1: Why Read Doctor Faustus in the Twenty-First Century?

When the novel was published, most of its early readers understandably took a narrower view of its ambitions, treating it exclusively as an allegory of Nazism, which had come to such an inglorious end only two years earlier. Mann at times supported this tendency. After all, he had become very famous as a commentator on Nazi Germany; an American newspaper had even declared him to be “Hitler’s Most Intimate Enemy.”3Paul V.C. Whitney, “Distinguished Exile Speaks Here Tonight,” Deseret News, March 21, 1938, 1. But as time went on, he increasingly lamented the fact that nobody seemed to recognize the more universal aspirations of his tale.4See, for example, the letter to Jonas Lesser of May 1, 1948, in which he stresses that in the novel “Germany is only a paradigm. The constant message of ‘the end is near, the end is coming’ refers not only to it.” In Mann, Selbstkommentare, 195. By and large, the more limited focus has dominated critical interpretations into the present.5Hans Rudolf Vaget, for example, writes that “[With Doctor Faustus] Mann chose to tell a particular part of German history in terms of ‘German’ music” and stresses that “the highly imaginative and professional musical encoding of the pre-history of the “German catastrophe” may be regarded as the novel’s most original […] feature.” See Hans Rudolf Vaget, “‘German’ Music and German Catastrophe: A Re-Reading of Doktor Faustus,” in A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann, ed. Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessell (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2004), 221–44.

The aim of this introductory guide, which is based on my experiences discussing Doctor Faustus with undergraduate students at the University of Notre Dame, is to change this state of affairs. My contention is that Mann’s novel, besides being compulsively readable and wickedly funny, is also a work of vital relevance to the present moment. It deserves rediscovery not just because it might help us understand the “German Catastrophe,” but also because of the way it reflects on the political turmoil of the twenty-first century. Like other important novels of the late 1940s and early 1950s (I’m thinking here especially of Camus’s The Plague, Orwell’s 1984, and Ellison’s The Invisible Man, works with which at first sight Doctor Faustus seems to have nothing in common), Mann’s late masterpiece is indelibly stamped by the tumultuous time in which it was written. The ethical authority bestowed by this mark illuminates our own age as well.

My argument in a nutshell is this: the central theme of Doctor Faustus is the regression of progressive liberal culture into irrationality and barbarism. The novel uses early-twentieth-century Germany as a case study, but its message is of universal relevance. Its two major figures, the narrator Serenus Zeitblom and the protagonist Adrian Leverkühn, are born in the final third of the long nineteenth century (Zeitblom in 1883, Leverkühn in 1885), they witness the demise of this era of unprecedented social progress and economic prosperity in 1914, and they live through sixteen more politically precarious and intellectually reckless years until Leverkühn goes mad in 1930 and Zeitblom withdraws from public life in 1934. Like any other historical period, the years that provide the subject matter for Doctor Faustus were unique and need to be treated as such. The crimes of the Nazis, which were made possible by developments set in motion during the time period narrated in the novel, are certainly beyond compare. And yet history, to invoke a popular cliché, “may not repeat itself, but rhymes.” Many of my students, who were born during the “golden quarter century” that came to an abrupt end in 2014/2015, when the Russian invasion of Crimea, the Brexit referendum, and the rise of Donald Trump signaled the renewal of darker times, have found the general structure of Doctor Faustus distressingly familiar.6I borrow the concept of a “golden quarter century” stretching from 1989/1990 to 2014/2015 from my colleague Vittorio Hösle, Globale Fliehkräfte: Eine geschichtsphilosophische Kartierung der Gegenwart (Munich: Karl Alber, 2021). Whether they, too, will witness the descent of the world into a general state of paralysis of the insane is as yet uncertain.

Doctor Faustus, so I believe, speaks to our present moment because its political analysis is constructed loosely enough to survive transposition onto the twenty-first century. Many prior critics have found fault with the novel precisely because of this vagueness. And, indeed, the explanations that the novel offers for the genesis of Nazism fall short of a comprehensive explanation. Economic factors, like the hyperinflation of 1923 or the Great Depression, play no role in the book; neither do the various crises of Weimar political culture. Anti-Semitism, too, is not systematically treated, and in fact Mann’s depiction of Jewish characters consistently relies on anti-Semitic stereotypes.7See Ruth Angress-Klüger, “Jewish Characters in Thomas Mann’s Fiction,” in Horizonte: Festschrift für Herbert Lehnert zum 65. Geburtstag, ed. Hannelore Mundt, Egon Schwarz, and William J. Lillymann (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer Verlag, 1990), 161–72; Egon Schwarz, “The Jewish Characters in Doctor Faustus,” in Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”: A Novel on the Margin of Modernism, ed. Herbert Lehnert and Peter C. Pfeiffer (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1991), 119–40; and Todd Kontje, Thomas Mann’s World: Empire, Race, and the Jewish Question (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 168–75. Mann himself admitted that “the Jewish problem and the Jewish fate as such play no role in the novel” when he was confronted by the critic Ludwig Lewisohn in April 1948, though even then he appears not to have realized why this might be a problem. Mann, Selbstkommentare, 189. The Holocaust, finally, is never directly mentioned—there’s a reference to the Buchenwald concentration camp at one point, but this site is primarily associated with the persecution of political prisoners, not of Jews. What we get instead is a dogged focus on intellectual and cultural questions along with—somewhat puzzlingly—an attempt to narrate the rise of totalitarian ideology through a story about modern music. I will examine this curious and ethically troubling omission at greater length in chapter 8, “Anti-Semitism and the Problem of Other People’s Suffering.”

These seeming inadequacies turn into strengths, however, if we approach Doctor Faustus not as an attempt to offer a definitive account of the rise of Nazism, but instead as a broader meditation on the question of why enlightened liberal cultures can relapse into authoritarian barbarism. Certainly, Doctor Faustus is an undeniably German story, and not just because its action takes place in Germany during the decades immediately predating the Third Reich. The novel analyzes a particularly Germanic path towards irrationality (one over which the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche presided as a guiding star, for example), and it does so by telling a story about music, in part because music, in the early twentieth century, was considered to be “the most German of the arts.”8Pamela M. Potter, Most German of the Arts: Musicology and Society from the Weimar Republic to the End of Hitler’s Reich (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998). But great literature always works by illustrating the general through the particular, and Doctor Faustus is no exception in this regard. Germanic as they may be, Leverkühn, Zeitblom, and the secondary characters that surround them are archetypes of intellectual culture more generally. Their sad fate over the course of the novel has much to tell us in the twenty-first century as well.