Thomas Mann: Doktor Faustus, first edition (1947 [Doctor Faustus, 1948])
Thomas Mann: Doktor Faustus, first edition (1947 [Doctor Faustus, 1948])
In diesem Stoff schoß alles zusammen, das Private wie das Öffentliche, die routinierte Pflege der alten Wunden und das hohe Ethos des Kampfes gegen Hitler. Der Ur-Kram kommt wieder herauf. Wieder haben wir eine Geschichte, in der ein Künstler an der Heimsuchung durch die Liebe scheitert … der zweite Grund ist die Rache an München. Die ihn [Mann, d. Red.] vertrieben hatten, konnten nun in die Vorgeschichte des Faschismus einmontiert werden.
[This material brought everything together, private as well as public; the routine tending of the old wounds and the high ethos of the fight against Hitler. The primal stuff re-emerges here. Here again we have a story in which an artist falls victim to the plague of love ... the second reason is revenge for Munich. Those who had cast him [Mann, Ed.] out could now be inserted in the pre-history of fascism. (ed. trans.)]
Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann. Das Leben als Kunstwerk, 2006
Thomas Mann’s great late-career work Doktor Faustus was published in German in 1947 by the émigré publishing house Bermann-Fischer in Stockholm. With his novel, which he had worked on in his California exile since 1943, Mann followed up his Joseph tetralogy with his long-held intention of writing his own rendition of the Faust material.
The book tells the story of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, born in 1885, who enters into a pact with the devil to obtain musical genius in exchange for renouncing the warmth of love. The story is enriched with numerous references to Mann's own biography as well as the socio-political conditions in Germany in the first half of the 20th century. The novel closes with the protagonist's descent into madness – a process of psychological incapacitation that coincides with the societal acceptance of Nazism.
Thomas Mann described the work on his novel, for which he received substantial assistance from Theodor W. Adorno with regard to musical theory, in his accompanying work Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (1949) [The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus (1961)]. In his speech Germany and the Germans (1945) delivered at the Library of Congress, in the aftermath of the end of the War he examines the historical background of the emerging novel and analyses it in the context of the German history of ideas: “Reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism, into a spree and a paroxysm of arrogance and crime, which now finds its horrible end in a national catastrophe, a physical and psychic collapse without parallel.” (ed. trans.)