The 40s: The Story of a Decade (62 page)

In 1899, at the age of twenty-four, Mann sent the manuscript of
Buddenbrooks
to Berlin’s most distinguished publishing house, S. Fischer Verlag. It is a wonder that the publishers ever read, let alone accepted,
Buddenbrooks.
It was written in longhand and on both sides of the paper. When Mann mailed it at the post office, he carefully insured it for a
thousand marks, because it was the only copy on earth, and the post-office clerk smiled. The serious young author had drastically underestimated himself. In the next twenty-five years, the book went through a hundred and fifty-nine editions, founded his fame, and started his fortune.
Buddenbrooks
was published in 1900. It thus came into the European world two years before Samuel Butler’s posthumous novel,
The Way of All Flesh
, had been heard of. In their separate ways, these were the key German and English books about unhappy fathers and sons, about family fights between members of a decadent nineteenth-century class, fights which were in miniature prophetic of the twentieth-century wars between nations, which were to kill a way of life.

· · ·

Mann’s first visit to America, made in 1934 at the invitation of his publisher, was tied up to the celebration of his fifty-ninth birthday, and was turned into quite a New York literary event, with local literati, including Mayor LaGuardia, attending a dinner in his honor at the Plaza Hotel. Mann, who was trying to learn English, made a speech in which, as a compliment, he meant to call Alfred Knopf a creator and called him a creature. Mann later said that this constituted his début in the English language. After two other visits, one of which was for the purpose of making a lecture tour, Mann returned here, with his wife, in 1938 to be welcomed as his country’s leading literary anti-Nazi. Upon his arrival, he announced to the astonished New York ship reporters, “Where I am, there is Germany.” The next year he applied for his naturalization papers. At first the Manns lived in Princeton, where the university had invited him to give some public lectures on the humanities. These lectures proved difficult. They had to be written in German and translated, and the English had to be annotated with diacritical markings and little private cabalistic signs to guide his pronunciation. Last year he resigned his post and the family moved to Pacific Palisades, one of Los Angeles’ elegant scenic suburbs, near Hollywood. Mann likes living in a small town surrounded by scenery which pleases him on his occasional motor rides. He enjoys few diversions unless they figure in his orderly routine. After his morning’s work, he takes a brisk walk with Niko, his poodle, before lunch. There have been a series of dearly loved dogs in his life; indeed, the only story he ever wrote with a happy ending was one about a dog. Mann also cares about eating, in a controlled way. He likes rich
and childish dishes. He also likes the beginnings and the ends of his dinners, favoring tasty soups and American ice cream.

· · ·

Though Hollywood is now the German intellectual émigrés’ accepted centre, Mann’s interest in settling there was not altogether social. Apparently he has recently played with the idea of writing a Hollywood novel as a parallel to
The Magic Mountain
and its special theme of sickness. He thinks there is a psychological condition peculiar to Hollywood which makes of it an island not unlike his island of Davos, on its Swiss mountaintop. Mann also has a tiny Achilles’ heel; he would love to have a movie made of one of his novels. In the
Times
’ critique of his
Joseph in Egypt
, his reviewer, Mrs. Meyer, who often speaks as Mann’s Delphic oracle, stated that the book contained drama such as even Hollywood had never approached. Among members of the book trade this was taken to mean that Mann, a master psychologist, hoped that Hollywood, piqued, would say that it could indeed approach anything, even the subject of a contract. A nibble was actually made by one of the film companies, but the scheme fell through, supposedly because the officials felt that only David Wark Griffith in his heyday could have dared tackle such a situation.

· · ·

Just two months ago, taking advantage of an international convention forbidding the distribution of propaganda to prisoners of war, the Germans suddenly put a ban on the circulation of Mann’s books among German prisoners in England. In the last war, Mann was exempted from military service because the Imperial German Army doctor who examined him was a reverent admirer of his writings. As Mann says in his autobiography, “He laid his hand on my bare shoulder and said, ‘You shall be left alone.’ ”

· · ·

The fact that Thomas Mann today is a political refugee and the circumstance that he is living in exile in our democracy constitute a pair of the more illuminating personal paradoxes involved in this present war. When the last war ended, Mann was still ignorant of politics, he disliked the democratic form of government, and he published, in 1918, a much-discussed
essay, “The Reflections of a Non-Political Man,” to prove both. Mann was still an ivory-tower German aesthete interested in liberty for the artist, not the polloi; he was a humanist concerned with the brain, not the body politic. In his so aptly named essay, Mann blamed Bismarck for teaching romantic Germany about politics in the first place; he further wrote, “Democracy is an empty frame of life,” declared his mistrust of the citizen type, whom he dubbed
Herr Omnes
(“Mr. Everybody”), and added, “I want neither parliamentarianism nor party administration. I want no politics at all. I want objectivity, order, and dignity.” He also wanted to polish off, with dignity, his novel-writing brother, Heinrich, who was pro-democrat, pro-politics, pro-French, and, what was apparently worse, against the German bourgeoisie. In Heinrich’s realistic social novel,
The Poor
, published the year before, he had attacked the Wilhelmenian middle class as a soulless, greedy, ambitious lot. To Thomas, the younger but more famous literary Mann, who was still wrapped elegantly, as in a démodé, brocaded house robe, in the nineteenth-century family glamour of the Mann (or Buddenbrooks)
Bürgertum
, this was doubtless
lèse-majesté
.

