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- Herausgeber: e-artnow
- Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
- Sprache: Englisch
Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus tells the tragic and gripping life story of the composer Adrian Leverkühn, a man whose extraordinary intellect and talent are accompanied by emotional coldness and deep inner isolation. The novel is narrated by his longtime friend Serenus Zeitblom, a humanist scholar who attempts to reconstruct Adrian's life and artistic path while constantly reflecting on their moral and historical significance. Adrian grows up as a quiet, highly gifted child in a rural setting, already marked by a strong tendency toward abstraction and distance from human closeness. In his early years, he turns to theology, searching for absolute truth, but soon abandons it in favor of music, which becomes the true center of his existence. As he moves through intellectual and artistic circles, Adrian encounters radical ideas about art, philosophy, and modernity that push him to reject traditional musical forms. His compositions become increasingly experimental, challenging conventions and unsettling audiences. A mysterious and deeply unsettling episode marks a decisive turning point in Adrian's life. In a moment of existential crisis, he appears to enter into a pact that grants him extraordinary creative power at a terrible personal cost. From this point on, his artistic success grows, but so does his emotional detachment. Friendships fade, intimacy becomes impossible, and his brilliance is inseparable from a growing sense of doom. Through Zeitblom's reflective and often anxious narration, the novel becomes more than the story of a single artist. Adrian's fate is closely intertwined with the intellectual and political turmoil of Germany in the early twentieth century. His life unfolds alongside a society moving toward catastrophe, giving his story the character of a dark allegory. Doctor Faustus is a powerful and unsettling novel that blends the artist's biography with philosophical inquiry and historical reflection. It explores the seductive danger of absolute knowledge, the cost of genius, and the fragile boundary between creative greatness and moral collapse.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2026
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Doctor Faustus
Table of Contents
The day was ending and the dark air
took away the animals that are on earth
from their labors, and I alone
prepared myself to endure the struggle
both of the journey and of pity,
which will portray the mind that does not err.
O Muse, O lofty genius, now help me,
O mind that wrote what I saw,
here your nobility will be revealed.
HERE YOUR NOBILITY WILL BE REVEALED.
I
I want to assure you with all certainty that it is by no means out of a desire to put myself in the limelight that I am publishing these notes on the life of the immortal Adrian Leverkühn, this first and certainly very preliminary biography of the dear man, so terribly afflicted by fate, raised up and brought down, and of the brilliant musician. I am prompted to do so solely by the assumption that the reader—or rather, the future reader, for at the moment there is not the slightest prospect that my writing will ever see the light of day—unless, by some miracle, it should leave our besieged Fortress Europe and bring those outside a glimpse of the secrets of our solitude; – I beg to start again: it is only because I expect that people will wish to be casually informed about the who and what of the writer that I am prefacing these opening remarks with a few notes about myself – not without the expectation, of course, that this may cause the reader to doubt whether they are in the right hands, that is to say, whether my entire existence makes me the right man for a task to which I am drawn perhaps more by my heart than by any justifiable affinity.
I reread the preceding lines and cannot help but notice a certain restlessness and heaviness of breath in them, which is only too characteristic of the state of mind in which I find myself today, May 27, 1943, three years after Leverkühn's death, that is to say, three years after he passed from deep night into the deepest night, in my small study in Freising an der Isar, where I have spent many years, to begin writing the biography of my friend who rests in God — oh, may it be so! resting in God, I say, for a state of mind in which a heart-pounding need to communicate and a deep shyness toward the unattainable mix in the most pressing way. I am a thoroughly moderate and, I may well say, healthy, humanly temperate nature, oriented toward harmony and reason, a scholar and conjuratus of the "Latin army," not without a connection to the fine arts (I play the viola d'amore), but a son of the Muses in the academic sense of the word, who likes to consider himself a descendant of the German humanists from the time of the "Letters of the Dark Men," of Reuchlin, Crotus von Dornheim, Mutianus, and Eoban Hesse. The demonic, as little as I presume to deny its influence on human life, I have always found decidedly alien to my nature, instinctively excluded it from my worldview, and never felt the slightest inclination to recklessly engage with the lower powers, to challenge them in my exuberance, or to offer them even the slightest assistance when they approached me of their own accord. I have made sacrifices for this conviction, both idealistic and in terms of my external well-being, by giving up my beloved teaching profession without hesitation when it became clear that it was incompatible with the spirit and demands of our historical developments. In this respect, I am satisfied with myself. But in my doubt as to whether I can actually feel called to the task I have undertaken here, this decisiveness or, if you will, the narrow-mindedness of my moral character can only strengthen me.
I had barely put pen to paper when a word escaped me that already secretly caused me some embarrassment: the word "genius"; I was speaking of the musical genius of my immortal friend. Now, this word, "genius," though excessive, is certainly noble, harmonious, and humanly sound in tone and character, and people like me, as far as they are removed from the claim to participate in this lofty realm with their own being and to have ever been gifted with divinis influxibus ex alto, should see no reasonable reason to shy away from it, no reason not to speak and act with joyful reverence and respectful familiarity. So it seems. And yet it cannot be denied, and has never been denied, that the demonic and irrational have a disturbing share in this radiant sphere, that there is always a faintly terrifying connection between it and the lower realm, and that this is precisely why the reassuring epithets I have tried to attach to it, "noble," "humanly healthy," and "harmonious," do not quite fit it — even then — with a kind of painful determination, I establish this difference — even then, when it is a matter of pure and genuine genius, bestowed or imposed by God, and not an acquired and perishable one, the sinful and morbid brand of natural gifts, the execution of a hideous contract of sale...
