'Mephisto' and neodivinity - a Substack essay

Perhaps Nietzsche was right when he spoke about God’s shadows inside caves, for years to come. As of late often such an image has appeared to me, in essays and fiction and articles and the news. This has especially been the case with American politics—the future ahead of us paints a picture of religious fanaticism, galvanized by American imperialism which slowly but surely fortifies Trump’s self-representation as a man-god figure. This strange sort of theocracy terrifies me.

Some time ago now I coined a term that refers to the dangers of idolatry, which later evolved into something a bit vaster: ‘neodivinity,’ I’ve decided, refers to the phenomena in which figures take on the role of supplements, or surrogates, of the “dead god;” In a post-Enlightenment world, they function as simulants of divinity. It is no surprise that in a book about political fanaticism this theme would arise, but having left the idea unexplored outside my own ramblings, I was eager to find a novel that explored this. And what a welcoming response I received at the end of ‘Mephisto’!

Klaus Mann’s Höfgen, the protagonist of his ‘Mephisto’ (1936) was written with a certain Gustaf Gründgens in mind: a Communist member turned Nazi for fame’s sake. Much like the real man, the fictional figure gives the eponymous 1936 novel its name after his successful performance as Mephistopheles, from Goethe’s Faust. Both men take on evil’s character in order to swiftly navigate the Third Reich. Borrowing Mann’s own words, the novel was written with the purpose of analyzing the ‘abject type of treacherous intellectual who prostitutes his talent for the sake of some tawdry fame and transitory wealth.’ And Mann does illustrate, in all its unscrupulosity, the horrors of Nazism, and the men that were seduced by its decadent sublime.

Upon starting the book I took notice of Höfgen’s disillusionment. Coupled with bitterness, his Faustian ambition motioned towards extravagant success, a desire to elevate oneself over Germany and to seduce the motherland. He inherits from the “killers of god” — the Enlightenment men who rose over the Father — ‘a new kind of faith – faith in the capacity of humans to act without guidance from beyond.’ (Kenan Malik, ‘The Enlightenment and the Dead God’). In my eyes, the anatomy of such a character consists of the following: an unrelenting passion for something greater beyond, and its unfortunate misplacement onto a field wherein it is defiled and departs from its original form. Without a Father at the center of society, Höfgen becomes his own. Is standing at God’s stead not a shadow of the divinity lost to our championing of man? Again appears Nietzsche’s prediction, and with it my little term.

For characters like Benjamin Pelz, Nazism simulates an apotheosis of sorts: ‘the birth of a new type of human being – or rather, the renaissance of a very ancient one, which is archaic, magical, and warlike,’ whom characters such as himself can regress – rather than elevate oneself – to. Nazism appeals to the evil man who never had the chance to meet the Father, but knows the Führer and wishes to become a ‘son of the Underworld.’ Characters like Pelz revel in their deification as much as they do being followers of a religion that bestows that role and performance; they relish the bacchic frenzy of their own decadence, which satisfies the hunger for ‘doomed adventure, for the depths, for the experience of extreme situations that place a man beyond the pale of civilization.’ Höfgen too flirtates with evil by performing in the likeness of the ‘Messias aller Germanen’ (that is, Hitler) and the other ‘gods of the Olympus’. Much like a religion, performing in the likeness of his Savior earns Hendrik a position in the heaven of terror of the Third Reich; being part of ‘schöne Versammlung von Göttern’ means the German actor himself is at God’s stead, too.

Antonio Gramsci once said, “once religious faith and the traditional sense of the word had gone, people desperately searched for a new system of beliefs and general principles around which to regroup themselves, and in which to find reason in their innermost selves for living in a worthwhile fashion.” Characters such as young Miklas, a member of the Hitler Youth, reflect just this: in the absence of the once central figure of the Judeo-Christian God, man replaces His corpse with the man-god who serves as a surrogate of the Father, a figure in Whose likeness one may be led to salvation. Nevertheless, man’s longing for salvation and renewal is unfulfilled through this promised bastardization of the resurrection provided by idols, whose powers are limited to an illusion of purpose and renewal and pervert the vision of a Savior. The youth’s earnest feelings are misdirected by hatred and propaganda, falling trap to the promises of idols and manufacturing ‘neodivinity’ instead.

