Customer Reviews
The destruction of genius portrayed - in an outstanding translation - By: A Common Reader, 27 Apr 2008 
I don't find Thomas Mann's books, such as Doctor Faustus at all easy to read. They are both long & highly complex, written not as a novel as such but to transmit a message,in this case, the similarities between the Faustus legend & the rise of Nazi Germany. However, I have been fortunate to read both this book & another major work of Mann, The Magic Mountain,in new translations by John E Woods which bring a clear & smooth passage through these undoubtedly great works of literature.
Dr Faustus is on the face of it, a fictional biography of Adrian Leverkuhn, a brilliant composer who came to famein the 1920s & 30s. The biography is recorded by his life-long friend Dr Serenus Leitblom, who happens to have possession of Leverkuhn's journals including a secret manuscript, which comes to light about half way through the book, which gives an account of the terrible evening when Leverkuhn entered into a pact with the devil, to exchange his soul for 24 years of brilliant musical composition.
Dr Leitblom has a hard time of it with Adrian Leverkuhn, the friendship never achieving an easy intimacy, & several times there are references to Leverkuhn's refusal to use the personal pronoun with even his closest associates. He is unapproachable & isolated, & takes private roomsin a farmhouse, some distance from Munich. His almost hermit-like existence is relieved by train journeys into the city where he takes partin musical & philosophical soirees, describedin some detail by Mann & showing his command of the most complex musical ideas.
Leverkuhn's music is rarely well-received, being appreciated by only a select band of critics, the message being that it is too rarified for the common concert-goer, but will eventually be vindicated by generations to come. The implication is that only listeners similarlyin league with the devil would be able to appreciate its complex abstractions.
Dr Leitblom writes his biography during the dark days of 1944 when Germany's collapse was seen as inevitable, & the tragic destiny of Leverkuhn is contrasted with occasional short accounts of the unfolding disasters caused by allied bombing of the great cities of Germany & the breaches of its borders by invading armies. This gives the whole book an atmosphere of burning cities & the inevitable doom which awaits Leverkuhn all who sup at the devil's table, the final chapter being a revelatory denouement which shows the dark forces which have worked through Leverkuhn's music throughout his life.
By the time Mann wrote this book he was livingin America & broadcasting radio messages into Germany criticizing the Nazi regime. Dr Faustus isin some ways Mann's ultimate critique of Nazism, something he had been fighting since its first appearancein the 1920s. Dr Faustus is not an easy read, far from it, but it is an important element of world literature & great piece of artin its own right which can only enrich the reader who perseveres with it.
The demonic forces in the human psyche - By: Sena, 19 Nov 2006 Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann is a challenging work, monumentalin conception. Many of its 525 pages are not easy to read, especially the ones dealing with the theory & history of music to those not familiar with this subject. The discussion of modern & classical music is inevitable as Adrian Leverkuhn, the main characterin the book, is said to be a great composer.
This novel is said to an "allegory of the rise & fall of the Third Reich", but what does that actually mean? The way I understand it is that Mann asks himself the question, how is it that the nation which produced the sublime music of Bach, Mozart, & Beethoven also produced Hitler & the horrors of the Holocaust? His novel is an artistic attempt at finding an answer to this question. For this purpose, Mann makes use of the legend & myth of Faustus, the man who is said to have sold his soul to the Devil -Precarious territory to negotiatein an age when those of intellectual standing don't believein the Devil. In Mann's balancing act he makes use of his narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, a close friend of Adrian. Zeitblom was born a Roman Catholic, but now considers himself a Humanist, whereas Adrian is born to a Lutheran family.
According to Zeitblom's account, Adrian firmly believes that he has sold his soul to the Devilin exchange for the ability to compose great music. It is worth quoting Adrian's own words here: "It is an age when no work is to be donein pious sober fashion & by proper means, & art has grown impossible sans the Devil's aid & hellish fire beneath the kettle......art is stuck fast & grown too difficult & mocks its very self, that all has grown too difficult..." The age he is referring to is the period after the First World War when Germany is resentfully licking its wounds of defeat, & the despair & turmoilin that country provides the fertile soil for the rise of Nazism.
