Mephisto (novel)

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Mephisto is a 1936 novel of Klaus Mann on which an award-winning 1981 movie was based. The novel adapts the Mephistopheles/Dr Faustus theme by having the main character Hendrik Höfgen abandon his conscience and continue to act and ingratiate himself with the Nazi Party to keep and improve his job and social position. The book is written as a satire, making Höfgen more a lampoon than a character in his own right, while the film is a more realistic exploration of a flawed but recognisably human character.

1 Context
2 Plot introduction
3 Lawsuit
4 References

[edit] Context

When his exile magazine Die Sammlung (The Compilation) lost popularity, Mann faced financial difficulties and had to rely on his family for financial support. His friend and editor Fritz Helmut Landshoff offered him a monthly pay for writing a novel. At first, Mann considered writing about a love triangle but discarded this idea stating that he could not write an apolitical novel at that point in history. In a letter to Mann, writer Hermann Kesten suggested writing a satire about "a homosexual careerist in the Third Reich, [...] artistic director Gründgens".

In 1924, Klaus Mann, his sister Erika, Gründgens, and Pamela Wedekind had all worked together on a stage production of Mann's Anja und Esther and had toured through Germany. Gründgens and Erika Mann got engaged while Klaus Mann similarly got engaged to Wedekind. The first two got married in 1926 but divorced in 1929 and Wedekind married writer Carl Sternheim a year later. Klaus Mann was exiled in 1934, Gründgens became a renowned theater and movie director. Mann never called Gründgens an adversary, he admitted "moved antipathy". Although he attacked Gründgens in newspaper articles, Mann hesitated to use homosexuality as a theme in the novel and decided to use "negroid masochism" as the main character's sexual preference.

After the novel's publication in 1936, the newspaper Pariser Tageszeitung presented it as a roman à clef. Mann resented this characterization and argued that he had not written about a particular individual, but about a type of individuals.

[edit] Plot introduction

The novel portrays actor Hendrik Höfgen's rise from the Hamburger Künstlertheater (Artists' Theater Hamburg) in 1936 to nationwide fame in 1936. Initially, Höfgens flees from the Nazis to Paris because of his communist past but realizes that he has already lost some of his friends. When he returns to Berlin, he manages to win over Lotte von Lindenthal, the wife of a Luftwaffe general who also thinks highly of him. He accepts the role of Mephisto in Faust Part One and realizes that he actually made a pact with evil (i.e. Nazism) and lost his humane values (even denunciating his mistress "Black Venus"). There are situations where Höfgens tries to help his friends or tells the prime minister about concentration camp hardships, but he is always concerned not to lose his Nazi patrons.

[edit] Lawsuit

In 1968, Gründgens' adopted son Peter Gorski sued Nymphenburger Verlagsbuchhandlung, then the publisher of Mephisto. The Federal Constitutional Court of Germany ruled that Gründgens' personal freedom (Article 2 of the Basic Law) was more important than the freedom of art (Article 5). The novel was however still available in (and importable from) the GDR. Rowohlt republished it in the FRG and, since the verdict only concerned Nymphenburger and Gorski never took legal action against Rowohlt, does so to date.