Recommendations
Books Like Doctor Faustus
What to read after Doctor Faustus by Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (1947) is his most personal and most ambitious novel — Adrian Leverkühn's pact with the Devil, the destruction of German culture, and the question of whether artistic genius and moral catastrophe are necessarily linked. The most complete literary reckoning with National Socialism by a major German writer. These novels will find you in the same territory.
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The Magic Mountain
by Thomas Mann
Hans Castorp's seven years in an Alpine sanatorium — Mann's most beloved novel and the essential companion to Doctor Faustus; where Doctor Faustus shows how European civilization destroyed itself, The Magic Mountain shows the civilizational arguments that preceded the destruction; the best starting point for Mann and the necessary context for understanding Doctor Faustus
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Buddenbrooks
by Thomas Mann
Four generations of a Lübeck merchant family from 1835 to 1877 — Mann's first major novel; the essential predecessor to Doctor Faustus in tracing the same theme (decline) across the entire arc of Mann's work: from the decline of a bourgeois family in Buddenbrooks to the decline of German civilization in Doctor Faustus
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The Tin Drum
by Günter Grass
Oskar Matzerath in Danzig — the postwar German novel that most directly inherits Mann's project in Doctor Faustus of reckoning with National Socialism through formal innovation; where Mann uses the Faust legend as his framework, Grass uses a grotesque carnival narrator; both are major works of literature that make the reader feel the weight of what Germany did and what it cost
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Lolita
by Vladimir Nabokov
Humbert Humbert's confession — the other great mid-century novel in which an extremely cultured, musically literate European intellectual makes a kind of pact with the devil (in this case, his own obsession) and is destroyed by the logical consequences; where Mann's Leverkühn makes a literal deal with the Devil, Nabokov's Humbert makes a metaphorical one with Lolita; both are narrated by observers who love but cannot save the protagonist
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The Possessed
by Fyodor Dostoevsky
Russian revolutionaries in a provincial town — Dostoevsky is the great predecessor to Mann's examination of what happens when an idea is taken to its logical conclusion regardless of its human cost; the Devil's argument in Doctor Faustus (that genius requires the surrender of conventional morality) is a refinement of the logic Dostoevsky examined in The Possessed and Crime and Punishment
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Doktor Faustus: A Novel of Culture
by Thomas Mann
Mann's diary of writing Doctor Faustus — The Genesis of a Doctor Faustus (1949) is the nonfiction companion to the novel, written simultaneously and describing the historical context (exile in California, the Allied advance, the revelations from liberated Germany) in which Doctor Faustus was composed; essential supplementary reading for anyone who wants to understand what Mann was doing
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The Reader
by Bernhard Schlink
Michael Berg's love affair with Hanna Schmitz, who turns out to have been an SS guard — the German novel that most directly grapples with the postwar question that Doctor Faustus raises in a different register: how does one love someone who was complicit in the Holocaust? Where Mann's novel asks about the artist's complicity, Schlink's novel asks about the ordinary person's
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Mephisto
by Klaus Mann
Hendrik Höfgen, an actor who makes his career under the Nazis — Thomas Mann's son Klaus wrote this roman à clef in 1936 as a direct response to the same question Doctor Faustus asks about artists and moral complicity; where Thomas Mann frames the question through the Faust legend, Klaus Mann frames it through the career of a specific actor (modeled on Gustaf Gründgens); the two novels in dialogue are essential for understanding German literary culture's response to National Socialism
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