Zeitblom gives us a description of the last work composed by Adrian, an oratorio entitled The Lamentation of Dr. Faustus. He says that the climactic passage of this work could be described as an "Ode to Sorrow", a lamentation,in contrast to Beethoven's Ode to Joy. "There is no doubt that he wrote it with an eye to Beethoven's Ninth, as its counterpartin the most melancholy sense of the word." While Beethoven's symphony may be said to be religiousin the conventional sense, Zeitblom suggests that Adrian's work is also religiousin a different sense. "A work dealing with the Tempter, with apostasy, with damnation - how can it be anything but a religious work!"
Although Adrian completed this workin 1930, I think Zeitblom (and Mann) is suggesting that he foreshadowed the total destruction of Germany by writing this Lamentation. It is likely that Mann wants us to understand the myth of the Devilin the same way that Herman Melville did less consciouslyin Moby Dick. Many critics have felt that the Great White Whale represents God, while Captain Ahab is the Devil. In Mann's novel, Adrian is one of the few people livingin that era who recognized the demonic forces at workin the human psyche. Those who deny these forces become True Nazis. A Nazi would never admit that he is doing the work of the Devil; he sees himself as a God-like being whose duty it is to purify the human race.
What is the relevance of this message for the 21st century? I think it is that those who are unaware of & deny the demonic forces within themselves become the unconscious instruments of these forces. However, Doctor Faustus is a great work of literature which depicts a concrete realityin the life of its characters, & there are likely to be many possible interpretations.
A Reckoning., - By: Themis-Athena, 27 Apr 2005 "Yes ... we are lost. That is to say: the war is lost, but that means more than a lost military campaign,in fact it means that *we* are lost, lost is our substance & our soul, our faith & our history. It is over with Germany; ... an unnamable collapse, economical, political, moral & spiritual,in short, all-encompassing, is becoming apparent, - I don't want to have wished for what is looming, because it is despair, it is madness."*
Thus, the narrator of Thomas Mann's last completed and, I think, greatest novel sums up Germany's fate after the barbarities of national-socialism. But this is no mere character speaking: This is Mann himself - the erstwhile self-proclaimed "Unpolitical Man," condemned to watch the Nazi tyranny's horrors from the distance of his Californian exile, taking up the mighty pen that had gained him his Literature Nobel Prize and, through the voice of a narrator named Dr. Serenus Zeitbloom (in itself, supremely ironic comment on Mann's own circumstances) composing his final reckoning with the country he left when the Nazis came to power, & where he never returned to live, although he finally did leave the U.S.in 1952, driven out by McCarthyism.
According to his diaries, as early as 1904 Mann had the idea of using a composer's temptation by the devil (and thus, updating the Faustian legend, *the* quintessential theme of Germany's cultural history at least since the Middle Ages) to illustrate the corruption of art by evil. Seeing the country's intoxication with the glorious promises of Hitler & his henchmen, seeing all of German society fall under the spell of evil, including the "Bildungsbürgertum," the educated middle class considering itself guardians of Germany's cultural tradition (and for whose acceptance the dark-haired merchant's son without a university education struggled throughout his life, much as they bought his books), reviving that idea first conceived forty years earlier was a logical choice; now further inspired by the personalities of Arnold Schoenberg, whom Mann metin exile & whose twelve-tone scale became that of his novel's protagonist Adrian Leverkuehn, & Friedrich Nietzsche, with whose writings & personal fate Mann had been fascinated early on. Philosophically & musically, the novel is also influenced by critical theorist Theodor Adorno, with whom Mann entertained an in-depth epistolary dialogue.
Blending together musical theory, the decline of humanist philosophy, the rise of fascism & the powers of black magic (most of which Mann had already exploredin earlier works like "The Magic Mountain" and, very pointedly,in the 1930 short story "Mario & the Magician"), "Doctor Faustus" is thus simultaneously a comment on the political developments, a warning, an attempt to come to grips with Germany's high-flying, yet so easily destructible philosophical & moral compass - and, masterfully construed though it is, a cry of despairin the face of utter madness. For while the novel is brimming with references to the better part of German (and European) cultural history, from the medieval "Faustus" tale to Goethe, Weber's "Freischuetz," Martin Luther, Protestantism, & Thuringia & Saxony as focal points of all things German, Mann's central point remains the parallel between his country's fate & that of his novel's protagonist, both endingin ruin & madness-induced stupor after their deal with the devil has run its evil course.
