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Though Hollywood is now the German intellectual émigrés’ accepted centre, Mann’s interest in settling there was not altogether social. Apparently he has recently played with the idea of writing a Hollywood novel as a parallel to The Magic Mountain and its special theme of sickness. He thinks there is a psychological condition peculiar to Hollywood which makes of it an island not unlike his island of Davos, on its Swiss mountaintop. Mann also has a tiny Achilles’ heel; he would love to have a movie made of one of his novels. In the Times’ critique of his Joseph in Egypt, his reviewer, Mrs. Meyer, who often speaks as Mann’s Delphic oracle, stated that the book contained drama such as even Hollywood had never approached. Among members of the book trade this was taken to mean that Mann, a master psychologist, hoped that Hollywood, piqued, would say that it could indeed approach anything, even the subject of a contract. A nibble was actually made by one of the film companies, but the scheme fell through, supposedly because the officials felt that only David Wark Griffith in his heyday could have dared tackle such a situation.
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Just two months ago, taking advantage of an international convention forbidding the distribution of propaganda to prisoners of war, the Germans suddenly put a ban on the circulation of Mann’s books among German prisoners in England. In the last war, Mann was exempted from military service because the Imperial German Army doctor who examined him was a reverent admirer of his writings. As Mann says in his autobiography, “He laid his hand on my bare shoulder and said, ‘You shall be left alone.’ ”
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The fact that Thomas Mann today is a political refugee and the circumstance that he is living in exile in our democracy constitute a pair of the more illuminating personal paradoxes involved in this present war. When the last war ended, Mann was still ignorant of politics, he disliked the democratic form of government, and he published, in 1918, a much-discussed essay, “The Reflections of a Non-Political Man,” to prove both. Mann was still an ivory-tower German aesthete interested in liberty for the artist, not the polloi; he was a humanist concerned with the brain, not the body politic. In his so aptly named essay, Mann blamed Bismarck for teaching romantic Germany about politics in the first place; he further wrote, “Democracy is an empty frame of life,” declared his mistrust of the citizen type, whom he dubbed Herr Omnes (“Mr. Everybody”), and added, “I want neither parliamentarianism nor party administration. I want no politics at all. I want objectivity, order, and dignity.” He also wanted to polish off, with dignity, his novel-writing brother, Heinrich, who was pro-democrat, pro-politics, pro-French, and, what was apparently worse, against the German bourgeoisie. In Heinrich’s realistic social novel, The Poor, published the year before, he had attacked the Wilhelmenian middle class as a soulless, greedy, ambitious lot. To Thomas, the younger but more famous literary Mann, who was still wrapped elegantly, as in a démodé, brocaded house robe, in the nineteenth-century family glamour of the Mann (or Buddenbrooks) Bürgertum, this was doubtless lèse-majesté.
This bitter ideological feud between the two Manns led postwar Germany’s agitated political circles to nickname them die feindlichen Brüder (“the enemy brothers”), a reference to two medieval robber-baron brothers who had built neighboring castles on the Rhine because they hated each other so much they could not let each other out of sight. The feud also led to Heinrich Mann’s becoming one of the most beloved leaders of the young German intellectuals, who, impatient with the old bourgeoisie, disgusted by the now-collapsed monarchy, and alarmed by the notion that revolution was brewing, were ardently gathering in support of the democratic ideals of the new Weimar Republic. As little boys, the feindlichen brothers Mann shared the same bedroom but often did not talk to each other; when they grew up, they failed to speak even the same language. Heinrich, who took after their Latin mother, was Gallic-minded, in a pinkish, liberal way was still cheering for the French Revolution, held Flaubert and Zola as his gods, had aimed in his half-dozen unappreciated books at being a European rather than a Germanic writer, and liked Bordeaux wine. Thomas drank Rhine wine and, in his own special fashion, Wagner, Martin Luther, and deep drafts of Goethe. In 1918, in his non-political essay, he described Heinrich (without actually naming him, of course, for it was a well-bred feud) as a Zivilisationsliterat. By this, Thomas, who thought French Zivilisation inferior to German Kultur, apparently meant that his brother was a Frenchified scribbler.
