Thomas Mann’s War by Tobias Boes

Author:Tobias Boes
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Cornell University Press
Published: 2019-08-28T00:00:00+00:00

Toward “Cosmopolitan Germanness”

So far this chapter has focused mostly on the ways in which the physical and logistical vicissitudes of wartime altered the reception of Thomas Mann on the European continent. But Mann himself was a fully conscious participant in this larger process, and the various essays and addresses that he wrote during the war document an ongoing shift in his self-perception as a representative author.

Mann had come to understand and consciously present himself as a “European” writer over the course of the 1920s. There had, to be sure, been traces of a cosmopolitan stance even in his nationalist writings of the previous decade, captured mainly by his conviction that Germany’s greatest cultural glories lay in the sphere of music, and thus in an art form that could be easily transported across national borders. But during the years of the Weimar Republic, abstract philosophical rumination gave way to concrete action and to a practical conception of a European literary sphere in which individual writers would act as reporters from, and ambassadors for, their home countries. The essay “Europe Beware!,” which first appeared in 1935 and would later lend its title to the 1938 Bermann-Fischer volume, is perhaps the last great outcome of this interwar mindset. Originally written as an address to the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation in Paris (an associate organization of the League of Nations, and a forerunner to the modern-day UNICEF), the text was quickly reprinted in Swiss, French, and Austrian newspapers. In it Mann quotes at length from the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, and describes the modern “spirit of the masses” displayed by the fascist rabble as the greatest threat to contemporary civilization. It is palpably an address written by one member of a cosmopolitan elite to other members of his tribe, a report from Germany that at the same time assumes the sympathetic ear of likeminded European listeners.

Once he settled in America, however, Mann’s outlook began to change. He now developed a different understanding of the relationship between nation-state and European community. In the 1939 essay “This War,” for example, he declared in no uncertain terms that the outbreak of the Second World War would mean “the epoch-making abandonment of a principle to which Europe with fatal conservatism still adheres… : the principle of non-interference, which lies behind the concept of the absolute sovereignty of the national states” (OD, 213; GW, 12:887). The concept of the sovereignty of nations, he continued, had irrevocably served its course and would now have to yield to one of two rivaling conceptions: on the one hand, the imperial ambitions of the Nazis, and on the other, the vision of an “adherence of the European states to a commonwealth” in which “national character” and “social equality” would be equally cultivated (OD, 217; GW, 12:890).

Later readers of Mann’s wartime essays have often noted the ways in which such formulations anticipate future debates surrounding the European Union.49 Just as interesting, however, is the change in Mann’s conception of representative authorship that they imply.

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