The Literary and Cinematic Reflection on Totalitarianism − Illustrated with an Example of Klaus Mann’s Novel Mephisto and Its Film Adaptation Directed by István Szabó

Czesław Płusa

Abstract

Klaus Mann’s novel Mephisto and its film adaptation directed by István Szabó put the
reader in a mood for reflective judgments about human behavior which grows on the ground
of the totalitarian system. The spectrum of Mann’s novel and Szabó’s film is made up by the
world of the Third Reich’s culture, where the actual reality, specific human fates, biographies
and events are determined by the conformism as well as the heroism of fight.
Klaus Mann’s novel and István Szabó’s film are mutually complementary in their
disparate modes of expression and cognition of man. The film adaptation encompasses the
elements impossible to represent in the text of the novel. In contrast with image, language
as the basic device of literature is helpless in the face of a rich diversity of direct individual
experiences. For language is reflective by nature, aiming to capture a whole (Kierkegaard).
The cinematic picture performs a function that is complementary to language, which fails
as a direct medium of the dynamism of the characters’ inner lives. The film is able to depict
what is passed over by the novel.
Describing Höfgen’s existential and spiritual situation, both the novel and the film reveal
his inner downfall. There is no escaping the affinity with the stigma of the evil – a source of
negative evaluation in the 20th century. This phenomenon is not self-acting but conditioned
by the sociopolitical context in which the individual gets tangled up. In conclusion, the
author quotes other examples from European literature, which expose the mechanics of the
evil summoning up the powers of the Antichrist, common to the various epochs.