Friedrich Nietzsche
The final and perhaps most obvious typological model for Adrian Leverkühn is Friedrich Nietzsche (1844–1900).
1The secondary literature exploring Mann’s fascination with Nietzsche is especially vast. A classic study, useful also for most other aspects of Mann’s life and work, is T.J. Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition (Oxford: Clarendon, 1973). For a more recent introduction that focuses on Doctor Faustus, see Nicholas Martin, “‘Ewig verbundene Geister’: Thomas Mann’s Reengagement with Nietzsche, 1943–1947,” Oxford German Studies 34, no. 2 (2005): 197–203. Subtle allusions to the philosopher are scattered throughout the early chapters of
Doctor Faustus; both the recurring migraines of Jonathan Leverkühn (a condition from which Nietzsche also suffered) and the uncanny laughter of little Adrian (connected to many discussions of laughter in Nietzsche’s works) are examples of such a connection.
2On Adrian’s laughter, see Mark Roche, “Laughter and Truth in Doctor Faustus: Nietzschean Structures in Mann’s Novel of Self-Cancellations,” Deutsche Vierteljahrsschrift für Literaturwissenschaft und Geistesgeschichte 60, no. 2 (1986): 309–32. As we have already seen, however, the correspondences emerge into full bloom with the Leipzig letter in chapter XVI, an episode that is closely patterned on a passage in Paul Deussen’s
Recollections of Nietzsche. Mann knew this work well and reread it in January of 1944, a few months before he started working on the chapter. More importantly, many German readers were familiar with the story too, and so the parallels between Leverkühn and Nietzsche became a focus of critical attention as soon as the novel was published. Mann did much to encourage such a focus, repeatedly referring to
Doctor Faustus as a “Nietzsche novel” in the months after it was published.
3For instance, in letters to Emil Preetorius on December 12, 1947, and to Kuno Fiedler on February 5, 1948, in Mann, Selbstkommentare, 138, 62.The biographical parallels between Nietzsche and Leverkühn are easy to see. Both are born in small villages in Saxony-Anhalt near the border with Thuringia (Nietzsche in Röcken, Leverkühn in the fictional Buchel), and both move to a nearby town during their school years (Nietzsche to Naumburg, Leverkühn to Kaisersaschern, which Mann modeled in part on Naumburg). Both initially study theology and join a fraternity (Nietzsche in Bonn, Leverkühn closer to home in Halle) before moving to Leipzig to pursue their true passion (classical philology for Nietzsche, musical composition for Leverkühn). After this, their life paths diverge, but both Nietzsche and Leverkühn will be irrevocably marked by the syphilitic infection that they contract during their student days in Leipzig, and to which both will succumb on the exact same day and month (August 25) at the age of fifty-five.
Much like Beethoven, Nietzsche was during the final years of his life also surrounded by admiring yet sometimes uncomprehending disciples. Early biographers like Paul Deussen or Paul Julius Möbius thus perform a very similar role to that performed by Anton Schindler for Beethoven, providing hagiographic and often gossipy descriptions of a famous figure that Mann could mine for material, but also serving as personal models for the character of Zeitblom. Women, finally, play an important role both in the life of the philosopher and in that of Mann’s fictional character, though the influence of Nietzsche’s sister Elizabeth Förster-Nietzsche would ultimately prove to be downright nefarious when compared to that of Else Schweigestill, Kunigunde Rosenstiel, or Meta Nackedey.
To get a grasp of the figurative significance of Friedrich Nietzsche in the novel, we need to turn no farther than to the lecture “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events,” which Mann gave at the Library of Congress on April 29, 1947, just three months after he finished
Doctor Faustus (and less than two years after speaking on Martin Luther and “Germany and the Germans” in the same venue). Midway through that lecture, Mann declares that, “basically remote from politics and innocently spiritual, [Nietzsche] functioned as an infinitely sensitive instrument of expression and registration; with his philosopheme of power he presaged the dawning imperialism and as a quivering floatstick indicated the fascist era of the West in which we are living and shall continue to live for a long time to come.”
