Doktor Faustus

Doktor Faustus is a German novel written by Thomas Mann, begun in 1943 and published in 1947 as Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde.

Themes

The novel is concerned with the intellectual fall of Germany in the time leading up to World War II. Leverkühn's own moods and ideology mimic the change from humanism to irrational nihilism found in Germany's intellectual life in the 1930s. Leverkühn (the name means "live audaciously") becomes increasingly corrupt of body and of mind, ridden by syphilis and insanity. In the novel, all of these thematic threads--Germany's intellectual fall, Leverkühn's spiritual fall, and the physical corruption of his body--directly analogue to the political disaster of fascistic Germany. Mann's sense of the inseparable nature of art and politics may be seen in the published version of his 1938 United States lecture tour, The Coming Victory of Democracy, in which he said, ""I must regretfully own that in my younger years I shared that dangerous German habit of thought which regards life and intellect, art and politics as totally separate worlds."" In Doktor Faustus, Leverkühn's personal history, his artistic development, and the shifting German political climate are tied together by the narrator Zeitblom as he feels out and worries over the moral health of his nation (just as he had worried over the spiritual health of his friend, Leverkühn).

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Another central theme is music. In the novel, Adrian Leverkühn develops the twelve-tone technique.

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Although Leverkühn's time as a student of theology is but brief, metaphysical considerations continue to permeate the novel, culminating in an imagined dialogue with the devil. Here, Leverkühn foregoes love to gain knowledge, paralleling the pact of Faust with Mephistopheles.

Related Topics:
Faust - Mephistopheles

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