Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music

Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and Theodor W.
Adorno's "Philosophy of Modern Music"

Authors(s): Evelyn Cobley
Source: New German Critique, No. 86 (Spring - Summer, 2002), pp. 43-70
Published by: Duke University Press
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Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics:
Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and Theodor
W. Adorno's Philosophy of Modem Music
Evelyn Cobley
The preoccupation with theory over the last four decades has made us
increasingly aware of the way philosophical discourse and literary practice
are mutually constitutive. This awareness is customarily engendered by
theoretically informed critics drawing out the philosophical assumptions
embedded in literary texts. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, 1 however, is
unusual in that it actually incorporates Theodor W. Adorno's history of
musical form, a history permeated by his materialist critique of Hegelian
idealism. Both written in the early 1940s, Mann's novel and Adorno's
philosophical discourse carry the imprint of the Nazi terror which drove
the two authors into exile in California, bringing the novelist and the
philosopher together in 1943.2 Adomo provided Mann with a manu-
script version of Philosophie der neuen Musik [Philosophy of Modern
Music].3 As Mann himself later acknowledged, he found Adorno's philo-
sophical views on music and culture so congenial to his own thinking
1. Whenever I use my own translations, I refer to the German version (1990). Most
of the time, I rely on H.T. Lowe-Porter's translation (1968); however, occasionally I refer
to the more recent translation by John E. Woods (1997). Although the Woods translation
is in many ways more "accurate," I believe that the earlier Lowe-Porter translation is sty-
listically closer to Mann's German.
2. Mann had started work on Doctor Faustus on May 23, 1943; in July 1943, while
working on chapter seven of the novel, he received from Adorno a book on music by
Bahle (Mann 1949, 31, 41).
3. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy ofModern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and
Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1973).
43
44 Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics
that he based the music theory of his fictional composer, Adrian
Leverkiihn, on Adorno's analysis of Sch6nberg and Stravinsky in this
manuscript. In Doctor Faustus Mann "quotes" so extensively from Philos-
ophy of Modern Music that Adorno's contribution exceeds the modest
label of "adviser" on avant-garde music. Since Adorno's music theory is
so intimately bound up with his Marxist methodology, Mann thus cannot
avoid articulating, through Leverkiihn, an ideological critique not only of
fascism but also of bourgeois capitalism. Contrary to the conventional
interpretation of Doctor Faustus as exemplifying once again Mann's
investment in liberal humanism and the bourgeois social order, I want to
argue that, on a less obvious and more complicated level, Mann implies,
through his borrowing from Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music, that
the liberal-humanist tradition was not just ineffectual against fascism but
actually complicit with it. My reading of Doctor Faustus seeks to fore-
ground the ideological implications of Leverkiihn's aesthetic theory by sit-
uating Mann's treatment of musical form within Adorno's dialectical
thinking.4 Although the general tendency has been to understand Adorno's
contribution as a relatively minor sharpening of Mann's own ideas, I con-
sider him to be a major, if largely unwitting, "collaborator" in the compo-
sition of Doctor Faustus. The novel is consequently traversed by a tension
between Mann's celebrated conservative impulses and Adorno's neo-
Marxist sympathies, a tension that has significant implications for our
understanding of the roots of fascism at stake in the explicit analogies
between Leverkiihn's avant-garde music and the emergence of German
National Socialism. Focusing on the composer's aesthetic ambitions in the
context of the political attitudes of proto-fascist intellectuals, critics have
primarily commented on the neo-Romantic sources of Hitler's nationalis-
tic appeal to the Volk. In contrast, I will discuss Leverkilhn's exposure to
Kretschmar's Adorno-inspired Beethoven lectures in order to shift atten-
tion from the irrational neo-Romantic roots of fascism to the complicity of
modernity's privileging of reason with the Holocaust.
Significance of "Borrowings"
To begin with, the much-debated question of Mann's borrowings from
Adorno needs to be revisited in order to provide a general idea of what
4. A more extended treatment of Mann's incorporation of Adorno's music theory
in the context of theories of fascism can be found in my Temptations of Faust: The Logic
ofFascism and Postmodern Archaeologies ofModernity (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002).
Evelyn Cobley 45
drew the two German exiles together and what separates them. The
extent of Mann's verbatim quotations from Philosophy of Modern Music
and other Adorno writings has led Hanjrrg Drrr to conclude that Adorno
should indeed be considered not only an adviser on details of musical
technique but an actual "co-author of Doktor Faustus."5 Offering a "sys-
tematic reconstruction of sources,"6 Dfrr juxtaposes passages from Phi-
losophie der Neuen Musik and Doktor Faustus, demonstrating the
novelist's enormous indebtedness to the philosopher. More critical than
others of Mann's own account, in The Story of a Novel,7 of Adorno's
role, Dorr claims that Mann does not fully acknowledge Adomo's influ-
ence. In the case of Adomo's contribution to Kretschmar's lectures on
Beethoven's late style, for instance, Mann openly admits that Adomo
assisted him not only by playing for him piano sonata opus 111 but also
by annotating a draft of the novel. However, as Dorr shows, the novel is
"thematically and formally"8 suspiciously close to Adomo's essay "Spait-
stil Beethovens" ["The Late Style of Beethoven"].
What appealed to Mann was Adorno's "attitude of mind," a shared
preference for the "Wagner-Nietzsche-Schopenhauer trinity" over the
new music of Arnold Schrnberg. Since Mann was himself torn between
"the contrived 'new' and the oddly personal 'old',"9 he was sensitive to
Adomo's conflict between his intellectual appreciation of Schrnberg's
avant-garde innovations and his actual taste in music. Recognizing that
he was incapable of carrying out the sophisticated analyses in Adomo's
writings on music, Mann gratefully accepted the philosopher's help. But
even Dorr limits his consideration of Adomo's contribution to Doctor
Faustus to the "grounding of the role of music in philosophy and intel-
lectual history."l0 Although he acknowledges that Adorno's music the-
ory satisfies Mann's search for "a period analysis appropriate to the
world of the novel,"11 he emphasizes questions of attribution and does
not pursue the ideological implications of Adorno's intertext. While I
5. HansjOrg D6rr, "Thomas Mann und Adorno: Ein Beitrag zur Entstehung des
Doktor Faustus," in Thomas Manns Dr. Faustus und die Wirkung, ed. R. Wolff (Bonn:
Bouvier, 1983) 50.
6. D6rr 50.
7. Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, trans.
Richard Winston & Clara Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961).
8. D6rr 53.
9. D6rr 50.
10. D *rr 49.
I1. D6rr 50.
consider it important that the record of Mann's "borrowing" be set
straight, my concern is with the specific features of Adorno's sociocul-
tural analyses which found their way into Doctor Faustus.
If music is treated as social commentary, then Doctor Faustus can be
accused of improper appropriation, not so much of Adorno's theory but
rather of Sch6nberg's music. Could Mann justifiably associate twelve-
tone technique with devil's work and, by implication, with fascism? It
is certainly the case that Mann made music symbolic of German cul-
ture in its most suspect manifestations: "Music is a demonic area. .. If
Faust were the representative of the German soul, he would have to be
musical because the relation of the Germans to the world is abstract and
mythic, namely musical."l12 From this perspective, the novel seems to
suggest that Leverkiihn's story is representative of the crisis of moder-
nity that produced in Germany both Schanberg's music and National
Socialism. It is not entirely surprising that Schoinberg objected to
Mann's use of his atonal technique in Doctor Faustus. Although Mann
eventually acceded to SchtOnberg's request for acknowledgment by add-
ing an "Author's Note" that declared the "twelve-tone or row system"
to be the "intellectual property"l13 of Schtnberg, he complained in The
Story of a Novel that this acknowledgment distorted the function music
played in the novel: "SchtOnberg's idea and my ad hoc version of it dif-
fer so widely that, aside from the stylistic fault, it would have seemed
almost insulting, to my mind, to have mentioned his name in the text."
In his eyes, twelve-tone technique in the novel takes on the kind of
demonic and magical tendencies which SchOnberg's music "does not
possess in its own right."l14 Without denying the importance of the
proper attribution of ideas and the accuracy of Mann's Adorno-inspired
reading of SchOnberg, my focus on the sociohistorical criteria that
Adorno applies in his theoretical assessments of music sidesteps issues
of "intellectual property" and "fair" treatment.15
It is crucial to remember that Mann readily admitted that Doctor Faus-
tus is not so much a "novel of music" as the more ambitious attempt at
12. Mann, "Deutschland und die Deutschen," in Thomas Mann Essays, ed. H.
Kurzke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1977) 285.
13. Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. H.T. Lowe-Porter (Harmondsworth: Penguin,
1968) 491.
14. Mann, The Story ofa Novel 36.
15. In a novel which makes "quotation" a central formal technique, the issue of
"intellectual property" is, in a sense, irrelevant.
Evelyn Cobley 47
conceiving a "novel of the culture and the era."l'6 Declaring music to be
