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Sensing fascism in America: Thomas Mann in Los Angeles
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1
Sensing Fascism in America
Thomas Mann in Los Angeles
By:
Sergio Muñoz-Bata
A Dissertation Submitted to the
FACULTY OF THE UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA
GRADUATE SCHOOL
In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree
DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
AMERICAN STUDIES AND ETHNICITY
December 2017
2
Acknowledgements
Getting to this point has not been an easy task. It all began in the fall of 1977,
when my family and I moved from Mexico City to Los Angeles to begin a journey that
four decades later is finally reaching its end. Doing the work-course for a PhD twice is
demanding and writing this dissertation was difficult, intriguing, sometimes frustrating
but overall joyful. I was able to achieve this goal thanks to the effort, disposition and
generosity of several people and I owe a word of recognition to them.
First of all, I want to thank the University of Southern California for its
unwavering support and to Martha Harris and Dean Mark Todd, who helped me jumpstart
the project after a long hiatus. To Dr. George Sanchez who made it possible to turn an
aspiration into a reality. Without his support, patience, sense of humor and understanding,
I would not have persevered. To Dr. Bill Deverell, who taught me how to read and
analyze California’s history and helped me understand issues I did not know anything
about. I owe special gratitude to Dr. Steve Ross, whose careful line-by-line reading of my
text, and whose commentaries, suggestions, and edits shaped it for whatever it is worth.
On more than one occasion he was the buoy that kept my project afloat. Obviously, none
of the members of my committee are responsible for the contents of my book, but without
their help I would not have finished it.
I also want to acknowledge the generous assistance of Dr. Ehrhard Bahr for
reading parts of this manuscript, correcting facts about Mann and suggesting new and
careful readings. Dr. Felix Gutierrez was also instrumental to this project and in other
investigations and research tasks. I am also grateful to my German teachers Anja
3
Kirchdörfer Lee of the Goethe Institut in Mannheim, Germany, and Dr. Eve Lee of the
University of Southern California. Both tried their best to teach me Mann’s language, an
almost impossible assignment. My old friend, Dr. Joanne Gass was especially generous
devoting time and effort to read the whole manuscript and correcting my grammar and
syntax. My colleagues Alicia Gutierrez and Nic Ramos helped me with formatting issues.
Gabi Hollender in Zürich, Switzerland twice opened the magic door to the Thomas Mann
Archives and was also very helpful answering questions and guiding me, via e-mail. At
the Centro de Estudios Orteguianos Madrid, Dr. Javier Zamora Bonilla explained to me
Ortega’s idea of Europe and Jorge Magdaleno helping me do research in the Ortega’s
archives. This dissertation, and perhaps my whole PhD program would not have come to
fruition without the support of Kitty Lai, the Program Assistant for the Department of
American Studies and Ethnicity, to her my sincere gratitude. I want to thank the members
of my family: my grandchildren Max and Francesca, my daughter Lorenza for assisting
me with language issues and son Sergio for his encouragement. Francesca found it truly
funny and cool that she and I were going to school at the same time.
But my biggest gratitude goes to my wife Juana Vázquez Gómez who stayed by
my side through the eccentricity of having an old husband engage in the intense
enterprise of getting a PhD instead of traveling the world and doing more profitable
ventures.
4
Contents
Introduction “From the ironic writer to the public intellectual” 5
1. “The political awakening of an un-political man.” 12
2. “The Two Americas, from the ideal to the real.” 36
3. “The Weight of Exile” 65
4 “Mann’s political commitment to the demands of his time.” 86
5. “Déjà vu: the birth of the Cold War” 126
6. Epilogue: Was the United States on the verge of fascism? 148
Bibliography 169
5
Introduction
“From the ironic writer to the public intellectual”
Why would novelist Thomas Mann, the man widely rumored to be Franklin
Delano Roosevelt’s candidate to be president of Germany after the Second World War,
end his exile in America concerned with the political trends he saw growing in the U.S.
that reminded him of the rise of Hitler in Germany?
1
Mann’s German experience has
been thoroughly documented by myriad scholars and in seminal essays he wrote warning
his countrymen of the dangers presented by the National Socialist Party. Yet, Mann never
wrote an essay explaining his disillusion with the United States or why he found such
glaring similarities between the two political realities. His apprehensions were limited to
a few entries in his diaries, letters, and conversations with friends. We know Mann felt
the political atmosphere in America was growing “more and more unbreathable”
2
We
also know, as Richard Winston has written, that “In the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy
to a peculiar kind of power in America he saw parallels to the rise of Hitler, and he
alternated between confidence in the soundness of American democracy and fear that
under the pressure of the Korean War in Asia and the confrontations with Communism in
Europe, America would go far in the direction of fascism.”
3
In a 1946 letter to his
1
The rumor on president Roosevelt’s choice of Thomas Mann to head the postwar German government is a
constant in books about Mann. See Kevin Starr, The Dream Endures California Enters the 1940’s, (New
York, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 372, Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise: German
Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930’s to the Present. (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1977), p. 261.
2
Richard Winston, Introduction to Letters of Thomas Mann 1889-1955 (New York: Alfred A. Knopf,
1971), Xliii.
3
Winston, xliii.
6
American friend and patron Agnes E. Meyer, Mann shared his vision of America as a
“morally damaged country” with all the signs of “spiritual depression, raw avarice,
political reaction and race hatred” and wondered if fascism would come.
4
Understanding that no analogy is perfect, I argue in this project that a comparison
between the political developments in post-World War II America and the rise of
National Socialism in Germany up to 1933 through the eyes of Mann is relevant and
valuable. In the hearings of the House Un-American Activities Committee and those of
Senator Joseph McCarthy, Mann sensed eerie similarities with the rise of Hitler in
Germany, in the exploitation of fear of communism in both countries, in the attacks in the
media he endured in America and Germany, and in the allegations of Un-Americanism in
his adopted country that reminded him of the accusation of being Un-German in his birth
country. This was an especially hurtful accusation because it was used as a pretext by the
Nazis to strip him of his citizenship.
My research on the exiled perspective in Thomas Mann, I believe, should add
another dimension to the scholarship on the Cold War studies. Mann saw America from
what Edward Said has described as a double perspective. “The exile,” writes Said, “sees
thing both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actually here and now, there
is a double perspective that never sees things in isolation. Every scene or situation in the
new country necessarily draws on its counterpart in the old country.”
5
This dissertation also takes issue with scholars like Keith Bullivant, Rolf Günter
and Hans H. Schulte Renner who have questioned Mann’s political commitment to the
4
Winston, p. 513.
5
Edward Said. Representations of the Intellectual The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books,
1994), p. 60.
7
demands of his time and the sincerity of his political responses.
6
Mann, I argue,
courageously confronted fascism, Nazism, McCarthyism and other absolute belief
systems in Germany, in Europe and in the United States.
Who was Thomas Mann?
Mann was born in June 6, 1875 in the Hanseatic City of Lübeck, in northern
Germany. His father was a prosperous merchant and senator with old roots in the city and
his mother, the daughter of a German plantation owner and a Portuguese-Creole
Brazilian, was born in Rio de Janeiro. As a young man he loathed school because he
found it unimaginative and rigid. Reciprocally, his Latin and German teacher, Dr.
Baethcke found him “a thorough good-for-nothing.” Like his older brother Heinrich,
young Thomas was interested in literature, the arts, and music and uninterested in
learning the family business. His father, Senator Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, died
when Thomas was 15 years old and soon thereafter the whole family moved to Munich.
Mann published Buddenbrooks, his first novel, at the age of 26 and it was an
instant best seller that gave him national fame. Death in Venice, published in 1912, was
another sudden success, and The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, remains one of the
most stimulating novel of ideas ever written. Had Mann stopped writing in 1929, after
winning the Nobel Prize in literature at the age of 54, he still would have been recognized
as the greatest German novelist of his time. But he did not pause. He continued writing
novels and essays and giving speeches and lectures in Germany until 1933. That year,
6
Keith Bullivant, “Thomas Mann and the Politics of the Weimar Republic” pp. 55-69; Rolf Günther;
Renner, “Public Symbolism and Private Doubts. The Psychological Conditions of Mann’s Writing in
Exile”, 85-102, in Thomas Mann, edited and introduced by Michael Minden (London and New York:
Longman, 1995) and Hans H. Schulte, “Ist Thomas Mann noch lebendig? Gerald Chapple and Hans H.
Schulte eds. Thomas Mann: Ein Kolloquium, Modern German Studies 1, (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag), pp. 95-
126.
8
Hitler became Chancellor and Mann was warned that given his “pacifistic excesses” his
safety in Nazi Germany was not guaranteed. His name was on the list to enter Dachau,
the first concentration camp opened in Germany. “It is questionable,” wrote Mann to his
friend Lavinia Manzzucchetti, “whether there will ever be room for my sort in Germany,
whether I will be able to breathe the air there again. I am too good a German, too closely
involved with the cultural tradition and language of my country for the prospect of a year-
long or perhaps life-long exile not to have a hard ominous meaning for me.”
7
Notwithstanding his doubts and reservations, Mann left Nazi Germany in 1933 and found
refuge in Switzerland. Four years later, as his contacts with America grew closer, he
started to consider spending a year in the United States thinking that, as he wrote in a
letter to Karl Kerényi, “a separation from Europe would be infinitely beneficial for my
spiritual freedom and serenity.”
8
His stay in the United States, however, would be anything but serene. He was
engaged wholeheartedly in the fight against fascism speaking in public forums
throughout the United States and radio broadcasting messages to the German people
through the BBC during World War II. He also wrote important fiction works like, Lotte
in Weimar, Joseph the Provider, Doctor Faustus, The Holy Sinner and lucid essays on
Freud, Goethe, Nietzsche, Wagner as well as other essays that somehow were connected
to political events of the time.
Mann and his wife Katia became American citizens in 1944, but in the aftermath
of World War II and at the beginning of the Cold War his faith in democratic America
7
Hans Bürgin and Hans-Otto Mayer, Thomas Mann a Chronicle of his Life, English Translation by Eugene
Dobson, (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1965), pp. 102-103.
8
Letter to Karl Kerényi, April 30, 1937, cited in Hans Bürgin and Hans-Otto Mayer, Thomas Mann a
Chronicle of his life, English Translation by Eugene Dobson, (University, Alabama: University of Alabama
Press, 1965) p. 129.
9
began to crumble as he witnessed a succession of disturbing trends in his adopted country
that reminded him of the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany. Piecing together
trends like the surge of the political right, rising extreme nationalism, growing
xenophobia and anti-Semitism, plus the HUAC hearings, the ascent of Senator McCarthy
and the loyalty oath demands of the Truman administration, Mann feared the United
States was on the way to become a fascist state. Unwilling to relive his experience in
Germany, he fled the United States in 1952. At the age of 77, Mann returned to Zürich for
a second voluntary exile that would last only three more years. Mann died in August 12,
1955, almost a month after his last conference on the poet Schiller in The Hague.
My dissertation project has six chapters and an introduction. In chapter 1, “The
political awakening of an un-political man,” the topic is Mann’s sui generis political
evolution from the conservative author of Reflections of a Non-Political Man (1918) to
the public intellectual supporting the Weimar Republic in “On the German Republic,”
(1922) to the reluctant warrior, a man full of doubts and unsure on how to handle his
(“Außensein”) “staying outside” Germany (1933-36).
In chapter 2, “That lover of mankind from across the ocean,” I trace the origin of
Mann’s ideas on the United States in the texts of Walt Whitman and the politics of
Franklin Delano Roosevelt. I describe how he formed his initially favorable impressions
of the country during his four trips to America and why he decided to become an
American citizen; his transformation into the spokesperson of the German speaking exiles
in the United States of America and his indefatigable personal war against Hitler and the
Nazis.
10
Chapter 3, “The Weight of Exile,” explores different definitions of exile and
reviews the similarities and differences of individual exiles experiences. I examine how
Mann’s exiled condition influenced his political observations on the U.S. Far from being
a byproduct of the Cold War; I argue that the activities of the House Un-American
Activities Committee and McCarthy’s witch-hunt expressed a strong resurfacing of
profound aberrations in American history. The American notion of white supremacy was
carefully crafted using eugenics, immigration Laws, racist/populist movements and an
anti-communist fervor that offered a cover for anti-Semitic, anti-intellectual and
xenophobic feelings.
In chapter 4, “The political commitment to the demands of his time,” I analyze the
purpose and the content of the broadcasts he recorded for the BBC that were transmitted
to Germany during the war. His addresses at the Library of Congress from 1942 to 1949,
explore the terms of the polemic in the Los Angeles exiled community, mostly between
Mann and Bertolt Brecht, on the concept of the German guilt. I also describe Mann’s
growing concerns with the hearings at the House Un-American Committee. The
beginning of the Cold War and the interrogatories of the FBI about his activities, his
friends and his trips; the press campaign against him in the United States and Germany
are also examined.
In chapter 5, “Déjà vu: the birth of the Cold War,” I describe Mann’s concerns
with the political climate in Cold War United States, how he sensed similarities in the
ascent of Nazism in Germany and the rise of Senator Joseph McCarthy in America. I
analyze the reasons behind his disappointment with the Allies’ selection of German
postwar authorities, his reconciliation with Europe and his decision to go into a second
11
exile in Switzerland. I also examine Mann’s last years in Switzerland and discuss the
letter Mann wrote and never sent to the New York Times stating some of the reasons why
he left the United States.
In chapter 6, I draw conclusions responding to the five key questions set at the
beginning of this project: Was fascism on the rise in the United States at the beginning of
the Cold War? What is fascism? Did his exile play an important role in Mann’s political
development? Did exile shape his appraisal of the United States political situation in the
cold War? Was Mann politically committed to the demands of his time?
12
Chapter 1
“The political awakening of an un-political man.”
In the aftermath of World War I, it was hard to know which way Germany would
go. From the signing of the Armistice in 1918 to 1933, the year Adolf Hitler became its
Chancellor, Germany was in a state of constant turbulence. In spite of its progressive
political system and its social compromises, including a relatively advanced welfare state,
the Weimar Republic failed to satisfy the needs of the people and to bring stability to the
troubled country. “Weimar,” writes British historian Mary Fullbrook, “was born out of
turmoil and defeat, under near civil-war conditions; it was hampered by a harsh peace
settlement and an unstable economy; it was consistently subjected to attacks from both
left and right, as large numbers of Germans rejected democracy as a form of
government.”
9
It was clear, however, that the socio economic, political and cultural configuration
of Germany at the time, riddled with strains and tensions between imperial and
democratic forces, was fertile ground for the empty promises of a populist, demagogic
leader like Hitler. “It is in the Weimar Republic that the immediate causation of Hitler’s
rise to power has to be,” adds Fullbrook with a warning, “where to lay the responsibility
for Hitler’s rise to power, given the consequences of the Nazi regime, will continue to be
debated.”
10
The post World War I period was a time when many communist leaders
considered that Germany’s “objective conditions” were ripe for a Marxist revolution:
9
Mary Fulbrook A Concise History of Germany (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 155.
10
Fullbrook, pp.155.
10
Fullbrook, pp. 156
13
Germany, much more than Russia, was an industrialized state with a large, politically
well-organized working class. Between 1918 and 1919, there were numerous
revolutionary upheavals, among them a mutiny of the German “High Seas Fleet” in Kiel,
the establishment of Kurt Eisner’s Bavarian Soviet Republic, and the Spartakist uprising
in Berlin that took the lives of Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht, murdered by the
fascist paramilitary Freikorps with the acquiescence of the Social Democratic
government. In 1920, a hitherto unknown former corporal in the German army named
Adolf Hitler announced his “Twenty-Five Point” program at a meeting of the National
Socialist German Worker’s Party in a beer hall in Munich. A year later, he had become
the undisputed leader of the Nazis and the Sturmabteilung or Brown Shirts, its
paramilitary wing that enjoyed beating up dissenters in the beer halls where their leader
spoke.
By the same token, in 1919 it was nearly impossible to predict the political
trajectory of Thomas Mann, author of Reflections, that jewel of conservative,
nationalistic, moral apology of Imperial Germany and of Germany’s role in WWI. Less
would we guess that someone who wrote “democracy is foreign and poisonous to the
German character”
11
would amend Goethe’s declaration that every sensible person is a
moderate liberal, with the radical “Nowadays every sensible person is a moderate
socialist.”
12
As a young conservative, Mann believed that when the state is well run by
statesmen there is no need for democracy, as the citizens had no need to concern
themselves with politics. He also believed that politicians would ruin states run by no
11
Mann, Reflections, p. 16.
12
Eichner “Thomas Mann and Politics,” Thomas Mann Ein Kolloquium (Modern German Studies 1. Bonn:
Bouvier, 1978), p. 5.
14
statesmen. Politics, according to Mann, made one coarse, vulgar and stupid and
politicians are full of “insolence and greed.”
13
Mann, who lived in Munich at the end of the First World War, was a frontline
witness of the tempestuous political times and the violent nature of the rise of the Nazis
and their message of intolerance. Towards the end of his 1921 essay, “Goethe and
Tolstoy,” read at his home town Lübeck and in Berlin,
14
Mann warns Germans of the
danger presented by the fascist nature of the National Socialist Party, “a racial religion,
with antipathy not only for international Judaism, but also, quite expressly, for
Christianity, as a humane influence; nor do its priests behave more friendly toward the
humanism of our classical literature.” Mann also attacked their rituals; “It is a pagan
folkreligion, a Wotan cult: it is, to be invidious-- and I mean to be invidious-- romantic
barbarism. It is only consistent in the cultural and educational sphere, where it seeks to
check the stream of classical education, to the advantage of the primitive German
heritage.”
15
The George Potempa bibliography lists 375 journalistic contributions written by
Mann between 1922 and 1933, the year he took up residence in Zürich, and most of them
have political references.
16
Aside from the work of a handful of brave journalists in the
Berliner Tageblatt, the Frankfurter Zeitung and the Münchener Post, Thomas Mann
along with his brother Heinrich Mann and satirist journalist Kurt Tucholsky were
13
Eichner, “Thomas Mann and Politics”, p. 6.
14
Read at the Johanneum auditorium, September 4, 1921, six days later at Berlin’s Beethoven Hall. In
Munich in October and Zürich in November.
15
Thomas Mann, “Goethe and Tolstoy”, Thomas Mann Essays of Three Decades. Translated from the
German by H. T. Lowe-Porter. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 172.
16
Potempa, Georg. Thomas Mann-Bibliographie: Ubersetzungen/interviews. (Morsum and Sylt: Cicero
1997). Cited in Kurzke, p. 328.
15
arguably the loudest and more visible intellectuals taking strong public positions against
the National Socialists. Others, like playwright Bertolt Brecht, poet Ernst Bertram,
composers Hans Pfitzner and Richard Strauss and philosopher Martin Heidegger stood
silent and some of them even joined the Nazi party.
Mann’s political evolution, as Eichner notes in his multi-cited essay, was
remarkable, especially if one considers that the man who in 1914 wrote, “the German
kind of authoritarian monarchy offered the best protection for the private sphere,” is the
same who in 1922 wrote, “[I] realized this kind of state belonged to the past, and that a
modern democracy offered far better guarantees for privacy than the kind of
Obrigkeitsstaat (Authoritarian State) that was now still possible.”
17
“In these years,”
writes Hermann Kurzke referring to the Weimar years, Mann “becomes the decisive
defendant of the Weimar democracy.”
18
And he does so while continuing to write stories,
novellas and novels of consequence like Felix Krull, The Magic Mountain, “Disorder and
Early Sorrow”, “Mario and the Magician” and Joseph and his Brother. In 1929, as has
been stated before in this dissertation, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
That same year, Mann published Mario and the Magician, a novella mined from a
family vacation in Italy in 1926 that provides a vivid and horrifying example of life under
fascism. The novella is divided in two parts. In the first section, a foreign family lives
through a dreadful experience in an Italian beach when their eight-year old daughter
swims naked at the beach and the other bathers, most of them Italians, overreact accusing
17
Eichner, p.15.
18
Herman Kurzke, Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art; A Biography. Translated by Leslie Willson.
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 328.
16
the parents of indecency and of breaching Italy’s hospitality. Brought to the police station
the incident is resolved with a fine but the absurdity of the charges does leave a negative
impact in the whole family. The second part narrates a performance by Cipolla, a
deformed magician who uses an eloquent, deceptive and sadistic speech to make
members of the audience commit demeaning acts. When Cipolla tricks Mario, the waiter
at the hotel where the family stays, into a weird masquerade where the magician becomes
Mario’s female companion, the humiliation drives the waiter to shoot and kill the
magician.
The novella has been widely interpreted as a tale of fascism in nationalistic Italy
in the 1920s, and more importantly, perhaps, it has also been hailed as a premonition of
the violent death of Benito Mussolini. “The novella,” writes Manfred Dierks,
“demonstrates the interplay of 'people and leader'; it shows the loss of freedom of the
individual will; and, finally, it defines the end of the game as the point when the 'Fuhrer'
violates the emotional integrity of other human beings.”
19
Many commentators have seen
the 1929 story as pertaining to Germany at least as much as to Italy, or at least as a
cautionary tale aimed at Mann’s countryman. In “An Appeal to Reason”, Mann warns
against the methods of force ‘by which today Munich and tomorrow Berlin can be made
Italian.’ “This,” writes Eugene Lunn, “was in keeping with the tendency before WWII to
explain National Socialism in terms of Italian Fascism,”
20
The political transformation of Mann had many other roots. One of them, as
unconventional as it may sound to American ears, was a revealing reading of the two
19
Manfred Dierks, “Thomas Mann's Late Politics," A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann, ed.
Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessel (New York: Camden House, 2004), p. 213.
20
Eugene Lunn, “Tales of Liberal Disquiet: Thomas Mann’s Mario and the Magician and Interpretations of
Fascism.” University of California Davis Literature and History; Spring 1985; 11,1; ProQuest, p. 79.
17
volume edition of the work of Walt Whitman translated to the German by Hans
Reisiger.
21
Mann’s fascination with the American poet was so profound that he wrote an
enthusiastic review of the book and an open letter to Reisiger that was published on the
front page of the Frankfurter Zeitung, in which he wrote, Whitman, is the “symbol of the
future of humanity”. He also wrote he was “convinced that no task is more urgent for
Germany than to give a new meaning to this idea.” Mann was referring to Whitman’s
idea of humanity.
22
A second transformative event was the assassination of the foreign
minister in the government of the Weimar Republic, Walter Rathenau, by right wing,
anti-Semitic extremists. Mann attended Rathenau’s memorial service and delivered a
speech entitled “Geist und Wesen der deutschen Republik” (“Spirit and Essence of the
German Republic”). But the big breakthrough had happened one year before with the
writing of “The German Republic,” an essay he read in Berlin’s Beethoven Hall in
October of 1922, that marked his need to respond to the political events taking place in
Germany and his sense of urgency in doing so. Ironically, the same conservative voices
that used to call him the German author par excellence accused Mann of now being ‘Un-
German.’
“The German Republic,” writes Mann’s daughter Erika “was his political
recognition of the Republic in its hour of need and his most inopportune ‘step’ since the
Reflections. At this critical juncture its effect was startling, as if the author had thrown an
21
A more detailed explanation of the influence of Whitman in the work of Mann will be developed in
chapter two.
22
Frankfurter Zeitung, April 16, 1922. Translated by Horst Frenz. Mann sent a letter to Reisiger thanking
him for a copy of his translation of Whitman. Whitman Archives consulted July 10, 2015.
http://www.whitmanarchive.org/published/foreign/german/introduction.html
18
incendiary bomb into his own house.”
23
Political scientist Theo Stammen considered the
speech “a crucial text in the corpus of Thomas Mann political writings,” and for scholar
Terrence Reed, “If his wartime stand had come as a shock to those who thought him a
liberal intellectual, his new position was an equal shock to those who had come to rely on
him as a conservative nationalist.”
24
“The German Republic” marked a pivotal turn in Mann’s political evolution as
well as “a plea for humanism and democracy,” as Hannelore Mundt has observed, despite
being “politically vague, full of literary references and certainly not written to appeal to
the general public but rather to Mann’s peers… its intention is clear: to support the young
republic and a democratic Germany guided by the principles of bourgeois humanism and
culture as represented by Goethe and the Age of Enlightenment, and whose carriers Mann
saw in the educated German middle class.”
25
In 1926, when a censorship law was introduced by the Nazis in the Reichstag
disguised as a measure to protect youth against “trash and dirt,” Mann, along with his
brother Heinrich, Albert Einstein, Gerhard Hauptmann, artist Käthe Kollwitz, (the first
woman to be elected a member of the Prussian Academy of Arts in the Weimar Republic
and who was forced to resign by Hitler) formed a committee to oppose it. On the other
side of the debate was organized religion, principally the Catholic Church. The German
Law to Protect Youth from Trashy and Dirty Writings was approved and came into effect
23
Erika Mann, Mein Vater, der Zauberer, Irmela von der Lühe and Uwe Naumann, editors. (Reinbek bei
Hamburg: Rowohlt, 1996), p. 297.
24
Cited by Lawrence Rainey in “Introduction to Thomas Mann, “On the German Republic”“
Modernism/ modernity volume fourteen, number one, the Johns Hopkins University Press, 2007, pp., 99-
25
Hanelore Mundt, Understanding Thomas Mann. (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South
Carolina Press, 2004), pp.,10 &11.
19
on December 1926. Mann criticized it publicly as a direct attack on freedom of
expression.
And whereas “The German Republic” sounded a tentative tone, courageous, but
timid, the 1930 “German Address–An Appeal to Reason,” was a vigorous call for social
democracy in Germany and a warning to the middle class about the dangers presented by
the Nazis. Reading the speech read at Beethoven’s Hall in Berlin on October 17, Mann
not only analyzed Germany’s political moment but also took robust political positions
calling on the German people to take concrete political actions against the rise of fascism.
“In times like these,” wrote Mann, “it is hard to speak of art. It happened when war broke
out in 1914. So it was in the post-war years; so it was twelve years ago when Germany,
after prolonged and criminal abuse of all her powers by those who called themselves her
leaders, collapsed…and so it is again today, after years in which the well intentioned have
tried to believe in recovery and slow return to comfort and security… now we are swept
by a new economic crisis that stirs political passions afresh…. Surely it is too much to
demand sound political thought from an economically ailing people.”
26
He was referring to “the masses” that would suffer the winter unemployed,
hungry and in ruins. “There can be no individual happiness where misery rules the hour,”
Mann wrote, “For how can he behave with frank human confidence in the midst of a torn
and divided people, where hatred-morbid fruit of want-robs every eye of ingenuous
vision?”
27
26
Thomas Mann, “An Appeal to Reason”, Order of the Day Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades.
(New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), pp. 46-48
27
Mann, “An Appeal,” p. 49
20
“Today,” said Mann, “the voice of the German citizen is drowned by ‘the slogan
of fanaticism.’” A fanaticism fueled by “a colossus with feet of clay.”
28
Mann’s political
transformation was now unequivocal. “I declare my conviction– and I am sufficiently
convinced to commit not only my pen but my person to the issue that today the political
place for the German citizen is in the Social Democratic Party.”
29
Throughout the
speech, the heckling of Nazis, radical right wing fanatics and members of the SA
(Sturmabteilung) who had infiltrated the audience was unbearable. A former close
associate of Bertolt Brecht named Arnolt Bronnen “called him [Mann] a liar, a traitor and
an enemy of the people.”
30
Mann was not intimidated. He finished his speech, and,
guided by conductor Bruno Walter, who knew its labyrinthine passageways, left the scene
unharmed.
One month before the speech “An Appeal to Reason” was delivered, the Nazis
had dramatically increased the number of seats in the Reichstag from ten to 107, the
Social Democratic Party of Germany still remained the largest party represented in the
Reichstag, winning 143 of the 577 seats. The economic downturn of the country alone did
not explain the election results; the big issue had to do with what Mann described as
political passions. He sensed the new order would become a world menace and the
burden of the Treaty of Versailles had damaged the spirit of the people. “The German
people took advantage of a garish election poster, the so called National-Socialist, to give
vent to its feelings.”
31
In the triumph of the Nazi party, Mann saw what he believed
would be the beginning of the end of the cultural legacy of Germany.
28
Mann, “An Appeal,” p. 57
29
Mann, “An Appeal to Reason,” p. 67.
30
Hayman, Ronald. Thomas Mann A Biography, (New York: Scribner, 1955,) p. 384.
31
Mann, “An Appeal to Reason,” p. 53
21
“The economic decline of the middle classes was accompanied–or even preceded–
by a feeling which amounted to an intellectual prophecy and a critique of the age: the
sense that here was a crisis which heralded the end of the bourgeois epoch that came in
with the French Revolution and the notions appertaining to it,” wrote Mann.
Furthermore, he believed there was “a new mental attitude for all mankind, which should
have nothing to do with bourgeois principles such as freedom, justice, culture, optimism,
faith in progress…. The nationalism of our day is…a nature cult precisely by its
unrestrained, its orgiastic, radically anti-humane, frenziedly dynamic character.”
32
Mann defined National Socialism in the harshest terms calling it:
A Nordic creed, a Germanistic romanticism, from
philological, academic, professorial spheres. It addresses the
Germany of 1930 in a high flown, wishy-washy jargon, full
of mystical good feeling, with hyphenated prefixes like
race-and folk- and fellowship- and lends to the movement a
concomitant of fanatical cult-barbarism, more dangerous
and estranging, with more power to clog and stupefy the
brain, than even the lack of contact and the political
romanticism which led us to war.
33
There are passages in “An Appeal to Reason” where the influence of José Ortega
y Gasset’s book The Revolt of the Masses” is evident. Both thinkers were concerned with
the idea that the European cultural identity was threatened by fascism and communism
and both believed the recovery of this European identity was essential to solve the
32
Mann, “An Appeal to Reason,” p. 54.
33
Mann, “An Appeal to Reason,” p. 55.
22
problems they saw rising in the horizon. “In this wave of anomalous barbarism of
primitive popular vulgarity”, wrote Mann. “Everything is possible, everything is
permitted as a weapon against human decency,” including: “The decline and
disappearance of stern and civilizing conceptions such as culture, mind, art, ideas. ”
34
His description of the grotesque character of the Nazis political rallies could not
be more vivid and accurate:
With Salvation Army methods, hallelujahs and bell ringing
and dervirshlike repetition of monotonous catchwords, until
everybody foams at the mouth. Fanaticism turns into a
means of salvation, enthusiasm into epileptic ecstasy,
politics become an opiate for the masses, a proletarian
eschatology; and reason veils her face. Is all that German?
35
Mann issued several warnings to the German people cautioning them that Nazi
militant nationalism would “clothe its foreign policy with innocence and sweet
reasonableness.” That it would lie about its preparations for war as it prepared for a new
stage where all its hate will be directed against all Germans who do not believe in its
methods, and whom it promises to destroy root and branch. He noted that the current
process of purification went against the “highly cultured” German tradition built by
Goethe, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. He argued that “even after ten thousand banishing
and purificatory executions to the wish image of a primitive, pure-blooded, blue-eyed
simplicity, artless in mind and heart, that smiles and claps its heels together,”
36
German
34
Mann, “An Appeal to Reason,” p. 56.
35
Mann, “An Appeal to Reason,” pp. 57-58.
36
Mann, “An Appeal to Reason,” p. 59.
23
culture would be obliterated. His public declarations opposing National Socialism in the
thirties meant a lot to those in exile and to “those terrified by the fact that there were so
few writers of rank that spoke against the band of gangsters that had come into power in
Germany”
37
A month before he decided to settle himself and his family in Switzerland, he
vowed to Ludwig Lewisohn that he would fight for “the fundamental ideas of humanity
and liberty that are permanent and universal” and, Lewisohn wrote, “He kept his word.”
38
It should be noted, however, that during these trying times, Mann believed Nazism could
be defeated democratically and he was not alone in this conviction. While recognizing
that in its twelve years of existence the Weimar Republic failed to convince the German
people of its virtues, historian A. J. Nichols writes that it offered the best possible
political option to come out of the crisis. As late as March 1932, writes Nichols, “there
was no reason why Hitler should have been regarded as an invincible force in German
politics.” Further more, “Had the president [Hindenburg] and the army leaders been
determined to defeat Hitler they could easily have done so. There were plenty of loyal
Republicans ready to help them.”
39
In the aftermath of the German elections of 1932, and after a series of bloody
clashes between Nazi and communist paramilitary groups, Mann published an article in
the Berliner Tageblatt entitled “What We Must Demand.” In that piece, he denounced
37
Eichner, p. 18.
38
Ludwig Lewisohn, “Thomas Mann” The English Journal, 22. 7 (Sep., 1933), p. 528.
39
A.J. Nichols, Weimar and the Rise of Hitler (New York: St. Martin’s Press 1991), p. 132.
24
Nazism as a “national disease,” as a “hodgepodge of hysteria and mouldy romanticism,
megaphone Germanism that is a caricature and vulgarization of everything German.”
40
Alarmed with these developments and fearing for their lives, the nation’s top
cultural figures, (Jews, communists, socialists and sympathizers of a leftist party) fled the
country. Kurt Weill, Lotte Lenya, Alfred Döblin and Heinrich Mann escaped to France;
Bertolt Brecht and his wife Helene Weigel fled to Prague. Mann challenged the Papen
government “to go on the offensive more resolutely against Nazi acts of terror. “Victory
of German Prudence” is another essay in which he called the people to vote in the
election of the Prussian legislature on April 24, 1932, a piece with passages that illustrate
the clarity and severity of Mann’s antifascist positions.
41
The essay is a strong indictment of the Nazis
41
“I despise the dreary amalgamation
that calls itself ‘National Socialism’…. Its love for the German people is hate…the lust
for murder is written on the brow of this ‘people’s movement’ and we must prevent its
fairy tale soul from finding an opportunity to operate.”
