I've been reading Thomas Mann's War by Tobias Boes, most of which deals with Mann's 16 years in America. Mann was an instant celebrity when he arrived in New York on the Queen Mary in February 1938, thanks in part to the brilliant marketing of his American publisher Alfred Knopf. But there was also tremendous curiosity in America about the developments in Hitler's Germany and Mann presented himself to Americans as Hitler's nemesis. He quickly was able to capitalize on his celebrity by engaging in a cross-country lecture tour of more than 30 cities, including Lewiston, Maine. At each stop he delivered his lecture "The Coming Victory of Democracy" (originally his 1937 essay "Vom kommenden Sieg der Demokratie" most likely translated for American audiences by his daughter Erika). Thousands of Americans flocked to these lectures, and Mann received an honorarium of $1,000 per speech ( a considerable sum in 1938, surpassed on by speeches of H.G.Wells). As Tobias Boes points out, Americans attended the events not so much to be lectured on the virtues of Democracy, but "by the promise of celebrity and by Mann's biography as an antifascist émigré, which lent his pronouncements a kind of authenticity that was clearly an attraction in its own right."
It is impossible to overestimate the popularity of Thomas Mann in America in the years leading up to America's entry into the war. Thirteen year-old Susan Sontag decided she would devote her life to literature and intellectual pursuits after becoming enthralled with The Magic Mountain - an unlikely bestselling novel in the US that would be found on many "middlebrow" bookshelves. Sontag wrote:
"Of course, Mann, unlike the other exiles, was also a public presence. To have been as officially honored in America as Thomas Mann was in the late nineteen-thirties and early nineteen-forties was probably more improbable than to have been the most famous writer in the world. A guest at the White House, introduced by the Vice-President when he gave a speech at the Library of Congress, for years indefatigable on the lecture circuit, Mann had the stature of an oracle in Roosevelt’s bien-pensant America, proclaiming the absolute evil of Hitler’s Germany and the coming victory of the democracies. Emigration had not dampened his taste, or his talent, for being a representative figure. If there was such a thing as a good Germany, it was now to be found in this country (proof of America’s goodness), embodied in his person; if there was a Great Writer, not at all an American notion of what a writer is, it was he."
`I downloaded the text of The Coming Victory of Democracy to get a sense for what Americans were experiencing and also to compare it to Mann's last gasp attempt to preserve democracy in Germany - his 1930 Appell an die Vernuft speech which was disrupted by Hitler's goon squad. Appeal to Reason could have been subtitled: "The Coming Victory of Fascism in Germany."
What I admire about The Coming Victory of Democracy is that Mann doesn't presume to lecture to Americans about the virtues of democracy; after all, America is one of the oldest and most successful democracies. Rather, speaking from experience, Mann emphasizes the fragility of democracy, that it must continually be nourished not only intellectually -with Vernunft - but with passion.
"America needs no instruction in the things that concern democracy. But instruction is one thing — and another is memory, reflection, re-examination, the recall to consciousness of a spiritual and moral possession of which it would be dangerous to feel too secure and too confident. No worth-while possession can be neglected. Even physical things die off, disappear, are lost, if they are not cared for, if they do not feel the eye and hand of the owner and are lost to sight because their possession is taken for granted. Throughout the world it has become precarious to take democracy for granted — even in America… Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without, that it has once more become a problem. America is aware that the time has come for democracy to take stock of itself, for recollection and restatement and conscious consideration, in a word, for its renewal in thought and feeling."
It is a lesson we are in dire need of today as we watch democracy slip away in Trump's America. We need another Democracy lecture tour, but who would deliver the lecture? Who today has the stature of a Thomas Mann? And would any Americans bother to attend?
As with many of your posts, it leads me to buying the book you mention. Thanks for this.
Posted by: Harvey Morrell | February 04, 2020 at 09:48 AM