8: Anti-Semitism and the Problem of Other People’s Suffering

Although he could not have known the exact nature of what went on in the death camps when he started writing Doctor Faustus, Mann was aware of the scale of the destruction unleashed upon the Jews of Europe even then. On June 18, 1943, he addressed over ten thousand people at a rally in San Francisco with the words: “the number of those who have perished partly by direct massacre, partly by planned starvation ran into millions even by the end of last year, and under constant intensivation [sic] of the awful action, it has substantially increased since then.”2Thomas Mann, “The Fall of the European Jews,” in Gesammelte Werke, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn, 20 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1974), XIII: 495. By the time that he finished Doctor Faustus in 1947, the world knew the truth about Auschwitz. Mann himself had in fact, been one of the first people to draw unsparing attention to it in his 1945 essay “The Camps.”3Most easily accessible to English-speaking readers as Thomas Mann, “Address to the German People,” The Nation, May 12, 1945, 535. Why, then, the curious silence in his novel?

To answer this question, it is useful to first sketch a general outline of Mann’s relationship to Judaism. To the average American observer at the time that Doctor Faustus was published, Mann would have appeared as a steadfast supporter of Jewish life and culture. In addition to his speeches and writings about the Nazi extermination campaign, he had also accumulated a record of appearing on behalf of Zionist causes.4Mann’s public utterances and appearances on behalf of Zionist organizations are examined in a recent blog post by Kai Sina, “Precarious Advocacy: Thomas Mann and Zionism,” https://medium.com/vatmh/precarious-advocacy-thomas-mann-and-zionism-bec11d7cd454 (accessed November 12, 2024). I have not been able to consult Sina’s forthcoming book on the same topic. Furthermore, his widely reviewed fiction of those years (the Joseph tetralogy and the Moses-story “The Tables of the Law) featured sympathetic depictions of well-known figures from the Old Testament. A particularly knowledgeable interlocutor might have also been able to point out that Mann was married to a Jew (Katia Pringsheim), counted many Jews among his friends and neighbors (including Theodor W. Adorno, his close collaborator on Doctor Faustus), and had remained loyal to Jewish publishers in both Europe (Gottfried Bermann Fischer) and America (Alfred A. Knopf) at a time when other writers deserted them so as not to endanger access to the German book market.

The truth was far more ambivalent, however. Mann’s earliest fictions, at the time little known in the United States, abound with characters—such as Frau Hagenström in the novel Buddenbrooks or the writer Detlev Spinell in the novella Tristan (1903)—who, although rarely explicitly identified as Jewish, are nevertheless described with anti-Semitic dog-whistles. Perhaps the worst example of this is Mann’s 1906 story “Blood of the Walsungs” which revolves around a pair of incestuous twins, one of whom delivers the narrative’s climactic line in a mixture of Yiddish and German. The offensiveness of this story is increased exponentially by the fact that the easily recognizable models for its protagonists were Mann’s own wife and her twin brother Klaus Pringsheim. Mann withdrew the manuscript from publication after a confrontation with his in-laws, and in a response to a newspaper inquiry the following year he declared himself to be a “convinced and unhesitating ‘philo-Semite.’”5Thomas Mann, “Die Lösung der Judefrage” [The Solution of the Jewish Question], GKFA 14.1: 174. Historical hindsight makes the title of this inquiry unfortunate, but it was a perfectly innocent phrase in the context of its time and was, at any rate, chosen by the Jewish journalist Julius Moses. Still, “Blood of the Walsungs” was eventually published in 1921, although Mann replaced the Yiddish phrase with a more innocuous German one. That same year, he wrote another essay on “The Jewish Question” with which he hoped to burnish his philo-Semitic credentials, but which he had to withdraw when his wife took issue with the stereotyped language Mann had deployed in the portraits of three of his Jewish childhood friends.

