Interview with Kai Sina | Thomas Mann: Drastic and clear

You wrote a book about Thomas Mann's political activism and his fight against the Nazis: "What is Good and What is Evil." At times, one gets the impression that you sympathize with your protagonist. Is this also a reflection of an admirer of Thomas Mann?

Yes, you could say that, but it's critical admiration, not religious admiration. I consider him one of the wisest and most interesting political intellectuals of the 20th century, precisely because he didn't begin as one. He had to first develop this role, learn it, and overcome errors. He wasn't a born democrat, but a seeker. That's what makes him so interesting to us today. Democracy isn't a fixed position, but a path that includes mistakes, contradictions, and self-correction. This development can be observed in Thomas Mann in a particularly impressive, and for me, downright moving, way.

There are already several meters of secondary literature on Thomas Mann's work and life. You write that your book doesn't intend to offer a definitive explanation, but rather a new description of Thomas Mann. Why is such a description necessary?

The political Thomas Mann, especially the democrat and republican he declared himself to be in the early 1920s, has rarely been taken seriously. His understanding of democracy is said to be unsubstantial, if not problematic, and anyway, as a mere "rational republican," he was never truly convinced of democracy. Even if quotations can be found that can confirm this impression, from this perspective one overlooks the fact that Thomas Mann saw politics less as a task of thought than as a concrete mandate for action. He is fundamentally a pragmatist, he once wrote in a letter. This is where I begin. I seek out the political author where he appears as an active agent; I am concerned with what, following John Dewey, one might call "everyday democracy," the detailed, tangible, protracted participation in the democratic opinion-forming process. This is precisely where Thomas Mann's strength lies.

They emphasize the difference between Thomas Mann’s artistic-aesthetic and political-activist forms of articulation.

Thomas Mann's novels and short stories present human beings in all their complexity, as contradictory, vulnerable, and insecure beings. Even where fascism becomes a theme, especially in the 1930 novella "Mario and the Magician," Mann is concerned with psychologically making the intertwining of charismatic seductiveness and the pleasurable surrender of reason plausible. Thus, he is more engaged in the business of literary analysis than political accusation, as was no different in the postwar great German novel "Doctor Faustus." The political speaker, on the other hand, must make and articulate clearer distinctions than he, as an artist, considers desirable. "Yes, we know again what is good and evil," declared Thomas Mann, for example, in his 1939 speech "The Problem of Freedom," explaining that we live in an "age of simplification." This is unmistakably a phrase of the political activist, one that the narrator and novelist would never have uttered in this deliberate exaggeration.

It is known that at the beginning of the First World War, Thomas Mann advocated for the German Empire in extremely nationalist texts and enthusiastically welcomed its war against the democratically constituted states of England and France. A surprising finding in your book is that prior to that, his political arguments were more liberal and progressive. How, then, can his nationalist stance be explained?

May I expand on your comment on the years before 1914? It is truly astonishing how clearly politically, indeed how decidedly liberal to left-liberal, Thomas Mann positioned himself even in this early phase. Heinrich Detering traced this in great detail in the Frankfurt edition: In 1907, Thomas Mann emphatically advocated the abolition of state theater censorship, which he described as "state presumption." In a 1911 report addressing issues of pornography and eroticism, he advocated for unrestricted freedom, even for provocative art forms, and explicitly opposed interference by "philistines or zealots." At the same time, he was involved in various public protests: in 1910, he signed a petition in support of the anarchist Erich Mühsam; in 1911, he spoke out against bans on performances of Wedekind's plays; and in the spring of 1914, he participated in a declaration against the confiscation of the magazine "Aktion," which, in the accompanying letter of protest, was described as a "small, brave, and clever organ of the literary left." Here, a political impulse already emerged that, while not yet culminating in a fixed program, should not be underestimated—a kind of latent activism that increasingly took shape in the late 1920s and experienced its greatest development in exile. It is remarkable that this connection received little attention for a long time. Instead, the image of an author who remained in a kind of political slumber until the outbreak of war in 1914 persisted.

This raises the question of how those nationalistic, war-drunk writings came to be written from 1914 onwards.