This bitter ideological feud between the two Manns led postwar Germany’s agitated political circles to nickname them
die feindlichen Brüder
(“the enemy brothers”), a reference to two medieval robber-baron brothers who had built neighboring castles on the Rhine because they hated each other so much they could not let each other out of sight. The feud also led to Heinrich Mann’s becoming one of the most beloved leaders of the young German intellectuals, who, impatient with the old bourgeoisie, disgusted by the now-collapsed monarchy, and alarmed by the notion that revolution was brewing, were ardently gathering in support of the democratic ideals of the new Weimar Republic. As little boys, the
feindlichen
brothers Mann shared the same bedroom but often did not talk to each other; when they grew up, they failed to speak even the same language. Heinrich, who took after their Latin mother, was Gallic-minded, in a pinkish, liberal way was still cheering for the French Revolution, held Flaubert and Zola as his gods, had aimed in his half-dozen unappreciated books at being a European rather than a Germanic writer, and liked Bordeaux wine. Thomas drank Rhine wine and, in his own special fashion, Wagner, Martin Luther, and deep drafts of Goethe. In 1918, in his non-political essay, he described Heinrich (without actually naming him, of course, for it was a well-bred feud) as a
Zivilisationsliterat.
By this, Thomas, who thought French
Zivilisation
inferior to German
Kultur
, apparently meant that his brother was a Frenchified scribbler.

Thomas Mann, like most proud men of his class, was violently partisan in the last war. In Germany’s first victorious year, he published a patriotic polemic extolling Frederick the Great that included a famous preface, which, like “The Reflections of a Non-Political Man,” has never been published in English. In this preface, properly called “Thoughts in War” and written in September, 1914, he said:

Thus ends the 1914 “Thoughts in War,” perhaps the most extraordinarily accurate exposition of the German racial psychology which Mann, that noted German analyst of men and women, ever penned.

It took Mann exactly twenty-three years, starting from this political attitude, to become the militant liberal and profound hater of the German concept of racial domination that he is today. To his heavy devotion to the past and his scrupulous, weighty, literary slowness, he was gradually forced to add the burden of his long-drawn-out ideological metamorphosis. In 1923, five years after the Weimar Republic had been founded (and his brother Heinrich had successfully started leading German youth), Thomas Mann, in a Goethe Memorial Day speech to the students of the University of Frankfort-am-Main, finally advised the young folk to rally to the Republic idea, to which, with meticulous truthfulness, he admitted he was not yet converted. However, he said, the Republic offered “the climate of humanity,” in which soul could speak to soul rather than citizen to citizen. It was this literary mixture of metaphysics, formal non-democracy, and old-fashioned Prussian nationalism that made Mann seem a chauvinist to the French intelligentsia, still nervous in victory across the Rhine, and led the Institut de France in 1924 to describe him as a dangerous pan-Germanist of the
d’après-guerre
variety.

In 1924, Mann’s major opus, the 400,000-word novel called
The Magic
Mountain
, which he had taken twelve years to write, was published. Its European success was immense. It was translated into Hungarian, Dutch, and Swedish, and in four years sold over a hundred thousand copies even in an impoverished Germany where the sixteen-mark price of the novel could buy a dozen dinners. Mann seems to have hoped that the educated German classes would be influenced by the book’s metaphysical-social European symbolism, in which a character who is a Jew with a Jesuit education represents Communism, plus medievalism, mysticism, and the Catholic Church; an Italian dialectic democrat is satirized as an organ-grinder; and a Russian seductress represents Asia and is unsuccessfully loved by the well-bred German bourgeois hero Hans, “simple-minded though pleasing.” Mann was especially confident that the Teutonic reader would recognize himself in this typical German Hans and, as he later wrote in his autobiography, “could and would be guided by him.” Unfortunately, it was the Austrian Adolf who soon did the guiding, and after the 1930 elections, which gave the Nazis their first big political victory, Mann made an alarmed speech of intellectual warning in Berlin during which Nazi rowdies rioted. His suddenly taking a stand vaguely disturbed the German nationalists, who ever since his early essay on the non-political man had supposed him safely on the anti-democratic side of the fence. As Germany’s leading intellectual, Mann, had he remained complacent, would have been valuable to the Nazis at the moment. Furthermore, the year before, he had won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and for both national and international propaganda reasons the Nazis wanted to muscle in on his honor. In 1932 Mann addressed a lengthier, impassioned appeal to the German intelligentsia and made his first public reference to the working class, whom he praised.