Gilliam 1977

The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory
ISSN: 0016-8890 (Print) 1930-6962 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vger20
Mann’s Other Holy Sinner: Adrian Leverkühn as

Faust and Christ
H. S. Gilliam
To cite this article: H. S. Gilliam (1977) Mann’s Other Holy Sinner: Adrian Leverkühn as
Faust and Christ, The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory, 52:2, 122-147, DOI:
10.1080/19306962.1977.11787240
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MANN'S OTHER HOLY SINNER:
ADRIAN LEVERKüHN AS FAUST AND CHRIST
H. S. Gilliam
Ihre Äußerung über den religiösen, christlichen Charakter des "Faustus" frap
pierte mich und erfüllte mich mit der Genugtuung, die einem die Wahrheit
gewährt. Es ist ja wahr und fast selbstverständlich: wie sollte denn auch ein so
Downloaded by [Australian Catholic University] at 12:29 31 August 2017
radikales Buch nicht irgendwie ins Religiöse reichen.

- Thomas Mann to Karl Kerenyi 1
John J. White's Myth and the Modern Novel proposes the term "pre
figuration," originally used in religious thought, as a flexible and hence
useful designation for the literary device by which an earlier plot, taken
from myth, legend, or another literary work, anticipates elements of a
later plot.2 Such prefigurations occur in most of Thomas Mann's fiction
before Doktor Faustus. The Joseph tetralogy is prefigurative according
to the original and specifically Christian sense recognized by Erich
Auerbach: events of the Old Testament anticipate the "history of salva
tion" in the New.3 Other works by Mann employ prefigurations in
White's more extended sense - that is, antecedents drawn from a wide
variety of sources: from music (Siegmund and Sieglinde in "Wälsungen
blut"), Greek mythology (Charon as the gondolier, Hermes and Eros as
Tadzio, in Der Tod in Venedig), Christian legend (Saint Sebastian as
Aschenbach), and drama (King Philipp from Schiller's Don Carlos
as Tonio Kröger). Instances abound.
Doktor Faustus, however, is Mann's most prefigurative work by far.
Prefigurations are important to Faustus not only for their sheer number,
scope, and variety but also because they provide - for the first time in
Mann's fiction - the work's main structural principle. Indeed, they vir
tually determine the lifecourse of the protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn.
But heterogeneous though they seem, Leverkühn's prefigurations are
organized about two primary models - the damned Faust of distinctively
German legend and the universal Savior, Christ. Relating these two
prefigurators to each other and to the circuitous journey of Romantic
myth, Mann uses the resultant pattern to generate the novel's plot and
1 Letter of June 20, 1949, in reply to the Ietter of June 16 from Kerenyi, in which he
observes that the "düsteren Ernst" of Faustus marks it as "ein christliches Werk von
außerordentlicher überkonfessioneller Bedeutung." The exchange is contained in Thomas
Mann and Karl Kerenyi, Gespräch in Briefen (Zurich: Rhein, 1960), pp. 164, 167.
2 White, Myth and the Modern Novel: A Study of Prefigurative Techniques (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1971), p. II.
3 Auerbach, "Figura in the Phenomenal Prophecy of the Church Fathers," Scenes from
the Drama of European Uterature (New York: Meridian, 1959), p. 30.
MANN'S DOKTOR FAUSTUS 123
to examine - with his typically self-conscious, though hardly cold eye -

the very notion of mythic recurrence, an idea which had fascinated him
throughout his career and had motivated the prefigurative technique
itself. Thus Faustus, Mann's crucial "end"-novel, provides a retrospective
critique of his charact�ristically prefigurative method.
I
In Doktor Faustus Mann's use of the life of the legendary Faust to
provide the general outline of Adrian Leverkühn's development is
obvious. Indeed, the title itself suggests it. This model has been so ex
haustively documented that there seems no need to offer additional proof

of its validity and importance.4
Leverkühn's association with Christ, however, is established by much
subtler, though unmistakable, allusions.5 The first indication of this
4 See. c.g.. Dietrich Assmann, "'Thomas Manns Faustus-Roman und das Volksbuch von
1587," Neuphilologische Mitteilunge,1, Vol. 68 (1967), 130-39: Walter A. Berendsohn,
"Faustsage und Faustdichtung bis zu Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus," Edda, Vol. 50
(1950), 371-82; Gunilla Bergsten, Thomas Mann's "Doktor Faustus": The Sources and
Structure of the Novel, trans. Krishna Winston (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1969), pp. 45-49; Genevieve Bianquis, "Thomas Mann et Je Faustbuch de 1587," Etudes
Germaniques, Vol. 5 (1950), 54-59; Henri Birven, "Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus und
das Faustbuch von 1587," Blätter der Knittlinger Faust-Gedenkstätten und des Faust
Museums, No. 3 (1956), 36-39; Maurice Blanchot, "Thomas Mann et Je mythe de Faust,"
Critique, Vol. 6 (1950), 3-21; Eliza M. Butler, "The Traditional Elements in Thomas
Mann's Doktor Faustus," Publications of the English Goethe Society, Vol. 18 (1949),
1-33; Anni Carlsson, "Das Faustmotiv bei Thomas Mann," Deutsche Beiträge, Vol. 3
(1949), 343-62; Inge Diersen, "Thomas Manns Faust-Konzeption und ihr Verhältnis zur
Faust-tradition," Weimarer Beiträge, Vol. 1 (1955), 313-30; Erich Kahler, "'Doctor Faustus
from Adam to Sartre," The Orbit of Thomas Mann (Princeton: Princeton University
Press, 1969), pp. 86-116; Birgit S. Nielsen, "'Adrian Leverkühns Leben als bewußte
mythische imitatio des Dr. Faustus," Orbis Litterarum, Vol. 20 (1965), 128-58; Harry
Slochower, "The Devil of Many Faces: Man's Pact with the Evil One from the Volks
buch to Thomas Mann," Twelfth Street, Vol. 4 (1949), 196-204; Lieselotte Voss, Die
Entstehung von Thomas Manns Roman "Doktor Faustus" (Tübingen: Max Nicmeyer,
1975), pp. 24-30.
r; While many critics have mentioned the numerous allusions to Christ, few have at
tempted to expound their logic. Among the most extended and interesting critical ex
amplcs are those found in Hildegarde Drexl Hannum's "Self-Sacrifice in Doktor Faus
tus," Modern Language Quarterly, Vol. 35 (1974), 294-95; Murray Krieger's The Tragic
Vision: Variations on a Theme in Literary Interpretation (Chicago: University of Chi
cago Press, 1960), pp. 87-102; Theodore Ziolkowski's Fictional Trans{igurations of Jesus
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1972), pp. 149-50; and in Voss's Die Entstehung
von Thomas Manns Roman "Doktor Faustus," pp. 212-13. Though I want to maintain
only that Faustus displays "ultimate concern" or "seriousness" and is therefore religious
in Paul Tillich's sense, several critics have argued that the novel is definitely Christian
in orientation. See, e.g., H. Burgert, "Verborgene Christlichkeit: Eine Anmerkung zu
Thomas Mann," Zeichen der Zeit, Evangelische Monatsschrift, Vol. 7 (1953), ll40; Anna
Hellersberg-Wendriner, Mystik der Gottesferne: Eine Interpretation Thomas Manns
(Bern: Francke, 1960), pp. 5-6; Pierre-Paul Sagave, Realite sociale et ideologie religieuse
dans /es romans de Thomas Mann: "Les Buddenbrook," "La montagne magique," "Le
Docteur Faustus," Publications de la faculte des lettres de l'universit.e de Strasbourg,
Fase. 124 (1954), p. 127; and Hans Jürgen Baden, Poesie und Theologie (Hamburg:
Agentur des Rauhen Hauses, 1971), pp. 115-24.
124 THE GERMANIC REVIEW
connection may be the early reference to the prepubescent youth's being

"berufen" to "etwas Höherem," but the link becomes explicit only quite
Iate in the novel, when Saul Fitelberg comes to tempt Adrian, figuratively
offering his mantle as a means of conveying him through the air and
showing him "die Reiche dieser Welt" and their glory.6 After this modern
variation of the Temptation , similar references to the life of Christ occur
with considerable frequency and force. Leverkühn visits Oberammergau
in the company of several Apostles and Mary, Mother of God, Marie
Godeau,' who resembles his own mother Elsbeth (568). Leverkühn appar
ently elects himself to be the sacrificial victim of one of those Apostles,
his Judas, Rudi Schwerdtfeger. Immediately after his betrayal by Rudi,

Leverkühn's Christlike tendency to bend the head to one side becomes
more marked (585). Even while he curses the Devil during Echo's terminal
illness. Adrian steps away from Zeitblom "wie ans Kreuz" (632). Later
when Zeitblom visits the now deranged Leverkühn, he describes him
as lifting up "ein verschmälertes Gesicht, ein Ecce homo-Antlitz" (674).
Zeitblom believes that Elsbeth interprets her son's return home as an
undoing of his original error in leaving. Adrian, he implies, had origi
nally departed in the spirit of the young Jesus's words, "Weib, was habe
ich mit dir zu schaffen." (671) The novel has come full circle, and we
are reminded of Leverkühn's being "berufen."
The references, though glancing, are patent; the rationale for them is
considerably less evident. Adrian himself is little help in this respect.
While at least toward the end he conceives his life as being an imitatio
Fausti, he never explicitly recognizes himself as a Christ-figure. Several
times, however, Leverkühn associates himself with the idea of self
sacrifice and thus indirectly with Christ. In connection with his betrayal
by Rudi, Zeitblom speculates about the possibility of Leverkühn's having
self-abnegating motives, though Zeitblom admits that his true incentive
may be a seif-defensive desire to preserve his own isolation. Once Lever
kühn compares his sufferings to those of John the Martyr. More signifi
cantly, he chooses to set to music the parable from the Purgatorio of the
selßess man who carries on his back a light which illuminates not his
own path but that of those coming after.
These two prefigurators, Christ and Faust, the mythic and legendary
models for Leverkühn's life, logically encompass and synthesize the
other, more historical models in that they designate in the broadest pos
sible terms the complex of polarities on which the entire novel turns -
the divine and the daemonic, creation and destruction, spirit and body,
redemption and damnation. Typically, the two models appear in para
doxical conßation. Thus the mantle of Fitelberg. Tempter of Christ, is
6 Thomas Mann, Doktor Faustus, Gesammelte Werke in zwölf Bänden (Frankfurt: S.
Fischer, 1960), VI, 47, 530. All subsequent quotations will be from this edition and will
be noted in the text by parenthetical page references.
also the mantle of Faust's Mephistophiles; and Leverkühn's self-sacri

