The Bitter Taste of Victory (42 page)

Mann’s
Doctor Faustus
started circulating into Germany from Switzerland at the end of 1947. This was a novel that the Germans had been waiting for, suspiciously, defensively, but none the less eagerly. It is the great novel to come out of Germany in these postwar years and at the same time, written by an American citizen with no first-hand experience of the ruins he portrayed, it is also arguably the greatest example of ‘outsider rubble literature’, chiming with Stephen Spender’s
European Witness
and Billy Wilder’s
A Foreign Affair
. From California, reading about the German ruins in American newspapers and German periodicals, hearing about them from his children, who
had encountered them in American army uniform, Mann had written a novel revealing himself to be at once a German and an outsider, able to diagnose the Germans’ guilt and despair with a clarity possible to few in Germany but unable to separate himself from the tragedy. The book takes as its starting point Mann’s suggestion in his ‘Germany and the Germans’ lecture that both Germany and its inhabitants have made a pact with the Devil and that as a great German artist seduced by German Romanticism, Mann himself is fully implicated in Germany’s guilt.

Doctor Faustus
relates the simultaneous and intertwined downfalls of its tragic artist hero and his tragic nation. The narrator Serenus Zeitblom, an ‘inner emigrant’ teacher who has spoken out against the Nazis and lost his post, tells the story of the life and times of the avant-garde composer Adrian Leverkühn. Zeitblom has loved Leverkühn devotedly and loyally since they played together as children, even after finding that as a young man Leverkühn made a strange, deluded pact with the Devil, sacrificing personal happiness for energy and inspiration as a composer. In Goethe’s version of the story, Faust sacrifices happiness for knowledge, promising Mephistopheles that ‘If ever I shall tell the moment: Bide here you are so beautiful!’ then he can fetter and damn him instantly.
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Mann’s hero makes a similar pact, acquiescing to the Devil’s demand that he live coldly, without love. Both Faust and Leverkühn make their pledges willingly because they are already unhappy; this is merely a continuation of their present ennui. ‘Is not coldness a precedence with you,’ the Devil says to Leverkühn. The tragedy is that there will now be no possibility of happy escape, as Harras too learns to his cost in Zuckmayer’s play.
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Leverkühn’s damnation comes in the form of syphilis, contracted from a prostitute called Esmeralda. A habitually cold man, Leverkühn surprises himself by falling in love at first touch and chooses to have sex with Esmeralda even after she warns him about the contagion. Like Nietzsche, one of Mann’s many models for his character, Leverkühn experiences the disease as creatively fertile but then gradually loses his mind.
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He engages in a lengthy dialogue with the Devil, who claims the illness as his own, taking credit for dispersing
the composer’s physicians, and warns Leverkühn that he will be unable to love: ‘your life shall be cold – hence you may love no human’.
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This prediction proves painfully true. And what the Devil has not made explicit is that should Leverkühn try to thwart the curse, he will doom those he loves to a hasty death. Leverkühn forms partial attachments to friends and women, all of whom die. Most tragically he comes to love his small nephew, Echo, sent by his sister to live with him while she is ill. From the start, Echo’s presence is redemptive. His perfect, slender figure, his ‘innocent tangle of blond hair’, his winning smile, his ‘gently floating presence’ bring ‘radiant daylight’ into Leverkühn’s life. But he is struck down by meningitis that kills him within two weeks; his body is returned home in a small coffin. ‘I have discovered that it ought not be,’ Leverkühn tells Zeitblom, ‘what people call human . . . It will be taken back.’ Instead he channels all his energy into his final masterpiece. For years Leverkühn has been pushing music towards abstraction, going beyond tonality in an attempt to emancipate dissonance from resolution. The great
Apocalypse
oratorio of his youth incorporated loudspeakers, infernal laughter and an austerely dissonant children’s chorus to conjure a musical approximation of hell. Now his late great symphonic cantata
The Lamentation of Doctor Faustus
uses a mournful dissonant echo to create an ode to sorrow as a counterpart to Beethoven’s ode to joy.