representative not only of art but of culture in general, he says that it
was "only foreground and representation, only a paradigm for some-
thing more general, only a means to express the situation of art in gen-
eral, of culture, even of man and the intellect itself in our so critical
era."17 Although music was extremely important to Mann, he confesses:
"Technical musical studies frighten and bore me."18 Since music as such
was not the prime impetus for Doctor Faustus, Mann felt no strong need
to present himself as an expert in music theory and gratefully accepted
Adorno as his "aid,... adviser,... expert in the subject who was also
capable of great insight into my literary intentions."19 What struck him
immediately upon reading Adomo's manuscript version of Philosophy of
Modern Music was that it provided "[m]oments of illumination on
Adrian's position" and about the "desperate situation of art."20 More
importantly, perhaps, he recognized "something important," namely "an
artistic and . . . sociological plane. The spirit of it was remarkably for-
ward-looking, subtle and deep, and the whole thing had the strangest
affinity to the idea of my book, to the 'composition' in which I lived and
moved and had my being."21 Adomo's influence goes far beyond ques-
tions of music, extending to his Marxist-inspired ideology critique and
sociohistorical methodology. It is as if Mann had encountered in
Adomo's theoretical conceptualizing echoes of his own thinking; Doc-
tor Faustus effortlessly interweaves the borrowed material and makes it
its own. Even the earliest scenes, produced at the beginning of 1943
before Mann had any contact with Adorno, betray unmistakable affini-
ties with the Dialectic of Enlightenment that Adorno co-authored with
Max Horkheimer (completed in 1944 but not published until 1947).
I would argue that Adorno did not just consolidate Mann's thinking
but that he redirected it in significant ways. No matter what theory of
intertextuality one consults, the consensus is that a quotation cannot be
grafted into a new context without carrying with it the imprint of its
previous context. Mann's much-vaunted montage technique is an exem-
plary application of intertextual grafting, illustrating his assumption that
17. Mann, The Story ofa Novel 41-42.
18. Mann, The Story of a Novel 40.
20. Mann, The Story of a Novel 42-43.
21. Mann, The Story of a Novel 43.
all writing is in any case always a form of rewriting. Comfortable with
the act of borrowing, Mann never tried to hide his indebtedness to
Adorno, honoring his collaborator by making his middle name, "Wie-
sengrund," a motif in Kretschmar's lecture on Beethoven's Arietta
theme in sonata opus 111. Indeed, Kretschmar's lecturing style, "the
permanent accompaniment and interruption of the prelude through
explanatory comments," captures "Adorno's idiosyncrasy."22 Even the
devil adopts for one of his incarnations the form of an intellectual music
critic reminiscent of Adorno. It seems that Mann's direct acknowledg-
ment of Adorno in The Story of a Novel and his indirect tribute to him
in the novel authorize an investigation of Doctor Faustus as the kind of
collaborative effort that informs my dual focus in this study on Mann's
bourgeois humanism and Adorno's critique thereof.
Mythic Paradigm and Bourgeois Ideology
The relationship between art and society is a dominant theme
throughout Mann's long career. In his earlier novels, the artist persis-
tently oscillates between aesthetic and bourgeois aspirations; pursuing
one or the other of these, he either succeeds or fails to accomplish his
objective. The dilemma for protagonists like Thomas Buddenbrook,
Tonio Krtiger, Hans Castorp, and Gustav von Aschenbach is that they
are torn between two separate spheres. As Harvey Goldman has so con-
vincingly shown,23 Mann's solutions for these protagonists vary from
rejecting the "Biirgerethik" ["bourgeois ethic"] to superimposing it on
the aesthetic. In Doctor Faustus, though, Mann no longer finds it possi-
ble to resolve the opposition between autonomous artist and bourgeois
social world; Leverkiihn's fate marks Mann's despair over the redemp-
tive qualities of art in the face of fascist totalitarianism. Instead of act-
ing as a bulwark against the socio-political realities of German National
Socialism, the aesthetic shows itself to be thoroughly contaminated by
the ideological. By suggesting a parallel between the aesthetic theories
of the fictional composer Adrian Leverkiihn and the fascist ideologues
of the Winfried and Kridwiss circles, Mann asks a very postmodern
question about the potential of art to resist the dominant social order.
By the time of Doctor Faustus, as Goldman points out, Mann abandons
22. Helmut Jendreiek, Thomas Mann: Der demokratische Roman (DUisseldorf:
August Bagel, 1977) 422.
23. Harvey Goldman, Max Weber and Thomas Mann: Calling and the Shaping of
the Self(Berkeley & Los Angeles: U of California P, 1988).
Evelyn Cobley 49
art to save Leverkiihn's soul and turns to religion to redeem him.
Although condemned by the dialectical logic of the history of music,
Leverkiihn finds himself exonerated on the paradoxical theological
grounds of the "contrition without hope," the argument that the possibil-
ity of salvation rests on the sinner's refusal to embrace it.
Redemptive interpretations of Doctor Faustus tend to follow Mann's
own invitation to cast historical events within the mythic-psychological
paradigm of Faust succumbing to the temptations of the Nazi devil.
Treating Leverkiihn as a mythic reincarnation of earlier Faust figures,
Mann stressed that this symbolic emblem allowed him to deal with Ger-
many "in purely psychological terms" so as to uncover "the mystery in
the character and destiny of this nation."24 Since Gunilla Bergsten's
detailed demonstration of the exact chronolo ical correspondences
between the chapbook Faust and Doctor Faustus, it has become a vir-
tual commonplace to see Leverkiihn as an expression of Germany and,
beyond it, of the universal human psyche. In a well-known essay, Mann
himself authorizes this mythic framing:
To me, the devil, Luther's devil, Faust's devil, appears to be a very
German figure. The pact with him, the signing away of one's soul
to the devil in order to exchange one's spiritual salvation for all the
treasures and power of the world for a short period of time, seems
to be something strangely close to the German nature. A lonely
thinker and scientist, a theologist and philosopher in his study signs
away his soul to the devil because he yearns for the pleasures and
power of the world. Is this not the right moment to see Germany in
this image, today that Germany is literally taken by the devil?26
Instead of blaming fascism on external events, Mann looks for its
roots in the German cultural tradition he himself has championed and
continues to embody. What Doctor Faustus addresses above all is the
problem of the extent to which Germany can or cannot be exonerated
from guilt. Did Mann believe that the "good" Germany had been per-
verted by the "bad" Germany or did he accept that the "good" Ger-
many is implicated in the "bad" one? Although he initially subscribed
24. Mann, "Freud und die Zukunft," Gesammelte Werke (Frankfurt: Fischer, 1960)
1121.
25. Gunilla Bergsten, Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus: Untersuchungen zu den
Quellen und der Struktur des Romans (Bonniers: Svenska Bokfdrlaget, 1963).
26. Mann, "Freud und die Zukunft" 1131.
to the perversion theory, he gradually acknowledged that good and evil
were inextricably tied up with each other. Outlining the stages of
Mann's painful awakening to his own unwitting complicity in the emer-
gence of fascism, Helmut Koopmann shows that, in a first move, Mann
initially believed that the bad Germany had driven the good Germany
into exile: "Thenceforth there is no double Germany for him. The
incredible and despicable Germany lives where previously the good and
great Germany existed; the essential Germany, that of culture, exists
only outside, particularly in Thomas Mann himself."27 But after about
1941, Mann began to acknowledge that he had to locate "not only the
pre-history of National Socialism in the German past, but also the mix-
ture of good and evil in that past, the shady sides of the whole German
tradition."28 The critical consensus Koopmann here expresses is pre-
dominantly based on Mann's most important broadcast from America,
"Germany and the Germans," in which he explains: "One thing this his-
tory may teach us: There are no two Germanies, an evil and a good one.
There is only one Germany whose good sides turned evil through a
devil's ruse. The evil Germany is the failure of the good one, the good
in disaster, in guilt, and demise."29
Mann's comments in essays, speeches, diaries, and letters encourage
us to adopt his own liberal-humanist framing of issues in Doctor Faus-
tus. This critical perspective is predominantly marked by a focus on
Leverkiihn's affirmation of art as a culpable withdrawal from life, on
Mann's continued investment in humanism, and on his deep-seated need
to apologize for the German "catastrophe." Through his self-imposed
isolation from society, Leverkiihn symbolizes the autonomy of the aes-
thetic sphere and, by extension, embodies modernity's investment in
autonomous subjectivity. Leverkiihn could be regarded as an extreme
example of the "private-aesthetic sphere" which is for Christopher Nor-
ris characteristic of "postmodern ironists such as Richard Rorty, thinkers
who take it for a prime virtue of 'liberal' cultures like our own that they
offer maximum scope for the enterprise of private self-creation."30 Or, to
adopt McGowan's terms, Leverkiihn claims the "negative" freedom of
27. Helmut Koopmann, Der schwierige Deutsche: Studien zum Werk Thomas
Manns (Tilbingen: Max Niemeyer, 1988) 86.
28. Koopmann 88.
29. Mann, "Freud und die Zukunft" 1146.
30. Christopher Norris, The Truth about Postmodernism (Oxford: Blackwell, 1993)
94. 83.
Evelyn Cobley 51
Nietzsche-inspired postmodernist celebrations of unfettered self-affirma-
tion or self-empowerment. When Mann has Leverkiihn go insane, he
seems to suggest that the autonomous subject cannot withstand the pres-
