I suppose for my first entry in this new found blog I will discuss and analyze a tale that is dear to my heart, and that has fascinated me for years: Faust.
Certainly Goethe's Faust is the most famous of the Faust tellings, though in too many ways Goethe's Faust is more like Job (for this is true) than like the Antichrist. It was Marlow who rendered Faust as the Antichrist — very literally his Doctor Faust lived a life that was the exact opposite of Christ's. Certainly Thomas Mann was cognizant of this; which leads me to what I consider the greatest of the Faust legends: Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus.
Mann's Faust, a musician named Adrian Leverkühn, is modeled primarily off of the philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche. This is one reason for why I personally hold Mann's Doktor Faustus in a higher esteem than other tellings of Faust, for his melding of Faust with Nietzsche is not only well executed, but very clever. In addition to this, Mann's Doktor Faustus is very elegant in how he uses the tale of Faust to describe the state of the German people during World War II, i.e. Germany selling its soul to Hitler (Mann being an Exilliteratur writer — a German writer who fled Nazi Germany and dissented against the Nazi regime in his writings; as he was writing Doktor Faustus in the latter years of WWII and a few years past it).
But I wish to speak of Mann's very clever amalgamation of Nietzsche with Faust, for it is not only subtle, but well executed. There are, of course, all the obvious similarities: both Leverkühn and Nietzsche had fathers that died while they were still young; both studied theology and abandoned it to study with a professor in Leipzig (Nietzsche philology; Leverkühn music, though Nietzsche was also a music-lover and composer); both suffered life-long illnesses, headaches, nausea, eye soreness, et cetera; both contracted syphilis after they "accidentally" visited a brothel; both went mad and lived an additional eleven years under the care of each's sister; et cetera.
Beyond that there is his treatment of various character's names; names that are neither directly from the various Faust tales nor the life of Nietzsche, but oftentimes a strange combination of both, an etymological play, or derived and altered from a prominent German. Adrian's last name, Leverkühn, is a play on the German leben kühn, or "live boldly/dangerously" (a sort of motto of Nietzsche's). A very interesting use of name and character is Mann's use of Wagner, or lack there of. Richard Wagner was a mentor and father-figure to Nietzsche for some years; but Wagner is also the name of Faust's assistant; thus the two Wagners would be contradictory in their roles to each other. This is where I think Mann fails in some regards... how perfect it would have been to find a means to meld the two characters who also share the same name — unfortunately, there really is no character that is either like Richard Wagner or like Faust's assistant. I suspect Mann denounced Wagner as much a Nietzsche later did (I'm conjecturing), for Wagner was Antisemitic and a prototype for Hitler, and Mann and Nietzsche both regarded themselves as anti-Antisemitic. Mann even excludes a very large and influential portion of what would have been Nietzsche's life in Tribschen, where Nietzsche spent much of his time with the composer and his wife (I mean Wagner's wife, as Nietzsche never married... which brings me to Lou Salomé).
Serving two masters is something addressed in both Marlow and Goethe's Faust tales: since Faust has signed his soul to the Devil, he may not marry, for marriage is a covenant between two people under God; thus serving two masters. This is why Faust asks for Helen of Troy to be his consort and whore in Marlow's telling, and Gretchen is killed in Goethe's tale. Likewise, Adrian seeks to marry a woman, Ines Rodde, who is based on Lou Salomé. Adrian asks a friend to convey his wish to marry Ines, but Ines instead marries the messenger. Lou Salomé said that Nietzsche had asked her to marry him through his friend, Paul Rée, the psychologist, which she declined; she also claimed that Rée had also asked for her hand in marriage and also declined. Binion actually demonstrates that this was a lie Salomé told, for she desired both men, though neither ever actually asked her. Mann, however, would not have been aware of this, as he held Bertram's biography on Nietzsche above all others, and Bertram does relate Salomé's telling of Nietzsche's proposal to her. Nonetheless, it seems acceptable for Mann to use this falsehood for the sake of conveying the forbidden "serving two masters".
The last real comparison and analysis that is very well executed is the Antichrist theme. Nietzsche often referred to himself as "The Antichrist", as well as it was the title of the first part of an unfinished book; he also called himself an "Immoralist" and denounced all notions of good and evil and Judaic-Christian morality. So was Faust an Antichrist, living the exact opposite of the life of Christ: Christ was tempted by the Devil and declined, where Faust was tempted and accepted; Christ had wine with his closest friends (the Apostles) on his last night, as did Faust; but Christ did not wish to be alone and wanted someone to watch over him while he prayed, while Faust wanted to be alone and told his friends to go to bed and not worry about a thing; Christ went to Heaven and Faust went to Hell. Adrian Leverkühn does the same thing, gathering his friends for one last supper to drink wine, and told them he told he sold his soul to the Devil; then he collapsed and went insane. The parallel between Nietzsche and Leverkühn that I most enjoy is their last works: Nietzsche's last publication was called Ecce Homo ("This is the Man", a reference to John XIX:5 when Pontius Pilate presents Jesus to the Jews for execution), his autobiography. Clearly Nietzsche is continuing his Antichrist theme by mockingly identifying himself as Christ — he was known for calling himself Dionysus, especially when signing letters. Likewise, Adrian's last musical composition was called The Lamentation of Doctor Faust, clearly carrying on the Antichrist theme and referencing himself as a Faustian man; in other words, an autobiography.
I would not be the first to say that Nietzsche was a man of extraordinary character. He was regularly sick, "...uninterrupted three-day headache accompanied by the laborious vomiting of phlegm... No one has ever been able to diagnose fever in me" (EH §1), and yet he went on to write five books in six months, a couple of which were penned in just a couple of weeks. He certainly was of such physically weak but mentally stern character that it seems to be no wonder at all that Mann would find Nietzsche be of such extraordinary character that the man seemed to belong more in the realm of fiction than reality.
Certainly there is more to Mann's Doktor Faustus than these few simple things: it is a critique of art, music, psychology, the state and mind of the German people, the German spirit, what it is to be German, and some more stuff about Germany. Of course one could filter the work through Mann's Exilliteratur spirit and a criticism of Germany selling its soul to Hitler, something William McDonald addresses several times in his Thomas Mann's Joseph and His Brothers. But this and what I have written is an aspect of Mann's telling of Faust that I do not think gets enough admiration.
Further reading:
Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. Knopf, Inc. 1948.
Kaufmann, Walter. Nietzsche: Philosopher, Psychologist, Antichrist. Princeton University Press. 1950.
Nietzsche, Friedrich. Ecce Homo: How One Becomes What One Is. 1908.
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