ficially supplying an opportunity for Rudi to propose to Marie parallels
the Volksbuch Faust's magically arranging a marriage between two
Iovers. 7 The repeated conflation of these two seemingly polarized models,
Faust and Christ, indicates that they bear each other a "komplementäre
Realität" like that of Kumpf's Devil and God (131).
Many of the historical figures associated with Leverkühn also manifest
the doubleness of the Christ-Faust conßation and are thus subsumed, to
some extent, under the rubric of these two models. Nietzsche, for example,
serves as both the daemonic Dionysus-Faust who opposes Christ and the
ecce-homo type whose derangement provides the pattern for Leverkühn's

last days, when he appears most "Christushaft" (640).8 Similarly, Dürer,
whose life was roughly contemporary with that of the historical Johann
Faust and whose magic square and astrological symbols serve as sources
for Leverkühn's Faustian magic, also supplies the model for the Christlike
Leverkühn through those paintings of his that are portraits at once of
himself and of Christ.9
7 A similar conflation occurs during the Oberammergau trip. Schwerdtfeger's seizing
the fiddle is apparently based on an incident in Nikolaus Lenau's poem, Faust (1835),
in which Mephistopheles grabs a violin and sets local villagers to a dance that terminates
in love-making. (This episode provided the inspiration for Liszt's "Mephisto Waltz.')
lf Schwerdtfeger is Mephistopheles, Faust can be found close by.
8 For the Iogic of Nietzsche's association with Christ and Christianity, see Ernst Ber
tram's Nietzsche: Versuch einer Mythologie (Berlin: G. Bondi, 1918), one of Mann's
sources for Faustus. Bertram argues that a figure like Nietzsche could have derived
only from a Lutheran, Reformist, Northern-Christian context (pp. 53, 55). (Cf. Voss,
Die Entstehung von Thomas Manns Roman "Doktor Faustus," p. 45.) For other con
nections between Nietzsche and Leverkühn, see Bergseen, Thomas Mann's "Doktor
Faustus," pp. 55-64; John C. Blankenagel, "A Nietzsche Episode in Thomas Mann's
Doktor Faustus," Modern Language Notes, Vol. 63 (1948), 389-90; Maurice Colleville,
"Nietzsche et Je Docteur Faustus de Thomas Mann," Etudes Germaniques, Vol. 3 (1948),
343-54; Erich Heintel, "Adrian Leverkühn und Friedrich Nietzsche," Wissenschaft und
Weltbild, No. 7 (1950), pp. 297-303; Thomas Mann, Die Entstehung des "Doktor Faus
tus," Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: S. Fischer, 1960), XI, 165-66; E. Kunne-Ibsch, "Die
Nietzsche-Gestalt in Thomas Manns Dr. Faustus," Neophilologus, Vol. 53 (1969), 176-89;
Jonas Lesser, Thomas Mann in der Epoche· seiner Vollendung (Zurich: Artemis, 1952),
pp. 433-42; Hans Mayer, Werk und Entwicklung (Berlin: Volk und Welt, 1950), pp.
322-32; Hubert Mainzer, "Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus - ein Nietzsche Roman?"
Wirkendes Wort, Vol. 21 (1971), 24-38; Gerard Schmidt, Zum Formgesetz des "Doktor
Faustus" von Thomas Mann (Wiesbaden: Humanitas, 1972), pp. 33-37.
9 For further information on the association of Leverkühn, Dürer, and Christ, see J.
Elema, "Thomas Mann, Dürer und Doktor Faustus," Euphorion, Vol. 59 (1965), 101;
Hans Wysling, ed., Bild und Text bei Thomas Mann (Bern: A. Francke, 1975), pp. 402-
405; Schmidt, Zum Formgesetz des "Doktor Faustus" von Thomas Mann, pp. 27-30; and
one of Mann's sources, Wilhelm Waetzoldt, Dürer und Seine Zeit (Cologne: Phaidon,
1953), p. 135. (This edition is not the edition Mann used for Faustus, which was un
available at the time of my recent research in the Thomas-Mann-Archiv, Zurich.) Sig
nificantly, Dürer's works include Christus am Olberg, Ecce Homo, and Abendmahl,
which suggest, rcspectively, Beethoven's composition Christus am Olberg (78), Christ
and the Nietzsche of Ecce Homo, and the Last Supper of both Christ and the Volksbuch
Faust as Antichrist. The complex intertwining of Leverkühn's associations with Faust,
Christ, Nietzsche, and Dürer typifies Mann's multi-layered "montage" technique in
Faustus.
In Der Zauberberg twenty years before, Mann had developed a similar

conflation of the divine and the daemonic. The aging Dutchman
Mynheer Peeperkorn suggests both Christ and Dionysus when he majesti
cally orders a feast that becomes Last Supper as weil as Bacchanalia.10
However, since the synthesis represented by Peeperkorn fails to encompass
the novel's primary categories, Peeperkorn's dual symbolic significance
is less central to Der Zauberberg than Leverkühn's is to Faustus. And the
Peeperkorn portrait assumes colors more benignly humorous and parodis
tic than totally earnest. The Faust-Christ unity in Mann's "Spätwerk,"
by contrast, is finally "dunkler im Ton als Ganzes und ohne Parodie,"
like Leverkühn's own Weheklag (648).

Mann's comprehensive and complementary use of Faust and Christ
would seem to imply that he considers them crucial indicators of the
archetypal configuration of the modern psyche. In a highly complex
series of paradoxical twists, theologically original as weil as literarily
interesting, Mann transforms the idea of the Volksbuch that Faust dies
as both a good and a bad Christian into a suggestion that it is the damned
Faust - symbol not only of modern Western man but also of Adamic
man, humanity in general - who provides the ground for the revelation
of the ultimate in the finite, the divine in the human, by becoming the
very medium for the incarnation of Christ.11 Moreover, by conflating
these two archetypes and establishing between them elaborate inter
changes, often hinging on the interrelationship of mythic and historical
time, Mann turns this paradoxical association of Faust and Christ into
a deliberate critique and a re-evaluation, from "a modernist perspective,"
of the mythic pattern of the circuitous journey out of paradise and
back - a pattern found throughout Romantic, and especially German
Romantic, thought. 12 In this journey the fall from paradisal grace,
10 Peeperkom's feast parallels the refreshments prepared for Leverkühn's "Abschied."
(Cf. Der Zauberberg, Gesammelte Werke, Vol. VI, 777; with Doktor Faustus, p. 6511.)
Quoting the "Wachet mit mir" of Gethsemane, Peeperkorn anticipates a similar refer
ence by Kretzschmar's Beethoven which is later reversed by Leverkühn's Faust. (Cf.
Zauberberg, p. 789, with Doktor Faustus, pp. 80 and 650.) For critical commentary on
Peeperkorn as Christ and Dionysus, see especially Oskar Seidlin, "The Lofty Game of
Numbers: The Mynheer Peeperkom Episode in Thomas Mann's Der Zauberberg,"
PMLA, Vol. 86 (1971), 927-112; and Ziolkowski, Fictional Trans{igurations of Jesus, pp.
11-6. One of Mann's earliest quotations of Christ occurs in Lorenzo's spcech in Fiorenza,
Act 111, scene iv: "Liebt einander. Denkt an mich" (Gesammelte Werke, VIII, 10119).
11 Some of the Christ references connected with Leverkühn are implicit in the Volks
buch Faust's serving as a bad Christian, even an Antichrist - the Temptation for ex
ample, and the Abendmahl, found in the Weheklag cantata and echoed in Leverkühn's
gathering of friends in Pfeiffering. But most of the others are not present in Mann's
primary literary model, and even those that are, Mann consistently emphasizes. While
the references to Faust inevitably predominate in the novel, the logic of the work sug
gests that Mann attempts a conceptual balance between Leverkühn-Faust and Lever
kühn-Christ in order to heighten his daemonic Zweideutigkeit.
12 See Walter L. Reed, Meditations on the Hero: A Study of the Hero in Nineteenth
Century Fiction (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1974), pp. 198-201.
MANN'S DOKTOR FAVSTUS 127
equated with the disintegration of an originally whole and unified

consciousness, one with nature, is followed by an ironic reversaJ at its
extreme point, by which the fallen and fragmented consciousness is
converted into its opposite, producing reintegration and redemption, a
return to paradise.
Though Mann hardly takes the validity of this schema for granted, he
does model the life of Leverkühn upon it. Born in the apparently idyllic
innocence of Buchel farm, Leverkühn, as if imitating this circular con
figuration, moves outward to alien and progressively more worldly en
vironments - Kaisersaschern, Halle, Leipzig, Hungary, and Italy, where
he concludes his compact with the Devil and establishes his Faustian role.
After the Italian interlude Leverkühn retreats to the Schweigestill farm,
a locale echoing Buchel and thereby already suggesting the "künstliche
'Rückkehr'" which is accomplished Iiterally and indirectly at the end,
when he goes home to Buchel and his mother (40). 13
The possible relevance of the Christ-archetype to the Romantic
journey is apparent, for Christ comes in the role of a Redeemer who
will undo the effects of the Fall. The logical connection hetween the
Faust-archetype and the Romantic paradigm is less obvious and far more
complex. To relate his Leverkühn-Faust to the circuitous journey, Mann
draws upon the symbolic connotations and traditional meanings of the
Faust-figure and, most of all, his temporal associations. Even in the
Volksbuch, Faust already implicitly serves as a symbol of modern (in
the sense of post-Reformation) man with his striving and inquisitive
character, rendered daemonic by virtue of its irrational urge toward
extremes, polarities, and antitheses. lt is by emphasizing this symbolic
function that Mann associates the Faust-figure with the Romantic jour
ney, both as an analogue and as a significant variation.
II
Based on the life of an actual magician of the late fifteenth, early
sixteenth centuries, Faustus caught the popular imagination just after
the transition from the Middle Ages to the Reformation and the Renais
sance. The popularity and profundity of the Faust legend can be under
stood in terms of the attitude of the new Lutheranism toward those like
13 For a discussion of the circuitous journey in Romantic thought, see M. H. Abrams'

Natural Supernaturalism (New York: Norton, 1971), especially pp. 207, 221, 223, 232-33,
and 255. Abrams notes that the beginning and the end of the journey in man's an
cestral home is often linked with a female figure (p. 255). In Goethe's Faust this is das
Ewig Weibliche; in Mann, Leverkühn's mother, Elsbeth. The circuitous joumey ob
viously resembles Nietzsche's "eternal recurrence." In his copy of Paul Deussen's Erin
nerungen an Friedrich Nietzsche (Leipzig: F. A. Brockhaus, 1901), now to be found in
the Thomas-Mann-Archiv, Mann marked marginally a long passage tracing the concept
back to Pythagorean theory (p. 101).
Faust who had made pacts with the DeviJ.H Whereas Catholic tradition
allowed for eleventh-hour salvation, in Lutheranism such souls were
inescapably condemned. (This is why Gounod's Faust, from a Catholic
country, is, Fitelberg realizes, not as profound as Goethe's.) The pact
with the Devil thus becomes for the Protestant an irrevocable act, an
irreconcilable break, an absolute fall. The depth of Faust's damnation
gives an indication of the burden of symbolic guilt he bears and indicates
the degree to which early Protestantism intensified man's conviction of
sin.15 So great is his sense of his own iniquity that the Volksbuch Faust
makes no attempt to avoid giving the Devil his due - Faust's own soul.
In Mann's book, similarly, Leverkühn finds an ideal way to manifest his

compulsion "die Strafe in die Sünde einzubeziehen" by having inter
course with a syphilitic prostitute (206).
Much as the Reformation broke the objective authority of the Church
and gave each believer the right, even the necessity, to make his own
religious decisions, Faust dares to breach bonds, obligations, and limits
previously assumed to be objective. His pact with the Devil, though it
be apostasy in the faith, has the effect of denying the authority of God.
The figure of Faust thus symbolizes the Reformation's awareness of its
own striking significance and disconcerting implications. Faust is an
extreme individualist for whom, as for the Nietzsche of Die Geburt der
Tragödie, the conception of individuation is the prima! cause of evil.16
Having learned all too well the lesson of Herr Doktor Schleppfuss that
"Freiheit ist die Freiheit zu sündigen," he is bent on realizing that
potential to the full (137).
As individualist, Faust is also a potential subjectivist. Even after the
Devil has described hell for him at great length, the Volksbuch Faust
is still insistent on seeing it for himself. In a more modern variant of
this pattern, Mann's Faust expresses no desire for exterior adventure
whatsoever. He wants only to explore the seif, and his various trips -
around the world, into the ocean depths, to the stars - become elaborate
allegories for exploration of the daemonic dimensions of the human
consciousness. Tellingly, Leverkühn admits to a feeling of guilt and
sinfulness accompanying the journey into the ocean, which suggests
literally modern scientific exploration and allegorically modern psycho-
14 The location of his home in Wittenberg, birthplace of Lutheranism, confirms the in
timate connection of Faust with Protestantism. The University of Wittenberg, Zeitblom
points out, is identical with that of Halle, which Leverkühn attends. See Voss, Die
Entstehung von Thomas Manns Roman "Doktor Faustus," pp. 44, 48, 62, 66.
15 Norman 0. Brown, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History (New
York: Random House, 1959), p. 214.
16 Friedrich Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, Nietzsches Werke. Volume /: Schriften
aus den Jahren 1869-1873 (Leipzig: Alfred Kröner, 1922), p. 102. See Abrams, Natural
Supernaturalism, p. 181, on the equation of "division, separateness, externality," and
"isolation" with evil in Romantic as weil as Neoplatonic thought. Cf. Hellersberg
Wendriner, Mystik der Gottesferne, p. 116.
logical exploration of the subconscious.17 As a Dionysian glance into the

horrors and eccentricities of inner as well as outer nature, the venture
provides an occasion for consciousness to look at the presumably un
conscious, for subjectivity to double back on subjectivity and produce
a peculiarly modern form of self-consciousness.
Not all this significance is immediately present, to be sure, in the
Faust of the Volksbuch; but it does seem to be there implicitly. As
symbol of post-Reformation man he must bear the guilt of that era. lt
is a burden that devolves from his betokening the individualism which
has disrupted an entire culture and which denotes a decisive historical
cleavage, a break with tradition and continuity. As Faust, Leverkühn

must have a very different perspective on the Reformation from that of
Zeitblom, for whom it is "eine Brücke. . . , die nicht nur aus scholas
tischen Zeiten herüber in unsere Welt freien Denkens, sondern ebenso
wohl auch zurück ins Mittelalter führt - und zwar vielleicht tiefer
zurück als eine von der Kirchenspaltung unberührt gebliebene christ
katholische Überlieferung heiterer Bildungsliebe" (15). Zeitblom is a
Catholic and a humanist. He is an echo of Renissance man, according
to the conception of that flowering which sees it as coming to late bloom
in Germany and as including the works of Goethe among its last vestiges.
Though Mann's novel contrasts Leverkühn as Reformation man with
Zeitblom as Renaissance-Romantic man and implicitly Volksbuch Faust
with Goethe's Faust, it nevertheless suggests a similarity between them:
all are figures of historical transition. On this similarity Mann hinges
another implicit but broader parallel - between the Reformation and
the Romantic movement: the latter, insofar as it marks the end of classi
cal humanism in Germany, intensifies the individualist and subjectivist
tendencies in Reformation thought that are potentially modern in the
larger sense. This parallel confirms the association of Leverkühn-Faust
with the Romantic figure, postlapsarian Adamic man, who performs the
circuitous journey. Bearing a sense of a personal and cultural past
regrettably lost, suggesting a subjectivity split off from its objective
home, symbolizing the individuation and fragmentation of a conscious
ness originally whole, and drawn with a sense of urgency into new and
unknown realms, the Faustian figure is readily adaptable to the Romantic
17 The descent is a striking manifestation of what Oswald Spengler, in his description

of the Faustian soul of the West, designates as the egoistic urge to "ent-decken, das
was man nicht sieht, in die Lichtwelt des inneren Auges ziehen .. ," (Der Untergang
des Abendlandes [Munich: C. H. Beck, 1922], p. 627). Leverkiihn's "speculating" the
ocean follows the motif of the descent of the mythic hero. lt is reminiscent of the
Volksbuch Faust's visit to hell and may bear certain resemblances to the classical Wal
purgis Nacht presented in Goethe's Faust. (See Victor A. Oswald, Jr., "Full Fathom
Five: Notes on Some Devices in Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus," Germanic Review,
Vol. 24 [1949], 276-77). The trip, as Zeitblom points out, harkens back to the elder
Leverkiihn's "die elementa spekulieren," which itself recalls the Volksbuch Faust's
being a speculator (22).
1!10 THE GERMANIC REVIEW
paradigm. Zeitblom, as narrator of Faustus, makes this conformity

explicit for Leverkühn-Faust by describing him as leaving his "spiel
erischen Zustand des Kindes" in Buchel, that "Tal der Unschufd," to
submit himself to a "Paradigma" of destiny involving "Werden, Entwick
lung, Bestimmung" through "eine 'unlautere' Steigerung" of natural
gifts (37, 12).18
Leverkühn, however, attempts his journey under conditions radically
different from those the Romantic hero confronted - conditions specifi
cally modern (in the particular sense) which make the return much
more problematic, if not altogether impossible. This qualification sug
gests that in Faustus Mann is calling attention to the parallel between

three historical periods of discontinuity and radical change - the Re
formation, the Romantic, and the Modemist, all representing a break
with the past which is a kind of Fall. 19 And because historical breaks
and mythic falls suggest ends, Doktor Faustus is a novel which stands in
the sign of the End. With World War II drawing to a close, not only the
end of the modern period in literature and music but also the end of
bourgeois humanism, of German history, of the novel as a genre, perhaps
even of Western culture - all appear imminent. The peculiarly modern
end represented by World War II may, the novel implies, posit a termi
nus after which, as in Beethoven's Sonata in C Minor, Opus 111, there
will be no return, no reconciliation after parting, no Romantic reintegra
tion. Since the novel itself, the Romantic journey, the nature of Faust's
pact with the Devil, and Christ's sacrifice all depend and focus attention
upon the idea of an end and the ambiguity of that end, it is only by
examining the character of ends in Faustus that one can hope to clarify,
discriminate, and comprehend the symbolic functions of Faust and
Christ in the novel.
III
"Zeit verkaufen wir. ... " (306) The Devil thus indicates the commodity
for which Leverkühn-Faust will harter his soul. Devil's time has as its
function the demarcation of ends. These ends, as the Devil indicates, are
of three kinds - the absolute end which is terminal, irreversible; the
relative end which marks the beginning of the repetition of a previous
temporal cycle; the regenerative end which serves as the break-through
out of one cycle and into another, though that cycle be in a sense the
same pitched at a higher level.
Related to the last kind of end, the time the Devil purveys is, he
18 As in Goethe, "Steigerung" suggests that process in the joumey's middle by which
the separated consciousness enhances itself to bring forth a new and higher conscious
ness at joumey's end. (See Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 184.)
19 See Monroe K. Spears, Dionysus and the City (New York: Oxford University Press,
1970), pp. 29 and !l!I, on the tendency of modern writers to regard "the break with the
past as disinheritance or Fall."
MANN'S DOKTOR FAUSTUS l!!l
stresses, filled with intoxication, inspiration, unreßectiveness, enthusiasm.