sures of the socio-political world. Shifting from art to theology to cre-
ate a glimmer of hope indicates Mann's inability to face the pessimistic
conclusion imposed by the logic of his narrative and his despair over
the impotence of the aesthetic as a locus of resistance.
Leverkiihn is indeed portrayed as an art-for-art's-sake composer who
arrogantly assumes that art is by definition an apolitical activity. Living
both physically and emotionally in hermetically sealed spaces, he can-
not be tempted by the "world" when it visits him in the guise of Saul
Fitelberg. Untouched by mundane everyday life, the artist responds to
and expresses higher human and cultural needs. Critics tend to argue that
Mann blames this aesthetic withdrawal from the life world, what Ger-
mans refer to as "inwardness," for the Nazi calamity that befell Ger-
many. Taking their clue from correspondences between events in the
fictional composer's story and Nietzsche's life, critics tend to indict
Leverkiihn as a fascist facilitator because his socially disinterested art-
for-art's-sake music strikes interpreters as anti-humanistic in Nietzschean
terms. Many critics then argue for a causal connection between aes-
thetic anti-humanism and the crimes against humanity committed by
German National Socialism. Jendreiek typically argues that fascism
must be seen as a possible consequence of the separation of art from the
life world: "The guilt of aestheticism as it is analytically defined in the
novel through Leverkiihn's character and in [Mann's essay on
Nietzsche] through Nietzsche as Leverkiihn's model is the guilt of a
theory that lacks a consideration of practice."31 Jendreiek's main thesis
seems to be that Mann analyzes fascism as a failure of humanism, a
failure brought about by yearnings of the "world" (sociopolitical sphere)
through misguided aesthetic means (abstract theoretical sphere). Isolat-
ing himself from the social world, Leverkiihn embarks on a theoretical
adventure which irresponsibly ignores political implications. His
Nietzschean search for renewed aesthetic vitality takes the form of an
irrationalism whose dangerous political consequences he arrogantly fails
to consider. According to Jendreiek, Mann ultimately attributes the fas-
cist catastrophe to the unfortunate coming together of the specifically
German characteristics of a tendency toward theoretical abstraction, a
31. Jendreiek 439.
romantic investment in the "heart," and a desire for order.
Having carefully shown that Mann saw fascism as a failure of human-
ism, Jendreiek then concludes that the narrator's stated "hope beyond
hopelessness" expresses Mann's belief that Germany will be saved by
embracing social democracy as embodying the ideal of "a social human-
ity."32 Referring to Mann's often quoted letter to Walter Molo, Jendreiek
affirms that the question of salvation at the end of the novel ought to be
understood "as the development of a 'bourgeois' democracy toward a
'social' humanism through which Germany will overcome its sickness of
loneliness and achieve the reconciliation of the world in a process of
political universalization."33 The final high g note in the composition
"The Lament of Doctor Faustus" is thus interpreted as "Thomas Mann's
musical symbol of hope signifying that the German people will win a
future through the fascist catastrophe, its Descent into Hell, and break
through from the barbarism of inhumanity to humanity."34 In short, Jen-
dreiek's assessment of the music theory in Doctor Faustus is informed by
the specifically moral question of what aspects of music serve the social
good of humanity. Working primarily within the opposition "menschlich/
unmenschlich' [human/inhuman], he identifies fascism with an inhuman-
ity unintentionally abetted by a bold but socially irresponsible aestheti-
cism. Although liberal humanism proved weak and ineffective against the
forces of darkness, it embodies values that ought to be reaffirmed.
Philosophy of Music and Critique of Bourgeois Ideology
A rather different picture emerges if we take into account Adorno's
contribution to the depiction of Leverkiihn's avant-garde aesthetic exper-
iments. Like Mann, Adorno exiled himself from Germany, moving first
to England and then to the United States. Although he escaped the worst
forms of persecution, he was plagued by the guilt of the survivor and the
exile. As Martin Jay comments, to "certain commentators, it has seemed
as if Adorno's personal trauma as a Jewish (or, more precisely, half-Jew-
ish) survivor of the Final Solution permanently blackened his perception
32. Jendreiek 475. Reading Doctor Faustus as a historical-religious novel, Bergsten
also contends that Mann was intensely concerned with the question of German guilt and
redemption. For her the ending means that no matter how harshly Mann judged National
Socialism, he maintained that after the complete collapse of the "evil" Germany, the
"'good' Germany" will finally "rise again" (Bergsten 1963) 159-60.
33. Jendreiek 463.
34. Jendreiek 462.
Evelyn Cobley 53
of the world, obliterating the Marxist optimism of his earlier period."
While the direct target of Adorno's sociohistorical critique is always the
commodification of the world under late capitalism, the "bitter implica-
tions of the Holocaust"35 display themselves in his tendency to see fas-
cism as a distorted manifestation of the capitalist mode of production.
Mann's bourgeois investment belongs to a long tradition of liberal phi-
losophy which has generally been driven by the assumption that free-
dom for all could be achieved if the autonomous subject could only be
made to coincide with the social collective. In contrast, Adorno's "nega-
tive dialectic" is highly suspicious of emancipatory liberal projects; for
him, subject and object are dialectically intertwined and hence always
implicated in a process of reversal which suggests development but not
necessarily progress. The historical fact of "Auschwitz" confirmed
Adorno in the suspicion that both Hegel and Marx advanced theories
based on the overly optimistic possibility that antagonistic social opposi-
tions were open to sublation and reconciliation. His "negative dialectic"
stresses the radical nonidentity of such dichotomies as subject and
object, concept and referent, universal and particular. Any projected syn-
thesis of subject and object strikes him as an unfortunate mystification
which obscures how effortlessly the subject can be absorbed by objec-
tive totalities like fascism or capitalism. His emphasis on negation
rejects the sublation of opposites, foregrounding instead their irreconcil-
able difference and contradiction. This emphasis on society as an antago-
nistic rather than a unified totality is the "truth" that serious art ought to
acknowledge in the wake of Auschwitz. But this truth can no longer be
expressed positively; the suffering of the dehumanized subject exceeds
the grasp of the liberal-humanist categories which Jendreiek attributes to
Mann. Importing Adomo's negative dialectic into Leverkiihn's aesthetic
theory, Mann cannot help but suggest that art is complicit with a capital-
ist system which, according to Adomo, has the same roots as fascism.
The sociohistorical approach Mann borrows from Adomo stresses the
systemic nature of the radical revolution of Leverkiihn's aesthetic innova-
tion. Instead of attributing LeverkiAhn's breakthrough to the "genius" of
the individual artist, Doctor Faustus dramatizes Adomo's conviction that
aesthetic accomplishments and historical events must be understood as
responses to specific material conditions. What is so sophisticated in
35. Martin Jay, Marxism and Totality: The Adventures of a Concept from Lukdcs to
Habermas (Berkeley: U of California P, 1984) 243.
Adorno's methodology is his insistence that art may not provide us with
access to universal truths but that it can alert us to the untruths blind-
ing us to our social and cultural situation. For Adorno, some artists are
able to express, and are courageous enough to confront, such untruths
whereas others prefer to hide and escape from them. Commentators
consistently argue that Adorno preferred SchOnberg to Stravinsky
because the former articulated the "truth-content" of late capitalism
while the latter took flight from history; where Schdnberg took a criti-
cal stance against commodification, Stravinsky simply registered the
complicity of aesthetics with late capitalism. Is it possible that Adorno
appreciated Mann's novel precisely because it "represents the truth of
society against the individual, who recognizes its untruth and is himself
this untruth"?36 It seems to me that, through his social isolation,
Leverkiihn criticizes society and draws attention to its "untruth"; by the
end of the novel, he further acknowledges that his masterpiece can do
no more than tragically intensify this "untruth." Although art may not
be able to "redeem" us, its awareness of the "untruth" of society ought
to at least make us suspicious of the kind of ideological mystifications
that allowed fascism to establish itself.
In addition to the dramatized staging of the composer's retreat from
the social world, Mann treats the conflict between subjective agency
and material conditions analytically through Leverkiihn's aesthetic edu-
cation. Tracing the emergence of twelve-tone technique historically to a
moment of crisis in Beethoven's career, Mann follows Adorno in focus-
ing on a complex paradigm shift from subjectivity to objectivity. The
logic of this Adorno-inspired dialectic undermines the ideological
assumptions informing the redemptive interpretation Mann endorses on
the psychological level of the Faust myth. The parallel between
Leverkiihn's music and the arguments of proto-fascist ideologues tends
to be invoked to reinforce the position that fascism was a perverted
consequence of neo-romantic nostalgia for simpler times. Echoing the
aptly named proto-fascist Deutschlin, the aspiring composer dreams of
freeing music from the constraints of exhausted conventions by recover-
ing its lost authenticity. Exclaiming that music is always poised to begin
"at the beginning, [to] rediscover[] itself afresh out of nothing, bare of
