Halle an der Saale (1903–1905)

There were other reasons to choose Halle as a setting for the novel. The theological faculty there had an exceptionally strong and multifaceted history. An early bastion of the Lutheran reformation, the university in the late seventeenth century also became the home of August Hermann Francke. Francke was a leading figure of German Pietism, the protestant reform movement better known to many Americans as the “Moravian Church.” And from 1804 to 1806, the Reform theologian Friedrich Schleiermacher, the greatest religious thinker of German Romanticism, served on the faculty there.

Zeitblom refers to all of these figures at great length and also muses about the general desirability of reform movements in the history of Christianity. Did Luther’s Reformation, he asks, not have the unintended effect of breathing new life into a moribund Catholic Church, thereby giving rise to the Counter-Reformation and a new era of persecutions and witchcraft trials? These may seem to be somewhat unusual thoughts for a man who will eventually take up a teaching post at a Catholic seminary, but Zeitblom has since the first pages of the novel self-identified with sixteenth-century humanists such as Erasmus of Rotterdam and Crotus Rubianus, who kept their distance from the narrow-minded dogmatics in both the Catholic and protestant churches.1For more on Zeitblom’s self-identification with these figures, as well as on the role of Halle as a theological institution more generally, see Peter Eagles, “The ‘Dunkelmänner’ of Doktor Faustus: Humanists versus Theologians,” German Life and Letters 75, no. 1 (2022): 88–115. Zeitblom’s musings, at any rate, are relevant not only to the life of Adrian Leverkühn (who will himself become an overzealous reformer in his chosen field), but also to politics. For Zeitblom and Leverkühn belong to the same generation that would produce real-life thinkers such as Arthur Moeller Van den Bruck, Carl Schmitt, and Oswald Spengler, all of whom became leaders of the so-called “Conservative Revolution” in political thought during the 1920s. This movement began with the goal of fanning the dying embers of German conservatism but largely ended up as a handmaiden of the Nazis. We’ll engage more closely with it later in this chapter.

During their studies, Zeitblom and Leverkühn encounter a number of fictional theology professors, whose names and demeanors once again foreground a connection to the early modern era. Perhaps the most memorable of these is Ehrenfried Kumpf, a professor of systematic theology who is clearly modeled on Martin Luther and even invites our two protagonists to a dinner straight out of Luther’s sixteenth-century Table Talks. Kumpf represents the crudest and most dogmatic tendencies of the Reformation period, and thus exactly those tendencies which Mann feared Germany had taken too much to heart. Tellingly, later in the novel, when Leverkühn starts talking in an old-fashioned German idiom, he sounds exactly like Kumpf (and both of them sound like Luther, whose writings Mann took as a model for these passages).

Kumpf is matched in interest to the reader only by a lowly lecturer named Eberhard Schleppfuss, who holds forth on the philosophy of religion and introduces to the novel a number of important themes related to early modern religiosity, cultic excess, and the suggestibility of ordinary people. Schleppfuss is also important because he is the first unmistakable devil figure in the novel (though earlier characters, such as the hunchbacked stableboy Thomas and the charmingly persuasive Wendell Kretzschmar, have at least a whiff of the demonic about them as well).

By no means was Halle only of interest to Mann because of its rich symbolic resonance, however. In drafting his description of university life, Mann also relied on his correspondence with a fellow exile to America, the liberal protestant theologian Paul Tillich.2By sheer coincidence, Tillich had supervised part of the dissertation of Mann’s informal musical advisor, Theodor W. Adorno. This bit of trivia neatly illustrates just how small (and at times downright incestuous) the community of exiled German intellectuals in America really was. This fact surely had an important influence on the form of Doctor Faustus. Tillich had himself studied theology in Halle during the years in question, and sent Mann a first-hand account of his student days. Chapters XI–XIII of Doctor Faustus should, therefore, also be read as a commentary on German university life during the early years of the twentieth century, and characters such as Kumpf and Schleppfuss might be read as caricatures of certain professorial types of the day.3The character of Eberhard Kump was greatly influenced by Tillich’s teacher Martin Kähler. For the academic community of that time and place as a breeding ground for reactionary sentiment, see Fritz K. Ringer, The Decline of the German Mandarins: The German Academic Community, 1890–1933 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1969). The sociologist Stefan Breuer has drawn attention to the fact that an unusually high number of far-right intellectuals during the Weimar years had studied theology. See Stefan Breuer, Anatomie der konservativen Revolution (Darmstadt: Wissenschaftliche Buchgesellschaft, 1993), 27–28. Kumpf enjoys the almost boundless devotion of a coterie of students who are drawn to him less by the originality of his thought or his mastery of his subject matter, and much more by the force of his personality and his eccentric behavior. Schleppfuss, on the other hand, deploys his rapier-like wit in the service of a post-Nietzschean critique that seeks to reduce ultimate values to mere products of human psychology.4There is also a lot of Kierkegaard in the Schleppfuss chapter, though Mann dialed back on it after he learned from Tillich that Kierkegaard was not really known in Halle until after the First World War. When the devil reappears in chapter XXV, he will again be quoting Kierkegaard. Neither of the two, one senses, are doing very much to give their students what professors of theology might be expected to give them, namely a solid anchoring point that would prevent them from being blown away by the tempests of the early twentieth century.

