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Trade, Aid, and the Cold War in the Americas: Thomas Mann and Latin America

Thomas Tunstall Allcock

in Thomas C. Mann: President Johnson, the Cold War, and the Restructuring of Latin American Foreign Policy

This chapter explores Thomas Mann’s career in the State Department in the period prior to Johnson’s presidency, establishing both Mann’s background and beliefs and the broad pattern of inter-American ... More

This chapter explores Thomas Mann’s career in the State Department in the period prior to Johnson’s presidency, establishing both Mann’s background and beliefs and the broad pattern of inter-American relations in the late 1950s and early 1960s. Mann’s role as an early champion of increased economic aid and cooperative measures to assist the economies of the hemisphere is vital for understanding the positions he would later advocate in the 1960s, as is his highly successful period serving as Kennedy’s ambassador to Mexico. The chapter also traces the gradual shift from the Eisenhower administration’s “trade-not-aid” position to early efforts at promoting economic modernization, supported by Senate majority leader Lyndon Johnson, as the Cold War came to Latin America via Fidel Castro’s Cuban Revolution. It concludes with the culmination of this process, the creation of John F. Kennedy’s Alliance for Progress.Less

Writers and Politics in the Weimar Republic

Karin Gunnemann

in Weimar Thought: A Contested Legacy

This chapter provides a literary and historical glimpse into the political fortunes of the great writers and novelists of the Weimar era, focusing on Kurt Tucholsky, Alfred Döblin, and the brothers ... More

This chapter provides a literary and historical glimpse into the political fortunes of the great writers and novelists of the Weimar era, focusing on Kurt Tucholsky, Alfred Döblin, and the brothers Thomas and Heinrich Mann. Tucholsky (1890–1935) was foremost a polemical political journalist, a humorist, and a writer of satiric poetry for the cabarets of Berlin. No ills of the Republic escaped his witty scrutiny, but when the Republic failed he ended his life in despair. Heinrich Mann (1871–1950) was both a prolific writer of fiction and one of Germany's leading political essayists. In response to the cultural changes of the twenties, he developed a new aesthetic for fiction that helped him preserve his utopian ideal of a democratic Germany. Döblin (1878–1957) expressed his criticism of post-war German society with greatest success in Berlin Alexanderplatz. Thomas Mann (1875–1955) is a representative of those writers who had great difficulty in moving away from their aesthetic and autonomous view of literature to a more “democratic” way of writing.Less

The Teacher of Germany

Tobias Boes

in Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

This chapter reflects on Thomas Mann's representative aspirations as the leading voice of the “other Germany.” It shows how his copious and often agonized reflections concerning his representative ... More

This chapter reflects on Thomas Mann's representative aspirations as the leading voice of the “other Germany.” It shows how his copious and often agonized reflections concerning his representative status reveal that he was intensely attuned to the social flux around him. And his later career in America demonstrates that he ultimately owed his fame to his ability not to resist, but rather to respond to, unprecedented historical conditions. Whatever else it might have been, Nazism was a powerful manifestation of modernity. In successfully positing himself as its antipode, Mann was not expressing blind obeisance to tradition but rather engaging in a dialectical dance that transformed the social role of the author into something that it had never been before.Less

The Greatest Living Man of Letters

Tobias Boes

in Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

This chapter argues that the process by which Thomas Mann was canonized as the “greatest living man of letters” in the New World certainly had many similarities to his staging as a representative ... More

This chapter argues that the process by which Thomas Mann was canonized as the “greatest living man of letters” in the New World certainly had many similarities to his staging as a representative writer in the Old. But there were enormous differences as well, and these would turn out to be consequential for literary history, including literary history back in Germany. The chapter explains how Mann's rise to literary prominence in the United States took place within the larger context of a newly emerging and distinctively American cultural formation, the “middlebrow.” At first, this seems antithetical to Mann's associations with “serious” modern literature. However, the chapter reveals that modernism and the middlebrow have never truly stood in opposition to one another.Less

