Doktor Faustus

Doktor Faustus, a novel by Th. Mann, written between 1943 and 1947, and published in 1947. It is Mann's judgement on the Germany of his lifetime. The sub-title runs ‘Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde’. This friend, Serenus Zeitblom, a German ‘Bürger’, represents traditional values but lacks strength. In contrast, the dynamic Leverkühn is a man possessed. Two aspects of the German character are here embodied. Leverkühn, born in 1885, grows up at the time when Nietzsche was the idol of the young, and Mann establishes points of identity between him and the fictitious Leverkühn. But he also demonstrates Leverkühn's subjection to Wagner's overwhelming and seductive music. The genius of the German people is conceived as musical, and the composer Leverkühn continues the task of destruction begun by R. Wagner. Zeitblom portrays his friend as intellectually ruthless, determined to penetrate that which should remain intact, and to explore paths which should remain barred. His mind is incapable of compassion. His life extends to 1940, embracing the growth of evil in Germany and its apparent triumph.

Leverkühn devotes himself entirely to a new kind of music. Only in parody do his compositions exhibit any link with musical tradition, and his life runs a destructive course parallel to that of his music. A decisive and symbolic incident occurs during his studies at Leipzig. He experiences a passionate attraction to a prostitute, whom he later calls the ‘Hetaera Esmeralda’. He meets her in Preßburg, and, in defiance of her warnings, insists on spending a night with her. He contracts syphilis, for which he vainly seeks a cure. One of his doctors dies, another is arrested. He there-upon accepts his disease as the ‘diabolical curse’ taking charge of his life. He visits Italy, and during an attack of migraine the Devil appears to him and announces his ultimate enthralment at the expiry of the allotted span of twenty-four years. Leverkühn betakes himself to a Bavarian village, Pfeiffering, where he lives for nineteen years, writing most of his music in that time.

Three times this disciple of the Devil attempts a human relationship, and each ends in failure. He falls in love and entrusts his wooing to a friend, the violinist Rudolf Schwerdtfeger. But Schwerdtfeger and Marie Godsau go off together, and Leverkühn loses at one stroke both friend and bride. When Nepomuk, the 5-year-old nephew to whom he is devoted, suffers an agonizing death from meningitis a few weeks after his arrival on a visit, Leverkühn becomes convinced that his curse afflicts those around him. His sanity begins to waver. He summons his acquaintances to hear his latest work, and informs them that he has a contract with the Devil and that the time has arrived at which the pact matures. He collapses, and the rest of his life is spent in imbecility, during which, like Nietzsche, he is tended by his mother.

Doktor Faustus is largely concerned with the nihilism which permeated European, and especially German, civilization in the 20th c., and Nietzsche and Wagner are exposed as its sponsors. The climax of Leverkühn's work of negation occurs in the composition and in the nature of his last work, the cantata D. Fausti Weheklag. To Zeitblom he exclaims ‘es soll nicht sein’, and goes on to explain that the ‘es’ of this cryptic prohibition is ‘what is good and noble’. He further declares that he will cancel ‘it’, and ‘it’ is revealed to be the Ninth Symphony of Beethoven, the symbol of faith and optimism. This nihilistic cantata, brilliantly described by Mann, closes with an orchestral movement, in which, when all the other instruments have fallen silent, there is heard a prolonged diminuendo on G flat from a solo cello; to ‘the listening soul’ the recollection of this note ‘steht als ein Licht in der Nacht’. This ‘light in the night’ ends Leverkühn's musical œuvre. It may express a hope of grace and give at least a hint that Mann's final attitude to German civilization is not one of total despair.

In 1949 Mann published Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus. Roman eines Romans. It is not a novel but a discursive autobiographical essay covering the period January 1943 to the appearance of Doktor Faustus in the autumn of 1947. Discussions with Th. Adorno are reported, and the evil influence which Mann attributes to the work of Nietzsche and Wagner is confirmed. A film version by F. Seitz had its première in 1982.