Yes, and I would first of all argue that this break should truly be understood as a break, and not be argued away, as has happened too often. Even within his closest family circle, the change of direction was met with incomprehension: "Tommy's politics are also rather embarrassing," his mother-in-law, Hedwig Pringsheim, noted in her diary at the time. She finished reading "Reflections of an Unpolitical Man" in October 1918 "under strong protest." How, then, can this change of direction be explained? One theory now seems very plausible to me: I see in the author of the war writings someone who, deep down, considered himself an outsider—as an artist and a homosexual—someone who could not or would not conform to the norms of the bourgeois world. In 1914, he was given the opportunity to no longer stand on the sidelines as an observer, but to join an exhilarating collective movement, even to lead it journalistically. In some places in the "Reflections," however, one senses that he himself wasn't entirely comfortable with this. And who knows—perhaps it was precisely this episode of reactionary seduction and inner regression that later, in the 1920s, made him realize so clearly where political fanaticism could ultimately lead.

Let us take up the title of Mann’s gigantic essay: What is an “apolitical person”?

Thomas Mann defines the "apolitical" as an artist who consciously distances himself from day-to-day politics and instead advocates inwardness, intellectual autonomy, and cultural values. Politics appears to him as a superficial, corrupting sphere incompatible with true art. Yet this attitude is, of course, anything but neutral: Mann contrasts the Western-liberal "civilized literary figure" with the German "artist," who stands for creative seriousness and "Germanness." Thus, distancing himself from the world of the spirit takes on a political charge; the retreat into the spiritual becomes itself an ideological gesture and is overlaid with nationalism.

Didn't some of Thomas Mann's positions at the time also owe their origins to family emotions, namely, the conflicts with his brother Heinrich Mann? He was also a writer, a supporter of French culture, the ideas of the Enlightenment, and reason. How would you assess the influence of the conflicts with his brother Heinrich on Thomas Mann?

This relationship has been researched and described in great detail, most recently by Hans Wißkirchen. I can and will add little to this, especially since I also see the danger of ultimately attributing Thomas and Heinrich Mann's political activity to familial emotions and thereby diminishing them. Perhaps only this: in my view, it is not just about the conflict between two brothers, but also about a productive force. Thomas Mann had to clash with this brother in order to find himself. Precisely because he initially took such a vehement stance against his brother, he was later able to develop his own stance all the more convincingly. The confrontation with his brother was certainly one of the decisive stages in a lifelong political learning process. Nevertheless: I cannot and will not advocate for one or against the other here; in my view, that would not get us anywhere, especially since both of them, as authors and political intellectuals in their time, amounted to so much more than their complex relationship as brothers.

To what extent did Thomas Mann's place of origin, Lübeck, whose intellectual climate is described in detail in the novel "The Buddenbrooks", actually shape his ideas?

I believe that "Lübeck" rather than "Germany" played a decisive role in Thomas Mann's early political socialization. He himself outlined this in his 1926 speech on "Lübeck as an Intellectual Way of Life." For him, the Hanseatic city symbolized a bourgeois-republican community based on self-government, a sense of duty, and cultural responsibility. This bourgeois ethic profoundly shaped his political thinking. This concept, "responsibility," was already central to his 1922 Republic Speech. In this respect, I believe Thomas Mann is less suited to substantiate the much-discussed thesis of a "German Sonderweg" in intellectual and political matters .

During the crisis-ridden Weimar Republic from 1929 onward, Hitler's National Socialists achieved significant electoral success. Thomas Mann tirelessly advocated for democracy in public lectures at the time. The left-wing publicist Siegfried Kracauer paid him great respect for this, but at the same time he remarked: "The liberal bourgeoisie Mann dreamed of unfortunately did not exist in Weimar Germany." Do you agree—and did Thomas Mann himself perceive it that way?

I agree with Kracauer. In his speeches, Thomas Mann appealed to a liberal bourgeoisie that barely existed in the reality of the late Weimar Republic. His appeal to political reason met with a society increasingly characterized by extremes. Jens Bisky recently demonstrated this impressively in his book "The Decision." Mann himself recognized this discrepancy, but it didn't stop him from doing what he could. His speeches expressed his belief in the power of reason, even though he knew that social reality no longer corresponded to this ideal.