Thomas Mann, like most proud men of his class, was violently partisan in the last war. In Germany’s first victorious year, he published a patriotic polemic extolling Frederick the Great that included a famous preface, which, like “The Reflections of a Non-Political Man,” has never been published in English. In this preface, properly called “Thoughts in War” and written in September, 1914, he said:
That conquering warring principle of today—organization—is the first principle, the very essence of art.… The Germans have never been as enamored of the word civilization as their western neighbors.… Germans have always preferred Kultur…because the word has a human content, whereas in the other we sense a political implication that fails to impress us.… This is because the Germans, this most inwardly directed of all peoples, this people of metaphysics, pedagogy, and music, is not politically but morally inclined. In Germany’s political progress, it has shown itself more hesitant and uninterested in democracy than the other countries.… As if Luther and Kant did not more than compensate for the French Revolution! As if the emancipation of the individual before God and as if The Critique of Pure Reason were not a far more radical revolution than the proclamation of the rights of man!…Our soldiering spirit is related to our morality. Whereas other cultures, even in their art, incline toward a civilian pattern of ethics [Gesittung], German militarism remains a matter of German morals. The German soul is too deep to find in civilization its highest conception.… And with the same instinctive aversion it approaches the pacifist ideals of civilization, for is not peace the element of civil corruption which the German soul despises?… Germany’s full virtue and beauty unfold only in wartime.… The political form of our civil freedom…can only be completed…now after certain victory, a victory in tune with the forces of history, and in the German sense, not in the Gallic, revolutionary sense. A defeated Germany would mean demoralization, ours and Europe’s. After such a defeat, Europe would never be safe from Germany’s militarism; Germany’s victory, on the contrary, would assure Europe’s peace.… It is not easy to be a German, not as comfortable as being an Englishman or as being a Frenchman and living with brilliance and gaiety. Our race has great trouble with itself…it is nauseated by itself. However, those who suffer the most are worth the most.… There is something deep and irrational in the German soul which presents it to more superficial people as disturbing, savage, and repulsive. This something is Germany’s militarism, its moral conservatism, and soldierly morality, which refuses to acknowledge as the highest human goal the civilian spirit.… The Germans are great in the realm of civilian morality but do not want to be submerged by it.… Germany is the least known of all European peoples.… But it must be recognized. Life and history insist upon it, and the Germans will prove how unfeasible it is to deny, from sheer ignorance, the calling and character of this nation. You expect to isolate, encircle, and exterminate us, but Germany will defend its most hated and innermost “I” like a lion and the result of your attack will be that much to your amazement you will one day be forced to study us.
Thus ends the 1914 “Thoughts in War,” perhaps the most extraordinarily accurate exposition of the German racial psychology which Mann, that noted German analyst of men and women, ever penned.
It took Mann exactly twenty-three years, starting from this political attitude, to become the militant liberal and profound hater of the German concept of racial domination that he is today. To his heavy devotion to the past and his scrupulous, weighty, literary slowness, he was gradually forced to add the burden of his long-drawn-out id
eological metamorphosis. In 1923, five years after the Weimar Republic had been founded (and his brother Heinrich had successfully started leading German youth), Thomas Mann, in a Goethe Memorial Day speech to the students of the University of Frankfort-am-Main, finally advised the young folk to rally to the Republic idea, to which, with meticulous truthfulness, he admitted he was not yet converted. However, he said, the Republic offered “the climate of humanity,” in which soul could speak to soul rather than citizen to citizen. It was this literary mixture of metaphysics, formal non-democracy, and old-fashioned Prussian nationalism that made Mann seem a chauvinist to the French intelligentsia, still nervous in victory across the Rhine, and led the Institut de France in 1924 to describe him as a dangerous pan-Germanist of the d’après-guerre variety.
