Germany and the Germans

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Original cover of the first edition

Germany and the Germans is a speech by Thomas Mann , which he gave on May 29, 1945 in the research library of the US Congress, the Library of Congress , initially in English. The German version was published in October 1945 in the magazine Die neue Rundschau . As with the essays Nietzsche's Philosophy in the Light of Our Experience and Dostoevsky, which were written a little later, the lecture is, in some measure, an essayistic work accompanying the extensive contemporary novel Doctor Faustus .

A few weeks after the German surrender and against the background of the effects of the Second World War , Thomas Mann assessed Germany's position in terms of political and intellectual history. He dealt with German inwardness and romanticism , in which he saw peculiarities of the German nature , and looked for mental constants that should make both the meaning of German culture and the fateful, culpable involvement in National Socialism understandable. National Socialism appears as part of the history of German inwardness, which was shown in the Reformation and the Romantic movement.

content

Thomas Mann, 1937

Personal introduction

Thomas Mann opens the speech with personal comments about his US citizenship and his amazing "patriarchal" age. Life is made of the stuff "dreams are made of", with which he alludes to the words Prospero from Shakespeare's drama The Tempest . He quotes a passage from Death in Venice : It is desirable to live long in order as an artist “to be characteristically fruitful at all stages of life.” In the novella, Gustav von Aschenbach “dearly wishes to grow old, because he has always had held to mean that truly great, comprehensive, yes, truly honorable, only the artistry is to be named, which was destined to be characteristically fruitful on all levels of the human. "

A daring company

It is true that it is a “daring venture” to talk about Germany and the Germans, but the topic is unavoidable and imposes itself because hardly a conversation is conceivable that does not focus on the “German problem, the riddle in the character and fate of this people decay, which has undeniably given the world so much beautiful and great things and which has repeatedly been a burden to it in such a fatal way. ”The fate of Germany and the historical catastrophe force an interest, even if it refuses to pity. It would be inappropriate for someone born German to want to arouse pity and defend the country. On the other hand, it looks bad on him too, out of "compliance with the immeasurable hatred that his people have known how to arouse, curse and condemn them and recommend themselves as 'good Germany'." If you were born German, you have to do with German fate and German guilt. However, truths that one tries to say about one's own people are only "the product of self-examination".

Thomas Mann delves into the German state of mind and tries to determine the psychological susceptibility of Germanness and, using the example of Faust , the representative of the German soul, to work out the danger of German depths using the example of Faust , who pacts with the devil . Here German inwardness and German Romanticism come to the fore in an analysis based on Nietzsche's psychology and terminology. The complexity of the German mental situation is illustrated with the help of original German personalities such as Martin Luther and Tilman Riemenschneider , Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Otto von Bismarck .

German world need

Lübeck

According to Thomas Mann, the German character unites worldly need and worldly shyness, cosmopolitanism and provincialism , an experience that he had made early on: Compared to Germany, Switzerland seems less provincial, is pervaded by western air and "far more 'world', European parquet, as the political colossus in the north, where the word 'international' had long since become a swear word and a conceited provincialism had spoiled and foxed the atmosphere. "Thomas Mann laments the" modern- nationalistic form of German unworldliness, German unworldliness, a profound misfortune of the world, which in earlier times, together with a kind of bourgeois universalism, a cosmopolitanism in the night cap, so to speak, had given the German image of the soul. "

There was something demonic, “bizarre-spooky” about the German image of the soul, which made it easier for him to feel his personal origins. Already in the atmosphere of the hometown Lübeck , which is Protestant , with its winding streets, the steeply towering cityscape, the dance of death painting of the Marienkirche but was influenced by the Gothic Middle Ages , you can feel "something of a latent spiritual epidemic", which is strange with one “Understandably sober modern trading city.” One could imagine suddenly encountering a “children's train movement”, a Saint Vitus dance , a cross-miracle excitation with “mystical wandering of the people”. Thomas Mann connects this "ancient, neurotic underground", which was externally characterized by weird originals, the "weirdos" and "harmless semi-insane (n)", the "old woman with watery eyes and cane", with a typical basic trait of the German mind and suggests its connection with the demonic .

Faust and German music

Faust in his study

Faust, the hero of the greatest German work, is a person between the Middle Ages and humanism , who sells his soul to the devil out of a presumptuous drive for knowledge. "Where the arrogance of the intellect is mated with spiritual antiquity and bondage, there is the devil." This devil appears to Mann as a typically German figure, "the alliance with him, the devil's prescription, to all treasures and To gain the power of the world as something peculiarly obvious to the German being. A lonely thinker and researcher, a theologian and philosopher in his hermitage, who, out of the desire for world enjoyment and world domination, surrenders his soul to the devil - it is not quite the right moment to see Germany in this picture, today when Germany is literally the devil get?"

