The Goethe-novel's novelist

Georg Lukacs

Thomas Mann

The text below is an extract from Lukacs’ essay “In Search of Bourgeois Man”, written in 1945 in honour of the seventieth birthday of Thomas Mann. In it, Lukacs traces Mann’s development from Buddenbrooks to the war-time Lotte in Weimar. His perspective is the whole ulterior development of German history. After 1933, Lukacs was haunted by the eclipse of German culture, which had been perhaps the richest and most vital in Europe in the formative years of his youth, and which had collapsed in barbarism. He returned to this theme again and again. “In Search of Bourgeois Man” is a tribute to Mann for his prescience and his resistance to fascism. Mann, who had often stayed with Lukacs’ parents in Budapest before 1914, reported an early encounter with Lukacs characteristically: “I have met Lukacs personally. He once spent an hour in Vienna giving me his ideas. He was right so long as he was talking. Even if afterwards I only remembered an impression of an almost unbearable degree of abstractness . . .” More than thirty years later he wrote a direct testimonial to the intelligence of the mature Lukacs: “There is no doubt that this birthday essay, ‘In Search of Bourgeois Man’ was a sociological and psychological portrayal of my life and work grander in scale and manner than anything I have ever yet received . . .”

The essay opens with an examination of Buddenbrooks and Mann’s work before 1914. The sections below follow.

This was the frame of mind in which Thomas Mann drifted into the First World War. It was a frame of mind which reflected the development of his country. He was, of course, in a dubious situation philosophically speaking. When we look back on this period from the vantage-point of the present we can see just how paradoxical a situation it was. Mann’s fictional criticism of Prussianism reached its peak at the very moment when the national crisis broke out—and when his personal and political attachment to the Prussian cause was at its height. With the historian’s prophetic hindsight we are horrified to see how little Thomas Mann followed his own literary development through to its logical conclusion at this period. How passionately he drew false conclusions from his own work!

But it is not sufficient to stare with platonic wonder at contradictions in a philosopher. We must try to understand the problem sympathetically. This is not to defend Mann’s war writings. If, as still happens in England and America, later works like The Magic Mountain (1924) are interpreted in the light of the Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918), the result is necessarily a reactionary caricature. We must realise that Mann’s political outburst in the First World War was not simply a chance phase in his “search for bourgeois man”; it must be understood as an inevitable stage in the disastrous general development of modern German thought.

Up to this point we have followed the problematical elements in Mann’s work as these were posed for their creator. But that was their social basis? (not that Mann was aware of it at the time). Some ten years after the First World War Mann gave an excellent description of the relationship between most of the major German thinkers and their country’s political development. He was writing about Richard Wagner and “his participation in the revolutionary upheavals of 1848, which cost him twelve years of tortured exile and which he later minimized and denied as much as he could. He repented of his “heedless” optimism and confused to the best of his ability the fait accompli of Bismarck’s Reich with the realisation of his early dreams. This was the path of the German bourgeoisie itself, from revolution to disillusionment, to pessimism and to a resigned, power-protected, emotional solipsism.”

This last attitude has a long history behind it, which is deeply rooted in the miserable political development of Germany. I have to touch on it here since it not only throws light on Mann himself but also clarifies his relationship to the German middle class.

To summarize: apart from exceptional figures like Lessing, the whole of German classical literature and philosophy grew up in an atmosphere of “power-protected emotional solipsism”. No doubt the semi-feudal absolutism of the petty principalities seemed questionable to German thinkers and writers of the time; and often they were sincerely opposed to it. But when Napoleon’s invasion thrust real power onto the scene, power bent on transforming political and social conditions, the best Germans were fiercely divided. Goethe and Hegel opted for Napoleon and were prepared to see the whole of Germany turned into something like the Confederation of the Rhine. The Phenomenology of Mind, completed at the time of the Battle of Jena (1806), described the French Revolution and the new bourgeois society it had created as the climax of modern history and admonished the Germans that it would be their task to create an ideological superstructure appropriate to the new conditions. This was “power-protected solipsism” with a vengeance. This power meanwhile guaranteed those political and social reforms which Napoleon was to introduce against the wishes of the princes of the Confederation of the Rhine. (Some years later Hegel was to call Napoleon the “great constitutional lawyer of Paris”).