Here I break off, with the shameful feeling of artistic misconduct and lack of self-control. Adrian himself would hardly have allowed such a theme to appear so prematurely in a symphony, for example — at most, it would have been hinted at from afar in a subtly concealed and barely perceptible way. Incidentally, what slipped out of my mouth may strike the reader as nothing more than a dark, questionable hint, and only appear to me as indiscretion and clumsy bluntness. For someone like me, it is very difficult and seems almost frivolous to take the point of view of the composing artist on a subject that is a matter of life and death for him and is burning in his mind, and to deal with it with the playful prudence of such an artist. Hence my hasty acceptance of the difference between pure and impure genius, a difference whose existence I acknowledge, only to ask myself immediately afterwards whether it is justified. In fact, the experience forced me to think about this problem so intensely, so fervently, that it sometimes seemed to me, frighteningly, as if I were being driven beyond the level of thought that was actually intended and appropriate for me, and was myself experiencing an "unfair" increase in my natural gifts ...
I break off again, remembering that I only mentioned genius and its demonically influenced nature in order to explain my doubt as to whether I possess the necessary affinity for my task. May whatever I have to say against it now be asserted against my scruples of conscience. I was fortunate enough to spend many years of my life in the familiar proximity of a brilliant man, the hero of these pages, to have known him since childhood, to have witnessed his development and his fate, and to have participated in his work in a modest supporting role. The libretto adaptation of Shakespeare's comedy "Love's Labour's Lost," Leverkühn's wilful youthful work, is mine, and I was also able to influence the textual preparation of the grotesque opera suite "Gesta Romanorum" and the oratorio "Revelation of St. John the Theologian". That is one thing, or rather, it is already one thing and another. But I am also in possession of papers, invaluable records, which the deceased bequeathed to me and no one else in his right mind, or, if I may say so, in comparatively and legally sound mind, and on which I will base my account, indeed, from which I intend to include some selections directly in it. Lastly and foremost, however—and this justification was still the most valid, if not before men, then before God: I loved him—with horror and tenderness, with compassion and devoted admiration—and asked little whether he returned my feelings in the slightest.
He did not, oh no. The bequest of his unfinished compositional sketches and diary entries expresses a friendly, matter-of-fact, almost, I might say, gracious and certainly honoring trust in my conscientiousness, piety, and correctness. But love? Who would this man have loved? Once, a woman—perhaps. A child, most recently—perhaps. A light-hearted, charming fellow and man for all seasons, whom he then, probably precisely because he was fond of him, sent away—to his death. To whom would he have opened his heart, whom would he ever have let into his life? That was not Adrian's way. He accepted human devotion—I would swear: often without even noticing it. His indifference was so great that he was hardly ever aware of what was going on around him, in what company he found himself, and the fact that he very rarely addressed a conversation partner by name leads me to suspect that he did not know their name, while the other person had every right to assume the opposite. I would compare his loneliness to an abyss in which the feelings people had for him sank silently and without a trace. There was coldness around him – and how I feel when I use this word, which he himself once wrote down in a monstrous context! Life and experience can give individual words an accent that completely alienates them from their everyday meaning and gives them a nimbus of horror that no one who has not experienced them in their most terrible meaning can understand.
II
My name is Dr. Serenus Zeitblom. I myself object to the strange delay in sending these cards, but, as it happens, the literary course of my communications has prevented me from doing so until now. I am 60 years old, for in A.D. 1883 I was born, the eldest of four siblings, in Kaisersaschen an der Saale, in the administrative district of Merseburg, the same town where Leverkühn spent his entire school days, which is why I can postpone its more detailed description until I come to it. Since my personal life story intersects with that of the master in many ways, it will be good to report on both in context, so as not to fall into the trap of jumping ahead, which one is always inclined to do when one's heart is full.
Let it suffice to say here that I was born into the modest station of a semi-learned middle class, for my father, Wolgemut Zeitblom, was a pharmacist — indeed, the most distinguished in town: there was a second pharmaceutical establishment in Kaisersaschern, but it never enjoyed the same public trust as the Zeitblom pharmacy “To the Blessed Messengers” and always had a hard time competing with it. Our family belonged to the small Catholic community of the town, whose majority population naturally adhered to the Lutheran confession, and especially my mother was a devout daughter of the Church, who conscientiously fulfilled her religious duties, whereas my father, probably due to lack of time, was more lax in this regard, without ever denying, even in the slightest, the group solidarity with his fellow believers, which also had its political significance. It was noteworthy that, alongside our pastor, Ecclesiastical Councillor Zwilling, the town’s rabbi, by the name of Dr. Carlebach, also frequented our guest rooms located above the laboratory and the pharmacy—something that would hardly have been possible in Protestant households. The better appearance was on the side of the man of the Roman Church. But my impression, which may be based mainly on my father’s remarks, has remained that the small, long-bearded Talmudist, adorned with a skullcap, far surpassed his differently believing colleague in learning and religious acumen. It may be due in part to this youthful experience, but also to the perceptive openness of Jewish circles to Leverkühn’s work, that I have never been able to fully agree with our Leader and his paladins on the Jewish question and its treatment, which was not without influence on my resignation from the teaching profession. To be sure, specimens of that bloodline have also crossed my path — I need only think of the private scholar Breisacher in Munich — whose confusingly unsympathetic character I intend to shed some light on in due course.
As for my Catholic background, it has naturally shaped and influenced my inner self, but without this tone of life ever resulting in a contradiction to my humanistic worldview, my love of the "best arts and sciences," as they used to say. There has always been complete harmony between these two elements of my personality, which is easy to maintain when, like me, you grow up in an old town whose memories and architectural monuments date back to pre-Reformation times, to a Christian world of unity. It is true that Kaisersasch lies right in the heart of the Reformation, in the heart of the Luther region, which encompasses the towns of Eisleben, Wittenberg, Quedlinburg, Grimma, Wolfenbüttel, and Eisenach—which is again revealing for the inner life of Leverkühn, the Lutheran, and is connected with his original field of study, theology. But I would like to compare the Reformation to a bridge that not only leads from scholastic times to our world of free thought, but also back to the Middle Ages—and perhaps even further back than a Christian-Catholic tradition of cheerful love of learning that remained untouched by the schism. For my part, I feel quite at home in the golden sphere where the Holy Virgin was called "Iovis alma parens."
