"Know, then," said he, at the table, "ye good and godly folk" (he said 'god and goodly'), "with your modest sins and resting in Goodes godness, for I have suppressed it so long in me but will no longer hide it, that already since my twenty-first year I am wedded to Satan and with due knowing of peril out of well-considered courage, pride, and presumption because I would win glory in this world, I made with him a bond and vow, so that all which during the term of four-and-twenty years I brought forth, and which mankind justly regarded with mistrust, is only with his help come to pass and is the divel's work, infused by the angel of death. For I well thought that he that will eat the kernel must crack the nut, and one must today take the divel to favour, because to great enterprise and devises one can use and have none other save him."Please think about the above quotes as telling one story. It was not until I finished Mann's Faustus that I realized the horrible reality behind it. I do not think I have fully understood this reality, but the elements are marshaling themselves in my mind.
"It is beautiful. It has beauty. Very good, oh, very good, one may say so!"
He reddened, and I looked at him large-eyed. It turned out that he was religious.
A genuine inspiration, immediate, absolute, unquestioned, ravishing, where there is no choice, no tinkering, no possible improvement; where all is as a sacred mandate, a visitation received by the possessed one with faltering and stumbling step, with shudders of awe form head to foot, with tears of joy blinding his eyes: no, that is not possible with God, who leaves the understanding too much to do. It comes but from the divel, the true master and giver and of such rapture.
The belief that we were forced into war, that sacred necessity called us to take our weapons--those well-polished weapons whose readiness and excellence always induced a secret temptation to test them. Then there was the fear of being overrun from all sides, from which fate only our enormous strength protected us, our power of carrying the war straightway into other lands. Attack and defense were the same, in our case: together they made up the feeling of a providence, a calling, a great hour, a sacred necessity. The peoples beyond our borders might consider us disturbers of the peace if they chose, enemies of life and not to be borne with but we had the means to knock the world on the head until it changed its mind and came not only to admire but to love us.
Renounce, it means. What otherwise? Do you think that jealousy dwells in the height and not also in the depths? To us you are, fine, well-create creature, promised and espoused. Thou maist not love.
A transatlantic general has forced the population of Weimar to file past the crematories of the neighbouring concentration-camp. he declared that these citizens--who had gone in apparent righteousness about their daily concerns and sought to know nothing, although the wind brought to their noses the stench of burning human flesh--he declared that they too were guilty of the abominations on which he forced them now to turn their eyes. Was that unjust? Let them look, I look with them. In spirit I let myself be shouldered in their dazed or shuddering ranks. Germany had become a thick-walled underground torture-chamber, converted into one by a profligate dictatorship vowed to nihilism from its beginnings on. Now the torture chamber has been broken open, open lies our shame before the eyes of the world.
Curses, curses on the corrupters of an originally decent species of human being, law-abiding, only too docile, only all too willingly living on theory, who thus went to school to Evil!
"Is that you, good soul?" he said as I went to him and laid my hand on his shoulder. "What are you doing here? This is no place for you. Cross yourself, like this, forehead to shoulders, the way you learned as a child. That will keep you safe."
Mann does a brilliant job of aligning the traditional Faust cycle with the less talked about decline of Germany during the beginning of the 20th century. As Mann's main character sells himself to evil for the glory and beauty and triumph of his art, so we hear Mann's narrator describing a national transaction with the devil: Germany is falling about around his ears because it sold its soul to the devil for a different price.
Mann published Doctor Faustus not long after World War II ended, although it is mostly set before that war. Perhaps it is all the more eerie because Mann is German and writing in German and was, before exile to America, a German national hero.
The narrative structure of Doctor Faustus will no doubt irritate you. Mann takes his time getting everywhere, and his narrator does a bit too much bewailing and complaining and saying "Woe is me!" If you can manage to put up with this sort of thing, you will find it all makes sense by the end. In fact, you might wonder he didn't cry a little louder.
Any story about man selling his soul to Satan should hopefully have its alien elements for us...hopefully. But Mann's Faustus is disturbing because he does not emphasize the metaphysical side of it, indeed he goes out of his way to make sure we always have an out--maybe the novel's troubled hero, Adrian, is simply out of his mind. In this way, Faustus becomes something that is much less like a glitzy 16th century play and something more like our lives. By the end of Mann's Faustus you will feel the story is no where near as foreign to you as it should be. This will revolt you...hopefully. Listen, if you do read it, especially to those passages that deal with Germany's national pride and vision--as spoken of by a man who was almost duped by it, Nazi Germany sounds no where near as foreign to us as it should.
This is no place for you. Cross yourself, like this, forehead to shoulders, the way you learned as a child. That will keep you safe.
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