Current State of Research

Liselotte Voss, noting in 1975 a growing scholarly interest in Mann’s Doktor Faustus, lists the following major areas of inquiry pertaining to the novel which still reflect major lines in a currently highly active area of research: Thomas Mann’s relation to Germany and Germans, the role of music in the novel, the role of Nietzsche, disease, the novel understood as portrait of an artist, and its relation to Spies’s Historia and Goethe’s Faust (Voss 1975, pp. 2-3). Voss’s study is an elaboration on several of these points, based on material made available through the opening of the Mann archives in Zürich in 1961. She notes that interpretations of the work as a whole tend to regard it as a summary of all themes treated by Thomas Mann in his previous works, with, according to these interpreters, limited success:

In den meisten Gesamtdarstellungen wird der ‘Doktor Faustus’ als eine Zusammenfassung aller Themen des Autors betrachtet, wobei die

Geglücktheit des Unternehmens allerdings zuweilen in Zweifel gezogen wird.

(Voss 1975, p. 2)

Jürgen H. Petersen (2007) is a more recent example of a scholar who has set out to prove that Doktor Faustus is characterised by its failure to adequately express the ideas that Mann attempted to incorporate into it.²⁰⁸ Regardless of whether it is true

208 Mann indicates in his Entstehung that the “essential” in his novel’s presentation of Adrian Leverkühn’s oratorio is a criticism of both sanguine barbarism and bloodless intellectualism (Mann 2009, p. 121). Petersen quotes this section, and then uncompromisingly states: “Nein, das ist dem

that the book is a summation of all themes Mann has treated throughout his literary career, and regardless of its merit in this respect, the novel does contain a large number of thematic and motivic strands that tie into Mann’s previous works.²⁰⁹ Regarding Doktor Faustus as the culmination of Mann’s vast array of themes may serve as an explanation for its seemingly inexhaustible range of interpretative possibilities.

In this study’s reading of Spies’s Historia, it was discovered that the pact motif is the driving force in the narrative. In Mann’s novel, this is no less true: The pact motif ties together the thematic and motivic multitude in the work. The pact is fascistic Germany’s historical pact,²¹⁰ it is the source of Leverkühn’s musical inspiration, the cause of his Nietzschean disease, and it is the primary link to the Historia. This covers all of Liselotte Voss’s identified themes of study, and commentators often cite the pact in their various approaches to the novel. While at first glance it may seem that this study falls securely within the last of Voss’s

Dichter ganz und gar nicht gelungen. Was immer Zeitblom dem Leser als Element des Barbarischen beschreibt, führt nicht dazu, das ganze Oratorium ‘dem Vorwurf des blutigen Barbarismus’

auszusetzen, und nichts und niemand vermittelt uns den Eindruck, in Leverkühns Oratorium walte zudem ‘blutloser Intellektualismus’. Die Diskrepanz zwischen Manns Vorhaben und dessen Ausführung im Roman dringt vielleicht nirgends so nachdrücklich ins Bewusstsein wie hier”

(Petersen 2007, p. 43).

209 A clear line can, for example, be drawn back to one of Mann’s earliest publications, the short story “Der Kleine Herr Friedemann” (1897), which chronicles a misshapen man who attempts to seek refuge from carnal desire in art and music, and who ends up drowning himself when he is rejected and ridiculed by the beautiful, and demonically red-haired, Gerda von Rinnlingen. The short story is a brilliantly humorous, and painfully scathing, mockery of the idea that it is possible to subdue the carnal aspects of human existence by recourse to art and social decorum; in other words, one might say that the Dionysian principle breaks through into the Apollonian constructs of little mister Friedemann’s world view (cf. 4.3.), and this is indeed precisely what Herbert Lehner (1968) says: He sees the structure of the short story to be commanded by the duality of the Dionysian and the Apollonian, and sees the misshapen man’s tragedy to be born of the spirit of music: “Die hauptsächliche strukturelle Beziehung ist beeinflußt von dem Dualismus des Apollinischen und Dionysischen (...). Seine Tragödie wird sozusagen aus dem Geiste der Musik geboren (...)” (Lehner 1968, p. 48). In this sentence from Lehner’s article, Friedemann’s name could be construed as completely interchangeable with Leverkühn’s.

210 From Zeitblom’s Nachwort: “Deutschland, die Wangen hektisch gerötet, taumelte dazumal auf der Höhe wüster Triumphe, im Begriffe, die Welt zu gewinnen kraft des einen Vertrages, den es zu halten gesonnen war, und den es mit seinem Blute gezeichnet hatte.” (MDF, p. 738)

overarching categories, the novel’s relation to Spies and Goethe, it may in fact encompass all of them. The current object of study is the centre-piece in the book.

The pact motif opens up several paths to a researcher with an interest in Thomas Mann: Comparative within Mann’s oeuvre; comparative outside of it; any number of thematical approaches; character studies; theories and histories of music, literature and art; political interpretations; and narratological approaches. Far from

discouraging a comprehensive study of the pact motif in Mann’s Doktor Faustus, this insight demonstrates the absolute need for such a study. Researchers and

commentators diligently cite the pact motif in their various approaches to these and other research questions, more often than not off-handedly rejecting the presence of any “real” or “plausible” pact,²¹¹ yet it is quite apparent that a much deeper

understanding of the pact’s form and function in the novel is needed.

The isolation of the pact motif from other motivic and thematic strands is a significantly less tidy operation than it was in Parts Two and Three of this study, but, nonetheless, it may be turned into a manageable problematic by identifying the main points of contention with regard to the pact motif. This means that primarily, this study touches on two histories of Mann research, which certainly intertwine, but which each have their own set of questions and topoi: His novel’s relation to tradition, particularly the works of Goethe and the unidentified man from Speyer, from whom he may have adopted the Faust material, and the status of the pact motif in his work. These two areas will be treated separately in the following exposition of the current state of research, eventually being tied together by virtue of certain blind spots that may still be discovered in Mann scholarship.

211 Ball (1986), Petersen (2007), Sorvakko-Spratte (2008). These are discussed in detail in 4.1.2.