150th birthday of Thomas Mann: Fighter for democracy

He would have been sure of a shitstorm. Had social media existed after the end of World War II, Thomas Mann would have had to endure vicious insults on X, Facebook, and the like. He learned about the contempt, indeed the hatred, that his German compatriots felt toward him, the exile, primarily from the newspapers. Literary critic Gerhard Nebel, for example, wrote in the "Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung" that Mann was the "exponent of an aversion to Germany that bordered on stupidity."

A postwar survey also spoke volumes: In June 1947, the American military government surveyed "political, economic, and cultural leaders, as well as average citizens, in Munich and other Bavarian cities whether they "wanted Thomas Mann back." The goal was for him (as well as other intellectuals such as Carl Zuckmayer) to participate in "re-education and reparations" in Germany. Most of the responses from artists, writers, and composers, however, were at least reserved, if not downright hostile.

Many of those interviewed there were supporters of self-proclaimed "inner emigration" after the war. Unlike Thomas Mann, Bertolt Brecht, Hannah Arendt, Albert Einstein, Mascha Kaléko, Gretel and Theodor W. Adorno, and countless others, they had not been forced to leave their homeland during the Nazi era. They had stayed at home and, as they argued after May 8, 1945, had lived out their resistance to Hitler through inner distance, not physical distance. In their view, staying there became a heroic act.

Still on the East Coast: Thomas Mann at Princeton University in 1940.

Source: IMAGO/GRANGER Historical Picture Archive

This attitude culminated in a now famous formulation that the inner emigrant Frank Thiess hurled at the exiled Thomas Mann, among others: "I, too, have often been asked why I did not emigrate, and I could always only answer the same thing: If I were able to survive this horrific epoch (about whose duration we were all mistaken), I would have gained so much for my intellectual development that I would emerge from it richer in knowledge and experience than if I had watched the German tragedy from the boxes and pit seats abroad."

Boxes and ground floor seats, then. Thomas Mann, born 150 years ago in Lübeck, had undoubtedly recently enjoyed a comfortable life in his villa in Pacific Palisades (the Los Angeles district had been back in the headlines a few weeks earlier during the major California wildfires). But when he and his wife Katia Mann did not return to their house on Poschingerstrasse in Munich from a winter trip to Switzerland in 1933, it was not a voluntary decision.

He was considered an enemy by the National Socialists at least since his "German Address" in 1930 in the Beethoven Hall in Berlin. In this speech, he not only uttered the incredibly timely sentence: "Every foreign policy, my dear listeners, corresponds to a domestic policy, which represents its organic accessory, forming with it an indissoluble intellectual and moral unity." But he also immediately added: "If I am convinced—a conviction for which I felt compelled to use not only my pen but also my person—that the political place of the German bourgeoisie today is alongside the Social Democrats, then I understand the word 'political' in the sense of this inner and outer unity."

Spared from the flames: The Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, pictured here in 2018.

Source: Bernd von Jutrczenka/dpa

And then, in 1933, Thomas Mann had also alienated the Richard Wagner faithful when he dared to criticize Bayreuth's pinnacle composer in his speech "The Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner." All this and much more was too much for the National Socialists' relationship with Thomas Mann. In 1938, the self-proclaimed champion of German culture—"Where I am, is Germany," Mann confidently declared into a reporter's microphone in the USA that same year—was officially expatriated.

But even after 1945, the Germans were still struggling with their Nobel laureate. From his desk at 1550 San Remo Drive, in front of the seven palm trees that stood on Mann's property, he had attempted since 1941 to drive a wedge between the Germans and Hitler in his "German Listeners" speeches, which were at times almost activist in style. Those in Nazi Germany who dared to listen to foreign broadcasts could learn about the atrocities of the war via the BBC.

As early as his speech of September 27, 1942, Thomas Mann mentioned the targeted killing of Jews: "According to information from the Polish government in exile, a total of 700,000 Jews have already been murdered or tortured to death by the Gestapo (...) Do you Germans know this? And what do you think?" By no means all Germans heard these speeches; after all, tuning into foreign radio stations was punishable by death. But anyone who listened to them could already have known about the extermination of the Jews.

Not always of the same opinion: Thomas Mann (l) greets his brother Heinrich in the port of New York in 1940 after his successful escape from France.

Source: ---/ETH Library Zurich, Thom

But was Thomas Mann something like a model democrat? Doubts about this began even during his lifetime. For hadn't he, born on June 6, 1875, the son of a Lübeck merchant and consul and his Brazilian-born wife Julia, sung the songs of all First World War swashbucklers in 1914? "Germany's entire virtue and beauty only unfolds in war. It will emerge from it freer and better than it was," he wrote in 1914.