Music is another focus of the consideration of the music lover Thomas Mann, who several times - in essays, but above all in his Doctor Faustus - had drawn attention to its ambiguity, its demonic character, its psychological dangers and seductive skills. The most passionate, most unreal art is the real sphere of Faust. Without her he couldn't really be understood. The Christian Kierkegaard had already drawn attention to their demonic side in his essay on Mozart's Don Giovanni . "If Faust is to be the representative of the German soul, he would have to be musical, because abstract and mystical i. e. musically, the German's relationship to the world is [...] clumsy and at the same time determined by the haughty awareness of being superior to the world in 'depth'. ”The depth consists in the musicality of the German soul, the“ inwardness ”- the“ The falling apart of the speculative and the socio-political element of human energy ... "The Germans are" musicians of the vertical, not the horizontal, greater masters of harmony [...] than melody, [...] the spiritual in music far more than that Congregated people cheering. You gave the West [...] its deepest, most important music. "

Luther and Goethe

Martin Luther, portrait by Lucas Cranach the Elder Ä. , 1529

Thomas Mann describes Martin Luther , the "incarnation of the German being", as extremely musical. In his anti-Roman, Protestant freedom but also the "choleric-grobian, scolding, spitting fury and" kick out that with "tender depth of feeling and the superstition in demons, incubi and Kielkröpfe " is connected. Thomas Mann would have preferred Luther's opponent, Pope Leo X , as a dinner guest, the "friendly humanist" whom he had performed as Cardinal Giovanni de 'Medici in the drama Fiorenza and who had insulted Luther as "the devil's pig, the Babst" .

In Goethe the contrast between Luther and Erasmus has been eliminated

The contrast between Luther and the humanist Erasmus von Rotterdam , with whom Thomas Mann had been concerned for a long time, was reconciled in Goethe . “Goethe is beyond this contrast and reconciles it. He is the civilized full force and national force, urban demonia. Spirit and blood at once, namely art ... With it Germany has taken a huge step forward in human culture - or should have taken it; because in reality it has always stayed closer to Luther than to Goethe. "

Luther is a liberating and at the same time a regressive force, a "conservative revolutionary." With his congenial translation of the Bible he had a lasting impact on the German language , in fact created the language that Goethe and Nietzsche completed. Despite his importance as a liberator from scholastic fetters, innovator of freedom of conscience and promoter of European democracy , despite his importance for the development of idealistic philosophy and psychology through the pietistic examination of conscience, he understood nothing about political freedom. His freedom was the inner, spiritual one of the Christian , while that of the citizen was repugnant to him. This can be seen in his relationship to the peasant uprising , which he saw as “a wild compromise of his work, the spiritual liberation [...]. He called the peasants to death like mad dogs and called out to the princes that now one could acquire the kingdom of heaven by slaughtering and strangling peasant cattle [...]. For the sad outcome of this first attempt at a German revolution [...] Luther, the German people's man, bears a good deal of responsibility. "

The wood carver and sculptor Tilman Riemenschneider , described by Thomas Mann with great sympathy , took sides for the cause of the farmers. Because of his natural modesty and the desire to only serve his art, politics was actually alien to him, and he felt nothing like a demagogue . Out of the “sphere of purely intellectual and aesthetic artistic bourgeoisie”, his conscience forced him to “become a fighter for freedom and justice.” At his influence, Würzburg refused allegiance to the princes and did not move against the peasants. After the suppression of the uprising, he was thrown into prison and tortured and, as a broken man, could no longer practice his art profession.

The inwardness of Germany “was completely in line with the Pauline saying 'Be subject to the authorities who have power over you!'” Luther's “anti-political devotion”, “this product of musical German inwardness and unworldliness, has not only existed for centuries the submissive attitude of the Germans towards the princes and all government authorities, it has not only partly favored and partly created the German dualism of bold speculation and political immaturity. Above all, it is representative in a monumental and defiant way for the core German disintegration of national impulse and the ideal of political freedom. "

German concept of freedom

According to Thomas Mann, the fact that National Socialism, which "perished in shame" , could use the name of a freedom movement indicates an unfortunate conception of the German concept of freedom, a "psychological law" that has repeatedly shown itself fatally throughout history. Politically understood freedom is above all a moral and domestic political term. But a people who are not internally free and responsible do not deserve external freedom, cannot have a say, even if they use the "sonorous word". In Germany, the term only referred to the externally related right to be German. "A defied individualism" in relation to the world was inwardly compatible with "an alienated measure of lack of freedom, immaturity, dull submission."

The storming of the Bastille on July 14, 1789

National Socialism perverted this servile sense and the disproportion to the idea of ​​"world slavery by a people who were as unfree at home as the Germans". Why now does the German drive for freedom have to result in internal bondage and freedom itself? Thomas Mann answers with the well-known historical phenomenon "that Germany has never had a revolution and has learned to unite the concept of the nation with that of freedom."

