Fascism is a temptress. Born not from doctrine but from the shadow side of human nature, it is profoundly irrational, seducing via the bitterness, insecurity, and conceit that resides within all of us. Yet what disturbs many unacquainted observers is that history reveals how reason offers some defence but no immunity. When the Nazis seized power in 1933, the intellectuals – those who supposedly fought for clarity, critique and sophistication – still bent the knee. From Heidegger and Heisenberg to Strauss and Schmitt, many stayed with the dictatorship or even sided with it.
Thomas Mann was living in Switzerland when Hitler came to power. As a Nobel Prize Winner and an outspoken critic of the Nazis, his arrest warrant had already been issued, with the police searching his house in Munich, confiscating many of his assets and expropriating his property. In 1936, weeks after receiving Czechoslovak citizenship, Mann’s and his entire immediate family’s citizenship was revoked at the behest of Reinhard Heydrich, director of the Gestapo and future architect of the Holocaust. After the Nazis occupied Czechoslovakia in 1939, the writer fled to the US, moving first to Princeton, New Jersey, as a lecturer, then to Pacific Palisades in Los Angeles in 1942, officially becoming an American citizen. Mann became part of an informal group of US-based exile writers, including Marxists such as Adorno, Horkheimer, and Bloch, as well as novelists like Erich Remarque (author of All Quiet on the Western Front), his children, and his brother, Heinrich.
Swathes of Germany’s cultural elite remained in lockstep with the Nazis, as lickspittles to a barbarity that represented values antithetical to reason, knowledge and education. The Nazis offered a seduction of superiority to these intellectuals – in search of unobtainable greatness – already disconnected from everyday human experience. Mann departed from these figures and even harshly critiqued them. However, he was not always such a determined democrat.
Mann’s long, magnificent argument against everything
Paul Thomas Mann was born in a stereotypical bourgeois background in the ancient Hanseatic port of Lübeck in 1875. He was raised by a patrician family of grain merchants, with his father serving as a senator of the town’s ruling body, the Freie Hansestadt Lübeck. Mann became part of a movement that sought to leave realism and naturalism behind, constructing a cult of beauty, which we now know as Aestheticism. And for Mann, as for many nationalist German youths of the time, Wagner was a key influence; a viewing of Lohengrin in his hometown’s Stadttheater made a significant impression on the then-18-year-old .
But when 1914 hit, Mann, like the rest of Germany, was gripped by the ‘Spirit of 1914’. He shifted to polemics, pitting inferior Anglo-French Kultur against a more sublime German Zivilisation, that is, between the shallow, politicised rationalism of France and Britain against the natural art, soul and ‘genius’ of Germany. Like fellow conservatives and nationalists of his era, he was drawn to the irrationality and mystery of life rather than to reason and progress. Freedom for him did not mean elections and protesting; instead, it signified a more profound, more intense form of existence that spurred on his arch-romantic ‘sympathy with death’. In pre-1914 works like Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice, this Sympathie mit dem Tode was not nihilistic, but rather a sustained and ironic engagement with mortality serving as the fundament of meaning, the shadow that gives life and art their weight.
As the rush of wartime fever immobilised his nation in 1914, Mann wrote Thoughts in Wartime, admonishing democracy, denouncing modernity and claiming that the ‘Volk is a truly holy sound’. His Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man declared that democratisation was antithetical to the German soul whilst extolling his 19th-century forebears of Schopenhauer, Wagner and Nietzsche. He even went as far as to celebrate German militarism as ‘a purification, a liberation, and a tremendous hope.’
Yet in the process of writing his highly conservative essay, he came to realise that democracy was the way of the future. A future that was inevitable. His experience writing The Magic Mountain, influenced by his pre-war years in a sanatorium in Davos, signifies this shift. Originally a reactionary aesthete – an elitist elegist – Mann underwent a shift similar to that of his protagonist, Hans Castrop, towards embracing humanism and a celebration of life, and away from a fascination with death. Castrop, despite existing in a liminal state between life and death, does not let the latter rule his thoughts. To paraphrase the novel, love and kindness, and not reason, are stronger than death.