After Mann went into exile in 1933, primarily in the USA, he came into his own as an activist, you write in your book. What do you mean by that?

By this I mean that in exile, especially in the USA, Thomas Mann embraced and fulfilled his role as a political activist like never before. His house in Pacific Palisades became the hub of his activism. He wrote speeches, radio messages, and appeals; he was in constant contact with committees, associations, and political groups; and from there he traveled several times on long lecture tours throughout the country, to coastal cities as well as to the so-called Heartland. His concern was not simply to defend democracy; he lived it as a form of social responsibility. In this action, in this public role, I would say he fully developed his activist identity—and in this way reinvented himself as an intellectual.

Thomas Mann said "yes" to the USA and accepted its culture. In stark contrast to the politically left-wing exile Adorno, who demonized this very culture as subservient to capitalism and superficial. In one passage of your book, it seems as if you, with Thomas Mann in mind, flatly reject Adorno's culturally critical attitude toward the USA. What do you say to Adorno?

My aim is less to condemn Adorno's position than to make the contrasting positions more visible; my personal sympathy may resonate in the book, but it is not decisive. While Thomas Mann saw democracy as an opportunity for active humanity, Adorno embodied the skeptical attitude of the detached observer, who recognized in the culture industry above all the loss of autonomy and critical thinking. Thus, two attitudes confront each other: committed participation versus intellectual critique, both shaped by exile, but with fundamentally different responses to the challenges of modernity. In all of this, Thomas Mann's deep gratitude to the USA should certainly not be underestimated.

Starting in 1940, Thomas Mann addressed the German population directly in regular radio speeches broadcast by the BBC. These texts leave nothing to be desired in terms of decisive anti-Nazi commitment, but have been largely neglected in the reception of Mann's work. Why, in fact?

Thomas Mann's BBC radio speeches from 1940 onward were clear, courageous addresses against National Socialism. He spoke about the murder of the Jews, their involvement, and guilt, and posed uncomfortable questions directly to the Germans. It was precisely this drastic and explicit nature that often drew criticism from him in the postwar period; some statements, such as those about the bombing of German cities, were never truly forgiven. He was accused of moralizing from the safety of his exile and viewed as a traitor, a traitor, and subjected to harsh insults. This explains why these speeches were long ignored or devalued. Furthermore, they did not fit the image of the detached literary figure with his detached irony (which is also a cliché). The rhetorical refinement with which the speeches were constructed, as well as their references to the Bible and the (Wagnerian) world of myth, could only be recognized later under these circumstances.

A surprising finding in your book is how early, and especially how intensely, Thomas Mann supported Zionism, including the founding of the State of Israel in 1948. What are the reasons for this stance?

Thomas Mann's advocacy for Zionism began in the 1920s and continued until the founding of Israel in 1948, which he clearly supported. This commitment is, in fact, barely present in public. One reason for this commitment lies in his early, very clear perception of the increasingly aggressive anti-Semitism in the Weimar Republic. For him, Zionism was also a political response to this hatred, initially conceived culturally, later increasingly practically. By 1942 at the latest, when the extent of the Holocaust became clear to him, he became a vigorous advocate for a newly founded Jewish state – out of moral conviction and historical responsibility.

Nevertheless, Thomas Mann's relationship to Judaism can also cause discomfort. In his novels and essays, he emphasizes the great civilizing achievements of classical Jewish culture – yet at the same time seems to be steeped in stereotypical ways of thinking, saying, for example, that Jewish people are different from other people. What exactly determines Thomas Mann's relationship to Judaism – and are there actually elements in it that could be described as racism?

These stereotypes exist in the stories and novels, and sometimes even outright derailments in letters and diaries—I don't question any of this, nor do I relativize it. At times, Thomas Mann's speech, even where he explicitly calls himself a "philosemite," veers into antisemitic clichés. Rather, my aim is to complicate the picture by considering Mann's abhorrence of political antisemitism and his committed opposition to it—and, indeed, his advocacy for Zionism. My impression is that, with regard to Thomas Mann's relationship to "the" Jews, any, truly any, sweeping judgment is prohibited.