To record the bare essentials of my vita, my parents allowed me to attend our high school, the same school where Adrian, two grades below me, also received his education, and which, founded in the second half of the 15th century, had until recently been known as the "School of the Brothers of the Common Life." Only out of a certain embarrassment at the supra-historical and, to modern ears, slightly comical sound of this name did it abandon it and rename itself after the neighboring church, Bonifatius-Gymnasium. When I left it at the beginning of the current century, I turned without hesitation to the study of classical languages, in which I had already distinguished myself to a certain degree as a student, and continued this study at the universities of Giessen, Jena, Leipzig, and, from 1903 to 1905, Halle, at the same time, and not coincidentally, as Leverkühn was also studying there.
Here, as so often, I cannot help but revel in passing in the inner and almost mysterious connection between an interest in classical philology and a lively, loving sense of the beauty and rational dignity of human beings, – a connection that is already evident in the fact that the study of ancient languages is referred to as the "humanities," but also in the fact that the spiritual harmony of linguistic and humanistic passion is crowned by the idea of education, and that the vocation of educating young people follows almost naturally from that of being a linguist. The man of natural science may well be a teacher, but he can never be an educator in the same sense and to the same degree as the disciple of bonae litterae. Even that other, perhaps more intimate but wondrously inarticulate language, that of sounds (if one may call music that), does not seem to me to be included in the pedagogical-human sphere, although I am well aware that it played a serving role in Greek education and in the public life of the polis in general. Rather, with all its logical and moral rigor, which it may well affect, it seems to me to belong to a spirit world whose unconditional reliability in matters of reason and human dignity I would not exactly stake my life on. The fact that I am nevertheless personally fond of it is one of those contradictions which, whether one regrets it or takes pleasure in it, are inseparable from human nature.
This is outside the scope of the subject. And then again, it is not, since the question of whether a clear and secure boundary can be drawn between the noble pedagogical world of the mind and that spirit world, which one approaches only at one's peril, very much and only too much belongs to my subject. Which realm of humanity, even the purest and most benevolent, would be completely inaccessible to the influence of the lower powers, or, indeed, completely uninterested in fruitful contact with them? This thought, not unseemly even for those whose personal nature is entirely removed from anything demonic, has remained with me from certain moments during the almost year-and-a-half-long study trip to Italy and Greece that my good parents made possible for me after I passed my state examination: when I looked out from the Acropolis onto the Sacred Way, where the mystics, adorned with saffron bands and the name of Iacchus on their lips, were passing by, and then when I stood at the site of the initiation itself, in the district of Eubuleus, at the edge of the Plutonic crevice overhanging the rock. There I experienced a premonition of the fullness of life expressed in the initiatory devotion of Olympic Greeks to the deities of the deep, and I have often explained to my senior students from the lectern that culture is actually the pious and orderly, I might say, appeasing incorporation of the nocturnal and monstrous into the cult of the gods.
Returning from that trip, the twenty-five-year-old found employment at the high school in his hometown, the same school where I had been educated, and where I now taught Latin and Greek, and also history for several years before I transferred to the Bavarian school system in the 12th year of the century and from then on enjoyed a satisfying career for more than two decades in Freising, the place that has remained my home, as a high school teacher, but also as a lecturer at the theological college in the aforementioned subjects.
Early on, soon after my appointment in Kaisersaschern, I got married — a need for order and the desire for moral integration into human life guided me in this step. Helene, née Ölhafen, my wonderful wife, who still cares for me in my declining years, was the daughter of an older faculty colleague and colleague in Zwickau in the Kingdom of Saxony, and at the risk of eliciting a smile from the reader, I will confess that the first name of the newborn child, Helene, that dear sound, played no small part in my choice. Such a name signifies a consecration whose pure magic cannot be denied its effect, even if the bearer's appearance only fulfills its high demands to a modest bourgeois degree, and even then only temporarily, by virtue of the rapidly fading charms of youth. We also named our daughter Helene, who has long since married a good man, an assistant manager at the Regensburg branch of the Bavarian Securities Bank. In addition to her, my dear wife gave me two sons, so that I have experienced the joys and sorrows of fatherhood as befits a human being, albeit within sober limits. I must admit that none of my children ever had anything enchanting about them. They could not compete with a child's beauty like that of little Nepomuk Schneidewein, Adrian's nephew and his late delight to the eye – I myself am the last to claim this. Today, my two sons serve their leader, one in a civilian post, the other in the armed forces, and just as my estranged position from the powers that be in my homeland has created a certain emptiness around me, so too can the connection between these young men and their quiet parental home only be described as loose.
III
The Leverkühns were a family of skilled craftsmen and farmers who flourished partly in the Schmalkaldic League and partly in the province of Saxony, along the Saale River. Adrian's immediate family had lived for several generations on the Buchel farm, which belonged to the village community of Oberweiler, near Weißenfels. This location, which could be reached from Kaisersasch in three quarters of an hour by train, could only be accessed by a cart sent from the station. Buchel was a farm of such size that it conferred on its owner the rank of Vollspänner or Vollhöfner, with some fifty acres of fields and meadows, a cooperatively managed mixed forest, and a very stately dwelling house made of wood and half-timbering, but with a stone foundation. Together with the barns and cattle stables, it formed an open quadrangle, in the middle of which, unforgettable to me, stood a mighty old lime tree, covered with wonderfully fragrant blossoms in June and surrounded by a green bench. The beautiful tree may have been a little in the way of traffic on the farm, and I heard that the heir had always argued with his father for practical reasons in favor of its removal when he was young, only to defend it one day, as master of the farm, against the wishes of his own son.
