Publication History
By the time Mann finished Doctor Faustus, the Third Reich had been defeated and the question of what a postwar Germany might look like was no longer an abstract matter. The international book market had changed as well. For much of Thomas Mann’s exile period, his works were banned in Nazi Germany. His German publisher, Gottfried Bermann Fischer, had to relocate first to Austria, then to neutral Sweden, from whence Mann’s books were shipped to the ever-dwindling number of European countries where they could legally be sold. Both financially and reputationally, the English translations that were published by Alfred A. Knopf in the United States and by Martin Secker in Great Britain became more and more important. Mann was keenly aware of this fact and went to great lengths to manage his international reputation. He sent chapters of Doctor Faustus to his long-time translator Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter almost as soon as he finished them, hoping to get a lucrative English-language edition between covers as quickly as possible.
This rushed production schedule put a great deal of stress on Lowe-Porter and was not exactly beneficial for the quality of her translation. But it did mean that the English-language version could be released in 1948, just a year after the first German edition by Bermann Fischer came out in Stockholm. Even before that, Alfred A. Knopf had published a limited-edition German version of Doctor Faustus in America in order to secure the copyright, for Mann had become a U.S. citizen in 1944 and the laws of his adopted country specified that American authors who published their works abroad first would thereby forfeit any copyright protection in the United States. This provision was meant to shield the domestic book trade, but was evidently counterintuitive in a case like Mann’s.
The year 1948 also saw the publication of a second and much revised German version of Doctor Faustus, which came out in Vienna (the city to which the Bermann-Fischer Verlag had relocated in preparation for an eventual return to Germany), as well as of a licensed edition published by Suhrkamp Verlag in Berlin. These later editions not only fixed the usual typographical errors (exacerbated by the fact that most of the production personnel in Stockholm could not read German) but also contained a number of cuts, which Mann specified because he feared that the original version might overwhelm the reader.
When the 1947 Stockholm edition came out, Germany still lay in ruins and there were only very limited distribution networks that could have carried the novel to readers in Mann’s native country. Copies thus almost exclusively shipped to the wider European market, especially to Switzerland. It was really only with the Suhrkamp edition that Doctor Faustus reached its intended target audience. The Suhrkamp edition was also the first to append an “Author’s Note” meant to appease the composer Arnold Schoenberg, who took a dim view of the novel’s montage technique and regarded the various descriptions of twelve-tone composition that Mann had attributed to Adrian Leverkühn as simple plagiarism.
This convoluted production history raises a number of interesting questions about
Doctor Faustus. Thomas Mann was a native of Germany who thought and wrote in German but had been stripped of his citizenship and was now a citizen of the United States. His novel was published in America in German before it came out in English, but the English-language version was financially far more lucrative than all other versions put together. It also received more press coverage. In Germany, readers would at first have had a very hard time getting their hands on
Doctor Faustus, and an even harder time obtaining domestic versions of Mann’s earlier works, which had not been available for years. At least some people, however, would have been able to acquire English versions of these books, which entered the country in the knapsacks of American soldiers, or U.S.-produced German-language editions, which arrived in the pockets of repatriated POWs who had received Mann’s novels as part of political reeducation measures.
1I trace the convoluted publication and consumption history of Mann’s books in the immediate postwar era in the fifth and sixth chapters of Thomas Mann’s War.Not that there was an excessive amount of interest. For a number of years, Mann would routinely be derided in West Germany as a subservient vassal of the occupying Americans. A sense of collective guilt, along with the recognition that the émigrés from Hitler’s Germany had been refugees, not traitors, developed only slowly. In East Germany, by contrast, Mann was lionized, though often more for political reasons than out of true literary appreciation.
Is Doctor Faustus, then, a German novel or an American one? And was the Thomas Mann of the 1940s a German or an American? For much of the twentieth century, the answer was clear: Thomas Mann was considered an unmistakably German author. As twenty-first-century readers, however, we are much more accustomed to the vagaries of transnational citizenship and of hybrid identities. Our answer may instead be that he was both, for there is no logical reason why an author might not be a part of two national traditions, or why the category of “national literature” should be given priority over that of “world literature.” Indeed, the complicated production history of Doctor Faustus foreshadows the contemporary moment, in which translations of successful authors frequently appear nearly simultaneously with the originals, and often outstrip them in sales and influence. In this way, too, Doctor Faustus points towards the future.