I have just finished reading Thomas Mann's great novel Doctor Faustus, in a new translation published by Oxford University Press. It's a sober version of the book, overcoming some of the mis-judgments of Mann's first translator. Still not light reading! Mann is never ponderous, but this book is allusive, the writing is often complex, the humour fades as the tale progresses, and at key points (such as the famous interview with the devil) Mann's style turns into teeth-grinding parody.
Worse, the fictional narrator Serenus Zeitblom, a teacher of humanities, is a little dim-witted, and he tells the story with hesitations and only in fragments. Yet Zeitblom's strait-laced character, and even his fascination with Adrian Leverkühn the syphilitic avant-garde composer and 'Faust' figure, are essential for Mann's picture of the decline of humanism, the failure of democracy and the rise and catastrophe of German fascism.
In fact that's why I was re-reading the book, because the rise of a new kind of fascism in our time has made me wonder what we can learn from perceptive accounts of fascism Mark I. Of course there are major differences - not least, the fact that the Mark II regimes of Trump, Putin, Modi, Xi, and Netanyahu all have nuclear weapons. So we won't wind up with another struggle like 1939-45. If a major war breaks out now, it is going to be shorter and much, much worse.
A one-to-one interpretation of Doctor Faustus as an allegory of the rise and destruction of the Nazis (in the sense that Orwell's Animal Farm is an allegory of the Russian revolution and Stalinism) won't wash. As the book became famous, Mann himself denied that interpretation. Yet there's certainly relevant symbolism here, including the tale of infection, achievement and fatal overreach.
More broadly, Doctor Faustus speaks both symbolically and directly about the preconditions for the rise of German fascism. Among them are the conditions in culture and intellectual life. It's not accidental that the book's hero is a pathbreaking, hyper-modernist composer. (Fictional Leverkühn's musical ideas were stolen directly from the real composer Arnold Schönberg, to Schönberg's fury.) Mann pictures German culture as split in multiple ways, especially between an anti-humanist avant garde and a declining, conservative but more tolerant, Goethe-inspired humanism. Especially in the novel's sardonic sketch of Munich intellectuals just after the Great War, Mann sees the national culture as including a cult of force, support of a strong state, and an openness to irrational violence - 'barbarism' - in support of the nation and state.
Mann knew something about that directly. During the Great War he published essays and a book in support of the war, the German nation and the Kaiser's regime. Already a famous novelist as a young man, Mann was then a 'national liberal' - much like the sociologist Max Weber, who was a captain in the Prussian army reserve and served in uniform (though not at the front) during the war.
It was after the defeat, the abortive revolution and the end of the regime that Mann revised his politics. He became a supporter of the Weimar republic, was openly anti-Nazi before Hitler came to power, went into exile to avoid arrest in 1933, and made a series of pro-democracy, anti-fascist broadcasts from the US and Britain during World War II. He began Doctor Faustus while doing this, in 1943. By the time he wrote it, then, he had come to see the growth of irrationality in culture as one of the important preconditions for fascism.
A weird but compelling feature of the book is that Zeitblom is supposed to have started his manuscript in Germany at exactly the time Mann began the real manuscript in America, and the story of Leverkühn's life is interleaved with the stages of Germany's defeat and occupation by alien armies and air forces. So the consequences of political irrationalism are, in the long run, dire. I feel there's a parallel here to the current denial of climate science by the extreme right, intensifying even as the dire consequences of climate change are becoming plain.
There's reference in this part of Doctor Faustus to the wrecking of German cities and massacre of civilians by Allied bombers in 1944-45, the subject of W. G. Sebald's remarkable book On the Natural History of Destruction. Maybe that's another post.