And when his 600-page "Reflections of an Unpolitical Man" was published in 1918 – with very bad timing, since the war was almost lost for Germany at that point – he also wrote it in opposition to his liberal brother Heinrich, and there he found a commitment to Germany as a counterpart to the Western democratic civilization in England or France.

On the day of the speech "German Address" in the Berlin Beethoven Hall: Thomas Mann (from left), Erika Mann and Katia Mann

Source: Imago Images

For decades, the narrative of Thomas Mann's political commitment went somewhat like this: Until the early 1920s, he was a supporter of a German-leaning authoritarian state, but in the growing Weimar Republic, he changed his mind with speeches such as "On the German Republic" (1922) and the "German Address" (1930) – which earned him the accusation of being a "rational democrat." When Hitler came to power, Mann had to be persuaded by his daughter Erika to oppose the new regime. From 1936 onward, and at the latest upon his final arrival in the USA in 1938, he became even more clearly committed to opposing National Socialism.

Objection, says literary scholar Kai Sina. The German studies professor at the University of Münster paints a different picture. Thomas Mann, according to the leitmotif of his book "What is Good and What is Evil," was a political activist—and a supporter of the republic and liberal values ​​long before the outbreak of the First World War.

As can be read in Sina's book, Thomas Mann wrote as early as 1905, in the midst of the anti-democratic, censorship-friendly German Empire: "I am, to put it quite simply, for freedom. The phrase 'the spirit is free.'" These were inappropriate words at the time. Kai Sina also points out that in 1907, Thomas Mann, contrary to state doctrine, also advocated for the complete abolition of theater censorship and, in a "Report on Pornography and Eroticism," advocated for the freedom of this art form. As late as 1914, he protested against the confiscation of a small left-wing magazine, although the shadow of pre-war militarism had by then clearly cast itself over his statements.

On the beach at Nida: The German writer Thomas Mann (2nd from right) gestures on the beach while standing next to Ilse Dernburg, Elisabeth Mann, Michael Mann, Golo Mann, Katia Mann, Monika Mann and an unknown woman (from left to right).

Source: Fritz Krauskopf, Königsberg/ETH-

For Kai Sina, Thomas Mann's involvement in the Weimar Republic is therefore less a political new beginning for the writer than a resumption of his writing and political activist commitment. "There is no doubt: As a journalist and political intellectual, Thomas Mann entered the public arena far earlier and more decisively than the relevant textbooks would have us believe." And above all: for Sina, the 1922 speech "On the German Republic" signifies less a turning point in Thomas Mann's political life than it does "a return to an earlier attitude and practice, albeit now as a powerful declaration under the grand, programmatic umbrella term of 'democracy'."

This democracy is currently in an immediate crisis. This raises the question: How relevant is Thomas Mann today? He himself might have answered this question with a quote he once coined about the legacy of Richard Wagner: "But it is futile to summon great men from their immortal past into the present in order to ask them their opinion—if any—on the problems of contemporary life." Accordingly, it is better not to appropriate the deceased for the present.

But on the other hand, there are still his novels. Anyone who wants to see the fear of decline felt by today's middle class and other segments of society reflected in a bygone era will find "Buddenbrooks" a very timely (and still wonderfully readable) novel. The seductive powers of populists are captured in literary terms in Thomas Mann's story "Mario and the Magician." And the author magically immortalized a pre-war society in "The Magic Mountain."

Even clearer connections to our time can be found in his political writings. Thomas Mann expressed this idea as early as 1922: "It has been placed in our hands"—the democratic state—"in the hands of every individual." Mann continued: "It has become our business, which we must do well." Kai Sina, following John Dewey, calls this "democracy as a way of life."

Great speaker: Thomas Mann also gave countless speeches and lectures, here at the award ceremony for honorary citizenship in his hometown of Lübeck.

Source: Hans Kripgans

Last but not least, Thomas Mann was a man full of contradictions. He was torn between his (presumably largely unfulfilled) homosexuality, which Tilmann Lahme places at the center of his recent biography "Thomas Mann: A Life," and what he understood as his civic duty to lead an exemplary family life with a wife and six (mostly deeply unhappy and smothered by their over-father) children. Politically, contradictions are reflected, among other things, in his sometimes erratic responses to the political situation at hand. But who can really blame him for that in the turbulent times of the 20th century?

This ability to tolerate contradictions—in oneself and in others—might be part of a magic formula for regaining more serenity in our today's so fractious world. The term "tolerance of ambiguity," which today describes this ability, already existed during Thomas Mann's lifetime. The psychologist Else Frenkel-Brunswik, an Austrian emigrant who also found exile in California, coined the term in 1949.

The ability to accept different opinions, behaviors, ideals, and even ambiguous situations is an important foundation of the democratic way of life. One could even describe democracy as the rule of contradiction. In the United States, we can currently observe what a policy of simplification and homogenization looks like.