all knowledge of its past cultural history, and [to] create[] anew," he
specifies that music would have to return to its "primitive stages" in
36. Adomo, Philosophy ofModern Music 50-51.
Evelyn Cobley 55
order to regain "extraordinary and singular heights."37 When he advo-
cates that "we should have to become very much more barbaric to be
capable of culture again,"38 there can be little doubt that we are invited
to acknowledge a correspondence with Hitler's volkish appeal to primi-
tive origins. However, what is at stake in the passages devoted to music
is a more complex approach to the conflict between a desire for subjec-
tive freedom and a recognition of objective necessity. Since Adomo's
sociohistorical reading of aesthetic form deconstructs the Hegelian
assumptions of bourgeois ideology, Mann's incorporation of Philoso-
phy of Modern Music into Doctor Faustus can be said to contradict his
own (and his critics') investment in this ideology.
It is possible that Mann heard an echo of his inability to separate the
"good" and the "bad" Germany in Adomo's contention that opposites
are mutually constitutive. Throughout Doctor Faustus we are treated to
a vertiginous display of opposites turning into each other; whether we
watch Leverkiihn observe the interplay of organic and inorganic matter
in his father's scientific-magical laboratory or see him listen to the inter-
action between subjective expression and objective convention in musi-
cal compositions, the narrative emphasizes the tendency of opposites to
reverse themselves. But where Mann seems to consider this tendency to
be "magical" or "demonic," Adomo draws attention to the impact of
material conditions on the dialectical interplay of subjectivity and objec-
tivity. From Adomo's historically informed perspective, formal devices
may at certain points in time take on functions diametrically opposed to
those they may have served at other times. Although Leverkiihn is justi-
fied in his condemnation of formal conventions as being beset by a ster-
ile formalism, there was a time when their organizational function
served the expression of an authentically experienced content. If aes-
thetic form carries within it the material conditions that made it possi-
ble, then musical innovation is driven not only by inherent formal laws
but the socio-historical material embedded in it. Leverktihn's aesthetic
breakthrough is consequently the outcome of material conditions open
to analysis rather than of a demonic predisposition.
If music reflects in its form the ideological presuppositions of the his-
torical moment, then counterpoint appears in Doctor Faustus as the most
desirable aesthetic convention. According to Mann's incorporation of
37. Mann, Doctor Faustus 64-65.
38. Mann, Doctor Faustus 61.
Adorno's history of music, in counterpoint harmony (subjectivity) and
polyphony (objectivity) combine so as to reinforce each other without
antagonism. Translated into political terms, counterpoint presents itself
as the most attractive aesthetic model in that it reflects the ideal plural-
ity of the democratic community. For Adorno, counterpoint consists of
an "organization of music in such a way that it had an absolute need of
each voice contained within it - that each voice and each note fulfill a
precise function within the texture."39 Each voice or note is seamlessly
integrated into a totality with which it coincides. In Mann's translation
of this conception, "true counter-point requires the simultaneity of inde-
pendent voices"40; in political terms, individuals can be integrated into a
collectivity without having to sacrifice their singularity. "True counter-
point" dreams of a "non-violent totality" which anticipates Jilrgen Hab-
ermas's Hegelian notion of a noise-free system to be established through
communicative action. Kretschmar's lectures in Doctor Faustus indicate
that this dream begins to unravel in the nineteenth century when
Beethoven finds it increasingly difficult to maintain the dynamic ten-
sion between subject and object on which Hegel's system is predicated.
Since Adorno calls Beethoven a "musical Hegel," the Kretschmar lec-
tures in Doctor Faustus constitute a demystification of German idealism
whose culmination will be Leverkiihn's twelve-tone system.
The historical contemporaneity of Beethoven (1770-1827) and Hegel
(1770-1831) allows Adorno to analyze German philosophical idealism
and tonal music as reflections of a social modernity that has entered
into crisis. Under the reifying impact of the capitalist mode of produc-
tion, Hegel's assumption that contradictions can be sublated into a
unity of opposites has become increasingly untenable. In his lectures,
Kretschmar argues that the shift to harmony liberated music from
polyphonic objectivity; the composer was allowed greater and greater
freedom of self-expression. However, classical tonal music both enabled
subjective expression and also constrained it through a highly orga-
nized, thoroughly integrated, and hierarchical key system. At its best,
the classical work of music exemplified the dynamic tension between
subjective expression and objective form that finds its articulation in
Hegel's sublation of subject and object into a unity that does not oblit-
erate their distinctiveness. According to Adorno, the sonata-form was a
39. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music 94.
40. Mann, Doktor Faustus (Frankfurt/Main: Fischer, 1990) 257, my translation.
Evelyn Cobley 57
particularly "powerful means for reflecting such a dynamic equilibrium
of freedom and constraint,"41 an equilibrium also asserted by advocates
of the bourgeois-capitalist social order. As Adorno sees it, Beethoven
achieved in his middle period a highly precarious, near-perfect balance
between subject and object. The classical sonata-form perfected by
Beethoven is for Adorno "integral to bourgeois ideology" since the
"hierarchical construction of music in which tones are related to one
another through their tonal centres is paralleled by the structural ideal of
bourgeois society."42 For Adorno, the ideal of the "closed work" in
Beethoven's music and Hegel's philosophy reflects and reinforces the
confident self-understanding of the emergent bourgeoisie.
In sociohistorical terms, Beethoven's life as a composer stretched from
the "heroic" phase of the emergent bourgeoisie to its decline into the
reifying conditions of monopoly capitalism. Beethoven was crucial to
Adorno's history of music precisely because his late work (roughly 1816
to his death in 1827) is marked by the suspicion that the achieved
organic wholeness exemplified in the sonata-form of Beethoven's mature
period might be an illusion. Where the compositions of the middle period
reflected the self-understanding of the bourgeois order as a non-coercive
collectivity, the later compositions foreground the illusory nature of this
self-understanding. Far from existing harmoniously within the bourgeois
social order, the individual subject found itself increasingly alienated
from the collectivity and disempowered by the capitalist mode of produc-
tion. The social order was antagonistic rather than organically harmoni-
ous. As Witkin puts it, what Beethoven's late work recognizes is that in
music the "smooth 'fit' of elements is not achieved without a great deal
of hidden violence."43 In the name of ensuring "the lawfulness of all
relations among elements," the tonal system "concealed the unfreedom of
the individual tones and the force with which they were constrained in
their relations."44 According to Adorno, the truth-content of Beethoven's
late compositions is thus the dawning recognition that reconciliation does
not arise organically from the parts but is artificially enforced by the
totality. By drawing attention to this "violence," Beethoven deconstructs
his own earlier (Hegelian) illusion of fully achieved wholeness.
The Kretschmar lectures in Doctor Faustus narrate a history of music
41. Robert W. Witkin, Adorno on Music (New York: Routledge, 1998) 45.
42. Witkin 45.
43. Witkin 65.
44. Witkin 45.
whose progression is marked by dialectical subject-object reversals that
intensify but do not resolve the terms of this opposition. In the first
instance, the near-perfect harmony between subjective expression and
objective form in Beethoven's mature style began to disintegrate into a
privileging of subjectivity which Leverkiihn's teacher interprets counter-
intuitively as a concealed affinity with objective totality. In conformity
with Adorno's insistence that the sublation of subject and object is always
a compensatory illusion for their irreconcilable difference, Kretschmar
suggests that subjectivity temporarily prevails over objectivity only to
find itself paradoxically instrumental in the regeneration of the very
objectivity it had sought to defeat. The Adorno-Kretschmar figure avails
himself of Hegel's dialectical reversals of the mutually implicated terms
of an opposition while rejecting the possibility of their harmonious recon-
ciliation in an absolutized subject. The Kretschmar lectures can be said to
be deconstructing the illusion of organic wholeness which constitutes the
sociohistorical truth-content of Beethoven's mature style. The topic of the
first two lectures is Beethoven's piano sonata in C minor opus 111, a
sonata composed around 1820,45 at a time when the heroic phase of bour-
geois-capitalism had already been betrayed and Hegel's dynamic dialec-
tic had congealed into the "cult of the state" in the Philosophy of Right
(published in 1821). Through Kretschmar, Mann dramatizes the self-
deconstructive moment in Beethoven as a crucial step in Leverkiihn's
development toward atonality and, by implication, of Germany's march
toward National Socialism. At the level of music theory, Doctor Faustus
suggests that fascism was continuous with modernity.
Kretschmar's first two lectures explain why Beethoven chose not to
write a third movement for his piano sonata in C minor opus 111.46
Traditionally, the sonata form influenced by Haydn and Mozart tended
to have three movements, with the last one returning to the first in order
to reconcile it with the second. Ending on the slow and lyrical second
