Misreading Thomas Mann's Doctor Fasutus correctly - who has not felt how aestheticism prepares the way for barbarism in one’s own soul

A funny thing happened while reading Thomass Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend. I will need that subtitle soon. Near the end of the book, I was looking up I do not remember what when I discovered that after four hundred dense pages I was reading the novel wrong, completely against decades of interpretation. The novel is supposedly about an avant-garde German composer who makes a deal with the devil, symbolically, presumably, although his biography is full of curious devil figures. Adrian’s artistic career, which ends tragically in madness, parallels the rise of German fascism in various ways that are not at all far-fetched. The narrator, Zeitblom, usually calls his friend “Adrian,” so I will do the same. The narrator, yes, right there in Mann’s subtitle. The novel is a fictionalized memoir, not a biography, of a man who was lifelong friends with an important composer. He finds devil figures throughout Adrian’s life;…