There is no need to waste much time to-day pointing out the Utopianism of these conceptions. Goethe’s ideas were very similar. It was clearly pure Utopianism to imagine that Napoleonic France’s hegemony over Europe could be permanently stabilized, without awakening a desire for freedom amongst these peoples whom its own tyranny had purged of feudal dross and restored to national selfawareness. It was equally Utopian to imagine that Germany could achieve the ideological leadership of this new world without even trying to become politically independent herself.

Oddly enough, however, all this was no more unrealistic than were the dreams of those honest Prussian reformers who for their part hoped to achieve in their own country the positive gains of the French Revolution simply by liberating Prussia from Napoleon’s yoke, but without any upheavals in Germany herself. Their Utopianism extended to imagining that they could abolish the social foundations and political consequences of Prussian feudal absolutism without removing the Junkers from power and without breaking down the Hohenzollern absolutism. The inadequacy of this broken-backed Utopianism was clearly demonstrated in the power-protected solipsism of the Romanticism which emerged after Napoleon’s defeat. One Utopia rivalled another in demonstrating that Germany’s philosophers were the rankest bystanders (or not very effective actors) in the drama of the forging of their country’s destiny. This “intellectual period” continued up to the 1830 July Revolution in France. A more realistic development set in from this date, but was cut short by the tragedy of 1848 and the tragi-comedy of 1870. In 1848 the Germans really did have the choice between freeing themselves democratically and continuing in their old miserable political routine. In 1870 the intellectuals capitulated once more to the growing power of the Prussianized German Reich, a state created and developed under the insignia of Reaction.

Thus the German intellectuals, as Mann rightly wrote of Wagner, continued to live in a state of “power-protected emotional solipsism”. But history does not repeat itself exactly; similarities are more often formal than real. Hence we must distinguish between Goethe’s power-protected solipsism in the time of Napoleon and Thomas Mann’s in the period of Wilhelmine imperialism. In all essential respects Goethe’s outlook was progressive; but it was Mann’s fate to be born into the age of Decadence, which tinged everything he did with pathos; he could only transcend this decadence by exaggerating its ultimate ethical consequences. Moreover, Goethe’s reaction to Napoleon’s power involved no real obligation to defend reactionary tendencies, which might have conflicted with his better nature. But the outbreak of the First War turned the situation of Mann and the German middle class inside out: those whose solipsistic lives had been protected by state power now had to take up arms and actively defend with their philosophy the power which protected them, i.e. reactionary Prussian-German imperialism.

Mann’s situation in the First War was paradoxical and close to tragedy. As a great artist he too was bound to examine, in this situation, the case of “bourgeois man”. He was bound to find the heart of the matter in the spiritual sufferings of the middle class. He was to make a thorough prognosis of the present contradictions between what they were and what they thought they were. This in itself was, to quote a judgment of Schiller’s on Goethe, such “a great and truly heroic idea”, that even the greatest of geniuses might be forgiven for making mistakes; all the more so, since his errors were not subjective but arose from his passionate patriotism, partially warped though this was by a miserable political heritage.

Thomas Mann was therefore quite right when, a few years later, he characterised his wartime writings thus: “(They were) intended as a monument and (have), if I am not mistaken, become one. (They are) a rearguard action fought in the grand manner—the last and latest rearguard action of the Romantic German middle class tradition—fought in the full knowledge that the battle was lost; a battle not without nobility, therefore. Fought, even, with some appreciation of the moral ambiguity and morbidity of feeling compassion for doomed institutions. But, unfortunately, underestimating health and virtue out of feelings that were, alas, too aesthetic in origin. Health and virtue I analysed and mocked at as the very essence of the things I was really fighting shy of, politics, democracy. . .”

