Mann's Doctor Faustus Reading Order

Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus (Doktor Faustus, 1947) is his most explicitly allegorical and his most difficult novel — a fictional biography of a German composer named Adrian Leverkühn, told by his childhood friend Serenus Zeitblom, who is writing the biography from 1943 to 1945 as Germany destroys itself. Leverkühn is an intellectual prodigy who, at the novel's pivotal scene, meets a figure who presents himself as the Devil and offers a bargain: twenty-four years of supreme creative genius in exchange for his soul and the prohibition on all human love. Mann wrote the novel in Los Angeles exile during the war years, and Doctor Faustus is his reckoning with how German culture — the tradition of Goethe, Schiller, Beethoven, and Brahms — had produced National Socialism. The fictional composer's music (a twelve-tone system influenced by Arnold Schoenberg, whose advice Mann consulted) is both the pinnacle of German cultural achievement and the expression of a diabolical bargain with historical forces that would destroy everything. The novel is demanding — requiring knowledge of German music history, Goethe's Faust, and Nietzsche — but is widely considered Mann's masterpiece alongside Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain.