On reading Thomas Mann's Doktor Faustus

and other things

Learning German has been an immersive, enriching, disturbing experience. What you never quite reckon on, when you start learning a language, is how you do not merely learn the equivalent vocabulary in someone else’s dictionary - WURST means SAUSAGE; - you have to see the world through their spectacles. Since the German-speakers (Swiss, Austrian and German) have been - let’s limit it to the last 250 years - so extremely clever about describing the WAY we view the world, and HOW we view experience - there is likely to be quite a lot of excitement and surprise in “learning German”. You are doing rather more than just labelling sausages “wurst”. Hegel, after all, redefined the very way in which we THINK we are describing our own experiences. And - as I have realized slightly too late to put it into my forthcoming GOETHE book - he derived a great deal of what he put into his prodigious book THE PHENOMENOLOGY OF SPIRIT (or MIND - the word is GEIST).

You might be rather shocked that I could dare to write a book about Goethe and Faust without having read the great novel by Thomas Mann entitled Doktor Faustus . The truth is, I had several “goes” but was absolutely stuck. The German is very difficult, the vocab. vast, the sentences convoluted. Trying to read it in the translation by H.T.Lowe-Porter, Boris Johnson’s beautiful American great-grandmother,

who rendered Mann