Unlike Goethe, who places his Faust's temptation at his tragedy's beginning, leaving no doubt about the event's physical reality, Mann even narratively lifts Leverkuehn's temptation into the realm of allegory & imagination, by splitting it into two incidents, whose combined effect will only come to fruitionin the novel's final part. On neither occasion Zeitbloom, the narrator, is present; for both we thus have only Leverkuehn's own words. Yet, even the first account, a letter describing how the would-be composer is mischievously led to a brothel & falls under the spell of a prostitute, already intimates the evil to come, the venereal disease that will later constitute the outward cause of his madness; & not only does Leverkuehn ask his friend to destroy that letter, he also closes it imploring him to pray for his soul.
Much laterin the narrative - although indicating that it was actually written earlier; thus employing yet another level of (temporal) abstraction - Mann introduces Leverkuehn's transcript of his exchange with the devil; a dream-like sequence during which shape-shifting "Sammael,"in language hearkening back to Goethe & even the Middle Ages, promises Leverkuehn nothing short of "the metamorphosis of a god": that by his name a whole generation of "receptively healthy boys"* will swear, "those who thanks to [his] madness will no longer have to be mad themselves;"* & that, indeed, his name will live forever. Still, at this point we have already witnessed Leverkuehn explaining the foundations of his twelve-tone scale, only to be challenged by Zeitbloom's question whether the strictness of his concept doesn't deprive the composer of all freedom (which Leverkuehn denies, rather seeing the composer as "bound by a self-imposed order, hence free").* And whenin an exchange laden with symbolism Zeitbloom then presses whether the formation of harmony wouldn't be left to chance, Leverkuehn's response is, "Rather say: to constellation"* - thus squarely introducing, as his friend will quickly note, concepts of black magic, whichin addition to the dialogue's musical & political references again drive home Leverkuehn's exposure to the irrational & evil, long before the reader actually learns about his interview with the devil.
Doubtlessly among Mann's most intimately personal works, "Doctor Faustus" is also among his most complex ones; & while hardly any of his writings make for a leisurely read, the sardonic "Felix Krull," the near-humoristic "Royal Highness" & even his early masterpiece "Buddenbrooks" are foils to the older master craftsman's rapier that is drawn here. Demanding, certainly - but also highly recommended!
_______________________________
*Translation mine.
_______________________________
Bob Zeidler,in friendship & grateful memory of an exchange that partly inspired the above. Bob's comments thereon are sorely missed.
Perfection of form - By: Adrian Lever, 24 Jul 2003 Well, what can you say? If Felix Krull is the novel that would have perfected Mann's form, Faustus was the one which actually did. The technicality of language & construction of novelistic technique here is like Nabokov tenfold. It is unsurpassed, even by Proust. And while it may lack the sublime artistry of Proust, Mann has his own inimitable style of beauty. The going is very slow, it takes you down two gears as a reader, & then another, as you absorbe all the dense but vague symbolism (that of Germany & her Mephistopheles, Hitler), & the complex character which is based on Schonberg. If you enjoy literaturein its perfected form, National Socialist German history, Goethe's Faust legend, or dodecaphonic music, you can do no finer than this.
Mann's difficult masterpiece - By: , 27 Jul 2001 Although translations always take something from the original, those of us who have troubles reading Mann's admittedly difficult German will surely find the reading quite pleasing. The dark & philosphical atmosphere of Mann's final masterpice is wonderfully capturedin this translation. Mann's interplay of reality & imagination already permeated his "Magic Mountain" & "Joseph & his brothers", but I find that it isin "Faustus" where he finally loosens all boarders between the real & the imaginary. The reader therefore never be quite sure whether Mann is taking the objective or subjective perspective. The novel completely lacks the lightness of touch Mann usedin the "Buddenbrooks", & reflects Mann's vision of the World War II. The story is only superficially similar to Goethe's Faust, & I found it very differentin both tone & storyline. But both books are masterpieces & both try to explain to us what it takes to be human.
