Abstract

In this essay, Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus is considered as a fundamental evidence of the German and European spiritual history of the first half of Twentieth Century. Analysing the hidden fascism of the main character of Mann’s romance, the musician Adrian Leverkühn, the author emphasizes the ideological aspects of his music, polarized between extreme modernity and archaistic and primitivistic dimension. From this perspective, Leverkühn’s works appear an expression of the crisis of bourgeois individual and a symbol of Twentieth Century archaic modernity