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Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
Borzoi edition published by Alfred A, Knopf, Inc. 1947
Chapter I
The subject of the book is the composer Adrian Leverkuhn, Lutheran, who died in 1940. Written in Freising on the Isar 27 May 1943 by a childhood friend of Leverkuhn. He describes himself:
p3 I am by nature wholly moderate, of a temper, I may say, both healthy and humane, addressed to reason and harmony; a scholar and conjuratus [sworn member (here: someone who knows Latin] of the “latin host,” [Roman Catholic?] ...
p4 ...the daemonic, little as I presume to deny its influence upon human life, I have at all times found utterly foreign to my nature. Instinctively I have rejected it from my picture of the cosmos and never felt the slightest inclination rashly to open the door to the powers of darkness...
He equates Nazism with the powers of darkness and resigned his teaching position as a result.
...it cannot be denied (and has never been) that the daemonic and irrational have a disquieting share in this radiant sphere [musical genius]. We shudder as we realize that a connection subsists between it and the neither world, and that the reassuring epitheta which I sought to apply [“genius”] “sane, noble, harmonious, humane,” do not for that reason quite fit... even when they are applied to a pure and genuine, God-given, or shall I say God-inflicted genius, and not to an acquired kind, the sinful and morbid corruption of natural gifts, the issue of a horrible bargain. . . .
The first real hint of where this is leading.
p5 ...the distinction between pure and impure genius...
Chapter II
p7 Narrator is Serenus Zeitblom, Ph.D. RC, 60, born Kaisersaschern on the Saale. “Semi-professional middle class” father an apothecary.
p8 ...I like to compare the Reformation to a bridge, which leads not only from scholastic times to our world of free thought, but also and equally back into the Middle Ages, or perhaps even further, as a Christian-Catholic tradition of a serene love of culture, untouched by churchly schism. For my part I feel very at home in that golden sphere where one called the Holy Virgin Jovis alma parens. [god as a nourishing parent]
And a hint of what Mann is actually interested in here.
p9 This is a marginal note. And yet not so marginal; since it is very pertinent to my theme, indeed only too much so, to inquire whether a clear and certain line can be drawn between the noble pedagogic world of the mind and that world of the spirit which one approaches only at one’s peril. What sphere of human endeavor, even the most unalloyed, the most dignified and benevolent, would be entirely inaccessible to the influence of the powers of the underworld, yes, one must add, quite independent of the need of fruitful contact with them? This thought, not unbecoming even in a man whose personal nature lies remote from everything daemonic, has remained to me from certain moments of that year and a half spent by me in visiting Italy and Greece... I experienced by divination the rich feeling of life which expresses itself in the initiate veneration of Olympic Greece for the deities of the depths; often, later on, I explained to my pupils that culture is in very truth the pious and regulating, I might say propitiatory entrance of the dark and uncanny into the service of the gods.
And now a Dionysian theme from both The Birth of Tragedy and The Magic Mountain comes in.
p10 Zeitblom married a woman named Helene and they named their daughter Helene as well. ...I will confess that the Christian name of the budding girl, Helene, those beloved syllables, played not the least considerable role in my choice. Such a name means a consecration, to its pure enchantment one cannot fail to respond, even though the outward appearance of the bearer correspond to its lofty claims only to a modest middle-class extent and even that but for a time, since the charms of youth are fleeting.
Helen, or Helena, (Helen of Troy) is a crucial character in Part 2 of Goethe’s Faust -- though, just like Clavdia in The Magic Mountain, she eventually vanishes and is never mentioned again.
Chapter III
Adrian’s father Jonathan interested in the natural sciences -- biology, crystals, insects -- especially clearwing butterflies...
Chapter IV
His mother, Elsbeth. a brunette. Cow-girl Hanne, who taught them to sing rounds. Adrian later in life finds a substitute (in Bavaria near the Starnberger See) for the family home (near Leipzig in Saxony).
