Syphilis and the Devils’ Pact
To get at better grip on Mann’s metaphorical use of illness, it is helpful to first know a little bit more about syphilis.
1The following description is largely guided by Hemil Gonzalez, Igor J. Koralnik, and Christina M. Marra, “Neurosyphilis,” in Seminars in Neurology 39, no. 4 (2019): 448–55. Syphilis is a sexually transmitted disease caused by the bacterium
treponema pallidum (in Mann’s day known as
spirochaete pallida). As we already saw in chapter 9, it arrived in Europe in the late fifteenth century, during the time of Albrecht Dürer, who produced the first known pictorial representation of the disease in the West, and who may have himself contracted it. Syphilis progresses in three distinct stages: primary, secondary, and tertiary. While primary and secondary stages occur in quick succession, years can pass between the remission of the secondary stage and the outbreak of the tertiary, during which time the disease remains latent in the body.
Leverkühn contracts syphilis in May 1906 during a visit to the town of Pressburg in the Kingdom of Hungary (now Bratislava in Slovakia), where he reunites with the prostitute Esmeralda, whom he first met during his Leipzig student days. As Zeitblom tells us in chapter XIX, five weeks later he decides “to seek medical treatment for a localized infection” (166/228). This localized infection would almost certainly have been a chancre, a skin ulceration that is the most distinctive symptom of primary syphilis. Leverkühn consults with two different dermatologists to determine a plan of treatment, but the former meets an untimely end and the latter is arrested during a follow-up visit. At this point, Leverkühn “let the matter rest.” However, Zeitblom also tells us, “the localized infection healed quickly” and “no secondary symptoms whatever were manifest” (168/231).
Secondary syphilis, the onset of which usually coincides with the healing of the initial chancre, can indeed occur without any specific symptoms, in which case the disease enters straight into its latent phase. Zeitblom may, however, simply be underestimating Leverkühn’s condition, for he repeatedly tells us about the migraine headaches that afflict his friend and also mentions a fever that he contracts while in Palestrina. While it is true that Leverkühn had been struggling with migraines ever since he was a child, these are common symptoms of secondary syphilis as well.
A little more than twelve years after the initial infection, during the fall of 1918, Leverkühn develops the first symptoms of tertiary neurosyphilis, probably of the meningovascular kind. Neurosyphilis frequently manifests as paresis, also known as “general paralysis of the insane” (GPI). GPI affects the frontal and temporal lobes of the patient’s brain; its early symptoms are once again debilitating headaches, like the ones that Zeitblom suffers from in 1918. As the illness develops further, it leads to degenerative changes, to hallucinations, suicidal ideation, and to the eventual collapse of all mental faculties. In its meningovascular manifestations, the disease also spreads to the arterial system, in some cases triggering a stroke. Leverkühn seems to succumb to all of these factors simultaneously when he collapses in spectacular fashion during his demonstration of excerpts from The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus in chapter XLVII.
So far, I have provided a depiction of syphilis as it is to be found in the modern medical literature. Doctor Faustus contains its own description of the disease, of course, in the first third of chapter XXV, where the devil provides it when he appears to Leverkühn in the guise of the red-headed porter who introduced him to the prostitute Esmeralda. Mann based this passage on medical reference works as well as on a descriptive letter sent to him by a doctor friend, Martin Gumpert. Nevertheless, metaphorical elements predominate in it, such as when the devil compares the “flagellates” that cause the disease to medieval penitents known as “flagellants” (247/338) or when he invokes the Latin names of the membranes that surround the brain, dura mater and pia mater (249/340), with clear knowledge of the religious tinge of these terms. The overall thrust of the metaphors is clear: the devil stresses the early modern origins of the disease, aligns it with cultic excess through the comparison with the flagellants, and uses the ability of the syphilis bacteria to penetrate the blood-brain barrier as a figurative equivalent to the process of artistic inspiration.
The larger significance of this has already become clear a few pages earlier, when the devil announces to Leverkühn that he would like to “come to an understanding with you” about the fact that “the hour-glass has been turned, […] the sand has begun to run” (243/332). For in Doctor Faustus, syphilis ultimately serves as a physiological correlative to the written devil’s pact of pre-modern legends. By deliberately contracting the disease, Leverkühn has given the devil permission to alter his neurological state, providing musical inspiration as the side result of a pathological trajectory that will ultimately also claim Leverkühn’s soul. The total length of the process is to be twenty-four years, the same time span also found in the Chapbook and in other sources. As the devil makes clear, there is one other price to which Leverkühn must submit in addition to the painful symptoms of his disease: he may not love, in either the sexual or the Platonic sense. This is another update to the early modern sources, in which Faustus was prohibited from Christian marriage.
Whether the devil actually exists or not is an open question, of course. Zeitblom is conflicted about the matter, and in the opening paragraphs of chapter XXV does his best to convince himself that Leverkühn’s interlocutor might just have been the product of a fever dream. Indeed, hallucinations and delusions of grandeur are classical manifestations of syphilis, though rarely encountered a mere six years into the progression of the disease. The question of whether the devil is real or not has a crucial bearing on the political dimensions of the novel. Are Adrian Leverkühn’s musical ideas truly his own, or are they rather the result of a demonic influence? And by extension, should the course towards fascism that they figuratively chart be seen as the inherent fault of the German people, or do structural factors and outside agents bear at least part of the blame? In Thomas Mann’s day, these were hotly contested questions, and as scholarly debates such as the so-called “Goldhagen Controversy” of the 1990s show, they have not been fully settled even today.
2Daniel Goldhagen, Hitler’s Willing Executioners (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996). For an introduction to the Goldhagen Controversy, see the chapter “The Past Distorted: The Goldhagen Controversy,” in Fritz Stern, Einstein’s German World (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2016), 272–88. As historians gain greater distance to the tragedies of the early twenty-first century, similar questions about collective culpability will undoubtedly be raised regarding our present moment.