German Literature Through Nazi Eyes (RLE Responding to Fascism) by G H Atkins

Author:G H Atkins [Atkins, G H]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: History, General, Europe, Germany
ISBN: 9781136960369
Google: EYTFBQAAQBAJ
Publisher: Routledge
Published: 2010-11-01T01:16:12+00:00

THOMAS MANN (b. 1875)

A small book could be written about Thomas Mann’s relations to the Nazi régime, and would form a very interesting indirect commentary on it He is probably the writer whom the Nazis most dislike; he is the very antipole of the assertive, dogmatic, militant, ‘volkhafte Dichter’ of their dreams. Before 1933 he was generally regarded, at home as well as abroad, as being the greatest living German novelist, and (with Gerhart Hauptmann) one of the two most representative German writers. In the English-speaking world at any rate he still has that reputation, which is reflected in the number of works that still continue to be written about him.

Mann’s record has been a strange one. In the Great War he came forward as the champion of the German cause, and on the strength of two books which appeared during its course was even looked upon as a jingo by the men of the left, including his own brother Heinrich. The first of these, Friedrich und die grosse Koalition, with the subtitle ‘Ein Abriss für den Tag und die Stunde’, planned long before as a novel, appeared in October 1914 as an essay. This historic parable was a defence of Frederick the Great (whose popularity in Germany only came several years later) against the ‘Misstrauen der Welt’, as the author himself put it. The other was the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918) in which Mann championed German ‘Kultur’ against western ‘Zivilisation’. It is a rambling and unwieldy work, the interest of the content for once overwhelming the artistic demands of form. Mann himself describes it as ‘eine Art von Tagebuch…dessen frühe Teile aus den Anfängen des Krieges und dessen letzte Abschnitte etwa von der Jahreswende 1917/18 zu datieren sind’.

The preface contained a statement which makes strange. reading in the light of the author’s development during the following decade:

I record my deep conviction that the German people will never be able to love political democracy…and that the much-decried authoritarian state is the form of state most suitable to the German people. [118]

One of the best known parts is the section of 16 pages headed Der Zivilisationsliterat, in which the voice might almost be that of a Nazi ideologue of today:

The type of this German adherent of literary civilization is naturally our radical man of letters, the man whom I have become accustomed to call the ‘Zivilisationsliterat’.

* * *

As a matter of fact, the word ‘Zivilisationsliterat’ is a pleonasm. For as I have already said, civilization and literature are one and the same thing. No one is a ‘Literat’ without instinctively detesting the individuality of Germany and feeling himself an ally of the imperium of civilization; more precisely, to be a ‘Literat’ is to be already half a Frenchman…

* * *

The radical ‘Literat’ of Germany belongs then body and soul to the entente, to the imperium of civilization. [119]

The ‘Fortschritt’ such a man talks of, the ‘Demokratisierung Deutschlands’, is really its ‘Entdeutschung’.

For all that, the right wing was never quite sure of Mann, was always rather suspicious of this particular ally.

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