Palestrina, Pfeiffering, and Munich Society Prior to the November Revolution (1911–1918)

Following his return to Germany, Leverkühn sets up residence in the fictional village of Pfeiffering, located about thirty miles southwest of Munich. From there, he regularly commutes to the Bavarian capital to take part in its social life. Pfeiffering is closely modeled on the real-world hamlet of Polling, where Mann’s mother settled in the early twentieth century and where Mann himself spent many an enjoyable weekend afternoon. In bringing the place to life, Mann drew on these memories, as well as on others he had of his own vacation home in nearby Bad Tölz. The vividly described topographical features that render Pfeiffering so memorable, such as Rombühel Hill or the Klammer Pool, can still be found in that part of upper Bavaria and are now the focal point of a modest kind of literary tourism. The Schweigestill farmhouse with its “winged-victory room” and “abbot’s chamber” is extant as well (Figures 11 and 12). Part of the building is now given over to a luxury car tuning and restoration service, which might serve as a useful reminder that the literary cloth from which Doctor Faustus is made is interwoven everywhere with the living fabric of German history.

Pfeiffering is a highly significant location within the literary logic of the novel, since it duplicates the setting of Leverkühn’s childhood days in Buchel and thereby highlights the themes of mythical return and the “ever-present now” that are so central to Doctor Faustus. From a historical perspective, however, Munich clearly outweighs it in importance, and will acquire an ever-greater significance in the second half of the novel. Munich was a thriving metropolis at the beginning of the twentieth century, second in Germany only to Berlin in terms of political and economic power. Culturally speaking, its influence arguably exceeded that of the capital. Its university was one of the very best in the country, and many of Germany’s painters, writers, and composers sought shelter from the repressive Prussian government in the comparatively liberal atmosphere of Bavaria.

The young Adolf Hitler was one such artist attracted to the Bavarian freedoms. He settled in Munich in 1913, trying to avoid the military draft in his native Austria and hoping to improve his middling fortunes as a postcard painter. Ten years later, he had risen to head of the National Socialist Party. Yet another ten years later, he was Chancellor of Germany. Thomas Mann does not comment on the rise of the Nazi movement at all in Doctor Faustus, and Leverkühn’s character traits are the opposite of Hitler’s in almost every conceivable way. Leverkühn is not Hitler, and yet it is not a coincidence that Mann’s fictional composer ends up in the same place at the same time as the historical dictator. For Munich, despite or perhaps precisely because its cultural and intellectual star shone so bright, would turn into a pivotal place for the rise of unreason and violent extremism over the next twenty years.1The process by which this happened in traced in great detail in David Clay Large, Where Ghosts Walked: Munich’s Road to the Third Reich (New York: W. W. Norton, 1997). Nowhere else in the world were the most advanced forms of enlightened liberal culture in such close proximity to regression and barbarism, and nowhere else did they capitulate to the challenges posed by this barbarism quite as readily. This is what Mann hopes to show us in Doctor Faustus.

We see this very clearly in chapters XXIII and XXVIII, in which Zeitblom describes the society salons in which Leverkühn spends a good amount of time in 1913 and 1914. The hosts of these salons—the Rodde family, the Schlaginhaufens, the publisher Radbruch, and the paper manufacturer Bullinger—are cultured people. Their guests include artists such as the painters Leo Zink and Baptist Spengler, the novelist Jeannette Scheurl, and the opera singers Harald Kjoejelund and Tanya Orlanda, as well as intellectuals such as the numismatist Dr. Kranich and the cultural philosopher Dr. Chaim Breisacher. But something is off right from the start. Mann’s depiction of the various artists and intellectuals is mocking. There’s the off-handed quip about “writers who wrote nothing at all” (215/294), for example, or the biting description of the painter Leo Zink, who is repeatedly compared to a randy faun. One senses that none of these people has much of an inner conviction or a devotion to an artistic ethos.

Nor are the intellectuals any better. Kranich is what the Germans call a Fachidiot, a blinkered specialist with no practical expertise outside his narrow academic field—a fact that he will repeatedly use as an excuse in situations where concrete action would be called for. Breisacher, however, is even worse. A charismatic and intellectually subtle lecturer, he holds forth on völkisch ideas, extolling such virtues as racial purity, primitivist immediacy, and thoughtless dynamism.2Breisacher is modeled on Oskar Goldberg, a Jewish philosopher of religion with whom Mann repeatedly crossed paths in the 1920s and 1930s and to whom he privately referred as a “mystic and fascist.” See Helmut Koopmann, “Ein ‘Mystiker und Faschist’ als Ideenlieferant für Thomas Manns Josephs-Romane: Thomas Mann und Oskar Goldberg,” Thomas Mann Jahrbuch 6 (1993): 71–92. The centerpiece of chapter XXVIII is the conversation between Breisacher and the intendant of the Munich Court Theater, Baron von Riedesel, whose last name is a portmanteau of the German words for “reed” and “donkey.” Riedesel is a traditional conservative, comfortable with the Bavarian monarchy and the state of society as it currently is—or rather, as it was in some hazily idealized not-too-distant past. At the Schlaginhaufen salon, he gets intellectually steamrolled by Breisacher, who argues that the goal of politics shouldn’t be to cling to what exists, but rather to overthrow the existing social order and restore a more primordial and authentic state of affairs. If Riedesel is a conservative, then Breisacher is an unabashed reactionary, and the conversation between the two men showcases how one form of right-wing politics—associated, in Germany, with defenders of the monarchy and members of the German National People’s Party—would, as the century wore on, increasingly lose ground to a more dangerous and reactionary kind.

Riedesel, of course, is not only a theater intendant and an amateur pianist, but also a nobleman. He belongs to the upper strata of society, not to the bohème. The same is true of the wealthier of the Munich society hosts, the Bullingers, the Radbruchs, and the Schlaginhaufens. The surname of the latter couple, which features especially prominently in these chapters, can be translated as “punch the rabble.” This little joke highlights that the dangerous ideology which Breisacher imports into the salons, and which the artists and intellectuals are neither willing nor able to counter in any form, would ultimately find a receptive audience amongst those seated quite comfortably within the halls of power.

The internal hypocrisy of Munich salon society is revealed with the outbreak of the First World War, when Serenus Zeitblom, of all people, is the only one who sees military service. His friends find various excuses to resist conscription; they are perfectly comfortable playing with incendiary ideas as long as it is others who end up getting burned. In one especially funny scene, Zeitblom runs into Breisacher in the streets of Munich. The prophet of reaction has decked himself out in cockades, the early twentieth-century equivalent of flag pins, in an attempt to leave no doubts about his patriotism and forestall anti-Semitic aggression by the very mob he so fervently praised in his prewar sermons. The contrast would be grotesque if it weren’t also so distressingly familiar from our contemporary television screens.