The Unbearable Pathos of Thomas Mann

By Morten Høi Jensen – March 25, 2016

IN THE MAGIC MOUNTAIN, Thomas Mann’s great novel of 1924, a young man travels to a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps intending to visit his tubercular cousin for three weeks but ends up staying seven years. Among many other experiences “up there,” the young Hans Castorp becomes audience to several semesters-worth of impassioned philosophical discussions between the Enlightenment humanist Settembrini and the radical Jesuit Leo Naphta. This Naphta — whose communist zealotry and religious mysticism bring to mind the contemporary philosopher Slavoj Žižek — repeatedly knocks Settembrini’s humanism from its lofty democratic peg. It is naive, he claims, to think that people desire freedom instead of “discipline and sacrifice, renunciation of the ego and coercion of the personality.” No, their deepest desire is to obey: “The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and development of the ego. What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is — terror.”

Naphta is often compared to a character from Dostoevsky or Conrad, yet his grim prophecy stands out for being the work of a bourgeois German novelist writing at the same time Adolf Hitler sat dictating Mein Kampf in the Landsberg Prison — just an hour’s drive east of the Mann family home in Munich. During the First World War Thomas Mann had banged triumphantly on the drum of German nationalism; less than a decade later he’d written a novel in which all the death and disease festering in the wound of postwar Europe was laid bare. From declaring democracy to be “foreign and poisonous to the German character,” he emerged as an unlikely defender of the embattled Weimar Republic.

Mann’s embrace of liberalism in the 1920s owed something to his discovery of Walt Whitman. During his 1938 lecture tour of America, it was the famous German novelist who reminded his audiences of the importance of Whitman’s celebration of American pluralism. “The world has probably never produced a master of words who has known so well as Whitman how to elevate and translate a social principle such as democracy into intoxicating song,” he said, “or how to endow it with such powerful emotional content, representing a magnificent fusion of spirituality and sensuousness.”

Before encountering the epiphany that was Whitman, Mann had insisted that the spiritual life — the proper realm of the artist — existed separately from the brouhaha of politics. In his rambling, unwieldy Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), he’d criticized democratic and pacifistic writers like his brother, Heinrich, as Zivilisationsliteraten: progressive, civilized authors pedantically educating their readers in being progressive and civilized. Even worse, the Zivilisationsliterat was hostile to German culture, being allied instead to France and the spirit of the Enlightenment — “an astounding, remarkable example,” Mann wrote, “of how far, still today, in post-Bismarckian Germany, the German can succeed in self-disgust and alienation, in cosmopolitan devotion and self-renunciation.” Many years later, Mann came to see just how wrong he had been; he described a speech by Joseph Goebbels on the future of the German nation as “roughly how I was writing thirty years ago.”

Following the debacle of his support for Germany during the First World War, which suspended his relationship with his brother for almost a decade, Mann was reluctant to step back into the political fray. And though he married a Jewish woman and hated everything about the rise of National Socialism, he, like so many of his countrymen, was slow to take its threat seriously. Financially dependent on the German sales of his books, he remained supportive of his Jewish publisher Bermann Fischer’s cautious position toward the new German authorities — a stance deemed unconscionable by a number of émigré writers, including Mann’s own children, Klaus and Erika.

Shortly before Hitler consolidated his power as führer of Germany, Mann and his family moved to Switzerland, where they remained until the invasion of Czechoslovakia in 1939, when they immigrated to the United States….