Serenus Zeitblom and the Question of Accountability

This is not coincidental, for Mann’s purpose when he started writing his novel in March of 1943 was not only to reflect on what had happened in the past, but also to look forward into the future. The question of what Nazism’s defeat might mean for the German people was just as important to him as the question of how the Third Reich had become possible to begin with. Serenus Zeitblom allowed him to tackle this question. Zeitblom is the “good German”—a term that, with Thomas Mann, should only ever be used in quotation marks. He is, in other words, a person who never gave up on the values of democratic liberalism, but who also has to confront the fact that these very values have proven so easily corruptible.

This is another dimension of Doctor Faustus that is highly pertinent to readers in the twenty-first century. If, as I have argued throughout this introduction, we are indeed already in a period of democratic backsliding, then the question of how we account for what has happened and how we justify our faults to future generations is of the utmost significance. In grappling with this vexing moral dilemma, Serenus Zeitblom provides a specimen case for all of us. His considerable faults should serve as a warning. His flawed humanity, however, also pulls us into the text and reminds us that Doctor Faustus, despite its glacial aspects, is ultimately as warm and engaging a novel as any ever written—if only we know where to look.

This allegorical dimension is not the only reason why Mann’s narrator should be an especially fascinating figure for readers in the twenty-first century. In conversations with my students, I’ve found them to be finely attuned to the emotional nuances of Zeitblom’s obvious sense of jealous possessiveness when it comes to his lifelong friend Adrian Leverkühn. The basic contours of this emotional disposition have long been known to scholarship: Zeitblom’s almost obsequious devotion to Leverkühn, his willingness to follow him around from town to town, his pride at being allowed to address the composer with informal pronouns, his jealous dislike of Rudi Schwerdtfeger. What most academic readers have been reluctant to acknowledge, however (unlike my students, born into a different generation and unburdened by any reverence to canonical interpretations), is that Zeitblom’s feelings for Leverkühn quite clearly reflect not Platonic friendship, but rather male-male desire.

Consider only the most obvious indices. Zeitblom is intensely jealous not only of Schwerdtfeger (with whom Leverkühn actually does begin a homosexual affair), but also of the only other man to win the composer’s friendship: Rüdiger Schildknapp, a man whose boyish good looks and natural charm earn him numerous amorous solicitations from female acquaintances, all of which leave him “lethargic, frugal, reserved” (180/247). As if to compensate for this evident jealousy, Zeitblom repeatedly assures us of his ostensible heterosexuality and manly prowess. In chapter XVI, having just mentioned that amongst the students of the Winfried fraternity “there was no talk of women or wenches, girlfriends or love affairs” (156/214), Zeitblom practically trips over himself to report that he “had tasted of the apple, and that for some seven or eight months back then I had an affair with a lass from the common folk, a cooper’s daughter” (157/214). Later in life, Zeitblom actually does wed a woman with the rather comical name Helene Ölhafen (her surname means “oil harbor” in German). By his own admission, he picks her in no small part because of the classical resonance of her first name. It’s a legitimate question how happy this marriage actually is. The opening of chapter XXI, in which we briefly peek in on the Zeitbloms’ domestic life, reads like a parody of Book IV of The Odyssey with its infamous depiction of the cold relationship between Helen of Troy and her husband King Menelaos of Sparta. Certainly, Zeitblom is willing to leave his wife and children at the drop of a hat whenever his composer friend calls. He even rents a bachelor pad in Munich so that he can more easily move about in the same social circles as Leverkühn.2The vague geographic references that Mann scatters throughout Doctor Faustus would place this bachelor pad in the vicinity of the Englischer Garten, which, as Robert Tobin has pointed out in an analysis of Mann’s novella Death in Venice, was well-known as a gay cruising ground at the time. See Robert Tobin, “Why is Tadzio a Boy? Perspectives on Homoeroticism in Death in Venice” in Thomas Mann, Death in Venice, trans. and ed. Clayton Koelb (New York: Norton, 1994), 207–32. None of these Munich friends, meanwhile, find it odd that Zeitblom usually appears without his wife. In fact, Heinrich Institoris is perfectly comfortable entrusting his own spouse to Zeitblom’s company for an entire evening while he goes out to play cards. And then there is the name of the only other close friend Zeitblom has besides Leverkühn, and to whom he confides his innermost thoughts, including his secret opposition to the Nazi regime. It is a Catholic priest hilariously named “Monsignore Hinterpförtner” (Monsignor Warden of the Back Door). His name fits right in with that of other self-evidently homoerotic ones in the novel, such as “Schwerdtfeger” (sword polisher; Feger is also a slang term for a cheeky young man) or “Zapfenstösser” (cone thruster).