Napoléon in his study 1812

The “nation” was born in the French Revolution and is a revolutionary and liberal term, “which includes the human element and means freedom internally and Europe externally. Everything that wins in the French political spirit is based on this happy unity, everything that narrows and depresses German patriotic enthusiasm is based on the fact that this unity could never be formed. "

The concept of the nation is actually not appropriate for Germany, the German idea of freedom is ethnic-anti- European and as a rule very close to the barbaric. Not by chance did Goethe, the folk culture was not foreign and not only classical works such as the Iphigenia , but also "core German things like Faust I" and Götz von Berlichingen had created, to the chagrin of Patriots no negative relationship with Napoleon had . The primitive, ethnic element of the freedom movements was repugnant to him. The "dominant terms, around which everything revolved for him, were culture and barbarism ".

Goethe's rejection of "political Protestantism", the "völkisch (n) Rüpel democracy", according to Thomas Mann, had a fatal effect on the German bourgeoisie because it deepened the Lutheran dualism of intellectual and political freedom and the concept of education was prevented from doing so. integrate the political element. This is shown in the many failed revolutions.

German politics

As the “art of the possible”, politics is a creative force that mediates between “spirit and life, idea and reality, the desirable and the necessary”, including “the hard, the necessary, the amoral”. According to Thomas Mann, the politically gifted peoples pursue politics as an art of life that does not go away without the “impact of the useful, the evil and the overly earthly, but never completely out of sight of the higher, the idea, the humane and moral leaves".

In contrast, to the Germans, “dealing with life based on compromise [...] appears to be hypocrisy [...]. Not by nature evil, but designed for the spiritual and ideal, he considers politics to be nothing but lies, murder, deceit and violence [...] and, if he subscribes to it out of worldly ambition, follows this philosophy. The German, as a politician, believes he has to behave in such a way that mankind passes hearing and seeing. "

Otto von Bismarck, 1890

The crimes of Germany in the war cannot be excused psychologically either, least of all because of their superfluity. The power and conquest plans did not need the crimes. They came about from “a theoretical disposition , in honor of an ideology, the racial fantasy . If it didn't sound so horrible, one might say that they committed their crimes out of unworldly idealism. "

The cosmopolitanism peculiar to the Germans had degenerated into a European hegemonic striving through "seduction" and was thereby transformed into its opposite - nationalism and imperialism .

Otto von Bismarck

In Bismarck , "the only political genius that Germany has produced", German romanticism is combined with Machiavellianism and realism. The German striving for unity towards an empire, directed by Bismarck into Prussian channels, was not just a unification movement. Even the Greater German discussions in the Paulskirche Parliament were influenced by medieval imperialism and memories of the Holy Roman Empire . Bismarck's empire from 1871 had “nothing to do with democracy at its core”, but was a power structure “with the meaning of European hegemony [...] The empire linked to medieval memories of fame”.

German inwardness and romance

The Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog by Caspar David Friedrich

Thomas Mann describes the German inwardness as follows: “Delicacy, the depth of the heart, unworldly eccentricity, natural piety ... in short, all the characteristics of high lyricism are mixed in.” This inwardness is the “German metaphysics , German music ... the miracle of German song” owe. The Reformation is a historical act of German inwardness . In this good act of liberation, however, "the devil had his hand in the game", because the division of the West and the Thirty Years' War were the result. The little "inner" Erasmus of Rotterdam, when he wrote the praise of folly , foresaw the consequences. The robust ruffian Luther, however, was not a pacifist , had affirmed the tragic fate and agreed to take the blood "on his neck". Thomas Mann regards German Romanticism as an expression of inwardness. The longing-dreamy and the artistic element stand opposite the dark side, the antiquity of the soul, which is addressed by irrational and demonic forces. The Germans "are the people of the romantic counter-revolution against philosophical intellectualism and rationalism of the Enlightenment - an uprising of music against literature, mysticism against clarity." This deep power of romanticism is not a weak enthusiasm and thinks little of "virtue and idealistic." World embellishment. "

Based on Goethe's laconic definition, "the classical is the healthy and the romantic the sick", Thomas Mann formulates that despite all the ethereal and sublime phenomena of romanticism, it carries the germ of disease, "like the rose the worm". Her innermost being is out to seduction, "and indeed seduction to death." Devotion to the irrational and the past is particularly pronounced in Germany, the homeland of Romanticism. As a united power country, Germany no longer created anything great culturally, but was only strong. “ Having fallen to a pitiful mass level, the level of Hitler , German romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism, into a frenzy and spasm of arrogance and crime, which now comes to its terrible end in the national catastrophe, an unparalleled physical and psychological collapse. "

German tendency to self-criticism

The history of German inwardness shows “that there are not two Germanys, one bad and one good, but only one that did his best by devil's trick to evil. Bad Germany, that's the good that went wrong. ”For this reason, a German-born spirit could not completely deny the bad,“ guilt-laden Germany, and declare: 'I am the good, the noble, the just Germany in white clothes, leave the bad I will help you to exterminate. '”The portrayed did not come from distant knowledge, but was experienced firsthand, which is why it is“ a piece of German self-criticism ”.

