Sunday 24 October 2021

"Doktor Faustus" by Thomas Mann - review


 “Doktor Faustus” by Thomas Mann:

This is, among so many other things, a fictional biography of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, who devotes himself to the devil. It is a well-educated, wonderfully composed, profound and tragic tale.


In following all the stages of development of the old Faust saga Thomas Mann links them with the threats and problems of our (that) time, the turn of a highly and overdeveloped national spirit to archaic primitivity and cruelty, resulting in awful disaster. The time frame are the years from 1884 to 1945, roughly Thomas Mann’s period. The book is Thomas Mann’s last great novel and was first published in 1947. The original title at first publication was „Doktor Faustus - Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn“ - erzählt von einem Freunde”. (“Doktor Faustus - The Life Of The German Composer Adrian Leverkühn As Told By A Friend”). 


The work is suffused with Mann's moral despair over his country's complacent embrace of Nazism and can be read as an allegory of how it came to be and how it came into being that Germany sold its humanity and soul. 


Thomas Mann himself called his novel a book of life of almost criminal ruthlessness, a strange kind of transferred autobiography, a work that “cost me more and consumed me more than any previous one." This feeling, that this was something which really had his greatest interest, energy and sympathy, is noticeable throughout the book.


I bow my head in awe and humility to this book. It took me a long time to read it, not in actual hours but in the time to be right for me to want to read, to finally read, understand, reflect and lastly highly appreciate it. This book shows what literature is capable of, what heights can be reached and what achievements can be made, what literature as an art form should strive for. 


All is told by the third person narrator Serenus Zeitblom, the dear humanist friend and companion of the composer Adrian Leverkühn from childhood on. 


Through this friend, through reflective distance we get to know Adrian Leverkühn, a clever, aloft, proud spirit, isolated, brilliant, overreaching, someone who is too clever for almost any profession, the work of a composer included. Leverkühn is filled with the artistic urge for creating -  without any inhibitions, without any regards to tradition or history, ruthlessly. He is a radical in the utmost sense. Leverkühn, in a Faustian pact bargains, after having, almost willingly contracted syphilis, his soul and the possibility to love for achievement of 24 years of unparalleled grandiose musical accomplishment.


There could be noticed, if so wanted, an allusion to the fascist intoxication which befell the peoples on the political level of the book. Apart from the political, though, many other levels permeate this book:

There is the ostensible re-telling of an old, typical German myth. 

There is the aspect of the Künstlerroman which lets us follow the life of the artist. 

There is the aspect of a social novel, there is life, there is art, there is philosophy, theology, musicology. 

There is a very extraordinary attempt to approach and describe music, in Mann’s opinion the most typical German of all art forms, with the means of prose and poetry and expose its role in society. Throughout the book there are enlightening passages which read like theoretical essays on art. 

There is indeed so much in this book, not least very much wisdom, that I find it impossible to give name to it all. It is also Mann's profound meditation on the German genius - a genius torn between profundity and form, both on the national and individual level.


The prose is absolute magical mastery, a highly intelligent, exquisitely fine-tuned machinery of words, beauty and the German language. Mann's known mastery in sentence structure is one thing but here he sometimes drives his linguistic finesse to the point of self-parody which gives the text additional charm. More than once I had moments of benign bliss that made me proud and happy to be capable to truly appreciate German. (I hear there are good translations, nevertheless). 


Impressive, frightening the moment when the Devil first makes its appearance, even seen through the reflections of an intellectually well-educated mind formed by the 20th century. Mann plays with virtuosity the psychology, the archetypical fear, the existential inferiority, the wavering metaphysic and conveys with bravura the feeling of being at the mercy of something fatefully inescapable, of doom.


Mann had the talent to assemble grandiose themes, knowledge, education and drama and fabricate out of them a wonderfully light-footed text, always entertaining, never becoming a boring show-off of style. A great book, a timeless classic, maybe one of the last few.


#robertfaeth, #painterinBerlin, #painting, #art, #bookblog, #bookreviews, #literaturelover, #poem, #poetry

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