In 1924, Mann’s major opus, the 400,000-word novel called The Magic Mountain, which he had taken twelve years to write, was published. Its European success was immense. It was translated into Hungarian, Dutch, and Swedish, and in four years sold over a hundred thousand copies even in an impoverished Germany where the sixteen-mark price of the novel could buy a dozen dinners. Mann seems to have hoped that the educated German classes would be influenced by the book’s metaphysical-social European symbolism, in which a character who is a Jew with a Jesuit education represents Communism, plus medievalism, mysticism, and the Catholic Church; an Italian dialectic democrat is satirized as an organ-grinder; and a Russian seductress represents Asia and is unsuccessfully loved by the well-bred German bourgeois hero Hans, “simple-minded though pleasing.” Mann was especially confident that the Teutonic reader would recognize himself in this typical German Hans and, as he later wrote in his autobiography, “could and would be guided by him.” Unfortunately, it was the Austrian Adolf who soon did the guiding, and after the 1930 elections, which gave the Nazis their first big political victory, Mann made an alarmed speech of intellectual warning in Berlin during which Nazi rowdies rioted. His suddenly taking a stand vaguely disturbed the German nationalists, who ever since his early essay on the non-political man had supposed him safely on the anti-democratic side of the fence. As Germany’s leading intellectual, Mann, had he remained complacent, would have been valuable to the Nazis at the moment. Furthermore, the year before, he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and for both national and international propaganda reasons the Nazis wanted to muscle in on his honor. In 1932 Mann addressed a lengthier, impassioned appeal to the German intelligentsia and made his first public reference to the working class, whom he praised.
In March, 1933, two weeks after the Reichstag fire and two months after Hitler had assumed power as Reichskanzler, Mann and his wife, who were concluding a holiday in Switzerland, received a cryptic warning from their eldest son and daughter, Klaus and Erika, telephoning from the family house in Munich. These modern young Manns, already politically prescient, begged their parents not to come home because the weather was bad. Mann naïvely replied that the weather was bad in Switzerland, too. Erika then alluded to some terrible house-cleaning ahead. It was probably Frau Mann who realized that the weather the young Manns had described was political and that the house-cleaning might be a purging of anti-Nazis. Mann and his wife never set foot in Germany again. The next day their six sons and daughters made preparations to join them and the voluntary exile of the Mann family began. When, a short time afterward, Mann’s passport expired and he asked the local German consulate to have it renewed, he was politely assured this would be done immediately if he returned to Munich. It was his refusal to go back home that made his anti-Nazi attitude official in Nazi eyes.
By the end of the year, Mann’s Munich house, library, and bank account had been seized by the Nazis. Late in 1936 the Nazi government deprived Mann and his family, who had remained in Switzerland, of their German nationality. It is characteristic of Mann that only in 1937, after the University of Bonn revoked the honorary degree of Doctor of Philosophy it had conferred upon him, did he break the four-year silence that marked the first stage of his exile. He had thought silence “would enable me to preserve something dear to my heart—the contact with my public in Germany”; that is, the continued circulation of his books there and what he steadfastly hoped would be their influence on German minds. On New Year’s Day, 1937, Mann addressed to the dean of the philosophical faculty of the University of Bonn his first public political words of excoriation of the Nazi regime—an indignant three-thousand-word letter, since reprinted in a pamphlet called “An Exchange of Letters,” which has been ranked as the noblest of Mann’s political statements. His other confessions of democratic faith are The Coming Victory of Democracy, hopefully written in the spring of 1938; This Peace, which appeared after Munich; and, a tragical third, This War, published early in 1940.
When Mann and his family lost their nationality, they were given honorary citizenship, by the Czecho-Slovakian Republic, as an anti-Nazi gesture. Actually, they never lived in Czecho-Slovakia; when they left Switzerland, they lived for a while in Le Lavandou and neighboring towns in the French Midi, and then settled down at Küsnacht, on the Lake of Zurich. Early in 1938, Mann received an offer from an American lecture bureau to visit the United States and go on tour. He accepted the invitation. As he had written to the dean of the University of Bonn, “I am more suited to represent [Germany’s cultural] traditions than to become a martyr to them.”
