Thomas Mann's War

Front matter

Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters

THOMAS MANN’S

WAR

Contents

List of Illustrations ix Acknowledgments xi

List of Abbreviations xiii Introduction: The German Envoy to America

The Greatest Living Man of Letters l: JOSEPH IN EGYPT (1938)

Conclusion

Notes 283 Bibliography 321 Index 341

2.2. 3.1.

3.2. 3.3.

4.1. 4.2.

4.3.

4.4.

4.5.

4.6.

5.1.

3.2;

5.3.

5.4.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Thomas Mann and his family en route to America, 1937 Satirical drawing of Thomas Mann by Arthur Johnson, 1923 Emile Zola’s “J’accuse” on the front page of L’aurore, 1898 Thomas Mann at the Polish PEN Club in Warsaw, 1927

A volume of the Kuno Francke edition of The German Classics, 1914

Thomas Mann in the Book-of-the-Month Club News, 1948 Audience members react to Nazi hecklers at Thomas Mann’s “German Address,” 1930

The honorary degree recipients of Harvard University, 1935 Ernst “Putzi” Hanfstaengl salutes the crowd at Harvard commencement, 1934

Front-page photo of Thomas Mann in the Deseret News, 1938 The cities visited by Thomas Mann on his American lecture tours, 1938-43

Promotional brochure advertising “The Coming Victory

of Democracy,” 1938

Audience members at Thomas Mann’s lecture in Tulsa, Oklahoma, 1939

Color guard of the German American Bund, Madison Square Garden, 1939

Thomas Mann’s staff card at the Library of Congress, 1943 Thomas Mann signing books with his daughter and translator Erika during a lecture stop in Tulsa,

Oklahoma, 1939

Dust-jacket illustration of the first US edition of Listen, Germany!, 1943

Tarnschrift of Thomas Mann’s “German Education” disseminated in bag of tea, 1938

Tarnschrift of Thomas Mann’s “This War,” ca. 1941 x

6.1.

6.2.

7.1: 7.2:

7.3.

ILLUSTRATIONS

Slip cover and title page of The Magic Mountain in the Bücherreihe Neue Welt, 1945

Armed Services Edition of Selected Short Stories of

Thomas Mann during his visit to Frankfurt am Main, 1949 The officers and board of the Goethe Bicentennial Convocation and Music Festival, Aspen, Colorado, 1949 Thomas Mann in conversation with Melvin J. Lasky, Zurich PEN Congress, 1947

221 248

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long time in the making, and I accrued a lot of debts during the years in which I was writing it. I conducted initial research for the project during a fellowship year sponsored by the National Endowment for the Humanities in 2015. I was able to complete the manuscript thanks to an Alexander von Humboldt Fellowship for Experienced Researchers that took me to the Georg-August-Universität Göttingen in the spring and summer of 2018. I owe special thanks to my initial sponsor, Gerhard Lauer, and to my host at Göttingen, Heinrich Detering. The Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts (ISLA) and the Nanovic Institute for European Studies, both at the University of Notre Dame, supported my visits to archives in the United States and in Germany. ISLA also provided a publishing subvention that helped defray the cost of producing this book.

My archival forays would not have been nearly as productive without the help of several experienced librarians and archivists: Katrin Bedenig at the Thomas-Mann-Archive of the Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule in Zurich, Rick Watson at the Harry Ransom Humanities Center at the University of Texas at Austin, Ned Comstock at the USC Cinematic Arts Library, and Maren Roth at the Melvin J. Lasky Center for Transatlantic Studies, University of Munich. Sara Judy, at the time a graduate student at the University of Vermont, conducted remote research for me in the Dorothy Canfield Fisher Papers, while Nikita Allgire, a graduate student at the University of Southern California, scouted the way at USC. I'd also like to thank the staff of the Library of Congress, the New York Public Library, and the Harvard and Princeton University archives.