4Thomas Mann, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events,” in Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress, 1942–1949 (Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1963), 94. More than being a mere “floatstick” (Mann is referring to a device for measuring fuel levels in the gas tanks of cars or airplanes), however, Nietzsche actually bore a certain responsibility for the events of the early twentieth century:
If the words “By the fruit of their deeds ye shall know them!” are true, then Nietzsche is in a bad way. With Spengler, his clever ape, the
Übermensch of Nietzsche’s dream has become the modern “realist man of grand style,” the rapacious and profit-greedy man who makes his way over dead bodies, the financial magnate, the war industrialist, the German industrial general manager financing fascism.
5Mann, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events,” 94.The “Spengler” in question here is, of course, the cultural philosopher and latter-day Nietzsche disciple Oswald Spengler, whom Mann despised and who served as one of the models for the reactionaries caricatured in the Kridwiss Circle. Mann makes the connection to authoritarian politics even more explicit when he notes that the Nietzschean injunction to “live dangerously” (
lebe kühn, from which Mann derived the name “Leverkühn”) “was translated into the Italian and became a part of fascist slang.”
6Mann, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events,” 94. “Live audaciously” would be a more literal translation than the one Mann uses. The implication thus is that the protagonist of
Doctor Faustus, like the historical Nietzsche, should be interpreted as both an early indicator and an active precursor of the coming age of fascism.
There is some amount of awkwardness involved here, for the correspondences between Leverkühn and Nietzsche are so much stronger than those between Leverkühn and other historical figures that there is simply no room left for the actual Nietzsche in the novel. Dürer, Luther, Beethoven, and Beissel are all extensively discussed in
Doctor Faustus; Nietzsche is never mentioned. This is made even stranger by the fact that Mann documents the impact of Nietzsche’s thought on the German intelligentsia of the early twentieth century in some detail in chapter XXXIV, which discusses the Kridwiss Circle. Clearly, then, Nietzsche (or somebody very much like Nietzsche) must exist as a historical figure within the fictional world of
Doctor Faustus, even though it never occurs to the superbly educated Zeitblom to mention him.
7The critic T.J. Reed has commented in this context that “complexity here begins to be confusion, of the kind which is born of mixing literary methods.” See Reed, Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition, 370.Not all of “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events” focuses on the philosopher as a forerunner of fascism, however. In the lecture’s opening argument, Mann refers to Nietzsche as “a personality of phenomenal cultural plenitude and complexity, summing up all that is essentially European”; a little later he also speaks of him as “a European proser and essayist of highest quality.”
8Mann, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events,” 69, 76. We here reencounter the duality that we already discussed in the opening chapter, where we observed that Leverkühn is on the one hand a deeply Germanic figure, but on the other hand a stand-in for the desperate condition of modern art in the early twentieth-century more generally. Indeed, Mann situates Nietzsche amidst a larger cultural progress in which “the dignified discipline and restraint of German humanistic tradition […] slowly degenerates into an awesomely mundane and hectically humorous super-feuilletonism” and specifically points towards the philosopher’s “Second Untimely Meditation: On the Uses and Disadvantages of History for Life” as his most important work, the one in which the “fundamental thought of his life […] is pre-formed most perfectly.”
9Mann, “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in the Light of Contemporary Events,” 78, 81. In this text, Nietzsche proposes that an exaggerated respect for history ultimately leads to intellectual paralysis. Timothy Snyder proposes a very similar idea in his description of the “politics of inevitability,” where he argues that contemporary pundits and intellectuals are frequently too caught up in their grand narratives to pay attention to the messy vicissitudes of history. Against the paralysis of modernity, Leverkühn proposes his “strict style” as a grand gesture, thereby fulfilling the prophecy of his Nietzschean name. But the strict style subordinates music (and by extension social life) to the dictatorship of an inalterable and endlessly repeated tone row. In the same way, the fascist regimes that took explicit inspiration from Nietzsche’s proposals ended up enforcing a “politics of eternity” with no room left for utopian thinking.