The passage is an accurate autobiographical commentary. To place it correctly in the wider framework of German history, it must, however, be studied as it was meant to be—from the standpoint of Mann’s further development. It was only because his rearguard action was followed by advance towards democracy that it can be called “not without nobility”. If a writer to-day were to advocate desperate defence of a hopelessly (and rightly) lost cause; if he were to cling to a doomed past without believing in its right to prevail; then he might well expect to be laughed at as the Don Quixote of an utterly vapid “code of chivalry”.

But, what is worse, this would turn his chivalry into nihilistic hypocrisy. One could then call this rearguard action a preparation for the advance of a new-style reactionary Bourbonism. It would be wilful destruction of new growth, a crucifying of civilization and ethics in order to give a parasitic pseudo-existence to something history had long buried. Compared with this, Mann’s noble farewell address to his people’s more than problematical past was a real farewell. It indicated departure along a new road, the road to democracy.

Mann’s conversion to democracy during the post-war years was the outcome of a great national crisis. It was a decisive turning point, moreover, in his personal development. Yet—though this may astonish the superficial observer—it was what one might have expected, given the inner logic of his previous development. The new development placed him (and us) in a fresh situation vis-a-vis that Bourgeois Man we are seeking.

The sole difference between the Thomas Mann of this period and the best of his fellow-Germans lay in his deeper feeling for, and capacity to work out more logically, the problems they all shared. Intellectually and morally, however, he was made of the same stuff as they were: even the most outlandish and sharply etched of his characters had therefore a familiar quality which his fellow-Germans could also savour. When Mann placed his early work by citing the names of Platen, Storm and Nietzsche, he characterised this remarkable situation with great precision. It was a body of work which was exceptional in its strict logicality of form and content. Yet though it far surpasses any other contemporary work, it is still engendered and nourished by the best and worst of his time.

The relationship between Mann and the German middle-class altered radically after his post-war philosophical, ethical and political change of heart. The German middle-class now pursued a path which diverged radically from the writer’s. The one idea that the Germans salvaged from the collapse of their first attempt at world domination was “front-line experience”—the hope of achieving, another time, with improved methods, what had failed this time. One method was to be a thorough-going settling of accounts with democracy. Thomas Mann, for his part, however, not only broke completely and wholeheartedly with German imperialism; he also understood perfectly the importance of democracy for the future rebirth of Deutschtum (no matter how much he had spurned democracy during the War as un-German). Further he at last grasped the connection between the ideological and emotional vagaries of Decadence and previous German political development. The struggle for democracy was now transformed into a struggle against decadence. This is the paradoxical continuation, the fruitful contradiction, of his wartime confessions. For the book had defended, as well as the German war-effort, Decadence, the fascination with disease and decay, with night and with death. But Thomas Mann’s defence became so deeply enmeshed in the bewildering tangle of pros and cons that, at the end of his frenzied attempt to justify German Decadence, his own experience in 1918 convinced him that he was utterly wrong.

This turn of events brought education into the forefront of Mann’s writing. But, before we consider this development, we have to ask whether this did not also mean the end of his ruling passion, his peculiar genius, the anti-Utopian nature of his talent? Yes and no. And rather more no than yes. For the mature Thomas Mann became an educator sui generis, not simply by virtue of the ironical reservations in his narrative technique and the delicate good humour of his story-telling. Though these were typical of his ease of mind, they connect at a deeper level with his vital aims. He was not an educator in the sense of imposing some lesson (albeit one thoroughly mastered) on his students. He was an educator in the sense of Plato’s anamnesis: the student himself is liberated to discover the new idea in himself, so that it is he himself who brings it to life.

Having become the educator of his people, Thomas Mann was now willing and able to look for Bourgeois Man at even deeper levels. His search had now found a concrete incentive: he was looking for the spirit of democracy in the mind of the German citizen. He sought for hints and signs of this new idea in order to awaken and foster it through exemplary fictions—although such exemplary fictions were not new to Germany. He wished his fellow-countrymen to discover them as their own experience of life. This gave his work a purpose which it had always subconsciously had, but which Mann had at last consciously realised.