42
Shortly thereafter, on January
30, 1933, by invitation of president Hindenburg, Adolph Hitler became Reich Chancellor
of Germany to lead a coalition government of nationalist conservatives and National
Socialists. A month after the election, the German Parliament building was burned down
and Hitler, calling it “a sign from heaven,” blamed the communists for the fire. The hunt
for communists intensified once Hindenburg signed an emergency decree that abolished
40
From the introduction by Richard Winston, Letters of Thomas Mann 1889-1955 Selected and translated
from the German by Richard and Clara Winston Introduction by Richard Winston. (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1970), p. xxxiv.
41
Kurzke, Herman. Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art A Biography, translated by Leslie Wilson.
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 330.
42
Kurzke, Thomas Mann, p. 330.
25
the rights of association, assembly and freedom of the press and enabled the government
to persecute opponents by legislative fiat.
The same year, on May 10, Joseph Goebbels, the Nazi minister of propaganda,
presided over a book burning at the University of Berlin, in which the works of Sigmund
Freud, Heinrich Mann and many other world-wide known authors were destroyed. The
same barbaric ritual was staged in many other German university towns and cities which
included burning the works of Thomas Mann. “They burned books they were incapable
of writing,”
43
Mann commented. For the Nazis, as historian Fulbrook notes, “the burning
of books by left-wing, Jewish and other un-German authors…symbolized the Nazi
attempt to purge from German minds all views except their own.”
44
In January of 1933 Mann wrote “Avowal to Socialism.” The essay was read aloud
by the Weimar Republic Prussian Minister of Culture, Adolf Grimme, once Hitler had
become Chancellor. The piece was widely read in Germany and Mann became a
spokesperson for democracy. To understand the dramatic change in Mann’s political
convictions, Kurzke lists seven possible reasons. Among them, the sixth is perhaps the
most interesting. “The politically unsteady aesthete is stabilized by the antifascist battle.
Much later Thomas Mann will say that the years of his battle against Hitler had been a
morally good period, for it was clear at the time what was good and what was not.”
45
Evidently, Mann paid a heavy price for his battle against Hitler from 1922 to
1933. During that decade, he endured frequent attacks in the press by journalists and
writers commissioned by the Nazis. Among them were Hanns Johst, a former friend of
43
Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from 1930’s to
the Present. (London: University of California Press, 1977), p. 305.
44
Fulbrook, Mary. A Concise History of Germany. (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991), p. 183.
45
Kurzke, p. 333.
26
Mann named Nazi Poet Laureate and SS major general, Arthur Hübscher, editor of the
Münchener Neusten Nachrichten, and Paul Nikolaus Cossman, also an editor in the same
publication. It was Johst, the author of the famous phrase: “Whenever I hear of culture…I
release the safety catch of my Browning,”
46
who suggested to Heinrich Himmler that he
send Mann to the Dachau Concentration Camp in the outskirts of Munich. Hübscher and
Cossman declared Mann Un-German. Ironically, in spite of his political alignment with
the Nazis, Cossman, who was a conservative Jew, was taken captive in 1933 and died in
the Theresienstadt concentration camp ten years later.
The continued confrontations with the Nazis were taking a toll on Mann. Five
days after the burning of the books, in a letter to Albert Einstein, Mann confided he was
filled with depression and dread. “At bottom,” he wrote, “I am too good a German for the
thought of permanent exile not to weigh heavily indeed,”
47
little did he know the worse
was yet to come.
Surprisingly, the brutal confrontation with his peers came with an essay
commissioned by the Goethe Society of Munich for the fiftieth anniversary on one of his
favorite composers. “Richard Wagner”, writes Hans Vaget, “provided Mann with the
central esthetic experience of his life. He wrote about Wagner with greater passion and
eloquence than about almost any other figure.”
48
His essays on Wagner were complex,
sometimes hesitant and often contradictory, “As you can see,” Mann wrote to Agnes
46
In 1933, Hanns Johst wrote Schlageter, a play to commemorate Hitler’s 44
th
birthday and the phrase is
uttered in Act 1 Scene 1.
47
Mann, Letters p. 198.
48
Hans Vaget review of Pro and Contra Wagner “ in Death in Venice and other Stories by Thomas Mann.
The University of Wisconsin Press Journals Division. Monatshefte 83.4 (1991) p. 466.
27
Meyer in 1942, “The way I talk about Wagner has no chronology or logical progression.
It is and will always remain ambivalent.” Nonetheless, he wrote more than forty essays
and speeches on the musician and on his music relating “the abysmal contrast between the
shabbiness of his character and the sublimity of his artistic effects, the mindless brutality
of his ‘ideology’ and ‘racism’ and the redemptive aspirations of his music. The infantile
nastiness of his verbal utterances and the undimmed radiance of so many of his
proclamations in sound; the stupidity of his theories and the insuperable cleverness of his
composing.”
49
As soon as Mann read the speech in Munich, and later on in Brussels, Amsterdam
and Paris, a “group of self-appointed guardians of Munich’s cultural hygiene,”
50
wrote an
open letter accusing Mann of defaming Wagner in the fatherland and abroad. Sadly,
among the signatories of the shameful and opportunistic pamphlet were distinguished
cultural figures that had aligned themselves with the Nazis. Composers like Richard
Strauss and Hans Pfitzner, professor Olaf Culbransson, painter Hermann Groeber and Dr.
Ludwig Hoeflmayr, Munich’s Senior Public Health Officer and Max Amann, the
publisher of Hitler’s Mein Kampf.
“The fifty page long essay is full of praise for the composer but it is also critical
yet no more critical than Nietzsche’s writings on the same subject--, and Nietzsche, Mann
reminded us in his essay, loved and hated Wagner.”
51
As Erich Heller notes, it was the
observation that “Wagner’s art is a case of dilettantism that has been monumentalized by
49
Heller, Erich, Introduction to Thomas Mann, Pro and Contra Wagner. Translated by Allan Bunden
with an Introduction by Erich Heller. (London: the University of Chicago Press Faber and Faber, 1985),
p.16.
50
Heller, p. 91
51
Hans Rudolf Vaget, Pro and Contra Wagner. Translated by Allan Bunden with an Introduction by Erich
Heller. (London: the University of Chicago Press Faber and Faber, 1985), p. 466.
28
a supreme effort of the will and intelligence-a dilettantism raised to the level of genius”
[that] seems to have infuriated the gentlemen of the Wagner City.”
52
Indeed, Mann’s
critics used half-truths to disparage his essay on Wagner and ignored his impressive and
detailed list of Wagner’s precious musical moments. “This exoteric music,” writes Heler
quoting Mann, “contains things of a brilliance and splendor,”
53
but the ideological zeal
and the political maneuvering of his critics led them to ignore these words of praise.
There is indeed much to admire in Wagner’s music: the power of his
compositions, the beauty of some passages, his rhythmical and tonal transformations but
there is also much to hate about the person, the racist anti-Semitic writer, his insensitivity
towards other people and what Mann called his “dishonest artistry,” the calculating ability
to create effects to please audiences. Mann saw it all and rendered it in full in this essay
written with a double purpose, it was also meant to denounce the Nazis’ appropriation of
the composer’s Germanness. I would argue that it was the strength of Mann’s analysis of
the context of Wagner’s nationalism that tipped the equilibrium and led Nazi leaders to
openly persecute and punish the writer who, not too long before, was considered the most
German of all contemporary writers.
“It is thoroughly inadmissible to ascribe a contemporary meaning to Wagner’s
nationalist gestures and speeches–the meaning hat they would have today,” wrote Mann,
“to do so is to falsify and abuse them, to sully their romantic purity.” The big difference,
according to Mann was that “when Wagner introduced the national concept into his work
as a familiarly potent theme…it was still in its heroic, historically legitimate era, the time
when it was valid, fully alive and authentic, when it was pure poetry and spirit, an ideal
52
Heller, Erich. Introduction, p. 15
53
Heller, Erich, Introduction, p.109.
29
aspiration. It is nothing but demagogy when today the ‘German sword’ lines…are
thundered tendentiously into the auditorium by the basses, in order to achieve an added
patriotic effect.”
54
The essay ends with a lapidary conclusion: “It is futile to invoke the
spirits of departed great men in order to ask them their opinions-if any-on problems of
contemporary life with which they were not confronted as such, and which are alien to
their intellectual experience…let us be content to honour Wagner’s work as a powerful
and complex phenomenon of German and Western European life.”
55
While he was on tour lecturing on Wagner, Mann was warned that his personal
safety in Germany was at risk and that he would have to leave behind his house, his city,
and his country and begin an exile that would first take him and his family to Zürich. The
Wagner essay provides the perfect example of how Mann, the artist, could become a
reluctant political contrarian by expressing his thoughts on a controversial figure that had
become a fundamental symbol of the German spirit for the Nazis. Via Wagner, Mann was
also confronting the National Socialist Party.
Mann did not flee Germany; he and his wife decided to stay in Küsnacht, near Zürich, and
as professor Ehrhard Bahr notes, “he avoided the terms emigration or exile for his status
and used the expression “staying outside” (Außensein) to characterize his residence in
Switzerland.” His problem, as Bahr writes, was that his German passport had expired and
he could not go back to Munich to renew it for fear of his life. Mann tried to acquire
Swiss citizenship but failed, “the Swiss authorities insisted that he had to wait for the
required six years as any other applicant,” writes Bahr in the same essay. So, he was
issued a permission to stay in Zürich and travel abroad with an identity card in lieu of
54
Heller, Introduction, p. 109.
55
Heller, Introduction , p. 140.
30
passport. The permission, though, came with a serious restriction, “the Swiss government
let it be known that it did not tolerate any political activities of foreigners within their
borders.”
56
The three years that followed his departure from Germany, from 1933 to 1936,
were painfully difficult for Mann. Apart from the “Protest of the Richard Wagner City of
Munich” against him signed by some of his peers, Mann learned that the Munich police
wanted to expatriate him reportedly to intern him at the Dachau concentration camp.
Mann also feared cutting ties with the German public if the Nazis imposed a ban on his
books, which were still selling well. Plus the thought that Nazi authorities would
confiscate his beloved house on Poschingerstrasse, his library, his diaries and letters and
other assets he had in Munich tormented him to the point he could not sleep, and he
suffered from fits of panic-stricken despair.
The intimate battle between what he wanted to do and what he thought he had to
do was suffocating him with doubt and anguish. In a letter from Max von Schillings, the
Nazi sympathizer anti-Semitic president of the Prussian Academy of the Arts, he bluntly
told Mann that if he wished to be identified with the academy he would have to
collaborate in “national cultural tasks,” and promise not to work against the government.
Mann’s answer evidenced his existential doubts in this period of personal instability
saying he would not intend to work against the government but did not want to remain a
member of the academy. Mann was in a predicament; he knew he could not go back to
Germany but at the same time he could not bear the thought of being exiled from his
56
Ehrhard Bahr, “Thomas Mann in America: From the ‘First Emigration’ (1938) to the ‘Second
Emigration’” (1938-1952) Unpublished lecture at USC, September 2011, p. 2. Original in German: Ehrhard
Bahr, “Thomas Mann in den USA: Von der ersten zur zweiten Emigration (1938-1952),” in Ian Wallace,
ed. Feuchtwanger and Remigration (Feuchtwanger Studies, vol. 3), Oxford: Peter Lang, 2013, pp. 187-200.
31
beloved Germany. “I am much too good a German for the thought of permanent exile not
to weigh heavily indeed,” wrote Mann to Albert Einstein in May of 1933, lamenting
being “forced into this role.”
57
Asked by a Jewish-American admirer for a statement about the political situation
in Germany to be printed in New York, Mann’s reply reflects perfectly what was his state
of mind at the moment: “If I told you what you wish to hear, my capital and property in
Germany would be taken away from me tomorrow, my son would be arrested as a
hostage, I do not know what would happen to my parents-in-law, who are Jewish, no
more of my books could be sold in Germany, and I do not know what the other
consequences would be.”
58
On March 15, 1933, Mann wrote he realized that he had reached the end of an era
in his life, but his books were selling well in Germany, ten thousand copies of The Tales
of Jacob were sold within a week in October that year, and twenty five thousand more in
the next three months.
59
In spite of the attacks against him by the Nazis and their
sympathizers, Mann’s work resonated with his German readers. During his three month
stay at Sanary-sur-Mer, his children Erika and Klaus urged him to condemn the Nazi
regime in strong terms, but he hesitated because he refused to see himself exiled from his
country; he still had hopes he would recover his property and, more importantly, he
wanted to keep open a communication channel with his German readers.
In 1934, Mann gave a speech in New York that was critical of the Nazis. He also
wrote in his diary that he was planning to write a political manifesto that would be titled
57
Mann, Letters, p. 198.
58
Ronald Hayman, Thomas Mann a Biography (New York: Scribner, 1995) pp. 405-406.
59
Thomas Mann Diaries 1918-1939, selection and Foreword by Herman Kestern. Translated from the
German by Richard and Clara Winston. (London: Robin Clark, 1984) p. 127.
32
“das Politikum.” He did not write it, but the following year, on March 23, he wrote, “My
revulsion is so great now that my desire finally to cut all ties with this country becomes
ever more urgent."
60
In April, his speech “Europe, Beware” was read in his absence in
Nice and in French, and even though there is no mention of Hitler or of National
Socialism “his criticism of primitive mass movements, irrationalism, and anti-
intellectualism, of the perversion of truth and morality, was received as a critique of Nazi
Germany.”
61
In the end and regardless of the specific circumstances he had to confront, it is
true that Mann made an effort not to criticize the Nazi regime for almost three years.
Notwithstanding, in April of 1936, in an anonymous editorial in the American magazine
The New Republic the editors wrote a piece supporting Thomas Mann’s decision to
remain silent, a silence “easy to understand and excuse. It has so far enabled him to keep
his German audience; and Mann is a great enough writer to understand that in his
audience lies part of his greatness-that without a united body of readers he might become
as voiceless and sterile as most of the White Russian novelists who have left the
homeland.”
62
“Mann maintained his neutrality until February 1936, when the literary critic of
the Neue Zürcher Zeitung Eduard Korrodi wrote an article which claimed that only a few
Jewish novelists had left Germany, while the majority of German poets and dramatists
had stayed.”
63
In his article, Deutsche Literatur im Emigrantenspiegel, Korrodi argued
that the only reason why some German exiled writers did not publish their books in
60
Mann, Diaries, p. 237.
61
Hanelore Mundt, Understanding Thomas Mann, p. 14.
62
The New Republic, From the Stacks: “Homage to Thomas Mann”, April 1, 1936”, consulted October
19, 2015. http://www.newrepublic.com/article/114269/thomas-mann-stands-anti-semitism-stacks
63
Bahr, “Thomas Mann in America,” p. 3.
33
Germany was because they were nothing but a handful of mediocre Jewish writers. To
reinforce his argument, Korrodi used Mann as the best example of a great German writer
whose books continue to be published and be sold massively in Germany. Mann could not
ignore this provocation and in an “Open Letter to Korrodi” also published in the Neue
Zürcher Zeitung, he made his final break with the National Socialist regime. “Nothing
good can come from the present German leaders,” wrote Mann, “nothing good either for
Germany or the world. This conviction has caused me to flee that land in whose cultural
tradition I have deeper roots than those who for three years have been hesitating as to
whether they should dare deny my German identity before the whole world. ”
64
He also
used the letter to categorically state that the Nazis hate against Jews went against the
traditional European cosmopolitism and predicted that anti-Semitism would isolate
Germans from the rest of Europe. “In conclusion, he declared that without its Jewish
component German literature would not be German, but crude primitivism.”
65
Predictably, the letter resonated dramatically, and the rumor that he and his family
would be deprived of their citizenship began to circulate. In November of 1936, Mann
and his family were granted Czech citizenship and less than a month later Mann, Katia
and their four younger children were deprived of their German nationality accused of
having taken “hostile positions concerning Germany” in organizations “mostly under
Jewish influence.”
66
A Czech passport allowed them all to travel.
The next move by the Nazis, also in December of 1936, was the withdrawal of his
honorary degree from the University of Bonn. Mann responded with a letter to the Dean
64
Bürgin and Mayer, p. 120.
65
Bahr, “Thomas Mann in America,” p. 3.
66
Bürgin and Mayer, p. 124.
34
of the university that was immediately translated into several languages and widely
distributed in Germany in “camouflaged pamphlets of the underground propaganda.” The
letter, according to Mann, was even memorized by young people “thus owning it in a way
that the police could not fasten on.”
67
The actual text left behind all former hesitations
and addressed the dire political, economical and social situation of Germany as well as
the responsibilities of the universities that had failed to understand the catastrophe in the
making. “The German universities,” wrote Mann, “share a heavy responsibility for all
the present distresses which they called upon their heads when they tragically
misunderstood their historical hour and allowed their soil to nourish the ruthless forces
which have devastated Germany morally, politically, and economically.” Mann also
challenged the Dean to post a copy of his reply on the bulletin board of the University,
next to the letter depriving him of the honorary doctorate. In a masterstroke of his refined
sense of irony Mann addresses his interlocutor as “Herr Dean (I have not even the honor
of knowing your name).”
68
The letter closed acknowledging that most likely the Dean
was unwilling to finish reading it frightened by the use of words like freedom, which
Mann reminded him have now been forbidden in Germany. The letters to Korrodi and
Professor Karl Justus Obenauer, the unnamed Dean of the Philosophical Faculty of Bonn,
had a cathartic effect on Mann that would last for a few years, at least until 1945, when a
sense of déjà vu began to haunt him. In March 1937, in his introductory words to a
reading before the Kadimah Jewish Union in Zürich, he recovered the critical authority
and energy he had shown prior to the 1933-1936 pause and chastised the Nazis and their
anti-Semitism as “an appurtenance and watchword for all dark, confused, and bestial
67
Thomas Mann, Order of the Day, xii-xiii.
68
Thomas Mann, Order of the Day, p. 107.
35
mass-humanity and mass-mystique of today. [Nazism] is neither thought nor word, has no
human voice: it is a cacophony.”
69
69
Bürgin and Mayer p. 127 quoting from Mann’s text Zum Problem des Antisemtismus.
36
Chapter 2
“The two Americas, from the ideal to the real”
“That lover of mankind from across the ocean”
70
Walt Whitman never visited Germany, but the works of many German-speaking
philosophers echo in his poetry. The poet from New York did not read German, he learnt
about Immanuel Kant, Johann Caspar Lavater, Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Georg
Friederich Hegel, Friederich Schiller, Novalis, and Heinrich Heine, by reading their work
in Henry Hedge’s book, Prose Writers of Germany. “Particularly Hegel,” writes David S
Reynolds in his monumental biography of Whitman, “had a profound effect on him…
Hegel struck him as resolving the problem of evil. Hegel taught of a spirit pervading all
phenomena, emerging from antagonistic forces…. Hegel accorded with Whitman’s
jingoism, since the all-resolving philosopher seemed to parallel the all-tolerating
America.”
71
Another clearly noticeable influence on Whitman was that of Swiss poet,
philosopher and physiologist Lavater, who “emphasized the miraculous nature of
apparently insignificant things: each particle of matter is an immensity; each leaf a world;
each insect an inexplicable compendium.”
72
Kant also left a mark with his “Nebular
Hypothesis,”
73
a theory developed by the philosopher from Königsberg in his 1755 work
The Universal Natural History and Theories of the Heavens that sought to explain the star
and planetary formations. “In the first poem in the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass,”
writes Reynolds, “later titled ‘Song of Myself’, Whitman wrote:
70
Thomas Mann, “The German Republic” in Order of the Day Political Essays and Speeches of Two
Decades. (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1942), p. 37.
71
David S. Reynolds, Walt Whitman’s America A Cultural Biography, (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, 1995), pp. 253-254.
73
Reynolds, p. 253.
72
Reynolds, p. 253.
73
E-mail from David S. Reynolds (rey.sn@gmail.com) November 6, 2015
37
Cycles ferried my cradle, rowing and rowing like cheerful boatmen,
For room to me stars kept aside in their own rings,
They sent influences to look after what was to hold me.
For it the nebula cohered to an orb. (My emphasis).
The long slow strata piled to rest it on;
Vast vegetables gave it sustenance,
Monstrous sauroids transported it in their mouths and
deposited it with care,”
Whitman was introduced to the British public in 1867, when English critic
William Rossetti published a new edition of Leaves of Grass. A year later, having read
Rossetti’s edition, German revolutionary and poet Ferdinand Freiligrath, a political exile
and a friend of Karl Marx, translated 10 Whitman poems into German that were
published in the Augsburger Allgemeine Zeitung. In his introductory note, Freiligrath
described Whitman “as the only poet America has as yet produced.”
74
Whitman
celebrated joyfully the translations; he believed it was important to be “admitted to and
heard by the Germanic people.”
75
Unfortunately, the translated poems came mostly from
Whitman’s Civil War poetry and thus “did not do justice to the essential modernity of the
American’s work.”
76
Two decades later, the first complete German translation of Leaves
of Grass was published and soon gained popularity among intellectuals: “in the minds of
German-speaking Europeans the work reflected ‘the newness of the New World’ which
74
Ute Ferrier, “Walt Whitman's Influence on Germany,” (Binghamton University, State University of New
York, 2012), p. 2.
75
Whitman in the German-Speaking countries- The Walt Whitman Archive, p. 68, consulted 3/4/15.
76
Ferrier, p. 5
38
at this time seemed very mythical…. Readers all over the world who seriously pondered
democracy took Whitman seriously long before he was recognized in the United States.
He was more respected and more widely read in Europe well into the twentieth century,”
writes professor Ute Ferrier.
77
The first German edition of Leaves of Grass, published in 1899 as Grashalme,
brought about a shift of emphasis on the work of the American writer. He was seen more
as a poet than as a guide to politicians, and up until the 1930s, Whitman became, in the
words of Ferrier, “the embodiment of the new generation” of German writers like
Johannes Schlaf, Arno Holz and Gerhart Hauptmann.
78
The adoration of Whitman in
some writers’ circles was such that Herman Hesse complained; “soon, the Germans
would build altars for him and elevate his writings to that of the gospel.”
79
Hesse believed
Germans had a distorted idea of the American poet: "already they are calling him all
kinds of things that he is not, for example a great philosopher and a prophet of the
modern laws of life." Yet, Hesse did appreciate in Whitman what he saw as a “freshness”
that was inherent to a poet from America, “a young country that is more interested in its
grandchildren than its grandfathers.”
80
Whitman was also the object of ridicule by satirist
Kurt Tucholsky who parodied some of the poet’s work suggesting that for intellectuals
living in the Weimar Republic, American optimism was out of place in post-war
Germany. Another point of contention at the time in Germany was Whitman’s
homoerotic poems. While writers like Eduard Bertz tried to use Whitman to help the
movement in favor of legal emancipation for homosexuals, other writers, Schlaf among
77
Ferrier, p. 2.
78
Ferrier, p. 4.
79
Ferrier, p. 13.
80
Ferrier, p. 14.
39
them, accused Bertz of misunderstanding Whitman. Schlaf was concerned that the
prevailing prejudice against homosexuality in Germany at the time would harm
Whitman’s standing at the time.
Mann was very much aware of the controversy surrounding the topic but he was
less clear on the virtues of Whitman’s poems. For example, after a visit to Bayreuth for a
performance of Wagner’ s Parsifal, in early August 1909, Thomas Mann wondered
whether the work of the composer had a future or was it to be considered only as an
oeuvre of historical interest. In a fragment of an unfinished essay titled Geist und Kunst,
81
he wrote, “For the new generation, beyond modernity, I do not know how things stand in
painting or music…. But in literature things are stirring everywhere…. The demand of the
times is to cultivate anything in us that can be called healthy.” And, as a subtitle or a
thought that apparently was to be expanded later, he wrote: “Influence of Whitman on the
youngest people is greater than that of Wagner.”
82
Mann did not elaborate on the meaning
of this controversial line, and it feels more like an echo of the buzz of the times when
Whitman was in vogue. Yet, in a letter written in January 1910, he mentions Whitman’s
work as a sample of ‘Indian Rousseauism,” linking Whitman to its fashionable novelty
but evidencing his unfamiliarity with the work of the American poet.
Twelve years later, and six months before Mann read his lecture/essay/manifesto,
“On the German Republic,” at the Beethoven Auditorium of the Berlin Philharmonic, he
published an open letter in the newspaper the Frankfurter Zeitung,
83
celebrating “the
81
The German word Geist is often translated as spirit and also as mind.
82
T. J. Reed, The Uses of Tradition. (Oxford New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), p. 137.
83
“Hans Reisiger’s Edition of Walt Whitman: A Letter” first appeared in the newspaper the Frankfurter
Zeitung, vol. 66, no. 285 (16 April 1922, second morning edition), 2. This translation is based on that
original printing, though it should be noted that the letter was later reprinted in Thomas Mann, Gesammelte
Werke in dreizehn Bänden, second edition (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1974), vol. 10, and Thomas
40
ethical and literary power of Walt Whitman,
84
apropos the Hans Reisiger two volume
translation into German of the work of Whitman. The “On the German Republic” lecture
came at a time of heightened political tension in Germany, four months after the
assassination of Foreign Minister Walter Rathenau by two anti-Semite right-wing
extremists and an accomplice. He also wrote the essay also to acknowledge that events in
Weimar were reshaping his political convictions from a conservative nationalist to a
liberal intellectual defending the Republic. Mann believed the survival of the Weimar
Republic depended on the support of the German younger generation and at the time he
seems to have been convinced the best way to connect with them was through Walt
Whitman, the American poet who “was the symbol of a ‘new humanity’ which defined
itself according to the new rules…(and who) was the embodiment of the new
generation.”
85
To strengthen the message with a national poet, Mann paired Novalis with
“the lover of mankind across the ocean,”
86
in “On The German Republic.” “Let me say it
openly,” wrote Mann in his appeal to young Germans, “to the extent it’s needed, my aim
Mann: Aufsätze, Reden, Essays, ed. Harry Matter (East Berlin: Aufbau-Verlag, 1983–1986), vol. 3. A third
reprinting took place more recently, part of the Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe, vol. 15, Essays
II: 1914–1926, edited by Hermann Kurzke (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2002). It has also been
previously translated into English by Horst Frenz, in Gay Wilson Allen and Ed Folsom, eds. Walt Whitman
and the World (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 1995), 201.
Lawrence Rainey, “Introduction to Thomas Mann ‘On the German Republic.’” Modernism/modernity
volume fourteen, number one, pp. 99-105. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
84
Lawrence Rainey, “Introduction to Thomas Mann ‘On the German Republic.’” Modernism/modernity
volume fourteen, number one, pp. 99-105. The Johns Hopkins University Press.
85
Ferrier, p. 7.
86
Thomas Mann, “The German Republic” in Thomas Mann Order of the Day Political Essays and
Speeches of Three Decades. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), p. 37.
41
is to win you over to the side of the republic, of what is termed democracy, and what I
term humanity.”
87
By associating ‘republic’ to ‘democracy’ and to ‘humanity,’ Mann was trying to
convince his readers that there was a connection between two texts Reflections of a
Nonpolitical Man (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen) and “On The German
Republic”. “I attempted to explain my idea of humanity in “On The German Republic,”
for which I have been accused of being Un-German and of contradicting the
Betrachtungen, which in reality is a direct continuation of them,” wrote Mann in a letter
to Felix Bertaux.
88
Whitman’s profound influence on Mann was noticeable mainly in two realms:
politics and sexuality. Whitman made it possible for Mann to abandon his allegiance to
the monarchy and by linking Whitman to Goethe and Novalis to retain the sense of a
German humanist tradition. Mann believed the German concept of “humanity” was
revitalized by Whitman’s concept of “democracy.” Whitman also helped Mann transform
the German Romantic obsession with death into a celebration of life because as professor
Robert K. Martin notes, “Mann did not perceive Whitman as hostile to the German
tradition but as a transformative force by returning it to life.”
89
Further more, reading
Whitman, Mann understood it was possible “for that male sexuality to be relocated and
revalued: it could now be situated as part of a democratic and humanist vision. This shift,
one of the most difficult in Mann's career, involved a break with the German homosexual
87
Mann, “The German Republic,” p. 11
88
Letter to Felix Bertaux, in Hans Bürgin and Hans-Otto Mayer, Thomas Mann: a Chronicle of his Life,
English translation by Eugene Dobson. (University, Alabama: University of Alabama Press, 1969) p. 58.
89
Robert K. Martin, “Walt Whitman and Thomas Mann”, Walt Whitman Quarterly Review, Vol 4/
Number 1 (Summer 1986), p. 2.
42
tradition from which Mann sprang.”
90
It also helped him understand his own tormented
and repressed sexuality.
Mann, a married man and father of six children had been concerned with his
homoerotic feelings and the role they might play in his writing and in society for quite
some time. By most academic accounts, Mann’s homoerotic relationships were
essentially platonic, not consummated acts, but there seemed to be always a veil of
secrecy surrounding the topic. So much so, that Mann’s translator H. T. Lowe Porter,
made the extreme an unfortunate decision to excise three pages of “On The German
Republic” where, pleading for sexual freedom Mann suggested, “democracy had
emancipated the homosexual.”
91
In 1919, reading Hans Blüher’s observations in Die Rolle der Erotik in der
männlichen Gesellschaft, that German gay thought derived from a conception of “male
superiority, male comradeship in military and chivalrous groups, and the beauty of the
(German) male body,” Mann commented, “one sided, but true…. There remains for me
personally no doubt that the Betrachtungen are also an expression of my sexual
inversion.”
92
Whitman’s poems allowed Mann to think about male love while rejecting its
militaristic and aristocratic undertones. “Calamus,” “I Sing the Body Electric” and
fragments of the essays in “Democratic Vistas” are extensively quoted in “The German
Republic,”
93
In one of the most sensual scenes in The Magic Mountain, Whitman’s “I
90
Martin, p. 2.
91
The revelation of the translator’s action is widely reported in several books and essays, see for example,
Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature, NY: Knopf, 1996,) p. 380.
92
Cited in Martin, p. 2.
93
Thomas Mann,“The German Republic,” from the middle to the end of the essay Mann quotes Whitman
in pages 25, 26, 27, 37, 38, 39, 41, 42,43 and 44.
43
Sing the Body Electric” inspires Mann to write Hans Castorp’s love declaration, in
French, to Clavdia Chauchat (a cat in heat) during carnival night, (Walpurgis). Castorp,
who came to a sanatorium for tuberculosis patients in the Swiss Alps to visit a cousin,
“falls in love with a patient named Clavdia because her Kirghiz eyes remind him of his
boyhood love, Pribislav Hippe, in a Whitmanesque case of transformation of homosexual
love,” writes biographer Jeffrey Meyers.
94
Politically, writes professor Robert K. Martin, “Whitman helped point the way for
the Lübeck patrician from a monarchical-aesthetic tradition to the republicanism of the
Weimar years and enabled his ultimate resistance to National Socialism in Germany”; in
literary terms, “Whitman’s poems and essays on male friendship helped establish an
alternate tradition for Mann, and thus made possible the resurrection of Hans Castorp as a
counterweight to the collapse of Gustav von Aschenbach, the protagonist of Death in
Venice,”
95
who falls in love with a young Polish boy named Tadzio in a cholera stricken
city and dies while watching him at the beach.
In “On The German Republic,” Mann wrote of the “social eroticism… the pure,
sweet-smelling primitive healthiness of the singer of Manhattan . . . bursting with racial
freshness, which just now let us bring into touch for a moment democracy and
aestheticism."
96
But as scholars like T. J. Reed have observed, Mann was a little too
carried away by his enthusiasm for Whitman. The essay “On The German Republic” is
important because it marked a milestone in Mann’s conversion from conservative to
republican but it was a naïve political document that overestimated the intentions of the
94
Meyers, Jeffrey. "Thomas Mann and Walt Whitman." Notes on Contemporary Literature 41.5 (2011): 8.
Biography in Context. Web. 6 Apr. 2016, p. 2.
95
Martin, “Walt Whitman and Thomas Mann,” p. 2.
96
Mann, "The German Republic," p. 42.
44
political parties in the Weimar Republic. Further more, writes Reed, "It was little short of
ludicrous to expand on Whitmanesque homosexual feeling as a force binding society."
97
In a no less utopian thought than Whitman’s view in “Democratic Vistas,” Mann
suggested the solution to the prevalent moral crisis (in the U.S.) would need "Two or
three really original American poets...(that) would give more compaction and more moral
identity, (the quality to-day most needed) to these States, than all its Constitutions,
legislative and judicial ties.”
98
Whitman believed literature would unite the country.
Mann in America
Before his pivotal reading of Whitman in 1922, Mann’s impression of the United
States was rather vague, formed mostly by his fragmentary readings of two unreliable
sources on the topic. He was aware that the poet Friederich Schiller once contemplated
immigrating to a revolutionary America;
99
he also had read a very short poem by Goethe
in which he described America as a country unhampered by the past, and the novel
Wilhelm Meister’s Journeyman Years.
100
In this novel Goethe wrote about a planned emigrant colony in America. But as
scholar Henry Hatfield writes, “to judge by Mann’s early works, he neither knew or cared
a great deal about the United States before he actually visited it in the Thirties”
101
In his
novel Royal Highness, American billionaire Spoelmann flees, wrote Mann, from the
97
Reed, Thomas Mann, p. 293.
98
Garrett Peck. Walt Whitman in Washington, D.C.: The Civil War and America’s Great Poet. (Charleston,
SC: The History Press. 2015), p. 150.
99
Ritchie Robertson, Goethe: a very Short Introduction. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016), P. 68
101
Robertson, Goethe, p. 114.
100
Robertson, Goethe, p. 114.
101
Henry Hatfield, “Thomas Mann and America,” Salmagundi. No. 10/11 (FALL 1969-WINTER 1970), p.
176.
45
“vulgar curiosity and hostility of his fellow citizens.”
102
Sometimes, writes Hatfield, “The
US appears in the background as a semi barbarous country producing types that are at
best uncultured, at worst brutal,” or Americans are seen as “well-meaning through and
through, incorrigibly confiding,” as Mann wrote in a 1938 letter to Erich von Kahler.