How often must the linden tree have shaded the early childhood naps and games of little Adrian, who was born in 1885, the second son of Jonathan and Elsbeth Leverkühn, in the upper floor of the Buchelhaus. His brother, Georg, now long the landlord up there, was five years his senior. A sister, Ursel, followed at the same interval. Since my parents were among the Leverkühns' friends and acquaintances in Kaisersasch, and there had always been a particularly warm relationship between our houses, we spent many a Sunday afternoon in the good season at the farmstead, where the townspeople enjoyed the hearty gifts of the land with which Mrs. Leverkühn regaled them: the hearty brown bread with sweet butter, the golden honeycomb, the delicious strawberries in cream, the milk thickened in blue satin and sprinkled with black bread and sugar. At the time of Adrian's, or Adri's, as he was called, early childhood, his grandparents still sat there in their retirement, while the farm was already entirely in the hands of the younger generation and the old man, who was listened to with respect, only interfered at the evening table, reasoning with them with his toothless mouth. I have little memory of these predecessors, who died almost simultaneously. All the clearer in my mind is the image of their children, Jonathan and Elsbeth Leverkühn, although it is a changing image and, in the course of my boyhood, school days, and student years, it slipped from youth into more weary phases with that effective imperceptibility that time is so adept at.
Jonathan Leverkühn was a man of the best German stock, a type that is hardly to be found in our cities anymore and certainly not among those who today represent our humanity with often oppressive vehemence against the world — a physiognomy as if shaped by times past, preserved in a rural setting, as it were, and brought over from German days before the Thirty Years' War. That was my thought when I looked at him, growing up, with an eye already halfway trained to see. His unkempt ash-blond hair fell into a domed, strongly divided forehead with prominent temples, hung unfashionably long and thick on his neck, and merged at his well-formed, small ear into a curly beard that covered his cheeks, chin, and the hollow under his lip. The lower lip protruded quite strongly and rounded under the short, slightly downward-hanging moustache, with a smile that was extremely attractive and matched the somewhat strained but also half-smiling gaze of the blue eyes, deepened by a slight shyness. His nose was thin and finely curved, the beardless area of his cheeks below his cheekbones was shadowy and somewhat gaunt. He usually wore his sinewy neck uncovered and did not like ordinary city clothes, which did not suit his appearance, especially not his hands, those strong, tanned, dry, slightly freckled hands with which he gripped his walking stick when he went to the village council.
A physician might have noted a certain veiled strain in his gaze, a certain sensitivity in his temples, perhaps a tendency toward migraines, which Jonathan did indeed suffer from, but only to a moderate degree, no more than once a month for a day and with almost no disruption to his work. He loved his pipe, a medium-length porcelain pipe with a lid, whose peculiar aroma, far more pleasant than the lingering smell of cigars and cigarettes, dominated the atmosphere of the lower rooms. He also loved a good mug of Merseburg beer as a nightcap. On winter evenings, when his inheritance and property lay snow-covered outside, he could be seen reading, primarily from a voluminous family Bible bound in pressed pigskin and fastened with leather clasps, which had been printed around 1700 with ducal exemption in Brunswick and included not only the "spirit-filled" prefaces and marginal glosses of Martin Luther, but also all kinds of summaries, locos parallelos, and historical-moral verses explaining each chapter by a Mr. David von Schweinitz. The book was said to have been, or rather it was reported with certainty, the property of the Princess of Brunswick-Wolfenbüttel, who had married the son of Peter the Great. However, she then faked her death, so that her funeral took place, while she fled to Martinique and married a Frenchman there. How often Adrian, who had a thirsty mind for the comical, later laughed with me about this story, which his father told with a gentle, deep gaze, lifting his head from his book, whereupon he, apparently undisturbed by the somewhat scandalous provenance of the sacred printed work, turned back to the verse commentaries of Herr von Schweinitz or the "Wisdom of Solomon to the Tyrants."
In addition to the spiritual tendency of his reading, however, there was another, which at certain times would have been characterized as his desire to "speculate on the elements." That is to say, he pursued, on a modest scale and with modest means, scientific, biological, and even chemical-physical studies, in which my father occasionally assisted him with materials from his laboratory. I chose that lost and not entirely blameless term for such endeavors because there was a certain mystical element to them that would formerly have been suspected of being a penchant for sorcery. Incidentally, I would like to add that I have always fully understood this mistrust of a religious-spiritualist era towards the emerging passion for exploring the mysteries of nature. The fear of God had to see in this a libertine involvement with the forbidden, regardless of the contradiction that one might find in it, to regard God's creation, nature, and life as a morally disreputable area. Nature itself is too full of vexatious creations that play on the magical, ambiguous whims, half-veiled and strangely ambiguous allusions, that chaste, self-restrained piety should not have seen it as a daring transgression to engage with it.
When Adrian's father opened his colorfully illustrated books on exotic butterflies and sea creatures in the evening, we, his sons and I, and probably Mrs. Leverkühn as well, would often peer over the leather-covered, winged back of his chair, and he would point out the splendors and eccentricities depicted there: these in all the colors of the palette, nocturnal and radiant, swaying, patterned and shaped with the most exquisite artistic taste, papilios and morphos of the tropics — insects that live an ephemeral life in fantastically exaggerated beauty, some of which are considered by the natives to be evil spirits that bring malaria. The most magnificent color they display, a dreamlike azure blue, is, as Jonathan taught us, not a real color at all, but is produced by fine grooves and other surface structures on the scales of their wings, a microstructure that, through the most artificial refraction of light rays and elimination of most of them, ensures that only the brightest blue light reaches our eyes.
"Well, well," I can still hear Mrs. Leverkühn say, "so it's an illusion?"