Chapter V
p 30 ... It would seem only too advisable here to inquire how the reader’s patience is holding out. To myself, of course every word I write is of burning interest...
p 31 ... I would not even suppress my suspicion, held on psychological grounds, that I actually seek digressions and circumlocutions, or at least welcome with alacrity any occasion for such, because I am afraid of what is coming. I lay before the reader a testimony to my good faith in that I give space to the theory that I make difficulties because I secretly shrink from the task which, urged by love and duty, I have undertaken... it was at about his fourteenth year, at the time of beginning puberty, and so at the end of the period of childhood, in the house of his uncle at Kaisersaschern, that he began of his own motion to experiment on the piano. And it was at this time that the inherited [from his father] migraine began to give him bad days.
Chapter VI
p36 ...the place [the fictional Kaisersaschern] seemed to wear on its brow that famous formula of timelessness, the scholastic nunc stans...[the everlasting now (an eternal instant that has no temporality)]
This much of the scene itself [following a description of Kaisersaschern during their youth]. But something still hung on the air from the spiritual constitution of the men of the last decades of the fifteenth century: a morbid excitement, a metaphysical epidemic latent since the last years of the Middle Ages. This was a practical, rational modern town. -- Yet no, it was not modern, it was old; and age is past as presentness, a past merely overlaid with presentness. Rash it may be to say so, but here one could imagine strange things: as for instance a movement for a children’s crusade might break out; a St. Vitus’s dance [Syndenham’s chorea (a nervous disorder, once thought to be caused by evil spirits)]; some wandering lunatic with communistic visions, preaching a bonfire of the vanities ; miracles of the Cross, fantastic and mystical folk-movements -- things like these, one felt, might easily come to pass... Our time itself tends, secretly -- or rather anything but secretly; indeed, quite consciously, with a strangely complacent consciousness... it tends, I say, to return to those earlier epochs; it enthusiastically re-enacts symbolic deeds of sinister significance, deeds that strike in the face the spirit of the modern age, such, for instance, as the burning of the books and other things of which I prefer not to speak.
A quick search to see if I could find an actual German city that served as model for Kaisersashern (I couldn’t) turned up this instead from The Cambridge Introduction to Thomas Mann by Todd Kontje (I’m surprised Mann never had a character named Todd since tod is death):
By his own admission, Thomas Mann was a terrible student. He was held back to repeat a grade three times... he never took the... comprehensive examination that qualifies German students for university attendance. Lack of intelligence was not to blame. Mann found his teachers arrogant and stupid, and the stress on military uniforms and physical prowess distasteful. One of his former fellow students recalled that Mann practiced a kind of passive resistance in his physical education class, symbolically touching the gymnastic apparatus with his fingertips with a look of withering disdain. The aloof posture of the privileged senator's son masked a shyness that further distanced him from teachers he could not respect and students who either repulsed him with their coarse vitality or aroused clandestine homosexual desires. By the time he graduated at the age of nineteen... Mann had long since given up on the school, and the school had given up on him.
As a result, Mann became a lifelong autodidact. His earliest readings included Greek and Roman mythology, the Iliad, and a book about the Egyptian pyramids; as he later recalled, he was never interested in adventure novels...
Well, all that makes sense.
p37 The stamp of old-world, underground neurosis which I have been describing, the mark and psychological temper of such a town, betrays itself in Kaisersaschern by the many “originals,” eccentrics, and harmless half-mad folk who live within its walls and, like the old buildings, belong to the picture. The pendant to them is formed by the children, the “young ‘uns,” who pursue the poor creatures, mock them, and then in superstitious panic run away...
Here let me be bold enough to express an opinion born of the experiences of our own time. To a friend of enlightenment the word and conception “the folk” has always something anachronistic and alarming about it; he [Hitler?] knows that you need only tell a crowd they are “the folk” to stir them up to all sorts of reactionary evil. What all has not happened before our eyes -- or just not quite before our eyes -- in the name of “the folk,” though it could never have happened in the name of God or humanity or the law! But it is the fact that actually the folk remain the folk, at least in a certain stratum of its being... I speak of the folk; but this old, folkish layer survives in us all, and to speak as I really think, I do not consider religion the most adequate means of keeping it under lock and key. For that, literature alone avails, humanistic science, the ideal of the free and beautiful human being.
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