103
Mann visited America for the first time in 1934, attending at the invitation of his
publisher Alfred A. Knopf to celebrate the first edition of Joseph and his Brothers
translated into English by Helen T. Lowe-Porter. In New York he met with fellow
American writers Willa Cather, H. L. Mencken and Sinclair Lewis; he was invited to
lunch at The New York Times and The Nation; New York Mayor Fiorello La Guardia
hosted a dinner for him that was attended by three hundred guests; he lectured at Yale and
made a speech on the radio. Back home in Küsnacht, near Zürich, he described the trip in
a letter to his German editor Gottfried Bermann Fischer in these terms, “The adventure is
behind me and seems only a dream, rather confusing but very pleasant.”
104
In June 1935, as Mann and his wife Katia sailed to America for their second visit
in the transatlantic ocean liner Lafayette, their daughter Erika Mann was deprived of her
German citizenship by the Nazi government and became a British subject by marrying
her good friend, English poet W. H. Auden. Erika’s lesbianism and Auden’s
homosexuality was no obstacle for a marriage driven by a moral obligation to provide a
home to homeless Erika. During this trip, Mann, along with Albert Einstein was awarded
an honorary Ph. D. from Harvard University and met Vice President Henry A. Wallace,
close ally of Eleanor Roosevelt and a man who represented the left wing of the
102
Hatfield, p. 176.
103
Hatfield, p. 177.
104
Bürgin and Mayer, Thomas Mann, p.110.
46
Democratic Party. A few years later, Mann supported his candidacy for the presidency as
a Third Party candidate. The highlight of the trip was, however, an invitation for a private
dinner with the President and Mrs. Roosevelt at the White House. Mann enjoyed
immensely the conversation with the President and his wife but found the food “rather
ordinary.”
105
Mann’s nephew, Klaus H. Pringsheim, has written that Mann confided to him that
Roosevelt “treated him with great respect and took him into his confidence in regard to
his thoughts on Nazi Germany.” He also recounted that Roosevelt told Mann he knew
America had to get rid of Hitler but “that the American people were as yet unprepared for
playing such a responsible role in international affairs.”
106
From that day on, it was
President Roosevelt who shaped Mann’s vision of the United States. He idolized him as a
mighty and benevolent mythical figure, as a semi-God figure who, Mann wrote, “could
not walk and walked; he could not stand up, and he stood.”
107
At the same time, as Hatfield points out, Mann “had realized, ever since coming to
this country, that it had its full share of ‘difficulties, inadequacies and human
frailties.’”
108
However, there is no available evidence to suggest that he understood the
depth of the problems the country faced in the 1930s or that he was familiar with the
controversial history of the country. Had Mann read the history of the country with a
critical mind he would have grasped the prevalent high level of self-delusion and would
have had more cues vis-à-vis his experiences in America at the time of the hearings of
105
Mann, Diaries, p. 244.
106
Klaus H. Pringsheim, “Thomas Mann in Exile- Roosevelt, McCarthy, Goethe, and Democracy,” in
Thomas Mann Ein Kolloquium,” Herausgegeben von Hans H. Schulte und Gerald Chapple. (Hamilton,
Ontario, The McMaster Colloquium on German Literature, 1976), p. 25.
107
Hatfield, p. 177.
108
Hatfield, p. 178.
47
HUAC and those of Senator Joseph McCarthy, two occurrences that had a déjà vu feeling
vis-à-vis his past experiences with fascism.
Mann made his third trip to the United States in 1937 at the invitation of the New
School of Research in New York to celebrate the fourth anniversary of the founding of
the Graduate Faculty of Political and Social Sciences. In his speech he mentioned the
founding idea of Alvin Johnson, the co-founder of the school, was to “preserve the
institution of the German University, in spite of the inevitable dispersal of the German
intellectuals all over the world, and to refound it here, beyond the seas.”
109
It was during
this trip that Mann met Agnes E. Meyer, the wife of the Washington Post publisher
Eugene Meyer, who would become a close friend and most effective benefactor, and
Caroline Newton who would become another close friend.
Immediately after this trip, Mann began to contemplate the idea of living in the
United States, at least for part of the year. “Such a separation from Europe would be
infinitely beneficial for my spiritual freedom and serenity,” he wrote in a letter to Karl
Kerényi.
110
Besides, Mann contemplated the possibility that the Nazis could easily invade
Switzerland. From wherever he was, Mann “followed the political events day by day with
anxious attention. He warned the Western powers even before Hitler’s march to Austria.
Democracies,” he wrote, “cannot prevent the war through an appeasement and through
weakness. They just postpone the catastrophe.”
111
109
Hatfield, p. 128.
110
Hatfield, p. 129.
111
Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art A Biography, translated by Leslie Wilson. (Princeton and Oxford:
Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 439.
48
In February of 1938 Mann’s fourth trip to America took him on a lecture tour of
the country, and he seriously considered taking up residence in the United States while
wondering, “what is it to be without a home? In the works that I write, is my home.
Engrossed in them I feel all the familiarity of being at home. These works are language,
German language and thought form. [They are] My personal development of the tradition
of my land and my people. Where I am is Germany.”
112
This famous statement, Wo ich ist
bin ist die deutsche Kultur, as T. J. Reed notes, should not be taken “as an arrogant
personal claim but as a necessary political act. For the Nazis had narrowed the definition
of what was German and what was culture to something crude and chauvinistic; Mann
was denying their competence…. [He was] stating a programme, anxious that his and
other émigrés work should make plain the distinction between Nazi Germany and the
Germany which had chosen exile.”
113
In Los Angeles, at the Shrine Auditorium, he gave his famous speech, “The
Coming Victory of Democracy” in which he announced his intention “to make my home
in your country,” defining America as “the classic land of democracy,” and admitting that
“Europe has much to learn from America as to the nature of democracy.”
114
In the same
speech, Mann warned America of the dangers that lay ahead and why the United States
should seriously consider the danger presented by the Nazis. “No, America needs no
instruction in the things that concern democracy. But instruction is one thing-and another
112
Kurzke, p. 133.
113
Reed, Thomas Mann, pp. 1 & 2.
114
Thomas Mann, “The Coming Victory of Democracy”, Order of the Day Political Essays and Speeches
of Two Decades. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942), p. 114.
49
is memory, reflection, re-examination, the recall to consciousness of a spiritual and moral
possession of which it would be dangerous to feel secure and too confident.”
115
The German annexation of Austria in March pushed Mann to take the crucial
decision; in a letter without a name and address, Mann wrote: “You may see what an
impression the outrage in Austria--that it was possible, that it was tolerated--has made
upon me by the fact that I have decided … not to return to Europe from this trip to
America. I am giving up my home in Switzerland and intend to take up residence in a
university town in the American East.”
116
Princeton offered him an appointment as
lecturer, and Mann accepted it, albeit not without deep feelings of guilt. He felt as if he
were deserting Europe in her hour of need. “You do understand our decision, don’t
you,”
117
he wrote rather anxiously to Erich von Kahler, soon to be his neighbor in
Princeton. In May 1938, Mann and Katia immigrated officially to the United States via
Canada while their children Erika and Klaus were in traveling through Madrid, Barcelona
and Valencia as journalists reporting on the Spanish Civil War. After a summer trip back
to Europe, Mann and his wife Katia sailed back to America in September 1938 and would
not be back for fifteen years.
The Munich Agreement of September 30, 1938 between Germany, Great Britain,
France and Italy and the exclusion of Czechoslovakia that allowed Hitler to grab the
Sudetenland infuriated Mann not only against the Nazis and fascists but also against the
Western powers for sacrificing Czechoslovakia and believing in a chimera. In a letter to
von Kahler, he expressed shame, disgust, and the shattering of all hopes he felt. He also
115
Thomas Mann, “The Coming Victory of Democracy, p. 114.
116
Quoted in Bürgin and Mayer, p. 134.
117
Thomas Mann, Letters of Thomas Mann 1889-1955. Selected and translated from the German by
Richard and Clara Winston Introduction by Richard Winston. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), p. 276.
50
denounced the Munich Pact in “This Peace,” an essay in which “he accuses the European
governments of conspiring behind the backs of their people, of having assured an
enormous victory for the Gestapo state, of having destroyed the democratic fortification
in the East, and of knowingly making it a spiritually broken appendage of National
Socialism.”
118
“This Peace” served as the foreword to a collection of political essays
entitled “Achtung, Europa! (Attention, Europe).
Towards the end of 1939, Mann refused the honorary presidency offered by the
League of American Writers, an organization launched by the Communist Party USA that
was originally founded as an anti-fascist group. The organization had turned anti-war
after the signing of the Nazi-Soviet Pact of 1939 and would become pro-war after the
German invasion of the Soviet Union. Far from holding grandiose dreams of a political
future for himself, Mann was once again agonizing. “At the outbreak of war, Mann was
in a state of painful perplexity. He could not want the brutalization he knew to be the
inevitable concomitant of war, and at the same time he longed for the war to proceed to
the complete destruction of Nazism”
119
The second essay of the series Attention, Europe, is “This War,” published soon
thereafter as an appeal to the German people to rise up in arms against the Nazis. He
wrote, “A people that wants to be free is free in that instant.”
120
The essay is also “an
energetic pro-British piece, from the heart and from (rational) conviction”; he wrote it in
admiration for England’s firm stand writes Prater.
121
118
Kurzke, p. 439.
119
Mann, Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955, p. xxxiv.
120
Mann, “This War,” Order of the Day Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades. (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1942), p.224.
121
Donald Prater, Thomas Mann: A Life. (Oxford and and New York: Oxford University Press, USA,
1995), p. 306
51
The pièce de résistance of the series, however, was “The War and the Future.”
Mann gave the speech in January of 1941 in the Town Hall in Washington, days before
he and his wife Katia would spend the weekend as guests of President Roosevelt in the
White House. The lecture began with a warning: America should feel guilty if the world
succumbs to evil in spite of the lucid analysis of a myriad of American intellectuals
explaining the significance of events in Europe and defining the values of the civilized
world. No one, said Mann, can claim ignorance of the perils lurking in Europe and
America. Speaking as a German and as “a writer who was born a son of that
problematical people which today is inflicting such frightful suffering upon the world,”
122
he made a confession that reversed his former conviction of an insurmountable line
between art and politics. He admitted he once had been guilty of the same mistake the
German educated classes were, “[of making] a cleavage between the spirit and life,
between philosophy and art on the one hand and political reality on the other.”
123
Faced with the adverse political circumstances of the moment, the basis of Mann’s
notion that politics and arts do not mix disintegrated; “It is not possible today-–if it ever
was--to draw a line between the realm of art, culture, and the things of the mind, and the
realm of politics.”
124
The political, said Mann, is the basis of our civilization; it is a
religion “in peril of destruction by a Calibanlike species of man, or rather by beast-men
who have dedicated themselves to violence and nihilism…. The political” he continued,
“is no longer what it used to be: a problem for experts,”
125
and the bond that unites the
world against evil could be called ‘God’ or ‘truth’ or ‘freedom’ or ‘justice’ or “we may
122
Mann, “The War and the Future,” in Order of the Day, p.239.
123
Ibid,
124
Mann, “The War,” p. 240.
125
Mann, “The War,” p. 242.
52
simply call it ‘democracy’…. “If politics had nothing to do with art, art nothing with
politics, should I be here today?” asked Mann, “I should be in Germany, in my house in
Munich; and the Nazis would let the German public read my books which are more
German than Hitler, Goebbels, Ribbentrop, and Himmler all rolled into one. But they
don’t let them because all my books, even the entirely unpolitical ones, are a united
protest against Nazi doctrines and Nazi deeds, and therefore they must be suppressed.”
126
Interestingly, Mann addresses the audience as a German writer but also as an
emigrant who feels and thinks distanced from his native land and who doesn’t fear being
called a traitor in Germany. To feel this way under the circumstances he wrote is
something “inevitable, honourable and useful.”
127
And speaking in the name of the
intellectual exiles that came to America fleeing fascism, he defines them and himself as
immigrants more than exiles. All the important representatives of German literature, said
Mann, the Italian physicists and historians, and all the European musicians that came to
America under the same circumstances are not waiting to return. “We are waiting for the
future.”
128
They, alongside with Americans must fight the common enemy because
neutrality is “a morally indefensible attitude.”
129
At this stage of the speech, Mann took
aim against the “America First” movement that had Charles Lindbergh among its leaders.
“To me,” said Mann, “‘America First’ sounds too much like ‘Deutschland über alles.’”
126
Mann, “The War,” p. 242.
127
Mann, “The War,” p. 245.
128
Mann, “The War,” p. 245.
129
Mann, “The War,” 246.
53
Instead of ‘America First’ said Mann, it should be “‘Democracy First,’ ‘Defence of
Freedom and Human Dignity First,’ these must be the slogans, they are already the
slogans, which can put America in the place of leadership in the world.”
130
Dragging Lindbergh into the debate was in itself an important political act and
maybe even a partisan act. Lindbergh the well-known anti-Semitic Nazi sympathizer was
at the time a political enemy of President Roosevelt. But the figure of Lindbergh will be
further discussed in a chapter ahead.
Mann remained at Princeton University for three years, and in 1941, he and his
wife Katia traveled across the country to settle in California, first in Brentwood, which
reminded him of Tuscany, and finally buying a home in Pacific Palisades, a plush section
of Los Angeles that had become the unofficial headquarters of an illustrious colony of
European intellectual exiles. “Exaggerating only slightly,” Thomas Mann wrote that in
that moment “all of German literature had settled in America.”
131
Indeed, in those years Mann’s neighborhood became the most famous European
cultural salon in the world, reuniting writers like Alfred Döblin, Lion Feuchtwanger,
Vicki Baum, Aldous Huxley, Christopher Isherwood, Emil Ludwig, Heinrich Mann,
Franz Werfel and Alma Mahler Werfel; philosophers, Max Horkheimer and Theodor W.
Adorno; architects Richard Neutra, and Rudolph Michael Schindler; musicians Arnold
Schoenberg, Igor Stravinsky, Gregor Piatigorsky and Freddy Hollander; conductors Otto
Klemperer and Bruno Walter; movie directors Fritz Lang, Ernst Lubitsch, F.W. Murnau,
Joseph von Sternberg, Erich von Stroheim, Billy Wilder, Otto Preminger and Fred
130
Mann, “The War and the Future,” in Order of the Day, p. 246
131
Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the 1930’s to the
Present, (Berkeley: University of California Press), p. 261.
54
Zinnemann; theater directors like Bertolt Brecht and Max Reinhardt; actors Charles
Laughton, Salka Viertel, Peter Lorre, Hedy Lamarr, and occasional visits of Greta Garbo
and Marlene Dietrich.
Why did so many German/Austrian exiles choose Los Angeles for their exile?
The main reason perhaps, was that to many Europeans, mostly Germans and Austrians,
Los Angeles meant Hollywood and the exiles knew it had been Central Europeans, most
of them Jews, who helped found the film industry in Hollywood at its inception in the
1910s and also that during the following decade German-speaking producers, directors,
actors and actresses shaped the industry.
132
Yet given the anti-Semitic feelings in
California as historian Kevin Starr noticed, “The Jewish grip in the industry also created a
backlash and to counter the hostile anti-Semitic reaction the Jewish moguls played the
nationalist card becoming more American than Uncle Sam and banished Jewish life from
the films they produced.”
133
Another powerful reason the exiles felt so attracted to the area was the fact that in
the 1920s, Hollywood had noticed the resurgent and powerful German cinema and had
brought some of the most renowned movie directors to their studios. One of them, Ernst
Lubitsch, came in 1922 and became the leader of Mitteleuropa.
Given his prominent status in the circles of power in Washington D. C., direct
connections with the White House, access to the top echelons of the State Department,
friendship with Agnes E. Meyer, and his reputation as one of the two most prominent
132
Kevin Starr, The Dream Endures: California Enters the 1940s (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997),
p. 342.
133
Star, The Dream Endures, p. 342.
55
German exiles (Einstein was the other one) Mann became the de facto spokesperson of
the refugees. Seconded by influential American intellectuals like Frank Kingdom,
Dorothy Thompson and Robert Hutchins, Mann was instrumental in the formation of the
Emergency Rescue Committee, whose main task was to assist people trying to flee
Europe. He also assumed the defense of exiles that having been admitted to the United
States were classified by the State Department as enemy aliens. That label, the ERC
argued, declared the exiles as unworthy of trust by the authorities. In those days, some
media, the most influential conservative sectors of society and even large numbers of
common American citizens couldn’t or didn’t want to make the distinction between
German Nazis and anti-Nazi exiled German intellectuals.
German literature had a strong following in the States until World War I. But in
the aftermath of that War, a big propaganda offensive against Germans began to take
shape under the auspices of President Woodrow Wilson. The misinformation campaign
was so effective that by 1939, a Fortune Magazine survey found that more than 80% of
the American people had negative feelings about admitting European refugees.
Notwithstanding these negative feelings, in the subsequent years, the most complete
migration of artists and intellectuals in European history began to take place and
approximately, 200,000 German and Austrian refugees--about 10,000 of whom settled in
and around Los Angeles, in what immediately became known as “Weimar in the Pacific”.
It was a replica of sorts of the cultural capital of pre-Nazi Germany, but its members
found that integration into mainstream America was not easy task.
In 1940, Mann had to endure personal losses. In September, a German U-boat
torpedoed City of Benares, a clearly marked British evacuation ship filled with children
56
and a few women and men unfit for military service. Mann’s daughter Moni, her
husband, the art historian Dr. Jenö Lányi, and their child were on that ship. Dr. Lányi died
as a result of the attack and Mann was enraged. In a letter to his friend Agnes E.
Meyer, he wrote, “I cannot say how shocked and embittered I am. When will America’s
Flying Fortresses join the R.A.F. to put an end to this bestiality?”
134
Nazis in America and American Nazis
Throughout the 1930s and early 40’s the shadow of Adolf Hitler haunted America.
In 1933, barely two months after Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s presidential inauguration
the German Nazi government authorized its embassy and consulates in the U.S. to form
an American Nazi Organization called Friends of New Germany, composed of German-
American citizens whose tasks were to support or even impose a sympathetic view of the
Nazi regime and discredit Jewish and other anti Nazi groups. They were so outspoken
they even wore uniforms: men wore a white shirt, black trousers and a black
hat with a red symbol; women wore a white blouse and a black shirt and they paraded in
small towns in southern United States and large urban centers like New York City,
Chicago and Los Angeles.
In California, one of these Nazi groups, the German American Bund staged rallies
at the former Hindenburg Park in La Crescenta, and celebrated events such as the
Anschluss of Austria, in March of 1938, and the so called “liberation” of the Sudetenland
in October of 1938. The largest rally in Los Angeles took place on April 30, 1939, when a
brigade of 2,000 German-American Bund members came to hear West Coast Bund leader
Hermann Max Schwinn and “American Fuehrer” Fritz Kuhn, who spoke from a stage
134
Starr, TheDream, p. 346.
57
draped in swastika banners.
135
The German language press, The California Staatszeitung,
The Sued-California Deutsche Zeitung and The California Demokrat, which tended to
support Hitler and The New Germany, less vociferous in its support for Hitler, were brutal
in the treatment of their exiled compatriots. The California Weckruf was the loudest Nazi
newspaper published from 1935 to 1938 by the German American Volksbund, the central
Nazi organization in the West Coast. As soon as the first German exiles landed in the
state, many of these newspapers launched venomous attacks against intellectuals like
Mann, Brecht, T.W. Adorno and others considered enemies of the Nazi regime. Many of
these newspapers denied the Nazi horrors as Greuelmärchen, Lügenberichten,
Kriegshetze and Deutschenhaß: Horror stories, lying articles, warmongering and Un-
German, and denounced many of the exiles as anti-German.
136
An editorial in The
California Demokrat interpreted the Anschluß, annexation of Austria, “as the fulfillment
of the wandering of the Nibelunweges, the path of the Nibelungs.”
137
As
Bander writes in her dissertation:
With few exceptions, the German languages press was not
fertile territory for the promotions of exile literature. A
journal that proved the exception was the
DeutschAmerikaner. While it recommended such authors as
Thomas Mann, Jakob Wassermann, Stephan Zweig, and
Theodor Plivier, it also published an article by the German
135
Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, p. 5
136
Carol Bander, “The Reception of Exiled German Writers in the Nazi and Conservative GermanLanguage
Press in California: 1933-1950.” PhD diss., University of Southern California, 1972, p. 170.
137
Bander, p. 213.
58
Consul in Los Angeles, which slandered the above writers
in no uncertain terms. The paper published announcements
and activities of the Bund.”
138
As the Nazi armies advanced in Europe and Britain, France, Australia, New
Zealand and Canada declared war on Germany, many Pro-German and Anti-British
Americans, supported by powerful politicians in the U. S. Congress, were vehemently
opposed to getting involved in a war against Germany. Among them there was a group of
Yale students who founded a Non intervention organization called the America First
Committee, which included among its members future president Gerald Ford, future
Peace Corps director Sargent Shriver and had the support of future president John F.
Kennedy. Eventually, the organization was coopted by well-known conservative
Republicans and became the strongest isolationist organization in the country with
800,000 paid members at its peak. The committee was headed by the millionaire
chairman of Sears Roebuck, General Robert E. Wood, and counted among its members
many high executives of the top American corporations, Sterling Morton of Morton Salt
Company, Jay Hormel, president of Hormel Meat Packing Co., textile manufacturer
William Regnery, newspaper magnates like Joseph M. Patterson, publisher of the New
York Daily News, and Robert Rutherford “Colonel” McCormick, publisher of the
Chicago Tribune; advertising executives turned politicians Bruce Barton, William
Benton, Chester Bowles and Senator Gerald P. Nye, and the aviator Charles Lindbergh, a
controversial figure turned into a national hero for his trans-Atlantic solo flight and who
would eventually become the unofficial leader and most famous spokesman for
138
Bander, p. 321
59
America’s isolationists. Given his fame as an expert on aircraft in 1938, while the Nazis
were taking over the Sudetenland in Czechoslovakia, he was asked by the governments of
France, Britain and Germany to inspect their respective aircraft factories, and willingly or
not, his reports discouraged the allies to fight the Nazis. “Underscoring British and
French deficiencies in air power and exaggerating German achievements,” writes Olson
giving Lindbergh the benefit of the doubt, “he unwittingly helped to encourage the
capitulation to Hitler at Munich.”
139
Lindbergh had a poor opinion of Americans: “We Americans are a primitive
people. We do not have discipline. Our Moral standards are low.”
140
The French did not
fare well either; to him they were apathetic and cynic. But he reserved the worst for the
British; “It is necessary to realize that England is a country composed of a great mass of
slow, somewhat stupid and indifferent people, and a small group of geniuses. It is the
latter to whom the empire and its reputation are due.”
141
On the other hand his
impression of the Germans and of the Nazis was generous to the extreme: “I cannot help
liking the Germans…. We should be working with them and not constantly crossing
swords. If we fight, our countries will not only lose their best men. We can gain
nothing…. It must not happen.”
142
During his frequent trips to Nazi Germany he never
noticed the oppressiveness of the regime: “of all the European countries,” he wrote in his
journal, “I found the most personal freedom in Germany.” Writing about Kristallnacht he
139
Lynne Olson, Those Angry Days Roosevelt, Lindbergh, and America’s Fight over World War II,
19391941. (New York: Random House, 2013,) p. 13.
140
Olson, p. 11.
141
Olson, p. 14.
142
Olson, p. 18.
144
60
described it as a stupid mistake albeit justifiable because the Nazis, he wrote, “have
undoubtedly had a difficult Jewish problem.”
143
Right after the Munich agreement, Hermann Goering, the Commander-in-Chief of
the Luftwaffe, presented Lindbergh with a medal, the Service Cross of the German Eagle,
at a reception before a dinner hosted by Hugh Wilson, the U.S. ambassador to Germany
and in the company of Truman Smith, the U. S. military attaché in Germany.
Lindbergh returned to America to convince his fellow countrymen to remain
neutral in the upcoming conflict but accepted Chief of the U. S. Army Air Corps General
Henry “Hap” Arnold’s, plea to get involved in the effort to speed up the development of
faster and more sophisticated U. S. airplanes. The mood in the country, as measured by
polls and opinions of politicians and personalities, favored isolationism and, more
troubling, the upper echelons of the U. S. armed forces not only did not trust but disliked
president Roosevelt and liked and admired the German Armed Forces. The upper
echelons of the U. S. Army held such close connections with German General Friederich
von Boetticher, the German military attaché in Washington, that he was granted
permission to visit “U. S. military research installations, regular army commands, and
plant producing aircraft, weapons, and other military equipment.” No wonder in his report
to Berlin in 1939, he wrote, “there was not the slightest indication of the U. S., preparing
for war.”
144
Once France and Great Britain declared war on Germany on September 3, 1939,
President Roosevelt proclaimed America would remain neutral in the conflict but he also
indicated his support for the Western allies, “Even a neutral cannot be asked to close his
143
Olson, p. 19.
144
Olson, p. 31.
61
mind or his conscience”; he added, “I hope the United States will keep out of this war.”
145
This was indeed a most difficult time for Roosevelt, so heart wrenching that playwright
Robert Sherwood; one of Roosevelt’s most fervent admirers characterized his statements
as probably the weakest words that Roosevelt ever uttered. However, he also admitted
that the President was determined to aid Britain and France albeit he knew convincing
Congress to authorize arms shipments to both countries would be extremely difficult.
Recalling a conversation Mann had with Roosevelt at the time, his nephew Klaus H.
Pringsheim wrote, “Roosevelt had revealed to him that he realized it was America’s job
to rid the world of Hitler – but that the American people were as yet unprepared for
playing such a responsible role on international affairs. That it would therefore be
necessary gradually to educate the people …and that meanwhile America would try to
strengthen and support the enemies of Hitler.”
146
Even though President Roosevelt faced ferocious opposition in Congress to get
the country involved in the fight against Hitler from Senators Burton Wheeler, William
Borah, Hiram Johnson and Gerald Nye, he knew that his most formidable opponent was
Charles Lindbergh. Supported by powerful allies within the military like Colonel Truman
Smith, the former U.S. military attaché in Germany, General George Marshall, the Army
Chief of Staff, and General Henry Hap Arnold, Chief of Air Corps, Lindbergh
broadcasted a radio address on September 15, 1939, to tell the nation he was opposed to
any U. S. involvement in the war in Europe. The insidious part of the broadcast was the
mischaracterization of the conflict as a feud amongst Europeans and not as what it really
was about, a battle for democracy and against totalitarianism. Regarding this war,
145
Olson, p. 54.
146
Pringsheim, “Thomas Mann in Exile,” p. 25.
62
Lindbergh said in his broadcast, “We must be as impersonal as a surgeon with his
knife.”
147
And sending an ominous signal of white racial supremacy, Lindbergh added,
“The real threat to Western civilization came not from Germany but from the Soviet
Union or some other ‘Asiatic intruder’…. European countries–and the United States –
should band together to ‘defend the white race against foreign invasion.’”
Over the following two years, Lindbergh became the most prominent American
advocating racial purity. In September of 1941, during a speech in Des Moines, Iowa,
Lindbergh proposed an American-German alliance against the Jews and warned his
audience there were three agitators with tremendous powers, “who have been pressing the
country toward war the British, the Jewish (sic) and the Roosevelt Administration.”
148
Lindbergh’s diatribe against Jews touched upon every single stereotype ever raised
against them. “Instead of agitating for war, Jews in this country should be opposing it in
every way, for they will be the first to feel its consequences. Their greatest danger to this
country lies in their large ownership and influence in our motion pictures, our press, our
radio and our government."
149
In her book, Olson points out that the racist theories espoused by Lindbergh were
deeply embedded in the culture of the military and points out that the books of the famous
white supremacist Lothrop Stoddard, who preached the supremacy of the Aryan race,
were on the mandatory reading list of West Point and other military institutions. No
147
Olson, p. 72.
148
Steven Carr. Hollywood and Anti-Semitism A Cultural History up to World War II. (Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 246.
149
Carr, p. 246.
63
wonder Hap Arnold and even War Secretary Harry Woodring wrote letters to Lindbergh
saying the address was “very well worded and very well delivered.”
150
But not everyone was thrilled with Lindbergh’s speeches. After the Iowa speech,
Time magazine wrote, “To many a U. S. citizen, [Lindbergh] was a bum.” And in
England, his former close friend Harold Nicholson wrote a piece in the weekly current
events magazine The Spectator that described him as an inflexible, rigid, arrogant, and
stubborn person and adopting an ironic tone, Nicholson diminished his former friend by
describing him as a “fine boy from the Middle West,” who shouldn’t be judged too
harshly. Another fierce critic of the aviator was renowned political columnist Dorothy
Thompson who wrote Lindbergh was a “somber cretin,” a man “without human feelings”
a “pro-Nazi recipient of a German medal” and a man who aspired to become “the
American Fuhrer.” Eleanor Roosevelt applauded Thompson for her “perceptive views
about Lindbergh.”
151
Perhaps the biggest irony surrounding the isolationist campaign Lindbergh led
was its inability to convince well-known pacifist people like playwright Robert Sherwood
to maintain his isolationist stance. Listening to one of Lindbergh’s speeches, writes
Olson, Sherwood was convinced that “Hitlerism was already powerfully and persuasively
represented in our own midst… Will Lindbergh one day be our Fuehrer?”
152
Even
President Roosevelt thought Lindbergh was a Nazi, “When I read Lindbergh’s speech I
150
Olson, p. 74.
151
Olson, p. 79.
152
Olson, p. 86.
64
felt that it could not have been better put if it had been written by [Nazi propaganda
minister Joseph] Goebbels himself.”
153
The debate surrounding the war policy of the United States ended December 8,
1941, the day after the Japanese attacked Pearl Harbor. Lindbergh tried to volunteer for
the war, but Roosevelt rejected his plea and the aviator went to work as a consultant for
Henry Ford, the carmaker and another rabid anti-Semitic American. Once the war was
over and the whole world learned of the Nazi atrocities against the Jews, Lindbergh
refused to acknowledge he was wrong in his assessment of the Nazis. According to
historian William O'Neill, "In promoting appeasement and military unpreparedness,
Lindbergh damaged his country to a greater degree than any other private citizen in
modern times. That he meant well makes no difference."
154
Walking the same path of
disloyalty the Hearst newspaper chain, which was the largest publishing business in the
U.S. and had launched a media campaign against President Franklin Delano Roosevelt,
printed in the pages of its newspapers the news produced by the Nazi German Ministry of
propaganda while at the same time doing every effort to defame the character and the
activities of the German intellectuals exiled in California.
153
Robert Dallek, Franklin D. Roosevelt and American Foreign Policy, 1932-1945. (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1995) p. 225.
154
William O'Neill, A Democracy at War America’s fight at home & abroad in World War II. (Boston:
Harvard University Press, 1995) p. 49.
65
Chapter 3
“The Weight of Exile”
Exile is an intensely personal and unrepeatable experience. Exile has been defined
as unending, a loss, a failing, banishment, exemplary expulsion, and even as a
metaphysical condition. Aristotle, Ovid, Cicero, Seneca, Dante, Voltaire, Lord Byron,
Karl Marx, Victor Hugo, Sigmund Freud and Thomas Mann have turned to the exilic
Pantheon, “seeking guidance, comparing notes, and retracing their antecedents’
exilicpaths on which they now found themselves.”
155
Exiles, writes Johannes F. Evelein,
belong to an Schicksalgemeinschaft (community of fate) that runs across the centuries in
texts, songs, themes and motifs. In his novel Joseph in Egypt, published barely three
years into his own exile, Thomas Mann wrote: “For we move in the footsteps of others,
and all life is but the pouring of the present into the forms of the myth.”
156
Each exile, however, sees exile in his/her own terms. Banished from Rome for
reasons never fully known, the poet Ovid cried “Exilium mors est,” or “Exile is death.”
Once in exile, the life of Publius Ovidius Naso, known as Ovid in the English-speaking
world, writes Evelein, “had no redemptive qualities and was synonymous with
nonbeing… ‘I am not what I was,’ wrote Ovid, ‘why trample an empty shadow? Why
attack my tomb, my ashes, with your stones?’”
157
Less dramatic but also deeply
aggrieved, Cicero, the Roman scholar and politician, wrote of his exile in Thessalonica as
a nostalgic and quotidian pain, “day by day, as one thinks of the misery of the present,
and looks back on the days that are past.” Nineteen centuries later, and perhaps mocking
155
Johannes F. Evelein, Literary Exiles from Nazi Germany Exemplarity and the Search for Meaning.
Rochester, New York: Camden House, 2014), p. 3.
156
Evelein, Literary Exiles, p. 1.
157
Evelein, Literary Exiles, p. 113.
66
Ovid, exiled French poet, novelist and dramatist Victor Hugo wrote on the door of his
studio on the Isle of Jersey, ‘Exilium vita est.’ “For Hugo,” writes Robert de Saint Jean,
“exile was a joy…because it was a power,” adding, “he differed from all exiles, however,
by proclaiming that he loved his allotted fate and cherished his banishment.”
158
“Exile,” as scholar and literary critic Edward Said has written, “is strangely
compelling to think about but terrible to experience. It is the unhealable rift forced
between a human being and a native place, between the self and its true home: its
essential sadness can never be surmounted.”
159
In the same vein, German philosopher and
musicologist T. W. Adorno wrote, “every intellectual in emigration is, without exception,
mutilated, and does well to acknowledge it to himself, if he wishes to avoid being cruelly
apprised of it behind the tightly-closed doors of his self-esteem.”
160
Adorno, who had left
Germany in the spring of 1934, lived in England, New York and Los Angeles always
missing Germany. In America, “Adorno,” writes Lorenz Jäger, one of his biographers,
“missed human traces in nature. He missed the paths and trails leading down to the valley
as he knew them in Germany,”
161
In aphorism 28, Paysage, of his book Minima Moralia,
Adorno writes, “What is missing in the American landscape is not so much the absence of
historical memories, as the romantic illusion has it, as the fact that no hand has left a trace
in it.” And anticipating the theory of the exile’s double perspective, developed by
158
Evelein, Literary Exiles, p. 113, quoted from Saint Jean’s essay on Hugo for The Torch of Freedom
edited by Emil Ludwig and Henry B. Kranz. (New York: Farrar and Rinehart, 1943)
159
Eduard Said, Reflections on Exile and Other Essays. (Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University
Press, 2000), p. 173.
160
T. W. Adorno, Minima Moralia Reflections From Damaged Life, translated from the German by E. F.
N. Jephcott. (London New York: Verso, 1974), p. 33.
161
Lorenz Jäger, Adorno, A Political Biography, translated by Stewart Spencer, (New Haven and London:
Yale University Press, 2004), p. 105.
67
Palestinian intellectual Edward Said,
162
Adorno writes “Germany is the yardstick by
which America is judged and found wanting.”
163
Historically the list of exiled politicians, writers, artists and scientists is long and
varied, and it is precisely for its substantial diversity that there are so many definitions of
the meaning of exile. “Exile is unending…it exists independently of one’s place of
banishment and it deprives life of nutrients” wrote German poet Hilde Domin
(19092006). “Exile stands for loss, but it is a loss that lends fresh perspective on life….
Exile holds the key to understanding human nature. Exile is exemplary: it offers us
models by which to live and reveals patterns of humanity that we may recognize in
ourselves.” It is also ‘exemplary expulsion,’ “an expulsion” adds Evelein, “which by
virtue of its moral stature, becomes an exemplum, a story by which to live one’s
life.”
164165
Exile is also banishment, but is it a temporary or a permanent condition?
Playwright Bertolt Brecht always believed in “the temporary nature of exile and the need
to remain unattached, mobile, poised to return”
166
In his poem, “Concerning the Label
Emigrant” (Über die Bezeichnung Emigranten)”, writes Ehrhard Bahr, for Bertolt Brecht
the difference between emigration and exile was clear. Refugees from Nazi Germany,
said Brecht, were not emigrants; they did not leave their country “of their own free will”
162
Said’s exile theory will be explained in the following pages.
163
Adorno, Minima Moralia, p. 33.
164
Evelein, p. 1. Hilde Domin was a German poet exiled in the Dominican Republic who returned to
Heidelberg, Germany in 1954 after living more than 20 years in exile.
165
Evelein, p. 4, cited from Brecht’s “Thoughts on the Duration of Exile.”
68
and did not enter a new country “to stay there, if possible for ever.” “He emphasized that
they had fled: “They were driven out, banned. /Not a home, but an exile [was] the land
[…] that took [them] in.” Now they were living restlessly, “as near as [they] can to the
border /Awaiting the day of return.”
166
For Brecht, exile had three stages: banishment
from the homeland, temporary stay abroad and permanent return, whereas emigration was
voluntary, had legal residence in a foreign country and no permanent return.
In the poem “Die Revolution” by Ferdinand Freiligrath, a friend of Karl Marx in
exile and himself an exiled revolutionary, the poet “legitimizes exile as a political force
that has only temporarily withdrawn from the battlefield. Soon it will return to claim the
ultimate victory over the forces of oppression and help build a just world.”
167
Reflecting upon the exile of a diverse group of exiles such as sociologist and
musicologist T. W. Adorno, cultural critic Sigmund Kracauer, philosopher Hannah
Arendt, scholar George Lichtheim and Weimar chronicler Henry Pachter, Martin Jay
writes in Permanent Exiles, that these exiles were “never truly at home in their adopted
country,” but he also suggests that going back to the homeland did not put an end to their
exiled condition. In other words, regardless of the location of the exiled, once it happens,
it becomes a permanent condition, once an exile, always an exile. I would argue that the
same idea applies to many other émigrés who left their homeland to live somewhere, they
never truly belonged to the adopted homeland but neither do they belong to the original
homeland after they return to it.
168
“Heine,” wrote German novelist Anna Seghers
166
Ehrhard Bahr, “Thomas Mann in America: From the “First Emigration” (1938) to the “Second
Emigration” (1952), p. 1. Unpublished English version of a lecture at USC September 2011.
167
Evelein, Literary Exiles, p. 29.
168
Martin Jay, Permanent Exiles Essays on the intellectual migration from Germany to America. (New
York: Columbia University Press, 1985), p. xiii.
69
referring to the nineteenth century great German poet, “shared with us all stages of
emigration: the flight and homelessness, the censorship, the battles, and the
homesickness.” Furthermore, “The exiles who fled Nazi Germany,” Seghers suggested,
“did so in Heine’s footsteps.”
169
Elaborating on the same idea, Evelein writes, “Going
into exile is analogous to failing: the exile loses its footing and sinks into a world
unknown to him in which he must learn to fend for himself”
170
or as Thomas Mann put it,
exiles are “outlawed, silenced, speechless in their own tongue.”
171
The reluctant exile
On February 27, 1933, as the Reichstag burned, Thomas Mann received warnings
from Munich that his safety could not be guaranteed. He was told, “he was on the list of
those guilty of intellectual high treason and pacifistic excesses,” as he explained in a letter
to his friend Lavinia Manzzucchetti. He was neither expelled nor banished from his
beloved Germany, and he did not know if his physical separation from Germany would
be temporary or permanent. A month later, he learned he was on the list to be sent to
Dachau, the first Concentration Camp the Nazis built in the outskirts of Munich, to
lockup intellectuals and prominent people who opposed the new regime.
In chapter one, I detailed how the rise of the Nazis in Germany drove Mann’s
complicated and often contradictory political evolution from a conservative supporter of
the old Prussian order, to the somewhat hesitant advocate of the Weimar Republic; how
he turned into a ferocious intellectual critic of the Nazi viciousness and why he kept silent
for almost three years until he recovered the courage to forceful embrace of the leadership
of the German exiled community against Hitler. In this chapter, the focus of my project
169
Evelein, Literary Exiles, p. 8.
170
Evelein, Literary Exiles, p. 10.
171
Evelein, Literary Exiles, p. 106.
70
shifts to explore the role exile played in both, his political evolution and his appraisal of
the political situation in post World War II America. To answer this two key
questions, I need to review Mann’s personal history, even at the risk of having some
inevitable repetitions, to explain how living in Los Angeles at the rise of the Cold War
made Mann sense he was reliving the rise of Nazism in Germany.
In the aforementioned letter to Manzzucchetti, while resting in the village of
Arosa, Switzerland, a distressed Mann tells her, “It is questionable whether there will
ever be room for my sort in Germany, whether I will be able to breathe the air there
again.”
172
(Curiously, Mann would use a similar metaphor to describe his feelings about
the political atmosphere in America at the onset of the Cold War, which seemed to him,
“more and more unbreathable.”)
173
“I am too good a German,” continued Mann in his
letter, “too closely involved with the cultural traditions and language of my country for
the prospect of a year-long or perhaps life-long exile not to have a hard, ominous
meaning on me.”
174
Midyear into 1933, the Nazi hierarchy in Munich stole his cars and a few days
later confiscated his Munich house in Poschingerstraße. The painful loss of home and
with it the loss of many dear personal items, would be followed three years later by the
loss of his German identity documents: he was formally declared Non-German. At this
early stage of his physical separation from Germany, Mann was at a loss regarding his
emigration status. There were messages coming from Germany enticing him to return to
Germany, among them the letter from Max von Schillings, discussed in chapter one,
172
Thomas Mann, Letters of Thomas Mann 1889-1955. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970), p.168
173
Mann, Letters, introduction p. xliii.
174
Mann, Letters. Two months later, on May 15, 1933, Mann repeated the phrase “I am too good a
German…” in a letter to Albert Einstein, p. 170.
71
where the president of the Prussian Academy of the Arts told Mann he would be
welcomed to Germany as long as he did not write anything against the Nazi government.
Another factor that contributed to his indecisiveness was the response from German
readers to his books, which continued to sell in vast numbers. His existential ambiguities
would persist until 1936, when he not only reaffirmed his repudiation of the Nazi regime
but also definitively renounced any return to Germany.
In 1933, Nazi Germany declared a state of emergency that allowed Hitler to
assume dictatorial powers through the so-called Act of Authorization, another turn of the
screw that mortified Mann deeply: “My ears are ringing,” wrote Mann, “with the stories
of murder and horror in Munich that are accompanying the regular and continuous
atrocities of a political nature: the crude mistreatment of the Jews…There is no pause in
the violence.”
175
For Mann, the refined intellectual brought up in the homestead of a wealthy
Senator in the sophisticated capital of the Hanseatic League city of Lübeck, the rough
upbringing of the fascist leaders was insufferable. As Robert O. Paxton notes in his book
on Fascism, it was astonishing to see “Mussolini, ex-school teacher, bohemian minor
novelist and erstwhile socialist orator and editor, and Hitler, former corporal and failed art
student, along with their shirted ruffians, in charge of European great powers,”
176
Four
days after the Law of Authorization passed, Mann would write in his diary, “without
underlying ideas, against ideas, against everything nobler, better, decent, against freedom,
175
Bürgin Hans and Hans-Otto Mayer, Thomas Mann: A Chronicle of his Life, English translation by
Eugene Dobson. (University of Alabama Press, University, Alabama: 1969), p. 103.
176
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 7.
72
truth and justice,” the “common scum” had taken power, “accompanied by vast rejoicing
on the part of the masses.”
177
Sanary-sur-mer
In August, he moved in with the family to Sanary-sur-Mer, a small village in the
French Riviera that had become a sanctuary for German exiles like Lion Feuchtwanger,
Bertolt Brecht, Franz Werfel, Ludwig Marcuse, Walter Benjamin, and others, but his stay
there was rather short. In early autumn, Mann and his wife moved to Küsnacht, a small
city on the shores of Lake Zürich. Against all evidence, Mann kept hoping that his
physical separation from Germany would be temporary and this ambivalence, writes
Ronald Hayman, would last for months. “He might, he told himself, have to live in exile
‘for a year or a lifetime’ but he also told himself that he might be able to secure a
guarantee for his safety if he went back.”
178
For the time being, he adamantly kept his
connection with the motherland through his books.
When his German passport expired and he learned that to renew it he would have
to return to Munich, an option that his lawyers and his family strongly objected to and for
good reason, both he and Katia applied for Swiss citizenship. They were granted a
permission to stay in the country and given identity cards to travel abroad but were told
they would have to wait the mandatory six years to become Swiss citizens. They were
also admonished in no uncertain terms, that all political activities were strictly forbidden
for foreigners within the country. For the next three years Mann refrained from
denouncing the Nazi atrocities until he finally responded with an article challenging the
177
Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 7
178
Ronald Hayman, Ronald, Thomas Mann A Biography. (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 404.
73
assertions of literary critic Eduard Korrodi in the Neue Zürcher Zeitung on February
1936.
179
Towards the end of the year, Mann and Katia were granted Czech citizenship
days before the whole Mann family were deprived of their German citizenship.
Mann could not let the occasion pass by and in his response to the German
information office, he emphasized the uselessness of the revocation of his German
nationality given the fact that having become a citizen of Czechoslovakia automatically
deprived him of his German citizenship. He ended the letter to the Nazi bureaucrats
saying “I have deeper roots in German life and tradition than the temporary, though
subtly penetrating, figures who at present are ruling Germany.”
180
.
A second relevant incident that convinced Mann he had to renew his denunciation
of the Nazi regime took place on Christmas Day that year, when the Dean of the
Philosophical Faculty of Bonn University sent Mann a letter announcing the withdrawal
of his honorary doctorate. The details of the incident are also discussed in chapter 1, the
relevant factor in this chapter is Mann’s explicit acknowledgement of his exiled
condition: “I could never have dreamed, it could never have been prophesied of me at my
cradle, that I should spend my later years as an émigré, expropriated, outlawed, and
committed to inevitable political protest. From the beginning of my intellectual life I had
found myself in the happiest accord with the temper of my nation and at home in its
intellectual traditions. I am better suited to represent those traditions than to become a
martyr for them…I called down on myself the fate which I must now learn to reconcile
with a nature essentially foreign to it.”
181
179
The Korrodi controversy is discussed in detail on chapter 1.
180
Bürgin and Mayer, Thomas Mann, p. 125.
181
Bürgin and Mayer, Thomas Mann, p. 126.
74
Zurich publisher Oprecht, published Mann’s open letter accompanied by the
university letter under the title Ein Briefwechsel [A Correspondence]. “The letter soon
spread throughout the world and was translated into several languages. It managed to find
its way into Nazi Germany, where it was circulated illegally disguised in a publication
titled Briefe deutscher Klassiker. Wege zum Wissen [Letters by Authors of German
Classics. Paths to Knowledge]. Thomas Mann made sure his letter of reply reached an
even wider audience when he read it out on the radio.”
182
Later that year, in Zürich and before a performance of Wagner’s opera Der Ring
des Nibelungen, Mann delivered a lecture on Wagner and The Ring, in which he
reminded his audience that the German composer had found refuge in that city after his
participation in the unsuccessful 1848 revolution, just like Mann had in 1933. In the
lecture, later published as an essay and published in Mass und Wert in 1938, Mann uses
“the inclusive ‘we’ as he related to Richard Wagner’s twelve years in exile, writing: ‘as
we say, im Elend, im Ausland (wretched…abroad)’”
183
stressing their mutual exilic
destiny.
The fact that Mann was not actually exiled but instead had decided not to
comeback to Germany after learning he would be arrested, provoked a debate about his
migratory status. Was he an exile or an emigrant? “Mann,” writes Dr. Ehrhard Bahr, “had
not fled from Germany in 1933, but happened to stay in Switzerland for a brief vacation
after a lecture tour in Holland and France. His children warned him by telephone not to
182
Quote taken from Arts in Exile within “The virtual exhibition and the Arts in Exile network”,
organized and managed by the German National Library. Accessed via Internet on January 25, 2017.
184
183
Thomas Mann, “Richard Wagner and the Ring,” in Essays of Three Decades. Translated from the
German by H. T. Lowe-Porter. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 361.
75
return to Munich.”
184
At this early stage, it was unclear whether he considered himself an
emigrant or an exile and he was not the only one uncertain of his migratory status. As
Bahr noted in his essay “Thomas Mann in America,” during this period “the differences
between emigrants and exiles were not fixed, but fluid.” For the next five years, Mann
did everything he could to avoid defining his immigration status characterizing his
residence in Switzerland as Außensein “staying outside.” Although, as pointed out earlier,
the expiration of his German passport had forced Mann and his family to obtain a Swiss
document that allowed him to live in Zürich and travel abroad; in 1936 they all had
become citizens of Czechoslovakia, and after the Anschluss, the German annexation of
Austria in March of 1938, they had moved to America and filed an application for
immigration at the American consulate in Toronto, Canada, “They were not exiles at that
time, but immigrants who would become citizens within six years,” writes Bahr.
185
In an interview with the New York Times during his fourth trip to the United
States, Mann talked about his exile from a different but very assertive perspective, “It
[living in exile] is hard to bear. But what makes it easier is the realization of the poisoned
atmosphere in Germany. That makes it easier because it’s actually no loss. Where I am, is
German culture. I carry my German culture in me. I have contact with the world and I do
not consider myself fallen.”
186
T. J. Reed notes that this quotation should not be
understood “as an arrogant personal claim but as a necessary political act. For the Nazis
had narrowed the definition of what was German and what was culture to something
crude and chauvinistic.” Soon thereafter, Mann would become not only the most famous
184
Ehrhard Bahr, “From the ‘First Emigration’ (1938) to the ‘Second Emigration’” (1938-1952)”
Unpublished lecture at USC, September 2011. p. 1.
185
Bahr, Thomas Mann, p. 2.
186
Thomas Mann. The New York Times, 22 February 1938.
76
representative of German culture abroad but also “the leading anti-Nazi propagandist, a
champion of liberal and democratic values and, increasingly, an authority on things
German.”
187
In 1941, Mann declared he had chosen America to be his homeland, a statement
that leads Bahr to designate the period from 1938 to 1942, as Mann’s ‘first emigration.’
Bahr’s characterization would fit many German-speaking exiles that just wanted to
assimilate to their new country as soon as possible and close the page on their old country.
One of these was composer Kurt Weill, who did not want Americans to believe that all the
émigrés were still nostalgic for Berlin. Furthermore, in a radio program broadcast in 1941,
Weill described his and his wife, the actress Lotte Lenya’s, arrival in the United States in
these glowing terms: “I remember very well the feeling I had as the ship moved down the
harbor past the Statue of Liberty and the skyscrapers. All about us were exclaiming in
amazement at the strange sights, but my wife and I had the sensation that we were coming
home.” And to remove any doubt about his feelings towards America he added, “I never
felt as much at home in my native land as I have from the first moment in the United
States.”
188
Without the patriotic excesses of Weill, Mann also rejected the idea of
returning to Germany and made it explicit on many occasions, once during a speech at
UCLA in 1943.
As soon as the United States declared war on Japan, a few Hollywood writers
formed a group to help President Roosevelt in the war effort. Soon thereafter, people in
the entertainment industry, universities and the media joined forces with the writers to
187
T. J. Reed, Thomas Mann The Uses of Tradition. (Oxford New York: Oxford University Press), pp. 1-2.
188
“I’m an American!,” Interview with Kurt Weill, Radio program broadcast March 9, 1941 on NBC Blue
Network. Published by The Kurt Weill Foundation for Music, accessed, 12/3/11.
77
organize a Congress to discuss how to support the war effort. The Congress was held at
the University of California, Los Angeles October 1-3, 1943, and 1,500 people, military
officers, scriptwriters, publicists, cartoonists, scholars, studio heads, actors, radio writers,
exiles and representatives of ethnic minorities participated in the event. Thomas Mann,
along with fellow exiled German novelist Lion Feuchtwanger, Greek actor and director
Alexis Minotis, and professors Paul Perigord and Gustave O. Arlt, spoke in a panel on
“Writers in Exile.” The title of Mann’s presentation was “The Exiled Writer’s Relation to
his Homeland.” He began his talk with a heart-wrenching description of German exiled
writers, living in a land which is not their homeland and fighting against “the land whose
speech is the spiritual material in which we work, against the land in whose culture we
are rooted, whose traditions we administer and atmosphere should be our natural shelter.”
189
He then pointed out that although both he and the American people were battling the
same fascist enemy, there were abysmal differences in how they faced the challenge.
Mann was eager to emphasize the predicament anti-fascist Germans faced confronting the
Nazis but hurting the motherland and their countrymen. He wanted to make it clear that it
was not the same to counter-attack a foreign power than to fight against your own people.
He also wanted to transmit to his audience the humiliation he felt seeing the flag of
Germany replaced by the odious symbol of the Nazis, the Swastika. Whereas Americans
saw the emblem of their sovereignty in the Stars and Stripes, the sight of a German
swastika in the house of a German representative abroad made him feel ill. “Germany,”
he said, “with its hundreds of homely and respected, pleasant and proud associations” was
189
Thomas Mann, “The Exiled Writer’s Relation to his Homeland,” Writers’ Congress, The Proceedings
of the Conference held in October 1943 under the sponsorship of the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization and
the University of California. (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1944), p. 340.
78
now, “a name of terror and deadly wilderness, into which even our dreams do not dare
transport us.”
190
Mann was not, by any means, the only German who felt outraged seeing the
Swastika usurping the place of the German flag. In July 1935, in the New York docks,
around one thousand anti-Nazi demonstrators, characterized by police reports as
“Communist sympathizers” stormed the German ocean liner SS Bremen, ripped the
swastika down, and tossed it into the Hudson River.
191
In 1943, at the time of his speech at UCLA, Mann believed many Germans were
undergoing the tremendous contradiction of rejecting the Nazi rule and even wanting their
defeat in the war “for the sake of the general future.”
192
This, Mann said, was the tragic
fate of the Germans and for it he felt the “deepest resentment against those who forced the
German love of country into such a position.” These compassionate views of his
countrymen led him to describe their initial support of the Nazis as a mistake. At this
stage of the war it is evident that Mann had mixed ideas about his compatriots. They
should assume their responsibility for the war but “misfortune” he wrote, “is a milder and
more understanding word than guilt and we feel that is more appropriate to speak of
misfortune and error than of crime.”
193
As Bahr notes, “Mann did not rule out ‘the day of return’ as a legitimate
alternative. On the contrary, his response was affirmative, but he insisted that this
question could ‘only be answered individually, and the answers would vary according to
190
Mann, “the Exiled,” p. 341.
191
James Q. Whitman, Hitler’s American Model The United States and the Making of Nazi Race Law.
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017), p. 20.
192
Whitman, Hitler’s p. 20.
193
Whitman, Hitler’s p. 341.
79
personal circumstances.’” Writing about the differences between the emigrant and the
exile, Bertolt Brecht said exile consisted of three stages:
a) Banishment
b) A limited stay abroad
c) Permanent return (“The day of return”)
194
Mann was banished from Germany but his exile from the homeland would last for
all his life, first in the United States and later on in Switzerland. Yet regarding the notion
of “the day of return,” albeit Mann was certain he would never return to Germany, he
abstained from criticizing those who decided to return:
It is now too late for me, and I say to myself that at
my age it is of no consequence in what place one completes
the life’s work which, on the whole, is already established
and which in a certain sense is already history. I am now on
the point of becoming an American citizen just as my
grandchildren who were born here and are growing up here,
and my attachment to this country has already progressed so
far that it would be contrary to my sense of gratitude to part
from it again.
195
For him, such decisions were very personal and therefore legitimate. Furthermore,
he said that given their experience abroad exiles returning home would be good for
194
Bahr, “Thomas Mann in America.” Bahr draws these three stages based on Brecht’s poem “Concerning
the Label Emigrant,” p. 2.
195
Bahr, “Thomas Mann in America,” p. 2
80
Germany, as they would broaden the knowledge and understanding of the world of those
that stayed behind.
In 1945, Walter von Molo, one of the founders of the German Pen Club, published
an open letter to Mann that was published in several newspapers in Germany, the United
States, and other countries in Europe and South America, begging Mann to return to
Germany to help in the reconstruction of the homeland. Von Molo’s letter and Mann’s
answer provoked an enormous and intense debate over the topic of German guilt
and Mann’s continual denunciations of collective German responsibility for Nazism. In
his letter, Molo argued that most Germans who remained in Germany during the Third
Reich stayed there out of necessity, not because they agreed with Hitler or supported him;
they simply had no other choice. He even described Nazi Germany as a “huge
concentration camp” and Germans as victims, not accomplices of the Nazis. “The
German people,” wrote Molo, “did not hate before the war, or during the war, and it does
not hate now, because it is not capable of hatred, because it truly has earned and still
deserves its great men and masters, who the world loves and honors.” The implication in
Molo’s letter was that those who went into exile were luckier than those who stayed, thus
suggesting Mann had no reason not to comeback to Germany.
According to the interpretation of professor Stephen Brockman,
196
, Molo wanted
to remind Mann, of the distinction between Kulturnation (the cultural nation) and
Staatsnation (the political nation) identifying Mann as an essential part of the former.
Kulturnation represented the ‘real’ Germany. The Nazis, wrote Molo, were evil whereas
196
Stephen Brockmann, “Inner Emigration The term and its Origins in Postwar Debates” Chapter one, in
Flight of Fantasy: New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German Literature 1933-1945, edited by Neil
H. Donahue & Doris Kirchner. (New York Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2003), p. 12.
81
the German people were essentially good. Mann had already dismissed this thesis as
untrue in his “Germany and the Germans” address to the Library of Congress in 1945. It
is possible, as Brockmann suggests, that Molo had heard a radio speech broadcast May 8,
1945, in which Mann said the German people were “basically good people that love
civilization and law” but Molo omitted to say that in the same speech Mann said,
“everything German, everyone who speaks German, writes German, has lived in German,
is affected” by Nazi crimes.
197
Four years later, in 1949, the year the French, British and
American zones formed the Federal Republic of Germany and the Soviet zone became
the German Democratic Republic, Mann gave an address to celebrate Goethe’s 200 birth
anniversary in Frankfurt (West) and in Weimar (East), in which he came back to the
notion that the language is the homeland. He spoke of “his loyalty to the German
language, this true and dear homeland that he maintained in exile.”
198
The exchange of letters between Mann and Molo brought new attention on the
issue, mostly because in his letter Mann wrote, “I do not forget that you later went
through much worse which I managed to forgo, but you did not know the heartache of
exile, the uprooting, the chill of homelessness.”
199
It is evident that Mann acknowledged
the suffering of those who opposed the Nazis and had to remain in Germany and that he
tried to soften his refusal to return to the homeland establishing a conciliatory tone. Molo,
on the other hand, as Brockman suggests, seemed to deny or at least neglect, the physical,
psychological and spiritual sufferings of German exiles that escaped the suffering and
present those who stayed as the true victims of Nazism. Molo rejected the concept of
197
Brockmann, “Inner Emigration,” p. 13
198
Brockmann, “Inner Emigration,” p. 7.
199
Bürgin Hans Thomas Mann, p. 199
82
German “collective guilt” that Mann seemed to embrace, at least in a milder version as
“collective responsibility.”
There can be no doubt many people in Germany did not support Hitler and for
different reasons had to remain in the country. A remarkable case was that of professor
Victor Klemperer, “the son of a rabbi, baptized Christian, who lived in Germany between
humiliation, terror and danger and he endured all of it.”
200
Klemperer was a professor at
the Technical University of Dresden who was forced to resign his position in the wake of
the Nuremberg laws in 1935. The Gestapo banned him from using the reading hall in the
university library then confiscated all his books and even his typewriter. He did, however,
keep a handwritten diary that chronicled the everyday criminal acts of the Nazis and the
resilience of the common German citizen from 1933 to 1945. His diary was published
after the war and became an instant bestseller considered by many a masterpiece of
contemporary cultural history.
It is also true that the plight of Klemperer could be used as an example of the
predicament lived by intellectuals who remained in Germany under Nazi rule in so called,
inner emigration-- a term that became popular at the end of World War II, which suggests
that there were writers who did not emigrate physically but “in spirit” or “turning inward”
“in order to survive oppression and the war with their own humane values intact.”
201
The
issue, which had been debated since 1933, was revived two years later at the Writers’
200
Neil H. Donahue cites the example of Klemperer in the introduction of Flight of Fantasy, p. 8, but the
quote comes from a piece in Der Spiegel, published 2/11/2005, accessed April 21/2017.
http://www.spiegel.de/international/victor-klemperer-i-am-german-the-others-are-un-german-a-
341147druck.html
201
Neil H. Donahue, Introduction, Flight of Fantasy, New Perspectives on Inner Emigration in German
Literature 1933-1945, Edited by Neil H. Donahue & Doris Kirchner. (New York Oxford: Berghahn Books,
2003), p. 1.
83
Congress in Paris,
202
a gathering attended by such well-known German exiles as Heinrich
Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Anna Seghers, when a masked man
representing the underground German antifascist writers presented himself as a member
of the inner emigration. After that symbolic moment, writes Donahue, “the writer of the
inner emigration in Germany was lost to view: the ensuing decade of menace, and
persecution, isolation and estrangement, terror and coercion, hardship and violence,
propaganda and war made such a posture of spirited defiance increasingly difficult or
perhaps even impossible to maintain within Germany and the pressures grew to conform
and collaborate in the ideological apparatus of the Nazi state.”
203
The tone and tenor of the debate changed when a group of members of the so-
called inner emigration, headed by an author of erotic novels named Frank Thieß, who
had remained in Nazi Germany, used it to attack Thomas Mann in “an intemperate… self-
aggrandizing … untenable position claiming the moral superiority of writers of the inner
emigration, who had experienced the German tragedy on location, rather than as
spectators from the balcony seats of exile, as he phrased it.”
204
In his letter, Thieß implied that the inner immigrant was more honest and
patriotic than the exiled, an argument that would be used against Mann and the whole
German exile community and for which literary scholar Hans Mayer provides two
possible explanations: rancor with the victor and rejection of the guilt feeling. Once the
Allies defeated Germany, all Germans, Nazis or non-Nazis, saw the exiles as part of the
202
The First International Congress of Writers for the Defence of Culture opened in Paris on June 21, 1935.
The purpose of the gathering was to face the threat posed by the Nazis. 250 writers from 38 countries
attended and about 3,000 people were in the audience.
203
Donahue, Flight, p. 2.
204
Donahue, Flight, p. 3.
84
victors and “connected to the sense of having been defeated was the strong psychological
sense of collective guilt for Nazi atrocities.”
205
In a memorable scene towards the end of the novel Doctor Faustus, Serenus
Zeitblom, the narrator, synthetizes both the feeling of being defeated and shamed morally
by recreating the moment when the American military authorities forced the inhabitants
of Weimar to confront the atrocities they repeatedly said they were not aware of:
The thick-walled torture cell into which a worthless regime,
dedicated from the beginning to nothingness, had
transformed Germany, is now thrown open, and our
disgrace lies open to the eyes of the world, of the foreign
commissions, to whom these unbelievable pictures are now
being shown everywhere, and who report at home: what they
have seen in all its hideousness goes beyond anything that
the human imagination is capable of picturing. I say:
our disgrace.
206
The inner/outer debate does raise quite a few interesting questions: were the inner
emigrants able to publish under the Nazi regime? Were they critical? Could they be
neutral? Or as Donahue puts it: “Was it at all possible to stay in Germany and avoid
collaboration, compromise, and complicity in the ideological apparatus of the Nazi
state?” History is on the side of Mann. None of the writers of the inner emigration ever
205
Brockman, p. 16.
206
Cited in Brockman, 16, from Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus The Life of the German Composer Adrian
Leverkühn as told by a Friend. Translated by John E. Woods. (New York: Vintage Books, 1999), p. 505.
As it is often the case, the English translation of the work of Mann differs in Brockman’s and Woods’,
albeit the content is similar.
85
wrote a word critical of the state. Some may not have collaborated with the enemy but
most of them, if not all, were compromised with the ideological apparatus of the Nazi
state.
*
86
Chapter 4
“Mann’s political commitment to the demands of his time”
1941, the year the Mann family moved to Los Angeles from Princeton was laden
with mixed emotions. It began auspiciously with a weekend at the White House
conversing with Thomas’ hero, President Franklin D. Roosevelt and his wife Eleanor, but
ended on a somber note after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor. Even though Mann had
begged President Roosevelt to declare war against Hitler, the thought of a world war
troubled and depressed him. “No,” he wrote to Agnes E. Meyer in December, “it does not
look very Christmassy in the world; the star toward which, when all is said and done,
humanity still goes on pilgrimage, is shrouded in a mist of blood.”
207
Months before, in March of that year, the University of California at Berkeley
awarded Mann an honorary doctorate, and in June, Thomas, Katja and famed German
architect J.R. Davidson began the construction of a new house in Pacific Palisades that
they would occupy the following year. In July, his father in law Professor Alfred
Pringsheim died in Zürich. In October, Mann was appointed Consultant in Germanic
Literature for the Library of Congress, a prestigious appointment that came paired with a
badly needed and generous remuneration. But his good luck landing this contract made
him reflect on the misfortune of many fellow exile writers whose contracts with
Hollywood Studios were set to expire that year and caused him great concern. The future
of his brother Heinrich, Alfred Döblin, Alfred Neumann, Wilhelm Speyer and other
famous exiles became an issue for Mann because he was the de facto leader of the
German-speaking exile community. Not only would these writers be left without the
207
Thomas Mann, Letters of Thomas Mann 1889-1955. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), p. 382.
87
means to support themselves but also losing their jobs would put their immigration status
in limbo.
208
“Undoubtedly,” as scholar and Harvard professor Henry Hatfield pointed out,
“Thomas Mann was the most prominent, indeed the dominant figure among [the
exiles]…willing to devote untold hours to helping refugees escape from Europe, raising
money for them, finding them teaching positions, fellowships, or publishers. ”
209
The imminent war between the U.S. and Germany brought about a paradox for
Mann and other German exiles. Even as they fought against the Nazis with their adopted
country, the U.S. Justice Department classified them as ‘enemy aliens’ imposing severe
restrictions on travel within the country and opening the possibility that they could be
sent to an internment camp. To top it all, Mann, the most German of all German
novelists, had begun broadcasting messages through the British Broadcasting Corporation
in Germany and other European countries seeking to convince the German people to
revolt against Hitler as the Royal Air Force kept dropping hundreds of bombs in
Hamburg, Köln, the Ruhr and even in his native Hanseatic League city of Lübeck. 1941
was a year filled with strong emotions, often with guilt feelings but mostly with a firm
determination to fight against Hitler till the end.
The human cost of the Japanese attack at the American naval bases at Pearl
Harbor on December 7 also saddened and worried Mann. “The strike at Pearl Harbor has
moved me frightfully. Were it only ships! But so many precious young human lives!” he
208
Hans Bürgin and Hans-Otto Mayer, Thomas Mann: A Chronicle of his Life, English translation by
Eugene Dobson. University of Alabama Press, University, Alabama: 1969, p. 159.
209
Henry Hatfield, “Thomas Mann and America,” Salmagundi, No. 10/11 (Fall 1969-Winter 1970), p. 174.
88
wrote to Agnes E. Meyer, “How was it possible that there was so little watchfulness at
this moment?”
210
His compassion for the loss of lives and his concerns over America’s
lack of preparation to defend itself from the surprise attack deepened his depression even
as he knew that the attack would mean an all out involvement of the U.S. in the war
against the Axis.
Once again, as he had done denouncing the irrational behavior of the Nazis in the
thirties, the recklessness of the attempts to appease Hitler and the blindness of American
isolationists on the eve of World War II and throughout the conflict made Mann display
his unwavering commitment to the demands of the time. For almost a decade he tirelessly
toured the United States giving speeches denouncing Nazi atrocities, encouraging the
cause of the Allies, and singing praise of America and Great Britain.