A scarcely disguised rendering of the Dionysian of Neitzsche, it is desig
nated simply "das Archaische, das Urfrühe" (316). lt would appear that
the Devil, like Wagnerian music as described by Kretzschmar, offers the
mythic capacity to reach back to the beginning, to start time all over, and
to repeat the past while transcending the beginning. He promises Lever
kühn the peculiarly Dionysian ability t9 give birth to both music and
tragic myth. In Leverkühn's case these will be expressed in the break
through, Dr. Fausti Weheklag.
lt is qua artist that Leverkühn needs the Devil, and in fact it is only
in his art that he will be able to effect the break-through, to achieve a

mythic return that will transcend the beginning.20 With respect to Lever
kühn's life itself and, by extension, to his ability to exercise his artistic
gift, the Devil's ware has what is indeed a fatal ßaw. lt contrasts with
classical time in which - the Devil stresses, quoting early Goethe - man
could experience daemonic polarities of joy and pain eternally, endlessly.
Plenteous though the Devil wishes it to appear, Devil's time is measured
and limited. lt is hour-glass time, time with a terminus, an appointed
end. lt is to the Devil that this end, where all leaves off, belongs. He
affirms the historicity, the terminal character of all ends.21 The nature
of history, the Devil implies, is such that no event within its scope can
be revoked or repeated; and the pact itself thereby becomes doubly
historical in that it already represents, as we know, a historical event
which is totally irrevocable.
Thus the stipulations of the Devil's pact, while bestowing the means
to complete the Romantic return in art, ironically deny that very
possibility in life, in history. The principle on which this irony turns
is simple: to save his art, Leverkühn must sacrifice his Iife; to warm
his art, he must renounce all warmth, all love, in life. In this aspect,
Mann's Devil would seem, in fact, to be a mythological personage who
is a symbol for the terror of history, the fear of ends. As in Paradise Lost
he imports into history suffering for mankind in general and death to
the individual in particular. He is Sammael, "Engel des Giftes," and his
poison brings Faust mortality - mortality conferred a second time, its
inevitability made explicit.
20 lt should be noted that in the Romantic journey the return often, if not typically,
represents a transcendence of the beginning such that the unity at the end is far better
than that of the beginning. The circuitous journey thus becomes a spiral ascent. (See
Abrams, N6tural Supematuralism, p. 207, on Schiller. Cf. Zeitblom's description of the
course of Leverkühn's Iife as a mounting, an ascent, "dem ihm bestimmten Aufstieg"
[!17].)
21 See Mircea Eliade, The Tu,o and the One, trans. J. M. Cohen (New York: Harper
and Row, 1965), p. 79, on Mephistopheles as the principle of stoppage, halting the flux
of Iife. Cf. Kretzschmar's stutter (on "Musik" and "Tod'), the Iater retardation and
hesitation of Leverkühn's speech, and the Devil's "Begabt, aber lahm ist der Deutsche"
(!105).
The twenty-four years the Devil promises Faust recall the twenty-four
hours of a day and thus suggest the profane time of the everyday un
touched by the sacred time of Mircea Eliade's mythic "eternal return."
Plenteous but measured; meted out according to the natural, profane
time of the everyday; bounded by death - the temporal span offered by
the Devil becomes symbolic of human life, and Faust's character as
symbolic of the human is confirmed. Like Nietzsche's Dionysus, he not
only represents mortal nature but also expresses humanity's recognition
of the necessity for all mankind to meet a sorrowful end.
Emblematic of the end which the Devil promises is the hell he attempts
in vain to describe to Leverkühn. Under one aspect Faust's hell sym

bolizes complete non-being, total nothingness. This is a hell that betokens
an absolute end. There everything leaves off, as his visitor repeatedly
teils Leverkühn. Suggesting the total insubstantiality of evil in Augus
tinian and Schleppfussian thought, hell has no actual content and
therefore no connection with language. That which does not exist, that
which is only an absence, a vacuum, cannot be described. This is the
hell of Luther, for whom it was not a place but the experience of death.22
From this hell there is no Possibility of return.
But hell also has another aspect, in which its terror lies not in its
absolute termination but in its circularity. lt will be "nur eine Fortset
zung des extravaganten Daseins" which Leverkühn now leads (329). He
will be doomed to repeat the same pattern time and again. Thus hell
comes to signal only the end of one cycle of repetition and the beginning
of another. The resemblance to archetypal imitation in myth generally
and to the recurrent circuitous journey in Romantic myth particularly
is obvious: Faust's hell will be a negative image of the redemptive result
promised by archetypal repetition, an ironic reversal of the connotations
ascribed to the end of the Romantic journey. This is in fact what seems
to happen to Leverkühn: he is condemned to live again "das extravagante
Dasein" that is Faust's. There is irony here: hell for Faust is that point
at which he sticks and returns to re-live the life of Faust. lt is the hell
of Sisyphus and a manifestation of the principle of eternal repetition in
Dante. A further irony is that the hell which is Leverkühn's punishment
in life offers a measure of the rigidity and paralysis that he has sold
his soul to escape in art. In association with this kind of hell, the Devil
comes to represent Leverkühn's confrontation with the terms of a cir
cularized history and his realization that his life is only an unending
circle, not the Romantic spiral which incorPorates an element of progress
into the repetitive pattern.
Thus the function of myth in history, the novel implies, is to reveal
22 Brown, Life Against Death, p. 215. Brown cites Martin Luther, Sämmtliche Schriften,
ed. J. G. Walch (St. Louis: Concordia, 1881-19IO), III, 256; IV, 990, 1800; IX, 1497;
XIV, 956.
the very nature of history. Though its ends are absolute in the sense that
they can never be reversed and that the individual in history cannot
avoid death, history itself is an ever on-going process, never finally com
pletable, never capable of being brought to an absolute, a positive end;
and in its continuation, history will always seem to bear a measure of
predestined recurrence, a tragic repetition of the patterns and mistakes
of the past.
IV
The end that hell represents for Faust, then, would seem to be both the
absolute non-being represented by evil and death and the total inversion
of the redemptive value of the mythic return. The pact with the Devil
therefore seems to oppose Faust diametrically to Christ, the redeemer,
renewer, and regenerator of history. The opposition, however, is not as
complete as it first appears.
As the Devil himself insists, he is the custodian of religion, the repre
sentative of "theologische Existenz" in the modern world; and his
appearance suggests the entrance of the ultimate, even the sacred, into
Faust's Iife (325). Repeatedly, the Devil expounds "das Ekstatische und
Paradoxe," which Zeitblom claims is essential to "dem religiösen Genius"
(122). He is the "ganz andere," the "entsetzlich andere," which is the
ambiguous object ("das Dämonisch-Göttliche") of Rudolf Otto's Das
Heilige (295). 23 Leverkühn's Devil could trace his origins back to those
undifferentiated daimons who functioned as the intermediaries of both
good and evil for classical humanity.24
Furthermore, though the terms of the pact doom Faust to the twenty
four years of human, finite, profane time, the gift the pact will allow him
to exercise for that span represents "Enthusiasmus," "divinis influxibus
ex alto," an infusion of "der heiligen Verzuckung" [sie] (316-17, 11). This
infusion has the ambiguity which Paul Tillich ascribes to the experience
of religious "ecstasy," an intoxication revealing a spiritual presence and
having both an elevating power and an annihilating, destructive power,
since it encourages sudden and shocking insight into the "abysmal
element" of being. (The parallel with the experience of Romantic
"Steigerung," Faustus' hell, and the intoxicated Dionysus' glimpse into
the horror of existence should be obvious.) Significantly, Tillich's
"ecstasy" often verges on a daemonic possession, from which he tries to
23 See Otto, Das Heilige (Breslau: Trewendt and Granier, 1923), pp. 28-35. Though
there is no proof that Mann read Das Heilige, he did know of its existence and showed
interest in a work similar to it. While collecting material for Doktor Faustus, he read
and underlined a two-page review by Walter Rigg of Walter Ehrlich's Der Mensch und
die numinosen Regionen, apparently from a 1943 issue of Neue Zürcher Zeitung (Ma
terialien for Doktor Faustus 6:5, in the Thomas-Mann-Archiv, Zurich). Rigg's review
discusses Das Heilige in the first paragraph.
24 See Emil Schneweis, Angels and Demons According to Lactantius (Washington: Cath
olic University of America Press, 1944), pp. 83-84.
distinguish it, and is in fact identical for Tillich with "enthusiasm,"

which means the state of having the god within one's self." 211
Most crucially, Faust and Christ both have to offer their lives to ful
fill their roles. In Leverkühn-Faust's case, the resignation of the body to
the Devil, the willingness to pay with death (also manifested by the
pregnant young girl boarding with the Schweigestills before Leverkühn)
may be based on the theologia crucis propounded by Luther. The early
Lutheran Christian believed he could obtain victory over the Devil by
voluntary submission of himself as flesh to the Devil. This ready submis
sion would constitute a kind of crucifixion analogous to that of Christ
himself. As Christ harrowed hell by offering himself for hell, so God

would lead down to hell those whom he predestined to heaven.26 Lever
kühn is obviously familiar with this doctrine not only through Frau
Schweigestill but also through Schleppfuss, with his tales of witches
whose bodies were submitted to the flames in order to snatch them from
the Devil's grasp. Indeed, Zeitblom believes that this doctrine motivates
the demented Leverkühn's attempt at suicide in the Klammerpool.
But whatever the precise theological ground of Leverkühn's submis
sion, there is a strong element of unselfish self-sacrifice in his as well as
Christ's offering of his Iife. Indeed, the association of Leverkühn with
Christ throughout the novel is founded upon the terms of the pact with
the Devil. As Leverkühn himself states to the company gathered at
Pfeiffering to hear excerpts of the Weheklag, he is, as Faust, damned
because he has taken "die Schuld der Zeit auf den eigenen Hals" - a
gesture reminiscent of Christ (662). Leverkühn sees himself as forfeiting
his life, his body, his personal comfort in order to save modern music
from the total sterility that threatens it. As Mann seems to have discerned,
the symbolic burden of Reformation guilt the Faust-figure bears readily
lends him to conversion into a Christ-figure. On this ground, Leverkühn
Faust, who makes a pact with the Devil, and Leverkühn-Christ, who
sacrifices himself for others, become one. lt is no wonder that the Devil
remarks to Leverkühn, "Warte bis Charfreitag, so wird bald Ostern
werden!" (313).
25 Tillich. Systematic Theology, Volume I (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951),
112-13. Cf. Mann's probable source for these ideas, Erwin Rohde's Psyche: Seelencult
und Unsterblichkeitsglaube der Griechen (Freiburg i.B.: J. C. M. Mohr, 1894), p. 312.
Rohde describes the Dionysian "Ekstasis" as "eine Hieromanie, ein heiliger Wahnsinn,
in welchem die Seele, dem Leibe cntllogn, sich mit der Got1heit vereinigt." Rohde, like
Tillich, identifies ecstasy with the condition of "Enthusiasmos": those who are possessed
by this state "leben und sind in dem Gotte."
26 See Hartmann Grisar, Luther, trans. E. M. Lamond (London: B. Herder, 1913), I,
236, 376; VI, 220; and Brown, Life Against Death, p. 215. Brown cites Luther's Sämmt
liche Schriften, ed. Walch, VII, 304; XII, 544. The Volksbuch Faust, submitting his body
to the Devil so that his soul will be left in peace, shares this rationale. Mann apparently
encountered the idea in Robert Petsch's Einleitung to Das Volksbuch vom Doctor Faust,
2nd cd. (Halle: M. Nicmeyer, 1911), pp. xxxi, xxxiv. (For Mann's notes, see Voss, Die
Entstehung von Thomas Manns Roman "Dohtor Faustus," pp. 27, 28, 204).
The means for which Leverkühn sacrifices himself and by which he is