Mann’s letters and diaries provide a similarly ambivalent picture. In a diary entry written on April 28, 1919, in the midst of the abortive Munich revolution that Doctor Faustus so vividly reconstructs, Mann notes with clear disapproval that ordinary people were referring to the leaders of the uprising as “bloody Jews” (Saujuden).6Diary entry for April 28, 1919, in Mann, Tagebücher, I: 215. And in a letter to Hermann Broch written after the end of the Second World War, in November 1945, he declares that “international law must henceforth brand anti-Semitism as a criminal tendency lest we be overwhelmed by barbarism.”7Letter to Hermann Broch dated November 18, 1945, in Thomas Mann, Die Briefe Thomas Manns: Regesten und Register, ed. Hans Bürgin and Hans-Otto Meyer, 5 vols. (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1976–87), III: 45/536. Yet in immediate proximity to such utterances we find him referring to the journalist Wilhelm Herzog, one of the intellectual leaders of the Munich revolution, as a “Jewish rascal” (Judenbengel)8Diary entry for November 8, 1918, in Mann, Tagebücher, I: 63. and grappling with the question whether the Jews should really be described as a “people” (Volk) or not rather as a “race” (Rasse), for “there is something different about them after all, and not just something Mediterranean.”9Diary entry for October 27, 1945, in Mann, Tagebücher, VI: 269.

Trying to make sense of all this, a number of critics have voiced the hypothesis that Mann was comfortable with Judaism only for so long as he could treat it as an abstract and remote phenomenon—as he did, for example, in his fiction of the 1930s and 1940s or in his political speeches. By contrast, whenever Jews began to exert a palpable influence on his life, whether through politics in the 1918/1919 revolution, or as literary critics in the Weimar Republic, he reacted with reflexive anti-Semitism.10See, for example, Michael Brenner, “Beyond Naphtha: Thomas Mann’s Jews and German-Jewish Writing,” in A Companion to Thomas Mann’s “Magic Mountain,” ed. Stephen D. Dowden (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1999), 141–57. I do not wish to minimize in any way the highly problematic nature of Mann’s attitude towards Judaism. Nevertheless, I believe that we need to take a fundamentally different approach when we deal with Doctor Faustus.

Let us briefly recap the problematic elements in that novel. First, there is the fact that although the plot of Doctor Faustus stretches into the weeks following the end of the Second World War, when news of the true extent of Nazi crimes finally make their way to Serenus Zeitblom, the Holocaust is never directly addressed. It is true that Zeitblom mentions Buchenwald and refers to Germans being marched past piles of corpses by American soldiers, but he does not identify those corpses as Jewish. Buchenwald was, in fact, primarily an internment camp for political prisoners. In Mann’s depiction then, the Nazis transgress against reason, against the rule of law, and against the fundamental essence of humanity, but not against the Jewish people per se. Nor does Mann make the persistent anti-Semitism in German society, or the troubling rise of this phenomenon over the course of the 1920s, in any way a subject of his novel. The closest that we get is a passing reference in chapter XX, where we learn that Rüdiger Schildknapp “ate his midday meal here and there at houses all over Leipzig, even at the tables of rich Jews, although he had been heard to make anti-Semitic remarks” (181/248). Commenting on this, Zeitblom disdainfully notes that “people who feel they are held back and not given their due, and who at the same time present a distinguished appearance, often seek redress in racist self-assertions” (181/248). We know that this was more or less also Mann’s take on the virulent anti-Semitism of his time, for in a 1937 address to a Zionist gathering in Switzerland he argued that anti-Semites take as their guiding maxim the formula: “I may be nothing, but at least I’m not a Jew!”11Thomas Mann, “Zum Problem des Antisemitismus” [On the Problem of Anti-Semitism], in Gesammelte Werke, XIII: 481. As an intellectual analysis of modern prejudice, this is hardly groundbreaking stuff.

Secondly, Doctor Faustus contains at least three highly problematic portraits of Jews. The first such figure is the “polyhistor” Chaim Breisacher, whom we first encounter in chapter XXVIII. Breisacher, whose “advanced, indeed reckless, intellect” and “fascinating ugliness” (294/405). Mann goes out of his way to mention, is the “hair-splitting forerunner of Fascism” mentioned by Schwarz. This means, in turn, that a Jew serves as the most visible exponent of a pseudo-Nazi ideology in the novel. This fact bothered readers even during Mann’s lifetime; the author brushed aside such objections with the unconvincing reply that there were, after all, plenty of unsympathetic gentile characters in Doctor Faustus as well.12See Klüger, “Jewish Characters in Thomas Mann’s Fiction,” 164.

