Lament and Redemption

The answer, as with so many other things pertaining to the musical aesthetics of Doctor Faustus, is to be found in Adorno. As Dieter Borchmeyer has pointed out, Adorno’s Philosophy of Music makes the attempt to think beyond twelve-tone music, arguing very strongly that “if it is to hope to make it through the winter, music must emancipate itself from twelve-tone technique.”1Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 89. Borchmeyer’s “‘Musik-Dämonie’—Saturn und Melancholie” offers by far the most complex analysis of the question of redemption that I am pondering here, even if he takes the rather surprising position that Leverkühn is not a Christ figure at all (1244). For another recent treatment of the same subject, see Tim Lörke’s chapter on “Kultur der Trauer und Klage” in his Die Verteidigung der Kultur: Mythos und Musik als Medien der Gegenmoderne: Thomas Mann, Ferrucio Busoni, Hans Pfitzner, Hanns Eisler (Würzburg: Königshausen & Neumann, 2010), 261–72. It does this, so Adorno argues, when it “casts away the dignity of the judge and abdicates, stepping down to take the side of the plaintiff who can be reconciled only by reality.”2Adorno, Philosophy of New Music, 97. What Adorno presumably means by these words is that music must take a step back from the ambition to reconcile the objective and the subjective aspects of historical reality, in the same way in which a judge reconciles the “subjective” nature of an individual case with the “objective” reality of the law. Instead, music must openly decry the broken nature of the modern condition in the manner of a legal plaintiff who demands, but cannot himself provide, justice and reconciliation.

The German word that Adorno uses for “plaintiff,” however, is Klage, a term that can also mean “lamentation” and that resurfaces both in the title of Leverkühn’s very last composition, The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus (Doktor Fausti Weheklage) and in Zeitblom’s descriptions of it as a “single immense variation on lamentation” (511/705; ein ungeheueres Variationenwerk der Klage). The strong implication, then, is that the very same composition that ostensibly documents the triumph of the devil through its stringent use of the pseudo-fascist “strict style” also points the way towards a possible redemption from this triumph. This redemption is triggered by Leverkühn’s persistent lamentations, through which he emancipates himself from the devil’s influence and becomes a truly Christ-like figure.

The terms “lament” or “lamentation” occur more than forty times over the course of the novel and are first applied to one of Leverkühn’s compositions in Zeitblom’s description of the puppet opera Gesta Romanorum on 335/463. About a hundred pages later, the aria (actually a duet) “Mon coeur s’ouvre à ta voix” (Softly Awakes My Heart) from Camille de Saint-Saëns’s 1877 opera Samson and Delilah. is described as a “dark lament for happiness” (dunkle Glückesklage) (434/599). At this point of his life, Leverkühn still mocks the emotional content of the French piece, which he denigrates as “not intellectual, but exemplarily sensual.”3The importance of the Saint-Saëns episode for the novel as a whole is analyzed in great detail by Hans Rudolf Vaget in “‘Blödsinnig schön!’ Französische Musik im Doktor Faustus.”

This attitude changes completely in chapter XLV, however, which describes the painful death from meningitis of Leverkühn’s nephew Nepomuk “Echo” Schneidewein. Echo’s decline is accompanied by the child’s “heart-rending laments and shrill cries” (498/688). Of all of Mann’s “literary murders” and ethically questionable applications of the montage technique, the “Echo” chapters are probably the most infamous. Earlier in the story, Mann had already copied the suicide note of his own sister Carla into the novel word-for-word. The character of Echo, however, was based on his six-year-old grandson Frido, whom the author dearly loved and whose literary counterpart he nevertheless condemned to a slow and agonizing demise. Clearly Mann felt that the literary payoff of such an action would be worth it. And indeed, it is Echo’s death—brought about by Leverkühn’s transgression of the devil’s pact when he shows fatherly affection for the young boy and caused by an inflammation of the same brain membranes the devil mentioned in chapter XXV—that leads the composer to renounce his pact with the devil. Towards the end of the chapter, he rages: “Take his body, over which You have dominion. But You will have to be content to leave his sweet soul to me—and that is Your impotence and Your absurdity, for which I shall laugh You to scorn for eons. And may eternities be rolled twixt my place and his, I will yet know that he is in the place from whence You, foul filth, were cast out” (500/691). A little earlier than this, he had already begun one of his final musical projects, a song cycle setting to music Ariel’s songs from Shakespeare’s The Tempest. At the end of Shakespeare’s play, the childlike spirit Ariel is released from his bondage to the sorcerer Prospero, suggesting that an escape from the confines of black magic is indeed possible.

