Making Faust Great Again
by Tess Crain
I began reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1947), in mid-2016, casually. I’d bought the book by mistake several years prior, thinking it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version—that is, the seminal German Faust. I am not the first to have confused the two authors. During the Nuremberg Trials, the Chief Prosecutor for the UK quoted as authentic words from the fictional Goethe of Mann’s Lotte in Weimar (1939). Far from coincidence, this misattribution reflects Mann’s ability to cross the boundaries of time. Set during the 1920s and ’30s in Germany, Doctor Faustus captures the arc of Hitler’s rise to power. In 2016, Mann’s depiction of swelling diabolism felt startlingly familiar.
The legend of Faust is born of the Western ambivalence toward individual responsibility. Despairing that nothing remains in heaven or earth of which he has not already dreamt, the scholar Faust sells his soul to Mephistopheles—the Devil’s messenger or guise—in exchange for knowledge and power. The historical inspiration was most likely Johann Georg Faust (late 1400s - 1541), a traveling German astrologer and alchemist who attracted tales of demonic association as if by intermolecular force. These stories were collected anonymously and published in chapbooks, originating with Historia von D. Johann Fausten (1587).
Faust and Marguerite in the Garden (1846) by Ary Scheffer
Each telling of Faust is a telling of the times, his soul revolving like a North-South weathervane in the winds of context. As Mann’s Devil says, “how I look… happeth… according to the circumstances….” Living during the Protestant Reformation, wherein Martin Luther claimed, “the human will is placed as a sort of packhorse, in the midst of two contending parties…. he is the captive, subject, and servant, either of the will of God, or of the will of Satan,” the folkloric Faust paid for his hubris with perdition. Writing The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus (1604) amid a similar zeitgeist, Christopher Marlowe made the title character an alumnus of and professor at the University of Wittenberg—just like Herr Reformer Luther—and condemned him to burn. By the time Goethe published Faust (1808), philosophical and national revolutions had transformed the West; he treated his antihero with wryness but largesse, ultimately saving him. Then, a century-and-a-half later, after the existential eclipse of World War II that was at once global and, specifically, German, Mann revived the legend.
Winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature, Thomas Mann was born in 1875 to a bourgeois family in Northern Germany. Educated in the sciences and journalism, he debuted as a novelist at twenty-five with Buddenbrooks (1900), followed by, most famously, Death in Venice (1912) and The Magic Mountain (1924). Despite a youth of questionable stances, he became increasingly liberal in the 1920s. After his political writings were burned in 1933, he emigrated from Nazi Germany to Switzerland, hopping lily pads west: Princeton in 1939, California in 1942. Unlike many contemporaries, he bore up under exile. “Where I am,” he told The New York Times, “there is Germany.” Via numerous essays, lectures, and tours, he denounced tyranny in all its forms—including McCarthyism, which would eventually drive him back to Switzerland in 1952.
Multiplying the domain of evil, Doctor Faustus forks from its mythological lineage. Two Satanic bargains are struck: one by the titular composer, Adrian Leverkühn, for twenty-four years of musical genius followed by syphilitic dementia, death, and damnation—and the other by “Germany… to gain the whole world by virtue of the one pact she was minded to keep, which she had signed with her blood.” Serenus Zeitblom, a lifelong friend of Leverkühn and teacher of Latin, Greek, and theology, narrates both plot-lines, one encircling the other as a snake wreathes a limb. Like Goethe, Mann treats his Faust character with sympathy, despite refusing him salvation. For his Germanic homeland, however, the author has only horror. A deal with the Devil is the purview of a single soul. The collective monstrosity of fascism, however, was a Faustian pact that exceeded the confines of individual responsibility, damning even those that had made no bargain.
I cannot remember when, exactly, Mann’s Weimar gave me a feeling of the uncanny. Perhaps it was as the narrator reflected that
…the masses would have in the future to be provided with mythical fictions, devised like primitive battle-cries, to release and activate political energies…. [W]hoever would share in the community must be prepared to scrap considerable elements of truth and science and line up for the sacrificium intellectus.
Or maybe when he observed, a few pages later:
…the dynamic, historically creative fiction, the so-called lie and falsification, in other words the community-forming belief, was simply inaccessible to [logical] attack. Science strove, on the plane of decent, objective truth, to confute the dynamic lie; but… [the group] could scarcely contain their mirth at the desperate campaign waged by reason and criticism against wholly untouchable, wholly invulnerable belief.
In 1961, Joseph Frank wrote in Chicago Review that “it would be folly and false pride to believe that Thomas Mann’s Devil holds no temptations for those raised elsewhere than among the medieval towers of an old German city.” In 2019, another phrase for “Make America Great Again” might be “Reaction as Progress”—how Mann, borrowing from Nietzsche, described the ethos of the Third Reich. It is simplistic to equate modern politics with Nazism; yet earlier this year, Tobias Boes published Thomas Mann’s War, cataloging the Nobelist’s sustained public battle against fascism. As with most things Mann, the timing seems more than incidental.
Tess Crain is a graduate of the NYU Creative Writing Program, where she served as a Goldwater Fellow. Her writing has appeared in the New Republic. She lives in New York City.
