From Twelve-Tone Music to the “Politics of Eternity”

In truth, however, Mann seems to have been unaware of Schoenberg’s pronouncement, and he did not become interested in twelve-tone music because he somehow thought the story of its invention might make a good allegorical vehicle for the rise of Nazism. He held no ill wish toward Schoenberg, and although his allusions to real-world contemporaries in Doctor Faustus were often ethically dubious, surely he would have recognized that using the work of an exiled Jewish composer for such a purpose would have been crass beyond compare.3It’s worth noting, however, that at least when he began the novel, Mann labored under the mistaken (and rather surprising) assumption that twelve-tone music was not only not persecuted but actually supported in the Third Reich. See the diary entry for May 8, 1943, in Thomas Mann, Tagebücher, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn and Inge Jens, 10 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1977–95), V: 572–73. Mann was instead captivated by the ways in which modern intellectual life (including the various forms of modern art) had created an entire generation of thinkers incapable of formulating an adequate defense against a rising tide of irrationality. Central to Mann’s concern was the increasingly wide intellectual gap that separated modern artists from their audience. Art, so he felt, needed to incessantly revise its formal language in order to escape becoming trapped in clichés. But in pursuing originality, it also became less and less accessible to the common man. This conundrum mirrored the condition of society at large, which, in becoming ever more specialized and technologically advanced, also became ever more obtuse and even frightening to the everyday observer.

Mann was naturally most interested in how this question played out in the realm of the novel. His essays and diary entries of the late 1930s and early 1940s document his increasing fear that the literary language he had developed during the first quarter of the twentieth century was by now useless—a concern we see most clearly in his increasing interest in the concept of “parody.” (In Doctor Faustus, Adrian Leverkühn repeatedly expresses a similar fascination with parody.) At the same time, however, Mann mistrusted the more radical language developed by his contemporary James Joyce in works such as Ulysses (1922) and especially Finnegans Wake (1939), fearing the way in which these works sacrificed realist causality for an internal order based in mythic association and language games.4Mann testifies to his preoccupation with Joyce in Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of “Doctor Faustus” (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 91.

Mann’s treatment of dodecaphony in Doctor Faustus transposes this problem into the realm of modern music. In other words, Mann was interested in Schoenberg and in twelve-tone composition not because he saw in them convenient vehicles by which to allegorize the rise of Nazism, but rather because he viewed Schoenberg as the musical equivalent of Joyce—a daring artist who had developed a novel and promising response to contemporary reality that, one suspects, is nevertheless not entirely sound. In pursuing this approach, Mann was greatly influenced by his neighbor in Pacific Palisades, the philosopher and music critic Theodor W. Adorno, who presented a similarly ambiguous picture of Schoenberg in his Philosophy of New Music (1949), which Mann read in manuscript version.

Once we learn to approach Doctor Faustus not as an allegory about a particular kind of historical evil, but rather as a narrative about the helplessness of advanced intellectual culture in the face of unreason, the relevance of the novel for the twenty-first century becomes much easier to see. In exploring this relevance with contemporary students, I have found the historian Timothy Snyder’s arguments about the relationship between what Snyder calls a “politics of inevitability” and a “politics of eternity” extremely helpful. In a series of books, essays, and blog posts written in response to the rise of authoritarian regimes in Russia, the European Union, and America, Snyder has tried to provide a general account that would link these regimes to the dictatorships of the twentieth century without thereby becoming enmired in historical particularism.5See centrally Timothy Snyder, On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century (New York: Tim Duggan, 2017), and The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America (New York: Tim Duggan, 2018). Snyder also discusses the politics of inevitability and eternity on his YouTube Channel in a presentation archived at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Eghl19elKk8 (accessed July 9, 2024). His ingenious approach is to seek the common denominator for democratic backsliding not in political or economic factors, but rather in a society’s relationship to time. As Snyder reminds us, modernity differs from pre-modernity perhaps most centrally by its teleological conception of history—by the idea that history is not a never-ending succession of ever-similar themes, but rather bends towards specific goals. This temporal understanding has great liberatory potential and has been the motor behind all great struggles for civil rights, justice, and liberty of the past few hundred years. But it can also be corrupted into smug self-security, into “a sense that […] the laws of progress are known, that there are no alternatives, and therefore nothing really to be done.” “In the American capitalist version of this story,” Snyder elaborates, “nature brought the market, which brought democracy, which brought happiness. In the European version, history brought the nation, which learned from war that peace was good, and hence chose integration and prosperity.”6Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, 7.

The confident pronouncements offered by the prophets of inevitability rarely match up with developments in the real world, however. At certain points in time, popular sentiments about the shape of history may indeed align with the talking points offered by pundits and political philosophers—Western Europe in the early 1990s, when a widespread sense of optimism in the future of liberal democracy provided a receptive environment for Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” thesis, might be a good example of such a moment.7Francis Fukuyama, The End of History and the Last Man (New York: Free Press, 1992). But the actual progression of history is messy, and sooner or later facts will interfere with theory. And as the prophets of inevitability add ever more epicycles to their political theories, seeking to reassure ordinary people that the triumph of the market, the communist utopia, or the everlasting peace amongst nations is just around the corner, disaffection amongst those forced to put up with rampant inequality, “actually existing socialism,” or the great game of aspiring superpowers grows. Eventually, the politics of inevitability collapse into a politics of eternity. “Whereas inevitability promises a better future for everyone,” Snyder writes, “eternity places one nation at the center of a cyclical story of victimhood. Time is no longer a line into the future, but a circle that endlessly returns the same threats from the past.”8Snyder, The Road to Unfreedom, 8.