This self-criticism is in German tradition. "The tendency to self-criticism, which often went as far as self-loathing, to self-curse, is core German." So it remains incomprehensible that a "people who were designed for self-knowledge could at the same time grasp the idea of ​​world domination". "The relentlessness that the great Germans, Holderlin , Goethe, Nietzsche have said about Germany, cannot be compared to anything that a French, an Englishman or even an American has said to his people in the face."

outlook

At the end of his speech, Mann expressed the hope that, after the catastrophe, steps could be taken towards a world situation that would break away from the national individualism of the 19th century, that the victory over National Socialism would pave the way for a “world social reform that Germany's innermost facilities and needs in particular offer the greatest opportunities for happiness, “that mankind could look to the world state .

The ideas of social humanism are not alien to the German being. “In his worldly shyness there was always so much world longing, at the bottom of the loneliness that made it evil, is who does not know! the desire to love, the desire to be loved. Ultimately, the German misfortune is only the paradigm of the tragedy of being human in general. We all need the grace that Germany so urgently needs. "

Emergence

Benedetto Croce, author of the history of Europe in the nineteenth century

In the fall of 1944, Thomas Mann was looking for a topic for a lecture tour that would take him from January 1945 through some cities on the east coast of the United States . The core topic of the lecture was already fixed at the end of October, as a letter to Agnes Meyer dated October 31, 1944 shows. He has a speech in mind that will deal with a critical, “but by no means purely negative and also self-contained presentation of German character and fate, German history [...] the peculiarity, inhibition and difficulty of the German relationship to the world”. He thinks of a synthesis of the considerations of an apolitical and the 1938 lecture On the Future Victory of Democracy .

At the end of October, Thomas Mann tried again to evade the annoying task of giving the annual lecture to the Library of Congress and was prepared to forego his salary in the future. The request, however, was rejected; instead he received a postponement until the end of May 1945 because Archibald MacLeish wanted to combine the speech with the celebration of his 70th birthday.

In a letter to Jonas Lesser , Thomas Mann described the subject to be treated as "breakneck". "For me it is always said: 'If you are looking for difficult things, it will be difficult', as it is said in the letter to the Ebreer."

On November 8, 1944, he began reading the History of Europe in the Nineteenth Century by Benedetto Croce , which the author had dedicated to him and which is one of the main sources of the lecture.

Thomas Mann found Tilman Riemenschneider's involvement in the peasant uprising in the book Tilman Riemenschneider in the German Peasants' War by Karl Heinrich Stein, which had already been read at the end of 1943 , and which had also dedicated a copy to him personally.

For health reasons Thomas Mann initially gave up the lecture tour planned for January 1945 and dealt again with Doctor Faustus , while he also worked on intensive studies for the speech. After he had the central XXV. When the first chapter of the novel had ended with the famous talk of the devil , he began writing the speech on February 27 and finished it on March 18.

On the same day he confided in his diary that he was "so satisfied with it [the lecture] that I consider it the best offered in this country".

Henry A. Wallace , Vice President of the United States , and Archibald MacLeish introduced Thomas Mann before his speech. Since the auditorium was not prepared for the large number of visitors, three more halls were opened in which thousands of listeners could follow the speech over loudspeakers. In addition to representatives from the United States, Katia Mann , her son-in-law Giuseppe Antonio Borgese and Gottfried Bermann Fischer , publisher and friend of Thomas Mann, were among the guests. Thomas Mann later admired the willingness with which his words were received by the audience.

On the day of the speech, he noted how "extremely happy" the lecture had gone after a nice introduction by MacLeish.

Thomas Mann had already dealt with many aspects of the lecture in the twenties. The Luther-Erasmus complex was intended for one of three novels on the history of religion , of which only the legend of Joseph was completed in the end. The assessment of the central figure of Goethe, who reconciles the antagonism between Luther and Erasmus in the “civilized power of the people”, can already be deduced from a diary entry from 1934. Thomas Mann took some of the quotations from Stefan Zweig's book Triumph und Tragik des Erasmus von Rotterdam , which, however, he assessed critically and negatively.

background

the novel

Doctor Faustus

Thomas Mann dealt with the Faustian and its relationship to Germany in his narrative and essayistic work; it is the express theme of his contemporary novel Doctor Faustus , the treatise The Origin of Doctor Faustus, and this speech.

The close relationship with Doctor Faustus becomes clear at several points in the speech through references and textual adoption. While in the novel the connections between the fate of the characters and the catastrophe of Germany, the aesthetic irrationality and the political of National Socialism are rather hinted at and suggested, they come to light in the speech.

The tragically ingenious composer Adrian Leverkühn enters into a pact with the devil in order to overcome the artistic failure he perceived. Its failure is less of a personal, reproachable one, but one that is due to the objective development of music history and falls in an epoch ( modernity ) in which the musical material is exhausted and “all means and conveniences of art are now only suitable for parody ".