BBC broadcasts 1940-1942
In the autumn of 1940, when producers of the British Broadcasting Corporation
proposed to Mann that he talk to his compatriots via short-wave radio commentaries
meant to support and encourage them to resist the Nazi dictatorship he seized on the offer
gladly and immediately. For him the BBC broadcasts would serve many purposes, it
would provide a unique opportunity to report accurately on how the civilized world saw
the Nazi atrocities; it would allow him to reconnect with his readers after his books were
banned in the country; it was an opportunity to write and speak in German, and last but
not least, it would keep alive in him the hope that not all Germans were Nazis.
210
Bürgin, Thomas Mann, pp. 161-162. The same quote, but translated differently by Richard and Clara
Winston, appears in Thomas Mann Letters, p. 381.
89
In one of his first BBC broadcasts to Germany in October 1940, he spoke about
his three great hopes: hope in America itself for its immense economic strength; hope in
England, whose courageous defense of London caused a chorus of admiration and, lastly,
hope that the German people would finally recognize that war would bring nothing but
“misery, exile, and suicide, and heap the hatred of the world upon themselves.”
211
One month later, in another broadcast, he praised the 1940 reelection of Roosevelt,
which he deemed “decisive for the future of the world.”
212
By Christmas that same year,
he reminded his fellow citizens of the vast contributions of the German people to western
culture and civilization. He mentioned Albrecht Dürer and Johann Sebastian Bach,
Friedrich Schiller and Johann Wolfgang Goethe, Beethoven’s Fidelio and the Ninth
Symphony, and asked his compatriots to reject the promise of the ‘New Order’ by
“refusing faith and obedience to your tyrants.” In the February of 1941 broadcast, he
informed his audience that President Roosevelt, “the best, wisest, and most clear-headed
statesman…[had] proclaimed a state of unlimited National Emergency; that means he has
summoned the great democracy which he leads to martial self-discipline and unity against
the enemy from without, who is, after all, the enemy of all men of good will, and he has
declared irrevocably that a peace with Hitler…will never be concluded.”
213
In October
1941, he denounced the Nazis’ disinformation campaign about the assassination of two
German officers in France and decried the execution of innocent French hostages in
reprisal for the deaths of the two Germans.
214
In the March 1942 broadcast he reminded
211
Thomas Mann, Listen Germany! Twenty-five Radio Messages to the German People over BBC. (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943), p. 6.
212
Thomas Mann, Listen Germany!, p. 7.
213
Thomas Mann, Listen Germany!, p. 17-18.
214
Thomas Mann, Listen Germany!, p. 54.
90
his audience how Hitler constantly and unsuccessfully tried to compare himself with
President Roosevelt, “As though a vulgar adventurer such as he could be at all compared
with a real statesman like Roosevelt, who is truly concerned with the future of
humanity.”
215
And one month later, he painfully acknowledged that the Palm Sunday
bombing of Lübeck’s military installations caused collateral damage to cherished
monuments in his hometown--Saint Mary’s Church with the monumental Danse
Macabre that fascinated young Thomas and the famous Totentanzorgel an organ where
Johan Sebastian Bach learned to play the instrument. But he also reminded his fellow
countrymen that the Lübeck bombing was in response to the “destruction of Coventry by
Göring’s fliers”.
216
It is hard to gauge if the German people were indeed listening. It has
been suggested that part of the animosity he would later confront in his homeland could
have derived from these broadcasts but as Ronald Hayman, one of his biographers writes,
that “at the time when the broadcasts were aired “he would get no feedback and have no
means of estimating how many people in Germany were listening to him.”
217
His last
broadcast on August 1942 was a powerful plea to his countrymen to embrace the idea of
“Europe…an idea of freedom, national honor, sympathy, and human cooperation in the
hearts of the best men.”
218
For Mann, Europe “was the opposite of provincial narrowness,
petty egotism, nationalist brutality and boorishness; it meant freedom, spaciousness, spirit,
and kindness.”
219
215
Thomas Mann, Listen Germany! p. 80.
216
Thomas Mann, Listen Germany! p. 84.
217
Hayman, Ronald, Thomas Mann A Biography. New York: Scribner, 1995, p. 463.
218
Mann, Listen, Germany! p. 112.
219
Mann, Listen, Germany! p. 109.
91
The idea of Europe as the salvation for Germany is a recurrent topic in Mann’s
work but also in the thoughts and books of Spanish philosopher, José Ortega y Gasset,
whose pivotal The Revolt of the Masses, first published as newspaper articles in 1929 and
as a book in 1930, was a brilliant attempt to defend the liberal ideas of European culture
against the exacerbated nationalism that sickened Germany and Spain under Francisco
Franco. Mann read The Revolt thoroughly, praised it and drew ideas from it. The
“German Address--An Appeal to Reason” by Mann was also published in 1930 and in
both essays there is an evident concern that Fascism and Communism threatened the
European cultural identity and also a firm belief that ‘Europeanism’ was the best antidote
against authoritarianism. Both writers thought the recovery of the European identity was
essential to solve the problems they saw rising on the horizon; and in their attempt to
renew Europe’s liberal-humanist cultural identity, they became two of the most
outspoken European public intellectuals of the time. In 1931 Mann travelled from south
to north in Germany speaking about “Europe as a cultural unity.” He first spoke at the
Republican Students Union in the Franconian city of Erlangen in Bavaria and later at the
Katherineum in his hometown of Lübeck. He spoke, he said, “as a European who would
not part from his European heritage lightly,” and, as Nigel Hamilton, the author of a
fascinating biography of the brothers Mann, wrote, to speak like that “In an age of
surging nationalism, it was no mean stand.”
220
Mann would keep his conviction on the
fortitude of a culturally united continent until his death in 1955.
By the end of 1942, two months after his last BBC broadcast, Mann again used a
public forum, the United States Library of Congress, to continue his intellectual struggle
220
Nigel Hamilton, The Brothers Mann The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann 1871-1950 and 18751955,
(New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979), p. 251.
92
against the Nazis. Ever since the rise of Hitler and his National Socialist Party in
Germany, Mann had struggled internally trying to reconcile the notion that the German
people, whose contribution to Western Civilization was so immense in the realms of
music, philosophy, drama, poetry, fiction, and art, would fall under the spell of an evil,
dangerous, demagogue like Hitler. His addresses at the Library of Congress from 1942 to
1949 are brilliant examples of his sui-generis approach to politics as a man of letters and
of his commitment to the events of his time. The first one, on November 17, was “The
Theme of the Joseph Novels,” a perfect example of a work where “the seriousness of the
man of action was combined with the playful irony of the artist; [and] politics and culture
came together.”
221
Furthermore, as political scientist Wolf Lepenies notes, “Mann turned
his lecture into a moving appeal for the unification of European and American traditions,
in culture as well as in politics.”
222
The fourth novel of the cycle, Joseph the Provider
(1944) not only was finished in Los Angeles, but Joseph’s reforms for Egypt are modeled
after Roosevelt’s New Deal. “Unification” wrote Mann at the end of the 1942 essay, “is
the word and command of the world hour, and the future belongs to the union of
knowledge and hope, of profundity and courage, of faith and labor in the face of all
doubt, and despite all doubt.”
223
At this stage of his life and in spite of occasional smear attacks against him in the
U.S. media, Mann not only felt at home in America but admired what he deemed
“virtues” of the American people. In a letter to Agnes E. Meyer, and reacting to her
221
Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History. (Princeton & Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2006), p. 61.
222
Lepenies, p. 61.
223
Thomas Mann, “The Themes of the Joseph Novels” in Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the
Library of Congress, 1942-1949. ((La Vergne TN: Wildside Press), p. 19.
93
comments about a silly attack against him by a writer in the New Yorker, Mann wrote,
“but I must come to the defense of America when you say that this country is more
malicious and dangerous to helpless me than Europe ever was. You have no idea with
what spite and nasty glee a reputation could be smeared in Germany. I find people here
good-natured to the point of generosity in comparison with the Europeans, and feel
pleasantly sheltered in their midst. This irritating episode cannot change that feeling.”
224
As early as September of 1942, Mann began denouncing the horrors of the Nazi death
camps. At a time when rumors of the Holocaust were still met with incredulity and
indifference, he accurately predicted that the camps would become the most potent
symbol of the Third Reich and its legacy. At the same time, he struggled to reconcile his
love for his native land with his hatred for the evil it was doing. He was also restless
raising awareness among Americans to the dangers of Nazism. He travelled the country
giving lectures and participating in conferences explaining his reasons on the need for a
continued struggle against the Axis Berlin/Tokyo/Roma, and to strengthen democracy in
the world. Often, this meant confronting his conflicted personal feelings on the so-called
“German Guilt.” At many stages in his life Mann felt all Germans, including himself,
were complicit in the Nazi horror, some by supporting it and some, like him, by not doing
enough to stop it.
On the other hand, writes Heilbut, “the war years were Mann’s easiest time in
America. Even as he agonized over the European situation, he became a citizen of a
country whose leader he admired to the point of idolatry.”
225
His attitude towards
American culture, according to Heilbut, was a bit ambivalent, but it was always
224
Mann, Letters, p. 382.
225
Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, p. 299.
94
“tempered by a commitment to America’s military role: as he wrote later, it was a
morally good period.” More important, “the wartime spirit accommodated Mann’s
international perspective.”
226
Unlike other German exiles like Brecht, who viewed their
emigration as a temporary switch in national identity, “Mann believed that it signified the
transcendence of all nationalist postures; there no longer existed any real or metaphorical
‘homeland’ for him to regain.”
227
Mann was convinced that America and Europe were now one in the fight for a
world free of Nazism and Fascism. In his Address at the Library of Congress, titled “The
Theme of the Joseph Novels,” he saw the history of the United States with the eyes of a
foreigner who firmly believed that the country was the powerful force that would lead the
world to recover “the idea of humanity, the human idea, the sense for the past and that for
the future, tradition and revolution form a strange and, to my mind, infinitely attractive
mixture.”
228
His faith in the future of humankind, however, didn’t exempt him from dealing
with a delicate topic both inside and outside of the German exile community, the burden
of the German guilt. In lectures and in his BBC radio broadcasts, Mann constantly
repeated his conviction that the entire German nation was implicated in Hitler’s horrors.
Worse, "For Mann, most disquieting of all was the fact that these horrors came from the
very same country that had produced some of the greatest glories of Western music.”
229
226
Heilbut, Exiled, p. 299.
227
Heilbut, Exiled, p. 299.
228
Thomas Mann, "The Theme of the Joseph Novels," p. 17.
229
‘The Tragic German Patriot’ Fourth Schurz Lecture on Thomas Mann, delivered by Dr. Hans Rudolf
Vaget at the Library of Congress on March 25, 1994, transcript, p.3.
95
These realizations led Mann to a melancholic state. He was certain that the
German mind and spirit were implicated in the horrors, and he did not exclude himself
and his work in his verdict that all Germans were guilty of the Nazi horrors, whether by
commission or omission. “There are not two Germanys, a good one and a ad one, but
only one whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is
merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany is misfortune, in guilt, and ruin,” said
Mann in his Address at the Library of Congress, May 29, 1945.
In a review of philosopher Karl Jaspers’ book The Question of German Guilt, T.
H. Minshall mentions that Jaspers distinguishes four types of guilt: criminal guilt, which
refers to overt acts; political guilt, helping or acquiescing in Nazi rule; moral guilt, a
matter of private judgment and metaphysical guilt: a universally shared responsibility in
and outside Germany, meaning those who failed to oppose, at all costs, the rise of
Nazism.
230
When the Allied Forces brought the question of the German Guilt at the
Nuremberg trials in 1945, the issue was criminal guilt. In his May 1945 Address, Mann
was talking about political and metaphysical guilt, yet, not everyone in the exiled
community agreed with Mann’s assertion or even on the meaning of the word “guilt”. As
early as 1943 Brecht had an acrimonious debate with Mann regarding this issue. Bertolt
Brecht complained that, “Thomas Mann did not distinguish between the Hitler regime and
the democratic strengths in Germany.”
231
Brecht argued that the idea of the German guilt
in Mann was inaccurate and unfair and to prove his point that not all German citizens
were Nazis supporting Hitler, he mentioned there had been hundreds of thousands of
230
T. H. Minshall, “The Question of German Guilt.” By Karl Jaspers and E. B. Ashton. International
Affairs (Royal Institute of International Affairs 1944-) Vol 25, No 1 (Jan., 1949) p. 102. Published by
Wiley on behalf of the Royal Institute of International Affairs. URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3019123
accessed: 24-03-2017 20:59 UTC.
231
Kurzke, Thomas Mann, p. 454.
96
German socialists who died fighting Hitler inside Germany and in Concentration Camps
throughout Europe. Brecht and other German socialist and communist exiles called for a
“De-Nazified Germany.” Brecht, who never liked Mann, was so upset with the novelist’s
confessions of guilt that he called him a “reptile” and promised to do him “all the harm
possible” once the socialist revolution settled in
Germany. Others, like Einstein, agreed with Mann. Whatever the case, “the
internal debate,” as Heilbut notes, “could not be kept secret from the émigrés’ hosts.”
232
Subsumed in this debate are two topics. One that has to do with the so-called “inner
emigration,” which will be discussed in chapter five within the context of the exilic
tradition, and another one regarding the strength of the internal resistance to Hitler and
whether there were truly significant German resistance movements to Nazism in Germany
during the war, as Brecht suggested. The historiography on the scope and limits of the
resistance movements in Germany is for the most part contradictory, albeit most
historians agree the resistance was not very extensive and it certainly failed to make a
dent in the Nazi takeover of the country. On the other hand it should be acknowledged the
Gestapo had no tolerance to even the smallest opposition to the Nazi regime, that
thousands of people were killed or sent to concentration camps for dissenting with the
regime.
Left-wing historians suggest that Brecht may have been right in talking about the
sacrifice of German socialists and communists; other less ideological historians suggest
that even if there was a communist resistance movement, the lack of documentation of
their activities makes it hard to determine its value and its strength. According to historian
232
Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, p. 328.
97
Hans-Joachim Reichhardt and Professor F. L. Carsten, the Left, composed of communists,
socialists, labor and some intellectuals, formed the largest group of resisters to Hitler, but
they agree that even in the 1990s it was extremely hard to gauge how large it was because
as soon as they appeared on the streets, the Gestapo immediately and brutally suppressed
all forms of opposition to the regime. Notwithstanding this caveat, “The number of
Communist victims of the Gestapo and SS terror is much larger than that of all other
groups taken together,”
233
they wrote. Other historians have written that Carsten and
Reinhardt’s conclusion is a “dreary testimony to both the ideological hairsplitting of the
German Left even in mortal crisis and the efficiency of the Gestapo which had little
trouble with resistance groups of any variety.”
234
The Right also formed resistance groups like the so-called Kreisau Circle, a name
given to them by the Gestapo because they met at the estate of Count Helmuth James von
Molke in Kreisau, that was made up of conservative and aristocratic military officers like
Colonel Claus von Stauffenberg, one of the leading officers of the failed July 20, 1944
plot to assassinate Hitler. Peculiarly, many of the ideas of this conservative group of
resisters were similar to those of the Nazis: Both agreed that Germany needed to expand
its borders East, West, South and North; both were also ardent anti-communist, anti-
Weimar Republic, and anti-Versailles Treaty, and both felt nostalgia for the Kaiser.
A third group of resisters grew out of the churches, and it was just as controversial
as the conservative groups. The Catholic Church held a hands-off position by virtue of
the 1933 Concordat between the Holy See and the German Reich, an agreement that
233
Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, p. x.
234
John Weiss, “The Face of the Third Reich: Portraits of the Nazi Leadership,” in The German Resistance
to Hitler by Hermann Graml, Hans Mommsen, Hans-Joachim Reichardt and Ernest Wolf ,” Political
Science Quarterly, Vol. 87, No. 2 (Jun., 1972), p. 293.
98
reflected the collusion between the Vatican and the Nazi regime. Some denominations
within the Protestant Church did present some type of resistance, although they actually
never objected to National Socialism. “The Churches had their martyrs, priests who
refused to compromise and who helped the victims of the regime, but they were only too
few.”
235
Without a doubt, the most principled and humanistic, albeit naïve resistance
movement, was the White Rose, a very small group of students and professors at the
University of Munich who defied the Nazis with a non-violent home-made propaganda
campaign that appealed to the dignity of the German people by asking: “Is it not a fact
that today every decent German is ashamed of his government?”
236
Hans Scholl, his sister
Sophie and their colleague Christoph Probst, who were the student leaders of this
movement, paid with their lives for their courageous deeds but their moral stand lives on.
Hans’ last words before he was executed by guillotine: “Long Live freedom,” still
resonate throughout Germany.
Thus the question becomes, was Mann wrong placing guilt on the German people
for electing Hitler and keeping him in power until the end? And the answer is that most
Germans, including Mann, share the guilt for the catastrophe they were unable or
unwilling to prevent. Since the end of the 1960s, however, the German nation has atoned
for its faults, confronted its shameful past and faced up its demons like no other country
in the world has ever done.
235
Carsten, in Raml, Hermann G., Hans Mommsen, Hans-Joachim Reichhardt, Ernst Wolf, The German
Resistance to Hitler, Introduction by Professor F. L. Carsten. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1970.p. xiii.
236
Raml, Hermann G., Hans Mommsen, Hans-Joachim Reichhardt, Ernst Wolf, The German Resistance to
Hitler, Introduction by Professor F. L. Carsten. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1970, p. Xiii.
99
On May 29, 1945, on the eve of his 70
th
birthday, and 21 days after Nazi Germany
signed an unconditional surrender at Allied headquarters in Reims, France, ending the
war in Europe, Mann delivered what was perhaps his most poignant address at the
Library of Congress, entitled “Germany and the Germans.” In many ways, the address
was a blueprint of his forthcoming novel Doctor Faustus, but it was also an unforgiving
piece of self-criticism. For several years before the lecture took place, Mann had been
trying to decipher an enigma: how to reconcile the history of a people that had produced
so many philosophers, thinkers, poets, novelists, musicians, painters, and scientists with
the people that had caused so much suffering and produced the worst catastrophe in
modern history?
“The story I told you in brief outline, ladies and gentlemen, is the story of the
German inwardness,” said Mann in the address.
237
Inwardness for Mann is a concept that
involves tenderness, depth of feeling, unworldly reverie, love of nature, and purest
sincerity of thought and conscience. These are the attributes that make the German
character reclusive, melancholic and timid, and this inwardness, Mann suggested, was
rooted in arrogance or in an innate provincialism, an international social inferiority
complex, and a philistine universalism that hides a secret demonism. An inwardness, said
Mann, that produced German metaphysics and German music, but also Martin Luther’s
Reformation, which for Mann was a disaster in as much as it brought about the religious
schism of the Occident. Mann thought Luther was a lonely thinker, a theologian whose
desire for world domination led him to trade his soul to the devil. In a less metaphysical
religious conception, Mann never forgave Luther for abandoning the peasants during their
237
Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of
Congress, 1942-1949. (Rockville, Maryland: Wild Side Press, 2010), p. 64.
100
1524-1525 rebellion. On the other hand, he recognized Luther’s importance; “he was a
conservative revolutionary…a liberating hero, but in the German style, for he knew
nothing of liberty…I am speaking of political liberty, the liberty of the citizen--this
liberty not only left him cold, but its impulses and demands were deeply repugnant to
him.”
238
It should be noted that the merciless portrait Mann makes of Luther in 1945,
seems somehow autobiographical of the young Mann writing his Reflections in 1918.
Luther wrote Mann, had his counterpart in Goethe, for they both traced the path for
Germany. Goethe, wrote Mann, “represents well-mannered, civilized strength and
popular robustness, urbane Demonism, spirit and blood at once, namely art…with him
Germany made a tremendous stride in human culture.”
239
Referring to the history of Germany, Mann emphasized it was “a melancholy
story, --I call it that, instead of ‘tragic’, because misfortune should not boast. This story
should convince us of one thing: that there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad
one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany
is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt, in ruin.”
240
For Mann, Germany had two identities, one good and the other evil, and it was
impossible to separate one from the other. This was the central notion of his famous and
most controversial address and it was written with absolute honesty albeit somehow
reluctantly because the implications were painful both for himself and for his work.
Curiously, Mann’s interpretation of the old trope of “good and evil” is very similar to the
238
Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” p. 51-53.
239
Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” p. 53.
240
Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” p. 64.
101
medieval argument posed by Anselm Archbishop of Canterbury who defined evil not as a
separate entity created by God, who is all goodness, but as a degeneration of good.
In his lecture, Mann “assessed not only the defeat of Germany, but also its shame
as a civilized nation after the full extent of the atrocities in the extermination camps had
been exposed.”
241
In the address, Mann assumed responsibility saying, “Any attempt to
arouse sympathy, to defend and to excuse Germany, would certainly be an inappropriate
undertaking for one of German birth today …anyone who was born a German does have
something in common with German destiny and German guilt.”
242
In an attempt to understand the transformation of a rational, orderly, efficient and
cultured people into a cruel, barbarous, irrational nation, Mann suggested that the
country’s political development never kept pace with its artistic and cultural
development. He also inferred “there was a secret union of the German spirit with the
Demonic,” that manifests itself in Martin Luther and in Goethe’s Faust, “[the Devil] is a
very German figure.” Luther, writes Mann, is “a lonely thinker and searcher, a theologian
and philosopher in his cell who, in his desire for world enjoyment and world domination,
barters his soul to the Devil, [and] Goethe’s Faust…is a man of God who, out of a
presumptuous urge for knowledge surrenders to magic, to the Devil.”
243
Goethe’s error,
suggests Mann is not having connected Faust with music, for music also, “is a demonic
realm…music is calculated order and chaos-breeding irrationality at once, rich in
conjuring, incantatory gestures, in magic numbers, the most unrealistic and yet the most
impassioned, mystical and abstract.” His description of music as unrealistic follows on
241
Ehrhard Bahr, Weimar on the Pacific, German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of
Modernism. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), p. 244.
242
Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” p. 48.
243
Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans,” p. 51
102
the steps of Dr. Samuel Johnson who wrote “Music is a method of employing the mind
without the labor of thinking,”
244
which comes after Ludwig van Beethoven’s definition
of music as “the one incorporeal entrance into the higher world of knowledge which
comprehends mankind but which mankind cannot comprehend.”
245
For Mann, music was also the manifestation par excellence of the German
inwardness, a concept that precedes Mann and has been used to interpret the German
character at different times by different people.
The Beginning of Disillusion
Once World War II began, Mann realized it was becoming difficult for most
people to distinguish between Nazi Germans and the exiled Anti-Nazi Germans, grouping
all Germans as enemies. He came to doubt the very existence of the idealized Germany
he had once praised and his doubts led him to a gloomy vision of the future. Another
question that tormented him was to what extent Americans recognized the different facets
of fascism and Nazism both abroad and at home, and if they cared about it.
After 1943, once the attacks from the German American Bund on the exiles had
dwindled at the start of the War, a few radical right-wing American groups picked up the
modus operandi of the fascists extending their attacks to progressive causes and seeding
an unhealthy mistrust of foreigners. “Long before the formal creation of the federal
employee loyalty program in 1947, conservatives began accusing New Deal agencies of
harboring subversives.” Both the National Labor Relations Board and the Office of Price
Administration were accused of “having ties to communist dominated elements in labor
244
Quoted by James Boswell in Journal of a Tour to the Hebrides, cited from “Some Definitions of
Music,” taken from the Internet, March 25, 2017.
245
Quoted by Bettina von Arnim in a letter to Goethe, taken from the Internet, March 25, 2017
103
and consumer movements.”
246
And then there was the anti-communist obsession of J.
Edgar Hoover and his Federal Bureau of Investigation. On August 18, 1943, two FBI
agents visited Mann at his home in Brentwood, California, to ask him about American
screenwriter Albert Maltz and German playwright Bertolt Brecht.
247
Five months later,
another two FBI agents visited Mann to inquire about Ernst Deutsch.
248
By the end of
May 1944, Mann had refused to sign the Manifesto of the Council for a Democratic
Germany out of fear that signing it could influence negatively on his application for
citizenship. Mann was feeling the pressure of being accused “of premature
antifascism.”
249
This peculiar label was attributed to Edgar J. Hoover to designate people
who had joined the Lincoln Brigades to fight against Fascism in the Spanish Civil War, a
commitment that made them suspect of being communists or socialists.
250
It later became
a code word for communist sympathizer. In the end, writes Kurzke, “being under
surveillance meant not only an unpleasant feeling but had consequences.”
251
The fear Mann felt of being denied citizenship for being labeled a premature
antifascist proved to be wrong, on June 23, both Katia and Thomas became American
citizens. But that did not stopped the FBI of showing up at his home once more four
months later, and according to Kurzke, that was the last time he was questioned.
However, his FBI dossier indicates he was under surveillance from 1937 to 1954, even
though from 1938, the year Mann and his wife officially immigrated to the United States
246
Landon R. Y. Storrs, The Second Red Scare and the Unmaking of the New Deal Left. (Princeton and
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2013), p. 51.
247
Herman Kurzke. Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art. A biography. Translated by Leslie Wilson.
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002,) p. 518.
248
Kurzke. Thomas Mann, p. 518.
249
Kurzke. Thomas Mann, p. 519.
250
Bernard Knox, “Premature Anti-Fascist,” The Antioch Review, Vol. 57, No 2, Essays Personal and
Political (Spring 1999), pp. 133-49, Accessed 30-05-2016.
251
Kurzke, Thomas Mann, p. 519.
104
from Canada, to 1945, Mann was actively engaged in a war of words with the Nazi
regime writing essays like: “The Coming Victory of Democracy,” 1938; “This Peace,”
1938; “This War,” 1940; Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two
Decades, 1943, and giving speeches and conferences. He also wrote five novels, Joseph
in Egypt, 1938; Lotte in Weimar, 1940; The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India, 1941;
the aforementioned Joseph the Provider, 1944, and The Tables of the Law, 1945.
Throughout this time, Mann was constantly tormented by his reflections on the
national character of Germany and the Germans, but his disenchantment with his country
of origin would soon combine with the realization that the growing right-wing political
radicalization in his adopted country gave him an eerie feeling of déjà vu. In his diaries
and letters, there are notes that reflect increasing awareness of political trends that remind
him of the rise of Nazism in Germany. In a letter to his son-in-law, the literary critic
Antonio Borgese, Mann congratulated him for an article he wrote for Life Magazine in
which he warned America not to forsake its idealism. The piece, wrote Mann, has been
met “with nothing but agreement and admiration among Americans of the higher type-
and after all, it was addressed to the American conscience.”
252
And on November 7, 1945,
he wrote a letter to Einstein expressing his discomfort with “the growing xenophobia, the
growing anti-Semitism” in the U.S.
253
Life in post-war America presented a dilemma for
Mann. As Professor Hatfield has noted, strong personalities like his daughter Erika or his
friend Agnes Meyer could easily influence Mann’s feelings in opposite directions, one
day he could appear to be completely anti-American and the next he could sound totally
252
Mann, Letters, p. 466.
253
Mann, Letters, p. 486.
105
pro-American. But “as his comments on American life and policy, after 1945, became
increasingly critical, he was subjected to attacks, even to denunciation.”
254
A Call from Germany
Meanwhile, his relationship with his country of birth was also worsening. That
same year, the Office of War Information sent him an open letter from Walter von Molo,
the former President of the Prussian Writers’ Academy, asking Mann “to return to
Germany and live there again, helping by word and deed.”
255
Other groups had also asked
him to come back arguing he had a historic task to perform in Germany. Mann answered
back in a letter telling Molo, “I am an American Citizen, and long before Germany’s
frightful defeat I publicly and privately declared I had no intention of ever turning my
back on America.” He also told him he was “too old to save a deeply troubled country”
and finished the letter confessing that having suffered “the angina of exile, the uprooting,
the nervous shock of homelessness,” he knew he didn’t belong in Germany anymore.
256
In Postwar, the British historian and essayist Tony Judt suggests that the interval
between 1945 and 1989 was “a post-war parenthesis, the unfinished business of a conflict
that ended in 1945 but whose epilogue had lasted for another half century.”
257
Thomas
Mann witnessed first hand the opening of this parenthesis during his trip to Europe right
at the beginning of the Cold War and lived through it until his death in 1955. Being aware
of the potential violent explosions of the epilogue, he did everything he could to bridge
the dangerous gap between the West and the East.
254
Hatfield, p. 175.
255
Mann, Letters, p. 479.
256
Mann, Letters, p. 480.
257
Tony Judt, Postwar: A History of Europe since 1945. (New York: The Penguin Press, 2005), p. 2.
106
His efforts, though, were unsuccessful. In February of 1946, Stalin delivered a
speech at the Bolshoi Theater in Moscow emphasizing the incompatibility of Capitalism
and Communism, a concept central to the Marxist-Leninist ideology but one that was not
necessarily a declaration of war. Nonetheless, the speech incensed American politicians
who took it as a threat. American diplomat George Kennan tried to put things into
perspective stating that although the communist threat was real and it would be foolish to
seek accommodation with the Soviet Union it did not warrant a violent response. He
finished his “Telegram” stating that the Soviet threat could be defeated without a war.
What the United States had to do, said Kennan, was to educate people on the realities of
Russia. “I am convinced,” Kennan wrote, “that there would be far less hysterical anti
Sovietism in our country today if the realities of this situation were better understood by
our people.”
258
Kennan was fully aware of the precariousness of the Russian way of life.
But shortly thereafter, Winston Churchill made his famous “Sinews of Peace”
speech at Westminster College in Fulton, Missouri, popularly known as “The Iron
Curtain Speech,” in which he described the division in Europe in the darkest terms:
“From Stettin in the Baltic to Trieste in the Adriatic, an iron curtain has descended across
the continent.”
259
It is widely assumed that President Truman, who was in the audience,
knew the content of the speech and must have approved the message.
Former Vice President and then Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, a
favorite friend of Thomas Mann, also intervened in the debate calling for détente with the
USSR; for that, he was forced to resign from his post. Then in March of 1947, a month
258
George Kennan, “Telegram,” Moscow, February 22, 1946—9PM.
http://nsarchive.gwu.edu/coldwar/documents/episode-1/kennan.htm p. 12, Consulted October 13, 2016.
259
Winston Churchill, “Sinews of Peace”, quoted in Mark A. Kishlansky, ed., Sources of World History
(New York: Harper Collins, 1995), p. 298-302.
107
before Mann’s trip to Europe, President Truman announced the Truman Doctrine, a
policy that declared the US would support Greece and Turkey from enemies within and
outside its borders. According to some sources, the Truman Doctrine was a direct reaction
to the aggressive behavior of Communist parties in Hungary, Romania, Bulgaria, Poland,
France, Belgium, Italy, Greece and Turkey, which, following directives from Stalin,
sought to participate in coalition governments in those countries. Many Greeks and Turks
saw it as a pretext to invade their country.
In May 1947, Mann sailed on his first trip for Europe after World War II, mainly
to attend a Penn Congress in Zürich, but also to hold a long lecture tour that would take
him to Sweden, London, Brussels, Amsterdam and Switzerland. Mann was angered by
the decision of the U.S. occupying authorities in Germany to re-insert former Nazis into
the new German government believing it was a slap in the face of all those who had
fought the Nazis for more than a decade. He felt that two years after the catastrophe, the
Germans were in still in denial of their crimes against humanity and had not atoned for
their sins. He was also troubled by what he saw forthcoming in America. He worried the
U.S. fear of the USSR would lead to unnecessary confrontations, and wild witch-hunting
at home that would make America live the nightmare he and many more suffered in
Germany in the 1930s. He was especially concerned with the renewed prominence of the
old House Un-American Activities Committee, founded in 1938, because he sensed the
animosity toward the Soviet Union kept growing in the American public instigated by
Congress, the American Legion, the FBI and a reactionary and sensationalist press
nationwide that included not only the tabloid press, but magazines like Time and
newspapers like the Los Angeles Times.
108
The four-month European trip would not include a visit to Germany. Mann knew
his presence in Europe would be even more controversial if he visited Germany, so from
London, he wrote a message to the German people telling them why he would not go to
his old homeland. “I am fully aware of the extraordinarily difficult and sorrowful position
in which Germany finds herself today and as a German deeply sympathize with it.” He
also mentioned he understood post-war Germany was in a very uncertain position, “it
cannot be expected a mere two years after so fearful a catastrophe as Germany has
suffered to see Germany recovered again.” And he concluded by expressing his hope and
belief that Germany would recover in a few years.
260
The letter did not have the soothing effect Mann thought it would have; instead, it
added more animosity towards him. Ever since the exchange of letters with Walter von
Molo in 1945, his possible return to Germany had been a subject of furious debates with
some intellectuals begging him to come back and others repudiating his probable return.
After the 1947 message from London, a sector of the German press and many Germans
were really furious at him. Manfred Hausmann, a writer who had worked for the Nazi
propaganda magazine Das Reich, wrote a very hostile article in the Bremen newspaper
Weser Kurier, aimed at throwing suspicions on Mann’s loyalty to the homeland.
Notwithstanding the commotion, Mann continued the trip, whose original purpose
was to attend the International Penn Congress in Zürich, a gathering of writers whom the
FBI characterized as communists. Curiously, the FBI agents who followed Mann
throughout the trip did not mention that the Congress opened with a greeting from the
President of Switzerland, Philipp Etter. Or that Etter was a conservative, member of the
260
Bürgin and Mayer, Thomas Mann, p. 215.
109
Christian Democratic Party, and a man whom many Swiss historians considered
sympathetic to the Nazis and an Anti-Semite. They also failed to notice that Mann
repeated the same lecture he had given at the Library of Congress in April, on German
philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche.
