5: A Brief History of the Faust Theme

Historical sources tell us that an astrologer and magician by the name of George (Latin: “Georgius,” German: “Jörg”) Helmstetter was born in the small town of Helmstadt near Heidelberg around 1466 (“Helmstetter” simply means “of the town of Helmstadt”). He enrolled at the University of Heidelberg in 1483, graduating as a magister of philosophy in 1487.1Detailed information about the historical Dr. Faustus, as well as about the early legends that formed around him, can be found in Frank Baron, “Faustus of the Sixteenth Century: His Life, Legend, and Myth,” in The Faustian Century: German Literature and Culture in the Age of Luther and Faustus, ed. J. M. van der Laan and Andrew Weeks (Rochester, NY: Camden House, 2013), 43–46. Shortly afterwards, he began a career as an astrologer and chiromancer (palmist), infuriating traditional practitioners of these crafts by his unorthodox ways but winning powerful patrons. Helmstetter seems to have experimented with a number of pseudonyms during this stage of his career, eventually settling on the nom-de-plum “Faustus,” which means “fortunate” in Latin and “fist” in German. By the early 1500s, he may well have added necromancy to his repertoire and may have boastfully compared his ability to perform miracles to that of Christ; the truth is difficult to ascertain because the main charges against him were written by a professional rival, the abbot Johannes Trithemius. Trithemius’s 1507 indictment was widely circulated and eventually led to charges of pederasty, sodomy, and devil worship being leveled against Faustus. These charges seem to have done no irreparable harm to his career, however, for Faustus soon found himself at the court of Emperor Charles V, for whom he drew up several horoscopes.

The historical Faustus died sometime around 1540, most likely in the small town of Staufen im Breisgau, located in the southwestern corner of contemporary Germany. Even before that, the lengthy process by which his life would be turned into one of the most enduring archetypes of literary history had been set into motion. In the early 1530s, the Protestant reformer Martin Luther mentioned Faustus twice during his so-called “table talks,” on both occasions referring to the magician as an instrument of the devil’s futile attempts to destroy him. These table talks were published in 1566 but widely circulated in fragmentary form before then. One of the people who was clearly familiar with them was a certain Johannes Manlius, a student of Luther’s close associate Philip Melanchthon. In 1563, Manlius published his own account of Faustus, ostensibly based on anecdotes told to him by his former teacher. Manlius changed Faustus’ first name to Johannes and his alma mater from Heidelberg to Cracow, then rumored to be a center of the black arts. He also claimed that Faustus had lived at Wittenberg, a location not attested in the historical records. This last change would prove to be particularly important, for it firmly associated Faustus with central Germany and, more specifically, with the home of the Protestant Reformation, despite his having led a rather peripatetic life mostly on the southern edges of the German-speaking world. In Manlius’s retelling, Faustus began to morph from a mere charlatan into a heretic, somebody who had transgressed against the very foundations of the new faith that was being proclaimed in Wittenberg.

The first book-length retelling of the story of Faustus was published in 1587 in Frankfurt by a printer named Johann Spies; its author is unknown but may well have been Spies himself. This Historia von D. Johann Fausten (History of Dr. John Faust) is often referred to simply as the Volksbuch or “chapbook”—a “chapbook” in this sense being a collection of heterogenous and frequently anonymous prose fragments intended for a mass audience.2For a good introduction to the Chapbook, see Gerald Strauss, “How to Read a Volksbuch: The Faust Book of 1587,” in Faust through Four Centuries: Retrospect and Analysis, ed. Peter Boerner and Sidney Johnson (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1989), 27–39, as well as Marguerie de Huszar Allen, “The Aesthetics of the 1587 Spies Historia von D. Johann Fausten” in The Faustian Century, ed. van der Laan and Weeks, 149–75. (For simplicity’s sake, I have capitalized all further instances of “chapbook” when referring specifically to this 1587 edition, rather than to the genre as a whole). The Chapbook became the keystone work for all further literary adaptations throughout the centuries and served as Mann’s primary inspiration—he reread it in March 1943, just as he was beginning to write Doctor Faustus, and he also studied a nineteenth-century retelling of the work in the summer of 1945. Besides shortening and Germanizing the name of the protagonist, the Chapbook introduced a number of consequential changes to the previously existing narratives, most importantly by adding the idea of a devil’s pact. According to this new trope, Faust sells his soul in exchange for twenty-four years in which the forces of darkness must do his bidding. Much of the narrative is then taken up with an account of various Satanic adventures; Mann would allude to many of these in Doctor Faustus, even if in sometimes heavily altered form. For instance, Faust travels throughout the known world and to the limits of the macrocosm, yet always returns to Wittenberg (chapters XXVII with the expedition to the depths of the sea and into deep space, as well as XXXVII with the rejected temptation by Fitelberg); he learns about the true nature of hell and is told that he may never marry (chapter XXV); he encounters Helen of Troy (who in Mann’s novel comically figures as the wife of Serenus Zeitblom); and he ultimately repents, drawing up his final will and testament (chapters XLIII through XLVII). Mann also borrows the names of some of his characters from the Chapbook and frequently quotes from it verbatim in those passages in which Leverkühn speaks in an archaic German—another important example of the montage technique already mentioned in the previous chapter.

