Three weeks after the surrender of Nazi German, on May 29, 1945, Thomas Mann delivered a speech at the Library of Congress about his homeland
Germany and the Germans. The speech was much anticipated, for to the American audience Thomas Mann embodied "the Good Germany" and there was a need to understand how Hitler's "Bad Germany" had come into being and was able to inflict so much damage on the world. Mann had originally written the essay in German - Deutschland und die Deutschen - and his daughter Erika translated it for the speech, which was delivered in English. Along with Deutsche Ansprache - Appell an die Vernunft (1930) and Bruder Hitler (1939) Deutschland und die Deutschen is considered one of Mann's most important political essays.
Recently the Thomas Mann House in Pacific Palisades, California conducted a Group Virtual Reading Initiative - Mutually Mann# - where Mann scholars, political analysts, historians and others were invited to read and comment on Germany and the Germans. The timing of this initiative was auspicious, since Americans are grappling with the aftermath of an election and the presidency of Donald Trump as many observers see an erosion of America's commitment to democracy and draw parallels to the Weimar Republic and the rise of fascism in Germany.
In his speech, Mann is quick to dispel the notion that he is condemning "Bad Germany" from a vantage point of a morally superior "Good Germany". For the qualities that led Germany down the path to mass destruction are contained within himself as well:
“Any attempt to arouse sympathy to defend and to excuse Germany, would certainly be an inappropriate undertaking for one of German birth today. To play the part of the judge, to curse and damn his own people in compliant agreement with the incalculable hatred that they have kindled, to commend himself smugly as ‘the good Germany’ in contrast with the wicked, guilty Germany over there with which he has nothing at all in common, — that too would hardly befit one of German origin. For anyone who was born a German does have something in common with German destiny and Germany guilt”.
This "inner complicity" with the German character is something Mann examines at length in Bruder Hitler.
Mann then compares and contrasts the German concept of Freiheit - Freedom - with French and Angl0-American liberté / Liberty. Here he turns to Martin Luther:
“And no one can deny that Luther was a tremendously great man, great in the most German manner, great and German even in his duality as the liberating and the once reactionary force, a conservative revolutionary. He not only reconstituted the Church; he actually saved Christianity”.
Luther liberated the church from the constraints of Catholicism, promoting a direct relationship between God and Man, democratizing the Bible through his brilliant German translation, but brutally attacked any movement towards civic freedom.
This duality finds further expression in Goethe's Faust, where the most compelling character is not the frustrated scholar, but rather Mephistopheles - the Devil:
“And the devil, Luther’s devil, Faust’s devil, strikes me as a very German figure, and the pact with him, the Satanic covenant, to win the treasures and power on earth for a time at the cost of the soul’s salvation, strikes me as something exceedingly typical of German Nature. A lonely thinker and searcher, a theologian and philosopher in his cell who, in this desire for world enjoyment and world domination, barters his soul to the Devil, — isn’t this the right moment to see Germany in this picture, the moment in which Germany is literally being carried off by the Devil?”
But Goethe clearly saw the danger of this German propensity towards 'inner freedom' - Innerlichkeit (in Mann's original) .
"Goethe laconically defined the Classical as the healthy, the Romantic as the morbid. A painful definition to one who lover Romanticism down to its sins and vices But it cannot be denied that even in its loveliest, most ethereal aspects where the popular mates with the sublime it bears in its heart the the germ of morbidity, as the rose bears the worm; its innermost character is seduction, seduction to death."
This German Romanticism contributed "deep and vitalizing impulses to European thought", but once it turned outward - closing the deal with Mephisto - the outcome has been tragic:
"And, reduced to a miserable mass level, the level of a Hitler, German Romanticism broke out into hysterical barbarism, into a spree and paroxysm of arrogance and crime, which now finds its horrible end in a national catastrophe, a physical and psychic collapse without parallel."
I have to say that I was disappointed by much of the discussion of Germany and the Germans on MutuallyMann#. Several of the commenters criticized Mann for failing to mention the Holocaust. This is perhaps unfair since Mann spoke several times about the mass murder of Jews in his wartime radio addresses to the German nation. The German Studies Scholar Stefan Keppler-Tasaki (University of Tokyo) suggests that Mann intended "German" to be a code word for "American" since Mann was warning Americans about the dangers of McCarthyism and anti-Communist hysteria. But McCarthy didn't start his destructive crusade until 4 years later - in 1949. No question were he alive today, Mann would be greatly disturbed by the anti-democratic tendencies of Donald Trump, the Republican Party, and Trump followers. We would benefit from a re-reading of his 1937 essay The Coming Victory of Democracy.
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