Misreading Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus correctly - who has not felt how aestheticism prepares the way for barbarism in one’s own soul

A funny thing happened while reading Thomass Mann’s 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend . I will need that subtitle soon. Near the end of the book, I was looking up I do not remember what when I discovered that after four hundred dense pages I was reading the novel wrong, completely against decades of interpretation. The novel is…