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In 1930 Leverkühn assembles his friends to confess his pact with the Devil (which most of them see as an allegorical joke) and to play his new piece. He collapses at the piano, falling into a coma from which he recovers physically but not mentally. Zeitblom cannot be sure if Leverkühn is actually in league with Satan. Reading the transcribed dialogue, he cannot decide if his friend is hallucinating. But he is aware that the question is irrelevant. Mann presents it as inevitable that Leverkühn should succumb to the Devil because the composer has been seduced by the demonic for years. The Devil has always been present in Leverkühn’s satanic ‘mildly orgiastic’ laughter, which Zeitblom found disconcerting in their youth. Leverkühn is a genius and Zeitblom observes that there is always a ‘faint, sinister connection’
between genius and the nether world. He is a musician and music is inherently devilish, belonging to ‘a world of spirits’.
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So too, Leverkühn is caught up on the same demonic tide as Nazism. He sees Zeitblom’s humanism as outmoded, committing instead to a mixture of nihilism and barbaric primitivism.
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‘You will break through the age itself . . . and dare a barbarism,’ the Devil says to him, ‘a double barbarism, because it comes after humanitarianism, after every conceivable root-canal work and bourgeois refinement.’ The phrase ‘break through’ is telling. Later in the novel Germany has a ‘breakthrough’ (
Durchbruch
) to world power under Hitler, while Nazi supporters see war as the way Germany will break ‘through to a new form of life in which state and culture would be one’ (
durchbrechen
). The Nazis may ban Leverkühn’s works for their experimental dissonance but in fact Leverkühn is a kindred spirit. And he is a natural candidate for hell in his haughtiness and brilliance. He is a selfish artist whom the Devil is right to see as fundamentally cold and who is prepared to sacrifice life for the sake of art.
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The sacrifice of art for life was Mann’s own. He had turned away from the intense homosexual love affairs of his youth, finding in a peaceful bourgeois marriage the domestic calm that he needed to write. Closeted each day in his study, he had shielded himself from the energy of his children, meeting them by appointment and requiring them to tiptoe silently around him as he worked. Though in recent years he had come to depend on the affection of Katia and Erika, he had always lived most fully through his strange and private imaginative life, confided only to his diary. Here he gave reign to urgent, impossible passions, revealing a strength of feeling that he did not wish to find an outlet for in ordinary life, conserving it for his art. In this private world, thirty years earlier he had confided in his diary his physical longing for Klaus as a fourteen-year-old boy, that angelic child with a mop of blond curls not unlike Echo’s.
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More recently, he had become fascinated by his grandson Frido (the son of Thomas’s son Michael and the immediate model for Echo), whose youthful grace he described lovingly in his diary. In killing Echo in the novel, Mann was reminding Leverkühn of the price of artistic greatness. Love for Leverkühn as for his creator
must remain chiefly a private state of mind, a latent possibility of intense feeling that could be channeled only into art.

Writing the novel while the bombs fell in his lost homeland and his own health deteriorated frighteningly, Mann had been engaged in an act of reckoning, asking if this was too high a price to pay. He held both himself and his nation to account, and he saw in his nation sins of pride, demonic genius and overweeningness that he also found in himself. As in Mann’s 1945 lecture, the Germany of
Doctor Faustus
has made a pact with the Devil and it is now paying the price, as its cities are destroyed from the air. This devilish act, Zeitblom says, ‘would scream to the heavens were not we who suffer it ourselves laden with guilt’. As it is, the scream dies in the air in the ‘prison’ that Germany has become. Zeitblom is convinced that the Germans deserve this apocalyptic justice even as he mourns the passing of a world he once loved.
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Since starting the book in 1943, Mann had followed news of the war obsessively, imagining day by day the destruction of the cities he had once loved and describing their ruins sadly in his novel. His diary from the war years charts the raids over Germany alongside his progress with his book. ‘Berlin’s agony, no coal, no electricity’; ‘Heavy bombing of Germany; ‘the conquest of Germany is rapid. The cities fall like ripe plums’; ‘the failure of the novel is beyond doubt now. Nevertheless I will finish it.’
