germany betrayed.
While not as great an achievement as Der Zauberberg, Tonio Kröger, or Tod in Venedig, this book is so masterful and rich that I can’t give it less than five stars. The complexity of its prose and the topics treated demand attentive reading, but I felt amply rewarded for the effort. Nevertheless, I think I’ll read next something with simpler sentences. Perhaps Hemingway. show less

A deal with the devil never goes your way. Thomas Mann’s last great novel is about a composer who makes such a deal and the heights and depths to which he is taken for it. At least that’s what the narrator says. As you read on, you realize that the book is no less about the deal with the devil Germany made with Nazism. Mann writes as a German devastated by the blood pact his country made with a madman. The result is a searing philosophical novel about love, history, and the price of civilization, told as a story of friendship and of thwarted and fulfilled ambition. There’s nothing quite like it in world literature.

I confess I have never finished this book. The only one by Mann so far. But not because I couldn't: it's because I don't want to finish it, yet! This is not a mystery novel, so it doesn't really matter whether you read the whole work. There are no surprises, you know form the very beginning what's going on. But every page is a surprise nevertheless. The chapters on Leverkuhn's musical education are unbelievable, and the whole idea of writing about dodecaphonic music as means of expressing the 900's is pure genius. This is one of the few books that should always be next to your bed or wherever you read. I wish I could learn it by heart!