This is more or less the reason why Mann the great writer stood so alone under the Weimar Republic. The reforms of Stein and Scharnhorst were not inspired by a popular movement in Prussia but by Prussia’s defeat at the Battle of Jena. In the same way German post-1918 democracy was not something striven and fought for, but the initially unwelcome gift of a malevolent destiny. This newborn and never very deep-rooted democracy had bitter enemies, some time-serving hangers-on, but few real friends and supporters. These last, for their part, mostly took things as they came and made no efforts to find a precedent for democracy in German history, even when they felt inspired to reappraise that history. In other words, Thomas Mann’s isolated position under the Weimar democratic system was precisely the result of his search for such a precedent. As a literary educator he was looking for a maturing sense of democracy sprung from a German ethos. This is why he was the only German writer of this period for whom democracy became a matter of Weltanschauung, and indeed a problem specifically for German Weltanschauung.

Here the struggle for German democracy merges into a vast philosophical background. It is the struggle of light and darkness, of day and night, of health and sickness, of life and death. And Thomas Mann, linked closely with Germany’s past, realised very acutely that he was here taking up the cudgels in an age-old German battle of ideas. We need only go back to Goethe’s attitude to the Romantics: “Classical I call what is healthy, Romantic what is sick”, said he; and he refused to acknowledge Kleist, calling him a “body which Nature intended well but which has been wasted by an incurable disease.” When in The Magic Mountain the spokesman of the reactionary, fascist, anti-democratic Weltanschauung, the Jesuit Naphta, exposes his ideas, he does so almost in the words of Novalis: “Sickness was something very human, Naphta immediately replied; to be human implied being sick. Indeed Man was essentially a sick creature; it was his being sick which made him human. If you tried to cure him, inciting him to make peace with Nature, to “return to Nature” (actually he never had been natural) . . . your Rousseaus would achieve nothing but a kind of dehumanising, animalising effect. . . . In the mind, therefore, and in sickness lie Man’s dignity and superiority. To put it bluntly, Man was the more himself, the sicker he was; the afflatus of sickness was more human than the afflatus of health.”

This marks a decisive change in Thomas Mann’s Weltanschauung. He firmly took up his defence of democracy against the specifically German Decadence, which arose out of the reactionary social backwardness of the country. Though the literary means which he used to suggest his new awareness are both subtle and intelligent, he still however failed as a thinker to realise that, objectively, his new stage of development represented a break with the teachers of his youth, with Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. Naturally he could see the existence of this kind of connection. He was, for example, perfectly correct in his judgment of Hamsun: “My great colleague, Knut Hamsun, for example, in Norway, although already an old man, is an ardent fascist. He makes propaganda for this party in his own country and has not been ashamed publicly to jeer at a world-famous victim of German fascism, the pacifist Ossietzky. This is of course not the behaviour of an old man who has stayed young in heart. It is the behaviour of a writer of the 1870 generation whose critical literary influences were Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche and who has stuck without moving at the stage of revolt against liberalism, not understanding what is happening to-day and not realising that he is besmirching his genius by his political—or rather his human— behaviour.”

Despite such insights Thomas Mann still wanted to preserve Nietzsche for the world of democratic ideas.

But in his creative work Mann was much more clear-sighted. The important novel The Magic Mountain is devoted to the ethical struggle between life and death, health and sickness, reaction and democracy. With his usual touch of genius in the invention of symbols, Mann removed these conflicts to a Swiss luxury sanatorium. Sickness and health and their physical and moral consequences in such surroundings are no longer abstract theories; they are not mere “symbols”. They grow organically out of physical, mental and ethical living. For superficial contemporary readers when the novel first appeared, the richly painted and fascinating tableau of the physical existence of the sick might indeed have obscured the deeper problems of politics and Weltanschauung—but only in the first instance.

