The Meaning of Typological Allegory

Mann’s basic ambition is clear, however: he is trying to establish these figures as forerunners of a great intellectual crisis in the twentieth century, aspects of which they already embodied in their own lives and works. This is not to say that Mann wants us to condemn these figures; he certainly was a glowing admirer of Dürer, Luther, Beethoven, and Nietzsche, if perhaps not of Beissel. But he does want us to approach them as ambivalent figures, whose greatest accomplishments, to repeat the phrase from “Germany and the Germans,” also “opened the way for devilish cunning.” “There is no document of civilization,” Walter Benjamin once famously said, “which is not also at the same time a document of barbarism.”1Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 256. This slogan accurately describes Thomas Mann’s treatment of cultural history in Doctor Faustus.

The historical antecedents that I have describe in this chapter are all German, and there can be no question that Mann, when he drew up his genealogy, had his mind bent towards a particularly Germanic malaise. Like many conservative thinkers of the 1930s, Mann believed that Nazism had deep roots in its native culture, and he set out to expose these roots not only in Doctor Faustus, but also in his essays and lectures of the period. But had he meant for his novel to be read only as an indictment of a German “special path” towards Nazism, he would surely have drawn up a different genealogy—one that might have included intellectuals such as Paul de Lagarde, Julius Langbehn, or Ernst Bertram.2On the intellectual roots of Nazism in a particularly German strain of nineteenth-century culture, see Fritz Stern, The Politics of Cultural Despair: A Study in the Rise of the Germanic Ideology (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1961); Mosse, The Crisis of German Ideology; and—on Bertram—the translator’s introduction to Ernst Bertram, Nietzsche: Attempt at a Mythology, trans. Robert E. Norton (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2009), xi–xxxvi. Mann certainly knew these figures (Bertram was a family friend) but they play only minor roles in Doctor Faustus. Zeitblom’s final words, for example (“May God have mercy on your poor soul, my friend, my fatherland” [534/738]) are adapted from a Langbehn quote.

Instead, Mann chose primarily figures of world-historical significance, and added to them a person of rather lesser importance, who was, however, active in the United States and not in Germany. Together, these choices illustrate that Mann’s ultimate interest was in developments that characterized modernity proper and that (as Beissel’s example shows) might even play out on the American continent. The fact that he refers to Nietzsche in his 1947 lecture not as a forerunner of Hitler, but more generally as a “quivering floatstick [for] the fascist era of the West” confirms this.

What, then, are these developments? Leverkühn’s typological forerunners are important to Mann first because they are all—to once again invoke the Dürer essay—men with a tendency towards “vaulting self-dramatization” and “thrilling intellectual climax[es].” They are not just innovators, but self-conscious revolutionaries who aimed to fundamentally transform their respective disciplines. There is a dangerous loneliness that attends such grand ambition, as Mann tries to show us in the figure of Dürer’s melancholic angel, his description of Beethoven’s struggles with the Missa solemnis, and most importantly in his vivid depiction of Nietzsche’s final descent into syphilitic paralysis, which Leverkühn reenacts. This loneliness, ultimately, is that of every modern artist or intellectual who strives to offer synthesizing descriptions of a world whose inherent complexity overwhelms the everyday observer.

Intellectual anomie is thus one danger of which Doctor Faustus warns. Its harm is so acute because it afflicts not only the modern thinker, but spreads also to society. Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony is perhaps the central demonstration of this in the text. The Ninth Symphony is the consummate expression of its era, the distillation of everything that was good about the Age of Revolutions into a grand choral “Ode to Joy” and freedom. It’s an undeniable masterpiece of Western civilization, but it also poses an intellectual problem, for the state of joy and harmony that it proposes as a remedy for human suffering is both unattainable and unsustainable in a world in which history does not stop. Having been written once, the Ninth Symphony cannot be composed again. It can only be performed—that is, reenacted. Every future performance of it comes with the unwritten historicist disclaimer that the joy that it celebrates is the joy of a past moment, one which we can only hope to approximate in the present. Future artists hoping to have a similar impact have to keep pushing the boundaries of their craft, creating ever more vertiginous compositions that will eventually start to alienate the very audience that they are meant to unite. As I discussed in chapter 6, “Doctor Faustus and Literary Modernism,” Mann detected a very similar danger in the modern novel; his late masterpiece is written in the pained awareness that the very complexity of its insights will contribute to the problematic condition that it diagnoses.

Another important lesson to be drawn from the stories of Leverkühn’s typological forerunners concerns the question of social engagement. The task of poets and thinkers is to offer a synthetic account of the world, a comprehensive picture that might help liberate us from the alienation and confusion that characterizes the modern world. But there are different forms that such a liberation might take. Martin Luther, a mighty thinker whose theses and sermons cut through the intellectual decay of the sixteenth-century Catholic church and offered a novel, energetic vision of what human salvation might look like, rejected the chance to give a socio-political significance to his theology during the Peasant Wars of the 1520s. In his lecture on “Germany and the Germans,” Mann claims that Luther “hated the peasant revolution which, evangelically inspired as it was, if successful, would have given a happier turn to German history, a turn towards [political] liberty. Luther, however, saw in it nothing but a distortion of his work of spiritual liberation and therefore he fumed and raged against it.”3Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” 54. As I have argued, we can detect in Doctor Faustus a similar criticism of Beethoven, whose Ninth Symphony likewise chooses spiritual liberation over the political liberty that is to be found in Fidelio. Mann, meanwhile, saw in Nietzsche’s “self-conquest of Christian morality” a similar outgrowth of an original Lutheran error—the decision to rank spiritual truth and self-affirmation over the needs of the human community.4Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” 53.

A final lesson to be drawn from these case studies is that artists and intellectuals can sometimes be at their most dangerous when they recognize all the pitfalls that I have just described and try to free themselves from these fundamental limitations. This is the path that Leverkühn will ultimately take in the novel, and it is also the path that helps describe why Mann added the obscure Georg Conrad Beissel to his pantheon of otherwise instantly recognizable typological models. For Beissel was a historical figure whose genius lay in the unusual lengths to which he went to try and reverse the chasm that separates the intellectual and the artist from the general public under conditions of modernity. The music theory that he created self-consciously strives to rid Western music of everything “too complicated and artificial to be truly serviceable” and to create a new kind of music “more suited to the simplicity of [common people’s] souls” (73/100). The technique that he comes up with is so radically simplified that it altogether erases the modern distinction between the specialized artist and the masses; at Ephrata, everybody is a composer.

Beissel’s work might thus be called radically democratic, in the original Aristotelian sense of the term of a community in which power resides with all the people. But as Mann well understood (and sought to communicate to American audiences in lectures such as “The Coming Victory of Democracy”) a modern state that lacks representation, and in which all power is instead directly invested in the populace is not a utopia, but rather a totalitarian nightmare. The sinister division between “masters” and “servants” in Beissel’s theory already hints at this. Wendell Kretzschmar’s description of the Ephrata community in chapter VIII of Doctor Faustus is perhaps the earliest point in the novel at which we can discern a direct connection between music theory and political allegory. A long-overdue consideration of the musical elements that structure Mann’s novel will help tease out this connection.