My manuscript improved considerably as a result of feedback that I received at several invited lectures and public discussions. I'd like to thank the following personal and institutional hosts: Rebecca Johnson and Christopher Bush at Northwestern University; Benedict Schofield and Erica Carter at King’s College, London; Rüdiger Görner at Queen Mary University, London; Helen Finch and Stuart Taberner at the University of Leeds; Julia Faisst at the Katholische Universität Eichstätt-Ingolstadt; Chris van den Berg at xi xii ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Amherst College; Katra Byram and Robert Holub at The Ohio State University; Caroline Kita and Jennifer Kapczynski at Washington University in St. Louis; Frank Wolff and Laura Roos at the Centre Marc Bloch, Berlin; Anna Kinder at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv Marbach. I also gave presentations on my manuscript at the German Studies Association, the Modernist Studies Association, the American Comparative Literature Association, the Internationale Vereinigung fiir Germanistik, and the Biannual Jewish-German Workshop at the University of Notre Dame.

Fellow Thomas Mann scholars Hans Rudolf Vaget, Tim Lörke, and Kai Sina kindly read parts of the manuscript and shared their expertise with me. Todd Kontje and Lynne Tatlock have also followed this project from the very beginning, and served as an inspiration for my thinking about transatlantic cultural exchange. The members of the Cultural Transformations in Modern Europe working group at Notre Dame provided feedback on virtually the entire manuscript as I was developing it. I am deeply grateful to the group’s members: Christopher Chowrimootoo, John Deak, Julia Douthwaite, Perin Gurel, Katie Jarvis, Tom Kselman, Alex Martin, Vittorio Montemaggi, Ian Newman, Joseph Rosenberg, and Yasmin Solomonescu.

A long list of people provided additional help and encouragement, or just asked provocative questions. Among them were Jessica Berman, Rebecca Braun, William Coker, Erika Doss, Sean Franzel, Laurie Johnson, Yuliya Komska, Robert Leucht, Eric Lindstrom, Kate Marshall, Jim McAdams, Barry McCrea, Andree Michaelis, Michael Valdez Moses, Carl Niekerk, Anna Parkinson, Thomas Pfau, Daniel Purdy, Paul Saint-Amour, Emily Spiers, Susanne Vees-Gulani, and Johannes von Moltke.

Melissa Dinsman, in her outstanding dissertation on modernist radio culture, asked methodological questions that would come to haunt me as well— and did excellent work on Thomas Mann’s BBC broadcasts. Jade Panlener, an undergraduate at Notre Dame, tracked down numerous page references from American works for me while I was on research leave in Germany.

A very early version of chapter 2 was published in Modernism/modernity; an early version of interlude II, in Kongressakten der Konferenz der Internationalen Vereinigung für Germanistik in Tongji. I thank these venues for the permission to reproduce this material.

ABBREVIATIONS

Quotations from the works of Thomas Mann are given in English throughout the text and are followed by parenthetical references to both English- and German-language editions. I have mostly cited the first American publications, though in some cases I have given preference to later editions if they achieved a much wider circulation during Thomas Mann’s lifetime or if doing so could help impose some consistency. The German references are to the most up-to-date critical editions available, as explained below. For texts that have as yet not been published in English, only a German citation appears, and the translation is my own. Similarly, on the rare occasion that an English text by Thomas Mann has never been translated into German, only the English citation appears.

English-language works of Thomas Mann

ADH Addresses at the Dinner in Honor of Dr. Thomas Mann, on the Occasion of His Seventieth Birthday, New York, June 25, 1945. New York: Nation Associates, 1945.

AGP “Address to the German People.” Nation, May 12, 1945, 535.

BR The Beloved Returns: Lotte in Weimar. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940.

D Thomas Mann: Diaries 1918-1939. Edited by Hermann Kesten. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. London: Robin Clark, 1984.

DF Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer, Adrian Leverkühn, as Told by a Friend. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1948.

ED Essays of Three Decades. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947.

EF An Exceptional Friendship: The Correspondence of Erich Kahler and Thomas Mann. Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.

xiii xiv

EL

EW

GL GM

GR

GT

HM

IMD

ABBREVIATIONS

An Exchange of Letters. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1937.

