42 THENEWYORKER, MARCH 9, 2020
the radio; he furtively admired hand-
some men in uniform; he puzzled over
the phenomenon of the “Baryton-Boy
Frankie Sinatra,” to quote his diaries.
Like almost all the émigrés, he never
attempted to write fiction about Amer-
ica. He was completing his own histor-
ical epic, the tetralogy “Joseph and His
Brothers,” which is vastly more enter-
taining than its enormous length might
suggest. The Biblical Joseph is rein-
vented as a wily, seductive youth who
escapes spectacularly from predicaments
of his own making, and eventually
emerges, in the service of the Pharaoh,
as a masterly bureaucrat of social reform.
It’s as if Tadzio from “Death in Venice”
grew up to become Henry Wallace.
Mann’s comfortable existence de-
pended on a canny marketing plan
devised by his publisher, Alfred A.
Knopf, Sr. The scholar Tobias Boes, in
his recent book, “Thomas Mann’s War”
(Cornell), describes how Knopf remade
a difficult, quizzical author as the “Great-
est Living Man of Letters,” an animate
statue of European humanism. The su-
preme ironist became the high dean of
the Book-of-the-Month Club. The florid
and error-strewn translations of Helen
Lowe-Porter added to this ponderous
impression. ( John E. Woods’s transla-
tions of the major novels, published be-
tween 1993 and 2005, are far superior.)
Yet Knopf ’s positioning enabled Mann
to assume a new public role: that of
spokesperson for the anti-Nazi cause.
Boes writes, “Because he so manifestly
stood above the partisan fray, Mann was
able to speak out against Hitler and be
perceived as a voice of reason rather than
be dismissed as an agitator.”
Essays like “The Coming Victory of
Democracy” and “War and Democracy”
remain dismayingly relevant in the era
of Vladimir Putin, Viktor Orbán, and
Donald Trump. In 1938, Mann stated,
“Even America feels today that democ-
racy is not an assured possession, that
it has enemies, that it is threatened from
within and from without, that it has
once more become a problem.” At such
moments, he said, the division between
the political and the nonpolitical disap-
pears. Politics is “no longer a game, played
according to certain, generally acknowl-
edged rules.... It’s a matter of ultimate
values.” Mann also challenged the xe-
nophobia of America’s strict immigra-
tion laws: “It is not human, not demo-
cratic, and it means to show a moral
Achilles’ heel to the fascist enemies of
mankind if one clings with bureaucratic
coldness to these laws.”
On the subject of German war guilt,
Mann incited a controversy that per-
sisted for decades. He was acutely aware
that mass murder was taking place in
Nazi-occupied lands—a genocide that
went far beyond what Werfel had de-
scribed in “Musa Dagh.” As early as Jan-
uary, 1942, in a radio address to Germans
throughout Europe, Mann disclosed that
four hundred Dutch Jews had been killed
by poison gas—a “true Siegfried weapon,”
he added, in a sardonic reference to the
fearless hero of Germanic legend. In a
1945 speech titled “The Camps,” he said,
“Every German—everyone who speaks
German, writes German, has lived as a
German—is affected by this shameful
exposure. It is not a small clique of crim-
inals who are involved.”
The overwhelming fact of the Ho-
locaust led Mann to call for a searching
self-examination on the part of German
people all over the world. In “Germany
and the Germans,” a remarkable speech
delivered at the Library of Congress in
1945, he argued that the demonic ener-
gies of Hitler’s regime had roots reach-
ing back to Martin Luther. Mann did
not exclude himself from the web of
shame: “It is all within me. I have been
through it all.” In the end, he said, “there
are not two Germanys, a good one anda bad one, but only one, whose best
turned into evil through devilish cun-
ning.” The entire story is a “paradigm of
the tragedy of human life.” That mes-
sage of universal responsibility—which,
Mann made clear, is not the same as
universal guilt—aroused fierce opposi-
tion in postwar Germany, where search-
ing self-examination was not in fashion.
Allied forces, for their part, were happy
to skate over the de-Nazification pro-
cess, so that Western Europe could focuson fighting a new enemy, the Soviets.
Mann’s words also caused a flap
among the émigrés. Brecht and Döblin
both criticized their colleague for con-
demning ordinary Germans alongside
Nazi élites. Brecht went so far as to write
a poem titled “When the Nobel Prize
Winner Thomas Mann Granted the
Americans and English the Right to
Chastise the German People for Ten
Long Years for the Crimes of the Hit-
ler Regime.” In fact, Mann disapproved
of punitive measures, but his nuances
were overlooked. As Hans Rudolf Vaget
has shown, in his comprehensive 2011
study, “Thomas Mann, der Amerikaner,”
the fallout from “Germany and the Ger-
mans” clouded Mann’s reputation for a
generation. Only after several decades
did the wisdom of his approach become
clear, as Germany established a model
for how a nation can work through its
past—a process that is ongoing.M
ann’s cross-examination of the
German soul had a fictional com-
ponent. In 1947, he published the novel
“Doctor Faustus,” in which a modern-
ist German composer makes a pact with
the Devil—or, at least, hallucinates him-
self doing so. In great part, it is a retell-
ing of the life of Friedrich Nietzsche,
of his plunge from rarefied intellectual
heights into megalomania and madness.
It is also Mann’s most sustained explo-
ration of the realm of music, which, to
him, had always seemed seductive and
dangerous in equal measure. The shadow
of Wagner hangs over the book, even if
Adrian Leverkühn, the character at its
center, is anti-Wagnerian in orientation,
his works mixing atonality, neoclassi-
cism, ironic neo-Romanticism, and the
unfulfilled compositional fantasies of
Adorno, who assisted Mann in writing
the musical descriptions.
The narrator of “Doctor Faustus” is
a humanist scholar named Serenus Zeit-
blom. With a high-bourgeois mien and
a digressive prose style, Zeitblom is un-
mistakably an exercise in authorial
self-parody, and he begins writing his
memoir of Leverkühn in May, 1943, on
the same day that Mann himself set to
work on the novel. But Zeitblom is not
in Los Angeles. Rather, he belongs to
the so-called inner emigration—the co-
hort of German intellectuals who pro-
fessed to oppose Nazism from within