The First Citizen of the International Republic of Letters

Tobias Boes

in Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

This chapter reveals the increasing tensions between Thomas Mann and the Nazi regime. Since the 1920s, he had become one of the most prominent defenders of the democratic constitution of the Weimar ... More

This chapter reveals the increasing tensions between Thomas Mann and the Nazi regime. Since the 1920s, he had become one of the most prominent defenders of the democratic constitution of the Weimar Republic, and an increasingly vocal critic of Adolf Hitler and his followers. In addition, over the course of the late 1930s, Mann's reputation as a “great man of letters” was adapted for a new and more belligerent age that found its culmination with the outbreak of the Second World War. By turning Mann into an anti-Nazi icon, Americans were simultaneously taking a stand themselves. One of the most important factors driving this process was Mann's physical presence in the country, which opened up entirely new avenues of reception.Less

Hitler’s Most Intimate Enemy

Tobias Boes

in Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

This chapter illustrates how Thomas Mann created a novel role for the artist: fully engaged with the political events of the day through a variety of twentieth-century media and yet fiercely ... More

This chapter illustrates how Thomas Mann created a novel role for the artist: fully engaged with the political events of the day through a variety of twentieth-century media and yet fiercely protective of an independent stance. The 1930s was a decade in which governments of various stripes throughout the world discovered the value of employing artists to drum up support within a populist base. And Mann was a patriotic resident of the United States who throughout the war years carefully refrained from criticizing his adoptive country. But his voice and his aims were always unmistakably his own, and he agitated for the United States because he equated the American cause with that of liberal democracy, not because of any government commission. The chapter further explains that Mann's relocation to California can serve as a symbolic marker of this transition. Indeed, it was during his residency in Pacific Palisades as well that he reached the apogee of his trajectory as an anti-Nazi celebrity in the eyes of the American public.Less

The Isolated World Citizen

Tobias Boes

in Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

This chapter considers Thomas Mann's role in postwar Germany. For a number of reasons, the idea of Mann leading postwar Germany on its thorny path back to democracy was utterly illusory. However, ... More

This chapter considers Thomas Mann's role in postwar Germany. For a number of reasons, the idea of Mann leading postwar Germany on its thorny path back to democracy was utterly illusory. However, Mann's future was uncertain now that it was no longer necessary to represent the autonomy of German culture against the totalitarian demands of the Nazis. This issue would plague Mann for the remainder of his life and lead to the decline of his public reputation in America during the late 1940s and early 1950s. As had been the case in the 1930s, however, Mann's search for a new representative role did not take place in a vacuum. The American cultural landscape was changing as well, and realigning itself in ways that made the once-topical author come to seem superannuated.Less

Evil Germany versus Good Germany: Thomas Mann’s Doctor Faustus

Ehrhard Bahr

in Weimar on the Pacific: German Exile Culture in Los Angeles and the Crisis of Modernism

In the fashion of exile dialectics, Thomas Mann proposed the “identity of the non-identical” and said: “There are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil ... More

In the fashion of exile dialectics, Thomas Mann proposed the “identity of the non-identical” and said: “There are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt, and ruin.” This chapter explores the role of dialectics as a structural element in Mann's novel Doctor Faustus. Mann's collaboration with Theodor W. Adorno reinforced this element not only as the essence of Faust's career as a German composer, but also as the basis for the allegory of Germany and its history. In addition, Adorno's concept of the “identity of the non-identical” enabled Mann to show that the life and works of Adrian Leverkühn not only reflected German history, but also contradicted it. The “identity of the non-identical” also became a structural element for Leverkühn's last composition, which marked his “breakthrough” as an authentic work of modernist art. It functions both as “historiography of its epoch” (Adorno) as well as an expression of human suffering.Less

Letters, Diaries, etc. (1948–1951)

Adrian Daub

E. Randol Schoenberg (ed.)

in The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930-1951

This section presents the letters, excepts from diaries, and other materials exchanged and/or written after Thomas Mann's delivery of a copy of Doctor Faustus to Arnold Schoenberg in January of 1948.