In the latest stage of his political evolution, Mann is now discussed in certain foreign diplomatic circles of Washington as the ideal president of the Fourth Reich, once the Nazis are defeated.
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As current events have made him feel increasingly remote from life, Mann, since his arrival in America, has gone out little, either to social functions, concerts, the movies (though movies fascinate him as something new under the sun), or the theatre. He was much interested in Robert Sherwood’s There Shall Be No Night last year and went to see it because he had heard he was the model for the character of the Finnish neurologist. If this were true, he said, he was much honored, but he thought the resemblance slight. He has read some American writers, is especially impressed by John Dos Passos and the early Ernest Hemingway, has recently enjoyed Frederic Prokosch, James M. Cain’s Serenade, John Steinbeck’s Of Mice and Men, and was at one time excited by Sinclair Lewis’s It Can’t Happen Here, considered as a document rather than as a literary production. Mann says he is glad his sons and daughters are in an English-speaking country because he thinks that English will be the only literary language that will remain free in the immediate future. Since it was not a language he learned to read with ease when he was young, as he did French, which interests him less, Mann is today driven to revert, for his regular afternoon reading after his nap, to his favorites, the German classics. He reread Goethe’s Faust five times hand running to get himself into what he considered the correct modern equivalent of the eighteenth-century mood in which to start writing his three novels about Joseph of the Old Testament days.
This trilogy, begun in 1926 and planned as a single book to be called Joseph and His Brothers, as time went on overflowed into Young Joseph and then into Joseph in Egypt, which itself ran into two volumes, and is now spreading into a tetralogy with a volume devoted to Jacob, on which Mann is working in California, where he now lives. The Joseph series (an elaboration, with symbolic commentary, of the familiar Biblical story, plus additional scholarly incidents Mann has culled from the Talmud) has, for the first time in Mann’s career, put his American devotees into two frames of mind. Some say it reminds them of Shakespeare’s King Lear and some merely say they can’t read it. The nub of the argument seems to be the lengthy episode involving Potiphar’s wife, treated by Mann with a candor which makes of it either the Three Weeks of the Old Testament or a remarkable study in Teutonic good-and-evil symbolism, depending on how the reader takes it. Some Mann readers also deplore his characteristic humorous effort in making Potiphar’s wife lisp during the major seduction scene, owing to her having symbolically bitten her tongue in a
preliminary attempt not to declare her passion. However, most readers, even the uncritical, agree that Potiphar’s wife finally saying (in the English translation) “Thleep with me” is definitely funny.
Among European writers of intellectual stature, Mann has outsold the field in America. Joseph in Egypt was a Book of the Month Club dividend in 1938, and over 210,000 copies were distributed apart from its bookstore sale of about 47,000. Buddenbrooks has sold about 48,000 copies in America and has just been put on phonograph records for the blind and placed in the twenty-seven regional libraries for the blind by the Library of Congress. The Magic Mountain, best known of his books among Americans, has sold more than 125,000 copies. Death in Venice, possibly the most beloved of his stories in this country, nevertheless had an original sale (accounted for, apparently, by only his most steadfast followers) of less than 20,000. However, it was included in Stories of Three Decades, which was also a Book of the Month Club dividend in 1936 and which sold 92,000 altogether. Even before this war, Mann’s largest group of readers was, owing to the Nazis’ suppression of his work, already concentrated in the United States; the Scandinavians ranked next. He has been alternately admired and suppressed by official Moscow. When the Revolution broke out he was unprintable because he was a bourgeois. After the rise of the Popular Front in France, the Soviet State publishing house brought him out in a handsome cheap edition. Just before the Berlin-Moscow pact was signed, his books began to be attacked again.
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