Leverkühn as Christ Figure
Political readings of the devil’s pact thus provide one answer to the question of how Mann employs illness as a metaphor in his novel. Syphilis, in such a reading, is the metaphorical expression of the German “devil’s pact” that led to Nazism and to total annihilation in the Second World War. An even wider-ranging interpretation is possible, however. In the epilogue to the novel, Serenus Zeitblom describes Leverkühn, who at this stage of his life has succumbed completely to GPI and seems incapable of formulating any rational thought, as possessing a “hunched posture” and “a shrunken face, an Ecce homo countenance, that despite a healthy country tan revealed a mouth opened in pain and unseeing eyes” (533/736–37). The reference here, of course, is not only to Nietzsche (who wrote a book called Ecce Homo) but also to Jesus Christ, to whom the words ecce homo (“behold the man,” see John 19:5) originally referred. Indeed, comparisons between Adrian Leverkühn and Christ are hidden all over the novel, as are many Biblical quotations. Already in chapter, XV, for example, Zeitblom describes a tableau he observed at Buchel that clearly alludes to early modern depictions of the pietà: “[Leverkühn’s mother] looped her arm around him, so to speak, not around his shoulders, but around his head, her hand resting on his brow, and then with her black eyes directed at Kretzschmar and still speaking to him in her sweet, resonant voice, she rested Adrian’s head on her breast” (137/188). These allusions multiply as the story nears its conclusion. In chapter XLVI, for example, Zeitblom points out that Leverkühn’s newly grown beard “lent his countenance a kind of spiritualized suffering, indeed, something Christlike” (507/699–700), while the opening line of chapter XLVII, spoken by Leverkühn himself, is “Watch with me!”—Jesus’s words in the Garden of Gethsemane, as reported in Matthew 26:40.
Needless to say, this comparison of a Faustus figure to Christ is more than a little unusual within literary history. Ever since the time of Johannes Manlius in the 1560s, Faustus has been linked to themes of apostasy. He sells his soul to the devil, after all. And indeed, there are passages within Mann’s novel that suggest that he should be read as an Antichrist, rather than a Christ figure. Zeitblom makes repeated note of Leverkühn’s tendency towards paroxysmic fits of mocking laughter, for example. Mann’s protagonist also derives the inspiration for his most important composition from Albrecht Dürer’s woodcuts of the Apocalypse, the series of events that portend the coming of the Antichrist. Then there is the fact that Kretzschmar establishes Ludwig van Beethoven as a kind of Christ figure in chapter VIII, when he describes the compositional process that led to the Missa solemnis in terms that clearly recall the final days of Jesus. Leverkühn explicitly declares his intention to undo the legacy of Beethoven and seems to reenact the same Biblical episode when he premieres the Lamentation of Doctor Faustus in chapter XLVII. Should he therefore not be seen as the diabolical antithesis to Beethoven’s redemptive struggle to bring joy and spiritual unity to all of humanity?
It’s hard to reconcile such a reading with the image of Leverkühn cradling his face on his mother’s bosom, however, or with Zeitblom’s description of his behavior following his return to Buchel at the very end of the novel: “he readily joined her with demonstrations of love and joy, dogged her every step once they were home, and was the most docile of children, whom she tended with that total dedication of which only a mother is capable” (532/736). Indeed, throughout the novel, Zeitblom continuously stresses the human and mortal aspects of Leverkühn’s allegorical relationship to Christ. Mann’s protagonist never appears in any guise that would even remotely resemble the Christus Imperator Maximus so ardently extolled by the pseudo-fascist poet Daniel Zur Höhe in chapter XXXIV. As a result, he also never becomes a compelling Antichrist figure, come to execute the devil’s victory on earth. During his ostensible moment of triumph, in chapter XLVII, where he presents the compositional fruits of his devil’s pact, Leverkühn appears wracked by guilt and remorse. His story thereby repeats that of Christ, who sacrificed his mortal body for the benefit of humankind but did so while experiencing feelings of fear and doubt.
There is, thus, a third allegorical layer in the novel that we might add to the political and typological reading described in previous chapters. It is a theological layer, an interpretation of the novel in which Leverkühn becomes the ultimate redeemer of a sinful humanity who, thanks to his compositional efforts, strives to liberate us from the paradoxes of the modern condition. It is fitting, surely, that this grandest of all interpretive schemes also comes into clearest focus in the final chapters of the novel.