movement, sonata opus 111 privileges subjective expression without
executing the expected fusion with objectivity. Since this turn to subjec-
tivity was accompanied by Beethoven's withdrawal from society on
account of his increasing deafness, it was customary to interpret the
sonata as a symptom of artistic isolation and personal self-expression.
46. Adorno points out that the symbolic deletion of the third movement was Mann's
own idea.
Evelyn Cobley 59
Growing out of the old composer's "ego painfully isolated in the abso-
lute, isolated too from sense by the loss of his hearing," the sonata had
generally been interpreted as the expression of the "entirely and utterly
and nothing-but personal."47 This standard interpretation assumes that
the late Beethoven, no longer able to retain the dynamic tension
between subject and object, became the mark of pure subjectivity. In an
apparently counter-intuitive way, Kretschmar argues instead that the tri-
umph of subjectivity in Beethoven's late work conceals a hidden com-
plicity with objectivity. At the moment when subjective autonomy
seems to triumph in Beethoven's late style, sonata opus 111 tragically
attests to the isolated composer's unacknowledged yearning for commu-
nity. In the process of asserting itself absolutely, the subject overlooks
its interdependence with the object and sets out to defeat it; in Adorno's
critical terms, this aspiration to autonomy destroys the dialectical ten-
sion between subject and object and seeks to absolutize one category.
Beethoven aspires to this absolutizing of the subject by arrogating to it
functions previously carried out by musical conventions: "Conventions
were deprived of this [organizational] function, however, by autono-
mous aesthetic subjectivity, which strove to organize the work freely
from within itself. The transition of musical organization to autono-
mous subjectivity is completed by virtue of the technical principle of
the development."48 Through "Durchftihrung" [modulation], Beethoven
allows the subject to usurp and repress the object, forcing it to go
underground. The increasingly autonomous subject destroys the objec-
tive material without realizing that it also necessarily feeds on it. It is
precisely because subjectivity blindly celebrates its victory over objec-
tivity that it opens itself up to its own destruction. Retaining the histori-
cal dialectic as the critical moment in Hegel's philosophy, Adorno
assumes that both subjective consciousness and material history move
from less developed or intense states to more developed or intense ones.
The contest between subject and object as mutually constitutive terms
thus means that each drives the other into more and more extreme posi-
tions, creating conditions in which the repressed "other" always returns
with renewed vigor. Following this logic, Kretschmar contends that it is
precisely at the moment of triumph in Beethoven's personal style that
subjectivity enters into its own death, into a degeneration that will find
its culmination in Leverkiihn's twelve-tone technique.
As will be the case with Leverkiihn, the crisis in Beethoven's career
was brought about by changes in material conditions. The composer's
withdrawal from society into his inner self is analyzed as a critique of
society whose increasingly alienating impact on the subject contradicts
the harmonious model of the second-style. Both Beethoven and later
Leverkifhn exemplify Adorno's contention that the isolated artist speaks
about society precisely by withdrawing from it: "The reproach against the
individualism of art in its later stages of development is so pathetically
wretched simply because it overlooks the social nature of this individual-
ism. 'Lonely discourse' reveals more about social tendencies than does
communicative discourse.'A9 The isolated artist is seen as a symbol of
alienation, expressing a false sense of subjective autonomy which has
arisen as a compensatory response to the unpalatable social conditions
under late capitalism. In sonata opus 111, explains Kretschmar, "the sub-
jective and the conventional assumed a new relationship, conditioned by
death." Subject and object have entered into a Hegelian struggle of life
and death; their desire to defeat each other absolutely runs the risk of the
"Hegelian murder" whose outcome would be the destruction of both.
Mann suggests that Beethoven initiates a dialectical reversal that will find
its tragic conclusion in the elimination of the subject in "The Lament of
Doctor Faustus," Leverkiihn's breakdown, and Germany's catastrophe.
What Kretschmar illustrates is that the subjective turn in music has
secretly already been appropriated by the of "cunning" of objectivity:
Where greatness and death come together, he declared, there arises
an objectivity tending to the conventional, which in its majesty leaves
the most domineering subjectivity far behind, because therein the
merely personal - which had after all been the surmounting of a tra-
dition already brought to its peak - once more outgrew itself, in that
it entered into the mythical, the collectively great and supernatural.50
Kretschmar's tragic narrative depicts Beethoven as an "ego painfully
isolated in the absolute, isolated too from sense"51 which yearns for a
connection with the social community which the sociohistorical moment
makes no longer available. Entering into the mythical and collective,
Evelyn Cobley 61
Beethoven anticipates for Mann the anti-liberal attitudes of volkisch
intellectuals whose alienation from society compels them to endorse a
false mythology open to exploitation by German National Socialism.
Kretschmar's counter-intuitive reading of Beethoven draws out the
conceptual confusions of reversals of opposites that are not recuperated
by a transcendental moment to imbue them with meaning. It is, for
instance, difficult for Count Brunswick, who had commissioned sonata
opus 111, to distinguish between what was conservative and what was
radical in a sonata that abandons the formal requirement of recapitula-
tion in the third movement, prolonging instead the slow second move-
ment and thereby accentuating the composition's introspective,
meditative, and mystical qualities. Echoing sentiments Zeitblom later
voices in relation to Leverkiihn's challenge to tradition, Beethoven's
discomfited patron saw in the sonata a "process of dissolution or alien-
ation, of a mounting into an air no longer familiar or safe."52 Indeed, as
Kretschmar exults, this sonata could not easily be appreciated as a
"well-rounded and intellectually digested work."53 For Count Brun-
swick, this musical experiment confirmed "a degeneration of tenden-
cies previously present, an excess of introspection and speculation," a
self-indulgence subversive of this patron's sense of social hierarchy.
But this naive reaction overlooks a far more disturbing aspect of
Beethoven's provocation than the challenging of feudal authority
through individualism. By refusing the transcendental moment of recon-
ciliation, Beethoven disrupts the very framework that made categories
like subject and object meaningful. What makes the sonata uncanny is
the suggestion that the familiar opposition between subject and object is
in the process of breaking down:
For one would usually connect with the conception of the merely
personal, ideas of limitless subjectivity and of radical harmonic will
to expression, in contast to polyphonic objectivity (Kretschmar was
concerned to have us impress upon our minds this distinction
between harmonic subjectivity and polyphonic objectivity) and this
equation, this contrast, here as altogether in the masterly late works,
would simply not apply.54
Once subject and object are no longer oriented toward a transcenden-
tal point of resolution, they not only overlap and intermingle but are
open to unlimited reversals that make classification difficult. Count
Brunswick mistakenly assumes that polyphony denotes respect for
objectivity whereas harmony expresses unrestrained subjective willful-
ness. In reality, though, the turn to subjectivity in Beethoven's late
work also accentuates the objective character of music: "Untouched,
untransformed by the subjective, convention often appeared in the late
works, in a baldness, one might say exhaustiveness, an abandonment of
self, with an effect more majestic and awful than any reckless plunge
into the personal."55 Classical convention makes itself most visible at
the very moment when its boundaries are being exploded. Beethoven's
farewell to convention is a nostalgic moment which already anticipates
a yearning for its return. The triumph of the subject is consequently
always threatened by the return of its repressed other. Running counter
to popular opinion, Kretschmar assigns the highpoint of subjectivity to
Beethoven's second style and argues that the late works were already
moving in the direction of a reversion to objectivity. Count Brunswick
thus misunderstands the revolutionary moment to which he objects.
Fearing that subjectivity will destroy his world of strict conventions, he
is blind to the far more real threat his social class faces from the objec-
tified social order initiated by bourgeois capitalism.
When Beethoven was thought to have expressed his most personal
sense of self, he was in fact compelled by the internal logic of both the
musical material and the sociohistorical conditions to reflect the paradox
that the bourgeois liberation of the subject from feudal oppression pro-
duced not the self-contained liberal individual but the alienated self of
bourgeois capitalism. It is not unfettered personal freedom which
Beethoven's sonata anticipates but the possible elimination of the sub-
ject under the reifying conditions of late capitalism. Far from realizing its
emancipation, the subject has been forced to forfeit its power of agency.
In its struggle for autonomy, the subject severs its ties to the collectivity
and, in the process, it surrenders itself to a more totalizing objectivity to
which the mystifications of bourgeois ideology have blinded it. What
masquerades as unfettered personal expression reveals itself on closer
