Thomas Mann's War Against Hitler

Jacob Heilbrunn

History, Americas

In his important new book, Thomas Mann's War, the literary scholar Tobias Boes carefully scrutinizes Mann’s embrace of his leading role in America in battling Nazism.

Tobias Boes, Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters (Ithaca, New York and London: Cornell University Press, 2019), 376 pp., $34.95.

IN FEBRUARY 1938, Thomas Mann and his family sailed from Cherbourg, France to New York, where they were greeted by a throng of reporters and a film crew from the Paramount News Corporation. Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize in 1929 and appeared on the cover of Time in 1934, decried British prime minister Neville Chamberlain’s policy of appeasement and correctly predicted that Hitler would annex Austria forthwith. Later that day, Mann, after being asked whether he found exile a lonely state of affairs, responded,

It is hard to bear. But what makes it easier is the realization of the poisoned atmosphere in Germany. That makes it easier because it’s actually no loss. Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me. I have contact with the world and I do not consider myself fallen.

Like Bertolt Brecht, Lion Feuchtwanger and Arnold Schoenberg, Mann ended up living in a German enclave that became known as Weimar on the Pacific. Mann was not only the most prominent member of the exiles, but also the one who had probably traveled the furthest politically. In 1937, the German philosopher Günther Anders observed: 

his enemies will be amazed by the tragic violence of a man they had always derided as the master of ceremonies of German prose. They will be amazed all the more by the fact that Mann speaks as a patriot, thus seizing the claim staked out by the present rulers of Germany.