to save modern music is the break-through. The very terms used to
describe the break-through and its significance confirm the association of
Faust, the human, the Adam who falls again, with Christ, second Adam.
The principle mediating between the two seemingly polarized mythic
models is the Romantic paradigm of the circuitous journey.
During his visit the Devil teils Leverkühn: "Nicht genug, daß du die
lähmenden Schwierigkeiten der Zeit durchbrechen wirst, - die Zeit selber,
die Kulturepoche, will sagen, die Epoche der Kultur und ihres Kultus
wirst du durchbrechen und dich der Barbarie erdreisten, die's zweimal
ist...." (324) This break-through, Leverkühn later makes clear, is an

alternative designation for the second Fall, for the Romantic return, and
for the redemption that comes at the eschatological End of time.Nega
tively paralleling the Devil's hell, the break-through represents not only
the point at which history ends one cycle and regenerates itself by break
ing through into another, but also a kind of breaking out of history in
its enclosed, enveloping, circular aspect into an infinitude of time.27
Thus the break-through holds out the hope of mitigating both forms of
the terrror of history represented by Leverkühn-Faust's hell.
In a conversation with Zeitblom at the beginning of World War I,
Leverkühn describes the break-through by reference to Heinrich von
Kleist's "über das Marionettentheater": " ... Adam müsse ein zweites
Mal vom Baum der Erkenntnis essen, um in den Stand der Unschuld
zurückzufallen." (410-11) This state, as the conversation suggests, will
mark a condition as much of aesthetic as of theological grace, one in
which modern art will be redeemed from excessive consciousness.
The conception of a fall through sinful assertion of freedom as being
the necessary prerequisite to a state of virtue runs from Irenaeus through
Hegel and other Romantic thinkers. Mann encountered an elaboration
of the idea in Reinhold Niebuhr's The Nature and Destiny of Man,
which he read in preparation for writing Faustus.28 In Kleist, signifi
cantly, the idea appears in the context of the Romantic journey- out of
paradise, around the world, and back, in order to see if paradise might
be open somewhere on the other side.29
In the context of Doktor Faustus, the Kleist reference takes on a rich
ness, complexity, and originality of association that makes it a crucial
27 lt is this second kind that Zeitblom indicates when he talks about the German desire,
manifested in World War I, to escape national isolation and the stagnant, dull, every
day world in a new "Durchbruch" (398-99, 401, 408).
28 See Reinhold Niebuhr, The Nature and Destifly of Man (New York: Charles Scrib
ner's Sons, 1964), II, 78; Thomas Mann, Die Entstehung des "Doktor Faustus," Gesam
melte Werke, XI, 162; and Herbert Lehnert, Thomas Mann: Fiktion, Mythos, Religion
(Stuttgart: W. Kohlhammer, 1965), pp. 179-80.
29 "Ober das Marionettentheater," Sämtliche Werke und Briefe, ed. Wilhelm Herzog
(Leipzig: Im Insel, 1910), Volume V: Gedichte und Essays; Briefe, Erster Teil, pp. 225-
26; and Abrams, Natural Supernaturalism, p. 221.
turning-point m the logic of the Christ-Faust identity pattern. Clearly,

the Kleist reference is self-referential for Leverkühn since, as Faust,
Adamic humanity already fallen, he has eaten "ein zweites Mal vom
Baum" in yielding to Hetaera Esmeralda; and the Devil's visit, by his
own admission, has as its purpose only the confirmation of an alliance in
which both parties have previously acquiesced.30 The ability to be twice
barbaric which the Devil promises Leverkühn-Faust correlates with that
"Stand der Unschuld" to be attained by the second eating. lt is significant
for the association of this Faust with Christ that only Mann, not Kleist,
specifies Adam as the one who eats again. By so doing, Mann suggests the
Pauline doctrine that Adam prefigures Christ and that in history Christ
the Redeemer appears incarnate in man as second or "letzter Adam," in
verting the original FalJ.31
The eschatological import of this symbolic repetition of Adam's Fall
is clear both in St. Paul, who refers to the coming of the End immediately
after his citation of Christ as the inverse of Adam,32 and in Kleist, whose
treatment of the break-through appears, as Leverkühn notes, in a section
of his "Marionettentheater" called "geradezu 'das letzte Kapitel von der
Geschichte der Welt'" (410). Appropriately, the entire second half of
Doktor Faustus looks toward the eschaton and represents an elaborate
working-out of the ambiguous and complex implications of the notion
of break-through.
V
There are four major indicators of the eschaton in the novel - Lever
kühn's oratorio, the Apocalypsis; his cantata, the Weheklag; Leverkühn's
personal collapse at the piano; and the total collapse of the German
nation, rendered simultaneous with Leverkühn's death by the double
time scheme of the novel, which makes events in Leverkühn's life appear
synchronous with those occurring during Zeitblom's writing. In describ
ing these events, Mann carefully creates parallels, differences, and para
doxical twists suggesting their distinction, yet interdependence. He
focuses, characteristically, on the ambiguity of the eschaton, its Janus
30 Mann's use of Leverkühn's first sexual experience to indicate the Fall relies on the
age-old association indirectly suggested in. Zeitblom's reference to his own first sexual
expericnce as a tasting "vom Apfel" (196). The traumatic significance of the visit to the
Leipzig house of prostitution for Leverkühn and its association with the Reformation
and the milieu of the Volksbuch Faust are confirmed by Leverkühn's switch to the
archaic language of the Reformation to describe it.
31 I Cor. 15:21-22, 45-49; Rom. 5: 12-21 (Luther translation). See Paul Ricoeur, The
Symbolism of Evil, trans. Emerson Buchanan (Boston: Beacon, 1967), pp. 238-61, 271,
274. Significantly, in speaking of the new "Durchbruch" of World War 1, Zeitblom re
fers to the sacrifice of the individual who "mit seinem Blute Sühne zu leisten bereit ist
für die Schwächen und Sünden der Epoche, in die die eigenen eingeschlossen sind; stellt
er sich dem Gefühl als ein Opfergang dar, durch den der alte Adam abgestreift und in
Einigkeit ein neues, höheres Leben errungen werden soll" (399-400).
32 I Cor. 15:22-24.
MANN'S DOKTOR FAUSTUS lll7
face, looking backward into history and its irreversible destruction, look
ing forward toward mythic redemption and renewal, the Romantic re
turn.The ambiguity of the eschaton seems to parallel the equivocal logic
of the Faust-Christ identity, with the damned Faust belonging to histori
cal destruction and Christ the Redeemer to mythic renewal; but Mann
tends at the close of the novel, again typically, first to stress the polar
ization of the Faust-Christ associations; then to merge them, if he does
not altogether invert them; and finally, by insisting on the impossibility
of facile distinctions, yet nonetheless implying discriminations between
them, to use them to comment on the efficacy of art for personal life and
national history and on the viability of belief in Romantic regeneration
in the modern world.
For Zeitblom World War I, which is the occasion of inspiration for
Leverkühn's Apocalypsis, represents a "tiefen und scheidenden histor
ischen Einschnitt," "geschwinde, gefährliche Zeitläufte," and "einen
tiefen Ab- und Einschnitt, die Eröffnung einer neuen, tumultuösen und
grundstürzenden, mit wilden Abenteuern und Leiden überfüllten Ge
schichtsperiode" (469-70, 419).33 By implication, the very way Zeitblom
describes this "sense of an ending" correlates the Reformation with
Romanticism and indicates that the Modern era marks the close of the
culture which those movements constituted. He believed "daß eine
Epoche sich endigte, die nicht nur das neunzehnte Jahrhundert umfaßte,
sondern zurückreichte bis zum Ausgang des Mittelalters, bis zur Spren
gung scholastischer Bindungen, zur Emanzipation des Individuums, der
Geburt der Freiheit ..." (468-69). lmmediately before the description of
the Apocalypsis (Chapter 34) there seems to be a lull in the forward
momentum of the novel, but afterwards a multiplication of eschato
logical signs occurs and the novel presses toward the end with relentless
drive. The disturbance and destruction of value reflected in the dis
cussions of the Kridwiss circle are characteristic of the time immediately
before the End - a time of trouble, when the terror of history is most
oppressive and history itself is brought to a close by an intensification of
that process most characteristic of history, the destructive, chaos-pro
ducing activity of chronos. Falling one after the other unremittingly, the
deaths of Clarissa Rodde, Rudi Schwerdtfeger, and Echo add the dimen
sion of personal catastrophe to the political, social, broadly historical one.
As the Allied armies encroach upon Germany, Zeitblom appropriates
from the Apocalypsis: " ... das Ende kommt, es kommt das Ende, es
gehet schon auf und bricht daher über dich, du Einwohner des
Landes...." (576)
The imminence of the End is also transmitted in Leverkühn's music,
33 See Spears, Dionysus and the City, pp. 29-114, for the pervasiveness of the feeling that
World War I marked the end of an era, a break with the past, and constituted a kind
of Fall.
which, like that of many late Romantics such as Bruckner and Mahler,
seems preoccupied with last things. The Apocalypsis not only conveys
"neueste Berichte vom Weltuntergang" as its subject but also serves an
apocalyptic role in the novel by announcing and anticipating the End -
the Weheklag and World War II.The Apocalypsis looks forward to the
End, and as is usually the case in an eschatology the events prophesied
as following the End mirror pre-eschatological history. The Apocalypsis
is bound to history; it holds out no hope of mythic redemption. Its
images of terror are those of pure destruction, reduction to non-existence.
There is repetition here but it is one of rigid correspondence, enforced