inspection to have been the desperate cry of the "abandonment of self'56
55. Mann, Doctor Faustus 54-55.
Evelyn Cobley 63
asking for reintegration into the social totality.
The analysis of the "Arietta-Thema" clarifies the potentially disastrous
implications for the subject that Kretschmar glimpses in the crack of the
Enlightenment self-understanding revealing itself in Beethoven's late
work. Reduced to the brief motif of only three tones, this theme hints at
the subject's sad farewell to convention as it reluctantly ventures forth on
its own. Although the arietta theme considers itself ill-prepared for its his-
torical role, it leaves the exhausted sonata-form behind and opens the
door to subjective autonomy. Suggesting that the theme would prefer to
preserve itself in its "idyllic innocence," Kretschmar points out that it
ends on a sad farewell motif that resembles "a brief soul-cry."57 This
reluctance implies that the subject acts less out of its own volition than
out of the necessities imposed on it by the socially imbued musical mate-
rial. Once the dialectical tension between subject and object no longer
corresponds to the antagonistic social reality, the subject withdraws from
the object in which it no longer recognizes itself. The problem is now no
longer that music is insufficiently subjective but that it is excessively so.
In its transgression of conventional limits, the arietta theme creates an
excessive emotional effect which destroys the balance required for the
sublation of subject and object. The beginnings of this assertion of subjec-
tive autonomy means that the traditional sonata form has become out-
moded. Yet the subject does not exult in its freedom; on the contrary, the
farewell to the traditional sonata-form comes across as the "most mov-
ing, consolatory, pathetically reconciling thing in the world."58 It is as
if the subject knew that its emancipation from the harmonious whole
really amounted to its expulsion from the Garden of Eden. Having ven-
tured into unfamiliar territory, the little aria finds itself in an "utterly
extreme situation," a moment of crisis "when the poor little motif seems
to hover alone and forsaken above a giddy yawning abyss."59 In the
first place, then, Kretschmar shows that the subject's search for auton-
omy was motivated not by arrogance but by the demands of the chang-
ing social conditions sedimented in the musical material.
The subject's situation is exacerbated when it retreats from adventurous
self-assertion into fearful self-effacement. Having embarked on the dan-
gerous road toward autonomy, the subject loses heart and takes refuge in
"a distressful making-of-itself-small."60 Unable to return to the lost para-
dise of perfect reconciliation with the object, the fearful subject is now
prepared to enter into an even more oppressive relationship with the
object. In the end, in a moving farewell, the subject "blesses the object"
and the sonata accepts its dissolution ("it cancelled and resolved
itself'61). In his attempt to save the sonata form from exhaustion,
Beethoven emancipates the subject and initiates a process that destroys
the convention he seeks to rescue and damns the subject he meant to
emancipate. His innovation is paradoxically depicted as both a blessing
and a condemnation; the sonata is provided with a new form "with what
its master blesses and to what condemns it." Kretschmar points out that
the "rhythmically-harmonically-contrapuntually" challenging opening of
the little aria destabilizes the very (Hegelian) categories on which
Beethoven relied to achieve the ideal sublation of opposites. In terms
that also characterize Leverkiihn, the new form is marked by "black
nights and dazzling flashes, crystal spheres wherein coldness and heat,
repose and ecstasy are one and the same." Once binary distinctions are
eliminated, it is no longer possible to classify what counts as either sub-
jective or objective and what is valued as either progressive or regres-
sive. The effect of this subversion of the sonata-form is "vast, strange,
extravagantly magnificent"; it is so uncanny that it is "quite truly name-
less."62 Translated into Adorno's sociohistorical terms, Mann suggests
that the subject is damned for remaining within the bourgeois social
order with which it no longer coincides, and it is damned for withdraw-
ing from the antagonistic social world into isolation and suffering. What
Doctor Faustus does not envision is the Marxist possibility of the sub-
ject laboring to transform the material conditions that impose on music
the sterility from which Leverkiihn will try to save it.
The more immediate consequences of Beethoven's farewell to the
sonata-form in sonata opus 111 are examined in Kretschmar's next lec-
ture on "Beethoven and the Fugue,"63 focusing on the Missa solem-
nis,64 a work Zeitblom calls the "Monster of all Quartets."65 Composed
64. Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. John E. Woods (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1997) 62.
65. Mann, Doctor Faustus, trans. Woods 63.
Evelyn Cobley 65
in the aftermath of the demystification of the sonata-form, this very late
composition, more than any other, carries the marks of Beethoven's cri-
sis as a struggle of life and death. At the time of its composition,
Beethoven is described as a man of deep suffering who produces works
so uncanny that not even those closest to him could understand them.
Kretschmar stresses the suffering of the defeated subject by telling an
anecdote which associates Beethoven with Christ. Finding his maids
asleep at night while he was feverishly composing, Beethoven is sup-
posed to have lamented, "'[c]ould you not watch one hour with me?"'66
The music the deaf composer produces, but cannot hear, strikes his lis-
teners as "a savage brawl between hellishly dissonant instrumental
voices, wandering lost in heights and depths, clashing with one another
in variant patterns at every irregular turn," a piece ending in "the Babel
of confusion." Beethoven's personal suffering and aesthetic disorienta-
tion are attributed, in the first instance, to the blind man's painful
insight into the dire situation of the subject under increasingly reifying
social conditions. But Beethoven makes matters worse by insisting on
producing fugues at a time when he already knows that this form was
no longer adequate to the sociohistorical situation. In a crucial observa-
tion, Kretschmar claims that "[i]n spirit, the fugue belonged to an age of
liturgical music which already lay far in the past for Beethoven; he had
been the grand master of a profane epoch of music, in which that art
had emancipated itself from the cultic to the cultural."67 According to
this reading, Beethoven's mistake was to misrecognize his own radical
departure from the past. Like volkisch intellectuals, he nostalgically
yearns for an earlier time whose religious spirit his own aesthetic inno-
vation had in fact just deconstructed.
Fascist Implications of Twelve-Tone Technique
What then are the ramifications of Kretschmar's Beethoven lectures
for our understanding of Leverkifhn's aesthetic breakthrough into ato-
nality if we consider Doctor Faustus as a parable of fascism? Although
Mann's incorporation of Adorno's analysis of Sch6nberg's twelve-tone
system deserves the same attention to detail as Kretschmar's Beethoven
lectures, there is only enough time to explicate the most important
66. Mann, Doctor Faustus 60. This statement anticipates Leverkiihn's echo, at the
time of his breakdown at the end of the novel (648), of Christ in Gethsemane.
aspects of the ways in which Leverkiihn finds himself destined to real-
ize the revolution so tentatively announced in sonata opus 111.
By the time Leverkiihn appears on the historical scene, "good counter-
point" has deteriorated into a system that is both too static and too asym-
metrical; the subject withdraws into stagnating self-contemplation while
the key system imposes oppressive limits on subjective expression. What
Leverkiihn rejects is the capricious self-indulgence he finds in late
Romantic music, a tendency to absolutize the category of the subject.
Attempting to redress this imbalance, he advocates the "idea of rational
total organization of all musical material,"68 an organization meant to pre-
vent the domination of one term of the harmony/melody opposition over
the other. In short, he endorses a system of rational rules in order to curb
the anarchistic propensities that Zeitblom's liberal yearnings for personal
self-expression tend to invite. However, intending to exploit polyphony as
a locus of intervention against harmony, Leverkiihn stretches the proper-
ties of good counterpoint until he pushes this ideal against the limits of its
possibility. According to Adorno, Sch6nberg both emancipated and elimi-
nated counterpoint: "However, it is questionable as to whether twelve-
tone technique - to the extent that it carries the contrapuntal idea of inte-
gration to an absolute - does actually abolish the principle of counter-
point by means of its own totality."69 It appears, then, that the organic
principle of counterpoint is being reconfigured into a totalizing system
which Mann presumably wants us to associate with fascist totalitarianism.
Since Leverkiihn is confronted by sociohistorical conditions that have
reached a point where the autonomous subject celebrated in Romanti-
cism necessarily "despairs of the possibility of being creative out of her-
self and seeks shelter and security in the objective," Mann's composer
offers the politically ominous scenario in which freedom is to be real-
ized through "subordination to law, rule, coercion, system."70 But the
system Leverkiihn envisages specifically targets the hierarchically orga-
nized key formations of tonal music as both too self-indulgently subjec-
tive and too rigidly oppressive. It is precisely through its hostility to
hierarchy that serial music institutes a new kind of atonal totality.
Adorno was particularly sensitive to the dangerous implications of
Schanberg's dismantling of the key system. In the process of trying to
69. Adorno, Philosophy of Modern Music 94-95.
Evelyn Cobley 67
"eliminate all such hierarchical means of ordering the new music,"71
