Composition

The next few years were artistically hard ones for Mann, however, who started and abandoned multiple projects as he attempted to write a follow-up to his biggest successes to date, the novel Buddenbrooks (1901) and the novella Tonio Kröger (1903). The Faust project fell by the wayside. Mann eventually pulled himself out of this period of relative infertility with the undisputed masterpiece Death in Venice (1912). Over the next few decades, he became one of the best-known writers in the world; his novel The Magic Mountain (1924) made him a household name in the literary centers of Western Europe, and in 1929 his career was crowned when he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature. Over the same time period, he underwent a process of political conversion. He had begun his life as a conservative German nationalist and vehemently defended this position as late as 1918, when he published the book-length Reflections of a Non-Political Man. But his experience of the abortive German revolution of 1918/1919, along with his disgust for the ever-more reactionary elements that were infiltrating the social life of his adopted hometown of Munich, led to a process of democratic conversion. In 1922 he publicly embraced the Weimar constitution. Over time, his politics even drifted towards the social democratic. Still, memories collected during his conservative period would serve him well when it came to writing Doctor Faustus, where the chapters devoted to the reactionary Schlaginhaufen salon (XXVIII), the German revolution (XXXIII), and the proto-fascist Kridwiss Circle (XXXIV) all draw on personal experience.

Mann’s literary fame, along with his embrace of democracy and his ensuing verbal attacks on the Nazis, placed him high on the list of public enemies when Hitler came to power in 1933. The author and his family became exiles from Germany, first in Switzerland (and briefly in the south of France), then, starting in 1938, in the United States, where Mann lived and taught at Princeton before moving to the Los Angeles area in 1941, eventually settling in the suburb of Pacific Palisades. For the first decade of his exile period, Mann was largely preoccupied with the massive Joseph tetralogy, a series of novels retelling the well-known story from the Old Testament with all the tools at the disposal of a modernist writer. Begun as an apolitical project, the Joseph novels soon morphed into an allegorical commentary on contemporary events, with Joseph’s brothers, who toss him into the well, personifying the fascist rabble, Joseph himself taking on features of Thomas Mann, and the administrative reforms that he initiates in Egypt standing in for Roosevelt’s New Deal. During those same years, Mann lectured far and wide on political events, recorded propaganda broadcasts for the BBC, and dined at the White House. Eventually he became so famous that his name was even tossed around as that of a future president of a democratic postwar Germany.

Mann concluded his work on the Joseph-novels in January of 1943 and immediately followed up on them with another Biblical tale meant to undermine the Nazis, the story “The Tables of the Law.” Already in late October of 1942, however, his thoughts had returned to the Faustus project of his youth. At Stalingrad, the Red Army was doggedly resisting the Wehrmacht; a few weeks later, the Western Allies landed in Northern Africa as part of Operation Torch. A German defeat, unthinkable during the first years of the war, began to seem not only possible but actually likely. It was an ideal time, then, to begin a process of reckoning, and what better way to do so than through a retelling of the story of Doctor Faustus, a man who sells his soul to the devil for immeasurable temporal gain but ends up by being dragged into hell? In this way, a project that forty years earlier had been conceived on a fairly personal level became filled with world-historical significance.

Mann wasn’t a stranger to huge novels commenting on contemporary history. The Magic Mountain had already fulfilled this function for the First World War and had played a major part in the struggles over collective memory that roiled the Weimar public sphere.3For an excellent introduction to The Magic Mountain and its cultural significance see Morten Høj Jensen, The Master of Contradictions: Thomas Mann and the Making of “The Magic Mountain” (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2025). Writing an analysis of the German soul in its lowest depths from a position of exile was a task that presented special challenges, however—challenges that would have major repercussions for the history of the novel form.

In early 1943, Mann was not yet cognizant of what lay ahead of him. He spent several months collecting materials and then began writing on May 23, 1943, the same day on which he has Serenus Zeitblom commence his biographical reflections (although due to an oversight on Mann’s part, some editions of the novel give this date as May 27 instead). Detailed research was integral to Mann’s compositional process, for he was an author who much preferred adapting preexisting materials over inventing subjects out of thin air. Indeed, in his 1906 essay “Bilse and I,” his first major work of self-commentary, he had argued that “if one searches for great ‘inventors’ in literary history one never ends up with the best names.”4Thomas Mann, “Bilse und Ich,” in Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe: Werke—Briefe—Tagebücher, ed. Heinrich Detering, Eckhard Heftrich, Hermann Kurzke, et al. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2002–), 14.1: 99. In all further notes, this edition will be abbreviated as GKFA, with references given to volume, sub-volume, and page number. The most important source for such preexisting materials was Thomas Mann’s own past life, a fact that has proven fortuitous for later scholars, since it meant that when the author destroyed large parts of his diaries in May 1945 (possibly because they contained compromising revelations about his homosexuality) he preserved the records for the years 1918–21, which he needed for the Munich chapters of Doctor Faustus. The novel is filled with thinly fictionalized accounts of autobiographical experiences and also contains many a biting portrait of people who considered themselves family friends. Mann privately referred to these portraits as “literary murders” and had to extend a great deal of energy smoothing things over after Doctor Faustus was published.