A Blooming Flower

Tobias Boes

in Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

This chapter highlights the extent to which media featured as weapons in Thomas Mann's struggle against Nazism. Mann benefited from government–industry collaborations, for example, by acquiring ... More

This chapter highlights the extent to which media featured as weapons in Thomas Mann's struggle against Nazism. Mann benefited from government–industry collaborations, for example, by acquiring access to American studios to record propaganda broadcasts that were then carried into Nazi-occupied Europe. His main intermediary on the continent, however, was his old German publisher Gottfried Bermann Fischer, who fought a battle of his own to keep Mann's books available in those countries that had not yet been conquered by the Nazis. Both forms of transmission—the transmission of Mann's voice via radio waves and the transmission of his books via increasingly convoluted distribution networks—were beset by all sorts of difficulties during wartime. But both were essential in keeping the author's influence alive in a time when he was unable to personally connect to his readership.Less

The Loyal American Subject

Tobias Boes

in Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

This chapter shows how Thomas Mann was reintroduced into postwar Germany—where his works had been previously banned—through American distribution of his literature. Many Germans were glad to be given ... More

This chapter shows how Thomas Mann was reintroduced into postwar Germany—where his works had been previously banned—through American distribution of his literature. Many Germans were glad to be given new reading matter after years of censorship, paper shortages, and aerial bombardments that destroyed a large number of civilian presses. For these Germans, both the U.S. Army and the Bermann-Fischer Verlag, which continued to publish from abroad until 1949, became valuable avenues through which they could reimagine their own broken literary heritage. Thomas Mann, that most German of modern authors, was now indisputably also a part of American (and through it of global) literary culture. His commercial success and his literary reputation were partly, if not predominantly, determined by factors that had nothing to do with the responses of German readers at all.Less

Letters, Diaries, etc. (1930–1948)

Adrian Daub

E. Randol Schoenberg (ed.)

in The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930-1951

This section presents the letters, excerpts from diaries, and other materials exchanged and/or written before Thomas Mann's delivery of a copy of Doctor Faustus to Arnold Schoenberg in January of ... More

This section presents the letters, excerpts from diaries, and other materials exchanged and/or written before Thomas Mann's delivery of a copy of Doctor Faustus to Arnold Schoenberg in January of 1948.Less

Introduction: The German Envoy to America

Tobias Boes

in Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

This introductory chapter discusses Thomas Mann's peculiar role as an authority on German culture to oppose the Nazi regime. It explains that two factors characterize Mann's unique position in ... More

This introductory chapter discusses Thomas Mann's peculiar role as an authority on German culture to oppose the Nazi regime. It explains that two factors characterize Mann's unique position in literary history—the battle of cultural autonomy against totalitarian dependence and the struggle between international and national sources of literary esteem—both of which continue to have a clear relevance for literary production into the present day. To that end, this chapter briefly explores the complex relationship connecting his battle for cultural autonomy to his struggle for international recognition. It also considers what it means for Mann when he defines his theory of exile as a “cosmopolitan Germanness.” Finally, this chapter looks at how Mann developed and employed strategies to wage a cultural war against Nazism and how he found success in this endeavor in the United States.Less

‘Sympathie mit dem Tode’: Thomas Mann, Hans Pfitzner, and the further reflections of a non-political man

Nicholas Attfield

in Challenging the Modern: Conservative Revolution in German Music, 1918-1933

Perhaps the most infamous of the Weimar musical ‘anti-modernists’, Hans Pfitzner is well known for his polemics against Paul Bekker and Busoni and his opera Palestrina, products of the First World ... More