In adding these accounts of Satanic dealings, the anonymous author of the Chapbook was directly responding to changing historical circumstances in the late sixteenth century. The early 1500s, when the historical George Faustus performed his tricks throughout Europe, had been a time of comparatively liberal theological attitudes. By the second half of the century, people who openly flirted with black magic were liable to see themselves persecuted as witches. The Chapbook was heavily influenced by contemporary accounts of witch trials, and it also amplified Manlius’s example of framing the Faust story as a morality tale about the dangers of theological heterodoxy. Mann recognized that these characteristics provided a fertile basis on which to construct an allegory of a society’s downfall into collective madness. He consequently conducted his own research into witchcraft trials, studying the Malleus Maleficarum (Hammer of Witches) by the fifteenth-century inquisitor Henricus Institoris and quoting extensively from this work when he drafted Eberhard Schleppfuss’s lectures in chapter XIII, Adrian Leverkühn’s final address in chapter XLVII, and several other passages.

The Spies Chapbook became an instant bestseller and went through ten printings in its first year alone. An English translation appeared in 1588 as The History of the Damnable Life and Deserved Death of Doctor John Faustus. One of its readers was the great Elizabethan playwright Christopher Marlowe, who immediately set out to turn the story into a play, which premiered on the London stage as The Tragical History of Doctor Faustus in 1589. From England, dramatic adaptations of the Faust myth made their way back to the European continent by means of itinerant puppet theaters. For several centuries, the Faust story, which provided ample opportunities for primitive stage magic and also obeyed a clear division into good and evil characters (eminently suited for wooden marionettes that do not have variable facial expressions and thus cannot easily convey emotional nuance), formed a major part of the European puppet repertoire.3For more on the theatrical and filmic afterlife of the Faust legend, see Sara Munson Deats, The Faust Legend: From Marlow and Goethe to Contemporary Drama and Film (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019). Mann read Marlowe’s play in November 1943; as a younger man he had almost certainly also seen a performance of one of the puppet plays. This latter experience likely inspired him to have Adrian Leverkühn write a puppet opera based on the Gesta Romanorum in chapter XXI. Mann was also led by these theatrical sources to the Elizabethan convention of mirroring a tragical plot with a comical one. In Marlowe’s play, Faust’s assistant Wagner, who has only a very minor part in the Chapbook, becomes a prominent source of comic relief. In Mann’s novel, Serenus Zeitblom performs a similar function.

Over the following two centuries, a number of different adaptations of the Faust myth were published both in Germany and elsewhere. But the next momentous event in the history of this literary archetype did not come until 1770 or 1771, when a young Johann Wolfgang von Goethe attended the performance of a Faust play in Strasbourg. The production clearly left an impression, for Goethe remembered it two years later when he attended the trial of a woman who had killed her infant son. Interlacing these two stories, Goethe created a highly original revision of the Faust myth in which both Faust and the devil barely resemble their counterparts from the Chapbook. The version of the play that we now know as Faust I was eventually published in 1808, the even more audacious sequel Faust II in 1832. Both texts became landmarks of the German literary tradition and have also exerted a profound effect on world letters.4The literature on Goethe’s Faust is far too vast to summarize here. Jane K. Brown, Faust: Theater of the World (New York: Twayne Publishers, 1992) provides an excellent starting point, as do the various essays and background materials compiled in Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust, trans. Walter Arndt, ed. Cyrus Hamlin (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2001).

Critics have often claimed that Mann avoided any direct engagement with Goethe’s plays when he wrote Doctor Faustus.5One articulation of this view can be found in Bergsten, Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus,” 48–49. Textual evidence for it can be found in Mann’s own commentaries on his novel. For instance, he wrote on February 5, 1948 that, “[Ludwig Marcuse] wrote that I had written the most un-Goethean Faustus possible, which I think is right. My composer owes much more to the Faust of the Chapbook than he does to the one from Goethe.” See Mann, Selbstkommentare, 162. However, this is true only in a superficial sense. It is certainly correct that Mann did not incorporate any of the distinctive plot elements from Goethe’s plays into his novel, and he also included only a small handful of quotations from these works, whereas he frequently cited verbatim from the Chapbook. But Doctor Faustus does owe a large debt to at least four of Goethe’s major structural transformations of the story. First, Goethe’s Faust is no longer content to use his Satanic powers to accumulate wealth, fancy foodstuffs, or sexual conquests, as his early modern forebears had been. He instead aims to transform the world and leave a lasting legacy, something that is also very much the goal of Adrian Leverkühn. Second, Goethe wrote his Faust story not in order to illuminate Lutheran orthodoxy, but rather to create an allegory of the transformative historical forces that he saw at work everywhere around him. Similarly large-scale ambitions also animate Doctor Faustus, although Mann is interested in plotting the ultimate outcome of processes that Goethe witnessed in their infancy. Third, Goethe put his dramatic focus not on the damnation of his protagonist, but rather on the harm and suffering that Faust’s actions inflict on the people in his vicinity. This, too, is true of Mann’s novel, which is at its most emotionally resonant when it focuses on those who are hurt by Leverkühn, whether it be Rüdiger Schildknapp, Rudi Schwerdtfeger, Marie Godeau, Serenus Zeitblom or, most affectingly, little Nepomuk Schneidewein. Finally, Goethe, in perhaps his most significant departure from the Chapbook, explicitly allows his Faust to be redeemed at the end of the play. Mann does not go quite this far, but he does introduce ambiguities that are at odds with the early modern sources. I will explore these ambiguities more fully in chapter 11, “Illness and Redemption.”

