7: The Historical Setting of the Novel

The plot of Doctor Faustus stretches from the late 1880s to 1945, with the majority of the action taking place during the years from 1905 to 1930. These were some of the most eventful decades of German history, and they are vividly if sometimes selectively rendered in a work that brims over with colorful vignettes and minor characters. While Mann’s discussions of music theory and theology are of undeniable importance to Doctor Faustus, the first-time reader of the novel would do well not to become overly intimidated by its more difficult passages. Mann always understood himself to be working in the great epic tradition of Goethe, Tolstoy, and Fontane.1Mann’s essays on these three writers are included in Essays of Three Decades, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948). For him, the novelist was a creator of worlds. And the world that he depicts in Doctor Faustus is as rich and as deep as any dreamt up by one of his great forebears.