On his book Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters
Cover Interview of November 20, 2019
In a nutshell
My book tells the story of the German novelist Thomas Mann’s anti-fascist activities during the period of his American exile, which began in 1938. Mann had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 and
was one of the world’s most famous literary celebrities when he settled in the
U.S. nine year later. At a time when many Americans still clung to the
isolationist ideas that had governed U.S. foreign policy for the previous
decades, Mann was adamant about the need to defend the ideals of liberal
democracy against the threat posed by the Nazis. He wrote essays and op-eds,
visited the White House, and embarked on lecture tours that reached hundreds of
thousands of people.
On one level, then, this is a work about a forgotten chapter
in the history of World War II. It’s also a book about the nature of literary
celebrity, however. I’m very interested in how Mann came to be so famous in the
United States. After all, the circumstances greeting him there were far from
auspicious. During World War I, there had been a massive backlash against all
things German, up to and including book burnings. And Mann was a difficult
writer who barely spoke English when he first arrived in America. How did he
become an anti-Nazi icon, an author who was not only followed by intellectuals,
but publicly cheered by ordinary people?
To answer this question, I’ve documented in meticulous detail
how Mann was advertised and promoted during the 1920s and 1930s. Doing so also
forced me to engage with more fundamental questions, namely: what were
Americans reading and what drove their choices? What, other than simple
entertainment, did they hope to get out of books? As it turns out, the answers
to these questions changed over time, and Mann’s American allies—foremost his
publisher Alfred A. