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Why is Zeitblom a Catholic? Reflections on
Thomas Mann's Novel Doktor Faustus
-by John Whiton
University of Waterloo (Canada)
Was the Nazi era an aberration or the logical consequence of modern German
history? Thomas Mann fears it was the latter, for he draws a linefromLuther
to German Romanticism, Wagner, Nietzsche, and Hitler. But buried beneath
this predominant strand is the older, humane tradition of Erasmian Christian
Humanism which Mann urges his compatriots to reclaim via the novel's
Catholic narrator, an anti-Nazi classical scholar and teacher. And reclaim it
they did, for in 1949, two years after the appearance of Dr. Faustus, the
Federal Republic was founded on Christian principles and led for most of its
50-year life by the Catholic CDU party and its statesmen Konrad Adenauer
and Helmut Kohl. Some serious reservations notwithstanding, Mann would
have applauded the accomplishments of these two statesmen.
Thomas Mann (1875-1954), Nobel laureate for literature in 1929, is
generally considered to be the greatestGerman author of the twentieth century.
The consensus is also that The Magic Mountain and Doktor Faustus are his
greatest achievements in the realm of the novel, while his novella Death in
Venice has long since become a world classic. Doktor Faustus was written
during the last years of World War II and the immediate post-war period, while
its author was living in exile from Nazi Germany in a suburb of Los Angeles.
The novel is Mann's painful attempt to confront Nazism, to explain to himself
and to his compatriots how it could be that Germany—Germany! that so highly
educated and cultured nation—could have succumbed to such a vicious form of
fascism. Was it an aberration? Or was there something in the German
character, as formed by its history, that predisposed the Germans to political
evil of this type?
The book is a fascinating conflation of the Faust legend on the one hand
(including its famous pact with the devil and the late medieval atmosphere in
which the historical Faust lived, with its witch hunts, burnings-at-the-stake,
superstitions, alchemy, astrology and magic) with the biography of Friedrich
Nietzsche on the other—all projected onto the backdrop of German social and
intellectual history (in the broadest sense) from the late nineteenth century to
1945. And hovering over it all are the ghosts of two of Doctor Faust's most
prominent contemporaries, Luther and Erasmus. A very complex web indeed.
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And all the more so since Mann does not speak to us directly in the pages of his
work, but interposes, rather, a fictitious narrator to tell the tale in the first
person, and from his own particular point of view.
Ostensibly what we are presented with is this narrator's biography of his
deceased friend, the composer Adrian Leverkiihn, who died, like his model
Nietzsche, in hopeless insanity, a madness caused by advanced syphilis,
deliberately contracted and left to run its course untreated, because disease, as
the German Romanticists taught, is the catalyst of artistic inspiration.
Of course, the novel is an elaborate parable, operating on several levels
simultaneously. Adrian Leverkiihn stands for Germany, and since that
country's culture, with its strong folksong tradition and lieder, with its great
luminaries from Gluck, Handel and Bach, through Haydn and Mozart to
Beethoven, Schubert, Schumann, Mendelssohn, and Brahms, to, for Thomas
Mann above all, Wagner, but also Bruckner, Mahler and Richard Strauss, is
preeminently musical, Leverkiihn must be a composer, the quintessentially
German mode of being a creative genius. Perhaps it is not unimportant to
mention, as an aside, that the music Leverkiihn composes is that of Arnold
Schonberg and his twelve-tone system, which Mann learned about in sessions
with the German-Jewish philosopher and musicologist Theodor WiesengrundAdorno, who was sharing Californian exile with Mann and many other German
artists and intellectuals (there was a large German colony in Los Angeles during
the war).
As we saw, Leverkiihn's inspiration is bought at a price. His contraction
of syphilis is, in terms of the parable Mann is telling, Adrian's pact with the
devil (even though there is a real pact scene in the novel, replete with a Satanic
apparition which, on the realistic plane, seems to be a figment of the
composer's fevered brain), and this, in turn, stands for Germany's own devil's
pact, its embracing of Hitler and his minions. Adrian's insanity of course
stands for Germany's mass psychosis during the Nazi years. It is interesting
also to note that according to the terms of the pact, Adrian is forbidden to love.
This, too, has its parallel in the hatred of the Nazis for the Jews, the Slavic
peoples, socialists, and - last but not least - the Catholic Church.
Where does the narrator fit in in this parabolic scheme? To answer that
question would be to divulge prematurely the whole point of these remarks.
But we can say at this juncture that two salient components of the narrator's
being are of signal importance, and, strange to say, these are aspects which have
been largely ignored in the voluminous critical literature on this novel. Perhaps
this is because the significance of the narrator as a person, his place in Mann's
parable, has been left unexamined. The reason for this oversight could simply
be that Zeitblom's presence is so ubiquitous that it is easy to forget he is there.
To be omnipresent, paradoxically, is to be absent in a sense. But what are these
two preeminent components that define the narrator? He is a Catholic and he
is a humanist (in the old sense of that word). That is to say, he is a student of
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the humanities, more precisely, of the classics, of the literature of ancient
Greece and Rome. As such, he expounds one of the bases of Western
civilization. Catholicism and Humanism, Jerusalem and Athens (or Rome),
two of the legs of the tripod upon which, according to the German way of
thinking at any rate, Western civilization stands. The third leg comprises the
Germanic element, due to the fact that the nations of western Europe are an
amalgam of the old Celto-Roman and Italic populations and their Teutonic
conquerers during the barbarian invasions of the fifth and sixth centuries, be
they Anglo-Saxons or Franks, Goths, Lombards, Burgundians, Vandals or
Vikings. Under the aegis of the Church, whose historic mission it was to
conquer the conquerers, to baptize them and bring them into Western
civilization, the three elements, the three legs of the tripod, were kept stable in
a harmony within which the great medieval synthesis epitomized by the gothic
cathedrals and the achievement of St. Thomas Aquinas, could flourish. This
delicate balance was upset by Martin Luther and the Protestant Revolt, the socalled Reformation, and Western civilization has never recovered its
equilibrium.
To be specific we must call to mind certain unsavory aspects of Martin
Luther and his teachings. He taught the total depravity of man, denied free will,
and called Reason a whore. He was a German nationalist and rabid anti-Semite
who urged that synagogues and Jewish books be burned and Jews killed or
driven out of Germany. He hated Rome and the Pope and the Church founded
on the rock of Peter. He preached ruthless brutality during the Peasant Wars
and urged the nobility to cut down the insurgents like mad dogs. He sanctioned
the bigamy of the Landgrave of Hesse and taught that marriage was neither a
Christian bond nor a sacrament. He was stubborn, arrogant and self righteous
in his claim that his understanding of the gospel ("sola fide" and "sola
scriptura") was the only correct one in the face of all the fathers and doctors of
the Church, Papal authority, and fifteen-hundred years of Catholic teaching and
sacred tradition. Supported as he was by greedy and ambitious princes in revolt
against the temporal and religious authority of the Holy Roman Empire in order
to further their own selfish interests at the expense of the common good, how
could a man such as this not but have a baneful influence on German culture?
To return to our tripod metaphor, Luther in effect cut off one of its legs, the
classical Athens-Rome one, radically shortened another, the "Jerusalem leg" by
dint of his new truncated version of Christianity with its two "solas", and
lengthened the third, the "Teutonic leg", with his German nationalism.
Christendom was split asunder, and Germany subjected to seventy years of
religious wars, political and social strife and upheaval from which it in a sense
has never recovered.
Attempts were made in the late eighteenth century during the
Enlightenment and the brief period of German Classicism under Goethe and
Schiller, to reestablish the rule of Reason, cosmopolitanism, and the connection
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to the golden age of Greece and Rome, but these efforts were pagan in
sentiment, and largely rationalistic. In any case, they soon succumbed to the
inexorable onslaught of German Romanticism with its emphasis on the
irrational, on German ethnicity, and on a pantheistic fascination with death as
a release of the soul from the curse of individuation and its return to the All like
a droplet falling back into the sea. With a strong boost from Richard Wagner,
Romanticism can be said to have lasted right down to the destruction of
Germany in the Gotterdammerung of 1945.
Thus it is that Thomas Mann sees a tragic line in German history running
from Luther via German Romanticism, Wagner and Nietzsche straight to Hitler
and the Nazis. This is the sense in which the ghost of the reformer of
Wittenberg can be said to haunt the novel. Even down to the not insignificant
detail that Adrian Leverkiihn studies Lutheran theology at Halle under
Professor Ehrenfried Kumpf, a caricature of Doktor Martinus himself, before
taking up music as a profession.
But what about that other ghost who also hovers over the novel? What
about Erasmus? This brings us back to our narrator who explicitly identifies
himself with the sage of Rotterdam. He is Doktor Serenus Zeitblom, a teacher
of classics at a humanistisches Gymnasium in a Bavarian town not far from
Munich. He has taken early retirement rather than compromise his principles
and conform his lectures to Nazi ideology. He has withdrawn completely from
public life as so many German intellectuals did during Hitler's rule as a way of
preserving one's integrity in the face of the demands of an evil totalitarian
regime. Zeitblom has gone into what is called the "innere Emigration" (interior
or inner emigration) from where he can observe and contemplate—and write his
friend's biography.
Zeitblom, like his ideal Erasmus, is a Christian humanist. His
omnipresence in the novel as the narrator, whose voice we hear on every page,
is a constant, if subtle, reminder that there does exist in the German tradition
another strand, a line different from the one we have delineated above, from
Luther to Romanticism, Wagner and Nietzsche to Hitler and disaster. This
alternative line, to put it mildly, has not been the mainstream of German culture
since the sixteenth century. It has been forgotten, buried, overshadowed by the
predominant Protestant ethos of modern Germany, especially in its Prussian
manifestation. But it does exist, it can be rediscovered. And it is the only
viable alternative, Mann seems to be saying, to the catastrophic path Germany
has tread since the 95 theses were nailed to the church door in Wittenberg on
October 31, the Eve of All Saints' Day, in the year of our Lord 1517.