"Do you call the blue of the sky an illusion?" replied her husband, looking back at her. "You can't tell me the colorant that causes it either."
In fact, as I write, I feel as if I were still standing with Mrs. Elsbeth, Georg, and Adrian behind my father's chair, following his finger through these images. There were glasswing butterflies depicted, which have no scales on their wings, so that they appear delicately glassy and only crisscrossed by a network of darker veins. One such butterfly, loving the twilight shade of the leaves in its transparent nakedness, was called Hetaera esmeralda. Hetaera had only a dark patch of color in violet and pink on its wings, which, since nothing else can be seen of it, makes it resemble a petal carried by the wind when in flight. Then there was the leaf butterfly, whose wings, resplendent with a rich triad of colors on top, resembled a leaf on the underside with incredible accuracy, not only in shape and veining, but also in the meticulous reproduction of small imperfections, imitation water droplets, warty fungal formations, and the like. When this rubbed creature settled in the foliage with its wings folded up, it disappeared so completely into its surroundings that even the most voracious enemy could not make it out.
Jonathan sought, not without success, to convey to us his amazement at this sophisticated protective imitation, which went into minute detail. "How did the animal do that?" he asked. "How does nature do it through the animal? For it is impossible to attribute the trick to its own observation and calculation. Yes, yes, nature knows its leaf precisely, not only in its perfection, but also with its small everyday flaws and imperfections, and out of mischievous kindness it repeats its outward appearance in another area, on the underside of the wings of this butterfly of its, to deceive other creatures. But why does this one in particular have this cunning advantage? And if it is indeed expedient for it to resemble a leaf when at rest, where is the expediency, from the point of view of its hungry pursuers, the lizards, birds, and spiders, for whom it is intended as food, but who, as soon as it wishes, cannot find it with all their keen eyesight? I ask you this so that you will not ask me about it."
If this butterfly could make itself invisible for its own protection, one need only leaf through the book to encounter others that achieved the same purpose through their conspicuous, even intrusive, far-reaching visibility. They were not only particularly large, but also exceptionally colorful and patterned, and, as Father Leverkühn added, flew in this seemingly defiant attire with ostentatious leisureliness, which no one would call insolent, but which rather had a melancholy quality, going their way without ever hiding and without ever having an animal, neither monkey, nor bird, nor lizard, even look at them. Why? Because they were disgusting. And because their striking beauty and the slowness of their flight made this clear. Their juice had such a foul smell and taste that if a misunderstanding or mistake occurred, the one who thought to feast on one of them would spit out the bite with all signs of nausea. Their inedibility is known throughout nature, and they are safe—sadly safe. We, at least, behind Jonathan's chair, wondered whether this certainty was not rather something dishonorable than something cheerful. But what was the consequence? That other species of butterflies cunningly dressed themselves in the same warning plumage and thus also flew away melancholically and confidently in slow, untouchable flight, even though they were perfectly edible.
Infected by Adrian's amusement at this news, a laughter that literally shook him and brought tears to his eyes, I too had to laugh heartily. But Father Leverkühn silenced us with a "Shh!", for he wanted all these things to be viewed with shy reverence – the same mysterious reverence with which he regarded the inaccessible writing on the shells of certain mussels, using his large square magnifying glass and making it available to us as well. Certainly, the sight of these creatures, the snails and shells of the sea, was also highly significant, at least when one looked at their illustrations under Jonathan's guidance. That all these threads and vaults, executed with magnificent certainty and a bold yet delicate sense of form, with their rosy entrances and the iridescent faience splendor of their multiform walls, were the work of their gelatinous inhabitants—at least if one held to the idea that nature makes itself, and did not call upon the Creator, who can be imagined as an imaginative craftsman and ambitious artist of glazed pottery, for he has his strange qualities, so that nowhere is the temptation greater than here to insert a masterful intermediate god, the Demiurge—I wanted to say: that these exquisite shells were the product of the soft creatures themselves, which protected them, was the most astonishing thought.
"You," Jonathan said to us, "have, as you can easily determine by feeling your elbows and ribs, developed a solid framework, a skeleton, inside you, which supports your flesh and muscles, and which you carry around inside you, if it is not better to say: it carries you around. Here, it is the other way around. These creatures have turned their solidity outward, not as a framework, but as a house, and the fact that it is an exterior and not an interior must be the reason for their beauty."
We boys, Adrian and I, looked at each other with half-smiles and puzzled expressions at such remarks from our father, such as this one about the vanity of the visible.
At times, this external aesthetic was treacherous; for certain cone snails, charmingly asymmetrical, bathed in a veined pale pink or white-speckled honey brown, were notorious for their poisonous bite — and in general, when one listened to the master of Buchel House, a certain disreputability or fantastical ambiguity could not be kept at bay from this whole whimsical section of life. A strange ambivalence of opinion had always been evident in the very diverse uses to which these magnificent shells were put. In the Middle Ages, they had been part of the standard inventory of witches' kitchens and alchemists' vaults and had been found to be suitable vessels for poisons and love potions. On the other hand, and at the same time, they had served as shell shrines for communion wafers and relics and even as communion cups during church services. How many things touched upon here—poison and beauty, poison and sorcery, but also sorcery and liturgy. If we did not think so, Jonathan Leverkühn's comments gave us a vague sense of it.