“The Exiled Writer’s Relation to His Homeland.” In Writers’ Congress: The Proceedings of the Conference Held in October 1943 under the Sponsorship of the Hollywood Writers’ Mobilization and the University of California Berkeley. Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1944. “German Letter.” Dial, December 1922, 645-54.

“Germany's Guilt and Mission.” Translated by Heinz and Ruth Norden. Decision 2, no. 1 (July 1941): 9-14.

“On the German Republic.” Translated by Lawrence S. Rainey. Modernism/modernity 14, no. 2 (January 2007): 109-32.

“Germany Today.” New York Times Magazine, September 25, 1949, 14, 16, 28, 32-34.

The Correspondence of Hermann Hesse and Thomas Mann, 1910-1955. Edited by Anni Carlsson and Volker Michels. Translated by Ralph Mannheim. New York: Harper & Row, 1975.

“In My Defense.” Atlantic Monthly, October 1944, 100-102.

Joseph and His Brothers. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Knopf, 1948.

The Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889-1955. Selected and translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1970.

Addresses Delivered at the Library of Congress. Washington, DC: Library of Congress, 1963.

Listen, Germany! Twenty-Five Radio Messages to the German People over BBC. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943.

“The Living Spirit.” Social Research 4, no. 3 (1937): 265-72.

Mythology and Humanism: The Correspondence of Thomas Mann and Karl Kerényi. Translated by Alexander Gelley. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1975.

The Magic Mountain. Edition in one volume. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1928.

“The Making of The Magic Mountain.” Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Atlantic Monthly, January 1953, 41-45.

“Mediators between the Spirit and Life.” Translator unknown. Publisher’s Weekly, May 27, 1939, 1886-88.

Order of the Day. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter, Agnes E. Meyer, and Eric Sutton. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1942.

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. Translated by Walter D. Morris. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1983.

ABBREVIATIONS xv

SD Stories of Three Decades. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1936.

SN The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of “Doctor Faustus.” Translated by Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961.

SP “Seeking to Preserve German Cultural Freedom.” Letter to the editor. New York Times, December 12, 1936, 18.

SS Selected Short Stories of Thomas Mann. Translated by H. T. Lowe-Porter. [New York]: Editions for the Armed Services by arrangement with Alfred A. Knopf, 1944.

TC Thou Shalt Have No Other Gods before Me. Translated by George R. Marek. In The Ten Commandments: Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War against the Moral Code, edited by Armin L. Robinson, 1-70. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1943.

German-language works of Thomas Mann

Major critical editions

GKFA Große kommentierte Frankfurter Ausgabe—Werke, Briefe, Tagebücher. Edited by Heinrich Detering, Eckhard Heftrich, Hermann Kurzke, Terence J. Reed, Thomas Sprecher, Hans Rudolf Vaget, and Ruprecht Wimmer in collaboration with the Thomas-Mann-Archive of the ETH, Zurich. 17 vols. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 2002-. Text citations give volume, book, and page number (i.e., GKFA, 5.1:445). This edition will comprise thirty-eight volumes when complete.

GW Gesammelte Werke in dreizehn Bänden. Edited by Peter de Mendelssohn. 13 vols. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1974.

All other references to German works

Br. Briefe. Edited by Erika Mann. 3 vols. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1961-65.

Br. AJ Thomas Mann, Katia Mann—Anna Jacobson: Ein Briefwechsel. Edited by Werner Frizen and Friedhelm Marx. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2005.

Br. AM Thomas Mann und Agnes E. Meyer: Briefwechsel 1937-1955. Edited by Hans Rudolf Vaget. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1992.

Br. Au. Briefwechsel mit Autoren. Edited by Hans Wysling. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1988.

xvi

Br. EK

Br. GBF

Br. HH

Br. HW

Br. KK

Br. LF

Br. RS

DüD

Nb.

Reg.

Tb.

ABBREVIATIONS

Thomas Mann und Erich von Kahler: Briefwechsel 1931-1955. Edited by Michael Assmann. 2 vols. Hamburg: Luchterhand Literaturverlag, 1993.

