A slight briefing on modernism and Mann's Doctor Faustus

For my presentation, my source was Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: A Novel at the Margin of Modernism, edited by Herbert Lehnert and Peter C. Pfeiffer. The book is a collection of essays regarding Thoman Mann’s Doctor Faustus. In the introduction, Herbert Lehnert remarks how Doctor Faustus displays awareness of a change of an era in the 20^th century; hence the book’s title regarding modernism.

The book’s notion of modernism revolves around Western society. At the beginning of modernism, religion had a strong influence on morality and social rules. This religious influence was slowly replaced by a secular morality. Modernism features rejection of the certainty of Enlightenment thinking and a revolt against conservative values of realism. Modernism features much ambiguity. Instead of presenting socially-acceptable characters, a modern novel reflects the many faces of a society. A novel playing to modernity does not subscribe to one set of moral codes.

Doctor Faustus deals with modernism as an era, the consciousness of the end of that era, and the transition to the new era of postmodernism. Mann accomplishes this by making Leverkühn be like the original Faust and having allusions to Luther and Nietzche. In the novel, Leverkühn is the modern artist, and Zeitblom is a typical middle class German. Leverkühn represents the creative mind and artistic amorality and immoral use of power. Zeitblom has all of the cultural characteristics of the bourgeois class. By having these two characters symbolize different facets of German society, Mann puts German high culture with creativity against modernist tradition, which is based on reason and guided by religion.