SAUL FITELBERG'S FAILED SEDUCTION: WORLDLINESS IN DOKTOR FAUSTUS

Abstract

This essay places Thomas Mann's treatment of the ‘Jewish question’ in the broader context of the artist's relationship to the world. Saul Fitelberg's offer to draw Leverkühn out of isolation engages questions about German national identity at a time when Mann insisted that he represented the true German tradition of cosmopolitan openness, in contrast to the Nazi effort to delimit Germanness to a racial core and eliminate those who threatened to contaminate the body politic. The article exposes multiple ambivalences that cling to the concept of German cosmopolitanism in relation to theories of world literature and the history of European imperialism, and, in doing so, argues for an intersectional approach to the ‘Jewish question’ in Thomas Mann's fiction.