However, in the case of Hendrik, it is not the fatherly figure that seduces him to take the course he does, but instead the shadow of an essence required for him to survive in the world – both spiritually and physically (the author’s exile comes to mind) – that appears to him in the abject. In the absence of something, Hendrik renews his energies in the decadent sublime of the abject; performance is a motion medium through which he comes in contact with it—-another shadow of the ineffable and infinite satisfaction of religious sublime. Klaus Mann utilizes the motif of dance throughout his works, and in ‘Mephisto’ it symbolizes a figurative and literal renunciation of the self to vice and primitivity, and all the depths and heights of the abject, as a means of transcendence.

The following line comes to mind: ‘success, that sublime and irrefutable justification of every infamy.’ By any means necessary, Hendrik will fight against the chronic recurrence of dissatisfaction and existential lethargy that haunts his life, no matter what form the solution may take on.

As one gives himself up to these greater-than forces, he encounters something akin to the awe-striking humility of divinity; Höfgen’s role as a god is insufficient, so the mere elevation of the self proves itself to fall short for a man like himself: he also needs to subject himself to a force under which he may squirm, like the Old Testament Father. We may think of Juliette as a surrogate for this role, to whom he sings the first lines of ‘ ‘Hymne à la beauté’ to: ‘Viens-tu du ciel profond ou sors-tu de l’abîme,/Ô Beauté? ton regard, infernal et divin,/Verse confusément le bienfait et le crime,/Et l’on peut pour cela te comparer au vin.’ Juliette becomes this ‘Beauté’ through Hendrik’s imposition of the image of a ‘strange … black god,’ a dangerous and untamable ‘venus’ thirsting for blood and sacrifice. By fetishizing her blackness he generates an “exotic other” under whom he may submit himself to; he ascribes perversity to her character, who she forces herself to play as twice is noted in the novel, in order to submit in a manner that echoes submission to a god. Mann explicitly tells us, too: ‘He had used her as a wicked inanimate force to refresh and renew his energies. He had made an idol of her before, whom he could intone in a trance.’ Höfgen imposes the role of a cruel goddess onto his ‘Princess Tebab’ to relish in the abject as a victim, and not solely a perpetrator and enabler of it as a member of the gods of evil. Through dance, especially with Juliette, Höfgen enters a bacchic frenzy that relieves him from the dissatisfaction of life, which he wills to escape by any means necessary, and gives himself up to a regressed state of primitivity; with her, he escapes the oppressive gaze of an audience that persecutes him and indulge in his own, for much part of the novel covert, rotten character.

But again, Hendrik fails to place his energies truly outside of himself, even in his submissive relations with Juliette, who he ultimately abandons for the sake of his public conception. Because he does not truly subscribe to Nazi ideology, despite his procrastination of a political, far-left theater before the far-right came to power. The character Höfgen represents not a man of evil inclinations, but one who can find no field towards which he feels fulfilled, inclining himself towards. In the absence of the thing – is it the purpose or comfort bestowed upon one by a greater being? – that inspires someone with infinite satisfaction, such as the sublime that is uncreated and overwhelms us with emotion, man will seek to draw from surrogate gods – be them oneself or others – displacing one’s longing for this thing and placing one’s energy onto places that depart from whence it truly can be attained.

‘‘All of them were to be envied—all who could believe in something, and doubly to be envied were those who in the sweep and thunder of faith had given their lives.’

There is a sense of bitter closure in the book’s ending, as the protagonist we have come to detest cries into his mother’s lap; we see him returning to that original form of man that simply wishes to have someone there to love and return that love to them, undefiled by deviations of this human condition. Confessing to her ‘everything, the whole story of his guilt, his great failure, and the despairing inadequacy of his remorse and why he lay there and wept,’ and being forgiven, he steps away from God’s stead, ‘arme mit schöner, klagender, hilflos-hilfesuchender Geste gebreitet;’ and cries, ‘what do men want from me? … All I am is a perfectly ordinary actor!’

‘Mephisto’ stands out to me as a story that has had to work against its own time, burdened by a fate meddled in lawsuits, delayed publications, and bereavement. My aim was to open a discussion for its political contents but ended up remaining too close to the text. Nevertheless, I hope Klaus Mann is given the recognition he deserves, away from the shadow cast by his father’s shame and away from the shame imposed upon him in life and death, and I hope this work, in its striking resemblance to our current landscape, contributes to his legacy. For all it’s worth, we may look to this book and understand why what is happening is happening, whatever that may be, whatever form it may take. May we find a way through it.