Thomas Mann's Artist-Heroes

Chapter Nine. Dürer and Doctor Faustus

141 CHAPTER NINE Dürer and Doctor Faustus In Doctor Faustus Mann re-creates the German myth of the artist destroyed by a demonic pact, and uses a number of historical and cultural parallels to give substance to his fictional characters. The novel is like an ancient palimpsest with multiple layers of meaning: Faustian myth, Lutheran theology, Shakespearean parody, Nietzschean pathology, Schönberg ’s music theory, Mann’s autobiography and Nazi history all coalesce into the complex totality of the work. Though the focus of the novel is on the doomed Adrian Leverkühn, the artist is placed against the background of the past and present history of Germany, which reveals striking parallels between the Reformation and Nazism. The controlling device of the novel is analogy, which often develops through irony into a complicated parody. Mann explains his use of analogy when, paraphrasing Lessing’s Laocoön, he writes, “Although aesthetics may insist that literary and musical works, in contradistinction to the plastic arts, are dependent upon time and succession of events, it is nevertheless true that even such works strive at every moment to be present as a whole.”1 The method of Adrian’s music teacher, Wendell Kretschmar, who likes “to make comparisons and discover relations, display influences, lay bare the interwoven connections of culture,” illuminates this difficult novel.2 Mann uses Albrecht Dürer’s art, especially Melencolia (1514) and The Martyrdom of St. John the Evangelist (1498), to reveal the mythical, theological , biographical, musical and historical meaning of the novel. Dürer’s art relates Adrian to Nietzsche and to Luther; connects him to the frenzied world of the German Reformation; portrays the medieval atmosphere of Adrian’s life; influences the physical characterization of his friends; and depicts the themes of artistic sterility, demonic suffering and apocalyptic destruction. In his essay “Dürer” (1928) Mann foreshadows the mood and tone of Doctor Faustus and writes that the artist represents the medieval, German atmosphere of “passion, odour of the tomb, sympathy with suffering, Faustian melancholia.”3 Mann anticipates his own allegorical treatment of this morbid theme in his description of German art as “perversely scrupulous , daemonic and ribald at once, sick with infinity. . . . Its pedantry, its philistinism, its self-torment, its anxious calculation, its laborious introspection . . . means history as myth.”4 Erwin Panofsky’s description of Dürer’s method, which combines the contemporary and the universal, applies to the novelist as well as to the painter: “He could plunge into folklore and into the news of the day; he could contrive unusual variations on historical or mythological themes and could think up brand-new inventions of a symbolic or allegorical character.”5 In The Birth of Tragedy, Nietzsche describes Dürer’s engraving of Knight, Death and the Devil (1513): “One who is disconsolate and lonely could not choose a better symbol than the knight with death and the devil, as Dürer has drawn him for us, the armoured knight with the iron, hard look, who knows how to pursue his terrible path, undeterred by his gruesome companions, and yet without hope, alone with his horse and dog.”6 For Nietzsche, Dürer’s allegorical knight is a pictorial representation of the courageous and solitary Zarathustran hero. Mann writes in his essay on Dürer that “Nietzsche was the medium through which I learned to know Dürer’s world,” and to Mann, Dürer’s knight symbolizes Nietzsche’s (and therefore Adrian’s) struggle with demonic madness and disease. Mann links Dürer’s and Nietzsche’s treatment of the Apocalypse theme when he maintains that both artists represent “the German world, with all its vaulting self-dramatization, its enthralling intellectualistic climax and dissolution at the end.”7 This engraving relates Dürer not only to Nietzsche but also to the contemporary adversaries Luther and Erasmus. Panofsky says that “grieved and incensed by the unfounded rumours of Luther’s assassination, Dürer jotted down . . . a magnificent outburst against the Papists which culminates in a passionate appeal to Erasmus of Rotterdam: ‘. . . Hark, thou Knight of Christ, ride forth at the side of Christ our Lord, protect the truth, obtain the crown of the Martyrs.’”8 But like Erasmus, who ignored 142 chapter nine Dürer’s invocation and remained hostile to Luther, Mann does not share Dürer’s enthusiasm for the great reformer: “I frankly confess that I do not love him...