Doktor Faustus
First edition of one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and Thomas Mann’s last great work.
An attractive and pure copy in publisher’s cloth with dust jacket, as issued.
Octavo, 773 pages. Publisher's brown cloth, gilt title on spine, dust jacket preserved.
191 x 113 mm.
Mann, Thomas. Doctor Faustus. The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, Told by a Friend.
Stockholm, Bermann-Fischer Verlag, 1947.
First edition of the last masterpiece by Thomas Mann.
Wilpert/Gühring, 100; Bürgin I, 76, A.
First edition of one of the greatest novels of the 20th century and Thomas Mann’s last great work.
With this novel, Thomas Mann provides a new interpretation of the Faust legend by relating it to German National Socialism.
The first edition is referenced in Printing and the Mind of Man: “Byron's ‘Manfred’ (1817) is the first of a long list of 'Faustian' plays, novels and musical compositions of which there may be mentioned Thomas Mann's novel (1948)” (PMM, 298).
The work was printed in Berlin later the same year, but the Stockholm edition is the true first.
“This narrative by Thomas Mann, published in 1947 and often considered his ‘literary testament,’ is the life story of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn, told by one of his friends. Mann perfected the novelistic technique by superimposing three layers: the story of a genius musician suffering from syphilis; a symbol of Germany’s destiny (the disease represents Hitlerism); and a depiction of life in Munich on the eve of the Second World War. The narrative is told, after Leverkühn’s death, by his friend Zeitblom, who writes amid bombings and thus, by weaving 1944 reflections into these memoirs, demonstrates the link between guilt and punishment. The complexity of the work is evident. Leverkühn is called Faustus because he has made, or believes he has made, a pact with the devil, granting him genius for a few years in exchange for his health.
This is the Faust of popular legend serving as a model here. The dialogue with the devil forms a long central chapter and evokes Dostoevsky. Leverkühn borrows many traits from Nietzsche. Leverkühn is also representative of the German people, and the genius-disease problem becomes simultaneously the art-decadence problem, the trial of a culture, and the chronicle of the end of a world. Besides and behind Leverkühn and Zeitblom, the two main figures, the narrative presents a rich tableau, a depiction of life in Germany, and especially in Munich, where all the qualities of a psychologist and observer are found. This novel interweaves philosophical themes, history, politics, and aesthetics, and is by turns both an indictment and a plea.
Mann wrote that he painfully ‘felt the tragedy of Leverkühn upon himself.’ It is indisputably a significant and disturbing work that commentators have yet to finish analyzing.” (Dictionnaire des Œuvres).
An attractive and pure copy kept in its publisher’s cloth in its dust jacket, as issued.
