Mephisto, written in exile in 1936, is regarded as a key novel about the actor Gustaf Gründgens. However, according to Mann, it is "not a portrait, but a symbolic type": an actor in conflict between career and conscience. The film adaptation starring Klaus-Maria Brandauer won the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film in 1981.
It tells the (fictional) story of the actor Hendrik Höfgen, from 1926 at the Hamburg Künstlertheater until 1936, when he became a celebrated star of the so-called Third Reich and was appointed director of the Berlin State Theater.
Höfgen, who only came to terms with the Nazi rulers at a late stage and openly sought conflict with his Nazi colleague Hans Miklas in the ensemble, initially fled to Paris. However, Lotte Lindenthal, the wife of the "aviation general" and Minister President, herself a rather mediocre actress, wanted Höfgen as a partner for her Berlin debut at the Staatstheater and was able to persuade her husband, "the fat one", to bring Höfgen back to Berlin.
As a passionate actor who is tailor-made for the role of Mephisto in Goethe's Faust, the opportunist Höfgen only realizes far too late that he has actually made a pact with the devil. He will lose almost everyone who means anything to him in this free fall into the moral abyss: his lover Juliette, his wife Barbara, his communist friend Otto. Only the actress and soulmate Nicoletta, with whom he has entered into a marriage of convenience to escape persecution for his sexual orientation, will stand by him.
In the end, Hendrik has become a "monkey of power", a "clown to distract the murderers". An actor torn between his career and his conscience. Culminating in the famous sentence: "I'm just an ordinary actor!"
The New Globe Theater will bring Mephisto to the stage as a "dance on the volcano" in the distorted mirror of a political cabaret of the 1920s/30s with live music and a compere.
March 31, 2025