If the novel interweaves Adrian's life with the second time level of the narrator Serenus Zeitblom (in National Socialist Germany up to the Second World War) and links this symbolically with the fate of Germany, the essay shows the devil symbolism very clearly: “Isn't it quite the right moment, To see Germany in this picture, today, when Germany is literally taking the devil? "

While Goethe's Faust is a philosopher, doctor and theologian, he appears in Thomas Mann's novel as a musician and composer (albeit without any explicit mention of the relationship to Goethe's Faust). The theme of music presented in this way enabled Thomas Mann to describe the “German temptation” for intoxication and irrationality, poisoning and illness using the example of Adrian Leverkühn. The composer's ambiguous genius can be characterized in one sentence in Nietzsche's speech : "The German is genius out of sympathy with the morbid."

In this speech, Thomas Mann explicitly distinguished himself from Goethe, the Olympic genius, whose work and personality he had dealt with not only in his novel Lotte in Weimar , but in a number of essays. It was, however, a mistake Goethe made to portray Faust as a philosopher. As the German embodiment of fate, Faust is not concerned with recognizing the wrong path or with probation and redemption, but with inwardness , demonia and death. Faust embodies the depth of the German soul that lies in its musicality. But this German depth is fatal, because while Goethe's Faust is being redeemed, Thomas Mann's Faustus is perishing.

Thomas Mann's preoccupation with the outstanding figure of Goethe, which lasted until the end of his life, was expressed in further lectures and essays, for example in Goethe and Tolstoy from 1921, in Goethe as a representative of the bourgeois age , the speech he gave in the Goethe year on 18 March 1932, held in the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin , in Goethe and the Democracy and in Goethe, the German Wonder (The Three Powerful) from 1949. In this essay, which was also given as a radio lecture, he again dealt with two other figures, who play a role in Germany and the Germans and whom he describes in a similar way: Martin Luther and Otto von Bismarck.

Thomas Mann and politics

Thomas Mann's relationship to politics was ambivalent and not unproblematic. It was only reluctantly that he entered the political arena as the best-known representative of German exile literature .

As an apolitical and free man of letters, as a writer of the timeless and super-individual who tried to put his artistry at the center of his existence, he was initially only marginally interested in the current, in the narrower sense of the word, political field. With his fine-nerved, sensitive nature, who perceived even the slightest hint of criticism as a personal attack and suffered from it physically, he also seemed unsuitable for a political role.

On the other hand, it was difficult for him to escape the developments of the time. There are only a few phases of complete political abstinence. The decisive historical events of his life - the First World War and the Weimar Republic , National Socialism , the Second World War and the beginning of the Cold War - caught up with him again and again and forced an author of his rank to deal with politics.

His commitment to Weimar democracy and his warning of the emergence of National Socialism, as well as his later confrontation with anti-communism and the Adenauer Republic, show him as a writer who wavered between the sphere of pure artistry and the obligation to take a political position.

From reflections on Weimar democracy

Even the conservative considerations of an apolitical with their echo from one side that seemed increasingly questionable to him, reveal the political sphere that he was to process from then on in his narrative and essayistic work and reflected in letters and diaries. Compared to other authors of his generation, Thomas Mann did not acknowledge the republic and democracy until relatively late , but then appeared as its public advocate and criticized tendencies that opposed the republican-democratic order.

In contrast to his brother Heinrich, who during the Weimar Republic repeatedly dealt with political issues of the day and was later proposed by Kurt Hiller as a candidate for the Reich presidential election in 1932, Thomas Mann restricted himself mainly to literary work. He wrote intensively on the Zauberberg and the Joseph Tetralogy and only occasionally fulfilled representative duties, such as those resulting from the establishment of the poetry section in the Prussian Academy of the Arts or the award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. His lectures From the German Republic , Germany and Democracy and Culture and Socialism can be viewed as exceptions.

The republic speech , which he gave on October 13, 1922 on the occasion of Gerhart Hauptmann's 60th birthday , is a characteristic document on the way of distancing himself from the political thoughts of the reflections , even if the author himself initially felt no break. He still saw himself as a conservative who had turned against the revolution in the name of humanity; From this motive he now throws himself against reactionary currents. The obscurantism is a danger to humanity, that of relativism was tired and strive for the absolute.

If he had previously turned against the republic, he now recommended it to his listeners. They and democracy are "internal facts ... and to deny them means to lie." The republic is a fate towards which amor fati (fundamental affirmation of life) is the right attitude.

Thomas Mann did not choose a natural legal- individualistic approach to proclaim the new values, but tried to derive them from specifically German roots and traditions. He referred to Novalis as an Eideshelfers , in whose political aphorisms he saw genuinely German connections between national and universal values, which are peculiar to the republican idea. In order to link the romantic poet's essentially German positions with Western political ideas, he resorted to the political poetry of Walt Whitman . With the speech, which ended with the emphatic appeal “Long live the republic!”, The path of the defender of the Weimar state idea was taken. After this confession, the political right now tended to regard him as a defector and a traitor.

Thomas Mann and National Socialism

Earlier than many other contemporaries - and still under the spell of the Conservative Revolution - Thomas Mann recognized the political danger of National Socialism and addressed it in several writings. His analysis was comprehensive and complex and also went into the causes of this movement.