recurrence, raving by rote, not of mythic imitation of Romantic return.
The resemblance of the atmosphere of the Apocalypsis to that of Faust's
hell should be evident.
In the chapters between his descriptions of the oratorio and the
Weheklag Zeitblom repeatedly strikes an unmistakably apocalyptic
theme. In the following passage, one example of the apocalypticism of
the novel, almost all the characteristics of the destructive aspect of the
End are reiterated in anticipation of the last paragraph of the novel:
Meine Erzählung eilt ihrem Ende zu - das tut alles. Alles drängt und stürzt
dem Ende entgegen, in Endes Zeichen steht die Welt, - steht darin weningstens
für uns Deutsche, deren tausendjährige Geschichte, widerlegt, ad absurdum
geführt, als unselig verfehlt, als Irrweg erwiesen durch dieses Ergebnis, ins
Nichts, in die Verzweiflung, in einen Bankerott ohne Beispiel, in eine von
donnernden Flammen umtanzte Höllenfahrt mündet. (599)
However, the End that Zeitblom foresees also has a potentially regenera
tive aspect; and even as he describes the progressive destruction of Ger
many and the rapidity of the Allied invasion, Zeitblom (borrowing from
the Apocalypsis, which in turn takes from the prophet Ezekiel) treats
the End as arising and awakening, as if it were a new beginning, a
dawning, a morning ("erwacht," "gehet ...auf," [474)). Similarly, when
Leverkühn's nephew Echo visits him, it seems at first as if he represents
repetition under the aspect of a regenerative beginning, a morning. But
later this assumption is totally overthrown. The terrible outcome of
Echo's stay provides a crucial commentary on the nature of the End in
Doktor Faustus and particularly on the possibility that a timeless con
dition might inhere in the mythic repetition which Echo's name suggests.
Like young Miles in Henry James' The Turn of the Screw, Echo com
bines the daemonic with the divine.34 His eyes, "unsäglich hold und
34 The figures to whom Echo mythically corresponds are numerous: the Echo who loved
Narcissus; the Volksbuch's Justus Faustus; Shakespeare's Ariel; Goethe's Euphorion;
Nepomuk, patron saint of Bohemia; Mahler's daughter, Maria, etc. Echo's fate bears a
striking resemblance to rhat of Pierre in Hermann Hesse's Rosshalde (1914). In the
rein," also sparkle with a "tiefen und neckischen" "Elfenspott" (611,

618).His is the very doubleness of human nature, as is suggested by the
device of the Monteverdian echo-effects in the Faust cantata. Echo is
a reflection in miniature of his uncle's character, Faust-Christ.
Even more explicitly than Adrian, however, is Echo identified with
Christ, especially Christ the Child. Women servants tend to kneel before
him and call on "Jesus, Maria, und Joseph." Echo seems to have the
Christ-like mythic gift of renewal: the schoolmaster becomes "ganz
anders" while talking with him (but note the association with the dae
monic as weil as the divine implied by "ganz anders"). He seems to Zeit
blom to invoke "eine Vorstellungssphäre des Mythisch-Zeitlosen, Gleich

zeitigen und Nebeneinander-Bestehenden, worin die Mannesgestalt des
Herrn keinen Widerspruch bildet zu dem Kinde im Arm der Mutter,
das er auch ist ... " (611, 615, 619). As Christ-child, Echo would seem to
make it possible to disbelieve in the work of time. Within the structure
of both Adrian's Iife and the novel as a whole, he provides a respite from
the relentless onslaught of the End.
The respite is only temporary. From the beginning Echo's speech,
with its "habt" and "Nacht," has suggested temporality and possible ter
mination.His reciting the prayer, "Kein Ding hilft für den zeitling Tod,"
and his being fascinated by the workings of a clock confirm his associa
tion with time and death.M Echo's sudden demise is a telling manifesta
tion of the persistence of historical ends in what appears to be a mythic
context. Even Echo turns out to be prey to time. His daemonic-divine
doubleness parallels his temporal ambiguousness - his seeming to be out
side time, yet his suffering death. His coming to the Schweigestills' J:an
be taken as another sign of the End, since his character, both mythic and
historical, reflects the .Janus-Iike aspect of the End.
VI
Now realizing the transience of goodness, of "was die Erfüllten jubelnd
verkündigt haben," Adrian vows to retract the Ninth Symphony of
Beethoven (634). The medium of the revocation is the Dr. Fausti
Weheklag, which is at the same time, ironically, the break-through, the
realization of the artistic return that the pact with the Devil had prom
ised. Just as by negating the religious the Weheklag does not deny the
religious but, on the contrary, establishes its own character as a religious
Sche.ible editions of the Volksbuch, Arie! appears as a demon who is called the "Great
Prince" or the "Prince of Hell." (See Bergsten, Thomas Mann's "Doktor Faustus," pp.
22-23n.) Thus Echo, through Leverkühn's thinking of him as Arie!, is indirectly linked
with Satan.
35 See Mann's Ietter of May 18, 1943, to Erich Kahler about his grandson, Frido, the
model for Echo: "Wenn er von etwas genug hat oder sich darüber trösten will, daß es
nicht mehr davon gibt, so sagt er: ''habt!' .. .Wenn ich sterbe, werde ich auch 'Habt!'
sagen" (Blätter der Thomas Mann Gesellschaft, No.10 [1970], 23).
140 THE GERMANJC REVIEW
work, so by its very intent to take back the Ninth Symphony, the
Weheklag calls attention to its relationship to that symphony and to that
Romantic confidence in joy and human brotherhood with which, in
Schiller's "Lied an die Freude," it ends. The Ninth Symphony is, of
course, "ein Jubellied" contrasting with the Weheklag. The finale of the
Ninth is both vocal and orchestral, human and instrumental; the finale
of the Weheklag is purely orchestral. Whereas Romanticism - in Bee
thoven's "Pastorale," for example - celebrates the relatedness of man to
nature, in the Weheklag the human voice, returning, echoing as nature
sound, can only mourn man's "Einsamkeit." But the relationship of the
Weheklag to the Ninth Symphony and, by implication, to Romanticism

generally is not entirely negative, for the dialectic by which the "para
doxe Möglichkeit" of the break-through is established, by which
"strengste Gebundenheit" gives way to the "freien Sprache des Affekts,"
by which coldness and formal strictness are converted into a "expressiven
Seelenlaut," is essentially a Romantic one - the conversion of a state into
its conflicting opposite at the extreme point of opposition, negation,
denial.36 That break-through, which has "eine jubilante, eine höchst
sieghafte Bewandtnis mit dieser schaudervollen Gabe des Entgelts und
der Schadloschaltung," is described as a "Wiedergewinnung," a "Rekon
struktion" - the Romantic return. (643-44)
Synthesizing the break-through, the eschaton, the close of Faust's life,
and the last of Leverkühn's musical composition, the end of the cantata
embodies not only this artistic paradox of the break-through to feeling
but also a related religious paradox. This paradox represents a more
subtle triumph, one by its very nature scarcely to be given voice. At the
end, the nadir of despair, Zeitblom raises the question, though in a
whisper: Is it possible that hope can germinate "aus tiefster Heillos
igkeit?" "Es wäre die Hoffnung jenseits der Hoffnungslosigkeit, die
Transzendenz der Verzweiflung, - nicht der Verrat an ihr, sondern das
Wunder, das über den Glauben geht." (651) From representing the his
torical annihilation and religious despair embodied at the end of the
cantata in silence, night, nothingness, and death, the closing high G of
the cello is transmuted, however tentatively, into mythic abiding:
Hört nur den Schluß, hört ihn mit mir: Eine Instrumentengruppe nach der
anderen tritt zurück, und was übrigbleibt, womit das Werk verklingt, ist das
hohe g eines Cellos, das letzte Wort, der letzte verschwebende Laut, in Pianis
simo-Fermate langsam vergehend. Dann ist nichts mehr, - Schweigen und Nacht.
Aber der nachschwingend im Schweigen hängende Ton, der nicht mehr ist, dem
36 This conversion is found prominently in Hegel and Schelling. (See Abrams, Natural
Supernaturalism, pp. 223, 232-33.) In Schelling the process bears a remarkable resem
blance to the "Sinnverkehrung" of Faust. Schelling sees man as turning back toward
God, toward redemption, at the very point of extreme selfhood, extreme alienation
fromGod.
nur die Seele noch nachlauscht, und der Ausklang der Trauer war, ist es nicht
mehr, wandelt den Sinn, steht als ein Licht in der Nacht. (651)
lt is as if the man with the light on his back retires, but leaves his light.
This religious paradox, like the artistic one, is modelled on the
Romantic paradigm of conversion at the extreme point. Indeed, the re
ligious paradox is dependent on the artistic nature of the Weheklag
itself, its capacity to articulate expressiveness, and especially on the artis
tic nature of its ending. Only in art, in an art product, is a completed,
finished, absolutely closed end possible; in life, in history, the absolute
ness of an end is always qualified by the continuation of the historical

