![]() ![]() The narrator, Serenus Zeitblom, Ph.D., a stuffy scholar who teaches high school during the Hitler years, looks back with much admiration at the life of his childhood friend Leverkühn. The novel tells the story of the syphilitic composer Adrian Leverkühn, born in 1885, who participates in the European avant-garde until succumbing to dementia in 1930 at the height of his musical genius (having just finished an oratorio based on Faust). Not since Goethe has this medieval German theme been made so strikingly and ingeniously relevant for the modern age. Here, Mann uses the Faustian pact with the devil to allegorize the rise of fascism in German culture. “The novel of my era, as the story of a highly-precarious and sinful artist’s life.”-This is how Thomas Mann, Nobel laureate in literature and master of the modern German realist novel, described his Doctor Faustus. ![]()
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