Beyond these thematic borrowings, Mann clearly also learned stylistic lessons from Goethe. The Chapbook is a heterogeneous text, whose component parts have often struck readers as arbitrary and ill-arranged. In Faust II, Goethe showed how such an eclectic compositional structure could be used to explode the confines of traditional theater and create what the critic Franco Moretti memorably called a “modern epic.”6Franco Moretti, Modern Epic: The World-System from Goethe to Garía Márquez, trans. Quintin Hoare (London: Verso, 1996), 11–98. Mann’s Doctor Faustus, too, uses a highly digressive and frequently unpredictable narrative structure to break with the limitations of the nineteenth-century novel and create an allegory of the twentieth century in all its extremes.

Goethe’s Faust plays had such an immediate and forceful impact on world letters that it would be futile to try and catalogue all the subsequent adaptations that appeared over the next 125 years. There were poems and plays by Alexander Pushkin, Heinrich Heine, Frank Wedekind, Fernando Pessoa, and Gertrude Stein; prose versions by Ivan Turgenev, Oscar Wilde, Mikhail Bulgakov, and Mann’s own son Klaus; musical adaptations by Franz Schubert, Hector Berlioz, Albert Lortzing, Robert Schumann, Franz Liszt, Charles Gounod, and Ferruccio Busoni; films by Georges Méliès and F.W. Murnau; drawings and paintings by Eugène Delacroix and James Tissot; philosophical ruminations by Oswald Spengler and Georg Lukács. Of all these possible sources of inspiration, the only ones that seem to have had a marked influence on Doctor Faustus were the musical ones.7For an overview of the Faust theme in music, see Lorna Fitzsimmons and Charles Mc Knight, The Oxford Handbook of Faust in Music (New York: Oxford University Press, 2019). Among the literary works, Mann demonstrably knew the Faust adaptations by Pushkin, Heine, Wedekind, and, of course, his son Klaus. As a lifelong admirer of Turgenev, he likely also knew the Russian novelist’s short story adaptation, though I have found no definitive evidence of this. Thomas Mann was a great lover of nineteenth-century music, and he treasured both Berlioz’s opera The Damnation of Faust (1846) and Gounod’s opera Faust (1859); he listened to the latter repeatedly while writing his novel. These works would, of course, have confirmed him in his ambition to link the Faust theme to the development of Western music. Just as importantly, they served as a constant reminder that the Faust story had become an international literary archetype, resonating just as strongly on the other side of the Rhine as it did in Germany—another example of how Doctor Faustus, although it focuses on a specifically German tale, really aims for a much wider significance. Passing references to both operas can be found throughout Doctor Faustus, especially in chapters XXVII and XXVIII, the two that are overtly concerned with French music.

Mann’s novel was greatly influenced not only by these two explicit Faust-operas, however, but also by a range of other works that play with the devil theme. Mann was a passionate admirer of Berlioz’s Symphonie Fantastique (1830), for example, which is also mentioned in chapter XXVIII. And he loved Wagner’s opera The Flying Dutchman (1843), whose protagonist mocks God and finds himself condemned to a life of endless journeying until a young girl redeems him—a fate not at all unlike that of Goethe’s Faust. Leverkühn attends a performance of The Flying Dutchman in chapter IX, and the redemption motif may well have influenced the story of Nepomuk Schneidewein in chapters XLIV and XLV. By far the most important of these ancillary musical sources, however, was Carl Maria von Weber’s 1821 opera Der Freischütz, about a young hunter who makes a pact with a devil figure named Samiel. Not only is “Samiel” the name by which Thomas Mann’s devil wishes to be called in chapter XXV, Der Freischütz also concludes with a prayer by a pious hermit set in the key of C major, the only scale not to feature any black keys. Leverkühn plays excerpts of this prayer on the piano in chapter XVI when he is trying to protect himself from the succubae in the brothel in Leipzig. C major is associated with purity and simplicity throughout Doctor Faustus, for example in the description of Schwerdtfeger’s violin concerto in chapter XXVIII.

Doctor Faustus thus continues a literary tradition that was almost four hundred years old when Thomas Mann sat down to write his novel. Even more important than these continuities, however, are the numerous ways in which the work breaks new ground in Western literary history. Doctor Faustus is a novel that belongs squarely to the twentieth century and to the modernist movement in arts and letters. It is to this context that we must turn next.