D octor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkuhn as Told by a Friend is written in the form of a biography and attention naturally centers around Adrian Leverkuhn's life. Only the decadence of bourgeois circles in Munich temporarily assumes center stage, with the composer barely more than an acquaintance to some of the melodramatic histrionics which Mann drew with merciless accuracy from his long years of residence in that city.

Next to the hero, the most interesting figure is his fictional biographer Serenus Zeitblom, the kindhearted childhood friend of Leverkuhn. Zeitblom is in love with the values of classical humanism and becomes a professor of Greek and Latin at a German gymnasium, a position he voluntarily relinquishes when Hitler comes to power. Not without sympathy but also in full recognition of his friend's highminded corruption, Zeitblom draws the sad conclusions from Leverkuhn's disastrous entanglement with...