Briefwechsel mit seinem Verleger Gottfried Bermann Fischer, 1932-1955. Edited by Peter de Mendelssohn. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1973.

Hermann Hesse—Thomas Mann: Briefwechsel. Edited by Anni Carlsson and Volker Michels. Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp Verlag, 1968.

“Thomas Mann, Hermann J. Weigand und die Yale University. Versuch einer Dokumentation.” Edited by Klaus W. Jonas. Philobiblon 38 (June 1994): 97-147.

Thomas Mann/Karl Kerenyi: Gespräch in Briefen. Munich: Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1967.

Ludwig Fulda: Briefwechsel 1882-1939. Edited by Bernhard Gajek and Wolfgang von Ungern-Sternberg. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1988.

Jahre des Unmuts: Thomas Manns Briefwechsel mit René Schickele 1930- 1940. Edited by Hans Wysling. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1992.

Dichter über ihre Dichtungen: Thomas Mann. Edited by Hans Wysling and Marianne Fischer. 3 vols. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1975-81.

Essays. Edited by Hermann Kurzke and Stephan Stachorski. 6 vols. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1993-97.

“Goethe: Gespräche mit Friedrich Wilhelm Riemer.” Frankfurter Hefte 1, no. 2 (1946): 70.

“Geist und Kunst.’ Thomas Manns Notizen zu einem ‘Literatur- Essay.’ ” Edited by Hans Wysling. In Quellenkritische Studien zum Werk Thomas Manns, edited by Paul Scherrer and Hans Wysling, 123-233. Bern: Francke Verlag, 1967.

Notizbücher. Edited by Hans Wysling and Yvonne Schmidlin. 2 vols. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1991-92.

Die Briefe Thomas Manns, Regesten und Register. Edited by Hans Bürgin and Hans-Otto Mayer, with the assistance of Gert Heine and Yvonne Schmidlin. 6 vols. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1976-1987.

Tagebücher 1918-21 und 1933-1943. Edited by Peter de Mendelssohn. Tagebücher 1944-55. Edited by Inge Jens. 10 vols. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer Verlag, 1977-1995.

ABBREVIATIONS xvii

Archives

GRI The Getty Research Institute, Los Angeles

HRC Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, University of Texas at Austin

HUA Harvard University Archives, Cambridge, MA

LoC Manuscript Division, Library of Congress, Washington, DC

NYPL New York Public Library Rare Books Division, New York City

PUA Princeton University Archives, Princeton, NJ

TMA Thomas-Mann-Archiv, Eidgenössische Technische Hochschule, Zurich

UCL University of Chicago Library, Chicago

USC Cinematic Arts Library, University of Southern California, Los

Angeles

THOMAS MANN’S WAR

Introduction The German Envoy to America

The ambassadors of the Third Reich, Hitler’s dangerously industrious agents, may well claim to speak for Germany, but nobody listens to them. . . . The true German in America, the representative of all things German in the United States, is Thomas Mann, no matter how much this may displease certain people.

—Bodo Uhse, “The German Envoy to America,”

July 23/24, 1939

Only the timeless verdict of the German nation itself can decide what counts as German culture and what doesn’t. For our time, that judgment has been made. The opinions of certain foreign circles, who believe that they can act as judges in this matter, will not change it.

—Volkischer Beobachter (official newspaper of the Nazi Party), October 25, 1935

In the morning hours of February 21, 1938, the ocean liner Queen Mary pulled into New York harbor, completing its transatlantic journey from Cherbourg, France. On board was one of the most famous writers of the day, the German novelist Thomas Mann, who had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 and become the first non-Anglophone author to grace the cover of Time magazine in 1934. Now he was regularly celebrated in the US press as the “greatest living man of letters.”

This was Mann’s fourth trip to the United States in as many years, and New York’s journalists might have been forgiven had they chosen to relegate his arrival to a small note in the society columns (figure 0.1). The opposite was the case, however. The author was greeted by a throng of reporters that included representatives of all the major city papers, along with a film crew from the Paramount News Corporation, which recorded his impromptu press conference on the main deck of the Queen Mary for af.