Mann returned to the United States in September of 1947, a month before HUAC
held hearings in Los Angeles and Washington to investigate communist activity in
Hollywood. On October 20, forty-three witnesses were subpoenaed to appear for the first
hearing conducted by J. Parnell Tomas, the Republican Representative from New Jersey
who was later a convicted criminal and served time in jail for corruption, with the
participation of actors Gary Cooper, Robert Taylor and Ronald Reagan, plus studio
executive heads Jack Warner and Walt Disney, all of them testified as cooperative
witnesses. The following day, it was the turn of nineteen witnesses considered
“unfriendly” because they were presumed to be or have been members of the Communist
Party, but only eleven actually appeared and only Bertolt Brecht chose to answer the
questions, a decision that was not well-received by his colleagues. The other ten
witnesses invoked their First Amendment rights against self-incrimination and declined to
testify. Ironically, out of the thirty thousand industry workers in Hollywood at the time no
more than three hundred were or had been members of the communist party.
261
“As the pendulum of history began its swing from Rooseveltian liberalism to
McCarthyite reaction, the Hollywood activists were standing in its path, and, in the
261
Griffin Fariello, Red Scare Memories of the American Inquisition An Oral History (New York London:
W.W. Norton & Company, 1995), p. 255.
110
persons of the Hollywood Ten, were the first to be felled.”
262
But, as Ceplair and Englund
note, the real charge against the Ten, was that for years, perhaps as many as twenty, the
film people had worked effectively for causes regarded as anathema for the new
conservative or reactionary majority in Congress, as well as by most of the press and
several powerful national interest groups.
263
For conservative politicians in Congress, Hollywood provided the perfect stage to
send a message to other labor groups. As Ceplair and Englund write in the introduction to
The Inquisition in Hollywood, the Hollywood message resonated among “unions, coal
miners, autoworkers, janitors, professors, lawyers and smaller bothersome ‘subversives’.
All and everyone associated with the progressive movements from 1935 to 1948 became
enmeshed in the strands of the Cold War: ‘internal security’ dragnet: informing,
investigating, prosecuting, recanting, oath taking…blacklisting.”
264
The HUAC hearing of 1947 revealed not only the ascent of a new conservative
majority in Congress but also how the anti-progressive forces had taken over both the
Democratic and Republican parties. It is true that most, if not all the Hollywood Ten were
communists, the real issues, however, was not their membership in the Communist Party
but a free speech issue and whether these Ten and/or the rest of the CPUSA really
presented a clear and present danger to the nation. According to British political historian,
Archie Brown “Even at its highest point in the inter-war period –in 1939- membership of
the CPUSA did not rise above 75,000 people, ” a number that makes you wonder how
262
Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood Politics in the Film Community
193060, (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), p. xxiii.
263
Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition, p. xxiii.
264
Ceplair and Englund, The Inquisition, p. xxiii.
111
these few could endanger a nation of 130 million inhabitants.
265
More ludicrous still is the
fact that HUAC felt entitled to call Un-American these American citizens who lived by
the rule of law in a democratic system that considered their American citizenship an
inalienable right. The one thing Ring Lardner Jr., John Howard Lawson, Albert Maltz,
Dalton Trumbo and the other self-declared communists were morally and politically
guilty of, was to follow a strict Communist Party line and remain silent when the
atrocities of the Stalin regime in the USSR became public, but the House
Committee did not blame them for this.
In retrospect, as Ceplair and Englund write, “it would seem that the liberal charges
against the Hollywood Communists were largely substantiated by history, while the right
wing view--that Red film artists were subversives aiming to undermine first movies, then
the state and society--was profoundly erroneous and predetermined by the Right’s own
distorted political vision and agenda. By appearing as ‘agents of Moscow’ American
Communists only helped clear the path for the conservative-reactionary crusade; they did
not set it in motion or determine its course.”
266
Unfortunately, the Left came out of the
witch-hunt scared and divided, unable to present a united front to resist the rightwing
crusade that flooded the country with Harry Truman and the expansion of the imposition
of Loyalty Oaths on federal employees. Even though “Unity on the Left could not have
halted the anti-communist crusade,” as Ceplair and Englund, write, “but it may have
lessened the number of victims and the extent of victimization.”
267
265
Archie Brown, The Rise and Fall of Communism. (New York: Harper Collins, 2009), p. 96.
266
Ceplair and Englund, p. 244.
267
Ceplair and Englund, p. 244.
112
During his appearance before a subcommittee of the HUAC as a hostile witness,
Mann compared the charges against people in the Hollywood movie industry to the Nazi
persecutions and declared:
I have the honor to expose myself as a hostile
witness. I testify that I am very much interested in the
moving-picture industry and since my arrival in the United
States nine years ago I have seen a great many Hollywood
films. If communist propaganda had been smuggled into
them it must have been most thoroughly buried. I, for one,
never noticed anything of the sort. . . . As an American
citizen of German birth I finally testify that I am painfully
familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance,
political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all
this in the name of an alleged ‘state of emergency.’ . . .
That is how it started in Germany.
268
Mann also recorded his statement for the ABC series “Hollywood Fights Back.”
His testimony before HUAC is the most explicit public explanation of the similarities he
felt existed between Nazi Germany and the United States during the Cold War. His exiled
condition allowed him to trace the comparison because, as Edward Said has written “the
exile sees things both in terms of what has been left behind and what is actual here and
268
“Thomas Mann in America” Jeffrey Meyers. Michigan Quarterly Review, Volume 51, Issues 4,
Fall 2012, p. 6. http://hdl.handle.net/2027/spo.act2080.0051.419 See also Prater, Thomas Mann, p.
403.
113
now, there is a double perspective that never sees things in isolation”
269
. Said’s theory
provides part of the theoretical framework that will be exposed in chapter five in this
dissertation.
Also in 1947, Mann published what would be his last monumental novel, Dr.
Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend, a
magnum opus and an extremely complex and controversial novel that has been praised by
scholars like T.J. Reed as a masterpiece, and vilified by others like the New York Times
book critic Orville Prescott. For Reed, “Doktor Faustus attempts the impossible: to
encompass and explain the German catastrophe. What happened to Germany and what
was done by Germans under Hitler was horrible in such scale that it defies the resources
of artistic imagination to formulate it and perhaps even casts doubt on the possibility of
an adequate tragic art in modern times.”
270
For Prescott, the novel was a “clumsy, stilted
and wonderfully tedious” book.
271
Showing an overwhelming arrogant ignorance, in the
same review Prescott accused Mann of “lacking political understanding” and of being late
in recognizing the Nazi danger. Evidently Prescott was unaware that Mann had actively
opposed the Nazis ten years before they gained power, and did not understand why Mann
269
Edward W. Said, “Intellectual Exile: Expatriates and Marginals,” in Representations of the Intellectual
the 1993 Reith Lectures. (New York: Pantheon Books, 1994), p. 60.
270
T.J. Reed, Thomas Mann The Uses of Tradition, (Oxford At the Clarendon Press: Oxford University
Press, 1976,) p. 360.
271
Orville Prescott, New York Times Books of the Times, book review of Doctor Faustus the Life of the
German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend, by Thomas Mann, translated
by H.T. Lowe- Porter, October 29, 1948. Prescott, who was the New York Times book
critic for two decades also wrote that authors like William Faulkner, Graham Greene or
Vladimir Nabokov, among others, were “excessively overpraised whereas the work of
writers like John Hersey, Conrad Richter or John P. Marquand, who were “more
significant and truthful interpreters of life,” was under-appreciated.
114
was forced to choose between exile in America and the Dachau concentration camp in the
outskirts of Munich.
Regarding the controversial views of the novel, perhaps the best synthesis of its reception
was written by Dr. Ulrich Grothus, Deputy Secretary-General of the German Academic
Exchange Service (DAAD), on the sixtieth anniversary of its publication: “Doctor
Faustus may possibly have been the novel by Mann that was the most admired by many,
and the most resented by some.”
272
Begun in 1943 and finished in 1947, the novel is a
critique of modern bourgeois life in Germany and is also an allegory of the rise of the
National Socialist Party. Mann used the Faust legend to explore and contrast the cultural
history of Germany of the past five hundred years with the 1945 Nazi catastrophe. In a
plot that spans forty years, the novel juxtaposes a narrative of the life of a music
composer with news about the involvement of Germany in World War II. The book,
suggests Susan von Rohr Scaff in her essay on Dr. Faustus, is also a profound reflection
on music, which for Mann was the German art par excellence, on aesthetics, on
philosophy, and on suffering and isolation in the artist’s life.
273
Unsurprisingly, the initial
reception and criticism of the novel in Germany focused on the theme of the German
identity, “Early German reviewers saw in Doktor Faustus a work of hatred and a
besmirching of German culture. Non-German critics have sometimes seen the reverse--an
incorrigible love of German culture and a tragic apologia for its consequences.”
273
Susan von Rohr Scaff, "Doctor Faustus," in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas
Mann, ed. Ritchie Robertson (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 175.
115
1949 was a year of commendations and condemnations for Mann and his family.
The Munich press launched a brutal attack against Erika and Klaus accusing them of
being communists yet Thomas was selected as the recipient of the Goethe Prize in the two
cities that claim Goethe as their favorite son. The first was Frankfurt am Main, located in
what later that year would become West Germany; one week later it was Weimar, in the
Soviet controlled area that would become East Germany. This was an honor that carried
him through a minefield from which he would come out wounded and with a few scars,
but which led him through another political transformation in response to the times he
was living in. In between his two trips to Europe in 1947 and 1949,
“Mann’s political position shifted from one who spoke mainly about a democratic
Germany to one who was a strong proponent for international peace and cooperation.”
274
As he was preparing for the trip, Mann knew going to Soviet-occupied Germany
would be exploited politically. But he did not want to go to allied-occupied Germany
either because he feared it would imply a political stance to which he was not inclined. At
this time, there was no formal East Germany and West Germany. When he finally
decided to go, he chose to go to both sides of Germany because he wanted to show that
his attitude was evenly balanced between East and West. He knew that it would be
difficult because in America he was more and more regarded as pro-communist. By this
time, he confessed to his friend Agnes E. Meyer that his “hatred now for the Un-
American Activities Committee was almost as great as that he once had for Hitler”
275
274
Kenneth Marcus, “The international Relations of Thomas Mann in Early Cold War Germany,” De
Gruyter doi 10.51515/ngs-2014-007 New Global Studies 2014; B (1): 49-63, p. 49.
275
Donald Prater. Thomas Mann: a Life (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, USA) 1995, pp.
410 & 411.
116
First he would go to Frankfurt, where Goethe was born, and then to Weimar
where the poet spent most of his mature life. The occasion was the 200
th
anniversary of
Goethe’s death. West Germans accused him of being a communist or of being soft on
Communism but he was not a communist. He was a man of principle who refused to be
pushed into hysterical denunciations of Communism and into what he described as
“incitements to war.” He was also aware that accepting the invitation to go to Weimar
would “spoil everything in America.” While he was in Frankfurt, there was an insulting
infamous piece against him on the pages of the Frankfurter Allgemeine. This was nothing
new; Mann had been receiving vicious letters from Germany declaring him a traitor,
mostly because of his address at the Library of Congress, “Germany and the Germans,”
where he admitted he and his countrymen should feel guilt for the atrocities committed by
the Nazis. Eugene Kogon criticized him for going to Weimar and interpreted his visit as
an approval of Russian crimes against humanity. “I know that the emigrant does not
count for much in Germany,” Mann responded to Kogon and his numerous other
critics.
276
Everything Mann said and did during this trip, especially while in East
Germany went directly into his FBI dossier in America.
The Goethe-Weimar trip brought about more uncertainty to his already
complicated life. He decided he would not go back to live in Germany, but he also knew
that remaining in the United States would be more difficult every day. Why couldn’t he
go back to Germany? Evidently it was too painful for him to hear German conservatives
denouncing him with innuendos and lies. There were many other reasons but perhaps the
main was that “the abyss between the emigrant and his former home could no longer be
276
Kurzke, Thomas Mann, p. 510.
117
closed.” Another explanation would be that he did not believe the Germans had learned
the lesson and “all too often he got a glimpse of the fascist grimace under the festive
veneer.”
277
In America, meanwhile, the media, the extreme right and the FBI went after him.
Mann was aware that the FBI had had him under surveillance for quite some time, but he
did not know his dossier would come to contain “far more than a thousand items from the
years 1937 to 1954, of which until now only a small part, and this with blacked-out
names, has been released.”
278
Reportedly, Mann was also unhappy with the reviews of
his latest novel Dr. Faustus by the same American critics who had praised his other
novels. It was deemed “parochial,” full of “idioms and local linguistic divinities,” and
described as an excessive “German allegory.” Few critics in America saw it as perhaps
the best novel ever written on the theme of exile. They did not appreciate that the book
ended in 1945 prophesying a better and more democratic life. Few American critics
understood the novel was “the work of a German asking American questions about
Germany,”
279
wrote Anthony Heilbut.
In a letter to T.W. Adorno, who had left the U.S. and returned to Frankfurt to
teach at the Goethe University, Mann told him the Beverly Wilshire Hotel had refused to
rent a room to the Southern California Chapter, National Council of the Arts, Sciences
and Professions for a dinner where he would receive an award “for his distinguished
contribution as author and citizen to the advancement of peace, intellectual freedom and a
democratic culture.” The hotel justified its refusal to rent the room because a “communist
277
Prater, Thomas Mann, p. 512.
278
Kurzke, Thomas Mann, p. 518.
279
Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the
1930’s to the present. (Berkeley Los Angeles London: University of California Press, 1983), p. 314.
118
like doctor Mann was scheduled to speak at the event,” but the pressure from many
influential people finally made it reverse its decision allow the dinner and the award
ceremony to take place.
280
Perhaps the most brutal strike came in the spring of 1950 when the Librarian of
Congress Luther Evans, a recognized leader in the fight against censorship, and Agnes E.
Meyer urged Mann to cancel his annual lecture. Evans was under severe pressure from
Congress. Reportedly, the FBI showed Evans a dossier with supposedly incriminating
evidence drawn against Mann, particularly from his trip to East Germany to receive the
Goethe Prize of the city of Weimar.
281
Then, in 1951, Mann, Einstein and other exiles felt
betrayed when the U.S. government began negotiating with “the same bureaucrats that
had administered Hitler’s system”
282
to reorganize the “liberated Germany,” and
pardoned of their former enemies. “Our former friends had ganged up with murderers,”
wrote Mann,
283
when the General Act of Clemency of 1951 was signed.
Nothing better exemplifies the revulsion to the new arrangements between
Germany and the occupying allied forces than a response by Albert Einstein to one of the
many invitations he received to return to the “homeland.” In no uncertain terms, Einstein
responded “The crime of the Germans is truly the most abominable ever to be recorded in
the history of the so-called civilized nations.”
284
Mann followed suit declining a
directorial position at the famous Bayreuth Festival honoring Wagner, saying he would
not accept to be a part to any attempt to restore any “thoroughly fictitious purity”
280
Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, p. 314.
281
Wolfgang Elfe, James N. Hardin. The Fortunes of German Writers in America: Studies in Literary
Reception. (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press, 1991), p. 139.
282
Heilbut. Exiled, p. 328.
283
Heilbut. Exiled, p. 328.
284
Heilbut. Exiled, p. 329.
119
Meanwhile in the United States, as the country plunged deeper and deeper into the
Cold War, his bulging file at the FBI kept on growing after his 1949 trip to Soviet-
occupied Germany, and Mann became a preferred target for the conservative press in the
United States for his association with world peace movements. The unwarranted attacks
against him in the American press were reminiscent of those he suffered in Germany in
the 1930s by journalists linked to the Nazi propaganda ministry.
In April 1949, Life Magazine published “Red Visitors Cause Rumpus,” a piece
that described Mann and Einstein, along with playwrights Lillian Hellman and Arthur
Miller, novelist Norman Mailer, actor and director Charles Chaplin, literary critic
Dorothy Parker, and other intellectuals as “fellow travellers” and “communist dupes.”
The basis for the accusation was their participation in a Conference of World Peace
celebrated in New York the month before. But this would not be the only time the Henry
R. Luce publications, Time and Life attacked Mann, and his magazines would not be the
only ones feeding the Second Red Scare. “It seemed” wrote Hans Vaget, “with the
denunciation in Life Magazine in April 1949, open season had been declared on him.”
285
Another scholar, Jeffrey Meyers suggests that Mann “mistakenly thought that in
the democracy that had just defeated fascism he was free to express his own beliefs (as
guaranteed by the Constitution), oppose the anticommunist witch-hunts led by Joseph
McCarthy, Richard Nixon and Henry R. Luce and work for world peace.”
286
Did Mann
really misjudge the consequences of being outspoken as Meyers suggests? Or were his
words and acts living proof that he had learned from his experience in Germany never to
285
Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Hoover’s Mann: Gleanings from the FBI’s Secret File on Thomas Mann” in The
Fortunes of German Writers in America: Studies in Literary Reception, Edited by Wolfgang Elfe and
James N. Hardin, and Gunther Holst. (Columbia, South Carolina: University of South Carolina Press,
1992), p. 141.
286
Meyers, “Thomas Mann in America,” p. 8.
120
be silent anymore? His words and his actions until the day of his death seem to confirm
the latter.
From 1949 to 1951, a sinister, mysterious free-lance ‘journalist’ named Eugene
Tillinger launched a furious campaign against Mann. The first piece was entitled “The
Moral Eclipse of Thomas Mann,” published in December of 1949 in the belligerent
anticommunist journal Plain Talk. The piece derided Mann as “America’s fellow traveler
No. 1.” For Tillinger, Mann’s closeness to former Vice President and presidential
candidate Henry A. Wallace, his support of the World Peace Conference celebrated in
New York in March 1949, and his trip to Weimar that same year
287
were sufficient proof
of his communist leanings. Upon reading the disturbingly biased piece, once again Mann
responded swiftly and firmly.
I am not a communist and never have been one.
Neither am I a ‘fellow traveler,’ nor could I ever be one where
the destination was totalitarianism. I felt it an honor and joy to
become a citizen of this country. But hysterical, irrational,
and blind hatred of Communism represents a danger to
America far more terrible than native
Communism. Indeed, the persecution mania and the mania to
persecute that we have succumbed to and that we seem on
the point of surrendering ourselves to, body and soul-these
cannot lead to anything good. Unless we change our course
287
Kurzke, Thomas Mann, p.. 515. See also Prater, Thomas Mann p. 424.
121
immediately they will surely lead from bad to worse. That is
something, which on this occasion has to be said.
288
FBI documents show that Tillinger sent this article to “My dear Mr. Hoover.” “It
seems,” wrote scholar Hans Vaget, “he wanted to make certain that the ‘Boss’ knew of
his good work, for he eagerly offered more of his services.”
289
In 1950, Congress passed the McCarran Internal Security Act, which required that
all “subversives” in the United States submit to government supervision. Although
President Truman vetoed the Act arguing it would make a mockery of the Bill of Rights, a
Congressional majority overrode his veto. The same year, Senator Joseph McCarthy gave
his famous speech where he declared that he had a list of 205 known members of the
Communist Party who were “working and shaping policy” in the State Department.
Mann believed these accusations were part of a pattern that included the political
pressures to go to war in Korea and the confrontations with Communism in Europe and
within America. He thought these political developments were undermining and
weakening the foundations of the American democratic system he had so much admired.
He even began to believe there was a similarity between what McCarthy was intent on
creating in the United States and Stalin had already created in the Soviet Union. Mann
felt that since the death of Roosevelt the boors were back in the White House and in the
academy and felt an oppressive loneliness. His isolation, compelled by American ill
wishes, only confirmed his Germanness. “We poor Germans! We are fundamentally
lonely, even when we are famous! No one really likes us.”
290
288
Mann Letters, p. 613.
289
Hans Rudolf Vaget, “Hoover’s Mann,” p. 141.
290
Mann, Letters, p. 637.
122
In America, he had been flattered as the representative of another, decent
Germany, but with the rise of McCarthyism, he began to feel increasingly unwelcome.
The next article written by Tillinger appeared in The Freeman, another FBI-sponsored
publication, in March of 1951.
291
The piece denounced Mann as a member of the
American Peace Crusade, which protested the war in Korea and demanded the admission
into the United Nations of the People’s Republic of China. Tillinger wrote the Crusade
was a communist front, and although some of its members were indeed communists,
there were others like Mann, scientist Linus Pauling, Bertrand Russell and Albert Einstein
who were active in the organization and were not communists but pacifists.
Tillinger also accused Mann of denying he had signed the Stockholm Peace Appeal
(which Mann had in fact signed) that called for a ban on Nuclear Weapons. It is true that
the Communist Party of the Soviet Union sponsored the WPC and that most of the
participants were communists, but not all and certainly, not Mann. And on April 15,
1951, Mann’s name appeared in the front page of the Los Angeles Times, along with 39
other people identified by HUAC as being affiliated with communist front organizations.
The accusations stemmed from Mann’s signing of the Stockholm Appeal. Tillinger wrote
two more articles against Mann and Time Magazine and Life, both published by Henry R.
Luce, would reproduce faithfully every single attack against him. “We are probably safe
to assume,” wrote Professor Vaget, “that both publications fed from the same secret
source of confidential information.”
292
291
Tillinger, “Thomas Mann’s Left Hand,” Freeman, 1, no13, March 26, 1951, pp. 397-98.
292
Vaget, “Hoover’s Mann,” p.142
123
In A Double Edged Sword, Seymour Martin Lipset tells the story of a debate that
took place in Great Britain’s House of Commons in 1940 between the furiously anti-
Communist Prime Minister Winston Churchill and a group of parliamentarians who
wanted to outlaw the British Communist Party. Horrified with the proposal, Churchill
said, “as far as he knew, the Communist Party was composed of Englishmen and he did
not fear an Englishman.”
293
“In Europe nationality is related to community,” Lipset wrote in the same book,
“and thus one cannot become un-English or un-Swedish. Being an American, however, is
an ideological commitment. It is not a matter of birth. Those who reject American values
are un-American.” And “this,” adds Lipset, gives “vivid evidence to the difference
between a national identity rooted in history and one defined by ideology.”
294
The reference to this incident in the House of Commons that Lipset narrates is the
infamous House Committee of Un-American Activities created to investigate alleged
disloyalty and subversive practices of American citizens and which ended up declaring
un-American a selected group of people that had been born on American soil. But Lipset
failed to include a fact that Mann knew quite well. In Nazi Germany, nationality was also
an ideological commitment, and Thomas Mann was one of the first victims of the Nazis’
ideological excesses when the Party’s hierarchy that had appropriated the anti-Semitic
musician as a symbol of both Nazism and Germany declared Mann un-German for
writing an essay on Wagner considered sacrilegious.
Mann was not a communist, but he was sympathetic to the idea of democratic
293
Seymour Martin Lipset, A Double Edged Sword. (New York: W.W. Norton, 1997), p. 31.
294
Lipset, A Double Edged Sword, p. 31.
124
socialism. "I am neither a dupe nor a fellow traveler," he wrote to a correspondent who
had expressed concern that Mann might be a communist, "and by no means an admirer of
the quite malicious present phase of the Russian revolution. But I consider a war between
the United States and Soviet Russia a horrible catastrophe with immeasurable
consequences for the entire civilization; it would certainly forever destroy the very things
America pretends to be fighting for."
295
Furthermore, it should also be remembered that in the 1920s and 1930s, Mann,
Spanish philosopher Ortega y Gasset, and other liberal intellectuals “had rejected Fascism
and Communism as anathema to European culture.”
296
In Cold War America, Mann was
convinced that the unfurling of the anticommunist flag in Congress and in the White
House were a betrayal of American ideals like freedom from persecution, freedom of
thought and association, the right for due process and the rule of law, and worried that the
threat of Fascism in America was real.
Mann was not the only person who felt the United States of America stood at the
verge of the fascist catastrophe in those anguishing years. In his last State of the Union
Address, president Franklin Delano Roosevelt said:
“One of the great American industrialists of our day-a man
who has rendered yeoman service to his country in this
crisis-recently emphasized the dangers of ‘rightist reaction’
in this nation. All clear thinking businessmen share his
concern. Indeed, if such reaction should develop-if history
295
Thomas Mann, Letters of Thomas Mann 1889-1955, Selected and Translated by Richard & Clara
Winston. (Berkeley Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1970), p. 412
296
Peter Gordon Mann, Vital Humanism: Thomas Mann, José Ortega y Gasset, and The Revolt Against
Decadence in Self-Nation-Europe, 1900-1949. PhD diss. Stanford University, July 2012, p.376.
125
were to repeat itself and we were to return to the so-called
‘normalcy’ of the 1920s--then it is certain that even though
we shall have conquered our enemies on the battlefields
abroad, we shall have yielded to the spirit of Fascism,”
297
In the 1950s, Mann felt unwelcome in his adopted land; invitations began to be
withdrawn, and Mann, believing the Cold War had poisoned America, began to prepare
for a second exile back to Zürich, Switzerland.
297
Franklin D. Roosevelt, “State of the Union Address,” 11 January 1944. Accessed March 26,
2017 http://www.thisnation.com/library/sotu/1944fdr.html
126
Chapter 5
“Déjà vu: the birth of the Cold War”
After fleeing the Nazis and battling Hitler’s brand of totalitarianism, in 1951
Mann found himself enmeshed in the equally vile political world of Senator Joseph
McCarthy and his rabid anti-Communist crusade. Mann and his friend Albert Einstein
were genuinely concerned that the political events of the time presaged a new world
conflict. Their most immediate worries were the continuation of the war in Korea; the
resumption of the House Un-American Activities Committee’s investigations into
communist influence in Hollywood; the convictions of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg for
conspiring to steal atomic secrets for the Soviet Union; the exclusion of Communist
China from the United Nations, and the activation of the Clemency that allowed the
United States government to negotiate “with the same bureaucrats that had administered
Hitler’s system,” as Mann wrote.
298
Both Einstein and Mann found this arrangement
repulsive and as the invitations to return to the “homeland,” multiplied, Einstein felt
obliged to issue an unequivocal response to explain his refusal to go back: “The crime of
the Germans is truly the most abominable ever to be recorded in the history of the
socalled civilized nations.”
299
Following suit, Mann declined a directorial position at the
famous Bayreuth Festival honoring Wagner, saying he would not accept to be a part of
any attempt to restore any “thoroughly fictitious purity.”
300
Mann and Einstein were not the only ones concerned with the political
developments in postwar Europe, more than 600 intellectuals from 48 countries who
298
Anthony Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals in America from the
1930’s to the present. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1983), p. 329.
299
Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, p. 329.
300
Heilbut, Exiled in Paradise, p. 329.
127
gathered in Warsaw that year, also demanded peace and issued a denunciation of
“American imperialism.” The World Congress of Intellectuals in Defense of Peace was
an event sponsored by the Soviet Union and counted among its attendees, communists
like Pablo Picasso and Bertolt Brecht, but it also attracted non-communist intellectuals
like English novelist Aldous Huxley, his brother scientist Julian Huxley and French
philosopher Julien Benda. Mann signed a support letter to the Committee for Peaceful
Alternatives, he also supported the American Peace Crusade led by scientist Linus
Pauling, two actions that would soon come back to haunt him in the heat of the Cold War.
Also in America there were individuals and groups that believed the U.S. was
getting involved in another worldwide conflagration and opposed the growing role of the
military industrial complex. The demands for peace in America echoed not only in
intellectual circles but also in non-ideological American movies like the “Day the Earth
Stood Still.” A popular, film directed by Robert Wise with a straightforward anti-military
message and in favor of world peace that nonetheless raised suspicions among cold-war
warriors like the Los Angeles Times reviewer who wrote the film contained “certain
subversive elements,” he considered disturbing.
301
Early in February, The New York Times published a brief note on the planned
march to Washington of an organization called the “American Peace Crusade,” and listed
Mann as one of the members of the group, along with singer Paul Robeson, author
Howard Fast, and several union leaders. Given the anti-communist hysteria of the time,
Alfred Knopf and other friends of Mann who were truly concerned to see his name
associated with well-known communists warned him these associations could endanger
301
“The Day the Earth Stood Still: The Cold War Sci-Fi Parable That Fell to Earth,”- The Los Angeles
Times. October 31, 2008, retrieved from the newspaper’s archives 4/1/17.
128
his residency in the United States. Fearing Mann might lose his passport and perhaps
even his citizenship, Knopf told him: “I should think that you would keep away from
anything that involves even the name of Paul Robeson as you would from the Bubonic
Plague.”
302
Believing that reason would prevail over the prevalent irrational Cold War fever,
Mann wrote a letter to The New York Times “explaining how he had been drawn into this,
in ignorance of the communist wire-pulling behind it.”
303
He also mentioned the names of
his true associates, among them Philip Morrison, a nuclear physicist at Cornell who was
not a communist. He sent the letter to Knopf hoping he would forward it to The New York
Times but Knopf never sent it convinced that it was best to let the issue die peacefully. He
did not, however, inform Mann about his decision. As weeks passed by and the Times
would not publish his letter, Mann learnt his letter was never sent to the newspaper and
became furious with Knopf for having kept him in the dark. Yet, as painful as the episode
was, Mann understood that in the 1950s being associated with communism in the United
States was toxic to any effort towards peace in the world. In an attempt to let the issue
die-down his daughter Erika wrote, in his name, a declaration for the United Press saying,
“I am convinced that any peace movement generally believed to be communist inspired
or controlled is bound to hurt rather than help the cause of peace in this country.”
304
As soon as this controversy subsided, new attacks against him were launched in a
tabloid publication sponsored by the FBI called The Freeman, as well as mainstream
publications like the Los Angeles Times and Time Magazine. In an April letter to his
302
Ronald Hayman, Thomas Mann A Biography (New York: Scribner, 1995), p. 579.
303
Donald Prater, Thomas Mann: A Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1955), p. 446.
304
Prater, Thomas Mann, p. 446.
129
friend Erich von Kahler, Mann told him he was “nothing but a bundle of nerves,
trembling at every thought and word. Only yesterday I let myself break down and weep
listening to the Lohengrin prelude-simply in reaction to all the baseness.” And adding
proof of his hopeless despair he continued, “Have people ever had to inhale so poisoned
an atmosphere, one so utterly saturated with idiotic baseness? We live in a world of doom
from which there is no longer any escaping.”
305
Resorting to the “Are you crazy”
anecdote circulating among some German exiles in the United States, Mann told von
Kahler the time to leave the United States and return to Europe had arrived for him.
306
Given the choice between Switzerland and the United States, concluded Mann, “It seems
to me that in general the European mentality does not come up to the barbarous
infantilism we have here.”
307
A sad, yet ironic commentary from a man that had learned
to love democracy reading Whitman and hearing Roosevelt speak and now was yearning
to escape the United States seeking democracy in a European continent that had just
recently learned to live in democracy.
On June 20, Donald Jackson, the Republican Representative who replaced
Richard Nixon on the House Un-American Activities Committee, denounced Mann as
“one of the world’s foremost apologists for Stalin and company. Politically, Mr. Mann
indicates a preference for those in the far left, and he rarely misses an opportunity to
eulogize the mental strait-jacket performances of fellow apologists.”
308
Ironically,
305
Letter dated April 23, 1951, in Letters of Thomas Mann 1889-1955, Selected and Translated by Richard
& Clara Winston, (Berkeley Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1975,) p. 437.
306
Ibid. The “Are You Crazy” anecdote was a joke popular among European exiles about a friend
sailing from New York to Europe and another in the opposite direction. As their ships pass on the high
seas they recognize one another and both cry out simultaneously in horror: “Have you gone crazy?”
307
Mann, Letters, p. 437.
308
Ronald Hayman, Thomas Mann, p. 585.
130
Johnson’s diatribe was motivated by a note Mann wrote to celebrate the sixtieth birthday
of Johannes Becher, a poet, critic, editor and politician affiliated with the German
Communist Party who, forced into exile, went to Moscow but returned to Germany in
1945 having grown disillusioned with Stalin.
On a fourth trip to postwar Europe Mann and Katia visited their old and very dear
friend Herman Hesse in Castagnola, a Swiss village in the northern shore of Lake
Lugano. In one of their many conversations Hesse commented on what he deemed the
falsity of American idealism, a strong statement that reinforced Mann’s conviction that
the United States of Whitman and Roosevelt had gone awry. Right then, Mann’s search
for a house in Switzerland began in earnest as new crises kept exploding in the Mann
household. Son Michael, a talented musician who was having an affair with Yalta
Menuhin, sister of violinist Yehudi Menuhin, became violent during a quarrel and hurt
her seriously. Katia became ill with cystitis, Thomas was depressed, and Erika developed
incurable insomnia and was in very poor health. She was breaking up under the strain of
successive humiliations by FBI officials who rudely questioned her on whether she was a
member of the Communist Party and/or a paid Stalinist agent.
The Mann family was not, by any means, the only German exiled community
members worried with being investigated by U.S. authorities. The FBI had files on more
than 200 German-speaking writers living in Los Angeles and some of the most prominent
ones fled back to Europe, among them Bertolt Brecht, T. W. Adorno, Alfred Döblin,
Erich Maria Remarque and composer Hanns Eisler, who frequently visited Mann seeking
protection from deportation. Eisler statement on leaving the United States on March 27,
1948 expresses the feeling of aggravation and impotence many exiles had facing HUAC.
131
“I leave this country not without bitterness and infuriation. I could well understand it
when in 1933 the Hitler bandits put a price on my head and drove me out. They were the
evil of the period; I was proud of being driven out. But I feel heartbroken over being
driven out of this beautiful country in this ridiculous way.”