In his essay Goethe and Tolstoy , who was still in the context of the considerations , he described the nature of the emerging movement as “folk paganism” and “romantic barbarism.” It is romantic because it seeks lost irrationality and barbaric because it does The level of development of the spirit will be betrayed and the result violently will be the return of the myth . The "swastika nonsense", as he explained in his essay On the Jewish Question , is a moment of cultural reaction.

In Germany and democracy , he dealt with the traumatic defeat of the First World War as well as the stab in the back legend and the war guilt thesis of the Versailles Treaty , elements that are partly responsible for the wave of political irrationalism that is breaking through Germany and, increasingly, political awareness many Germans are numb. After initially praising Oswald Spengler , he later turned against him, criticized the tendency of his downfall of the West and described him as Nietzsche's “clever ape”.

Thus, as the starting point of Mann's ( aesthetic ) “ fascism theory ”, the artist problem can be viewed as analyzed by Nietzsche - in his Wagner case , for example . The influence of Nietzsche's analysis of decadence becomes clear in several of Mann's political writings, for example in his disturbingly concise essay Brother Hitler , in which the “rejected quarter artist” is portrayed as a “bad-comer”, whose daring appearance carries twisted fairytale traits in itself and makes it necessary To show a certain disgusted admiration for “catastrophic fellows”. Like the Wagner targeted by Nietzsche , the Décadent Hitler appears as a charlatan and cold actor who, without believing himself, uses the effects as a mass psychologist that induce the people to believe in him.

In contrast to other writers, the “ seizure of power ” by the National Socialists initially did not alarm Thomas Mann in such a way that he would have thought of an immediate emigration . On February 10, 1933, he gave his major lecture, The Sorrows and Greatness of Richard Wagner , in the Auditorium Maximum of the University of Munich , with whom he then went on a longer lecture tour to other European countries. He was not in Germany when the Reichstag burned and the last free elections were held under the terror of the National Socialists - events of which he learned about in the foreign press. The protest of the Richard Wagner City of Munich in the Münchner Neuesten Nachrichten , which was signed by Richard Strauss and Hans Pfitzner among others , confronted him with the reality of the country and also drew the National Socialist authorities' attention to him. At the end of April, for example, part of his property was confiscated and his accounts blocked, and a protective custody order was issued a little later . Under this impression, he did not return to Germany, but initially stayed in Switzerland.

It was only later, under the impression of the new experiences and the influence of his daughter Erika , that Thomas Mann made his way to a decisive position and condemned the regime in various writings.

In a letter to the literary editor of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung , Eduard Korrodi , he made it clear that nothing good could come of the National Socialist rule for Germany and the world. This conviction had him steer the country in which he is culturally rooted deeper than those that it be Germans wanted to deny.

In 1936 his German citizenship was revoked and he emigrated to the USA.

Thomas Mann in the United States

Paul Tillich wanted to win Thomas Mann for a committee

Thomas Mann, who held a well paid position at the Library of Congress, could not avoid the annual lecture obligations. His political positions were discussed controversially among the emigrants and among the American public.

The lecture Fate and Task from 1943, for example, met with overwhelming rejection. Agnes Meyer was disturbed, even outraged, by some passages which, from her point of view , revealed a strange understanding of democracy and communism . The audience did not expect any information about the nature and character of communism, but rather about the question "how Germany can return to human society".

At the request of Paul Tillich , Thomas Mann had inwardly reluctantly discussed the establishment of a committee for a democratic Germany with other emigrants on November 4, 1943 . Thomas Mann was skeptical of the idea for several reasons. He wanted to become a US citizen and asked Adolf Berl how the US government assessed the project. He advised him to avoid controversial debates. With relief at the "happy negative outcome" - so his diary note - he announced his rejection to Tillich one day later. This caused great disappointment among the emigrants. As Thomas Mann told Agnes Meyer in a letter, Paul Tillich berated him for having “pronounced Germany the death sentence” with his decision.

Thomas Mann describes fascism as the last, technical phase of romanticism . National Socialism, which he condemned in theological terms as absolutely evil , the utterly absurd , was fought by him from 1936, the year of his official expatriation, with journalistic means.

In the monthly radio broadcasts Deutsche Hörer! From 1940 to 1945 he addressed the German public with a brilliant and passionate style to warn them of the rejected powers to which they were at the mercy. It was "the voice of a Germany that showed the world and will show another face than the hideous Medusa mask that Hitlerism impressed on it."

reception

Considerations of an apolitical

In 1959, the German scholar Erich Heller described the considerations as a "source reservoir for Thomas Mann's creative life" and pointed out that entire passages - now with the opposite evaluation - were included in the lecture. The originally praised German inwardness and the penchant for mysticism and music would now be held responsible for National Socialism.

Despite his cosmopolitanism, Walter Jens rates Thomas Mann as one of the few great authors for whom the topic of “Germany and the Germans” was a real problem. The few other intellectuals can paradoxically, literally or figuratively, also be seen as emigrants : Karl Marx , Heinrich Heine and Friedrich Nietzsche . According to Jens, the most accurate statements about Germany and its ideology, its nature and its misery were formulated abroad. From an economically and socially developed position it was possible to recognize the “peculiar dialectic between political impotence and daring conception in the realm of the spirit” in which bourgeois culture in Germany could develop. This culture found its conclusion and climax in Thomas Mann.

