Günter Grass is often lauded for his bold use of the techniques of magical realism, in his novel The Tin Drum (1959), to create a wry, indirect indictment of the moral compromises and pervasive bad faith (in the Sartean sense of lying to oneself) of Germany during the 1930s and 1940s. Yet Thomas Mann had already done the same a dozen years earlier with his angst-ridden novel Doctor Faustus , published in 1947, and actually begun in 1943, two years before the end of World War II—and when Grass was still wearing a Nazi uniform.
Here Mann finds a most fitting symbol for Germany's plight, building his story around a deal with the devil, a universal theme of time-honored appeal to authors and readers, but one with especial resonance for his own nation’s literary history, and the subject of the greatest work of German literature, Goethe's Faust . Modern writers are often fascinated by the potential for updating a classic work in contemporary trappings, but seldom has the fit between old and new been so compelling. If any moment in German history could benefit from a probing reexamination of the Faustian bargain, it was the very point at which Mann embarked upon this project. His countrymen had made just such a deal, only to learn that, in these transactions, the devil always dictates the terms and sets the outcomes.
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Even before the rise of Hitler, Mann had been obsessed with ideas of decline, dissipation and disease—a striking contrast with his cultural milieu which displayed a marked obsession with hygiene, racial purity and expansionary conquests. His debut novel Buddenbrooks charted the gradual fall from grace of a mercantile family, and his most famous works, The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice , reveal an acute sensitivity to the concept of illness—which in Mann's worldview was invariably intertwined with issues of creativity and transcendence.
This strange intersection of the pathological and transcendental reappears in Doctor Faustus , where Mann relates the life story of the fictional modernist composer Adrian Leverkühn, as seen through the eyes of his devoted childhood friend Serenus Zeitblom. Leverkühn is willing to barter his soul and much of physical well-being in exchange for a period of 24 years during which he will be "blessed" with a rare degree of artistic inspiration. Yet, in a manner typical of Mann, this demonic contract is more than a questions of simple barter or quid pro quo : the ravages of the body are depicted here as inseparable from the glories of the creative spirit, Leverkühn's highest achievements revealing their intimate connection to the composer's most abject debasement.
Toward the conclusion of this novel, Mann's narrator mulls over this linkage on a larger world-historical scale. "What will it be like to belong to a nation whose history bore this gruesome fiasco within it, a nation that has driven itself mad, gone psychologically bankrupt," Zeitblom asks himself. Then he despairingly probes the connection between this downfall and the cultural landmarks that preceded it, the achievements of a Wagner, Nietzsche, Beethoven, Goethe. "Was not this regime, both in word and deed, merely the distorted, vulgarized, debased realization of a mindset and worldview to which one must attribute a characteristic authenticity and which, not without alarm, a Christianly human person finds revealed in the traits of our great men, in the figures of the most imposing embodiments of Germanness?"
Under any circumstances, this would be a bitter, horror-gripped admission, but all the more so when one considers that Mann himself was one of these "great men" of German culture. The most lauded German novelist of the first half of the 20th century, Mann could only honor his native land by severing his connection with it. His aesthetic sense for the corrupt and debased may have prepared him for this, but could hardly have softened the blow. As early as 1930, he denounced Nazi ideology in a Berlin speech, entitled "An Appeal to Reason," asserting that the new political climate marked a "wave of anomalous barbarism, of primitive popular vulgarity" and identifying "a state of feeling that may become a world menace." Mann was in Switzerland when Hitler came to power, and remained there for several years, later moving to Southern California. In the unlikely locale of Pacific Palisades, home to countless Hollywood stars and celebrities, he began work on Dr. Faustus in 1943, with war still raging on three continents, and published it in 1947.
