Mann on Germany

For four years after Hitler came to power, Nobel Prizewinner Thomas Mann, greatest of exiled German writers, evaded questioners who pressed him for his opinion of fascism in Germany. When he visited the U. S. in 1934 and 1935--the first time to be honored on his 5gth birthday, the second to receive an honorary degree from Harvard--he maintained a controlled silence about politics that was exceptional among literary exiles,,extraordinary in view of the anti-Nazi activities of his brother Heinrich, his son Klaus and daughter Erika. Sometimes he said he kept silent to protect his German readers. Sometimes, when reporters got him to the point of discussing Hitler or his own status as an exile, he was checked by shrewd, matter-of-fact, English-speaking Frau Mann, who hovered near, adroitly answered for him. In voluntary exile in Zurich since Hitler came to power, officially deprived of German citizenship last December, his property confiscated and books burned, Dr. Mann nevertheless held his tongue, waited until the right moment to strike back.

Last fortnight in Manhattan Dr. Mann's right moment came. Starting his 12-day visit to the U. S. by striking back with a stinging denunciation of Nazi censorship, he carried on his attack with lectures, mass meetings, an impressive barrage of speeches and statements. Dr. Mann's most telling blast was in his pamphlet, An Exchange of Letters,* which critics recognized as belonging with such classic literary rebukes as Zola's J'Accuse. Like most such spontaneous expressions of intellectual integrity, An Exchange of Letters was called into being by a relatively small occasion. Last December Dr. Mann received a curt note from the Frederick-William University, of Bonn, stating that since "Herr Thomas Mann, writer," had lost his citizenship, the University was obliged to withdraw its honorary degree. Author Mann's reply to this last straw was first published in the Nation, was reprinted by his U. S. publisher to coincide with his arrival in the U. S.* Even Nazis might be impressed by the dignity with which Author Mann states his position. "I have spent four years in an exile which it would be euphemistic to call voluntary since if I had remained in Germany or gone back there I should probably not be alive today." His work has won appreciation outside of Germany, nevertheless he still considers himself a German writer, primarily for German readers: "From the beginning of my intellectual life I had felt myself in 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; far more fitted to add a little to the gaiety of the world than to foster conflict and hatred in it. Something very wrong must have happened to make my life take so false and unnatural a turn." With what might seem presumption in a lesser man but in Mann's case carries prophetic weight, he calls the Nazi leaders to account: "I, forsooth, am supposed to have dishonored the Reich, Germany, in acknowledging that I am against them! They have the incredible effrontery to confuse themselves with Germany! When, after all, perhaps the moment is not far off when it will be of supreme importance to the German people not to be confused with them. To what a pass, in less than four years, have they brought Germany! Ruined, sucked dry body and soul by armaments with which they threaten the whole world, holding up the whole world and hindering it in its real task of peace, loved by nobody, regarded with fear and cold aversion by all, it stands on the brink of economic disaster. . . . The mature and cultural states--by which I mean those which understand the fundamental fact that war is no longer permissible--treat this endangered and endangering country, or rather the impossible leaders into whose hands it has fallen, as doctors treat a sick man--with the utmost tact and caution, with inexhaustible if not very flattering patience." Nazis will gnash their teeth over this prophecy: "No other people on earth is today so utterly incapable of war, so little in condition to endure one. That Germany would have no allies, not a single one in the world, is the first consideration but the smallest. Germany would be forsaken--terrible of course even in her isolation--but the really frightful thing would be the fact that she had forsaken herself. Intellectually reduced and humbled, morally gutted, inwardly torn apart by her deep mistrust of her leaders and the mischief they have done her in these years, profoundly uneasy herself, ignorant of the future, of course, but full of forebodings of evil, she would go into war not in the condition of 1914 but, even physically, of 1917 or 1918...a war, that is, which after the first inevitable defeat would turn into a civil war.

"I have not spoken out of arrogant presumption, but out of a concern and a distress from which your usurpers did not release me when they decreed that I was no longer a German--a mental and spiritual distress from which for four years not an hour of my life has been free. . . .

God help our darkened and desecrated country and teach it to make its peace with the world and with itself!"

*An Exchange of Letters--Knopf (50-c-). *Two months ago Thomas Mann became a citizen of Czechoslovakia following the example of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus. His actress daughter Erika, who last summer married English revolutionary poet W. H. Auden, has applied for U. S. citizenship.

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