Gottfried Bermann Fischer rated it in 1975 as a “tremendous honor” for Thomas Mann as well as for the “great cultural idea represented by the term Germany”, shortly after the liberation “from Hitler's incubus ” in a prominent position in the Library of Congress as a representative of the USA and to speak of liberated Germany. This fact has not yet been adequately appreciated in Germany. The speech is an analysis of the history of ideas, carried by a sense of responsibility, by an independent writer. It takes a lot of courage at this "historic moment, in an atmosphere of hatred and rejection of everything German, to put in a word for Germany and to ask for understanding for the wrong turns of the so terribly beaten country."

For Klaus Harpprecht , the speech is one of the rare “great testimonies of German rhetoric.” It offers a “powerful and witty interpretation” of German history, “full of brilliant and often ingenious wordings”. While it does open up bold perspectives, it does not forego dangerous abbreviations and, with its simplifications, is "sometimes on the edge of the demagogic". The jubilation over the truths expressed and the anger over the simplifications had receded before the “power of confession” at the end of the speech. Thomas Mann had accepted that the demonization of the German would be associated with an exaltation, a “negative glorification”, which at its core was just as romantic as the consideration of an apolitical .

According to Manfred Görtemaker's similar-sounding assessment , the speech cannot explain the development of National Socialism from German history. While Thomas Mann was able, in his less ambitious contributions, to take a clear position against National Socialism and to name his crimes, in the celebratory speech he returned to the spirit of contemplating something non-political by placing guilt and responsibility in the area of ​​religiously disguised non-commitment . It is therefore no coincidence that many parts were taken from the conservative early work - as Erich Heller and Joachim Fest had already shown. Thomas Mann only changed the signs and the context. In the end, the “German misfortune” is reinterpreted in a universalist way and linked to the religious need for self-criticism.

Single issues

  • Germany and the Germans. Bermann-Fischer (Outlook), Stockholm 1947.
  • Talk about Germany and the Germans . Suhrkamp, ​​Berlin 1947.
  • Germany and the Germans 1945 . With an essay by Hans Mayer : Again “Germany and the Germans”, 1991. (pp. 41–66) European Publishing House (EVA-Reden 1), Hamburg 1992, ISBN 3-434-50101-0 .

literature

  • Ehrhard Bahr: Thomas Mann's lecture “Germany and the Germans”. Coming to terms with the past and German unity. In: Michael Braun , Birgit Lermen (Ed.): Stories are told, the truth is formed. Thomas Mann: German, European, citizen of the world. Peter Lang, Frankfurt 2003, ISBN 3-631-38046-1 , pp. 65-79.
  • Kurt Pinthus : Germany and the Germans . In: Structure . 11, NY, June 8, 1945, p. 7.
  • Ulrich Sonnemann : Germany and the Germans . In: Staatszeitung and Herold . NY, March 6, 1948.
    • ders .: Thomas Mann or measure and demand. In: Frankfurter Hefte . July 1948, p. 625 ff.
  • Tobias Temming: "Brother Hitler"? On the importance of the political Thomas Mann. Essays and speeches from exile. WVB Wissenschafts-Verlag, Berlin 2008, ISBN 978-3-86573-377-1 . ( passim to Germany and the Germans. with literature index.)

