Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Chronology
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Origins, influences, and early mastery
- 3 Artists and outcasts in Mann’s early fiction
- 4 From world war to the Weimar Republic
- 5 The struggle against National Socialism
- 6 A pact with the devil: Doctor Faustus
- 7 Tribulations and final triumphs
- Notes
- Suggested further reading
- Index
6 - A pact with the devil: Doctor Faustus
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 September 2012
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Chronology
- 1 Introduction
- 2 Origins, influences, and early mastery
- 3 Artists and outcasts in Mann’s early fiction
- 4 From world war to the Weimar Republic
- 5 The struggle against National Socialism
- 6 A pact with the devil: Doctor Faustus
- 7 Tribulations and final triumphs
- Notes
- Suggested further reading
- Index
Summary
While it is usually possible to reconstruct the origins of Mann’s works from his diaries, letters, and essays, he made it easy for us in the case of Doctor Faustus, for shortly after completing the novel in 1947 he wrote the “novel of a novel” (Roman eines Romans) about the “genesis of Doctor Faustus” (Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus, translated as The Story of a Novel). The long essay was originally conceived as something of a preemptive strike: Mann had already come under fire from Arnold Schoenberg for having borrowed his twelve-tone method of composition for his protagonist without permission, and he worried that Theodor Adorno might also protest that he had received insufficient credit for his substantial contributions to the novel, both in helping Mann create plausible descriptions of imaginary compositions and in the theoretical discussions of modern music that Mann included in his work. Thus in The Story of a Novel Mann pays tribute to Adorno and acknowledges his contributions to the text – so much so, in fact, that after listening to Mann’s reading of the essay’s first draft, Katia and Erika insisted that he tone down some of his praise lest he give the impression that Adorno was a coauthor of his work. Taken on its own terms, The Story of a Novel is also a highly readable autobiographical account of the years between 1943 and 1947.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- The Cambridge Introduction to Thomas Mann , pp. 101 - 112Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2010