Sch*nberg created a system which was for Adorno "questionable as an
ideal"72 because the drive toward the total integration of all elements
struck him not only as totalitarian in fascist terms but also as complicit
with the destruction of meaningful social relations under the reifying
impact of late capitalism. Adorno blames "the blatant emptiness of the
integral composition"73 for merely registering, rather than resisting, the
"'integration' of a society in which the economic basis of alienation con-
tinues to exist unchanged while the justification of antagonisms is denied
by suppression.'"74 While providing insights into the illusory pretenses of
the closed bourgeois work Kretschmar demystified in his Beethoven lec-
tures, the twelve-tone composition does not recognize its own suspect
ideological investments and mystifications. It is in the attempt of elimi-
nating the last vestiges of hierarchy that the serial system becomes totali-
tarian; the dream of revitalizing good counterpoint leads Leverkiihn to
create a system of absolute integration, a synthesis so destructive of all
heterogeneity that Adorno associates its violence with Auschwitz.
Although Adorno acknowledges positive aspects of twelve-tone tech-
nique, "serial music is ultimately anathema to [him] because it subordi-
nates all expression, all inventiveness, to the domination of a rigid
prefigured ordering."75 Leverkiihn's aesthetic breakthrough does indeed
open up unlimited possibilities of variation, offering the composer a degree
of freedom never before experienced. However, this freedom is predicated
on the necessity of each note occupying a position which has been prede-
termined, not by the composer (the subject), but by the twelve-tone row
(the system). Experiencing its convergence with other notes to be both
inescapable and accidental, the serial note is as predetermined as
Leverkiihn is a doomed Faust figure. Through the uncanny combination of
total integration and unchecked dissemination, the twelve-tone row is said
to abandon its elements to fate. The act of composition itself is no longer
experienced as the creative effort of the artistic genius; it is predetermined
by the twelve-tone system. Adorno draws attention to this problem when
he observes that, in the absence of a tonal center, "variation is again rele-
gated to the material, preforming it before the actual composition
71. Witkin 134.
72. Adomo, Philosophy ofModern Music 96.
73. Adomo, Philosophy of Modern Music 98.
75. Witkin 134.
begins."76 Subjective agency has been forfeited, for, as Leverkiihn antici-
pates early in the novel, the composer no longer expresses his own vision
but obeys the demands of the socially imbued musical material: "The
whole disposition and organization of the material would have to be ready
when the actual work should begin, and all one asks is: which is the actual
work?" Instead of perpetuating the Romantic illusion that artists create
freely out of themselves, that their art retains what Benjamin calls its
"aura," Leverkiihn foregrounds the "truth" that art is inevitably a reproduc-
tion of a reproduction, a copy of a copy without origin. For Leverkifhn, this
"composing before composition"77 means that the act of creation "would
be transferred back to the material."78 In his eagerness to "free" music
from artificially imposed conventions, the composer is prepared to return
music to its material objectivity by sacrificing his own subjective agency.
What Mann illustrates through Leverkifhn's breakthrough is that his
decentering of tonal music "liberates" atomistic elements only to sub-
ject them to a more rigorously deterministic totality. Schonberg's ideal
of "convergence" is in fact predicated on the "idea of rational total orga-
nization of the total musical material," a totalizing order marked by the
fact that "not only all ... dimensions are developed to an equal degree,
but further that all of them evolve out of one another to such an extent
that they converge."79 The dream of Hegelian idealism, to achieve the
"identity of the most varied forms," has fatally and catastrophically
come true in Leverkifhn's "formal treatment strict to the last degree,
which no longer knows anything unthematic, in which the order of the
basic material becomes total, and within which the idea of a fugue
rather declines into an absurdity, just because there is no longer any free
note."80 The manifold is obliterated by the totality rather than sublated
into a unity based on a common identity and purpose. The twelve-tone
system is both the deconstruction and the completion of the project of
modernity of which the Hegelian Beethoven is the most adequate
expression. On the one hand, Leverkifhn demystifies Hegel's "identity
of opposites," the assumption that singularity would naturally and har-
moniously coincide with plurality, by uncovering the violence implicit
in this synthesis. On the other, though, he not only fails but actually
Evelyn Cobley 69
exacerbates Hegel's totalizing tendencies. Instead of liberating and orga-
nizing the constituent parts of the hierarchically "closed" bourgeois
work, his rigorous totality threatens to absorb and subject all elements to
a predetermined order. The twelve-tone system constitutes a revolution
that eliminates the principle of counterpoint it set out to revitalize.
When Mann associates Leverkiihn's serial experiments with Hitler's
totalitarian regime, his novel must then be suggesting, perhaps unwit-
tingly,81 that Auschwitz is a possibility always already implicit in the
project of modernity. Instead of showing that German fascism indicated a
national propensity, the novel conveys that the Holocaust cannot be dis-
missed as an aberration from modernity but ought to be acknowledged as
one of its possible consequences. Although Nazi rhetoric legitimated the
irrational agenda of genocide with appeals to neo-Romantic nostalgia for
spontaneity, the actual implementation of this agenda exemplified the
"rational spirit, principle of efficiency, [and] scientific mentality"82 we
associate with progressive modem societies. Indeed, as Bauman so con-
vincingly illustrates in Modernity and the Holocaust, the death camps not
only exemplify modernity's investment in social engineering projects but
they are also the outcome of activities typical of modem bureaucracies.
When Leverkiihn's totally integrated system is shown to have realized
81. It may be useful to reiterate that this argument runs counter to standard interpreta-
tions of Doctor Faustus as a novel confirming Mann's tendency in "Deutschland und die
Deutschen" to attribute the emergence of Nazism to the "demonic" or psychological charac-
teristics of the German people. But once we take Adomo's contributions to the sociohistori-
cal interpretations of music in the novel seriously, we are compelled to acknowledge that
Doctor Faustus authorizes an analysis of fascism which incorporates an ideological critique
of modernity clearly at odds with Mann's much discussed Germanocentric perspective. To
my knowledge, there is no real evidence that Mann was aware of the complicity between the
rationalizing tendencies of modernity and the Holocaust which he imported along with
Adorno's expertise on music. Yet his response to Adorno's manuscript version of Philoso-
phie der Neuen Musik suggests that he recognized, at some level, the uncanny interdepen-
dence of rational and irrational tendencies in modernity which made "Auschwitz" possible.
Mann is thus in my eyes not unlike his character Breisacher who is said to have a "scent for
the intellectual weather of the time" (Mann, Doctor Faustus 270). My search for implicit
meanings of Doctor Faustus is ultimately premised on Adomo's contention in "Toward a
Portrait of Thomas Mann" that "the substance of a work of art begins precisely where the
author's intention stops" (Adomo, "Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann," Notes to Litera-
ture, vol. 2, ed. R. Tiedemann [New York: Columbia UP, 1992] 13). Distancing himself
from "the interminable string of dissertations" on predictable themes in Mann's novel,
Adorno tells us that he "would like to create a little discomfort with all that" (Adorno,
"Toward a Portrait of Thomas Mann" 13). It is my hope that this article, too, creates "a little
discomfort" with conventional readings of Doctor Faustus.
82. Zygmunt Bauman, Modernity and the Holocaust (Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1991) 10.
Beethoven's Hegelian dream of a unity of opposites, Doctor Faustus dra-
matizes in the history of music that fascist totalitarianism ought to be
acknowledged as the unintended consequence of the liberal humanism to
which critics seek to return Germany. We need to remember that the
"conditions propitious to the perpetration of genocide are thus special, yet
not at all exceptional. Rare, but not unique." Far from being "a case of
malfunction," the genocide "demonstrates what the rationalizing, engi-
neering tendency of modernity is capable if not checked and mitigated, if
the pluralism of social powers is indeed eroded - as the modem ideal of
purposefully designed, fully controlled, conflict-free, orderly and harmo-
nious society would have it."83 It is in Adorno's insistence that we fore-
ground social antagonisms that we may find sites of resistance to the
totalizing tendencies not only of fascism but also of late capitalism. Not
surprisingly, Adorno contended that the novel's optimistic ending, Zeit-
blom's "hope beyond hopelessness," contradicts the logic of the narra-
tive: "I found the heavily laden pages too positive, too unbrokenly
theological in relation to the structure not only of the Lamentation of Dr.
Faustus but of the novel as a whole. They seemed to lack what the cru-
cial passage required, the power of determinate negation as the only per-
missible figure of the Other."84 Incorporating into Doctor Faustus
Adorno's sociohistorical critique of musical form, Mann thus offers an
analysis of fascism which complicates and contradicts the humanist fram-
ing authorized by his mythic Faust paradigm.
83. Bauman 114.
84. Adorno, Philosophie der neuen Musik, 6 ed. (Frankfurt/Main: Suhrkamp, 1991)
17-18.