309
Towards the end of his
statement, Eisler re-enforced the sense common among the exiles that were driven out of
the country by fascism:
My trouble started when I was subpoenaed a witness
before the House Committee on Un-American
Activities. I listened to the talk and the questions of these
men and I saw their faces. As an old antifascist it became
plain to me that these men represent fascism in its most
direct form, that they represent the ignorance and
barbarism, which could lead to a new war. I was against
them. There is a limit to the patience of an artist*
Other exiles, Heinrich Mann, Franz Werfel, Bruno Frank died in America between
1945 and 1950. Lion Feuchtwanger lived in Pacific Palisades in his Villa Aurora under
the scrutiny of the FBI, accused of being a “premature antifascist,” until his death in
1958. Having arrived to the U.S. in 1943, He never travelled outside the U.S. fearing he
would not be allowed back in. He was granted American citizenship one day after his
death. The reach of the FBI extended to Mexico, where a small group of German-
speaking communists, approximately 60 writers and scholars, among them German writer
309
Eislermusic.com http://eislermusic.com/depart.htm 1 . * same source
132
Anna Seghers, Austrian and Czech travel writer Egon Erwin Kisch, Ludwig Renn, a
nobleman from the Royal Court of Saxony in Dresden who became a devoted
communist, Bodo Uhse, who joined the Communist Party of Germany after being the
editor of a Nazi newspaper in Ingolstadt and fought in the Spanish Civil War as a member
of the International Brigades against Francisco Franco, and the intriguing Stalin spy
André Simone, who used 21 pseudonyms including Otto Katz, had found refuge. Mann
was in a very pessimistic mood when he made the decision in early December 1951 to
sell his house in Pacific Palisades: “Almost all my memories are painful, and the future
seems to have only failure in store. If I am going to Switzerland it is not to live there but
to die there,” wrote Mann in his diary.
310
Unwilling to write an overtly political essay articulating a critical vision of the
United States and feeling a deep nostalgia for Europe, Mann relied on a novel,
Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, to express both visions through one of its
characters, Ken Keaton. Ken is an American who dislikes the greedy attitude of his
compatriots, detests what he believes is a faked religiousness, and despises their
ignorance of history and their contradictory cult of mediocrity and worship of success.
Touching upon a topic also observed by other German exiles like T. W. Adorno and
Bertolt Brecht, Mann sensed a peculiar emptiness in the American landscape, an evident
divorce between rural and urban and an ahistorical characteristic in its cities. “Though
there are magnificent landscapes in the United States, there’s nothing behind them.
American cities look as if they were put up yesterday and might be taken away tomorrow,
while in museums the cultural treasures all come from Europe.” In his analysis of the
310
Hayman, Thomas Mann, p. 591.
133
Confessions, Hayman writes that Ken, the American character, “loves French Cathedrals,
Italian palazzi, Swiss villages, oak tables in German inns, and ancient cities in the
Rhineland.” Ken’s comments, which obviously reflect what Mann missed during his
fourteen years of voluntary exile from Europe, provides a partial list of the reasons why
Mann wanted to return to Europe.
311
In 1951, Mann, who was 75 years old, had followed the unusual political path of
going from a very conservative position to a very progressive one, more left-wing than the
“moderate liberal” that Goethe said every sensible person should become in his old age.
In his essay “Thomas Mann and Politics,” Hans Eichner reminds us that in the 1970s
Mann was attacked in some Leftists circles for being conservative. It would fair to say
that Mann was very conservative in 1916 when he wrote Considerations of an Unpolitical
Man, and he could also be accused of resorting to sweeping generalities criticizing the
German people, but “he always did what his conscience dictated, and not what served his
own interests…. He spoke against the Nazis when you risked your life doing so. He
argued for a détente with Russia when the Communist witch hunt in the United States was
under way.”
312
And as Eisner concludes in his essay, Mann was not only one of the great
masters of the German prose but “upright and a gentleman…[and] a great man.”
When news of Mann’s decision to leave America and return to Europe was leaked
to a newspaper in Munich, Echo der Woche, it was rumored that his decision was
motivated by the persecution he was suffering by the House Un-American Activities
311
Hayman, Thomas Mann, p. 593.
312
Hans Eichner, “Thomas Mann and Politics,” Thomas Mann Ein Kolloquium, (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag
Herbert Grundman, 1978), p. 19.
134
Committee and by the lack of support from some of his spineless but unnamed friends.
Mann reacted to the speculation immediately and denied harboring anti-American
feelings. Unconvincingly, he said he intended to work in Europe for a year or two and
comeback to the United States. The truth, however, was that Mann had very mixed
feelings about the United States; he was fed up with the political persecution against him
and felt annoyed with the American way of life. At the same time, he was also terrified of
becoming stateless again if he spoke ill of the country and the American authorities
decided to withdraw his passport. “Mann,” writes Hayman, “now found it embarrassing
to travel with an American passport, and Erika grew increasingly bitter and irritable
whenever the conversation came back to the United States.”
313
Finally, on June 24, 1952, Thomas and Katia Mann left their house in Pacific
Palisades and five days later flew from New York to Europe; they would never return to
the U.S. A few days before their departure, in a letter to Herman Hesse, Mann quoted
from a letter sent by Goethe to geographer, explorer, scientist Baron Alexander von
Humboldt describing his view of the state of world affairs in 1832: “The world is
governed by confusing doctrines that make for confused actions”…. That’s how it is
today, and still worse, it seems to me, more dangerous and more difficult for a thinking
man to maintain an attitude of decency and to hold his own against the absurd, confused
powers of the day.”
314
Stricto sensu, the analogy Mann makes between a revolutionary year like 1832
and Cold War 1952 sounds imprecise, but it does reveal the anguish he felt in the 1950s.
313
Eichner, Thomas Mann, p. 19
314
The Hesse/Mann Letters, Edited by Anni Carlsson and Volker Michels, Introduction by Pete Hamill,
Foreword by Theodore Ziolkowski (New York, New York: Jorge Pinto Books Inc, 1975), p. 151.
135
The 1830s were years of revolution and repression. In Poland there was the Cadet
Revolution against the Russian Empire that was brutally crushed. In Belgium, Belgian
revolutionaries fought against Dutch forces and were defeated. In Germany, during the
Hambach Festival citizens rebelled against the dukes of Austria and the electors of
Brandenburg demanding democracy but failed in their attempt. In France, the barricades
built in Paris during the June rebellion against the monarchy lasted two days. In Italy, the
Austrian army crushed the Ciro Menotti revolution. In Switzerland, the 1832 peaceful
assemblies of common citizens lead to the amendment of the Constitution incorporating
the citizens’ demands.
From the end of World War II until his death in 1955, Mann fought against “the
confusing doctrines that make for confused actions,” with the tools of the intellectual, his
pen and his eloquence. In his lucid essays he exposed the dangers of confused doctrines
and action. He felt the chilling effects of political repression and, like the 1832 electors of
Brandenburg, he rebelled against the undemocratic maneuvers of HUAC and McCarthy
and the relocation of former Nazis in the post war German government. In the 1950s, the
hostility between communist regimes and anti-communist governments led to a war in
Korea and disputes, threats and conflicts elsewhere. In the 50s, however, there were no
revolutionary movements against autocratic governments.
During the initial months of the second exile in Switzerland the Mann family
experienced very tense moments. Thomas and Katia were having myriad medical
problems--he was losing weight and was unable to take his daily walks, and Katia was ill
with cystitis. On the other hand, Erika, who was in a depressive state realizing how her
career had disintegrated, found being in Europe invigorating and became translator,
136
secretary, interpreter, driver, and personal assistant to her father. Fortunately for the
family, once in a while there was good news. In October, during a reading from Felix
Krull at the Schauspielhaus in Munich, Mann was deeply moved by the applause and the
cheers from the audience asking him to come back to the motherland. He was so stirred
by the reception of his countrymen that when Hans Ludwig Held, the director of the civic
library offered him a house if he would be willing to comeback, he felt half-inclined to
accept the invitation. Yet, his health deteriorated when he learned General Dwight D.
Eisenhower had won the presidency of the United States. Not only did he distrust the
military, but also was dismayed at the idea of losing his American citizenship and thus
avoided giving controversial answers to questions by journalists about America. When
asked to share his views on newly imposed restrictions on freedom in the United States,
he would answer that the threats American democracy was facing demanded certain
limitations. At the same time, fearing he would be cited by the HUAC, Mann determined
he would pursue Swiss nationality and give up his American citizenship. The last months
of 1952 were, for the most part, agonizing for Mann due to his poor health and the
uncertainties about his present and future. In spite of it all, Mann would say he was glad
to have left the “air-conditioned nightmare”
315
behind him. Curiously, Mann was not the
only German exile who characterized the United States as an “air conditioned nightmare,”
his brother Heinrich used it before Thomas did, and also Theodor W. Adorno in his essay
on Brave New World, the Aldous Huxley novel. Huxley, writes Adorno, describes life in
the New World as a “conditioned” society. “The panacea that guarantees social stasis is
‘conditioning….’ Conditioning of a community where there are no individual differences,
315
Hayman, Thomas Mann, p. 600.
137
everything is standardized because the environment has been conditioned, as in air-
conditioning.”
316
By the end of January, 1953, Mann had received a letter from Paul Hoffman, The
New York Times correspondent in Geneva, Switzerland asking for an interview or an
article “on the realities and dangers in the current trend of American policy toward
restriction or entry and investigation (and castigation) of non-conformist opinion in all
walks of life- everything in short that will be suggested to you by the names McCarthy
and McCarran.”
317
As Chairman of the Senate Internal Security Subcommittee, Nevada
Senator Patrick McCarran was responsible for the act that obliged aliens to register, a
requirement that made it harder for political suspects to obtain visas. After some initial
hesitations over whether to answer the letter or not, Mann did write an answer prefacing it
with a caveat, it would have to remain “confidential and strictly off the record.”
318
Erika translated the letter into English but pleaded with him not to send it. She feared
Hoffman would not keep it confidential. Agnes Meyer also advised him not to send it and
Mann agreed not to send it but he did not destroy it either.
In the letter, two impeccably typewritten pages on thin onion paper; Mann told
Hoffman he ‘withdrew’ to Switzerland to keep intellectual and spiritual distance from
current affairs. At his advanced age, he wrote, he wanted to devote time to his artistic
work. Yet he described the last years of his stay in the US as mostly unfortunate: “If
during the latter part of my 15 year’s stay in the US, I occasionally ventured through my
316
Theodor W. Adorno, Prisms cultural criticism and Society Spengler, Huxley, Kafka, Proust,
Schoenberg, Jazz, etc. Translated from the German by Samuel and Sherry Weber. (London: Neville
Spearman, 1967), p. 100
317
I read the original letter at the Thomas Mann Archives at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology in
Zürich during two visits to the archives in July 30
th
2012, and in September 10, 2014.
318
Thomas Mann Archives.
138
words critically and warningly to interfere with what I deemed a fatal development, I
earned little thank and much hatred, persecution and pain.”
319
He also complained that during that period of time not even the liberal press
defended him, a situation that he felt was comparable to what had happened to him in
Germany in 1933, when the German press viciously attacked him. He expressed an
special rancor against The New York Times for publishing a piece that, in Mann’s words,
“distorts the meaning of a meeting with respectable and well-known people who had a
gathering to promote peace, and paints it like a communist conspiracy headed by Paul
Robeson who had just returned from Moscow.”
320
Having read both the letter Mann wrote and the short piece in The New York
Times, one could conclude that Mann was over reacting. The Times piece is informative
and does not express an opinion. The problem for Mann was that the piece associated his
name to well known communists like Robeson, Howard Fast, Philip Morrison, unionists
Hugh Bryson, Ben Gold, Abram Flaxer, Fred Stover, and communist sympathizers like
artist Rockwell Kent and Elmer A. Benson, a former governor of Minnesota who called
Hubert Humphrey a “war criminal,” but justified Stalin’s crimes. In Cold War America it
was dangerous to be associated with progressives. Mann felt so persecuted by the
American press that it seems he was unable to make a distinction between Time
Magazine, the Los Angeles Times, The New York Times and trashy, corrupt tabloid
319
In this quote, as in many others translated from the German, the syntax seems awkward but nonetheless
understandable.
320
. http://query.nytimes.com/mem/archive- Retrieved from the newspaper on February 1, 1951.
free/pdf?res=9E01E6D71431E333A05752C0A9649C946092D6CF
139
publications like The New Leader or The Freeman. Although sometimes, it must be said,
it was really hard to notice the difference among them.
The truly important point of Mann’s response to the New York Times
correspondent letter was that Mann touched upon a vital subject for him, exile, a topic
that will be further developed in the following chapter, and which has to do with how past
occurrences affect the perceptions of the exiled: “My German experiences” wrote
Mann, “of which I feel continuously reminded render me pessimistic and thus make me
the wrong man for that interview or that article. We are, I am afraid, moving on a road
with stops no longer permitted.” He goes a point further expressing his disappointment
with America, saying he felt “the decline of American democracy points toward war,
whilst the threat of war serves to justify oppression of freedom of opinion and
compulsory conformism.” He accused American radio stations of being silent on the
Korean War and complained about the servile attitudes of European governments
regarding the subject. He compared the future of the United States to the country
portrayed in George Orwell’s novel 1984. “But even if an all out war should be avoided,
a condition will probably emerge as, in his “1984” the Englishman Orwell described and
pictured with uncanny foresight.” Mann seemed convinced the United States would
become a fascist state and made a dire prediction about an undignified future for The New
York Times: “Should, as it must, the Machtergreifung [rise to power] be completed, your
great newspaper would indubitably adapt itself to the facts [sich auf den Boden der
Tatsachen stellen] it would get away with it and save its life. But I?” At 77 years of age,
it was evident he did not want to experience again what he had been through when he was
60. “Expatriation and total deprivation, surely I need not need to provoke all this. I
140
shudder at the thought of uselessly unleashing irrational hatred and screaming persecution
against myself.” He ended the letter saying he would devote the rest of his life “to the
service of occidental civilization.” After finishing the letter to Hoffman he wrote a shorter
version of it, but never sent either one.
In spite of his poor health, Mann continued traveling throughout Europe meeting
famous people like Pope Pius XII and Jawaharlal Nehru, and receiving honors and
awards. The audience with the pope was especially significant for Mann mainly for two
reasons: the splendor of the Catholic liturgy that, according to Mann, had an enormous
aesthetic value and his contempt for Martin Luther and the dullness of the rituals of the
Reformation. When he was twenty years old, Thomas and his brother Heinrich took their
first trip to Italy, and for the next three years he would live on and off in Venice,
Palestrina, Florence and mainly Rome. “I was fond of visiting San Pietro, when Cardinal
Rampolla, the Secretary of State read the mass in pompous humility. He was an
extraordinary decorative personality, and for reasons of aesthetics I regretted that his
elevation to pope would be hindered diplomatically.”
321
Albeit Mann was not Catholic,
his enthrallment with the style and elegance of the rites of the Catholic Church, contrasted
sharply with the revulsion he felt for the “ridiculous, dissembling, estranged form art,
without imagination and without understanding,” features of the Protestant clergy. His
Manichean vision of the two churches would prevail throughout his life.
321
Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann Life As a Work of Art A Biography, translated by Leslie Willson.
(Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2002), p. 84. Cardinal Mariano Rampolla was the
Vatican Secretary of State in 1903, and would have been elected pope if Austro-Hungarian Emperor Franz
Joseph had not vetoed him. He was by far the most popular candidate.
141
He also felt a complete fascination with the figure of the pope, “I feel a fraternal
sympathy not easy to explain,” he writes. He even writes a papal novel, The Holy Sinner.
Given these antecedents it was no surprise that his audience with Pope Pius XII meant so
much for him. The audience happened on April 29, and Mann describes it with exuberant
emotion: “A most moving and most intense experience that curiously continues to have
an effect upon me.” They talked about Rome, “the city where one wandered through
centuries”; about Germany and its expected reunification; about Wartburg, the Castle that
gave refuge to the exiled Martin Luther and where he translated the New Testament into
German and the Palace on the top of the hill where Richard Wagner’s Tannhäuser lost the
singing contest that sent him into Venus’ arms. At the end of the audience, Mann kissed
the ring of the Fisherman and the pope complimented him for his work.
322
An interesting question is whether Mann in 1953 was aware of the accusations
against Pope Pius XII of being Hitler’s Pope? Pius XII was accused of being complicit in
the genocide of Jews. However, diplomatic documents found by Charles R. Gallagher, a
Jesuit historian and a former police officer, at the John F. Kennedy Presidential Library in
2003, present a different story. They show that Cardinal Pacelli wrote memorandums to
the United States Ambassador Joseph P. Kennedy in 1939, criticizing the Nazis and the
Austrian bishops who supported the Nazi occupying forces in their country. In one of
them, Pacelli wrote that “‘evidence of good faith’ by the Nazi regime was 'completely
lacking' and that 'the possibility of an agreement' with the Nazis was 'out of question for
the time being.'”
323
The documents, writes the reporter interviewing a Professor of
322
Kurzke, Thomas Mann, p. 85.
323
Laurie Goldstein, “New Look at Pius XII’s Views of the Nazis”, The New York Times, August 31, 2003,
reprieved from the newspaper’s archive on May 30, 2017.
142
religious studies and history at the University of Virginia, “have been in the public
domain for nearly 50 years, but that Mr. Gallagher was the first to find a copy that proved
it had been sent to the White House.” To talk about collusion between the Vatican and
Hitler seems far-fetched but it is true that Pacelli and the Vatican did not use the big
pulpit they had to denounce the horrors of the Holocaust.
The second important meeting between Mann and a revered public personality
took place a month later at Cambridge, England, where Mann and Indian Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru received honorary doctorates. Mann had the rare distinction of holding
doctorates from both Oxford and Cambridge. On their return to London by train, Mann
and Nehru exchanged ideas and anxieties about the state of world affairs. Nehru, in the
eyes of Mann was the best and the wisest of contemporary statesmen. Four years before
this encounter, Mann met Nehru for the first time in San Francisco, California and was
very impressed with his wisdom. It seems evident that in those difficult years of the Cold
War, Mann saw in Nehru a role model, a strong and wise statesman who refused to take
sides between the United States and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics, and sought
an independent third way.
On his 79
th
birthday, he looked back on his life and found that although there were
moments of despair and anguish, he felt the journey was worth it and was proud of his
work, specially, Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, the Joseph novels and Doctor
Faustus. Near the end of his life, during a chat with Hesse at his retirement home in Sils
Mariah, Switzerland, Mann admitted he could not ever contemplate the thought of
retiring. As if to prove the point, that year Mann published Felix Krull. The following
year, Mann was honored in Stuttgart, Weimar and Lübeck, and it was precisely in his
143
hometown Lübeck that Mann made a remembrance of the day his father Senator Mann
was also honored by the City. During the ceremony, he also told his audience that his
father considered Thomas and Heinrich “as prodigal sons incapable of making a good life
for themselves.”
324
Upon his return home to Kilchberg, he once again felt anguished by
the thought of being deprived of his American citizenship and worried about the status of
his application for Swiss citizenship. He dreaded being stateless once again.
To cheer him up, his family prepared a big celebration for his 80
th
birthday on
June 6
th
. The actual party, which began two days before his birthday and went on several
days afterwards, was attended by eminent French politicians like Vincent Auriol,
President of the Republic of France, Robert Schuman, one of the founding fathers of the
European Community, and French Premier, Pierre Mendès-France. Tellingly, no German
politician was invited and only the Minister of the Interior, Gerhard Schroeder sent a
congratulatory telegram. There were no greetings from President Theodor Heuss or from
first post-war Chancellor Konrad Adenauer. Their absence, however, was hardly noticed
given the amazing constellation of celebrities gathered at Kilchberg to celebrate Mann:
Pablo Picasso, Albert Schweitzer, Albert Camus, Andre Malraux, Francois Mauriac, Jules
Romains and Marguerite Yourcenar. His old friend Herman Hesse wrote a public
encomium in a Swiss newspaper noting the uniqueness of Mann’s prose, “I am thinking
not of the syntax but the tone, and specially the carefully calculated mixture of love and
mischief.”
In mid 1955, Mann travelled to Amsterdam to have tea with Queen Juliana of
Holland and their chat was so animated that it lasted longer than scheduled. On July 18,
324
Hayman, Thomas Mann, p. 609.
144
as if sensing his death was near and feeling the need to dig into his German roots, Mann
began to work on a play on Martin Luther, a subject that had been a life-long and
unfulfilled project on an individual he admired and despised at the same time.
Throughout his life, Mann felt a fascination with Luther and wanted to write about this
man who, for him was the perfect example of the inwardness he judged distinctive of the
German character. Inwardness is an important concept that Mann elaborates on in many
of his books and essays but mainly in his 1945 address “Germany and the Germans.” It is
a term that connotes tenderness, depth of feeling, unworldly reverie, love of nature, purest
sincerity of thought and conscience. These, says Mann are attributes that make the
German character be seclusive, melancholic and timid. It is also a philistine universalism
that hides a secret demonism. Mann thought it was this German inwardness what
produced German metaphysics, German music and Luther’s Reformation, a reform that
for Mann was a disaster that brought about the religious schism of the Occident. “I do not
love this man,” wrote Mann in the Address.
325
He also believed Luther was a lonely
thinker, a searcher, a theologian and philosopher in his cell that in his desire for world
domination bartered his soul to the Devil. Mann saw Reformation as a bridge to the
Middle Ages and Luther as a medieval man who wrestled with the devil.
In 1955, at this stage in his life, Mann was still obsessed with the figure of Faust
and the notion that the musicality of the German soul was a manifestation of its
inwardness, the concern with one’s inner self. And the question that haunted Mann since
the 1930s until his death was, how could the people that have given the world much that
is great and beautiful be responsible for the worse catastrophe in modern history? The
325
Thomas Mann, “Germany and the Germans” Thomas Mann’s Addresses Delivered at the Library of
Congress, 1942-1949, (LaVergne, TN USA: Wildside Press, 2010), p. 52.
145
explanation was the German inwardness; an introspection that Mann believed prevented
the German political development to keep pace with its artistic and cultural development.
That day in July 1955, as he was laboring on Luther, Mann felt a discomfort in his
left leg and taken to the hospital he was diagnosed as suffering a thrombosis, and ordered
to stay in bed immobilized. In private, the Dutch doctors told Katia he might be suffering
from something they could not diagnose yet. After a two-day rest at the Dutch hospital,
he was allowed to fly to Zürich to convalesce at a Swiss hospital. He spent a few days
chatting with friends, listening to Beethoven’s fifteenth String Quartet and reading Albert
Einstein’s book on Mozart. While in the hospital, he was awarded the Peace Class of the
order, “Pour le Mèrite.” The German order of merit was established in 1740 to recognize
individuals with extraordinary personal achievement, and was awarded mostly to military
men.
On August 10
th
at 8:00 PM, his heart stopped. His death was painless. For the
burial in the small Kilchberg cemetery overlooking Lake Zurich, the family requested a
small funeral but hundreds attended and dozens of writers wrote a farewell thought,
among them a very special one from his old friend Herman Hesse:
In deep sadness I bid farewell to Thomas Mann, my
dear friend and great colleague, the master of the German
prose, a man misunderstood in spite of many honors and
much success. His heart, fidelity, responsibleness, and
capacity to love, which stand behind the irony and
virtuosity, and which for decades went completely
unrecognized by the great German public, will give to his
146
work and memory a liveliness far beyond our disordered
times.
326
Reflecting on Mann’s oeuvre, Hayman traces the evolution of his political
positions within the context of his “Germanness’; Reflections of a Non-political Man is
truly a reflection on what is characteristically German. It is an important book because it
serves as a bridge between the two parts of The Magic Mountain, one written before the
war and the other after it, and also as a step towards Doctor Faustus, the novel intended
as a comprehensive statement about Germany.
327
Furthermore, according to Hayman,
Mann made a distinction between German Burgherdom and German bourgeoisie. Mann
was a Burgher who “held the moral values, cultural traditions and a pride that was
incompatible with Nazism. The bourgeoisie allowed itself to be infiltrated by the Nazis.
Thomas became the chief spokesman for the German culture that had nothing to do with
Nazism. He was also its leading practitioner.”
328
While I agree with Hayman that Mann’s political evolution can be viewed within
the context of his Germanness, and also taking into account that Mann’s values were
anchored in what the Germans call Kulturnation, the century’s old cultural nation that
preceded Nazism, I would argue this is a very narrow view of Mann’s political evolution.
Mann’s radical transformation from a conservative nostalgic of the Prussian Empire to
the supporter of the Weimar Republic who became a Rooseveltian democrat and later an
incipient socialist, was informed by his ideas on Europe and his experiences, theoretical
326
Bürgin Hans and Hans-Otto Mayer, Thomas Mann: A Chronicle of his Life, English translation by
Eugene Dobson. (Alabama: University of Alabama Press, University, 1969), p. 265.
327
Hayman, Thomas Mann, pp. 618-19.
328
Hayman, Thomas Mann, pp. 618-19.
147
and practical, in the United States from Whitman to Roosevelt and to McCarthy. In the
final chapter of this dissertation I engage in a larger conversation about my interpretation
of his political evolution, which is one of the three fundamental topics of my project.
148
Chapter 6
Was the United States on the verge of fascism?
Was fascism on the rise in the United States at the beginning of the Cold War? For
Mann, there was no question that in Cold-War America he was reliving the nightmare he
lived in pre-war Germany, and no one has the right to question his personal experience.
But he was not, by all means, the only one sensing fascism in America. His predicament
in America from the end of World War II to 1951 was the subject of chapter three, and as
excruciating as that time was, the question remains whether his experience in Germany
from 1922 to 1933 was comparable to what he lived in America from 1945 to 1952. Were
the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph
McCarthy fascists? Were the tactics and operations of the FBI similar to those of the
Gestapo? Were the hearings in the House and Senate a one-time byproduct of the Cold
War or were they actually a strong resurfacing of aberrations in the history of the country,
another chapter of the battle between white supremacists and democrats to define the
character of the nation?
From its inception, the United States has struggled with different narratives to
define the national character. For example, were the first Puritan Pilgrims that settled in
America immigrants or conquerors? The official story defines them as pilgrims sharing
turkey with the natives; the unofficial story is very different, it is one of a violent
conquest from 1622 to the nineteenth century that ended in genocide. For a time, and
under the influence of Thomas Jefferson, the dominant narrative defined the nation as an
“empire of liberty,” meaning it was a country where all its citizens were free,
notwithstanding the fact that blacks were enslaved and native Americans killed or sent to
149
concentration camps named reservations. White Americans saw themselves as different
from the Europeans but being “different” from their ancestors also meant being better
than them. In due time, this notion would lead to the belief that the United States was an
“exceptional” country composed by white people, white supremacists. The notion of
Exceptionalism also led to a Manichean vision that divided the world in two: “good
patriots” and “bad enemies.” In Nazi Germany, notes Paxton, “enemies were central to
the anxieties that helped inflame the fascist imagination. Fascists saw enemies within the
nation as well as outside. Foreign states were familiar enemies…. Internal enemies grew
luxuriantly in number and variety.”
329
In the early 1800s, the patriots were white national
Protestants and the enemy was the small Catholic population and African Americans.
Several decades after the fratricidal Civil War ended, the new enemies were the Southern
and Eastern European immigrants, the Italians, the Jews and the Russians.
From the turn of the twentieth century to the 1950s, four events shaped a dark
modern history of the United States. The rise of the eugenics movement that aimed to
improve the human race and to dispose of those deemed unfit; the enactment of
immigration laws that included strict quotas on people deemed undesirable (non-whites,
Jews, Asians); the rise of racist, bigoted, populist movements; and the resurgence of an
unjustified anti-Communist witch-hunt in government offices, Hollywood studios,
college campuses and worker’s unions.
Eugenics was a term coined by Francis Galton, an English scientist who believed
the right selection of the mating couple could produce human beings with better than
average genetic endowment, both mentally and physically. Louis Pasteur’s discoveries on
329
Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 36.
150
the role of bacteria in contagion, and the studies on the mechanism of heredity by
Austrian monk and scientist Gregor Mendel helped place the focus of science on a new
internal enemy: the ill, the diseased, the criminal, the unclean, the fool. “The urge to
purify the community medically,” writes Paxton, “became far stronger in Protestant
northern Europe than in Catholic southern Europe…. The United States and Sweden led
the way in the forcible sterilization of habitual offenders (in the American case, specially
African Americans), but Nazi Germany went beyond them in the most massive program
of medical euthanasia yet known.”
330
Federally funded sterilization programs designed to control undesirable
populations, mostly immigrants, blacks, poor, disabled and mentally ill people, were
implemented in 32 states. Citing research by scholars Alexandra Minna Stern and
Miroslava Chavez-Garcia, historian William Deverell points out, "What's fascinating is
how much of this was the purview of the reformers."
331
Indeed, Progressive American
politicians, scientists and businessmen like Theodore Roosevelt, Alexander Graham Bell
and John D. Rockefeller Jr. were pushing to make America the leader of the movement to
improve human species through breeding while German eugenicists were also working
towards the same end. "The Progressive era," says Deverell in the interview, "was an
oftentimes surprising and quite energetic humanitarian [period] having to do with
cleaning up city water, cleaning up disease, perfecting the nation in light of the new 20th
Century, reaching down to the downtrodden, reaching down to the immigrant and
reaching down to the working class." And what is truly worrisome, adds Deverell is that
330
Paxton, 36.
331
William Deverell, cited in Jeremy Rosenberg, “When California Decided Who Could Have Children
and Who Could Not.” Transcript of T.V. interview in KCET, June 18, 2012, accessed May 9, 2017, p. 2
https://www.kcet.org/history-society/when-california-decided-who-could-have-children-and-who-couldnot.
151
"These are the people who see themselves at the leading edge of social reform and this is
seen as a simple extension of it. It's really, philosophically, 'you clean up the water and
you clean up the people who are utilizing the water.'"
The advocates of sterilization for eugenic purposes won a big battle when the
Supreme Court ruled it legal, in an 8-1 decision. Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes wrote the
opinion of the majority stating: “It is better for the world, if instead of waiting to execute
degenerate offspring for crime, or to let them starve for their imbecility, society can
prevent those who are manifestly unfit from continuing their kind.” And in reference to
the case in question he declared, “three generations of imbeciles are enough.”
332
There
were also many other American Progressives and Conservatives as well, at the forefront
of another movement to rid America of “idiots and imbeciles,” people that mostly were
non-protestant English speaking whites. In 1907, for example, the state of Indiana passed
the country’s first sterilization law. In California between 1909 and 1979, 20,000 people
were sterilized, most of them prior to 1950, according to Stern and Chavez-García.
“Fairly quickly in the early 20
th
century,” says Deverell in the Rosenberg interview, “you
are going to encounter people who say, ‘We can perfect the human race’ or at least ‘we
can weed out the deleterious and drags on progress or the social order”
333
America’s history of racial exclusion in its immigration laws dates to the First
Congress of the Republic with the Naturalization Act of 1790 that granted naturalization
to any free white person. The trend continued with the Immigration Law of 1924, whose
purpose was to maintain the racial composition of the United States by imposing national
332
Andrea DenHoed, “The Forgotten Lessons of the American Eugenics Movement,” The New Yorker,
April 27, 2016, 11, accessed May 9, 2017,http://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/the-
forgottenlessons-of-the-american-eugenics-movement
333
Deverell, “When California,” p. 2
152
quotas that restricted Eastern Europeans, mostly Jews and Italians, Middle Easterners and
Africans, and barred Asian immigration entirely. Native Americans were viewed up to
1924 as ‘nationals’ but not ‘citizens’. Puerto Ricans and Filipinos were also second-class
citizens, and especially American blacks.
In the 1930s, Nazi Germany and the American South presented so many
similarities that two professors from the Mississippi State University, Johnpeter Horst
Grill and Robert L. Jenkins have written an essay wondering if the Nazis and the
American South in the 1930s were a mirror image. “Nazis were not only anti-Semitic but
they were also viciously antiblack. Like many southerners, they saw the African
American as a major threat to white civilization.”
334
For Grill and Jenkins, both Germany
and the American South were protecting its long established system of white supremacy.
Many Nazis, including Hitler, writes Professor of Comparative and Foreign Law at Yale
Law School James Q. Whitman, took a serious interest in the racist legislation of the
United States. “In Mein Kampf Hitler praised America as nothing less than the ‘one state’
that had made progress toward the creation of a healthy racist order of the kind the
Nuremberg Laws were intended to establish.”
335
Further more, adds Whitman, “the
United States also stood at the forefront in the creation of forms of de jure and de facto
second-class citizenship for blacks, Filipinos, Chinese and others…. As for race mixing
between the sexes, the United States stood at the forefront there as well.”
336
Until the late
1930s, there was an active back and forth traffic between American and Nazi eugenicists
and the Nazis looked at the United States as a model. “None of this is to suggest that
334
Johnpeter Horst Grill and Robert L. Jenkins, “The Nazis and the American South in the 1930s: A Mirror
Image?” The Journal of Southern History. Vol. 58, No. 4 (Nov., 1992) 668, URL:
http://www.jstor.org/stable/2210789 Accessed: 10-05-2017 03:12 UTC.
335
Whitman, Hitler’s American Model, p. 2.
336
Whitman Hitler’s American Model p. 12.
153
America was a Nazi country in the 1930s”, writes Whitman but “of course the racist
strains in American law coexisted and competed with some glorious humane and
egalitarian strains.”
337
The interest of the Nazi jurists and policy makers in American race law was very
intense especially at time when they were writing the Nuremberg Laws. They found
appealing that the American practice of harshly criminalizing interracial marriage lay in
the background of the Blood Law (a law that prohibited German Jews from marrying or
having sexual relations with persons of German blood). Many American states—
primarily, but not exclusively, in the south—defined a Negro as someone who had any
Negro ancestors; hence the term “one drop.” Ironically, the Nazis considered the onedrop
rule too harsh, and instead adopted the one-grandparent rule to define Jewishness. They
were trying to determine how best to turn Nazi racial ideology into German federal law
but were not interested so much in U.S. segregation laws; their goals were to disqualify
Jews from citizenship and to criminalize marriage and sexual relations between Jews and
non-Jews, in order to, they said, protect German blood and honor.
The U.S., it must be said, was by no means the only country to decide
immigration based on racist ideas, but as Whitman notes, it did become the leader in
developing explicitly racist policies of nationality and immigration and the laboratory for
experimentation in diminished citizenship rights. The Nazis also looked closely at the
laws in 30 states prohibiting marriage between whites and blacks, (Virginia abolished the
law in 1967) and the practice of “mongrelization,” which entered the American legal
system originally because of relations between white masters and black slaves. An issue
337
Whitman, Hitler’s American Model p. 15
154
that was very important to the Nazis in order to address the question of Germans who
were of Jewish descent.