‘Es lebe die Republik’
Mann’s viewpoint was turned upside down by The Great War’s conclusion and the establishment of the Weimar Republic. Most of Germany’s conservatives embraced the far-right politics of the era, focussing on dismantling the new Republic in favour of the return of the Kaiser or the establishment of a new authoritarian regime. The assassination of Germany’s foreign minister, Walter Rathenau, by a far-right antisemitic activist in 1922 stunned Mann. For him, the death of this intelligent, internationally well-respected, liberal Jewish politician signified the demise of Germany’s hope for the future. In this climate, he delivered a lecture titled On the German Republic, in which he expressed his support for the Republic as a conservative. Mann pleaded with younger Germans not to remain mindlessly hostile to these changes, but to be responsible and face the demands of the present moment.
This seemed to be a genuine political conversion. His conception of Zivilisation fed into a more inclusive Menschheit – humanity. The strength of German culture resided in the ability that it could deal seriously with the ‘foreign’ and embrace aspects of it to develop a ‘higher form of humanity’. It was thus the order of the day to shape politics responsibly. Mann believed it was necessary to be a truly public intellectual. It is the duty of the academic to not live sequestered in an ivory tower as a Dichter, but rather to stay informed of current affairs, be in touch with daily life, and keep a finger on the pulse of the times as a Schriftsteller. A writer should stand for universal values, embrace the Enlightenment, reason, and humanity, letting go of his death-fascination. He went on to condemn the reactionary movement he had previously sympathised with in 1925, and to advocate for the Locarno Treaty and pan-European solidarity.
Despite moving towards liberal cosmopolitanism in temperament, style and subject matter, Mann continued to abide by conservative values, the most compelling aspect of his transition. Remaining a conservative at heart, he would work for centre-left ends. T.J. Reed described these gradual changes as ‘a process of observation, reflection, reorientation and decision’. Mann even expressed an ethical belief in socialism in his 1927 essay Kultur und Sozialismus, arguing that democracy, socialism, and national interest must be reconciled to create a better world. In 1930, he even implored the reluctant German middle classes to vote for the pro-Republic Social Democrats, and then pleaded with the working class in a speech in Vienna in late 1932. Yet what Mann was to discover is that fascism does not care about reason and holds it in contempt. The main language of fascism consists of irrational passions, spontaneous action and fabricated myths. And this vocabulary is more effective in binding and mobilising than critical reason and science.
Mann’s lessons for life and history
Mann’s self-imposed exile led to a series of lectures across the US warning Americans about the value and the threat to democracy from his homeland. His Coming Victory of Democracy, written in 1938, praised Abraham Lincoln and Walt Whitman as heroes of America’s democratic freedom and stated that democracy was ‘that form of government and of society which is inspired above every other with the feeling and consciousness of the dignity of man’. Up until the end of the war, Mann delivered monthly messages to the BBC German Service on his very own show Listen Germany!, scorning Hitler and Nazi tyranny. His previous flirtation with pre-war jingoistic fervour and interwar myopic resentment led him to this pronouncement in 1940’s The War and the Future: ‘National Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life’. He understood that he was no different from those standing by Hitler in Germany; everyone could be tempted by fascism packaged as an alluring spectacle.
After the war, Mann supported more progressive causes. He joined the effort to end the Korean War and was associated with organised labour and black intellectuals in the early civil rights movements. In an eerie reflection of the present, his patriotism was questioned. Mann was labelled a ‘suspected communist’ by the House Un-American Activities Committee, was forced to resign from his position at the Library of Congress and lived the rest of his life back in Switzerland. Societies tend to forget when confronted with fear; a key takeaway from history is that people will inevitably become oblivious to what the past attempts to teach them. The tragic unravelling of events reveals something that remains true today; authoritarianism is always present in the national consciousness, lying dormant unless it is addressed. This is one lesson that we continue to ignore.
Published in 1947, Mann’s landmark novel Doctor Faustus is an allegorical tale that explores how Germany’s intelligentsia bargained with the ‘devilish nihilism’ of Nazism – not by fate, but by choice. The novel’s humanist narrator, Zeitblom – warm, moderate, and grounded in social relations – ultimately proves wiser than the tragic genius of Leverkühn, even as he does not reach the same heights of creative achievement. The lesson is simple but hard: death is inevitable, but letting it govern our thinking leads, at best, to self-defeat and, at worst, to barbarism. As Umberto Eco notes, the fascist regimes advertise a heroic death as the best reward for a heroic life. Life is subservient to struggle. Death is revered as a cult, and more are sent to death for this. For Mann, democracy offers dignity to everyone — but reason alone cannot defend it. The profundities of life are mysterious and resist a clear-cut definition. To defeat hatred and corruption, democracy must tell a story more compelling than the one being told against it. And this story is needed now more than ever.
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