THE ‘DUNKELMÄNNER’ OF DOKTOR FAUSTUS: HUMANISTS VERSUS THEOLOGIANS

Abstract

This essay considers the treatment of theology in Thomas Mann's novel Doktor Faustus. Specifically, it proposes theology as meeting-point of the two opposing elements characteristic of German cultural history: humanism and fanaticism (‘the demonic’). The most significant representatives of humanism are the so-called ‘Dunkelmänner’: the Christian humanists of the Reformation period and authors of the Epistolae obscurorum virorum. In these letters, we encounter the refined creative capacity of the human mind and spirit, in contrast to the excessive coarseness of the protestant Reformation and Martin Luther. The novel's narrator Serenus Zeitblom identifies himself particularly with Crotus Rubianus and Erasmus as representatives of both the classical and the Christian cultural world, a tradition threatened by fanaticism and violence in the twentieth century as in the sixteenth. The Epistolae arose from the burning of Jewish literature, and Mann's point is that the enfeebled German intelligentsia of the Third Reich now contains no true ‘Dunkelmänner’ – except perhaps himself. The essay also examines the sources of the theological material in the novel, both with reference to the characters in the university faculty in Halle and to the theological concepts themselves which give the novel its essential substance and are therefore necessary to its understanding.