Looking more closely at the novel, it is plain that this milieu was an ideal literary device for illuminating all sides of the theoretical arguments. The remoteness of life in the sanatorium has, too, another even more important artistic function. In details of character Mann has always “invented” relatively little, like most really important epic writers. He has an infallible instinct for plots and surroundings, which set off the problems he examines in the clearest and most meaningful way, with the greatest emotional impact and the profoundest irony. This makes his work a delightful mixture of invented or half-invented overall design and earthy detail (which can even be traced back to its real-life source).

Thomas Mann was continuing in this sense the work of Chamisso’s Peter Schlemihl, E. T. A. Hoffman and Gottfried Keller, but in his own idiosyncratic way and not as their direct imitator. “We describe everyday events,” he once said, “but these everyday events become odd if they are built up on odd foundations.” Such a half-fantastic background produced the miniature court in Royal Highness, designed to illustrate the problems of a “code of behaviour”, and it produced the sanatorium in The Magic Mountain in the same way.

The characters in the sanatorium are “out of school”. They have been torn away from their everyday cares, their normal struggle for existence. Their everyday cares have already moulded them, spiritually and ethically. But in this milieu they become beings who can express themselves with perfect freedom and without embarrassment; they become unnaturally clearsighted about the deepest philosophical problems. This gives us a quite unusually percipient picture of the contemporary bourgeois, caricatured in places and at times slipping over tantalisingly into fantasy. Yet the final effect is, in actual fact, profoundly realistic. The moral emptiness and ethical unscrupulousness of the bourgeois is displayed before our eyes, expanding at times into entirely grotesque forms. At the same time, however, the better characters gradually become aware of those sides of their nature which their everyday life in the capitalist world would never have given them time to recognise.

This is the basis for the “educational-novel” aspect of The Magic Mountain, which is the story of the education of an average pre-war German, Hans Castorp. Its main intellectual theme is the symbolic duel between the representatives of light and darkness, between the Italian humanist democrat Settembrini and the Jesuit-educated Jew, Naphta, spokesman of a catholicising, pre-fascist ideology. These two wage war for the soul of an average German bourgeois.

It is impossible in this small compass even to hint at the richness of these duels, which take place on intellectual as well as on human, ethical and political, moral and philosophical levels. It is enough to say that the intellectual duel ends in a draw. After all his spiritual struggles to battle through to political and philosophical clarity, Castorp is swallowed up by the tawdry and mindless everyday life of the Magic Mountain. For the “holiday” which is made possible by abandoning material cares has two sides to it. It allows greater intellectual elevation, but it also allows the inmates to sink by degrees into cultivation of the animal instincts—to a greater extent than is possible in the everyday world “down below”. In the rarified air of this half-fantastic milieu, people do not gain new and greater powers. The powers they do have simply develop very much more thoroughly. Objectively the scope for their innate abilities does not become any greater. But we see them—though in a natural, unartificial way—as through a magnifying glass. It is true that Castorp “saves” himself in the end from complete engulfment into passive meditation by joining the German army in August, 1914. But from the standpoint of the dilemma of the German intellectual and of the German middle class, of all those who could reach no final satisfaction within their “power-protected solipsism”, participation in the war in word and deed was, as Ernst Bloch once trenchantly put it, just “one more monstrous holiday”.

Though Thomas Mann was strict in his criticisms of antidemocratic ideas, he was justifiably sceptical of the way his books presented the efficacy of his newly-discovered view of the ethos of the German burgher. So he returned to these two themes and depicted them in even stronger colours, in the Novelle Mario and the Magician (1929). In between, in Disorder and Early Sorrow (1926), he had given a deliberately ironical picture of the melancholy preoccupation with death of a typical bourgeois intellectual of the prewar vintage, who feels himself completely deserted under the Weimar Republic so far as ideas and morals are concerned, although he has a glimmering of an idea that his own behaviour actually does leave a great deal to be desired. “He knows”, Mann wrote about this hero, Professor Cornelius, “that professors of history do not like history in so far as it deals with real events but in so far as it deals with events rolling by. They hate the contemporary upheaval because they feel it to be lawless, unconnected and irregular—in a nutshell ‘unhistorical’. What they love is the past which is safely dead, connected and historical. . . . What is past is immortalised, i.e. it is dead. And death is the source of all piety, of all the instincts of preservation.”