FIGURE 0.1. Thomas Mann, his wife Katia, and their oldest daughter, Erika, who frequently served as his translator, en route to America on board the steamer Île-de-France in 1937. No images survive of their 1938 passage on the Queen Mary. Thomas-Mann-Archive, ETH Zurich.

later use in a newsreel.’ As the title of this newsreel—“U.S. Reacts to European Crisis”—indicates, literary considerations were of decidedly secondary importance for the commotion. The reporters were there because of recent political developments. Roughly a week earlier, Adolf Hitler had forced the Austrian chancellor, Kurt von Schuschnigg, to include members of the Austrian Nazi Party in his government, thereby effectively staging a coup in the neighboring country. Many observers predicted that this would mark the end of an independent Austria, and indeed by mid-March German tanks made an unopposed entrance into Vienna. The American public followed the developments in Europe with bated breath, and the reporters were thus eager to hear what Mann, who had been living in exile in Switzerland ever since Hitler had come to power, might have to say about the situation.

The famous author gladly obliged. In a pointed address, he correctly predicted the annexation of Austria and compared it to Benito Mussolini’s invasion of Ethiopia two and a half years earlier. He also condemned the appeasement policy pursued by the British prime minister, Neville Chamberlain (E, 4:246). The remarks that Mann delivered aboard the Queen Mary were exclusively political in nature, but during a second press conference later that day, he did add a few words about the contentious relationship between the official culture of fascism and his personal creative work. Asked whether he did not find exile to be a rather lonely occasion, Mann defiantly replied, “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 Iam, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me. I have contact with the world and I do not consider myself fallen.”?

This was not the first time that Mann had publicly identified himself with German culture and used this claim to position himself in opposition to the Nazi regime. Roughly a year earlier, in an open letter to the dean of the philosophical faculty of the University of Bonn, which had just stripped him of an honorary doctorate that had been conferred in 1919, Mann had written, “Justly or not, my name [has] once and for all become connected for the world with the conception of a Germany which it loved and honoured. The disquieting challenge [rings] in my ears: that I and no other must in clear terms contradict the ugly falsification which this conception of Germany [is] now suffering” (EL, 7; GW, 12:788). The leading liberal weekly the Nation published an English translation of Mann’s letter under the attention-grabbing headline “I Accuse the Hitler Regime,” and Reader’s Digest carried a condensed version of it into millions of American homes.’ A few months later, Mann’s US publisher, Alfred A. Knopf, reissued the entire document as An Exchange of Letters, just in time for the book signings during Mann’s first American lecture tour.

From this point on, and especially after he took up permanent residency in the United States in September of 1938, Mann, who had once described himself in the title of one of his books as a “nonpolitical man,” acquired a new role in the eyes of his US audience. For the hundreds of thousands of American readers who purchased his books, flocked to his lectures, or followed his endeavors by means of the frequently breathless news coverage, Mann became an embodiment of German culture as well as a personal antagonist to Hitler, Joseph Goebbels, and the Nazi regime. Through his words and actions, he seemed to personify a great cultural tradition now in danger of being irreversibly corrupted or even eradicated by fascism. Mann himself took great satisfaction in this development and fully understood its implications. As he commented in a 1941 letter to his American patron Agnes E. Meyer, “I am waging a war” (L, 354; Br. AM, 253; Je fais la guerre).

My aim in this book is to explore the circumstances that made this remarkable development possible, as well as to chart its significance for literary history more generally. Writers have certainly served as a thorn in the side of the powerful almost since the beginnings of recorded history. But Mann’s case was nevertheless novel. He became famous in America not because of his personal criticism of Hitler nor even because he found powerful words to attack governmental injustice, as his nineteenth-century predecessors Heinrich Heine and Emile Zola had done. His fame instead rested on the quietly dignified aura of culture and tradition with which he surrounded himself and that seemed to emanate from every page that he wrote.