The second problematic Jewish character in Doctor Faustus is Kunigunde Rosenstiel, one of the two female admirers of Leverkühn whom we first meet in chapter XXXI. Rosenstiel, whom Mann partly modeled on his part-time archivist Ida Herz and partly on the literary critic Käte Hamburger (both Jews), is the part-owner of a “firm that produced sausage casings” (330/455), a position that not only makes her seem slightly ridiculous but can possibly also be read as an anti-Semitic joke about Jewish dietary strictures. Like many of Mann’s other characters, she possesses a rather singular tic, namely the “elegiac habit of beginning every sentence with a plaintive ‘ah!’” (331/456). In a novel in which the protagonists grasps his way towards a possible redemption by way of a musical piece that is explicitly marked as a “lamentation” (see in this context chapter 12, “Illness and Redemption”), this seeming throw-away reference to an “elegiac habit” is significant. In the essay from which I quoted at the start of this chapter, Egon Schwarz follows up on his prediction regarding the future reception of Doctor Faustus with the observation that in this novel, Jewish figures “are even excluded from mourning their own hopeless fate and that of the culture which they have served, painful feelings which Leverkühn and Zeitblom are so movingly allowed to suffer.”13Schwarz, “Jewish Characters in Doctor Faustus,” 138. The example of Kunigunde Rosenstiel shows that the truth may be even worse. Not only is there no room for Jews in Leverkühn’s Lamentation of Doctor Faustus or in Zeitblom’s fervent prayer in the epilogue, Jewish mourning is, in fact, treated as a source of cheap humor.14For a fuller analysis of Kunigunde Rosenstiel, see Yahya Elsaghe, “‘La Rosenstiel’ and Her Ilk: Jewish Names in Thomas Mann,” Publications of the English Goethe Society 80, no. 1 (2009): 53–63.

The final character to have often given readers pause is Saul Fitelberg, the Jewish impresario who offers Leverkühn a brilliant career in Paris in chapter XXXVII, and whom Mann modeled partly on an acquaintance, the film agent Saul C. Colin, and partly on a character from an eighteenth-century play by Gotthold Ephraim Lessing, the French mercenary Riccault de la Marlinière. Like Marlinière, Fitelberg is an over-confident name-dropper who speaks in a curious mixture of French and German. This emphasizes his foreignness and has also invited comparisons to stereotypical portraits of Jews, who are often depicted as speaking a “defective” German characterized by the admixture of “foreign” (usually Yiddish or Hebrew) elements. Fitelberg’s worldliness and his uninhibited desire to make money off of Leverkühn’s art round out the problematic nature of his appearance. With Fitelberg, too, Mann encountered pushback already during his own lifetime, especially after he made a habit of reading from chapter XXXVII, which offered him all sorts of opportunities for theatrical interludes, whenever he had friends over for dinner. His son Klaus pointed out to him that the chapter might be regarded as anti-Semitic, causing Mann to note in his diaries that “I cannot share those concerns.”15Diary entry for August 18, 1946, in Mann, Tagebücher, VII: 31.

Problematic as he may be, Saul Fitelberg differs from the other Jewish characters in Doctor Faustus in one important respect: because his torrential stream of words is quoted as direct discourse, we experience him on his own terms, not on those dictated by Serenus Zeitblom. And these terms include several remarkable statements that come at the very end of the chapter, in his parting words to his two awestruck interlocutors. There, Fitelberg claims that Jews “are international—but we are pro-German, like no one else in the world, if only because we cannot help seeing the similarity of the roles Germanness and Jewishness play in the world. Une analogie frappante! They are both equally hated, despised, feared, envied, are both equally resented and resentful. One speaks of the age of nationalism. But in reality, there are only two nationalisms, the German and the Jewish” (428/591). Fitelberg’s neat separation of “Germanness” and “Jewishness” (a conceptual division we also find in Mann’s non-fictional writings) is undoubtedly problematic, for it presupposes not only that these are monolithic identity formations, but also rules out any possibility that one could be both a German and a Jew. Nevertheless, the thesis that Germans and Jews are “equally hated, despised, feared” by the world is unusual enough to warrant more detailed study.

