Leipzig and First Stay in Munich (1905–1911)

The Leipzig chapters, in other words, are symbolically even more overdetermined than the ones set in Halle an der Saale. Nevertheless, there is a historical reference point for them, even if it too is highly mediated by literature. For the salient details of the first encounter with Esmeralda (an accidental visit to a brothel, awkward communications between prostitute and customer, a chord struck on a piano, flight from the establishment) are taken from Paul Deussen’s aforementioned Recollections of Nietzsche. Nietzsche spent his own student days in Leipzig and supposedly found himself in the same risqué situation as Leverkühn. Chapter XVI, in which this episode takes place, thus marks a high point of the composer’s similarity with the German philosopher and is a central chapter for any reader that seeks to interpret Doctor Faustus as a “Nietzsche novel.”

After four years of study about which we learn relatively little (Zeitblom is traveling through Greece for part of this period), Leverkühn relocates to Munich, thereby breaking free from the geographical confines of the Chapbook. For a brief while, he rents a room in the bohemian district of Schwabing. Mann modeled Leverkühn’s landlords—the widowed Frau Senator Rodde and her daughters Inez and Clarissa—on his own mother Julia and his sisters Julia Elisabeth and Carla. This kind of superimposition of close relatives onto the story of a devil’s pact is inherently awkward. But Mann’s decision gets even more vexatious by virtue of the fact that both of his sisters committed suicide. Carla Mann poisoned herself in 1910 when she was blackmailed by a former lover, an episode that made it into Doctor Faustus in nearly unaltered form, down to the wording of the suicide note. Julia Elisabeth hanged herself in 1927, having been thrust into economic destitution by the 1923 hyperinflation. Mann gave her a different fate in his novel, making Inez Rodde a central figure in a murderous love triangle inspired by real-life events that he had first heard about during a visit to Julia Elisabeth’s house.

The Rodde episodes are amongst the most ethically troublesome in all of Doctor Faustus. They raise serious questions about the limits of Mann’s montage technique and of the liberties permissible to fiction when adapting real-world events. If Mann’s actions are defensible, they are so only because he did not draw on his sisters’ biographies for salacious reasons, but rather because he thought their fates expressed something of deeper significance about the Zeitblom-Leverkühn generation and its place in German history.

Inez and Clarissa’s lives are tragically dominated by their attempts to mediate between the nineteenth-century bourgeois sphere into which they were born and a rapidly evolving modern world. Their mother was a “celebrated member of a patrician society and manager of a household full of servants and duties” (210/286). After the death of her husband, however, she falls upon hard times and is forced to sublet her Munich apartment. Inez resents this, she “made a point of looking back to the old paternal world of bourgeois dignity and rigor” (211/287). But her only way to return to this paternal world is through marriage to the art historian Dr. Helmut Institoris who, despite holding a solid academic post, is very much a creature of the tempestuous fin-de-siècle. Regarding their unlikely liaison, Zeitblom observes that “it was, to put it in the briefest terms, the dichotomy between aesthetics and ethics, which to a great extent governed the cultural dialectics of the era and was more or less personified in these two young people—the contradiction between a scholarly glorification of ‘life’ in its glittering thoughtlessness and a pessimistic veneration of suffering” (305/420). Readers familiar with Nietzsche will immediately recognize in Zeitblom’s dualism of “thoughtlessness” and “suffering” a variation of the opposition between “blond beasts” and “ascetic priests” described in The Genealogy of Morals. Institoris, however, though he tellingly has carefully coiffed blond hair, is ultimately no “blond beast,” but merely an example of the “scholarly glorification” thereof. He stands symbolically for a generation of German scholars who may not have directly participated in the rise of the Nazis, but who nevertheless provided intellectual cover for it by failing to subject the rising tide of unreason to adequate forms of critique. Later in the novel, we will consequently encounter Institoris as a hanger-on in the company of much more dangerous figures, the members of the Kridwiss Circle.

Clarissa Rodde, meanwhile, chooses a different path from Inez. Like Mann’s sister Carla, she seeks an escape from the nineteenth-century bourgeois sphere in the bohemian world of the theater. When she belatedly realizes that her talents are insufficient to secure her a career, she is reduced to the standard fate of struggling actresses of the time: selling her body to a rich admirer. Events take their course, and Clarissa ultimately commits suicide when her final desperate attempt to marry back into the bourgeois sphere founders on the shoals of blackmail. The widening gulf between bohemian and bourgeois life worlds in the late nineteenth century led to many dissolute existences in the fin-de-siècle and was a subject of lifelong fascination for Thomas Mann. He was well aware that one of the most characteristic products of this dynamic was Adolf Hitler, who, after many years living as a struggling artist, succeeded in translating his bohemian inclinations into a new form of community when he took over the Nazi party.1Mann explores Hitler’s fundamentally bohemian character in the 1938 essay “Brother Hitler,” published in English translation as “A Brother” in Esquire 11 (1939): 31, 132–33.