Perhaps the most infamous of the Weimar musical ‘anti-modernists’, Hans Pfitzner is well known for his polemics against Paul Bekker and Busoni and his opera Palestrina, products of the First World War’s end. Pfitzner’s relationship with Thomas Mann has also been discussed, particularly in terms of Mann’s description, in his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, of Pfitzner as the bearer of ‘sympathy with death’. As this chapter details, Mann’s early post-war work situated Pfitzner at the heart of a drive for revival, based around the ‘Hans Pfitzner Association for German Composition’, and linked to Mann’s idiosyncratic notions of cultural-political ‘synthesis’ and Humanität. This revival provoked Pfitzner’s swerve from opera towards the more direct public form of the cantata. Here, in his 1921 work Von deutscher Seele, the allegedly reclusive Pfitzner tried to strike a ‘popular’ tone and seized the moment to address his vision of the entire German nation.Less

From the Romantics to Thomas Mann and Beyond

Brian Murdoch

in Gregorius: An Incestuous Saint in Medieval Europe and Beyond

The first modern adaptation of the Gregorius-narrative is a song-cycle by Franz Theodor Kugler and Carl Loewe in the Romantic period, the source of which is unclear. In the twentieth century Thomas ... More

The first modern adaptation of the Gregorius-narrative is a song-cycle by Franz Theodor Kugler and Carl Loewe in the Romantic period, the source of which is unclear. In the twentieth century Thomas Mann tackled the story twice, first briefly in his novel Doktor Faustus, where the central figure writes a musical puppet play of Gregorius, then later in his fascinating but linguistically and interpretatively difficult Der Erwählte, The Holy Sinner, which is here analysed in detail in terms of the sensitive modern reception of a medieval text, retaining the themes of sin and grace. This novel has given rise to far more recent experimental theatre versions in Poland and New Zealand. The now virtually unknown Austrian dramatist Rudolf Henz used the story, too, as an allegory of recent history, especially the takeover of Austria by the Nazis, in an impressive drama.Less

Introduction: California Haunting: Mann, Schoenberg, Faustus

Adrian Daub

in The Doctor Faustus Dossier: Arnold Schoenberg, Thomas Mann, and Their Contemporaries, 1930-1951

This introductory chapter provides the necessary context for the two protagonists (Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann), as well as the leading supporting figure (Theodor Adorno). It aims to guide ... More

This introductory chapter provides the necessary context for the two protagonists (Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann), as well as the leading supporting figure (Theodor Adorno). It aims to guide readers through the thicket of acquaintances, old grudges and new anxieties, problems of politics and aesthetics that resonate—sometimes faintly, sometimes clearly—between the lines in the essays and exchanges gathered in this volume. These are, after all, one reason scholars, students, and lay readers have returned to the Faustus controversy time and time again. The other is that rarely has a literary controversy spoken so directly to a unique place and time: Faustus could not have been written, and Faustus could not have generated the controversy that it did, outside of the highly peculiar setting of Southern California during the Second World War.Less

Death in Venice: Irony, Detachment, and the Aesthetic State

Kevin Newmark

in Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man

Thomas Mann, perhaps the most widely recognized theorist-practitioner of irony in the 20th century, provides a crucial test case for any study of irony. This chapter situates Mann at the far end of ... More

Thomas Mann, perhaps the most widely recognized theorist-practitioner of irony in the 20th century, provides a crucial test case for any study of irony. This chapter situates Mann at the far end of German romanticism and asks how his understanding of irony relates to that of Schlegel, Kierkegaard, and Nietzsche. After sketching key elements in his theory of irony, the chapter reads Death in Venice to determine whether Mann's concept of aesthetic detachment can match the ironic forces inscribed within his fiction. The lucidity, self-consciousness, and aloofness of the novella's narrator stand in marked contrast to the confusion, loss of self-understanding, and demise that progressively beset the main character. This divergence between empirical fallibility and the serenity of intellectual comprehension corresponds perfectly to the concept of irony that Thomas Mann proposes throughout his career. Other elements, however, both thematic and rhetorical, ultimately interrupt this correspondence with an irony of a wholly foreign type.Less