The story of Mann’s life seems tailor-made to support such an impression. The son of a merchant and senator from the small north German town of Lübeck, Mann had grown up wealthy and had learned from an early age what it meant to assume a representative function in the eyes of the public. In 1894, when he was nineteen years old, Mann moved to Munich to begin a career as a writer, following in the footsteps of his older brother, Heinrich, a highly regarded novelist. Success and financial independence came with the publication of his first novel, Buddenbrooks, in 1901, and with the novella Tonio Kréger in 1903. Although Mann was gay, he shortly thereafter married Katia Pringsheim, the daughter of a prominent mathematics professor. The couple had six children, the two oldest of which, Erika and Klaus, had embarked upon promising literary careers of their own by the time that the Manns arrived in the United States. The Pringsheims were one of the wealthiest and most influential families in Munich, and from 1905 to 1933, the author and his ever-expanding household lived a life of affluence and social distinction. During this time Mann wrote what are now his most famous works, the novella Death in Venice (1912), and the novel The Magic Mountain (1924). He also penned numerous works of cultural criticism, with which he cemented the public impression that he was a writer in the great German lineage of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Schiller, and Theodor Fontane, rather than an avant-garde revolutionary. By the time that he stepped foot off the Queen Mary, Mann was about halfway finished with a four-volume novel cycle recounting the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers. It was a “big” project in all senses of that term, a self-conscious attempt to cement a posthumous legacy.

Mann was, in other words, a writer unlike any of his contemporaries who continue to enjoy a similar level of fame in literary history: famous, rather than toiling in obscurity like Franz Kafka; wealthy, rather than penniless like James Joyce; well-traveled and outgoing, rather than reclusive like Marcel Proust; supremely self-confident, rather than clinically depressed like Virginia Woolf. It was precisely this studiously cultivated air of authority and dignity that made Mann a particularly potent actor in an age of totalitarian domination. The Nazi government based its representative claims on the notion of the Volkswille, a collective will that supposedly permeated every aspect of the German nation’s identity. Under this totalitarian logic, Mann became a political threat precisely because of his pretensions toward cultural autonomy, not despite of them. In his letter to the dean of the philosophical faculty at Bonn, Mann had noted that “from the beginning of my intellectual life I [have] felt myself in happiest accord with the temper of my nation and at home in its intellectual traditions. I am better suited to represent those traditions than to become a martyr for them” (EL, 6; GW, 12:786). The complaint was justified, but also a bit beside the point. It was precisely because Mann was so well-equipped to represent the intellectual traditions of his nation that he was in danger of becoming a martyr at the hands of the Nazis.

There was a second novel quality to Thomas Mann’s case as well. As both his interview with the New York Times and his letter to the dean note, Mann’s representative authority was rooted not in the assent of the German Volk, but rather in that of the “world,” or in what we might now call the global literary community. And indeed, translations of An Exchange of Letters quickly appeared not only in the United States but also in England, France, Denmark, Sweden, the Netherlands, Poland, Hungary, Czechoslovakia, the Soviet Union, Bulgaria, Argentina, and Japan. This was hardly surprising, for Mann had made a triumphant entrance into world literature at an early stage of his career, seeing his works widely translated throughout Europe and beyond. This development was greatly aided by the birth of stable copyright regimes and the growth of international publishing during the closing years of the nineteenth century. As a result of these larger developments, “German culture” became an entity that no longer assumed a coherent form in the eyes of Germans alone. It now was an export commodity and, like all such commodities, became a vehicle for fetishistic projections by international consumers. Regardless of how much they consolidated their territorial and cultural control over German-speaking Europe (excepting tiny Switzerland), the Nazis therefore could not prevent Mann’s self-stylization as a representative German in the eyes of the world.

It’s true that once the Second World War broke out, this “world” largely became confined to the North American continent. But this restriction was of little consequence, for once the war was over, US military and industrial might completely reshaped the literary world—especially in Europe, where entire publishing industries lay in ruins. As the United States rose to the status of a global hegemon, American tastes profoundly altered what the world read. This fact was not lost on other German writers, one of whom jealously described Thomas Mann as a “loyal American subject.”