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It is therefore not surprising that Zeitblom’s sorrow at the destruction of Germany echoes Mann’s. Zeitblom begins the book on 23 May 1943 (the day that Mann himself began to write) from a hideaway in Freising on the Isar, just outside Munich. On 14 March 1945 Mann recorded receiving news from Klaus about the destruction of their Munich house, noting a ‘strange impression’ in his diary. That day he was engaged in writing chapter twenty-six, where Zeitblom reports that ‘the terror of the almost daily air raids on our nicely encircled Fortress Europe increases to dimensions beyond conceiving . . . more and more of our cities collapse in ruin’. From the peace of his quiet study in California, Mann paced through the wreckage of his much-loved city, reeling from the devastation but turning back to look again both
because this was the only responsible thing to do and because he could not help it. At one stage he portrays Zeitblom as writing in his study in Freising as the bombs fall around him: ‘as the Last Judgement fell upon Munich as well, I sat here in my study, turning ashen, shaking like the walls, doors and windowpanes of my house – and writing this account of a man’s life with a trembling hand’.

In his hermit’s cell on the Isar, Zeitblom recoils from ‘our hideously battered Munich’, with its toppled statues, its façades ‘that gaze from vacant eye sockets to disguise the yawning void beyond, and yet seem inclined to reveal it, too, by supplying more of the rubble already strewn over the cobblestones’. This was a landscape that Mann had not seen and had no intention of seeing in the near future. But he had read about it in the newspapers and in the anguished reports from Erika and Klaus; it haunted his dreams and his diary and now became eerily tangible in his novel.
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In California, Mann had hoped publicly and to a large extent privately that Germany would lose the war. Like Spender in
European Witness
he saw the destruction of the German cities both as tragically necessary and as the supreme achievement of his age. He reminded his readers of America’s superior military prowess in his novel, ironically voicing Zeitblom’s surprise that ‘enfeebled democracies do indeed know how to use these dreadful tools’ and that war is not after all ‘a German prerogative’. But the prospect of another shameful German defeat had also filled Mann with secret horror that he expressed through Zeitblom, who admits that he ‘cannot help fearing it more than anything else in the world’. Zeitblom never quite allows himself to hope for either defeat or victory. He is pleased when the Germans invent a new kind of torpedo, feeling ‘a certain satisfaction at our ever resourceful spirit of invention’, even if it is used in the service of a regime that has led them into a war aimed at creating a terrifying ‘and as the world sees it, so it would seem, quite intolerable reality of a German Europe’.
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Through Zeitblom, Mann turns the Germans into a nation of tragic heroes; good people grappling with impossible paradoxes whose current mental state ‘weighs more heavily upon them than it would upon any other, hopelessly estranging them from themselves’. If Zeitblom’s sons
knew that he secretly possessed Leverkühn’s private papers, they would denounce him, but they would be horrified by their own act. Mann once described Zeitblom as ‘a parody of myself’. Through Zeitblom he was ironising the German tendency to see their conflicts of conscience as unusually noble and profound. Zeitblom does not always perceive how much he displays the vices of his nation. He shares his intellectual compatriots’ cultural elitism and fear of the masses; like his creator he participated in the ‘popular elation’ at the start of the First World War, believing that war offered ‘a sacrificial rite by which the old Adam’ could be laid aside. He is too foolish not to be mocked for asserting that the German ‘soul is powerfully tragic’, that ‘our love belongs to fate . . . even a doom that sets the heavens afire with the red twilight of the gods’. But even as he mocked his own tale, Mann allowed it to take on full tragic force and implicated himself in the tragedy. ‘How much
Faustus
contains of the atmosphere of my life!’ Mann wrote in January 1946; ‘A radical confession, at bottom. From the very beginning that has been the shattering thing about the book.’
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Wondering what the Germans would make of the novel when it was first published in Switzerland, Mann hoped that it would teach them that it was ‘a mistake to see me as a deserter of Germanness’. That summer, lecturing in London and Zurich, Mann had told German reporters that although he was still not ready to return to a Germany that he did not yet deem ready to receive him, he remained a German writer. ‘I was too old and fully formed as an artist when I left Germany and I have simply done more work and completed what I had started before.’ Earlier in the year he had described the novel to the dean of the philosophical faculty at the University of Bonn as ‘so utterly German’ that he doubted its translatability.
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