Snyder’s theory of a transition from inevitability to eternity is broad enough to fit not only Russia in the 1990s and 2000s or (one fears) the United States in the 2010s and 2020s, but also Germany in the 1920s and 1930s. This aspiration towards universality, along with the strident tone of Snyder’s pronouncements, raises the interesting question whether his model is not itself an example of the “politics of inevitability.” However, I describe it here not because I think it is unquestionably correct, but because I think it provides a highly accessible summary of what Thomas Mann is trying to convey in Doctor Faustus by means of a much more densely woven allegorical account of the history of Western music.

Earlier in this chapter, I argued that Mann chose music as the allegorical vehicle for his tale “in part” because music in the early twentieth century was considered to be a particularly Germanic art. We know this to be true because of a lecture that Mann gave at the Library of Congress in May 1945, in which he stated (clearly making a disguised allusion to the novel he was then writing): “It is a grave error on the part of legend and story not to connect Faust with music. […] If Faust is to be the representative of the German soul, he would have to be musical, for the relation of the German to the world is abstract and mystical, that is, musical.”9Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” in Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942–1949 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1963), 51. But this is not a sufficient, nor even a particularly satisfactory, explanation for the overall structure of Doctor Faustus. For Mann’s novel does not offer a specifically “Germanic” treatment of its musical subject matter. Yes, Leverkühn makes musical advances that in real life were the intellectual property of a German composer, Arnold Schoenberg. And yes, his syphilitic infection recalls the life of the (Austrian) composer Hugo Wolf, as well as that of Robert Schumann. But Leverkühn’s biography is just as much influenced by the Russo-French-American composer Igor Stravinsky and by the French composer Hector Berlioz. And while Mann devotes an entire chapter to a discussion of Ludwig van Beethoven, one of the “three Bs” that the nineteenth-century conductor Hans von Bülow had famously located at the heart of German musical identity, Bach and especially Brahms (the other two “Bs”) receive comparatively scant attention. The same can be said of Wagner, though Mann does smuggle in a clever reference to the Meistersinger overture.10Perhaps the reference was too clever, for even Adorno failed to recognize it when Mann sent him the passage in manuscript version (see the commentary for 142/195). Most critics treat Mann’s description of this incident in The Story of a Novel as a humorous anecdote demonstrating Adorno’s obtuseness. To me, it instead suggests that the philosopher was set up because Mann had given him no prior indication of how and why he might wish to integrate Wagner into the novel. What we get instead are lengthy treatments of non-German composers such as Orlando di Lasso, Claudio Monteverdi, or Giovanni Pierluigi da Palestrina.11Thomas Mann criticism long neglected this extra-German dimension of Doctor Faustus. Important corrective accounts are offered by Hans Rudolf Vaget, “‘Blödsinnig schön!’ Französische Musik im Doktor Faustus,” in Seelenzauber: Thomas Mann und die Musik (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2006), 122–42, as well as by Eckart Goebel, Esmeralda: Deutsch-französische Verhältnisse in Thomas Manns “Doktor Faustus” (Göttingen: Wallstein Verlag, 2015).

Doctor Faustus, in other words, is a novel first of all about music as such, and about German music only in the sense that Mann believed the German people to have always had an especially intense relationship with a more universal problematic. In his Library of Congress lecture, Mann states: “Music is calculated order and chaos-breeding irrationality at once, rich in conjuring, incantatory gestures, in magic of numbers, the most unrealistic and yet the most impassioned of arts.”12Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” 51. These lines, which I will explore at greater length in chapter 10, “Music Theory and Political Allegory,” suggest that he chose music as the allegorical center of his novel because in its attempt to create “calculated order” out of the “chaos-breeding irrationality” of mere sound it directly resembles the struggles of the modern intellectual, who similarly wrestles to bring order to an ever-more-chaotic world. If there is one image that cuts to the very heart of Doctor Faustus, then, it is the one that I have chosen as the cover for this book, and which Adrian Leverkühn tacks to the wall above his piano in chapter XII (102/138) of the novel. Dürer’s Melencolia I depicts an angel caught in a moment of melancholic contemplation, surrounded by various tokens of intellectual labor and scientific inquiry: a book, a compass, a rhombohedron, a brazier, and a balance scale, among other things. Above the angel’s head hangs a magic square (an array of numbers that always adds up to the same sum, no matter if read horizontally, vertically, or along the major diagonals). Over the course of the novel, Mann will develop this magic square into a symbol of dodecaphonic composition, thereby stressing the link between music and intellectual work more generally.

Doctor Faustus documents how Leverkühn, the archetypal modern composer, becomes disenchanted by the rat race of tonal composition, in which novelty can only be achieved by ever greater harmonic subtlety, by a play with rules that have long since become too complex for ordinary listeners to genuinely appreciate. Seeking to overcome this dictatorship of tonal innovation, he turns towards a radically different compositional style, one that is based on predetermination and on endless recurrence. Thomas Mann calls this the “strict style”—his name for Schoenberg’s innovation. Timothy Snyder, describing a similar development in the realm of politics, also locates predestination and the endless recycling of familiar arguments at the heart of his “politics of eternity.”