![]() ![]() ![]() Despairing that nothing remains in heaven or earth of which he has not already dreamt, the scholar Faust sells his soul to Mephistopheles-the Devil’s messenger or guise-in exchange for knowledge and power. The legend of Faust is born of the Western ambivalence toward individual responsibility. In 2016, Mann’s depiction of swelling diabolism felt startlingly familiar. Set during the 1920s and ’30s in Germany, Doctor Faustus captures the arc of Hitler’s rise to power. Far from coincidence, this misattribution reflects Mann’s ability to cross the boundaries of time. During the Nuremberg Trials, the Chief Prosecutor for the UK quoted as authentic words from the fictional Goethe of Mann’s Lotte in Weimar (1939). I am not the first to have confused the two authors. I’d bought the book by mistake several years prior, thinking it was Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s version-that is, the seminal German Faust. I began reading Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend (1947), in mid-2016, casually. ![]()
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