It is remarkable to me that Zeitblom’s sexuality, and by extension its larger importance for the novel, seems to have never received sustained attention in the critical literature. My students, on the other hand, unencumbered by any background knowledge about the collective guilt hypothesis, the debates surrounding humanism in the 1940s, or any of the other topics through which Zeitblom’s role is customarily read, tend to latch onto details such as these with evident interpretive zeal. This indicates to me that twenty-first-century readers have much to contribute to the study of Doctor Faustus yet, not despite but rather precisely because they approach the novel without any knowledge of what one is “supposed” to say about it.

A reading of Doctor Faustus as the document of a queer friendship may appear frivolous to some, given the weighty intellectual questions that are undeniably being negotiated in the text. In truth, however, we are dealing with two sides of the same coin. We know, for example, that Thomas Mann in the early 1920s developed a theory of democracy that was closely tied to the conception of homosocial eros propagated by Walt Whitman in his 1871 essay “Democratic Vistas,” in which the American poet describes “intense and loving comradeship, the personal and passionate attachment of man to man” as it had been shown, for example, by the soldiers of the Union Army, as the “most substantial hope and safety of the future of these [United] States.”3Walt Whitman, “Democratic Vistas,” in Leaves of Grass and Other Writings (New York: Norton, 2002), 770. This Whitmanesque theory, in turn, represented a decisive turning away from the national-chauvinistic theories of homosociality formulated by Hans Blüher, which Mann had studied with great fascination a few years earlier. Blüher argued that the German state could only be saved by tight-knit coteries of men operating outside the view of the public and willing to embrace violent means where necessary; his theories would eventually feed into the wave of reactionary militancy known as the “white terror” between 1919 and 1921.4Mann’s intellectual debt to Hans Blüher has been analyzed in German by Hans Wißkirchen, “Republikanischer Eros: Zu Walt Whitmans und Hans Blühers Rolle in der politischen Publizistik Thomas Manns,” in “Heimsuchung und süßes Gift”: Erotik und Poetic bei Thomas Mann, ed. Gerhard Härle (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1992), 17–40. For briefer treatments in English, see Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995), as well as Lawrence S. Rainey, “Introduction to ‘On the German Republic,’” Modernism/modernity 14, no. 1 (2007): 109–32.

Mann’s reflections on the role of homosocial eros took place a quarter century before the composition of Doctor Faustus, but were clearly much on his mind when he wrote the novel: Hans Reisiger, the friend and translator who introduced Mann to Whitman, served as the model for Rüdiger Schildknapp, and Mann exchanged several letters with Hans Blüher, whose notion of a Männerbund (male community) also influenced the depiction of the Winfried fraternity in chapter XIV.5Blüher is quoted in the student newsletter that Mann consulted when he wrote the Winfried episode. Mann underlined the relevant passage and placed an exclamation mark next to it.

To approach Doctor Faustus as a queer text—an approach that I have found uniquely helpful in capturing the interest of my undergraduate readers—might therefore also allow us to come to novel conclusions about Mann’s evolving democratic sensibilities, and about his ultimate judgment of Serenus Zeitblom. Does the narrator’s affection for his composer friend more closely resemble the conception of homosocial eros advocated by Blüher or by Whitman? Or does it represent an advance over both? Settling this question would require interpretive work that is beyond the scope of an introductory guide. The act of posing it, however, already shows that plenty remains to be said about Doctor Faustus, and that the novel is likely to continue to enjoy a rich afterlife in the twenty-first century.