Mann, in California, writing in Zeitblom’s name, is simply unable to arouse any sympathy for his fictional counterpart in the Germany of the latter part of the war. Moreover, at the core of the book is the “German question,” Mann’s belief that the seeds of National Socialism existed long before Hitler, and the recommendation to reject “the myth of a ‘good’ and a ‘bad’ Germany, the bad at the same time also the good.” This postulate might have been presented to advantage in a more remote period in any event, the portrait of a moderately “conscientious” German inside the Third Reich in 1943-1945 is totally unconvincing, though the same character, Serenus Zeitblom, narrator and spokesman for the author, is credible at other times. And, apart from the Mephistophelian contract, the primacy in the novel of the theme of “sin,” the importance of theology, and the space given to the subject of witchcraft belong more to the age of Martin Luther than to that of a “hero” dying in 1940. Not that similar bargains with “the forces of evil” are uncommon today, being in fact the rule rather than the exception, but the agencies with which the contemporary kind are negotiated have been non-personal. Pacts with devils in human form, complete with “cold winds” and changing guises, are more appropriate to the sixteenth century than to the twentieth. And the book’s major flaw as fiction-counting as minor blemishes the discursiveness, and the imbalance between theory in the first half, story development and human variety in the second-may be attributed to conflicts between Mann’s symbolic and realistic intentions.
Yet paradoxically, the story of a former divinity student who bargains his soul and body to become a “musician of genius” is set in the wrong historical era. The career of Thomas Mann’s modern Faust is intended to illustrate the political, artistic, and religious dilemmas of the author’s time.
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