Kaisersaschern (1883–1905)

In 1895, the ten-year-old Leverkühn moves to Kaisersaschern, the hometown of his childhood friend Zeitblom. Kaisersaschern is a fictional place, though a heavily overdetermined one. For its description in chapter VI, Mann excerpted passages from encyclopedia entries about Nuremberg, Eisleben, Quedlinburg, and Wolfenbüttel—all towns near the center of Germany that flourished in the fifteenth through seventeenth centuries and are intimately associated with prominent cultural figures from that period such as Albrecht Dürer, Martin Luther, or Johann Sebastian Bach. Other influences were Naumburg, where Friedrich Nietzsche spent his childhood years, and Mann’s own hometown Lübeck, which also held a distinguished place in early modern German history. In fact, when he needed to describe Lübeck for his 1945 Library of Congress lecture on “Germany and the Germans,” Mann simply copied out some of the sentences from his manuscript.

The purpose of this montage work was to support Zeitblom’s assessment of Kaisersaschern as a town that “maintains its identity, which was the same three hundred, nine hundred years ago, against the river of time sweeping over it and constantly affecting many changes” (39/57). This is an early example of the spiritual rebellion against progress and the recourse to mythical thinking that will come to afflict Leverkühn over the course of the novel. Kaisersaschern’s “timelessness,” as Zeitblom also calls it, has more direct consequences as well, however. In one central passage, Zeitblom complains that “there hung in the air […] a hysteria out of the dying Middle Ages, something of a latent psychological epidemic” (39/57–58). Over the next few pages, he connects this “psychological epidemic” first to the ordinary people of Kaisersaschern who “voted the Social Democratic ticket at the polls, [but] were capable at the same time of seeing something demonic in the poverty of a little old lady” (41/59–60), and then to a series of vividly characterized eccentrics, among them “a man of indeterminate age, who at any sudden shout would feel compelled to perform a kind of jerky dance with knees pulled high” (41/60). He is, in other words, drawing a direct line between the medieval character of Kaisersaschern and the experience of Nazism, which inspired ordinary people to denounce their neighbors and to behave like marionettes as they performed the Hitler salute or goose-stepped across parade grounds.

The idea of connecting Nazism to medieval German history and to small-town culture was certainly not unique to Thomas Mann. In the same year that Doctor Faustus was published, his fellow exile Siegfried Kracauer finished his “psychological history of the German film” From Caligari to Hitler, which rests on a similar premise.1Siegfried Kracauer, From Caligari to Hitler: A Psychological History of the German Film (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1947). In most other regards, Kracauer and Mann’s respective analyses are quite different, as Hans Rudolf Vaget has pointed out in “‘German’ Music and German Catastrophe,” 223–24. And Mann’s own brother Heinrich had excoriated German small-town life as an incubator of authoritarian tendencies in novels such as The Loyal Subject and The Blue Angel.2Heinrich Mann, The Loyal Subject, trans. Helmut Peitsch (London: Continuum, 1998); The Blue Angel (New York: Howard Fertig, 2011). These authors certainly had a point. The base of the Nazis’ power did rest in small towns, and the electoral district of Merseburg, where the fictional town of Kaisersaschern would have been located, posted some of the highest returns for Hitler of any district in Germany during the 1932 presidential elections. The Nazis did explicitly try to connect their “Third Reich” to the Holy Roman Empire of the early modern period, as anybody who has seen Leni Riefenstahl’s propaganda film Triumph of the Will (1935) can confirm. And small-town life in Germany during the final third of the nineteenth century did on a number of occasions tip over into pogroms that can only be characterized as “medieval.”3For a vivid illustration of one such case, see Helmut Walser-Smith, The Butcher’s Tale: Murder and Anti-Semitism in a German Town (New York: Norton, 2002).

Precisely because it is so central to the conception of the novel, the Kaisersaschern chapter has also been met with a lot of criticism over the decades. For as Ernst Fischer pointed out as early as 1949, it vividly illustrates one of the main premises of Doctor Faustus, namely that Leverkühn’s pact with the devil and his willed regression towards early modern structures indict Germany as a whole.4Ernst Fischer, “Doktor Faustus und die deutsche Katastrophe: Eine Auseinandersetzung mit Thomas Mann,” in Kunst und Menschheit: Essays (Vienna: Globus-Verlag, 1949), 37–97. This, so Mann’s detractors have argued, ignores Germany’s various social and emancipatory movements, from Thomas Münzer in the sixteenth century to the 1848 revolutionaries.

Hans Rudolf Vaget has replied in Mann’s defense that the depiction of Kaisersaschern is internally more complex than such charges would admit.5Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Kaisersaschern als geistige Lebensform: Zur Konzeption der deutschen Geschichte in Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus,” in Der deutsche Roman und seine historischen und politischen Bedingungen, ed. Wolfgang Paulsen (Bern: Francke Verlag, 1977), 200–35. He argues that Mann believed German culture to be fundamentally cosmopolitan in nature, and that he thought of precisely this quality when he described the Third Reich as “[good] turned into evil through devilish cunning.”6Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” 64. To support his point, Vaget draws attention to the fact that Mann rather strangely made the fictional Kaisersaschern the gravesite of the Holy Roman Emperor Otto III (980–1002), who actually lies buried in the West German town of Aachen. So important was this figurative exhumation to Mann that he even drew attention to it in the town’s name (Kaisersaschern means “emperor’s ashes”). Otto III, however, thought of himself as the leader of a cosmopolitan empire and not as a German.

Leverkühn will follow in the footsteps of the Holy Roman Emperor. In chapter XX, Zeitblom tells us that “it was not for nothing that he was the son of the town in which Otto III lay buried. His distaste for the Germanness that he embodied […] appeared in two divergent forms: an eccentric reticence to deal with the world and an inner need for the wide world beyond” (175/240–41). Leverkühn’s “inner need for the wide world” will manifest itself throughout the novel in various ways, such as in his love for French and Italian music, and in his self-identification with Felix Mendelssohn, the Jewish composer and conductor who led the Bach revival of the early nineteenth century. But as Zeitblom already notes, it is fatally aligned with an unwillingness to deal with the world in a practical, “external” fashion. We see this in chapter XXVIII, in which the devil appears to Leverkühn in the guise of the concert agent Saul Fitelberg, offering him a brilliant musical career in Paris. Leverkühn rejects this offer, much as Germany opted to disengage from the wider world in the 1930s, instead choosing the hysteria and psychological illness that also afflict Kaisersaschern.