Of course, it is precisely Echo’s death that causes Leverkühn to sink to his lowest depths, when he grimly announces: “I have discovered that it ought not be. […] The good and the noble, […] what people call human, even though it is good and noble. What people have fought for, have stormed citadels for, and what people filled to overflowing have announced with jubilation—it ought not be. It will be taken back. I shall take it back. […] The Ninth Symphony” (501/692–93). The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus—described as a “symphonic cantata” and thus the musical inverse of the Ninth Symphony, which is a choral symphony—clearly represents such a negation. But Mann’s thoughts about music, which follow Adorno’s, are ultimately dialectical and do not obey the zero-sum game of traditional philosophical logic. The Lamentation can negate the optimism and progressivism of the Ninth Symphony and the homophonic era more generally without thereby emerging as the final word on the matter.

Zeitblom acknowledges as much when he claims at the end of chapter XXXVI, that “there were years when we children of the dungeon dreamt of a song of joy—Fidelio, the Ninth Symphony—with which to celebrate Germany’s liberation, its liberation of itself. But now only this work can be of any use, and it will be sung from our soul: the lamentation of the son of hell, the most awful lament of man and God ever intoned on this earth” (509/702). The original German word for “liberation of itself,” Selbstbefreiung, makes clear that Zeitblom is here talking in allegorical terms about the German people casting off the yoke of Nazism. Such a liberation, as Zeitblom writing in 1945 realizes, never came. But he also holds out hope that Germany will not be confined to hell (or, in Snyder’s terms, to the “politics of eternity”) forevermore. For as he adds in the next paragraph:

Zeitblom’s hope, in other words, is that the cold and ultra-rational style that Leverkühn applies in his symphonic cantata might bear within itself the seeds for its own negation, and therefore also for Germany’s redemption. The tools for such a negation are lamentation and Christian contritio, or the sincere regret at one’s own sinful nature—a concept first discussed during Leverkühn’s theological studies in chapter XV.

The important question with which Doctor Faustus concludes is whether Zeitblom’s redemptive hopes are justified or not. The novel is full of ambiguous gestures in this regard: the final “high G of a cello” at the end of the Lamentation, for example, which can be interpreted as either “the dying note of sorrow” or as its opposite, “a light in the night” (515/711). Or Leverkühn’s attempt to walk into the Klammer Pool (the German name Klammerweiher means “clinging pond”), which can be read as either a final expression of madness and an attempt to extinguish the sinful self, or as an attempt at a redemptive baptism.

Ultimately, only the reader can decide on an answer to this question. Philologists tell us that Mann’s manuscript for Doctor Faustus came down much more firmly on the side of redemption, and that the author changed his text only at the insistence of the ever-pessimistic Adorno. But the change was made, and the novel now stands before us in all of its glorious ambiguity. Which is, perhaps, as it should be, for even eighty years after the end of Nazism the question whether Germany can ever be forgiven still stirs up debate, and other historical cataclysms cast a similarly long shadow.4For an excellent demonstration of the ambivalence surrounding the question of German redemption, see Susan Neiman, Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil (New York: Picador, 2019) as well as the essays that Neiman has published since then, partially retracting her earlier more optimistic position. Zeitblom concludes his novel in the optative mood with the words: “may God have mercy on your poor soul, my friend, my fatherland” (534/738). The mixture of desperation and hope that speaks through these lines has lost nothing of its relevance in the twenty-first century.