THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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call the „deep structure“ of the Gnostic narrative, its plot and
its drama. Time and history can have meaning only if they are
the unfolding of the psychodrama, otherwise they are
meaningless. But how does one distinguish?
No one sensed this problem more acutely than Thomas Mann
whose beautifully ironic Roman der Seele, the Romance of the
Soul, forms the centerpiece of the „Prelude“ to his
masterpiece, the tetralogy Joseph and his Brothers. The soul’s
romance with dark and formless matter has a mitigating irony
that can also be interepreted as a tragic fall, as for instance in
the story of Adrian Leverkühn, the doomed hero of Doctor
Faustus. Leverkühn’s pact with the devil, the evil demiurge in
the non-Christian Gnostic symbolism, is to ensure an
„extravagant“ Dasein for him, a Nietzschean „magic of the
extreme“ that culminates in the romantic Gnosis of
Leverkühn’s art.
„There is at bottom only one problem in the world, and this is
its name. How does one break through? How does one get
into the open? How does one burst the cocoon and become a
butterfly? The whole situation is dominated by the question.“ 7
With these words, spoken to his friend Serenus Zeitblom,
Leverkühn sums up the meaning of the modern artist’s
mission. It is an effort to transcend nature and creation and, in
the process, to create or re-create the artist’s, humanity’s true
Self through a return to a beginning that lies before the fall.
This is also, Leverkühn continues, the message of Heinrich
von Kleist’s famous essay on the Marionette Theater which
deals with the loss of aesthetic grace and the question of how
it could be regained. Kleist’s artistic utopia, so often seen as
7 Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus, New York: Knopf, 1992, 314.