9: Five Masters from Germany: Leverkühn as Artist and Intellectual

An even more complex example of polyphonic style is presented to us by the character of Adrian Leverkühn, who exists on at least six different temporal planes simultaneously. For again and again throughout the story, we find references to important figures from German cultural and intellectual history to whom he bears an uncanny resemblance, whether in external appearance or through biographical particulars. A polyphonic composition in which the various musical voices present variations and repetitions of a single common melody is known as a “fugue,” and as a result we might describe Doctor Faustus as having a “fugal” texture. Taken together, these fugal elements combine to present an allegorical argument that takes in three centuries of German cultural history.

Consider the example of chapter XVI, a large chunk of which is taken up with the transcription of a letter that Leverkühn sends to Zeitblom shortly after his arrival in Leipzig in the fall of 1905. The letter is written in an archaic idiom reminiscent of the sixteenth century, a stylistic choice that Zeitblom somewhat paradoxically calls both “a parody […] a self-stylization” and “a manifestation of [Leverkühn’s] inner disposition” (148/204). His inability to decide on one of these options is telling. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s, Mann consistently expressed dissatisfaction with the theory that Nazism had been entirely foreign to the German character, that it had overwhelmed and corrupted a fundamentally good nation whose ultimate innocence could still be found in certain sheltered parts.1Mann would have had good reason to contemplate this thesis, for he encountered it repeatedly while in American exile—during the late 1930s in his dealings with Count Hubertus zu Löwenstein and his American Guild for German Cultural Freedom, which held steadfast to the notion that the “true” Germany had fled beyond the borders of the Reich; during the early 1940s in his interactions with Marxist intellectuals like Bertolt Brecht, who saw Nazism as an outgrowth of international capitalism, not as something endemic to the German nation; and finally in the mid-1940s within official Allied policy, which tried to foment a popular uprising in the Third Reich by reassuring ordinary Germans that they were not the real enemy. Instead, he argued in his 1945 Library of Congress lecture on “Germany and the Germans” that “there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning.”2Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” 64. Going even further, he claimed that “not a word of all that I have just told you about Germany or tried to indicate to you came out of alien, cool, objective knowledge, it is all within me, I have been through it all.”3Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” 65. Doctor Faustus makes the same point in fictional form. Leverkühn is not just the fundamentally good, basically innocent childhood friend as which Zeitblom would like to remember and protect him. He instead carries within him a strong legacy of the irrational and the demonic, elements which the novel highlights by repeatedly associating him with the early modern period, the era of black magic and witchcraft trials. Mann himself therefore went so far as to call Doctor Faustus a novel that “always has one foot in the sixteenth century.”4Letter to Hans Ulrich Staeps, October 8, 1947, in Mann, Selbstkommentare, 121.

That is not all that we can extract from Leverkühn’s letter to Zeitblom, however. Studying it carefully, we soon stumble upon the budding composer’s first encounter with the prostitute Esmeralda, over the course of which Leverkühn steps up to a piano and strikes up a sequence of chords. Readers well versed in German intellectual history may feel a certain sense of familiarity when confronted with this passage, and indeed it is another example of Mann’s borrowings from Paul Deussen’s memoirs, which we already encountered as an important source for Doctor Faustus in the previous chapters. This act of copying adds a second temporal layer to the texture of the novel, however. Within the context of a letter in which Leverkühn seems to oscillate between the sixteenth and the twentieth centuries, he now also appears to repeat actions that were actually performed by Friedrich Nietzsche, a real-world figure from the nineteenth century!

This proliferation of layers tends to baffle first-time readers of Doctor Faustus. We are used to allegorical narratives in which a surface element (known to literary theorists as the vehicle) represents exactly one deeper element (the tenor). In George Orwell’s Animal Farm, for example, the pig Napoleon represents Stalin, Snowball represents Trotsky, etc. This is by no means the only way in which allegory can work, however. Early Christian theorists (with whose ideas Mann was eminently familiar from the twenty-six years he had spent researching and writing his Joseph novels) in fact developed a four-fold model of allegory, in which a single vehicle represents as many as four different tenors. Doctor Faustus can be seen as having a similar structure.5For a particularly strong reading of Doctor Faustus as a twentieth-century variation on the four-fold schema, see the chapter on “Allegory and History: On Rereading Doktor Faustus” in Fredric Jameson, The Modernist Papers (London: Verso, 2007), 113–33. Besides a “literal” level, in which tenor and vehicle are identical, medieval thinkers postulated three further layers: the “typological,” the “tropological” (or “moral”), and the “anagogical.” The particular kind of allegory that I wish to examine here closely corresponds to what Christian theorists called the “typological” reading. I will describe a moral approach in the next chapter, “Music Theory and Political Allegory” and an anagogical one in chapter 11, “Illness and Redemption.”

Typological allegory works by way of a mechanism called figura. In figura, according to the philologist Erich Auerbach, “something real and historical […] represents and proclaims in advance something that is also real and historical.”6Erich Auerbach, “Figura,” in Time, History, and Literature: Selected Essays of Erich Auerbach, ed. James I. Porter, trans. Jane O. Newman (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2014), 79. For Christian theorists, it was the events of the Old Testament that proclaimed in advance the story of Christ. Figura—and thus typological allegory—can usefully explain what is happening in the letter Leverkühn writes to Zeitblom from Leipzig. In its pages, he becomes Nietzsche, or we might say just as readily: Nietzsche becomes him.

The argument that I want to develop in the rest of this chapter is that typological allegory can be productively used to analyze the fugal structure of Doctor Faustus as a whole. Leverkühn’s internal division, the fact that he exists on multiple temporal planes at once, comes about by virtue of the fact that he combines within himself multiple historical personalities who are nevertheless simply variations of the same theme. I will first describe the various historical layers and then offer some concluding thoughts as to their ultimate significance.