The First World War and the Failed German Revolution (1914–1919)

Zeitblom personally partakes in this mad atmosphere and in one of his lengthy digressions also gives us an important conceptual tool with which to describe it, namely that of the “breakthrough” (325/449). “Breakthrough,” in Doctor Faustus, refers not only to the military aim of breaking through the enemy ranks, but also to the utopian social aspirations that accompanied the mobilization of 1914. In a third sense, it refers to Leverkühn’s quest to “break through” to a new kind of music. Mann explicitly links this artistic sense to the socially utopian one: while the German youth march off to war, he has Leverkühn write Gesta Romanora, a “puppet opera” for wooden marionettes greatly influenced by the essay “On the Marionette Theater” by the Romantic poet Heinrich von Kleist. Kleist’s essay treats the graceful movements of marionettes on their strings as a parable for the possibility of human redemption from a fallen earthly existence. It would not have been lost on Mann that this redemption is possible only because the marionettes have wooden heads—like ideal soldiers, they merely carry out the directions of others.1Paul de Man, a critic uncommonly attuned to the similarities between the respective rhetorics of Romanticism and of Nazism, noted about Kleist’s essay: “Aesthetic education by no means fails; it succeeds all too well, to the point of hiding the violence that makes it possible.” See Paul de Man, “Aesthetic Formalization: Kleist’s Über das Marionettentheater,” in The Rhetoric of Romanticism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), 289. I’m grateful to Todd Kontje for bringing this quote to my attention. The very real human stakes in all this talk about “breakthroughs” are illustrated by one of the more haunting vignettes in Doctor Faustus: Zeitblom’s depiction, at the start of chapter XXXI, of a “gaunt French woman standing on a hill” who curses the advancing German troops with raised fists, shouting the words “Je suis la dernière!” (I am the last one; 327/451) to no avail.

Another historical event that Mann describes in significant detail is the German revolution of 1918 and 1919, which came about as a result of the power vacuum that followed upon the abdication of the Kaiser and took an especially dramatic form in Munich.2For a comprehensive overview of the events of 1918 and 1919, see Robert Gerwarth, November 1918: The German Revolution (New York: Oxford University Press, 2020). Large, Where Gosts Walked, provides a compelling narrative of the events in Munich. On November 8, 1918, the journalist and Independent Socialist Party politician Kurt Eisner proclaimed the birth of a Bavarian Republic to be led by a council of workers, soldiers, and peasants. The Wittelsbach dynasty, which had ruled Bavaria for almost 750 years, was unceremoniously deposed, with King Ludwig III fleeing across the nearby border to Austria. Eisner’s actions came in advance even of those of Philipp Scheidemann, the Social Democrat who one day later proclaimed a German republic from the balcony of the Reichstag in Berlin. Over the course of the next three months, the relationship between the nascent German government in Berlin and its more radically left-wing cousins in Munich became increasingly frayed, a fact that empowered the reactionary Freikorps militias who refused to accept the armistice or the formation of a democratic (to speak nothing of a socialist) state on German soil. Eisner was assassinated by a militant reactionary in broad daylight on February 21, 1919. To prevent a putsch by rightist elements, his comrades first declared a general strike and then proclaimed the formation of a council republic on the Soviet model on April 7. The Munich Soviet Republic lasted for less than a month; it was smashed by Freikorps forces assisted by regular army units that the central government in Berlin dispatched to restore order in Bavaria.

As a resident of Munich, Mann got a first-hand impression of the events of 1918 and 1919. For the rest of his life, he believed that the revolution held the key to many subsequent developments of German history. For purposes of Doctor Faustus, arguably the most important thing about the revolution was that it was led by artists and intellectuals. Kurt Eisner was a freelance journalist who had studied philosophy. Ernst Toller, the leader of the Munich Soviet Republic, was a playwright, as was his close associate Erich Mühsam. Ordinary citizens soon referred to the new regime as the “Schwabing Soviet” (after the bohemian district surrounding the university) and to its leaders as “coffeehouse anarchists.”3Large, Where Ghosts Walked, 105. The abject failure of their endeavors illustrates one of the central theses of Doctor Faustus, namely that modern artists and intellectuals, as a result of over-specialization and increasing withdrawal from the affairs of common men, have lost both the claim and the ability to meaningfully guide modern societies. In chapter XXXIII, Mann reveals the intellectuals’ desperate attempt to return wholeness to a fragmented society as doomed farce. In a central passage, we peek in on a meeting of the Munich “Council for Intellectual Workers” at which “a belletrist spoke, not without charm, indeed with dimpled sybaritic fuzziness, on the topic of ‘Revolution and Brotherly Love’” while “a little girl recited a poem, a man in field gray was prevented only with difficulty from reading a manuscript that had begun with the greeting, ‘my dear citizens and citizenesses,’ and doubtless would have lasted all night; an angry graduate student ruthlessly took to task every single speaker who had preceded him, but never once deigned to offer those assembled a single positive opinion of his own” (359/494–95). Art and thought are revealed to be either utterly trite (as in the case of the young girl or the man in field gray) or completely useless (as with the belletrist and the graduate student). Either way, intellectual work seems to no longer have any utility.

One artist who keeps himself above the fray, of course, is Adrian Leverkühn, who spends much of the fateful fall of 1918 in bed with severe headaches caused by the outbreak of tertiary syphilis (see chapter 11, “Illness and Redemption”). By spring 1919, he is at work composing the Apocalipsis cum figuris (Apocalypse with Pictures) and also nowhere to be seen in Munich. To some extent, the Apocalipsis can be seen as an indirect commentary on revolutionary events. Leverkühn’s oratorio is inspired by a cycle of Dürer woodcuts of the same title, which in the logic of the novel are in turn linked to the peasant’s uprising of the 1520s. Like the Munich Soviet, the peasant revolt ended in bloodshed. Leverkühn’s fascination with antiquated musical forms, his belief that an escape from the progressive liberal culture of the nineteenth century will only be possible through a return to pre-modern elements, also parallels the Munich Soviet’s attempt to replace mass democracy with a system of occupation-based councils.4Similar attempts would proliferate throughout the 1920s on both the far left and the far right of the political spectrum in Germany. See the chapter on “The Corporate State and the Conservative Revolution in Weimar Germany,” in George L. Mosse, Germans and Jews: The Right, the Left, and the Search for a “Third Force” in Pre-Nazi Germany (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1970), 80–98. But the Soviet is ultimately a dead-end street, its utopian aspirations unfulfilled and unredeemed. The Apocalipsis, on the other hand, is a transitional work. It serves as a capstone to the “middle period” of Leverkühn’s creative striving, but it also marks the onset of his final phase, the one that will eventually lead him to paralytic collapse, and Germany to the catastrophe of Nazism.