John von Düffel, Thomas Mann

In the life story of Adrian Leverkühn - the fictional biography of a composer who devotes himself to the devil - Thomas Mann summarizes all the stages of the development of the old Faust saga and links it to the "threatening problem of our time, the catastrophic regression of the highly developed and overdeveloped spirit into archaic primitiveness." The temporal framework circumscribes the years from 1884 to 1945 - his own epoch. He himself called Dr. Faustus "a life-book of almost criminal brutality, a peculiar kind of transposed autobiography, a work which has cost me more, and more deeply, than any previous one." The overwhelming interest of the author in the writing remains perceptible, chapter by chapter, despite the introduction of an apparently omniscient narrator.