Urich Grothus: Sixty Years of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

In case anyone finds this interesting, I neglected to write this up during the previous weeks, but the article itself provides interesting insight.


Sixty Years of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus
Urich Grothus
2008

A fan of Goethe's Faust and the Faust myth in general, Urich Grothus makes a few points about the literature. Firstly, he sees Syphilis as more of a metaphor for a pact with the Devil, which enables Leverkuhn to begin on his musical journey-- "The infection is interpreted as a stimulant to artistic creativity - and as a silent pact with the devil who makes his appearance exactly half-way through the novel, probably only in Lever­kühn’s fantasy." He describes the untreated syphilis as Leverkuhn's undoing in the end, paralyzing him the day he invites his friends over to share his presentation of his "Lament of Doctor Faustus" and to inform them of his condition.

Grothus describes the novel as a parallel for the "entire era from Imperial Germany to the Nazi regime." He describes Zeitblom as definitively non-Nazi, but not necessarily anti-Nazi, as he never actually resists them. Through Zeitblom, Mann articulates his idea that the “good” in German society and intellectual history could not easily be separated from the “bad” and dark.

Grothus goes on to compare Leverkuhn to both Nietzsche and Schoenberg, arguing that the latter is clearly the model for Leverkuhn's musical life, citing the 12-tone music as Schoenberg's invention, and the former for Leverkuhn's "clinical history." He offers a little insight to the relationship between Mann and Schoenberg: "Schönberg, whose sense of humor was not quite up to his musical genius, was furious to be portrayed as suffering from syphilis and being in a pact with the devil (and even feared that future generations might think Mann, rather than he, had invented the system). Schönberg had once said that his system would “ensure the hegemony of German music for the next hundred years”. Even he was not free from the temptation to style Germany as the unique music nation, different from and superior to any other."

Grothus thus describes the desire for Germany to be unique and great-- the Kulturnation-- as the first central topic of the novel; the closeness "of aestheticism and barbarism, of beauty and crime, ...which touches the fundamental role of art in society" as the second topic of the novel; and music-- with Theador Adorno as Mann's musical advisor-- as the third topic.

Comparing modern Germany to the Germany of Mann's time, Grothus says, "the strain of irrationalism that Mann describes and that was so fraught with disaster has all but vanished in contemporary German culture." He discusses the moving away from philosophy as a topic of fascination for the German people-- how few modern graduates have even given the consideration that previous generations have to philosophical works, but philosophy's neighbor, music, has survived.

He concludes saying, "there are good reasons to believe that, finally, democracy in Germany has been the success that Thomas Mann, in Zeitblom’s words, had already hoped for during the Weimar Republic. “It was an attempt, a not utterly and entirely hopeless attempt (the second since the failure of Bismarck and his unification performance) to normalize Germany in the sense of Europeanizing or “democratizing’ it, of making it part of the social life of peoples.”