A Faustian Pact

Thomas Mann’s novel Dr. Faustus is an intimidating, needlessly over-written version of the Faust myth. It was so cerebral, my hair hurt. That was my surmise after the first 25 chapters. Am I allowed to change my mind? 

Having now plowed through the next 23 chapters I regard it as the most erudite and challenging novel in recent memory, with particular relevance for our times. Worth the inferiority complex, the word awesome is not a hyperbole. 

The pact made with the devil traces the rise and fall of a brilliant pianist and composer of classical music. Mann conflates his fate with high German culture and its descent into the abomination of Nazism. 

I don’t pretend to understand either Germanic mythology which Wagner’s music drew upon nor the atonal scale of Arnold Schoenberg’s music, both of which are central to the book along with Neitzsche and the Appolonian vs Dionysian split.

 Yet in spite of all that was lost on me, I still emerge from the verbiage with an admiration for the profound ideas and the linguistic leaps taken in support of his central thesis. The book itself becomes a rather atonal narrative with non-linear tangents and digressions, both in the future and past.

For generations to come, books, essays, plays, movies and operas will grapple with the same question. What went wrong? How could we collectively have lost our grip on our heritage, however flawed? Never before has a nation sunk so far and so fast as we have during the past twelve months.

We might look to Germany for answers. The reparations imposed on them along with runaway inflation and a worldwide Depression created a chaos ripe for the promise of a new order with full employment. Enter: Hitler.

Those preconditions did not exist here, but Trump invented them. First came the dumbing down. Social media excels in fabricating news and providing legs to monstrous lies. He channeled the grievances of those left behind, blamed Democrats for everything from the high price of eggs to busted shoelaces. and created a movement seduced by his clownish degeneracy and hollow promises.  

Just as Jews became the scapegoat for Germany's ills, our regime has targeted immigrants with heartless detention. Hitler had his axis with Italy and Japan and we seem to be moving in that direction letting China and Russia dominate their regions as we have our way in the Caribbean and North Atlantic. 

 Have we sealed a Faustian Pact selling our own soul and precepts for an extended empire while the nation slumbers?