In Mario, written in Weimar times and set—by no means accidentally—in Italy, we are already dealing with fascism’s tactical use of the masses, with mass-suggestion and hypnosis. To befog the intellect and break the will is the philosophy of militant reaction, once it leaves the libraries and the bohemian cafes and goes out on to the streets, when Schopenhauer and Nietzsche are succeeded by Hitler and Rosenberg. Again Thomas Mann’s genius for finding symbols gives fine literary shape to this new stage. He invents a plot which displays with subtle touches of graded colour and in very varied ways the helplessness of the German middle class faced by the hypnotic power of fascism.

A “gentleman from Rome” provides one striking example. He refuses to submit to the magician’s suggestive invitation to dance, only to succumb after a tough but short resistance. In this pointed comment Mann sums up his defeat: “As I understand what happened, the gentleman was beaten because he took up a posture for the struggle which was too negative. It would seem that the mind cannot live by not wanting to do something. It is not sufficient in the long run not to want to do something. Indeed there is, perhaps, such an uncomfortable closeness between the ideas of not wanting to do something and of not wanting to be bothered to make any longer the effort of wanting not to do it, i.e. being prepared to do what one is told, that between the two the idea of freedom is gravely endangered . . .” The defencelessness of those German bourgeois who did not want Hitler, but who obeyed him for over a decade without demur has never been better described. What then was the reason for this defencelessness?

One one occasion Hans Castorp tells Settembrini, the democrat, “You are frankly a windbag and a barrel-organ man, but you do mean well. You are straighter, and I like you more, than that beastly little Jesuit terrorist, the little Torquemada with his flashing glasses, even though he does nearly always get the better of you when you argue. . . when you play out your exemplary battles for my miserable soul—like God and Satan fighting for the human race in the Middle Ages. . .” Why can Naphta beat Settembrini in argument? This question is very plainly answered in the novel. At one stage, when Castorp is ill, he has an interesting conversation with his democratic tutor about the capitalist world “down there”. Castorp sums up his own disillusioned ethical experience in the words, “You have to be rich down there. . .Woe betide you if you are not rich or cease to be rich. . . This fact has often struck me unpleasantly, as I now see, although it is my world and although I never personally suffered in that respect. . . What were the expressions you used—“tough”? And “quick on the mark” and “energetic”. All right. But what do they really mean? They mean hard and cold. And what do hard and cold mean? They mean cruel. The air down there is cruel. It is inexorable. When I lie here and look at it from a distance I get the shudders.” But Settembrini calls this sentimental nonsense, the kind of thing a sensible man leaves to intellectual “weaklings”. He, for his part, is a herald of progress without qualification. He has not a trace of selfcriticism and no reservations. This is why—although he has no personal stake in it—he is such an uncritical booster of the capitalist system. And so he has no really effective intellectual weapons with which to fight Naphta’s anti-capitalist demagogy.

Such is the way in which Thomas Mann brings out the basic weakness of hum-drum, modern bourgeois democratic thinking as compared with the demagogic appeal of reactionary anticapitalism. This also throws light on Castorp’s own indecision and his unwillingness to act. In his case, we have here the equivalent of the purely negative position demonstrated in the unavailing resistance of the “gentleman from Rome”.

