Written between 1943 and 1947, Doctor Faustus expresses its author's shock and grief about the political, cultural, and moral corruption of his native Germany under the impact of a seemingly unforeseeable resurgence of wholesale barbarism. As in previous novels, Mann is primarily interested in the ideological changes that precede and motivate social action. The artist, once again, is perceived as the conscious and often unconscionable perpetrator of crucial reversals of value without which neither a Goebbels nor a Himmler could have assumed their cruel hegemony. On this level, Doctor Faustus is a bitter indictment of Germany's creative elite for its self-serving experiments with anarchic powers that were to destroy not only the elite itself but also the society for which it should have felt responsible.