Doctor Faustus

Doctor Faustus is a German novel of Thomas Mann, started in 1943 and published in 1947 under the original title: Doktor Faustus. Das Leben of the deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde .

The novel is a fictitious biography of a musician, Adrian Leverkühn (1885-1940), told by his/her old friend Serenus Zeitblom: this one begins the drafting of the account on May 23rd, 1943 is 3 years after the death of the type-setter and finishes it in 1945.
Leverkühn is a musician wonder of the beginning of the XXe century whose existence will proceed on the model of that of the mythical character of Faust, which sold its heart with the devil incarnated by Méphistophélès in exchange of knowledge. Just as Leverkühn, had demons, its musical art develops up to one day decisive which will be fatal for him, the German company evolves in parallel to the catastrophic destiny which will be the advent of the Nazisme.

Structure of the novel

Doctor Faustus is a vast assembly of characters, fables, events, theories, memories, ideas, and places, the ones directly connected to the life of Adrian Leverkühn, the others only in a marginal way. To work out its novel, Mann studied the Musicologie and the biographies of large type-setters such as Mozart, Beethoven, Berlioz, Hugo Wolf and Alban Berg, and certain philosophers like Nietzsche. It was also put in relation to contemporary type-setters like Igor Stravinski, Arnold Schoenberg and Hans Eisler to write certain details. But the most important contribution and most direct came from the philosopher and critical musical Theodor Adorno: in its book “the genesis of Doctor Faustus” (1949), Thomas Mann states indeed that ceraines observations of Adorno led it to récrire whole parts of the book. Other people came into contact with work through readings of chapters that Mann gave regularly to groups of invited friends, a current practice (used in particular by Kafka), to test the impact of the text on the public.

Serenus Zeitblom, the single narrator, connects all these elements as well as possible its capacities and of its energy. According to Mann: “Zeitblom is a parody of myself. The personality of Adrian is closer to the mienne than one could - or would have - believe”.

Topics of the novel

The principal subject is the intellectual decline of the Germany during the time having preceded the Second world war. The feelings and the ideas of Leverkühn reflect the swing of the Humanisme to the irrational Nihilisme which occurred in the German intellectual life of the Années 1930. Leverkühn (a name which means “life of audacity”) becomes increasingly corrupted body and of spirit, and finishes destroyed by the syphilis and the madness. In the novel, these three sets of themes - intellecuelle decline of Germany, falls spiritual of Leverkühn, physical forfeiture of the hero - are treated in parallel with the political disaster of the Nazi Germany. The intuition of Mann of nature inseparable from art and the policy can already be interview in the version published in 1938 of its cycle of conferences to the the United States, “ The Coming Victory off Democracy ”, in which he declares: “I must much to my regret to recognize that in my youths I shared this dangerous German practice to think the intellectual life, art and the policy like completely separate worlds”. In Doktor Faustus, the pesonnelle history of Leverkühn, its artistic development, and the degradation of the political climate in Germany are connected by the Zeitblom narrator who worries and wonders about the moral health of his nation, in the same way that it worried about the mental health of his friend Leverkühn.

The other central theme of work is the music, since one sees Adrian Leverkühn there working with the theory of the Dodécaphonisme actually invented by Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg, which lived not far from at Mann with Los Angeles at the time where the book was written was furious that Mann seized the method without quoting it and on its insistence, the later editions had to add at the end of the text a description of the invention of this technique by Schoenberg.

Although the studies of Théologie of Leverkühn were short, the considerations metaphysics impregnate all the novel and culminate at the time of the dialog imagined with the devil, in which Leverkühn exchanges the love against knowledge, in analogy with the pact of Faust and Mephistopheles.

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