As for the hieroglyphic writing that he could never quite make sense of, it was found on the shell of a New Caledonian shell of moderate size and was executed in a slightly reddish-brown color on a whitish background. The characters, as if drawn with a brush, merged into pure line ornamentation towards the edge, but on the larger part of the curved surface, their careful complexity gave them the distinct appearance of signs of communication. As I recall, they bore a strong resemblance to early Oriental scripts, such as the ancient Aramaic style, and in fact my father had to bring his friend archaeological books from the well-stocked city library in Kaisersaschern, which offered the possibility of research and comparison. Of course, these studies led to no results, or only to results so confusing and absurd that they amounted to nothing. Jonathan admitted this with a certain melancholy when he showed us the mysterious illustration. "It has proven impossible," he said, "to get to the bottom of the meaning of these symbols. Unfortunately, my friends, that is the case. They elude our understanding, and it will probably remain that way, painfully. But when I say they 'elude' us, that is just the opposite of 'revealing themselves,' and no one can convince me that nature painted these ciphers, for which we lack the key, on the shell of its creature merely for decoration. Decoration and meaning have always gone hand in hand; even ancient writings served both as decoration and as a means of communication. Let no one tell me that nothing is being communicated here! The fact that it is an inaccessible message, that one must immerse oneself in this contradiction, is also a pleasure."
Did he consider that if this were really supposed to be a secret script, nature would have to have its own organized language, born of itself? For which of those invented by humans would it choose to express itself? Even then, as a boy, I understood very clearly that non-human nature is fundamentally illiterate, which in my eyes is precisely what makes it so uncanny.
Yes, Father Leverkühn was a speculator and a thinker, and I have already said that his inclination toward research—if one can speak of research when it was actually only dreamy contemplation—always leaned in a certain direction, namely the mystical or a prescient semi-mystical one, toward which, it seems to me, human thought pursuing the natural is almost necessarily directed. That the very undertaking of experimenting with nature, of provoking it into phenomena, of "testing" it by exposing its workings through experiments—that all this had a great deal to do with witchcraft, indeed already fell within its domain and was itself a work of the "tempter"—was the conviction of earlier epochs: a respectable conviction, if you ask me. I would like to know how people at that time would have viewed the man from Wittenberg who, as we heard from Jonathan, had invented the experiment of visible music a hundred and some years ago, which we sometimes got to see. One of the few physical devices at Adrian's father's disposal was a round, free-floating glass plate, resting only in the middle on a pivot, on which this miracle took place. The plate was sprinkled with fine sand, and by means of an old cello bow, which he stroked from top to bottom along its edge, he set it into vibration, causing the excited sand to shift and arrange itself into astonishingly precise and varied figures and arabesques. This visual acoustics, in which clarity and mystery, the lawful and the miraculous came together in a sufficiently appealing way, pleased us boys very much; but not least to please the experimenter, we often asked him to demonstrate it to us.
He found a similar pleasure in ice flowers, and on winter days, when these crystalline deposits covered the small farmhouse windows of the Buchelhaus, he could spend half an hour studying their structure with the naked eye and through his magnifying glass. I would like to say that everything would have been fine and we could have moved on to the order of the day if the products had remained, as they should have, symmetrical, figurative, strictly mathematical, and regular. But the fact that they imitated plants with a certain deceptive insolence, the most beautiful fern fronds, grasses that feigned cups and stars of flowers, that they dabbled in the organic with their icy means, that was what Jonathan could not get over, and about which his somewhat disapproving but also admiring shaking of the head knew no end. Did these phantasmagorias, he asked himself, represent the forms of vegetation, or did they imitate them? Neither, he answered himself; they were parallel formations. Creative, dreaming nature dreamed the same thing here and there, and if there was any question of imitation, it was certainly only mutual. Should the real children of the field be held up as models because they possessed organic, profound reality, while the ice flowers were mere appearances? But their appearance was the result of no less complex material interaction than that of plants. If I understood our host correctly, what preoccupied him was the unity of animate and so-called inanimate nature, it was the idea that we sin against this unity when we draw too sharp a line between the two realms, since in reality it is permeable and there is actually no elementary ability that is entirely reserved for living beings and that biologists cannot also study in inanimate models.
The "eating drop," which Father Leverkühn administered to us more than once before our eyes, taught us how confusingly the realms intermingle. A drop, whatever it may consist of, paraffin, essential oil—I don't remember exactly what it was made of, I think it was chloroform—a drop, I say, is not an animal, not even the most primitive, not even an amoeba; one does not assume that it feels an appetite to seize food, to retain what is digestible, to reject what is indigestible. But that is precisely what our drop did. It hung separately in a glass of water, where Jonathan had placed it, presumably with a fine syringe. What he did next was this. He took a tiny glass rod, actually just a thread of glass, which he had coated with shellac, between the tips of a pair of tweezers and brought it close to the drop. That was all he did; the rest was done by the drop. It formed a small elevation on its surface, something like a mound, through which it took in the rod lengthwise. In doing so, it stretched itself out, took on a pear shape so that it could completely enclose its prey and prevent it from protruding beyond its ends, and began, I give everyone my word on this, by gradually rounding itself again, first taking on an egg shape, to consume the shellac coating on the glass rod and distribute it throughout its little body. Once this was accomplished, he returned to a spherical shape and transported the cleanly licked applicator across his periphery and back into the surrounding water.
I cannot claim that I enjoyed watching this, but I admit that I was spellbound by it, and so was Adrian, although he was always tempted to laugh at such displays and suppressed it only out of consideration for his father's seriousness. At most, one could find the eating drop comical; but this was by no means the case, in my opinion, with certain incredible and ghostly products of nature that my father had succeeded in cultivating in the strangest way and which he also allowed us to observe. I will never forget the sight. The crystallization vessel in which it was presented was three-quarters full of slightly slimy water, namely diluted water glass, and from its sandy bottom rose a grotesque little landscape of differently colored plants, a confused vegetation of blue, green, and brown sprouts that resembled algae, mushrooms, attached polyps, even mosses, then shells, fruit cobs, small trees or branches of small trees, here and there even limbs – the strangest thing I had ever seen: strange, not so much because of its admittedly very bizarre and confusing appearance, but because of its deeply melancholic nature. For when Father Leverkühn asked us what we thought of them, and we timidly replied that they might be plants, "No," he replied, "they are not, they only pretend to be. But do not think less of them for that! Precisely because they pretend and do their best to do so, they are worthy of every respect."