process itself. In the context surrounding the cantata, the notion of the
completeness of the end is stressed - always with reference to art. In his
farewell, Leverkühn asserts that all is "fertig bis aufs Letzt": " ... unter
Mord und Unzucht hab ich's vollendet.... Ich mich so befleißigt und
alles zähe fertig gemacht." (666) lt is his composing, his artistic life, he
refers to, for his physical life will continue beyond the end of the twenty
four-year term. Echoing Leverkühn, Zeitblom begins the "Nachschrift"
with "Es ist getan" (668). Their words recall Christ's words on the cross.37
Mann's implication seems to be that only art, which can be "vollendet,"
is capable of serving as the vehicle of eschatological renewal, of the
Romantic return, of religious transfiguration. Only an artistically cir
cumscribed silence is audible; only the absolute negation, the "nichts
mehr" of silence and night with which the cantata ends, can become the
very ground of a transcendence "jenseits" the flux of life, though not
irrelevant to it.as
One of the bridges between the Weheklag as work of art and Lever
kühn's life is provided by the subject of the cantata, the end of the
Volksbuch Faustus' life.Forced to look backwards into the horror of his
personal history, Faustus proudly and bitterly undergoes a "Sinnverkeh
rung" indicating that he, like Nietzsche's Dionysus, has to some extent
come to acknowledge the human condition and its concomitant, the neces
sity of his own end. Since he represents an intensification of the human
and human guilt before God, Faust must suffer the human end, death, so
keenly and severely that his end becomes an eschatological end. Thus
Faust gives his body to death and the Devil in acknowledgement that it
belongs to the process of history, with its destructive potential, and that
37 Johannis 19:30: "Es ist vollbracht." Cf. the "Consummatum est" of Marlowe's Faustus
as he completes the pact with Mephistophilis, in The Tragical History of Doctor Faus
tus, in Christopher Marlowe, Plays (New York: E. P. Dutton, 1950), p. 164. Mann read
the Marlowe before finishing Doktor Fausttts. (See Mann, Die Entstehung des "Doktor
Faustus," Gesammelte Werke, XI, 186.)
38 Cf. Otto, Das Heilige, p. 88: "Wie das Dunkel und das Schweigen so ist die Leere
eine Negation, aber eine solche, die alles 'Dieses und Hier' wegschafft, damit das 'Ganz
Andere' Akt werde." Otto applies this principle, significantly, to the end of the "In
carnatus" section of the Credo in Bach's B-minor Mass.
it cannot be saved by the ready and easy imposition of a transcendent

myth. This Faust is a hard-headed and unsentimental realist, a Dionysus
who disdains all Apollonian illusion. Not only does he reject the thought
of salvation as temptation, but also he despises the world's positivism and
piety as false, hypocritical. As utter nothingness provides the ground for
the manifestation of the holy at the end of the cantata, so Faust's rejec
tion of salvation becomes the basis for his potential transcendence of
despair; for Faust dies no more as a bad than as a "guter Christ: ein
guter kraft seiner Reue, und weil er im Herzen immer auf Gnade für
seine seele hoffe ..." (646).
This paradoxical turn from despair to possible hope at both the close
of Faust's life and the end of the cantata, where it is more strongly
realized, is precisely that described by Paul Tillich in The Courage to
Be. lt is a paradox, Tillich argues, which is implicit in the underlying
tenets of Lutheran Protestantism, especially in that familiar doctrine of
"justification by faith." The Faust who believes himself damned obviously
fits the case of the apparently unacceptable sinner Tillich describes:
In the Lutheran formula that "he who is unjust is just" (in the view of the
divine forgiveness) or in the more modern phrasing that "he who is unacceptable
is accepted" the victory over the anxiety of guilt and condemnation is sharply
expressed. One could say that the courage to be is the courage to accept one
self as accepted in spite of being unacceptable....
Decisive for this self-affirmation is its being independent of any moral, intel
lectual, or religious pre-condition: it is not the good or the wise or the pious
who are entitled to the courage to accept acceptance but those who are lacking
in all these qualities and are aware of being unacceptable.... lt is the paradoxi
cal act in which one is accepted by that which infinitely transcends one's
individual seif. lt is in the experience of the Reformers the acceptance of the
unacceptable sinner into judging and transforming communion with God.39
lt is this reconciling change that seems to suggest to Zeitblom a number

of comparisons between the Faust of the cantata and Christ: Zeitblom
views Faust's instructions to his companions to "mit Ruhe schlafen" as a
deliberate reversal of the "Wachet mit mir" of Gethsemane, takes Faust's
parting dinner as a ritual, another Last Supper, and finds in Faust's newly
won acceptance an inversion of the temptation of Christ (650). By revers
ing or inverting Christ, Faust points to Christ and affirms his relation to
Christ, just as the cantata itself does not deny the religious by negating
it.40 Faust's is indeed an apostasy in the faith.
39 Tillich, The Courage to Be (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1952), pp. 164-65.
While Mann obviously did not read The Courage to Be before writing Faustus, he did
consult Tillich about Leverkühn's theological training.
40 Lest it be objected that Leverkühn-Faust's association is not with Christ but with the
also apocalyptic Antichrist who is to come in "die letzte Stunde" (1 Johannis 2: 18), it
should be noted that within the terms of the daemonic logic of Doktor Faustus the op
position between Christ and Antichrist would not be complete. Just as the relationship
MANN'S DOKTOR FAUSTUS 14!1
VII
Counterpointing to the description of the cantata and the last chapter
of the novel, which contains Leverkühn's farewell, Mann takes pains to
suggest their similarities and differences. Not only does the cantata occa
sion the farewell and Leverkühn consciously imitate the "freundliche Bitt"
of the cantata Faust to the companions of his "letzten Stunde," but also
Leverkühn's guests slowly retire in echo of the retiring groups of instru
ments at the end of the cantata. Indeed, the last chapter of the novel
begins with a comparison of Faust and Christ that recalls the inverse
Faust-Christ relationship suggested in the cantata:
"Wachet mit mir!" Adrian mochte im Werke wohl das Wort gottmenschlicher
Not ins Einsam-Männlichere und Stolze, in das "Schlafte ruhig und laßt euch
nichts anfechten!" seines Faustus wenden, - es bleibt das Menschliche doch, das
triebhafte Verlangen, wenn nicht nach Beistand, so doch nach mitmenschlichem
Beisein, die Bitte: "Verlaßt mich nicht! Seid um mich zu meiner Stunde!" (651)
The passage is reminiscent of Kretzschmar's earlier reference to Beetho

ven's outraged question, "Könnt ihr denn nicht eine Stunde mit mir
wachen?" (80). The similarity, Gunilla Bergsten believes, points up
Adrian's negative relation to Beethoven (and by implication to Christ) in
that Adrian's allusion to Jesus· words in Gethsemane is bitterly satiric.41
lt is true that Zeitblom does indeed understand the injunction of the
cantata Faust to "mit Ruhe schlafen" as a "gewollten Revers" of the
exhortation of Jesus (650). The relationship of Leverkühn himself, how
ever, to this exhortation is not altogether satiric, for the quoted passage
stands at the opening of the very chapter in which he does in fact invite
his acquaintances to be with him at his last hour, the eschatological End.
The invitation can be seen as Leverkühn's one act of faith in human
community, though it is marred, rendered ambiguous, by his failure to
warn Frau Schweigestill and even to relate to his guests.
Zeitblom's description of Christ's "Not" as "gottmenschlich" - truly
God's and truly man's - directs attention to the idea of the Incarnation:
Christ is becoming human, incarnate in a human body, that of Lever
kühn. Zeitblom's emphasis falls on the human, which "bleibt ... doch."
Even as he most explicitly follows in the footsteps of Faust, Leverkühn
comes to share with Christ the very human need for sympathy which
Faust disdains. The last chapter of the novel is poised on the ambiguities
suggested by the convergence and conflation of the Christ and Faust
models: here Leverkühn is intensely both the human being and the
between the Weheklag and Beethoven's Ninth is not entirely negative, so even the con
ception of Leverkühn as Antichrist would depend upon his association with Christ as
its ground.
41 Bergsten, Thomas Mann's "Doktor Faustus," pp. 197-98.
artist whose speech creates what zur Höhe and Frau Radbruch take as
poetry, is both damned and saved, daemonically and divinely possessed;
and here the eschatological End reveals both its creative and destructive
aspects in their intensest forms.
The accentuation of the Christ imagery begins as Leverkühn is finish
ing the Weheklag: he grows a beard which lends his "Antlitz etwas
Vergeistigt-Leidendes, ja Christushaftes" (640). The final chapter ends
with the collapsed Leverkühn, his head cradled by the woman he calls
"Mutter Schweigestill," lying in a posture suggestive of the Pieta. To the
Leverkühn-Christ of this chapter, the words of St. Paul apply: "Ich bin
mit Christo gekreuziget. ... Nicht ich, sondern Christus lebet in mir." 42
Unlike the Faust of the Volksbuch and the cantata, Leverkühn is moti
vated by the Christ-like mission of bearing the guilt of the time and
renewing modern music. Like Christ, he must turn the daemonic destruc
tion of eschatological history against himself in an effort to overcome it;
and again like Christ, "er hat Andern geholfen" but "kann sich selber
nicht helfen." 43 For Leverkühn to refuse to accept death and damnation
would be to reject his musical mission. If it is not clear that Mann accepts
the necessity of this sacrifice - life for art's sake - he is calling attention
to the profound tendency in Western„ and especially German, culture
for such sacrifice to be viewed as inevitable and in fact to be carried out.
Indeed, this necessity is an affirmation in the negative of the interrela
tionship of art and life.
If the existence of evil (according to Augustine and Schleppfuss) is a
requisite to the manifestation of good and if Christ (according to Milton)
can triumph only after the Fall and in the presence of evil, then the
cantata Faust's negative relationship to Christ is necessary to Leverkühn's
positive identification with Christ - an identification which leads Lever
kühn to voice the hope that "veilleicht kann gut sein aus Gnade, was in
Schlechtigkeit geschaffen wurde." 44 But in this "Abschied" chapter hope
is expressed even more tentatively than in Zeitblom's description of the
end of the cantata: Leverkühn "weiß es nicht," he is not sure. (666) Even
as he rehearses the events of his life in imitatio Fausti, this double reitera
tion fails to yield the cathartic and regenerative effect that should follow
from mythic repetition and return. In fact, Leverkühn's going backwards
over that past, rather than purifying it, seems to pollute his view of it.
For example, as inspiration for the Weheklag he remembers a vision of
42 Galater 2: 19-20.
43 Marci 15:31. See Paul Tillich, Der Widerstreit von Raum und Zeit: Schriften zur
Geschichtsphilosophie, Gesammelte Werke, cd. Renetc Albrecht (Stuttgart: Evangelisches
Verlagswerk, 1963), VI, 60.
44 On the interdependencc of good and evil, see Mann's notes, quoted in Voss, Die
Entstehung von Thomas Manns Roman "Doktor Faustus," p. 147; and his source, Jakob
Sprenger and Heinrich lnstitoris, Der Hexenhammer, trans. J. W. R. Schmidt (Berlin:
H. Barsdorf, 1906), I, 166.
singing children who are reminiscent of the young children singing

rounds with Hanne, the stable-girl, at Buchel farm.Contrasting with
Palestrina's angelic vision in the Pfitzner opera (which Mann loved),
Leverkühn's vision seems to turn daemonic almost while he is speaking,
in the act of recollection rather than in the original vision itself. The
corrupted vision recalls Leverkühn's own Blake songs: "Aus ihren
Nasenlöchern ringelten sich manchmal gelbe Würmchen...." (665)
Leverkühn is already suffering the hell of repetition which the Devil
promised would be his end.
VIII
In the "Abschied" chapter the polarities of Christ and Faust are care
fully balanced. In the appropriately entitled "Nachschrift" that follows,
these poised polarities come apart altogether, and the allusions to Christ
in connection with Leverkühn come to predominate. Even Leverkühn's
attempt at suicide functions as a double allusion - reminiscent not only
of Christian baptism but also of the mode of death of King Ludwig, who
was associated with Oberammergau.Eschatologically, this emphasis is
true to form. At the End Christ is to establish his kingdom by entering
history again and thus repeating in another mode his previous incarna
tion. The period after the End will belong to Christ.
In the "Nachschrift" Leverkühn-as-Christ would appear to be per
forming his eschatological function of inducing mythic regeneration and
bringing about a return after the farewell, the parting. Alienated from
himself, he yet seems to enact a mythic return to earth, to pastoral
simplicity; he becomes childlike again - an echo of Echo. If according
to Nietzsche, Beethoven's Ninth Symphony embodies one Dionysian and
Romantic unity, that of man with man, Leverkühn's last days appear to
celebrate the other such unity, that of man with nature: "die entfrem
dete, feindliche oder unterjochte Natur feiert wieder ihr Versöhungsfest
mit ihrem verlorenen Sohne, dem Menschen." •5
Explicitly an ecce-homo figure in his last decade, Leverkühn is, how
ever, less a Christ who has triumphed over Dionysus than a Christ crazed
by a Dionysian glimpse into the abyss. Like Kurtz in Conrad's Heart of
Darkness, he cannot psychologically survive his vision of "the horror" -
though Leverkühn, unlike Kurtz, does literally return home. If the
Leverkühn-Faust who writes the Weheklag breaks through, the Lever
kühn-Christ of the "Nachschrift" is broken through. His daemonic pos
session is the correlative of his divine inspiration, according to Tillich's
conception of religious "ecstasy": "Bessenheit und Begnadetheit ent
sprechen sich, dämonisches und göttliches überwältigtsein, Inspiriertsein,
Durchbrochensein sind Korrelate." 46
45 Nietzsche, Die Geburt der Tragödie, p. 52.
46 Tillich, Der Widerstreit uon Raum und Zeit, Gesammelte Werke, VI, 49.
The "Nachschrift," in fact, plays with the ideas of religious esctasy,

Romantic return, and religious redemption mockingly, ironically. Re
marking that his friend's hands lie "wie bei einer Grabfigur des Mittelal
ters, auf der Brust gekreuzt," Zeitblom exclaims: "Welch ein höhnisches
Spiel der Natur, so möchte man sagen, daß sie das Bild höchster
Vergeistigung erzeugen mag dort, wo der Geist entwichen istl" (675). The
entire proffering of a mythic return and redemption is "ein höhnisches
Spiel," designed to trap the unwary reader. The potential value of
Adrian's mythic ability to go home again is almost totally undercut by
his insanity and his apparent lack of awareness of the experience. Zeit
blom wants desperately to believe in the consolatory Apollonian illusion

that Leverkühn's existence is genuinely peaceful and idyllic and that
Leverkühn maintains some awareness of his state; but Zeitblom's efforts
are, as he seems to sense, only a veil to conceal the horrible truth:
Tief lagen die Augen in den Höhlen, die Brauen waren buschiger geworden,
und darunter hervor richtete das Phantom einen unsäglich ernsten, bis zur
Drohung forschenden Blick auf mich, der mich erbeben ließ, aber schon nach
einer Sekunde gleichsam in sich zusammenbrach, so, daß die Augäpfel sich
nach ober kehrten, halb unter den Lidern verschwanden und haltlos dort hin
und her irrten. (675)
Having been crucified with Christ, the Leverkühn of the "Nachschrift"

has become only a body, a vessel which would appear to contain the
spirit of Christ but ironically contains no spirit, no consciousness, no
individuality at all.
Mann's implication seems to be that even if modern man could succeed
in projecting and accepting a mythic return, he would have to lose not
only his paralyzing self-consciousness but even, as Leverkühn has, his
consciousness altogether. He would have to drink the Devil's mythic
elixir of primitivism indeed. Indirectly Christ's incarnation as Leverkühn
offers an ironically negative comment on the viability of the attempt
found in much of modern literature to posit a mythic redemption.47
The last paragraph of the novel, also eschatological, is strongly reminis
cent of the conclusion of Zeitblom's description of the Weheklag. Here
Mann raises the issue of the possibility of Romantic renewal in a
nationalistic as opposed to an aesthetic-religious context. Germany is
emblematized by an image combining Dionysus' glance into the abyss
with a figure from Michelangelo's "Last .Judgment":
47 lt may also imply a criticism of Mann's own portrayal of historico-mythic salvation

in Joseph und seine Brüder. The bankruptcy (Krida) of the Romantic circuitous return
may be suggested by the very name of the Kridwiss Kreis, which Zeitblom describes,
appropriately, between the two "end"-chapters on the Apocalypsis and many of whose
members ascribe to the idea of the identity of regression and progression.
Heute stürzt es, von Dämonen umschlungen, über einem Auge die Hand und
mit dem andern ins Grauen starrend, hinab von Verzweiflung zu Verweiflung.
Wann wird es des Schlundes Grund erreichen? Wann wird aur letzter Hoffnungs
losigkeit, ein Wunder, das über den Glauben geht, das Licht der Hoffnung
tagen? (676)
If the Romantic daemonism that is regenerative for art may be destructive

for human life, Mann becomes even more sceptical of its value for an
entire nation. Like the Faust of the cantata, he rejects easy redemption,
the assurance of the inevitability of Romantic return. Like the Lever
kühn of the "Abschied," "ein einsamer Mann" can only pray for mercy.
Nevertheless, Mann apparently wants to conceive the pattern of con

temporary German history as a decline into the bottom of an abyss, an
apocalyptic end, precisely because the abyss is so profound that some
movement upward must follow. (This historical logic is consonant with
the daemonic logic of the Christ-Faust polarity: utter negation implies
what it negates as its ground.) An even more disturbing possibility is
that Germany's collapse might be merely one of many relative ends and
that history itself might consist of an infinite series of unmythicized ends,
with no element of cyclical repetition; but the novel never raises this
possibility and Mann apparently prefers not to confront it. Himself
susceptible to the terror of history in the contemplation of Germany's
fall, Mann clings, despite his scepticism, to whatever remnants of the
Romantic model he can salvage.
Northwestern University

Gilliam 1977

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The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory

ISSN: 0016-8890 (Print) 1930-6962 (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/vger20

Mann’s Other Holy Sinner: Adrian Leverkühn as

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radikales Buch nicht irgendwie ins Religiöse reichen.

to examine - with his typically self-conscious, though hardly cold eye -

haustively documented that there seems no need to offer additional proof

connection may be the early reference to the prepubescent youth's being

his Judas, Rudi Schwerdtfeger. Immediately after his betrayal by Rudi,

also the mantle of Faust's Mephistophiles; and Leverkühn's self-sacri­

ecce-homo type whose derangement provides the pattern for Leverkühn's

In Der Zauberberg twenty years before, Mann had developed a similar

like Leverkühn's own Weheklag (648).

equated with the disintegration of an originally whole and unified

13 For a discussion of the circuitous journey in Romantic thought, see M. H. Abrams'

In Mann's book, similarly, Leverkühn finds an ideal way to manifest his

logical exploration of the subconscious.17 As a Dionysian glance into the

cleavage, a break with tradition and continuity. As Faust, Leverkühn

17 The descent is a striking manifestation of what Oswald Spengler, in his description

paradigm. Zeitblom, as narrator of Faustus, makes this conformity

gests that in Faustus Mann is calling attention to the parallel between

stresses, filled with intoxication, inspiration, unreßectiveness, enthusiasm.

in his art that he will be able to effect the break-through, to achieve a

in vain to describe to Leverkühn. Under one aspect Faust's hell sym­

distinguish it, and is in fact identical for Tillich with "enthusiasm,"

himself. As Christ harrowed hell by offering himself for hell, so God

The means for which Leverkühn sacrifices himself and by which he is

ist...." (324) This break-through, Leverkühn later makes clear, is an

turning-point m the logic of the Christ-Faust identity pattern. Clearly,

There is repetition here but it is one of rigid correspondence, enforced

rein," also sparkle with a "tiefen und neckischen" "Elfenspott" (611,

blom to invoke "eine Vorstellungssphäre des Mythisch-Zeitlosen, Gleich­

Weheklag to the Ninth Symphony and, by implication, to Romanticism

ness of an end is always qualified by the continuation of the historical

it cannot be saved by the ready and easy imposition of a transcendent

lt is this reconciling change that seems to suggest to Zeitblom a number

Faust-Christ relationship suggested in the cantata:

The passage is reminiscent of Kretzschmar's earlier reference to Beetho­

singing children who are reminiscent of the young children singing

The "Nachschrift," in fact, plays with the ideas of religious esctasy,

blom wants desperately to believe in the consolatory Apollonian illusion

Having been crucified with Christ, the Leverkühn of the "Nachschrift"

47 lt may also imply a criticism of Mann's own portrayal of historico-mythic salvation

If the Romantic daemonism that is regenerative for art may be destructive

Nevertheless, Mann apparently wants to conceive the pattern of con­

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also the mantle of Faust's Mephistophiles; and Leverkühn's self-sacri

in vain to describe to Leverkühn. Under one aspect Faust's hell sym

blom to invoke "eine Vorstellungssphäre des Mythisch-Zeitlosen, Gleich

The passage is reminiscent of Kretzschmar's earlier reference to Beetho

Nevertheless, Mann apparently wants to conceive the pattern of con