Gunilla Bergsten
Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus": The Sources and the Structures of the Novel.
The University of Chicago Press, 1969. First US edition. Translation by Krishna Winston of "Thomas Manns Doktor Faustus: Untersuchungen zu den Quellen und zur Struktur" (Svenska Bokforlaget, 1963). viii/246 pages.
Volume, measuring approximately 6" x 9.5", is bound in dark olive green cloth, with stamped gilt lettering to spine. Book displays very light shelfwear. Binding is firm. Pages are clean and bright. Dust jacket, showing mild wear at edges, is preserved in mylar cover.
"Thomas Mann's "Doctor Faustus", one of the outstanding novels of this century, boldly attempts to explain and trace the historical sources of German National Socialism. In this narrative, Mann employs a "montage technique" which makes extensive use of quotations adopted from many sources as he models fictional characters and events upon historical reality.
Mrs. Bergsten has completed the first full-length study of Mann's most complex novel, utilizing the extensive materials in the Thomas Mann Archives in Zurich, which includes Mann's personal library with his fascinating marginal annotations. In the introductory chapters, Mrs. Bergsten investigates Mann's source materials and the literary techniques which transform disparate details into an artistic whole. Although Mann describes the genesis of "Doctor Faustus" in "The Story of a Novel", Mrs. Bergsten amplifies his discussion of montage techniques by revealing for the first time the astonishing amount of "borrowing" to which he resorted in creating this account of "the life of the German composer Adrian Leverkühn."
The second part of this work is concerned with the interpretations of "Doctor Faustus" as a reflection of modern German history. After summarizing previous criticism, Mrs. Bergsten builds further interpretations on the solid ground of Mann's comprehensive source material. In Mann's view, National Socialism could be regarded as a kind of disease whose germs first infected the life of the nation at the time of the Reformation, then caused repeated and more serious bouts of the illness leading up to the crisis of World War II. The symptoms, Mann suggests, became noticeable in the spheres of religion and music before political life was seen to be affected, and thus the life of the protagonist, Adrian Leverkühn, is presented in counterpoint to the decline and fall of Germany".