Thomas Mann also shows us the inner social workings of the neo-German middle-class mind when he describes the hero of The Magic Mountain. He has this to say about Hans Castorp: “Man does not only live a personal life as an isolated individual; whether he is conscious of it or not, he also lives the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. He does this even if he looks on the general and impersonal foundations of his existence as immutable and selfevident. But even if he is as far from any thought of criticising them as poor Hans Castorp was, it is very likely that he will feel his moral rectitude vaguely tarnished by their faults. Individuals usually have only vague personal aims, hopes and prospects floating round their minds. But these do affect them sufficiently to stir them to make violent efforts and to be extremely active, even if the impersonal world around them, their own time (which, despite its busy rushing about, does not encourage hopes or ambitions) whispers secretly to them that it is all hopeless, planless and helpless, and presents only a mocking silence when asked (consciously or subconsciously), as it always is, to state the ultimate supra-personal meaning of all this activity. The people who are paralysed by this confusion are invariably the most honest people. The pointlessness starts by numbing the mind and the moral sense and goes on until it strikes at the very physical organism. If a man is to be ready to do more than he is asked to do, even though his age give him no satisfactory answer to his “what for?”, he must either have a rare degree of spiritual isolation and a rare reserve of strength—or he must possess enormous animal spirits. Hans Castorp had none of these and so he was what you would call mediocre. But he was, of course, mediocre only in the most honourable sense of the term”.

In the novel—the quotation occurs quite early and describes Castorp at the stage when he is developing from his student days into becoming an engineer—this mediocrity caused by lack of obviously positive aims may very well be defined “in the most honourable sense”, though even here Mann reveals a trace of irony. For when the Castorp type is confronted by questions of national destiny, his reactions must be judged, not in themselves, but according to their adequacy in dealing with the situation, which in itself is constantly changing. Honourable mediocrity is all very well; it is possible to respect the fact that Castorp cannot summon up sufficient enthusiasm to be publicly active, and to admire his being drawn to Settembrini (even though he is still powerless to defend himself intellectually against Naphta). But this is, from the point of view of German history, guilt. For, though the “gentleman from Rome” was honest in his attempt to fight for “the dignity of the human race”, he was still beaten. He joined the other Saturnalian dancers whose wills had been benumbed, and danced to the piping of the fascist hypnotist. And in real life this wild dance came within an ace of becoming the dance of death for the whole of civilisation.

If, therefore, Thomas Mann had really found his German burgher in Professor Cornelius, Hans Castorp or the “gentleman from Rome”, or rather, if his search had stopped with his successful and masterly portrayal of that German bourgeois who let himself be swallowed up by Hitlerism, the outcome of his work would have been the deepest pessimism ever to permeate the work of a German writer. For this German bourgeois, this gentle creature, fellowtravelled throughout Hitler’s unscrupluous and aggressive wars; he plundered and raided like the others, even though to himself he behaved the whole time as though he were merely doing his “duty as an honest soldier”.

But Mann was not content with this portrait. During the bad years of Hitler’s tyranny, in the time of the descent into fascism of the German people, he wrote his great historical story, Lotte in Weimar (1939). Here he created a figure of the highest rank and brought to life again the best in the way of progressive thought that the German middle class ever produced. This was the mighty figure of Goethe, the Gulliver in Lilliputian Weimar, the man striving for a self-perfection in the fields of intellectual, artistic and moral endeavour which, though perpetually menaced, he stubbornly and persistently defended.

German writers and scholars had tried for decades to twist Goethe into becoming an accomplice of their fashionable obscurantism. Mann now cleaned the reactionary varnish from this portrait. Whilst the German bourgeoisie allowed itself to be dragged down to the very depths, whilst it was bathed in the bloodstained swamps of a drunken barbarism, Mann raised aloft an image of its unrealised potentialities. He lovingly depicted a humanism which, for all its questionable elements, was both genuine and forward-looking.

This was a considerable achievement, one worthy of our gratitude and respect. It served indeed to defend Germany’s honour at a time when the Germans were engaged in giving themselves the most horribly humiliating of characters. Yet the Goethe-novel was more than a monumental lullaby designed to soothe a frenzied people intent on immolating itself in the abyss of fascism. It returned to the past in order to give promise for the future. By re-creating the best the German middle-class mind had yet achieved, Mann wished to rekindle possibilities buried in the debris, lost and overgrown. Mann’s novel was rilled with a primal moral optimism which urged his fellow-countrymen to remember that what was possible once could always be done again.