Sergey Chaikun, illus. from Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”
Tuesday
Yesterday I shared blogger Kristen Ellen Johnsen’s essay applying Goethe’s Faust to Donald Trump’s child separation policy. Using emotional pain to deter asylum seekers has been a devil’s bargain, with the loss of empathy being the price paid. When we cease to care about human suffering, we lose our souls. It appears that architect of the policy Stephen Miller, along with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, Chief of Staff John Kelly, and Homeland Security Secretary Kirstjen Nielsen, have all signed on to the bargain. Trump, of course, is almost sociopathic in his inability to empathize.
Thomas Mann’s updating of the Faustus story, like Goethe’s, focuses on the inability to love and to care. Particularly unsettling is how the author sees lack of caring as a key dimension in Germany succumbing to Hitler’s vision. Begun in 1943 and completed in 1947, Doctor Faustus parallels the exhilarating highs and then catastrophic lows of Nazi Germany.
On a personal note, Mann’s Doctor Faustus is one of the most difficult works I have ever read so I appreciate Johnsen helping me understand it. I also note that one of my father’s duties, when a soldier in Munich following the Germans’ surrender in 1945, was to escort Germans through Dachau so that they could not dismiss it as American propaganda.
In the novel, Adrian Leverkühn is a young genius who intentionally contracts syphilis because he believes that madness will deepen his artistry. His “Faustian bargain” involves giving up love in exchange for 24 years of musical creativity, which Mann models on the innovations of composer Arnold Schoenberg. In the end, the syphilis takes over his brain and he descends into an infantile state.
Johnsen draws the historical parallels. Mann, she says, saw Germany’s emphasis on its cultural and intellectual superiority as inextricably bound up with its crimes against what it saw as lesser humans. When the narrator, reflecting Mann’s own crisis, learns of the concentration camps, he writes that
all that is German — even German intellect, German thought, the German word — shares in the disgrace of these revelations and is plunged into profoundest doubt.
In other words, the narrator realizes that Germany’s pride in its accomplishments is linked to the vulgar patriotism of an Adolph Hitler. In fact, by insisting on a supreme ideal rather than opening its arms to messy humanity, Germany found its way to the final solution. Quoting the novel, Johnsen writes that the Nazi regime and its patriotism were
“both in word and deed, merely the distorted, vulgarized, debased realization of a mindset and worldview” authentically rooted in “the traits of our great men” as “embodiments of Germanness.”
By having his protagonist choose artistic genius over love, Mann describes the arc of Germany under the Nazis:
Mann parallels the fall of Faust to the fall of the German people at the close of WWII. He describes the historical moment: a “nation now stands wild-eyed before the abyss,” witnessing the “ghastly failure” of “hundreds of thousands of Germans who committed acts before which humanity shudders.” Masses were swept up into “enraptured frenzy… under whose garish banners our youth marched with flashing eyes.”
The seeds of the Nazi takeover, Johnsen says, were bound up in Germany’s “hellish self-consumption,” by which I take her to mean its arrogance and self-absorption. When you cease to care for others (Johnson calls this “the sacred leveling involved in honoring common humanity”), you end up embracing demons. Those who strive for supremacy enter into a devil’s bargain that leads inevitably to despair and the abyss:
Mann saw this in his own nation in 1945. This trade-off of the glorification of a concept of cultural supremacy at the expense of the sacred leveling involved in honoring common humanity can only end by falling as far as the fantasy flew high. In the days before the end of WWII, “Germany, a hectic flush on its cheeks, was reeling at the height of its savage triumphs, about to win the world on the strength of the one pact that it intended to keep and had signed with its own blood. Today, in the embrace of demons, a hand over one eye, the other staring into the horror, it plummets from despair into despair. When will it reach the bottom of the abyss?” Mann describes the paradox at work by this inversion: that the moral lament inherent in Faust’s, Leverkühn’s, Germany’s (and America’s) ultimate betrayal of Care is foundational to the underlying structure of the cultural concepts of supremacy.
Staring into the horrors committed by one’s beloved nation can result in a shattered heart, which is why some people choose to stop caring. Demonizing immigrants from the south is to close one’s heart, just as linking American greatness to white supremacy is to surrender one’s soul. As Johnsen puts it, this is “the Faustian payout.”
Yet in facing up to his nation’s moral failure, she says that Mann manages to salvage something:
Mann offers a last note of hope in Dr. Faustus, his opus magnum. He hopes that the very act of embracing the abyss of despair in facing a nation’s moral failure may somehow be tended by Grace. “To the very end, this dark tone poem permits no consolation, reconciliation, transfiguration,” Mann writes. If there is a “miracle beyond faith” which can offer hope out of despair, it is in allowing the “dying note of sorrow” to hang in the silence, to which the soul must continue to listen.
From which Johnsen concludes,
This is what it means to hear the cries of frightened children. This is what it means to Care. It is up to all of us.
People vaunting American superiority have been ripping children from the arms of their parents and hope that we will become numb to these horrors. To hold on to our souls, we must continue to care for those immigrants and children.
And while we’re at it, we must continue caring as well for the Puerto Rican victims of Hurricane Maria, the innocent black victims of police violence, opiate addicts, abused transgenders, and all those others that Trump is either demonizing or ignoring. History shows what happens when we close our hearts.