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Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics: Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and Theodor W.

Adorno's "Philosophy of Modern Music"

Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics:

Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and Theodor

W. Adorno's Philosophy of Modem Music

increasingly aware of the way philosophical discourse and literary practice

are mutually constitutive. This awareness is customarily engendered by

theoretically informed critics drawing out the philosophical assumptions

embedded in literary texts. Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus, 1 however, is

unusual in that it actually incorporates Theodor W. Adorno's history of

musical form, a history permeated by his materialist critique of Hegelian

philosopher together in 1943.2 Adomo provided Mann with a manu-

script version of Philosophie der neuen Musik [Philosophy of Modern

Music].3 As Mann himself later acknowledged, he found Adorno's philo-

sophical views on music and culture so congenial to his own thinking

listically closer to Mann's German.

Bahle (Mann 1949, 31, 41).

3. Theodor W. Adorno, Philosophy ofModern Music, trans. Anne G. Mitchell and

Wesley V. Blomster (New York: Seabury, 1973).

44 Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics

that he based the music theory of his fictional composer, Adrian

Leverkiihn, on Adorno's analysis of Sch6nberg and Stravinsky in this

manuscript. In Doctor Faustus Mann "quotes" so extensively from Philos-

ophy of Modern Music that Adorno's contribution exceeds the modest

label of "adviser" on avant-garde music. Since Adorno's music theory is

so intimately bound up with his Marxist methodology, Mann thus cannot

avoid articulating, through Leverkiihn, an ideological critique not only of

fascism but also of bourgeois capitalism. Contrary to the conventional

interpretation of Doctor Faustus as exemplifying once again Mann's

investment in liberal humanism and the bourgeois social order, I want to

through his borrowing from Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music, that

actually complicit with it. My reading of Doctor Faustus seeks to fore-

ground the ideological implications of Leverkiihn's aesthetic theory by sit-

uating Mann's treatment of musical form within Adorno's dialectical

thinking.4 Although the general tendency has been to understand Adorno's

contribution as a relatively minor sharpening of Mann's own ideas, I con-

sider him to be a major, if largely unwitting, "collaborator" in the compo-

sition of Doctor Faustus. The novel is consequently traversed by a tension

between Mann's celebrated conservative impulses and Adorno's neo-

Marxist sympathies, a tension that has significant implications for our

understanding of the roots of fascism at stake in the explicit analogies

between Leverkiihn's avant-garde music and the emergence of German

National Socialism. Focusing on the composer's aesthetic ambitions in the

context of the political attitudes of proto-fascist intellectuals, critics have

primarily commented on the neo-Romantic sources of Hitler's nationalis-

tic appeal to the Volk. In contrast, I will discuss Leverkilhn's exposure to

Kretschmar's Adorno-inspired Beethoven lectures in order to shift atten-

tion from the irrational neo-Romantic roots of fascism to the complicity of

modernity's privileging of reason with the Holocaust.

To begin with, the much-debated question of Mann's borrowings from

Adorno needs to be revisited in order to provide a general idea of what

4. A more extended treatment of Mann's incorporation of Adorno's music theory

ofFascism and Postmodern Archaeologies ofModernity (Toronto: U of Toronto P, 2002).

extent of Mann's verbatim quotations from Philosophy of Modern Music

should indeed be considered not only an adviser on details of musical

technique but an actual "co-author of Doktor Faustus."5 Offering a "sys-

tematic reconstruction of sources,"6 Dfrr juxtaposes passages from Phi-

losophie der Neuen Musik and Doktor Faustus, demonstrating the

novelist's enormous indebtedness to the philosopher. More critical than

others of Mann's own account, in The Story of a Novel,7 of Adorno's

ence. In the case of Adomo's contribution to Kretschmar's lectures on

by annotating a draft of the novel. However, as Dorr shows, the novel is

"thematically and formally"8 suspiciously close to Adomo's essay "Spait-

stil Beethovens" ["The Late Style of Beethoven"].

Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music

Avant-Garde Aesthetics and Fascist Politics Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and Theodor W. Adorno's Philosophy of Modern Music