Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn
written by Thomas Mann
Visitor from the Inferno
"Then in a clap I am stricken by a cutting cold, even as though I sat in a winter-warm room and a window had blown open towards the frost. It came not from behind me, where the window lie."
World War One
"War had broken out. The fate that so long had brooded over Europe was upon us, it raged. In the disguise of a disciplined execution of all the plans previously made and rehearsed, it raged through our cities and towns, as terror and exaltation, as the inevitable, as 'destiny'."
Esmeralda
"I saw him standing at the door of that room in the house of joy; slowly comprehending, eyeing the waiting daughters of the wilderness...I saw the snub-nosed girl beside him, Hetaera esmeralda: her powdered bosoms in Spanish bodice—saw her brush his cheek with her arm."
The Death of Echo
Germany, the hectic on her neck, was reeling then at the height of her dissolute triumphs, about to gain the whole world by virtue of the one pact she was minded to keep, which she had signed with her blood. Today, clung round by demons, a hand over one eye, with the other staring into horrors, down she flings from despair to despair. When will she reach the bottom of the abyss? When, out of uttermost hopelessness—a miracle beyond the power of belief—will the light of hope dawn? A lonely man folds his hands and speaks: ”God be merciful to thy poor soul, my friend, my fatherland!”