mephisto

Klaus Mann's mephisto talks of a man who, for power, fame and glory, turns his back on his wife, his mistress, friends and ideology.

Perhaps Mann meant for us to feel disgust at the man in question, Hendrik Hoefgen. Nevertheless, my sympathy for him outweighted that disgust. To feel disgust for such a man is understandable: he was scheming, manipulative and ruthless- all things immoral and undesirable. But i felt sympathy for him because it would be unfair to write him off simply as that sort of character without examing his fall from grace, as well as the moral conflict within him.

Hoefgen's ascent could be said to have come in three parts: his rise as a provincial actor in Hamburg, his success in the capital Berlin, and finally his appointment to the post of the head of the State Theater. I felt that only towards the end did he completely renounced his friends, in particularly the communist Otto Ulrichs. Ulrichs could be said to be the personification of Hoefgen's conscience: Hoefgen used him to console himself that he was not a lost cause as yet. His somewhat insincere pledge to help with the Revolutionary Theater to advance Communism in the Hamburg days and his use of his own influence to free Ulricsh from prison and then to secure him a job in the State Theater were all in his eyes 'a credit item on the account'. It was only towards the end, when he 'felt himself at the brink of the abyss' as he tried to find out about Ulrich's fate from an angry General that he abandoned Ulrichs. Likewise, that he kept his family by his side all this while could also be said to keep his conscience in check.

This calculative and scheming nature of his could certainly disgust. Yet, it also exposes his true nature: that of someone weak, with an inferiority complex, yet ambitious. One could only feel for him when he spoke to his wife Barbara of his 'memories like little hells into which we must descend from time to time', only to discover that she had none of such experiences.

The contradictory nature of his character led to his fall. In order to achieve all he longed for, which were beyond his means, he needed, like a parasite, others: first Barbara and her father, then the Professor, and finally the general. Enough was never enough for him, thus he hurtled on towards self-corruption, turning away his old friends to embrace more powerful ones. This chameleon-like behaviour is certainly appalling, but i sympathised him because he never knew what he wanted, never knew himself, and was never in control.

This was as much evident to me as to himself. He was always aware of his own actions and the potential moral consequences, hence his keeping of 'an account of good deeds.' Yet, like a locomotive already at full steam, it all culminates in his final burst of hysteria, that he was only an actor, an ordinary and blameless one at that. Such was the extent of his pathetic state. He had seen it coming: at his wedding with Nicoletta, he 'saw the shameful, dreary chronicle of their decline, their degradation, which a stupid world saw as ascent.' He had lived in fear, that should the Nazis fall, gone too would his new world. Nevertheless, one could hardly blame him for his reacting the way he did at the end. He had lived a lie; surely he be allowed to indulge himself once more?

Hoefgen was, like the Mephistopheles he played to such critical acclaim, depraved. In juxtaposing him with his mistress Juliette, who suffered because she could not 'walk on bodies', Mann suggested that Hoefgen had a special capacity for depravity. As Miklas, the disenchanted Nazi and enemy of Hoefgen described: 'he walks on corpses- he'd stop at nothing.' Juliette had dominated Hoefgen, yet Hoefgen had destroyed her in the end, which leads to one last question.

Did Hoefgen become what he was because he was Hoefgen per se, or because all men had the innate potential to hurtle along this same path of moral decadence, and sink to such depths of depravity? Was he an ordinary man, or was he specially marked, possessing something no one else had?