THOMAS HOLLWECK is Associate Professor of German at

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of recapturing the common mythology through art over and
over again, but it was twice in his life that he succeeded in
telling it so well that the story could remind the audience of
something that is also the stuff of which common mythology
is made. I am referring to Joseph and his Brothers and Doctor
Faustus. In the first instance Mann revisited mythical time
itself, the time of the beginning and the origin of Joseph’s
individual consciousness, in the second he examined the
artist’s role as the creator of a new consciousness in the light
of the one indigenous myth created in Europe on the threshold
to its modern age, the myth of Faust.
These two myths are but two different versions of Mann’s
fundamental artistic concern, the slow differentiation of the
Self, the I, from the matrix of the surrounding unconscious
social and historical reality, in Freudian terms, the process of
„ego-formation.“ In the language of Schopenhauer’s
philosophy Mann speaks of this differentiation in all his
works, but unlike Freud he remains ambivalent regarding the
Ego and its slow colonization of the surrounding unconscious
reality of the Es. Here lies the source of Mann’s highly
personal form of irony. Schopenhauer’s unique way of
blending the German subject-object problem with Platonism
and the philosophy of India led him to a kind of Gnosticism
that gets away from the a-cosmism of the ancient Gnostics
because his pleroma is in the here and now of the free
contemplation of beauty. Beyond that, his blind will, the
equivalent of the creation of the evil Demiurge, allows only
one other form of freedom, freedom through death. Here,
Thomas Mann’s own experience sets him apart from the
death-world of the Romantics, Schopenhauer, Wagner, and
even Freud.