The novel incorporates the catastrophic events that presided at its birth. As the narrator recounts the life story of his composer friend, he frequently breaks away to mull on the events of World War II, which are taking place while he (and Mann) write—with bombs literally dropping from the sky. At first glance, the story of Adrian Leverkühn might seem to have little connection with the fate of the German nation. The composer does not participate in political movements, and over time isolates himself from social activities of all sorts. He lives for his art, and can hardly remember people's names, on those rare occasions when he goes out into public. Yet even in his aloofness, Leverkühn reveals traits—of pride, disdain, narcissism, arrogance—that will infect the body politic and set events on their tumultuous, world-shaking course. Leverkühn aspires to a Nietzschean kind of greatness, and when forced to chose, is willing to accept an unholy, demoniac grandeur over a purity and innocence that never rises above the ordinary. In short, he has made a deal with the devil.
Among the composer's papers, the narrator finds the transcript of a dialogue between Leverkühn and the Devil. Mann is deliberately ambiguous about how we should interpret this document. Is it a sign of madness? A symbolic story? A factual account of a real discussion with some infernal tempter? And this author, true to his track record, also offers a possible medical diagnosis of a purely physiological sort— Leverkühn contracts syphilis during a brief love affair, and readers are left to consider that this disease serves as the instigator both for the composer's creative surge and dementia.
We are thus invited to dismiss the Devil from these pages, treat him as a mere hallucination. Yet Mann does not make this easy for the reader. Some larger demonic force seems to hold a real sway over events during the course of this novel, and the predictions and promises made by the Devil during his dialogue with Leverkühn possess an uncanny knack for coming true. Certainly the composer himself seems wholly convinced that he has entered into a Faustian bargain, one that, once made, cannot be disavowed or revoked.
In their dialogue, which stands as the emotional centerpiece of this anguished novel, the Devil demands that Leverkühn abstain from all love. The composer scoffs at this condition, and expresses doubt that his interlocutor can enforce such a vague mandate. "Would you attest to your reputed stupidity," Leverkühn asks, "and bell yourself as a cat, by wanting to found your business and promise on so pliant, so captious a term as—'love'?" The Devil, as they say, is in the details, but here too the dark side shows that it holds the upper hand. Whenever the composer tries to test this restriction, and dares to nurture and channel his softer emotions, a heavy toll is exacted. Only his art remains as an acceptable vehicle for his emotional life. But this too takes on a dark, woe-begotten aspect. The aptly labeled allegro con fuoco from his string quartet "sounds as if flames are licking at one from all four sides," and his final composition, The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus , is nothing less than a musical evocation of his own damned state.
Other novelists have addressed musical themes in their works, but few can match Mann for the depth of technical knowledge of the composer's art that he shows, time and again here. At a certain point, he describes Leverkühn's immersion in twelve-tone row techniques, and the lengthy description and apologia for serialism is as good as anything you will find in any book of music criticism. Elsewhere the lengthy asides—on Beethoven's attitude toward counterpoint, on "servant" and "master" notes, on the compromises of the well-tempered scale, etc.—may strike the less musically-inclined as slow going; yet those with a zeal for such subjects will find Mann a profound, knowledgeable guide. (In all fairness, he himself had his own guides: Mann got help from Schoenberg and Stravinsky during the course of writing Dr. Faustus .)
In truth, there are few interludes or asides here that do not contribute to the overall effect. Even throwaway conversations—on Mad King Ludwig or the theories of sociologist George Sorel—will later appear to have a connection to the unfolding plot. Mann is one of the most intellectual of novelists, treating ideas with a seriousness that one rarely encounters in authors of fiction nowadays. Yet our esteemed Nobel laureate had good reason for this attitude: this author lived during an era in which intellectual concepts killed far more people than all seven of the deadly sins combined, and the particulars of his own biography put him at the geographical epicenter of these catastrophic ideas. Above all, Mann's deftness at dealing with the abstract, and personifying it in the interplay of characters and events is unsurpassed, and places him in a small group of literary masters— Musil , Tolstoy, Kundera , Bellow , Canetti and (pre-eminently) Dostoevsky—for whom the novel can be a vehicle for ideation on a profound, almost philosophical level, yet without sacrificing the intensity and immediacy possible only through fiction.