Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters
2020; Penn State University Press; Volume: 57; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês
10.5325/complitstudies.57.1.0178
ISSN1528-4212
Autores ResumoTobias Boes' Rezeptionsgeschichte describes how Thomas Mann, the most distinguished German émigré, assumed the role of public author from 1938 to 1952 to warn America about the political and military dangers of Nazism. Mann used press conferences, coast-to-coast lecture tours, newspaper stories, magazine covers, book clubs, radio broadcasts, congressional appearances, political committees, seven honorary degrees and three meetings with President Roosevelt to promote his democratic views, enhance his literary reputation, and attract a huge audience to his difficult works.Boes places Mann in the American cultural landscape, but does not discuss his personal life. He does not mention that Mann had many crucial advantages. Besides his American-sounding name and knowledge of English, Mann had the dignity of a Spanish cardinal and aura of a German general, the Nobel Prize and a prestigious publisher, Alfred Knopf, the only one outside the family allowed to call him “Tommy.” (Other eminent émigrés—Ernst Toller, Walter Benjamin, and Stefan Zweig—found exile unbearable and committed suicide.) It is also worth noting that Mann had no close friendships with American authors. In Los Angeles, he socialized with German writers and musicians and remained cocooned in the German colony that gathered in Salka Viertel's salon.Mann's War is thoroughly researched and clearly written (apart from frequent repetition and numerous clichés). But Boes struggles to describe Mann's late boring books: the last two novels in the Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy (1938 and 1944), which gave Mann intellectual and artistic continuity in his transition from Europe to America; The Beloved Returns: Lotte in Weimar (1939); The Tables of the Law (1943); and the mass of wartime propaganda collected in Order of the Day (1942) and Listen, Germany! (1943). Boes does not discuss The Holy Sinner (1951), which reflects Mann's political life and describes the long penance of a good man who had inadvertently transgressed the law, or The Black Swan (1953) in which the callow young American hero becomes romantically and tragically involved with an older German woman.The best parts of Boes' book are his analyses of Helen Lowe-Porter's translations, Mann's arduous and exhausting lectures when he was in his seventies, and the tortuous publication of his books in Vienna and Stockholm by the loyal and inventive Gottfried Bermann Fischer. Boes writes that before emigrating Fischer had managed to secure “the rights to all authors whom the Nazis deemed offensive” (179). Mann's essay “Europe, Beware!” (1938), for example, was printed in Sweden, typeset in Holland on paper imported from Switzerland, and distributed by a company in Denmark.There is some confusion in Boes' book about Mann's demeanor and public image. He calls Mann formal and patrician, aloof and ironic, nervous and hesitant, comically unsuited to partying in Hollywood. A 1930s photo shows him wearing spats. Though he was very different from the dashing and flamboyant Vladimir Nabokov, Boes also describes Mann as theatrical, charismatic, and speaking with gusto. Mann had a strong German accent and rolled his “r's,” which may have alienated audiences during the war or suggested profundity. Boes never resolves these contradictions. Despite emotional and linguistic limitations—Mann could read a speech translated into English, but needed help from his daughter Erika when fielding questions from the audience—Mann gave masterful performances on the platform.Mann's international lecture tours had been pioneered by Charles Dickens, Anthony Trollope, and Oscar Wilde, who roared across America in the nineteenth century. Mann's idealistic advocacy of humane values, a strong contrast to Nazi ideology, drew as many as 20,000 people in Madison Square Garden in September 1938. He employed the lofty language of incantation and exhortation, but was also called confused, unfocussed, and overintellectual; portentous and didactic; mired in philosophical abstractions, even banal. He awkwardly proclaimed that art was revolutionary “in that it would not take its goal untried out of any past whatever but would undertake to test it in utter sincerity by present conditions” (105). In other words, art belongs to the past and the present.Despite Mann's stiff persona and opaque content, his lectures were amazingly effective and popular. At least two speeches contained false and unconvincing statements. He claimed that “economic and political conflicts have never been enough to set people at war with one another” (43). In Doctor Faustus, he satirized the fanatical and rabidly anti-Semitic Martin Luther, who once threw an inkwell at the devil, but also maintained that Luther “represents the very best of Germany” (210). It did not seem to matter that his image clashed with his appearance. He was puffed by the press—one journalist elevated Mann's stature by incorrectly calling him “tall”—and his rapturous audiences revered him as “The Greatest Living Man of Letters.” In an amusing letter (not quoted by Boes), Mann exclaimed, “What do these people expect? After all, I'm not Caruso. Won't they be completely disappointed? But they aren't. They declare it was the greatest thing they have ever heard.”Primed by his lectures, the Book-of-the-Month Club editions of the Joseph novels sold 100,000 copies; his Stories and the demanding Doctor Faustus sold an astonishing 200,000. Mann gave a total of 134 speeches in America, and in the summer of 1938 earned $15,000 by giving the same talk—like a windup robot—in fourteen cities. Though rolling in money, he claimed to be under “financial strain.” His omnipotent but annoying patron Agnes Meyer, wife of the owner of the Washington Post, got him a teaching post at Princeton (1938–1940) with an annual salary of $6,000. She then funded a position at the Library of Congress (1941–1949), where Archibald MacLeish was director. It had minimal duties and paid $5,000 annually.The FBI file on Mann (not quoted by Boes) reveals that Mann was persecuted and driven out of America in 1952. During the McCarthy witch-hunts of the early 1950s, the FBI mistakenly defamed him as “strongly radical, & particularly strongly pro-USSR.” Even more outrageously, “one of the world's most noted Communists.”Man's noble declaration when he arrived in America in February 1938, “Where I am, there is Germany,” seems Goethean and egoistic, but was true. Boes concludes his valuable book by stating that Mann was “the missing link in a cultural tradition that was banished from the territory of the Third Reich but found a home on foreign soil during the years of the Nazi terror” (207).
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