Douglas Mercer
February 27 2025
It was Thomas Mann who conferred the name Hitler’s Hangman on Reinhard Heyrdich—by then Mann had fled Germany and was living in Santa Monica, and giving radio broadcasts over the BBC in support of the Allies. In them Mann would tell the German people that the National Socialists were vulgarians and crude philistines out of touch with German humanism. In 1947 Mann wrote a novel called Dr. Faustus thereby choosing the foremost figure of German culture who through the challenging of God sells his soul to the devil. In this paint by number mythology naturally the National Socialists are cast as Satanic; his metaphor in the book is a composer of genius who succumbs to the devil’s blandishments; the composer is also loosely based on Friedrich Nietzsche and so it is said to be a salutary warning against the ethos of the Superman. In this way Thomas Mann hits all the necessary marks for an uninspired allegorical tale.
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The narrator is a historian who was the childhood friend of the composer, and he is writing in 1943 and he says that he is keeping his writing secret because he wants Germany to be defeated:
“After all never failing public indoctrination has made sure we are profoundly aware of the crushing consequence of defeat in all of its irrevocable horror. And yet there is something that some of us fear more than a German defeat—and that is a German victory. My wishes and hopes are compelled to resist the German victory of arms. But what if by some unfortunate accident my son were to find out about these papers and feel compelled to report me to the Gestapo?”
This of course is Mann writing from the comfort of California, having abandoned the Fatherland and betrayed his people.
Mann sets the scene in the novel very slowly but he drops broad hints that the composer is to be some kind of stand in for National Socialism who have given himself over to occult powers in order to attain glory. He writes that man’s quest for knowledge, his attempt to deduce the truth from nature, to tempt her to expose her secrets, is always a kind of “sorcery.” He calls the composer an adept as if he was working with the dark arts and he says German learning, German growth, and German striving means that German revolutions (in all spheres) is such that it will always throw wild parties for world history. This is of course a childish and underinformed view of what National Socialism was. But for nearly eight years now this novel has been music to the ears of the enemies of Germany, they say its maker represented the responsible Germany, the ones who fled in horror and did all in their power to see Germany defeated. It also is supposed to have seen the false myth behind Hitler and exposed it to light:
“Mann uses Leverkühn (the composer) as the prototype of the German character unafraid of unleashing self-destructive forces to attain his goal, determined to go his own way without regard for the damage that may befall him or others from the choices he makes.”
So say the critics.
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The narrator recalls the year 1933:
“When I think back ten years to its awakening and blind fervor, to the uprising that broke forth to break open and break down, that was going to purify everything, to our popular and national rebirth, to the specious holy ecstasy in which, to be sure, there were mixed, as warning signs of its treachery, so much savage brutality and hulking vulgarity, so much obscene lust to violate and humiliate, which already bore the war within it—all this wanton contempt for reason, the sinful ignoring of truth, the voluptuous cult of a trashy myth.”
Pointedly the composer abandons the field of study of theology for music, the music that represents the German soul in all of its profundity and (they say) darkness. As he begins to write his complex, haunting, and brooding masterpieces the composer begins to descend into madness just like Nietzsche. Near the end of the book the narrator says that with the war it seems like we are moving into the next sign of the zodiac, that is he laments the demise of his (and Mann’s) comfortable world of bourgeois liberal humanism.
And to symbolize this descent (and, of course to tar the National Socialists) he has the composer compile a dialogue between himself and the devil, written in the devil’s language of (of course) archaic German. This letter is written in overwrought and super heated prose and brings forth the stale and time worn image of selling one’s soul, this time for twenty-four years of creative genius. The devil even has red hair just so Mann is sure that he does not miss a single cliché, though we are not told if he has cloven feet. The composer is told that the terms of his contract demand that in order to be the celestial artist he must renounce (you saw it coming) love.
What all this has to with the historical realities of National Socialist Germany is, of course, nothing. But the scholars and the critics hail this book as the definitive artistic rendering of what happened from 1933 to 1945. The tale is it is supposed to tell? Why the story of a people who surrendered their reason to converse with the demonic powers in order to gain control of the globe. If it’s been told once it’s been told a thousand times, thought rarely as here in such tedious and overly ornate language.
Every artist cooks the books of course, that’s why they call them artists, rather than someone trying to explain reality. And toward the end of his death contract the composer begins to experience illnesses of retching, headaches and migraines, and in the throes of this pain he produces an Oratorio called Apocalypse With Figures. Here he ransacks the putrid storehouse of Jewish imagery from Ezekiel to Daniel and John Of Patmos with as assist from Durer. The composer tells the narrator that though he has left the study of divinity it is hard to be rid of the theological virus. And the final message of the book, if not the oldest one in the book, is that aestheticism is the herald of barbarism; and when the composer dies he is killed with poisonous and hellish influences. That is Thomas Mann, German expatriate, German traitor, from the comfort of his pricey beach house, is sticking to the script.
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Mann is their heavyweight, he was more or less part of the Conservative Revolution in the 1920s and then he defected; hell, even HUAC had a good look at him. What he was was one of those fuss budgets who thought that German Culture was writing ponderous door stops of book about three generations of a family as it faces the modern world; or writing a philosophical fantasia in the snow peaked mountains where pointy headed intellectuals debate the trends of the Zeitgeist. All to say that had Mann remained a patriotic German no solider at Stalingrad would have had Mann in his knapsack, first off they weighed a ton, whereas you can fit Holderlin in a slim volume.
But his version is just the ex post facto version of German culture, the culture of the faint hearted written by a vile cadre of effete defeatists and bespectacled dandies fretting about the fall of the Bourgeois Ideal. What German culture is is something altogether other, not a trashy myth, or a berserker free or all; German Culture is the blood of its people expressed in language or music, at times gnomic, but as always beautiful. Before his slide into madness the composer writes a kind of cosmic fugue called The Marvels Of The Universe, and in this we see what represents the path to that promised next sign of the Zodiac. For German thought and German Consciousness possess a power and a fury which will always eludes the intellectuals of Santa Monica, and when its final revolution rolls around, its mission completed, it just might throw one of those wild parties for World History. Not as a trashy myth, but as a beautiful ideal.
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Notes:
As a note for posterity we shot Mann in Malibu in 1950 and the American government wrote it off as the cost of doing business, all being fair in both love and war. After all Stalin took out Trotsky and thirty-four years after the event a distant relative of Caesar’s knifed to death an equally distant relative of one of the assailants in a Roman street; revenge is just so long as it is done with a cold heart. I was intimately involved in this quest and even bruited about the idea that I should do it which was nixed on practical grounds. So I have it on good authority that he was shot in the face—as a great people never leave a stone unturned. We let Hesse live as we all knew that it was impossible for him to hurt a fly, he died some twenty years ago fluttering, I suppose, in some mystical and imagined internal migration (Empyrean Part One, White Biocentrism, December 8 2024).
