Martin Luther
A second historical person whose typological link to Leverkühn is related to that of Albrecht Dürer is the protestant reformer Martin Luther (1483–1546). Luther doesn’t come into prominent focus in the novel until chapter XII, where Leverkühn’s theology professor Ehrenfried Kumpf is clearly conceived as an overt parody of the great reformer—thrown ink well and dinner orations included. In subsequent chapters, names and phrases from Luther’s letters and writings also proliferate throughout the novel. But his presence is indirectly felt even earlier, for Leverkühn’s childhood and youth is closely connected to a number of small towns in modern-day Thuringia and Saxony-Anhalt that played an important role in the protestant reformation.
As was the case with Dürer, Mann’s essays provide important insight into the nature of the typological link between Luther and Leverkühn. The most important document in this regard is his 1945 Library of Congress lecture on “Germany and the Germans”—the same text in which he also justified his decision to employ the story of modern music as an allegorical device for political commentary. Martin Luther, whom Mann calls both a “gigantic incarnation of the German spirit” and “exceptionally musical” plays a major role in the lecture.
1Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” 52. Mann, who was raised as a Lutheran (though some critics believe he had drifted towards Unitarianism by the time he wrote
Doctor Faustus),
2Heinrich Detering, Thomas Manns amerikanische Religion: Theologie, Politik und Literatur im kalifornischen Exil (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2012). takes care to acknowledge his monumental achievements, conceding that he “not only reconstituted the Church; he actually saved Christianity,” and also that “it was his momentous translation of the Bible that really first created the German language.”
3Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” 53. But he also stresses that Luther was a man who knew nothing of “political liberty, the liberty of the citizen” and argues that it was precisely the Reformer’s intense focus on spiritual liberation at the expense of political emancipation that renders him a quintessential German figure.
4Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” 54. Luther’s myopic focus, so Mann argues throughout the essay, became characteristic of German culture as a whole during the nineteenth century, allowing a country that climbed to ever-new artistic and philosophical highs to simultaneously depart from the path of political liberalism trodden by other Western European nations. “National Socialism,” Mann concludes, was the inevitable outcome of this process, for “in its exaggeration of this incongruity between the external and internal desire for liberty” it went so far “as to think of world enslavement by a people themselves enslaved.”
5Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” 56.The physical and biographical parallels between Leverkühn and Luther are weaker than those between Leverkühn and Dürer. Luther was an immense man of immense appetites, known for his bawdy and choleric temper. Leverkühn, by contrast, lives an ascetic existence and he is refined and cosmopolitan in outlook. There are some connections, however, such as the fact that both men have an encounter with the devil during a period of self-enforced exile that will also prove formative for their intellectual output: Luther while hiding in the Wartburg in Thuringia, where he translates the Bible into German, and Leverkühn while sequestered in Palestrina, where he writes his first major work, the opera Love’s Labour’s Lost.
Symbolically and spiritually, the correspondences are much stronger. Both Luther and Leverkühn are zealous reformer figures, eager to revitalize and reconstitute what they regard as a moribund intellectual system—Christianity in Luther’s case, classical music in Leverkühn’s. Both achieve this task through an act of translation: Luther by transposing the Bible from Church Latin into vernacular German, Leverkühn by replacing the laws of tonality with those of dodecaphony. And both “save” what they value the most only at an immense price, namely the sacrifice of individual liberty that comes with the self-willed imprisonment in a carceral belief system that discourages any engagement with politics or with the social world more generally.