Gynophobia and Anti-republicanism in Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus

Why does Adrian Leverkühn choose a Shakespeare play for his major first and his first twelve-tone composition? Why in particular a Shakespeare comedy? And why, of all comedies, Love’s Labour’s Lost? Why does he start working on it in Munich? Why does his work there soon come to a halt? Why does it prosper only in Italy? And why does he eventually return to Upper Bavaria so as to complete it? Why is he said to have completed the opera exactly one hundred years ago? And why, finally, is it first performed only after the outbreak of the war and then, surprisingly, in a German adaptation? In order to answer these and similar questions, this paper sets out to re-contextualise Doktor Faustus with regard to discourse history and re-read the novel from a gender-theoretical perspective. The leading hypothesis is that Thomas Mann’s novel belongs to the proto-history of feminist Shakespeare reception, an assumption to be substantiated through an analysis of settings, locations and the constructions of space.

Adrian Leverkühns 'Love's Labour Lost' als Interpretamtent für Thomas Manns 'Doktor Faustus'

Adrian Leverkühns erste Zwölfton-Komposition, die Oper ›Love's Labour Lost‹, soll hier diskursgeschichtlich auf die Bedeutung hin befragt werden, die sie für die Zeitdiagnose und Gesellschaftskritik des ›Doktor Faustus‹ hat. Zu diesem Zweck wird erst das zugrunde gelegte Drama in der Geschichte der Shakespeare-Rezeption situiert, dann aber auch die Konzeptions-, Entstehungs- und Aufführungsgeschichte seiner Vertonung im Gender-Diskurs der Weimarer Republik rekontextualisiert.