These two factors that characterize Mann’s case—the battle of cultural autonomy against totalitarian dependence and the struggle between international and national sources of literary esteem—continue to have a clear relevance for literary production into the present day. Here we need to think only of the Turkish writer Orhan Pamuk (perhaps not coincidentally a great admirer of Thomas Mann), who was recently accused by the progovernment media in his own country of being the “project” of an “international literature lobby” eager to destroy Turkish culture.” What Pamuk’s case shares with Mann’s is not only the constellation pitting an author against his own government, but also the fact that Pamuk’s enemies claim that his representative authority derives from the opinions of the global literary community rather than from readers in his native country. Or we could think of the Israeli novelist Dorit Rabinyan, whose novel All the Rivers, a Jewish- Palestinian love story, received a wide international release even as it was banned from Israel’s school curricula on the grounds that it threatened the “national-ethnic identity of the people” by downplaying the “significance of miscegenation.”° Thomas Mann’s story in the 1930s and 1940s is thus of clearly more than antiquarian interest. It instead marks the starting point of a historical situation that persists well into the twenty-first century.

The World Republic of Letters

An honorary doctoral diploma that Thomas Mann received from Harvard University in 1935 neatly illustrates the complex relationship connecting his battle for cultural autonomy to his struggle for international recognition. In An Exchange of Letters, Mann proudly invokes the Latin text of this diploma, which praises him as a “famous author who . . . together with a very few contemporaries sustains the high dignity of German culture” (EL, 4; GW, 12:786). For Mann, the diploma signified the existence of an autonomous cultural sphere that cut across national borders and could not be circumscribed by merely local actors, even ones as powerful as the Reichsschrifttumskammer, the Nazi agency in charge of literature and the book trade. A second doctoral diploma that he received four years later from Hobart College even gave a name to this autonomous sphere: the “international republic of letters.”’ During the summer of 1938, Mann also reread the Conversations with Eckermann, a transcript of a series of conversations between the poet Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and his assistant Johann Peter Eckermann in the 1820s and 1830s (Tb., June 2, 1938). Mann made careful note of the famous passage in which Goethe predicts that the nation-state would become an increasingly unimportant arbiter of what constitutes literary greatness and that “the epoch of world literature is at hand.”* References to it are scattered throughout several of his essays from the war years.

For Mann, the “international republic of letters” was by no means an apolitical realm. This is a crucial difference between his understanding of global literary circulation, developed during an age of unprecedented military conflict, and the twenty-first century notion of a “world republic of letters” proposed by the influential literary critic Pascale Casanova. Whereas Casanova regards the republic of letters as an aesthetic realm in which writers are freed of all “arbitrary political and national power,” Mann believed that it was truly a republic in the original sense of that term: a space whose members acted as representatives or emissaries of their individual nations.’ As early as 1922, Mann had asserted (in his essay “On National and International Art”) that “there is no such thing as a pure, an absolute cosmopolitanism” in the realm of literature. Instead, “greatness and national character in a paradigmatic sense are related to one another in a causal and organic fashion, and while a great German, a great Frenchman, a great Russian do indeed ‘belong to humanity,’ they would not be great, and would thus also not “belong to humanity’ if they weren't first to a large degree German, French, or Russian” (GKFA, 15.1:506). He therefore saw his own place in world literature as a direct consequence of his ability to embody, rather than transcend, Germanic culture in the eyes of the world.

This belief, in turn, was shared was shared by a large number of other European intellectuals who had witnessed the devastation of 1914-18, when ideas, no less than soldiers, went to war with one another. In reaction to these experiences there arose a clear conviction among the European intelligentsia during the 1920s that artists and scholars had a duty to seek international dialogue not just out of a shared commitment to beauty or to the life of the mind, but rather in order to keep open conversations that were all too easily abandoned by power-hungry politicians. Thomas Mann took this conviction with him to America.