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A review by lectoribenevolo
Doctor Faustus: The Life Of The German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn As Told By A Friend by Thomas Mann
5.0
Possibly Mann’s masterwork, Doctor Faustus, written between 1943 and 1947 during Mann’s exile in California, tracks the symbolic convergence of (fictitious) composer Adrian Leverkühn’s descent into madness and the events surrounding narrator Serenus Zeitblom as he awaits the downfall of the German Reich. Mann pours his palpable sense of grief at what befell his homeland as a result of its world-historical crimes, but also a sense that, at long last, Germany might emerge from its historical sickness.
The perceptive reader will note that of all of the late 19th and early 20th century artists and intellectuals of note to figure in the discussions of this book, one is conspicuously, studiously absent: Friedrich Nietzsche. This is not an accident, I don’t think, since the broad arc of Leverkühn’s life is modeled on that of Nietzsche, especially the syphilitic illness that destroys Leverkühn’s mind. More than this, though, Mann seems to understand the significance of Leverkühn’s lonely artistic project and his suffering in the same terms on which he understands that of Nietzsche. In 1947 Mann delivered a lengthy address to the Library of Congress entitled “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in Light of Current Events.” It is a remarkable essay, not only as a reading of Nietzsche that would have driven the Nietzsche scholars I know up a wall, but as a thinly veiled discussion of the major themes of this book that saw the light the very same year. Mann was never all that shy about telling readers what he thought his own works meant, and perhaps he felt even more comfortable doing so to an American audience who he thought would find the “Germanness” of the book so alien to their habits of mind. If the reader can find a copy of this essay, it is, without ever once mentioning Doctor Faustus, a remarkable commentary on just this work.
The perceptive reader will note that of all of the late 19th and early 20th century artists and intellectuals of note to figure in the discussions of this book, one is conspicuously, studiously absent: Friedrich Nietzsche. This is not an accident, I don’t think, since the broad arc of Leverkühn’s life is modeled on that of Nietzsche, especially the syphilitic illness that destroys Leverkühn’s mind. More than this, though, Mann seems to understand the significance of Leverkühn’s lonely artistic project and his suffering in the same terms on which he understands that of Nietzsche. In 1947 Mann delivered a lengthy address to the Library of Congress entitled “Nietzsche’s Philosophy in Light of Current Events.” It is a remarkable essay, not only as a reading of Nietzsche that would have driven the Nietzsche scholars I know up a wall, but as a thinly veiled discussion of the major themes of this book that saw the light the very same year. Mann was never all that shy about telling readers what he thought his own works meant, and perhaps he felt even more comfortable doing so to an American audience who he thought would find the “Germanness” of the book so alien to their habits of mind. If the reader can find a copy of this essay, it is, without ever once mentioning Doctor Faustus, a remarkable commentary on just this work.