It turned out that these growths were entirely of inorganic origin, brought about with the help of substances obtained from the pharmacy “To the Blessed Messengers.” Jonathan had sprinkled the sand at the bottom of the vessel with various crystals—if I am not mistaken, they were potassium dichromate and copper sulfate—before pouring in the water glass solution, and from this seed, through a physical process known as “osmotic pressure,” had developed the pitiful cultivation for which its caretaker immediately sought to claim our sympathy all the more urgently. He showed us, in fact, that these wretched imitators of life were light-seeking, “heliotropic,” as the science of life calls it. He exposed the aquarium to sunlight for us, cleverly shading three of its sides from the light, and behold, toward the pane of the glass vessel through which the light entered, the entire dubious brood—mushrooms, phallic polyp stalks, little trees and algae grasses along with half-formed limbs—soon leaned, and with such a yearning urge for warmth and joy that they practically clung to the pane and stuck fast to it.
"And yet they are dead," said Jonathan, tears welling up in his eyes, while Adrian, as I could see, was shaken by suppressed laughter.
For my part, I must leave it open whether such things are to be laughed at or cried over. I will say only this: ghostly apparitions such as these are exclusively a matter for nature, and especially for nature that has been wantonly tampered with by humans. In the dignified realm of the humanities, one is safe from such hauntings.
IV
Since the previous section has become excessively long, I would do well to start a new one in order to pay tribute, in a few words, to the image of the Buchel landlady, Adrian's dear mother. It may well be that the gratitude one feels for one's childhood, combined with the tasty snacks she served us, romanticizes this image, but I still say that I have never met a more attractive woman in my life than Elsbeth Leverkühn, and I speak of her simple, intellectually unassuming person with the reverence that instills in me the conviction that her son's genius owed much to his mother's vitality and creativity.
While I enjoyed looking at her husband's handsome old German head, my eyes lingered no less willingly on her thoroughly pleasant, peculiarly determined, and clearly proportioned appearance. A native of the Apolda region, she was of the brunette type that is sometimes found in German lands, without any discernible genealogy to suggest Roman blood. The darkness of her complexion, the blackness of her hairline, and her quiet, friendly eyes could have led one to mistake her for a Welsch woman, had it not been for a certain Germanic coarseness in her facial features. Her face formed a rather short oval, with a rather pointed chin, a slightly irregular, slightly indented nose that was slightly raised at the front, and a calm mouth that was neither voluptuous nor sharp. The parting I mentioned, which covered half of her ears and slowly turned silver as I grew up, was very tight, so that it reflected light, and the dividing line above her forehead exposed the white scalp. Nevertheless, some loose hair hung down very gracefully in front of her ears, though not always and therefore probably not intentionally. The braid, which was still thick in our childhood days, was wrapped around the back of her head in the peasant style and was probably threaded with a colorful embroidered ribbon on festive days.
Urban clothing was as little her thing as it was her husband's; ladylike attire did not suit her, but the rural, semi-costumed traditional dress in which we knew her was perfect for her: the sturdy, as we said, homemade skirt, a kind of embroidered bodice with an angular neckline that left her somewhat stocky neck and upper chest exposed, on which a simple, light gold necklace lay. Her brownish hands, accustomed to work but neither coarse nor overly manicured, with the wedding ring on her right hand, had, I would say: something so humanly right and reliable that it was a pleasure to look at them, as well as at her determined, not too large and not too small, righteous feet in comfortable shoes with flat heels and green or gray woolen stockings that encircled her well-formed ankles. All of this was pleasant. But the most beautiful thing about her was her voice, a warm mezzo-soprano in range and, in its pronunciation, with a slight Thuringian accent, extremely charming. I do not say "ingratiating" because that would imply something deliberate and conscious. This vocal charm came from an inner musicality that remained latent, however, since Elsbeth did not care about music, did not profess to like it, so to speak. It happened that she would casually strum a few chords on the old guitar that adorned the living room wall and hum one or two broken verses of a song to accompany them, but she never engaged in actual singing, although I would bet that this was where the most excellent material could have been developed.
In any case, I have never heard anyone speak more sweetly, even though what she said was always the simplest and most matter-of-fact; and in my opinion, it means something that this natural and instinctively tasteful melodiousness touched Adrian's motherly ear from the very first moment. For me, this contributes to the explanation of the incredible sense of sound that manifests itself in his work, even if the objection is obvious that his brother Georg enjoyed the same privilege without it having any influence on the course of his life. Incidentally, he looked more like his father, while Adrian's physique was much more like his mother's – which again does not seem to be true, as it was Adrian who inherited his father's tendency to migraines, and not Georg. But the overall appearance of the dear departed, along with many details: the brunette complexion, the shape of the eyes, the mouth and chin, all came from his mother's side, especially noticeable as long as he was clean-shaven, that is, before he grew the strongly alienating goatee, which only happened in later years. The jet black of his mother's iris and the azure of his father's had blended in his eyes to a shadowy blue-gray-green, with small metallic flecks and a rust-colored ring around the pupils; and I was always certain that it was the contrast between his parents' eyes and the mixture of their colors in his own that made his judgment of beauty in this regard so indecisive and prevented him from ever deciding which eyes, black or blue, he preferred in others. But it was always the extreme, the tarry sheen between the eyelids or the light blue, that captivated him.