Even stranger sentences are yet to come, however. “The Germans,” Fitelberg concludes, “with their nationalism, their arrogance, their fondness for their own incomparability, their hatred of being second or even placed on a par, their refusal to be introduced to the world and to join its society—the Germans will bring about their own misfortune, a truly Jewish misfortune, je vous le jure” (428/592). We may well nod along with this until we get to the final two phrases. Has Fitelberg really just drawn a parallel between the German descent into Nazism and the “Jewish misfortune,” which culminated, after all, in the Holocaust?

In a recent study, the critic Todd Kontje has offered the most compelling interpretation of these strange lines to date. Mann included Jewish characters in the novel, so he argues, because he wanted to illustrate the fundamental choice the German people were facing, a choice that Jews had already been familiar with for many centuries. The options were either to double down on a chauvinistic view of the world that differentiates between a “Chosen people” and everyone else, or to seek a cosmopolitan engagement with other nations. Chaim Breisacher, whose German nationalism and anti-rationalism goes hand in hand with an equally arrogant love of “the old and genuine Hebrew presence of Yahweh,” as opposed to the later “Biblical personages revered by every Christian child” (297/409), represents the former option. Saul Fitelberg, who urges Leverkühn towards a cosmopolitanism that is already foreshadowed by the composer’s origins in Kaisersaschern (see chapter 7, “The Historical Setting of the Novel), represents the latter. Kontje even proposes that Mann’s decision to pick the Fitelberg chapter for his public readings possesses “a strong element of self-parody […] that arises from Man’s long-term unease with himself in the role of [a] public intellectual and advocate of democracy and the Enlightenment.”16Todd Kontje, Thomas Mann’s World: Empire, Race, and the Jewish Question (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 2011), 171.

If we adopt such a reading, it would go a long way not towards excusing Mann’s harmful stereotyping of Jewish characters, but at least towards blunting the full impact of his actions. Ultimately, we might then say, Mann was including caricatures of Jews in his novel because he wanted to thereby illustrate what he regarded as a fundamentally German dilemma. But such an interpretive move in turn raises other important questions about the treatment of anti-Semitism and the Holocaust in Doctor Faustus, questions that I think are best approached by means of an exchange that took place between Mann and his Jewish colleague Jakob Wassermann, one of the most popular authors of the Weimar period. Wassermann had complained about the many obstacles Jewish writers faced if they wanted to be successful in Germany. This irritated Mann, who sent his friend a letter in which he claimed that “many of your complaints refer to circumstances in Germany as such, and could just as well have been made by any non-Jewish writer.” Wassermann responded by pointing out the differences between personal and social injustice, asking Mann: “How would you have felt if somebody had called for a vote of no-confidence in you simply because you were from Lübeck and a North German?”17I owe this quotation to Klüger, “Jewish Characters in Thomas Mann’s Fiction,” 164.

Mann, as this exchange suggests, possessed no notion of what we nowadays call “structural” racism or anti-Semitism. Injustices for him were personal, and because he had created characters like Breisacher, Rosenstiel, or Fitelberg with an allegorical purpose and not out of malice, he was impervious to any charges that their mere existence was harmful. Furthermore, because he was not particularly receptive to Jewish suffering as a structurally specific form of experience, he was entirely comfortable folding it into larger categories such as the “German” or the “European.” This, I think, also helps explain why the Holocaust is curiously absent from the novel, although Mann was undoubtedly aware of its true scope. For him, the Holocaust wasn’t a singular catastrophe, but simply a part of the larger complex of destruction unleashed by the Nazis. Since he saw such a close parallelism between Jewish and German identity, he likely would also not have understood Schwarz’s complaint that Jewish suffering remains unredeemed at the end of the novel. That he thereby drew a perverse equivalence between the corpses at Buchenwald and the people who were made to march by them seems to have not occurred to him.

This deficiency of Doctor Faustus is, I think, closely related to (though certainly of a different order of magnitude than) another problem that I already mentioned in the previous chapter, and which contemporary readers frequently find both fascinating and revolting. I’m referring to Mann’s unflinching willingness to adapt intimate details not only from his own life but also from those of people close to him into his fiction. Carla Mann’s suicide note and Frido Mann’s speech patterns come to mind in this context. These are individual cases, of course, not examples of structural suffering, but Mann nevertheless had no problems using them in order to strengthen the allegorical texture of his novel, just as he had no compunctions about resorting to stereotyping. His audacity resulted in some of the most memorable secondary characters in twentieth-century fiction. But the price was enormous.