What are some of the features of this alternative path? Instead of narrow
and belligerent nationalism, for instance, there can be a cosmopolitanism which
is at the same time suffused with true patriotism and love of one's homeland.
And over against rationalism or its opposite, a solipsistic subjectivism and
relativism, into which modern culture has fallen as if out of the frying pan into
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the fire, there stand the alternatives of recte ratio, right reason, and the natural
law. Dare one say also, since Erasmus and Zeitblom are Catholics, that Thomas
Mann is telling us that instead of the shallow and self-contradictory "solas"
("sola fide" is self-contradictory because faith, as an assent of the intellect
prompted by an act of the will is a work, and because "sola scriptura" is an
extra-biblical principle not found in scripture) - dare one say that instead of
Protestantism, Mann, via Erasmus and Zeitblom, is urging a return to the
Church in a formal sense? No. Mann, the nominal Lutheran Protestant, was
probably not thinking of Catholicism in a dogmatic, theological way. But he
was thinking of Catholic culture, of beauty and art, of Catholic morality, of life,
and love, and of family and humaneness and charitableness and kindness. And
these values he associated with Erasmus, not Luther. Luther or Erasmus: either
a return to Christian humanism or a descent to barbarism - these seemed to
Mann to be the choices set before the German nation. The tragic line ending in
the debacle of 1945 is not the only road open to the German people. There is
the alternative path of Erasmian Christian humanism. That this benevolent
ethos is Catholic in nature and spirit, Mann was, of course, well aware.
Erasmus never left the Church as did Luther. Erasmus never preached violence
or hatred as did his counterpart in Wittenberg. By making his narrator a
Catholic, a Christian humanist and an admirer of Erasmus, Mann is simply
telling his German readers that they can renounce the dark side of their history
and its cult of death if they would but return to their older, Catholic roots which
would link them to their broader European heritage now buried under Nazi
chauvinism and racism. That such a return is possible and beneficial is
embodied and proven in the figure of Zeitblom who is able to preserve his
innocence and integrity in spite of the Nazis, and who is as impervious to
Hitler's blandishments as were many of his co-religionists and contemporaries
who listened to the Church and heeded Pius XI' s anti-Nazi encyclical Mit
brennender Sorge, written in German rather than Latin (something absolutely
unheard of) so as to underscore the urgency of the Holy Father's message to the
German people.
As a German, and classical scholar and humanist, and as a Catholic,
Zeitblom epitomizes European civilization, that stable tripod with its Teutonic
heritage, of course, but also with its feet planted firmly in the soil of classical
Greece, and the Rome of the popes.
It has now been more than fifty years since the publication of Doktor
Faustus. What has recent history to tell us about Germany's path since 1945?
The Federal Republic was founded in 1949, two years after the appearance of
Mann's novel, on solidly Christian principles under the influence of the
Catholic Konrad Adenauer and his Catholic political party, the CDU (Christian
Democratic Union)—the successor of the old Zentrum party, founded in 1870
in response to Bismark's Kulturkampf. It was Adenauer and his Catholic
finance minister Ludwig Ehrhard, whose concept of soziale Marktwirtschaft
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(social capitalism) was based on the papal social encyclicals, who set the tone
for much that was to follow during their long initial reign from 1949 to 1963,.
They made generous restitution, as far as was possible, to the victims of Nazism
and their families, including substantial reparation payments to Israel, and they
planted Germany firmly among the Western democracies where it has thrived
and become a respected and leading member of the emerging European Union.
For the overwhelming majority of contemporary Germans, Nazism is dead and
utterly discredited, as is the extreme nationalism which was its keynote. Under
Adenauer's successor, the Catholic Helmut Kohl leading the CDU, Germany
was reunited without violence or bloodshed—a modern miracle—and without
upsetting or frightening any of her many neighbours. She is seen today as a
benign country and a threat to no one. Of all this Zeitblom could be pleased.
If we were to allow him the same eighty-year lifespan as his creator Mann,
Zeitblom (born in 1883) would have died in 1963, coincidentally the very year
Adenauer left office, just in time to escape witnessing what has, since the
turbulent decade of the sixties, become of Germany (and all of Western society
for that matter). It has become decidedly secularized and "post-Christian".
Germany today is afflicted by consumerism, the contraceptive mentality, and
the radical secularization of intellectual life. German Catholics in particular are
plagued by the latter malaise through a virulent form of neo-Modernism which
is decimating the Church. After an auspicious new beginning (1949-1963), the
future again looks grim, as Germany seems to have turned away once again
from the Catholic heritage urged upon it by Mann via Serenus Zeitblom.
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