During the 16th century, along with the rise of Lutheranism, a story arose about a man who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for knowledge and adventure beyond human limit. This story of Doctor Faustus, written by an unknown author, was simple, direct, and unquestionably moral. The devil was an actual, embodied creature, the pact explicit, and Faustus’ end, detailed and horrible. Since the original chapbook was published, multiple treatments of the same basic theme have arisen, sometimes to send the same message, sometimes to portray something quite different. Perhaps the most well-known are those by Christopher Marlowe, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Thomas Mann. While all of these accounts offer rich materials for contrast and comparison with the original story of 1587, it is in the story told by Thomas Mann in his Doctor Faustus that I am here most interested, and for one particular reason: the devil is no longer a distinctly external and independent being from Faustus, but rather is (most likely) an internally existing devil, a product of the main character’s own mind.

For Mann, this turn from an external to an internal devil is used, along with many other details in the story, to illustrate a point concerning the German people during the Nazi era. Doctor Faustus of 1587 knowingly conjured and entered into a pact with a concretely and independantly existing devil. Adrian Leverkühn, Mann’s 20th century Faust, unknowingly enters into a pact with a devil who may or may not exist outside of Leverkühn’s own mind. The inability to lay blame or responsibility (on whom?) presents a great problem, one which comes up again and again with reference to the Holocaust. And it is this very issue which Mann is here raising; throughout the book winds not only the thread of the Faust myth, but also a parallel between the life of Adrian Leverkühn and the fate of Germany herself during WWI and WWII.

In this paper, I explore the implications of Mann’s choice in making the devil’s existence ambiguous. What does it say about the nature of evil, about the ability to take responsibility and lay blame? What can we, in 21st century America, take from this? The question of evil and the devil is difficult to ignore when it is pointed out to us everywhere (from Saddam Hussein and Osama bin Laden to a capitalist system to Tinky Winky on the Teletubbies) and blamed for everything. Of late, we have had a tendency to revert back to that devil of the 1587 chapbook; we like to look around us and point fingers to account for the evil in the world. But should the examination rather begin with ourselves, as Mann seems to suggest?