While in Halle, Zeitblom and Leverkühn join the Christian student fraternity “Winfried,” a thinly disguised version of the real-life fraternity “Wingolf,” of which Tillich was a member. In his letter to Mann, Tillich opined that “that which I have become in a theological, philosophical and human sense, I owe only partly to professors. A much greater part was played by the fraternity, where theological and philosophical debates past midnight and personal conversations at dawn played a decisive part for my entire life.”5GKFA 10.2: 371–72. Many members of Mann’s and Tillich’s generation would have found this a familiar sentiment, for fraternities played an important part in German life of the day. The history of these organizations (which dates back to the days of the Napoleonic Wars) and their internal structure is significantly different from that of American student organizations, but there are still many similarities. Mann milks every bit of humor possible out of Zeitblom’s and Leverkühn’s respective struggles to fit in with the chummy conviviality of the Winfried brothers, and one wonders whether the other students are secretly more annoyed by Leverkühn’s inability to stick to informal pronouns or by Zeitblom’s insistence on accompanying their songs on his viola d’amore.

The reason why student fraternities were so important to German history is that they decisively shaped the outlook of the Zeitblom-Leverkühn generation, that is, the generation that went to war in 1914 and then dominated the intellectual and cultural life of the Weimar Republic.6For more on this cohort, see Robert Wohl, The Generation of 1914 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1979). Generational identity is, in fact, a major topic of the midnight debates that the Winfried brothers conduct on their regular hiking trips. In an exchange with Adrian, who as always is acting older than he actually is, one of the students proclaims that “to be young means to be primordial, to have remained close to the wellspring of life, means being able to rise up and shake off the fetters of an outmoded civilization.” These qualities, furthermore, are supposedly archetypally German, for “the German is, if you will, the eternal student, the eternally striving student among the nations” (127/174). Just to be sure we don’t fail to realize that this is intended as the description of an ideological formation, not just an individual point of view, Mann gives the character in question the name “Konrad Deutschlin.”

Other topics discussed by the Winfried brothers include the general tendency of modern societies to subordinate the common good to the demands of groups that each have a “specific sense of life” (125/171), the question whether economic rationality should or should not be applied to matters of public well-being (131–32/177–78), and the question whether societies should be structured around liberal or communitarian principles (133–34/180–81). There is also a general celebration of vitalism, of action over theory, of audacity over calculation. These discussions are framed in terms that are particular to their own time and place, but they nevertheless hold a universal relevance.

The ultra-nationalist position tends to win out in these debates, especially since later in the chapter Deutschlin receives reinforcement from another character named “Teutleben” (= German life). Mann has sometimes been accused of putting his thumb on the scale by using as his main source of inspiration a fraternity newsletter called Die freideutsche Position (The Free-German Position) from 1931, and thus from a time at which most student movements were already infiltrated by Nazism. While this is fair criticism, it is also true that German student fraternities had been moving towards increasingly chauvinistic and anti-Semitic positions since the 1890s.7See in this context the chapter on “University Students and Professors on the March,” in George L. Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology: Intellectual Origins of the Third Reich (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1964), 192–205. Here as elsewhere in the novel, Mann is presenting a complex and intriguing portrait of an era that he himself experienced.