Did America’s racist legislation directly influence any aspects of Nazi racial
laws? Whitman concludes that although the Nazi statute criminalizing mixed marriage
“was not directly copied” from the U.S. legal code. Yet the German jurists’ thinking
clearly was “influenced” by the American example, as demonstrated by their frequent
reference to U.S. law during that crucial 1934 conference, and the inclusion of extensive
American material in major Nazi law texts.
All of this, Whitman concludes, does not reveal anything new about the racism of
either Nazi Germany or early 20th-century America, but it does document some troubling
legal connections between the two, and it “tells us some uncomfortable things about the
character of American legal culture.” The most uncomfortable is that the U.S. was “not
just a country with racism,” but was “The leading racist jurisdiction” in the world—“so
much so that even Nazi Germany looked to America for inspiration.”
338
Populist movements in America
In 1845, native-born white Americans, not Native American Indians, formed what
could be defined as the first openly anti-immigrant party in the United States: the Native
American Party. The rejection of immigrants was basically founded on racism but not
exclusively, social status could also raise objections, and non-Protestant immigrants were
deemed undesirables. Five years after, this group evolved into the Know-Nothing Party
with the goal of turning their focus into party politics. The Ku Klux Klan, a group that
338
Whitman, Hitler’s American Model p.138
155
proclaimed white supremacy and persecuted immigrants, Catholics, Jews, blacks and
organized labor was founded in 1866. Among scholars, there is a debate about which
country spawned the earliest fascist movement but no one claims it was Germany. “It
may be that the earliest fascist phenomenon that can be functionally related to fascism is
American: the Ku Klux Klan,” writes Paxton. “Just after the Civil War some former
Confederate officers, fearing the vote given to African Americans in 1867 by the Radical
Reconstructionists, set up a militia to restore an overturned social order.”
339
The Klan
wore a uniform, a distinctive characteristic of fascist movements, and used intimidation
and violence to defend, they said, impose, I would say, the interests of the defeated
southern white community.
After a short period of decline, a KKK Georgia group called the Knights of Mary
Phagan, kidnapped from prison and lynched Leo Frank, a Jewish pencil factory manager
wrongly convicted of murdering a 13-year-old girl who worked at the pencil factory. The
Knights were part of a revitalized Ku Klux Klan and was composed of lawyers, sheriffs,
judges, and other prominent people from the state of Georgia. The cruelest irony in the
case was perhaps, that the only witness against Frank was the African-American janitor
who actually committed the crime. Were the anti-Semitic feelings in Georgia at the time
stronger than the ancestral racist hate against blacks? I don’t know the answer but it is
true, as Paxton writes, that before there were ugly anti-Semitic incidents in Germany or
in France, with the Dreyfus affair, the United States had them with episodes like the
lynching of Leo Frank.
The 1920s brought out a big revival of the Ku Klux Klan with its anti-Catholic,
339
Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism, p. 49.
156
anti-Semitic, anti-alien, anti-black, anti-immigrant and anti-communist, anti-unions
pronouncements and activities. The Klan was active placing bombs in schools and
churches for black people, and hanging them from trees under false accusations. They
took burning a cross as a symbol and also held rallies, parades and marches to
demonstrate their strength. At its peak, Klan membership exceeded 4 million people
nationwide, farmers, planters, lawyers, ministers, merchants, and physicians, a large
enough universe of voters that allowed them to elect the most radical members of the
Republican and Democratic parties in Congress.
Throughout the 1930s there was a proliferation of populist, anti-Semitic,
protofascist popular movements in the United States led by charismatic figures like
Father Charles Edward Coughlin, who was a Catholic priest with an anti-Semitic,
anticommunist zeal, who claimed his organization had 5 million members and whose
magazine Social Justice named Benito Mussolini man of the year in 1938, and defended
Hitler’s persecution of Jews. “In the summer of 1938, Father Charles Coughlin threw his
arm out in a Nazi salute and told a rally of supporters ‘When we get through with the
Jews in America, they’ll think the treatment they received in Germany was nothing.’”
340
Louisiana’s governor and later on U. S. senator Huey Long was a populist,
protofascist American figure who built a national organization called “Share our Wealth”
that claimed a membership of 8 million, but whose radio programs could reach as many
as 25 million people. In 1935, watching the rise of Louisiana politician Huey Long,
Sinclair Lewis wrote a novel, It Can’t Happen Here, in which a politician, helped by a
ruthless paramilitary force imposes a totalitarian regime before civil war breaks. Truth is,
340
Bill Kovarik, Revolutions in Communication: Media History from Gutenberg to the Digital Age. (New
York: The Continuum International Publishing Group, 2011), p. 225
157
as Robert O. Paxton notes in his classic book The Anatomy of Fascism, “the United
States…has never been exempt from fascism,” and all kinds of “antidemocratic and
xenophobic movements have flourished in America.”
341
Yet, perhaps the most
disturbing aspect of all these movements has been their connection to racist ideologies
that later become immigration, miscegenation and/or eugenic-sterilizations laws.
Long was an authoritarian politician who used the National Guard and police
force to intimidate the press and his opponents, and who chose Gerald L. K. Smith to
organize his movement. Smith was another far-right, white supremacist clergyman
whose ideas were so extreme right that when he tried to forge an alliance with the
America First Committee (the non-interventionist committee that Charles Lindbergh,
America’s would be Führer, belonged to) he was rejected because of his blatant anti-
Semitism. He also had an impact on the nativists after World War II with his message
warning the country of a ‘Judeo-Communist conspiracy’. Gerald B. Winrod was another
fundamentalist Protestant Evangelist who tried to convince his followers the French, the
Russians, the Jews, the Catholics and the communists were plotting to destroy America.
Winrod led an openly anti-Semitic, pro-Hitler movement with its Black Legion in
Kansas. At its peak, his newspaper, The Defender reached a 100,000 monthly circulation.
And then there was William Dudley Pelley, who blamed Jews for the depression and
created an underground protofascist white-supremacist organization known as the Silver
Legion of America or Silver Shirts, reminiscent of Hitler’s brownshirts and Mussolini’s
blackshirts. At its peak, the Silver Shirts claimed a membership of 15,000. In 1935, with
mining fortune heiress Jessie Murphy, Nazi German and Hollywood money, the Silver
341
Robert O. Paxton, The Anatomy of Fascism. (New York: Vintage Books, 2004), p. 201.
158
Shirts began construction of the Murphy Ranch, near Los Angeles, a fortress-camp that
would serve as the fortified world headquarters of the Fascist global movement. Pelley
wanted to place American Jews in a ghetto, ran for president in 1936, and was later jailed
accused of sedition.
Art J. Smith was the leader of the American Fascist Party who formed another
paramilitary group called Khaki Shirts. And then, there was the infamous German
American Bund formed mostly by American citizens of German ancestry and received
financial assistance from the German Nazi government. Wearing German Nazi uniforms
and carrying flags with the Swastika, they held parades in New York City and rallies in
La Crescenta, California. Its national Leader, Fritz Julius Kuhn, who had been appointed
Führer by Hitler, was prosecuted for grand larceny in 1939.
None of these failed fascist leaders and movements caught Mann’s attention as
much as aviator Charles Lindbergh, the leader of the first “America First” movement.
Lindbergh was a declared anti-Semitic American airman who urged America to back
Hitler and in 1938. His link to the German military was so close that he was awarded the
Commander Cross of the Order of the German Eagle by Herman Goering, the
Commander in Chief of the German Air Force. Lindbergh was also a virulent enemy of
President Roosevelt and did everything he could to undermine his presidency. In the end,
however, Mann only devoted a few commentaries in his diary and in his letters to the
pilot. He never believed he had the stature to compete with Roosevelt.
Why then, none of these fascist and proto fascist movements was as successful as
the ones in Italy and Germany? Mostly, because none of these leaders had a large and
159
solid base of followers, they all lacked the necessary charisma to lead a large movement
and they did not have the financial support of the big bourgeoisie.
Mann was concerned with the words and actions of powerful people in Congress,
like the members of the House Un-American Activities Committee and Joseph McCarthy
in the Senate. He also thought president Harry S. Truman could not be trusted. He also
distrusted Edgar J. Hoover, the FBI, and the media: newspapers, television and radio that
served as accomplices in an anti-communist crusade.
“Long before the foreign war was over,” write Ceplair and Englund in their book
on the anti-communist persecution in Hollywood, “The presidential election of 1944 was
seen by both parties as a crucial watershed in American history,” because “the winner
could set the tone for postwar domestic American domestic policy.”
342
The political wars
at home had resumed in all their intensity. The war had given a tremendous impulse to
the business community and a renewed influence with Washington politicians. The
Republican Party, heads of corporations, the chambers of Commerce, and the
conservative movements who had resisted President Franklin D. Roosevelt saw in
anticommunism the perfect weapon to thrive and to recover the executive power. Those
who accused Roosevelt of being soft on communism felt a visceral reaction to programs
like the New Deal and the 1935 Wagner Act. This was a law that established the right of
most workers, to join unions and to bargain collectively with their employees but,
tellingly, excluded agriculture and domestic workers, two sectors of the economy where
the labor force was mostly Latinos and blacks.
342
Larry Ceplair and Steven Englund, The Inquisition in Hollywood Politics in the Film Community,
193060. (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2003), 200
160
Harry S. Truman won the election but lacking the political skills of Roosevelt and
certainly less liberal than him, the new President veered right with the enthusiastic
cooperation of the religious right. In America, as religious historian Dianne Kirby has
noted, there was a significant religious dimension to the Cold War. “America’s
godfearing Presidents, Truman and Eisenhower,” writes Kirby, “are seen as having
instinctively recognized the inherent evil of the Soviet regime and committed their nation
to a global leadership.”
343
And in the case of Truman, Kirby singles out his attempt to
“construct an international anti-communist religious front that would bring together the
world’s key Christian leaders, adding a spiritual dimension to what in essence was a
traditional power struggle.” This was an alliance, ads Kirby, which foundered because of
Catholic and Protestant disagreements.
344
What is Fascism?
It is a common place to say that the term fascism has been used and abused ad
nauseam. Digging beyond the “images of jackbooted thugs, swastikas, and a perverse
love of violence,” writes Douglas W. Greene reviewing Paxton’s book on the topic,
“Fascism is a word often uttered but little understood.”
345
Nonetheless, the fact that it
does have an elusive meaning should not preclude us from sensing fascism when the
government invokes an imagined terrifying internal and external enemy to instill fear in
the citizenry; or when thugs dressed in a sailor uniform beat extravagantly dressed
children of immigrants to satisfy their racist impulses; or a bigoted general orders the
343
A century of anti-communisms: a roundtable discussion. Twentieth Century Communism–Issue 6, p. 42.
http://usc.summon.serialssolutions.com/search?q=A%20century%20of%20anti-
communisms%3A%20a%20roundtable%20discussion#!/search?ho=t&l=en&q=A%20century%20of%20a
n ti-communisms:%20a%20roundtable%20discussion
345
Kirby, “A century of anti-communisms,” p. 43.
344
Kirby, “A century of anti-communisms,” p. 43.
345
Douglas W. Greene, “The Bourgeois Origins of Fascist Repression: On Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of
Fascism. Socialism and Democracy, published online: 20 Sep 2010, p.1.
161
round-up of Japanese American citizens suspecting their loyalty without a shred of
evidence. The same principle applies when authorities exert control over the press to
suppress or to publish information or propaganda, and when the government equates
dissent with treason. All of the instances mentioned above can make us feel a sense of
fascist oppression. In the late forties and early fifties, the foundation of democracy in the
United States were seriously battered but was the country on the verge of fascism?
Paxton dissects fascism into its components or stages, each one of them
constituting a chapter in his book. How fascist movements are created; how do they take
root in society; how do they achieve power and exercise it; and what are the long-term
outcomes. In the case of Germany the radicalization of the movement led to the
holocaust. In Italy, the fascist movement was a gradual decline into disorder. At the end
of the 19
th
century, writes Paxton, a mass-based nationalist activism against socialism
and liberalism arose in Europe, and in the interwar period fascists felt the harmony of
traditional society was breaking down and in need to be remade, but first, those
responsible for the destruction of the traditional community had to be punished. In their
minds, the enemies were the intellectuals; industrial capitalists, Marxists, Jews,
homosexuals and gypsies, all of them outsiders that threatened traditional societies. The
best way to create a new national harmony, they thought, was through state corporatism.
As Marxist historian Douglas W. Greene notes in his review of Paxton’s book, “The
fascist state will subdue and expel all outsiders in order to create a pure state – that is, a
162
state without class struggle, in which society will be cleansed through a march backward
to national greatness.”
346
Towards the end of his book, Paxton offers an all-encompassing definition of how
fascism grew, achieved power and exercised it. Fascism may be defined as a form of
political behavior marked by obsessive preoccupation with community decline,
humiliation, or victimhood and by compensatory cults of unity, energy, and purity, in
which a mass-based party of committed nationalist militants, working in uneasy but
effective collaboration with traditional elites, abandons democratic liberties and pursues
with redemptive violence and without ethical or legal restraints goals of internal cleansing
and external expansion.
According to this definition, the only two countries where fascism, sensu stricto
thrived were Italy and Germany. And yes, it is true that the United States did not become
a fascist nation sensu stricto as Mann imagined it would. But tracing Mann’s experience
in America within the context of the German exiles and their interactions with U.S.
political actors and institutions, I argue that the political climate in the United States in
the 1930s, 40s and early 1950s did present too many similarities with the rise of Adolf
Hitler in Germany. The racist, anti-immigrant, anti-foreign, anti-communist,
antiintellectual, anti-Semitic zeal of American politicians, as we have explained
throughout this chapter, did provide a connection between German, Italian and American
politicians. So did the creation of an enemy (or enemies) to rally the people behind them,
the fear tactics they all used, and the unfounded accusations they launched to achieve
their political goals and ruin the lives of their enemies.
346
Douglas W. Greene, “The Bourgeois Origins of Fascist Repression: On Robert Paxton’s The Anatomy of
Fascism. Socialism and Democracy, 22:2, 109-120, DOI: 10.1080/08854300802083315, p. 111.
163
Even though the fascist radical right did not take power in the United States,
Mann rightly foresaw in the 50s, that the perverse methods used by McCarthy to
investigate innocent people would have a lasting negative impact on the political debate
in the United States and seriously damaged the country’s intellectual life. It also
weakened the convictions of many a teacher to think critically for many years to come, it
narrowed the scope of their research and instilled fears of being persecuted for
expressing freely their ideas and opinions.
In Weimar on the Pacific, Ehrhard Bahr notices how Hitler and the Nazis
demonized the image of the refugees to depict them as dangerous. Apart from the Jews,
who were Hitler’s first enemies, intellectuals and left-wingers were also painted as
criminals. “The book burning and the dismissal of academics had succeeded in making
independent thought and scholarship appear criminal.” And although only a small
percentage of the refugees were professional intellectuals, the image that haunted them in
their exile was that all the refugees were taken for radical intellectuals.
347
Mann sensed a similar association in America, Jews, Germans and foreigners
were seen as radical intellectuals, close to Un-Americans. Mann was investigated by the
secret services in both countries; he was declared Un-German in Germany and
UnAmerican in America by the authorities in both countries. He saw the Nazis burn
books in public squares in Germany and HUAC ban books in American universities; he
saw the devastating effects of anti-communist witch-hunts in people in both countries; he
witnessed the progressive erosion of civil liberties and the rise of loyalty oaths in
Germany and in America and he was a constant critic of the consolidation of the
347
Bahr, “Thomas Mann”, p. 24.
164
industrial military complex in the two countries. And Mann, it must be said, was not the
only person who sensed the country was on the verge of Fascism. In his 1944 State of the
Union speech, President Roosevelt said there was a moment when the nation “yielded to
the spirit of Fascism.”
348
Regarding Mann’s second exile to Switzerland, Bahr notes that at some point he
talks about a “second emigration,” yet his decision to leave the United States under
political pressure, I would argue would be better described as an exile rather than as a
second emigration. It has been written that Mann’s main motivation to move to Zürich
was his desire to die in Europe. Mann himself said it once or twice, but I agree with Bahr
challenging that interpretation: “In my opinion,” writes Bahr, “the desire to return to
Europe was used to conceal the scape from the never-ending barrage of political
defamation.”
349
As to his reticence to make a public announcement indicting America, I
believe it was due to a natural instinct of survival. At his age, he did not want to raise
new questions that would jeopardize his American passport.
Bahr argues there was never a concerted campaign against Mann in the United
States but that the attacks had a cumulative effect. I beg to disagree while admitting there
were significant differences in the way he was persecuted by the Nazis and haunted by
the Americans. The main one being that his German enemies wanted to send him to
Dachau whereas his American foes wanted to silence him. Furthermore, in general terms
it could be argued that the American campaign against him was concerted by FBI
Director Edgar J. Hoover and parroted by different conservative anti-communist
obsessed politicians and newspaper editors. Hitler reacted to some of his writings and
348
See the complete Roosevelt quote on chapter three, page 30, of this dissertation.
349
Bahr, “Thomas Mann,” p. 8.
165
speeches but it was subordinates like Reinhard Heydrich, the Munich police chief and a
protégé of Gestapo Heinrich Himmler and journalists in his payroll that attacked Mann.
Ironically, a year before Mann’s death in Zürich, the political influence of Senator
McCarthy in the United States waned after his peers in the Senate censured him. And, as
Hayman writes at the end of his book, when Mann died, he was considered the last great
European man of letters.
350
Did exile play an important role in Mann’s political development?
Definitely, although what initially moved him from his politically conservative
position into a more progressive one took place in Germany when he stepped forward to
defend the democratic principles of the Weimar Republic. Yet his conversion into a full
fledge social democrat took place while he was in exile in the United States and under
the influence of Franklin Delano Roosevelt. The way he experienced exile was also a
gradual process that began when he felt it as a terrible loss. He lost his homeland, his
inspiration, his readers, his house, and his belongings. He felt “the homelessness, the
censorship, the battles and the homesickness,” Anna Seghers wrote about.
351
But like
Ferdinand Freiligrath, Mann felt exile legitimized him “as a political force that has only
temporarily withdrawn from the battlefield… [But] will return to claim the ultimate
victory over the forces of oppression and help built a just world.”
352
And while it is true
that the first dramatic change in his political position took place in 1922, when he read
his manifesto supporting the Weimar Republic, “The German Republic” in the
Beethoven Hall in Berlin, his political evolution took new urgency in exile. As I have
350
Hayman, Thomas Mann, p. 620.
351
Evelein, Literary Exiles, p. 8.
352
Evelein, Literary Exiles, p. 29.
166
argued before in this dissertation, the policies of President Roosevelt, the battles against
Hitler in World War II, and the encounters with the House Un American Activities
Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy, would take him further into the progressive
side.
The end of the war and the victory of the Allied Forces over the Nazis did not
bring peace of mind to Thomas Mann or to his friend Albert Einstein. In a November 27
letter, Mann confided to Einstein the discomfort he felt with “the growing xenophobia,
the growing anti-Semitism,” in America.
353
It was precisely between this moment of his
exile in America and his second exile in Switzerland that Mann began to see things from
the “double perspective” that Edward Said proposes in his theory of exile. In the third of
the Reith Lectures, the Palestinian scholar writes, “Because the exile sees things both in
terms of what has been left behind and what is actually here and now, there is a double
perspective that never sees things in isolation. Every scene or situation in the new
country necessarily draws on its counterpart in the old country.”
354
Mann’s double
perspective was more than evident in his letters and in the entries in his diaries, where he
was constantly comparing and contrasting the experiences he was living in the United
States with those he lived in Germany. For Said, the double perspective adds depth to
one’s perceptions, “from that juxtaposition one gets a better, perhaps even more
universal idea of how to think…by comparison with another.”
355
Did exile shape his appraisal of Cold War United States political situation?
353
Thomas Mann, Letters of Thomas Mann 1889-1955, Selected and translated from the German by
Richard and Clara Winston Introduction by Richard Winston. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), p. 486.
354
Edward Said. Representations of the Intellectual The 1993 Reith Lectures (New York: Pantheon Books,
1994), p. 60.
355
Said, Representations, p. 60.
167
My answer is a resounding yes. Mann was reacting to the political developments
in the United States from a “double perspective.” The persecution he suffered in Cold
War America for questioning the HUAC witch-hunt was strikingly similar to the one he
went through for criticizing fascism in Nazi Germany. In Germany he saw the Nazis
burn the books they considered Un-German; in the United States he witnessed the
banishment of allegedly Un-American books in prestigious American Universities like
Harvard. In Germany he experienced the persecution of intellectuals for thinking
critically and independently; in America intellectuals were persecuted for expressing
ideas that did not conform to the dogma of what was defined as American. Every time
the American press attacked him he sensed he had already gone through the same
experience in Germany and the same applied every time the FBI interviewed him, or
HUAC threatened to force him to testify, or a Congressman filed a motion of censure in
the House of Representatives. We should not forget that Mann left Germany the year
Hitler assumed power, and his life experiences there reflected life in Munich up until
1933, the period when Hitler rose to power, before Nuremberg’s “The Victory of Faith,”
Nazi rally, before “The Night of the Long Knives” when the Sturm Abtellung was
purged, and before the horrors of Kristallnacht.
Was Mann politically committed to the demands of his time?
In his old age, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, the poet, dramatist, novelist, natural
scientist and conservative political advisor to Carl August Duke of Saxe Weimar
Eisenach reached a startling conclusion, “we,” he said, “and all sensible people are and
should be a moderate liberal.” In his old age, Thomas Mann, the winner of the 1929
168
Nobel Prize in literature who as a young man was a fervent conservative raised the bar
set by his idol Goethe declaring, “Nowadays every reasonable human being should be a
moderate socialist”
356
How did the writer of Reflections, probably the most passionate defender of
Kaiser Wilhelm II and German militarism ever written became an advocate of the
Weimar democratic republicanism in “The German Republic” (1922) and a self-
proclaimed socialist in his old age? This counter-current political transformation of an
old man from right to left is still a subject intensely debated among scholars.
357
Marianne Dörfel, Peter Gay, Martin Swales, and T. J. Reed have written essays
upholding Mann’s conversion albeit differing on the scope and limits of the renovation.
Keith Bullivant, Hans H. Schulte, and Rolf Günter Renner have questioned both his
political commitment to the demands of his time and the authenticity of his political
responses.
358
Schulte has also expressed doubts on the sincerity of his conversion and has
criticized him for his “tendency to aestheticize his political concerns.”
359
I take issue with the allegations that Mann did not meet the demands of his time
and that his responses were insincere. He confronted fascism, Nazism and other absolute
356
Both, the Goethe and Mann quotes are in Hans Eichner, “Thomas Mann and Politics,” in Thomas Mann:
Ein Kolloquium, Modern German Studies 1, (Bonn: Bouvier Verlag), pp. 5-6.
357
See Donald Prater, Thomas Mann a Life, (oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) p. 199. See also
Manfred Dierks, “Thomas Mann’s Late Politics,” A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann, Edited by
Herbert Lehnert and Eva Wessell, (Camden House: 2004). “Mann’s socialism,” writes Dierks, “has little to
do with Marxism, though; it is aligned with the humanism of the progressive bourgeoisie and its desire to
preserve its own cultural values for the future.” In February of 1933, Mann published an Open Letter
declaring that socialism is humanizing materialism. It is, wrote Mann, “nothing other than the duty-bound
decision to stop surrendering one’s own mind to celestial fantasies in the face of social and collective
needs, but to side with those who want to lend significance to the earth-human significance. In this sense, I
am a socialist.” p. 211. (Italics by Mann).
358
Keith Bullivant, in Minden, pp. 55-69; Martin Swales, “In Defence of Weimar: Thomas Mann and the
Politics of Republicanism”, pp. 70-84; Rolf Günther; Renner, pp. 85-102, in Minden; Peter Gay, Weimar
Culture the Outsider as insider. (New York London: W. W. Norton & Company, 2001) pp. 74, 123-127;
T.J. Reed, Thomas Mann. The Uses of Tradition, (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1974, p. 293.
359
Hans H. Schulte, “Ist Thomas Mann noch lebendig? Thomas Mann Ein Kolloquium, pp 95-126.
169
belief systems in Germany and in the United States courageously and with
determination. He called upon the German people to revolt against Hitler in his twenty-
five messages to Germany broadcast over the BBC during World War II. He also
confronted the fascist trends he felt were driving the witch-hunt in the House Un-
American Activities Committee and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s hearings.
It is true, however, that Mann was a man of letters, not a political writer and even
less a politician. His written responses and speeches to the daily events were articulated
from the point of view of a novelist who had mastered the arts more than the behavior of
a political activist. It was the gradual electoral success of the National Socialist Party in
the German political scene what turned Mann into a reluctant warrior. He was first and
foremost a “Nonpolitical” novelist who despised politics, a person with a profound
nineteen-century sense of decency, a thinker who conformed to standards of respectable
and reasonable conduct. His reactions to political events were driven by a moral
obligation to denounce what he believed was abusive, outrageous and indecent behavior,
whether it was the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany, the ascent to power of
Adolf Hitler, the Nazi atrocities during World War II, or the fascist trends he sensed were
manifest in America at the beginnings of the Cold War.
In Reflections, Mann wrote, “I am deeply convinced that the German people will
never be able to love political democracy simply because they cannot love politics itself,
and that the much decried ‘authoritarian state’ is, and remains the one that is proper and
becoming to the German people, and the only one they basically want.”
360
Mann’s belief
was widely shared in Germany as exemplified in the famous “Manifesto of the
360
Thomas Mann, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man . Translated and with an introduction by Walter D.
Morris. (New York: Frederick Ungar Publishing Co. 1983), pp. 16-17.
170
NinetyThree,” signed by leading German scientists, professors and intellectuals in
October of 1914 expressing their unconditional support of German military actions at the
beginning of World War I.
In his book The Germans, Norbert Elias notes that during the eighteenth and part
of the nineteenth century “embedded in the meaning of the German term ‘culture’ was a
non-political and perhaps even an anti-political bias symptomatic of the recurrent feeling
among the German middle-class elites that politics and the affairs of the state represented
the area of their humiliation and lack of freedom, while culture represented the sphere of
their freedom and their pride.”
361
Goethe, wrote Mann, conceived “the German people as
an Unpolitical, intellectual nation, centered upon human values.”
362
As a young writer,
Mann was no exception to the rule; he believed, like most cultivated Germans, “there
was an unbridgeable difference between culture and civilization. German tradition was
‘culture, soul, freedom, art, and not civilization, [which was] society, voting rights, and
literature.’ ”
363
Another factor that can help us understand Mann’s reluctance to get involved in
politics even while acting politically is to place him within the framework of his time.
Mann, writes UCI Professor Emeritus Herbert Lehnert, “belonged to a generation of
young writers who questioned the values of a staid and inflexible bourgeois order in the
face of social change.”
364
His Weltanschauung was informed by reading Charles Darwin,
whose theory of evolution shattered the belief in God as the creator of a stable world and
361
Wolf Lepenies, The Seduction of Culture in German History, (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton
University Press, 2006), p. 4.
362
Thomas Mann, “Goethe’s Career as a Man of Letters,” Essays of Three Decades, Translated from the
German by H. T. Lowe-Porter. (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948), p. 62.
363
Lepenies, The Seduction, p. 28.
364
Herbert Lehnert, Introduction, A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann, Edited by Herbert
Lehnert and Eva Wessell, (Rochester NY: Camden House, 2004), p.2.
171
Friedrich Nietzsche, who proclaimed not only that God was dead but also that we all had
killed him, and that this Deicide “demanded the creation of a new morality.”
365
It is no
coincidence, as Lehnert observes, that the characters in Mann’s first works were
outsiders, eccentrics who did not fit into ordinary society, oddities that Mann used to
question an apparently stable world. Even in his novel Buddenbrooks, writes Lehnert,
which is not an antibourgeois novel, “the reader is made uneasy about the values and
standards the novel portrays.”
366
Undeniably, there were times when Mann saw current
events from the outside, with hesitations and doubts. His doubts during most of the first
three years of his exile provide ample evidence of this tormented unease.
The intense rivalry between him and his brother Heinrich is another factor that
helps explain the ambiguity of Mann’s political positions. They held diverging views on
the role of the writer, and their ideological differences were profound: Heinrich was a
profoundly anti- Prussian militarism leftist writer while Thomas was a conservative
bourgeois who did “war service with the weapon of thought”
367
supporting the Kaiser in
World War I. This was a brotherly conflict that reached its hottest point in the period
between 1912 and 1918, when the two brothers were competing to write the great
German novel. A novel “to be read by the readers of ‘higher’ German literature, the
educated class or Bildundgsbürger, the core of which were the higher civil servants.”
368
Heinrich, writes Lehnert, wanted his readers “to become political and to take power away
from established authority; literature was to be the instrument of political change.” On
the other side of the divide, Thomas, “was satisfied with the existing order, since it
365
Lehnert, A Companion , p. 2.
366
Lehnert, p. 2.
367
Hayman, Thomas Mann, p. 76.
368
Lehnert, p. 11.
172
offered sufficient freedom for a writer. He was convinced that being politically involved
reduces the writer’s ‘ironic’ distance and his freedom to assume any or all positions.”
369
Unlike socially committed writers like his brother Heinrich, Emile Zola, or
Charles Dickens, who turned their apprehensions of their respective societies into a
political activism that was evident in their literary work, Mann always kept an emotional
distance from the reader of his novels through the use of irony. He uses words to convey
a meaning that is the opposite of its literal meaning or describes a situation in which
actions have an effect that is opposite from what was intended. “Distance,” on the other
hand, helped Mann express his ideas of displacement, homelessness or even exile. To
understand Mann’s occasional hesitations and ambivalences even in his essays, one must
take into account Mann’s continued use of these literary devices. Throughout his life he
often became a reluctant warrior albeit he always was a grudging and sharp dissenter of
official “truths.”
In the foreword to Order of the Day, his collection of political essays and
speeches of two decades written in 1942, Mann wrote, “I should go far in my life to find
a time when my narrative output was not accompanied by theoretical excursions, critical
analyses, yes, controversial productions.”
370
He points out that Buddenbrooks; the novel
he wrote when he was 26 years old was the only book he was able to write without
interruptions caused by political events that would force him to write an essay expressing
his point of view. “From the beginning it always had for me an active and combatant
character, in contrast to the dream-life of imaginative writing.”
371
His reactions to the
369
Lehnert, p. 11.
370
Thomas Mann, Order of the Day, p. v.
371
Mann, Order, p.. v.
173
events of his time, however, were always inscribed in the realm of the imagination. “I
can’t but smile when I hear it said of me that my stories have no inner reference to the
new time and its problems… Really? Fiorenza, Death in Venice, “Mario and the
Magician”, to say nothing of The Magic Mountain…(were) unconcerned about the
problems of the time?”
372
Thirteen years later and two months before his death, in a New
York Times interview to celebrate his 80
th
birthday, Mann confessed to the Viennese
writer and critic Frederic Morton, “Under the pressure of events my original
preoccupation with the artist acquired a broader base. Without trying to indulge in
politics I did draw moral conclusions from political facts and added to them the so far
largely esthetic themes of my work."
373
A constant in Mann’s political thought was his belief in liberal humanism, “an
ideology that posited reason and freedom as the inalienable possessions of the
autonomous self, granting political legitimacy to the nation-state and moral universality
to European culture.”
374
He thought liberal humanism was the best antidote to fascism
and communism not only in Europe, but in America as well. His essays, speeches and
broadcasts responding to the troubled times he encountered throughout his life are a
testament of his political evolution although he occasionally participated directly in
politics.
*
372
Mann, Order, p. viii.
373
Frederic Morton, “A Talk With Thomas Mann at 80.” New York Times Book Review, June 5, 1955, pp.
374
Peter Gordon Mann, “Vital Humanism: Thomas Mann, José Ortega y Gasset, and the Revolt Against
Decadence in Self-Nation-Europe, 1900-1949”. PhD Dissertation, Stanford University, 2012, p. 3.
174
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Abstract (if available)
Abstract
In 1952, Thomas Mann fled the United States for a second exile in Switzerland. The ascent of Senator Joseph McCarthy reminded him of the rise of Adolf Hitler in Germany and he sensed America was on the verge of becoming a fascist state. In his last State of the Union address in 1944, Franklin Delano Roosevelt himself also feared the United States was veering dangerously close to embracing fascism. Twenty years prior, Adolf Hitler had praised America’s use of racist laws and scientific experiments as a model for pure nations to follow. ❧ In “Sensing Fascism in America Thomas Mann in Los Angeles,” I argue that beyond Mann’s personal feelings, an undebatable issue, was his insight into the political realities of America at the dawn of the Cold War where he compared the rise of Hitler and the dawn of Cold War America. His reactions to political events were driven by a moral obligation to denounce what he believed was abusive, outrageous and indecent behavior, whether it was the rise of the National Socialist Party in Germany, the ascent to power of Adolf Hitler, the Nazi atrocities during World War II, or the fascist trends he sensed were manifest in America at the beginnings of the Cold War. Throughout his life he often became a reluctant warrior albeit he was always a grudging and sharp dissenter of official “truths.”
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Sensing fascism in America: Thomas Mann in Los Angeles
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Access Conditions
The author retains rights to his/her dissertation, thesis or other graduate work according to U.S. copyright law. Electronic access is being provided by the USC Libraries in agreement with the a...
Repository Name
University of Southern California Digital Library
Repository Location
USC Digital Library, University of Southern California, University Park Campus MC 2810, 3434 South Grand Avenue, 2nd Floor, Los Angeles, California 90089-2810, USA
Tags
exile: Nazism
Joseph McCarthy