Thomas-Mann-year-foamed by politics

He had already stood on this desk. When he gave his speech “by the German Republic” in the Beethovensaal in Berlin on October 13, 1922, which was celebrated in the big newspapers as a break with his “considerations of an apolitical” from the war years. “My resolution is, I say it openly,” explained Thomas Mann that day, “you, if necessary, to win for the republic and for what is called democracy …” He had actually wanted to write an essay on the 60th birthday of Gerhart Hauptmanns, but then in June 1922 Foreign Minister Walther Rathenau was murdered. In horror, he decided to transform the planned captain in a commitment to the Republic.

Eight years later, on October 17, 1930, Thomas Mann again spoke in the Beethovensaal of the Philharmonie. After the spectacular success of the NSDAP in the Reichstag elections, he had written his “German speech”, a broad description of the political and economic states with the consequences of the war catastrophe and the tremendous mass elevation, an appeal to reason to oppose the “lying terripal propaganda” of the Nazis.

“That is why I loathe the cloudy amalgam, which calls itself” National Socialism “(…) this misery mix of muffled souls and mass clamucks.”

Thomas Mann, 1932

In 1922 the right in their press had only grown about his speech, this time 20 SA men in borrowed tuxedo ensures that the event ended in the tumult. At first there were only interjections, then handle and cheeks, finally the police moved on and tried to get respect with rubber muffles. The leader of the spectacle, Arnolt Bronnen, was put at the door, but came back to help his comrades. Bronnen, once a Brecht friend and expressionist playwright, now intimate by Goebbels, had asked his people, supported by the brothers Friedrich Georg and Ernst Jünger, to “spark a discussion”. The hall battle was programmed. “But my husband,” said Katia Mann, “didn’t let himself be disturbed and led the lecture completely.” He finally escaped the Tohuwabohu over a staircase, led by the local Bruno Walter. But the disgust, he later wrote to Félix Bertaux, “was temporarily strong”. In the “Weltbühne” Carl von Ossietzky explained: “Thanks to Thomas Mann that he comes out of the series of silent intellectuals … here can no longer be struggled with literature.”

The “German speech”, one of the emphatic warnings of the Nazis, is one of the important political statements that are now in the third essay band of the large commented Frankfurt edition, the most complete and now also well -advanced edition of the entire work. He collects all the public work, speeches and essays from 1926 to 1933, which is responsible and bribed by Friedhelm Marx, and with his 1,300 text pages already stands out due to his enormous scope (the commentary volume is even more than 1700 pages).

What astonishing productivity man in this period. In November 1926 he wrote the first sentences of his novel “The Stories of Jaakob”, who initiates his tetralogy “Joseph and his brothers”. He still appeared in Germany in 1933. In August 1929, the holiday stay at the sea was also unthinkable for him without any employment that “strongly exceeded the political story: Mario and the magician”. In addition, framed by the autobiographical essay “Lübeck as a spiritual way of life” and the “commitment to socialism” from 1932, all the essayist and journalistic work that Thomas Mann has published in these years: congratulations, obituary, views, greeting, statements, published letters, autobiographical, answers to surveys, book recommendations, studies on Kleist, Platen, Storm, Fontane, Joseph Conrad and Gorki, talk about Lessing and Gerhart Hauptmann, the speeches and essays on the 1932 Goethe anniversary, which all meticulously and comprehensively commented on.

In his Thomas Mann Bibliography, Georg Potempa determined 375 journalistic contributions that were made between October 1922 and January 1933. This band alone brings 290 texts. In February 1933, Thomas Mann went into exile, from a lecture trip followed by a winter vacation in Switzerland, he no longer returned to Germany after warnings from friends. Even though he traveled his old homeland in various ways after the end of the war, it should stay that way: on August 12, 1955, he died in Zurich.

He had already said he was “foamed” by politics in 1922. Since then, the fight against irrationalism and nationalism has been one of the most urgent issues of his journalistic work. Also where it was about literature, as in the Lessing case, whose 200th birthday he celebrated with several articles and a great speech, the political conditions of 1929 did not get out of view. His Lessing was not a poet from distant time, but a man at his side, with him combined in the struggle for “freedom and reason”, against ecstatic salvation and “the shouting of the blanks and darklings”. He loathes “the cloudy amalgam, which calls itself” National Socialism “, he wrote in April 1932 in his call to the Prussian state elections,” this misery mixed out of muffled souls and mass clam, in front of the Germanistic senior teacher than before a “popular movement” on the abdom Inconged in revolution. “

Again and again the work on the first Joseph novel was interrupted. Sometimes an appeal was to be signed like the “election call to the party of non -voters” from 1930, then again a speech had to be written, which was read out in 1932 in a meeting of Viennese workers. Thomas Mann solidarized with the judicial victims Ernst Toller and Carl von Ossietzky, in 1932 the Papen government called for resistance to the Nazi terror, renewing his belief in democracy. He and his brother Heinrich, both tirelessly and decided, became the striking voices in the fight against the upcoming disaster. In January 1933, Thomas Mann repeated his “commitment to the social republic and the conviction that the intellectual person of bourgeois origin belongs to the side of the worker and social democracy today”.

The hatred of the Nazis was certain from the start. Friedhelm Marx documented many of the abuse and threats in the commentary, which offers a great time picture. Friedrich Georg Jünger denied Thomas Mann every idea of “true nationalism”, he was accused of “bottomless ignorance” and “malice”, called him a traitor who denied his Germanism, organized an orchestrated campaign against him, announced in anonymous telephone calls to “change”.

In July 1932 he stayed for the third (and last) time in his summer house on the Curonian Spit, when after the Reichstag election all over the country, also in the nearby Königsberg, bloody unrest, terror and assassinations of the military associations of SA and SS. He reacted spontaneously and protested from “real agony and outrage … and from a feeling of shame about the general crouched silence” with his essay “what we need to ask”. The text was sent to the “Berliner Tageblatt”, where it was also published, but was weakened because it was feared to be banned. Nevertheless, it was for many, said Thomas Mann, “a liberating word”. His publisher Gottfried Bermann-Fischer agreed with him: “Finally a hard brave word about all this crawl, putting yourself, making concessions and overflowing”. Shortly afterwards, Thomas Mann was delivered a package. It contained a charred copy of his novel “Buddenbrooks”, “sent to me by the owner for the punishment that I had publicly expressed my horror in front of the nazis conflict.”.

In the radio speech “German listener” of the BBC of May 25, 1943, he came back to this. “It was,” he emphasized, “the individual prelude to the symbolic act organized by the Nazi regime everywhere in Germany on May 10, 1933: the ceremonial mass burning of books of freedomal writers …”

Thomas Mann: Essays III. Large commented Frankfurt edition, Vol. 16, ed. v. Friedhelm Marx. S. Fischer, text and comment in Kassette, 3056 pages, born, € 348.