Mrs. Elsbeth's influence on the Buchel farmhands, who were not particularly numerous in economically quiet seasons and were only augmented by the surrounding rural population at harvest time, was the very best and, if I saw correctly, her authority over these people was even greater than that of her husband. The image of some of them still floats before my eyes: the figure of the stable boy Thomas, for example, the same one who used to pick us up from the Weißenfels train station and take us back there, a one-eyed, exceptionally bony and tall man, but with a hump high up on his back, on which he often let little Adrian ride around: it was, as the master often assured me later, a very practical and comfortable seat. I also remember a stable maid named Hanne, a person with a sagging bosom and bare, perpetually muddy feet, with whom the boy Adrian also maintained a close friendship for reasons that will be explained later, and the manager of the dairy, Mrs. Luder, a widow who wore a bonnet, whose unusually dignified expression was partly due to the protection afforded by her name, but also to the fact that she was skilled in the production of recognized excellent caraway cheese. It was she, if not the housewife herself, who entertained us in the cowshed, that benevolent place where, under the strokes of the maid crouching on the milking stool, the lukewarm, foamy milk, smelling of the useful animal, flowed into our glasses.
I would certainly not lose myself in individual memories of this rural childhood world, along with the surrounding simple scenery of fields and forests, ponds and hills, if it were not for Adrian's early environment up to the age of ten, his parents' house, his native landscape, which so often enclosed me together with him. It was the time when our "you" took root, and when he must have called me by my first name – I no longer hear it, but it is inconceivable that the six- and eight-year-olds should not have said "Serenus" or simply "Seren" to me, just as I said "Adri" to him. The exact time cannot be determined, but it must have been during our early school days when he stopped granting me this privilege and addressed me, if at all, only by my last name, while it would have seemed completely harsh and impossible for me to respond in kind. That's how it was—and the only thing missing was that it looked as if I wanted to complain. It just seemed worth mentioning that I called him "Adrian," while he, if he didn't avoid using names altogether, called me "Zeitblom." Let's leave this curious fact, to which I had become quite accustomed, and return to Buchel!
His friend, and mine too, was the farm dog Suso—he strangely bore this name—a somewhat shabby hound who, when you brought him his meal, used to smile broadly across his whole face, but was by no means harmless to strangers and led the peculiar life of a chained dog confined to his hut and his bowls during the day, roaming freely around the yard only in the quiet of the night. Together we looked into the filthy crowd of the pigsty, well aware of old maids' tales that these unclean creatures with their cunning, blond-lashed blue eyes and human-colored bacon bellies occasionally devoured small children, forced our throats to imitate the subterranean nuck-nuck of their language, and watched the rosy wriggling of the piglets suckling at their mother's teats. Together we amused ourselves with the pedantic life and activities of the chicken population behind its wire mesh, accompanied by dignified, moderate sounds and only occasionally erupting into hysteria, and paid discreet visits to the bee hives behind the house, familiar with the not unbearable but buzzing pain it caused when one of these collectors strayed onto your nose and unwisely decided to sting you.
I remember the currants in the kitchen garden, whose fruit stems we pulled through our lips, the sorrel in the meadow that we tasted, certain flowers from whose throats we knew how to suck a trace of fine nectar, the acorns that we chewed in the forest, lying on our backs, the purple, sun-warmed blackberries that we picked from the bushes along the way, and whose tart juice quenched our childhood thirst. We were children—not out of our own sensitivity, but for his sake, when I think of his fate, of his destined ascent from the valley of innocence to inhospitable, even gruesome heights, I am moved by the memory. It was an artist's life; and because I, a simple man, was destined to see it from such close quarters, all the feelings of my soul for human life and fate have gathered on this special form of human existence. Thanks to my friendship with Adrian, I consider it the paradigm of all fate-shaping, the classic cause for emotion about what we call becoming, development, destiny—and that may well be true. For although the artist may remain closer to his childhood throughout his life, not to say more faithful to it, than the man who specializes in the practical and real; although it can be said that, unlike the latter, he remains permanently in the dreamy, purely human, and playful state of childhood, his path from untouched early childhood to the late, unimagined stages of his becoming is infinitely longer, more adventurous, more shocking to the observer than that of the bourgeois man, and not half as tearful is the thought that he too was once a child.
Incidentally, I urgently ask the reader to attribute what I have said with feeling entirely to me, the writer, and not to believe that it was spoken in Leverkühn's spirit. I am an old-fashioned person, stuck in certain romantic views that are dear to me, including the dramatic contrast between artistry and bourgeoisie. Adrian would have coolly contradicted a statement like the one above—if he had found it worth the effort to contradict it at all. For he had extremely sober, even reactionary, cutting opinions about art and artistry and was so averse to the "romantic fuss" that the world had been fond of making about it for a while that he did not even like to hear the words "art" and "artist," as could be clearly seen on his face when they were uttered. The same was true of the word "inspiration," which was to be avoided at all costs in his company and replaced with "idea" at best. He hated and mocked that word—and I cannot help but raise my hand from the blotter in front of my writing and cover my eyes with it as I remember this hatred and mockery. Alas, they were too tormented to be merely the impersonal result of intellectual and temporal changes. These, however, were effective, and I remember that even as a student he once said to me that the nineteenth century must have been an extremely comfortable age, since never before had it been more difficult for humanity to break away from the views and habits of the previous epoch than it is for the generation now living.
I already mentioned briefly the pond, surrounded by willows, which was only ten minutes' walk from the Buchel house. It was called the "cow hollow," probably because of its oblong shape and because cows liked to walk to its shore to drink, and, for some reason, it had remarkably cold water, so that we were only allowed to bathe in it in the afternoon hours when the sun had been shining on it for a long time. Climbing the hill, it was already a half-hour walk to get there, which we enjoyed doing. The hill was called, certainly since very ancient times, but quite inappropriately, "Zionsberg" (Mount Zion) and was good for sledding in the winter, although I rarely went there then. In summer, with its circle of shady maple trees at its "summit" and the bench erected there at the community's expense, it offered a breezy, open space where I often enjoyed myself on Sunday afternoons before dinner with the Leverkühn family.