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Prospero: These actors of ours, as I told you before, are all spirits, and they melted into thin air again, and like these unsubstantial air faces, so should the towers crowned with clouds, the stately palaces, the sacred temples, and this great globe itself, and everything that it contains, melt, and like this vanished, insignificant spectacle, do not leave the slightest trace behind. We are the stuff that dreams are made of, and our little life ends in sleep - sir, I'm worried ...
  2. ↑ Thomas Mann: Death in Venice. In: Thomas Mann: Collected works in thirteen volumes. Volume 8, Fischer, 1974, p. 451.
  3. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 5: Germany and the Germans. Fischer, Frankfurt 1996, p. 262.
  4. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 5: Germany and the Germans. Fischer, Frankfurt 1996, p. 264.
  5. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 5: Germany and the Germans. Fischer, Frankfurt 1996, p. 266.
  6. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 5: Germany and the Germans. Fischer, Frankfurt 1996, p. 268.
  7. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 5: Germany and the Germans. Fischer, Frankfurt 1996, p. 269.
  8. ↑ a b Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 5: Germany and the Germans. Fischer, Frankfurt 1996, p. 273.
  9. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 5: Germany and the Germans. Fischer, Frankfurt 1996, p. 279.
  10. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 5: Germany and the Germans. Fischer, Frankfurt 1996, p. 280.
  11. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 5: Germany and the Germans. Fischer, Frankfurt 1996, p. 281.
  12. ↑ Information from: Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 5: Germany and the Germans. Commentary, Germany and the Germans, emergence. Fischer, Frankfurt 1996, p. 433.
  13. ↑ cit. based on Thomas Mann: Essays. P. 433.
  14. ^ Manfred Görtemaker: Thomas Mann and politics, Germany and the Germans. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 171.
  15. ↑ Thomas Mann: Letters 1937 - 1947. Fischer, 1963, p. 411.
  16. ↑ Thomas Mann: Diaries 1944 - April 1, 1964, March 18, 1945. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 176.
  17. ↑ Gottfried Bermann Fischer: Turbulent times with Thomas Mann. In: Thomas Mann 1875 - 1975, lectures in Munich - Zurich - Lübeck. Fischer, 1977, p. 519.
  18. ↑ Thomas Mann: Diaries. 1944 - April 1, 1964, May 29, 1945. Fischer, Frankfurt 1986, p. 211.
  19. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 5: Germany and the Germans. Sources and Relationships, Germany and the Germans, Origin. Fischer, Frankfurt 1996, p. 433.
  20. ↑ a b Kindler's New Literature Lexicon. Vol. 11: Thomas Mann: Germany and the Germans. Kindler, Munich 1990, p. 65.
  21. ↑ Hermann Kunisch: Thomas Mann's Goethe picture. In: Thomas Mann 1875 - 1975, lectures in Munich - Zurich - Lübeck. Fischer, 1977, p. 321.
  22. ↑ Hermann Kunisch: Thomas Mann's Goethe picture. In: Thomas Mann 1875 - 1975, lectures in Munich - Zurich - Lübeck. Fischer, 1977, p. 321.
  23. ↑ This lecture met with criticism, as some saw Luther disparaged, but Bismarck overrated
  24. ↑ Manfred Görtemaker: Thomas Mann and politics. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 7.
  25. ↑ Manfred Görtemaker: Thomas Mann and politics. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 8.
  26. ↑ Manfred Görtemaker: Thomas Mann and politics. Reasonable Republicans. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, pp. 55-56.
  27. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Comment on Von deutscher Republik. Volume 2, For the New Germany. Fischer, Frankfurt 1993, p. 345.
  28. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Comment on Von deutscher Republik. Volume 2, For the New Germany. Fischer, Frankfurt 1993, p. 346.
  29. ↑ a b Thomas Mann: Essays. From the German Republic. Volume 2, For the New Germany. Fischer, Frankfurt 1993, pp. 135-136.
  30. ↑ Thomas-Mann-Handbuch, Theo Stammen: Politische Welt. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 29.
  31. ↑ Thomas-Mann-Handbuch, Theo Stammen: Politische Welt. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 32.
  32. ↑ Thomas-Mann-Handbuch, Theo Stammen: Politische Welt. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, pp. 36-37.
  33. ↑ a b Thomas-Mann-Handbuch, Herman Kurzke: Political Essayistik. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 703.
  34. ↑ Thomas Mann: Essays. Volume 4: Brother Hitler. Fischer, Frankfurt 1995, p. 307.
  35. ^ Thomas Mann Handbook, Herman Kurzke: Political Essayistik. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 704.
  36. ↑ Thomas-Mann-Handbuch, Theo Stammen: Politische Welt. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 40.
  37. ↑ Manfred Görtemaker: Thomas Mann and politics. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 164.
  38. ↑ Manfred Görtemaker: Thomas Mann and politics. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 165.
  39. ↑ Erich Heller: Thomas Mann. The ironic German . Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt a. M. 1959 (1975), cit. based on: Joachim Scholl: Review by Manfred Görtemaker: Thomas Mann and politics. Deutschlandradio Kultur, August 5, 2005. The reviewer misses Manfred Görtemaker 's reception of Mann's article Brother Hitler (1938)
  40. ↑ Walter Jens: The last citizen. In: Thomas Mann 1875 - 1975, lectures in Munich - Zurich - Lübeck. Fischer, 1977, p. 632.
  41. ↑ Gottfried Bermann Fischer: Turbulent times with Thomas Mann. In: Thomas Mann 1875 - 1975, lectures in Munich - Zurich - Lübeck. Fischer, 1977, p. 519.
  42. ↑ Klaus Harpprecht: Thomas Mann, A Biography. Chapter 91, Germany and the Germans. Rowohlt, 1995, p. 1462.
  43. ↑ Manfred Görtemaker: Thomas Mann and politics. Fischer, Frankfurt 2005, p. 175.
  44. ↑ Both titles document the speech that Sonnemann gave to German emigrants in New York. Thomas Mann is named half a fascist: His political work is clumsy and lacking in ideas, at the same time full of a pathos that lectures indignantly, gets professorial excitement, the index finger everywhere, the heart nowhere. He swung from one political error to another; he had given Germany no thought. Quote: "He has forfeited his share of the legacy of humanism and the classical period and surrendered himself skin and hair and with all signs of bad conscience to the civilization literary, the Nazi brother who was hostile to the Nazi."
  45. ^ Table of contents at DNB . The text is presented in the context of other relevant Mann essays.
This version was added to the list of articles worth reading on December 16, 2011 .