But in order to write as complex a novel as Doctor Faustus, Mann also had to engage in significant research into secondary sources. Academics have invested an enormous amount of detective work over the past few decades tracking down the hundreds of books and articles that Mann likely consulted. Since the particulars are of limited relevance for a first-time encounter with Doctor Faustus, I have refrained from providing a comprehensive listing.5Readers who speak German can find a detailed list of all the titles that have been identified in GKFA 10.2: 1169–75. In English, the best source—still relevant and eminently readable more than sixty years after it was originally published—is Gunilla Bergsten, Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”: The Sources and Structure of the Novel, trans. Krishna Winston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969). Nevertheless, a partial catalogue of only the most important titles would include the volumes The Story of Music and Beethoven by the music critic Paul Bekker, Ernest Newman’s The Unconscious Beethoven, Arnold Schoenberg’s Theory of Harmony, an explanatory guide to musical instruments by Fritz Volbach, a fifteenth-century inquisitor’s manual known as the Malleus Maleficarum or “Hammer of Witches,” biographies of the sixteenth-century artists Albrecht Dürer and Tilmann Riemenschneider as well as of Ludwig van Beethoven and Friedrich Nietzsche, the memoirs of Hector Berlioz and Igor Stravinsky, the letters of Martin Luther and of Austrian composer Hugo Wolf, a bevy of scientific articles that proved crucial for chapters III and XXVII, medical literature on the progression of syphilis, and the newsletter of a conservative student fraternity, which helped inform chapter XIV.

Just as important as these written sources were conversations and epistolary exchanges that Mann conducted with friends and family. His youngest son Michael (then a violist with the San Francisco Symphony) sent him a letter that included a lengthy introduction to musical theory. The theologian Paul Tillich contributed detailed information about the curriculum for German divinity students in the early twentieth century, which Mann incorporated into chapters XI–XIII. By far the most formative, however, were Mann’s conversations with the philosopher and musical theorist Theodor W. Adorno, who had settled just a few miles down the road from him in Brentwood. Adorno served as an informal musical advisor to Mann. He performed and explained many of the musical pieces that are mentioned in the novel, gave Mann copies of his writings (most importantly the 1937 essay “Late Style in Beethoven” as well as a manuscript version of Philosophy of New Music, which would eventually be published in 1949), proofread Mann’s manuscripts and even drafted paragraph-length descriptions of fictional compositions that Mann then incorporated wholesale into his novel. Most of what Mann knew about the twelve-tone technique, for example, derived from Adorno. The fact that Doctor Faustus never acknowledges this debt (except in the sense that Mann lends Adorno’s facial features and distinctive horn-rimmed glasses to the devil in chapter XXV, which is hardly a flattering tribute) led to some friction between the two men.

Mann’s complex relationship with Adorno illustrates what precisely the author meant when he privileged “adaptation” over “inspiration.” Mann did not simply use ideas that he found in his secondary sources to shape his own writing. Instead, he frequently copied entire passages from his readings into his novel, altering them only slightly and otherwise presenting them as if they were his own work. At times, it is clear that he did not even understand the full ramifications of what he was copying. For example, he relied heavily on Adorno to flesh out Wendell Kretzschmar’s lectures on Beethoven in chapter VIII, and amongst other things included verbatim quotations from a letter that Adorno had written to him explicating Beethoven’s piano sonata Op. 111. Unfortunately, he had a hard time deciphering Adorno’s handwriting and rendered the philosopher’s phrase Eigengewicht der Akkorde (inherent weight of the chords) as the non-sensical Fugengewicht der Akkorde (fugal weight of the chords) (59/84).

Among literary and musical theorists, this kind of deliberate cut-and-pasting is known as “montage”; I will explore it more fully in chapter 6, “Doctor Faustus and Literary Modernism.” For present purposes, it is worth stressing that Mann’s montage work extended even to his personal life, making Doctor Faustus a novel that veers precariously and excitingly from the extremely objective (e.g., passages from textbooks inserted into the narrative) to the painfully intimate. In chapter XXXV, for example, Mann quotes verbatim from the suicide note of his younger sister Carla, who poisoned herself in 1910 and was dragged into service as the real-life model for the character of Clarissa Rodde thirty-five years after her death. The ethical implications of this trigger vigorous debate even to the present day.

Work on the novel progressed steadily over the next four years, even as the Third Reich fell in May of 1945. A caesura of a more personal sort occurred in the spring of 1946, when Mann had to interrupt work in order to travel to Chicago and undergo surgery on his lungs. His family kept the true gravity of the situation from him: Mann had been diagnosed with cancer. Even without full knowledge of what was happening to him, however, the seventy-year-old author undoubtedly realized that his condition was serious. As soon as had he recovered from the immediate effects of the surgery, he propped himself up in his hospital bed and continued working on Doctor Faustus with grim determination. On January 29, 1947, he brought his project to a successful completion. His desire to give a literary shape to an epoch had clearly not been sated, however, for just a few months later he sat down again to write The Story of a Novel, his 1949 account of the composition of Doctor Faustus, which simultaneously serves as a vivid portrait of the émigré community in Los Angeles.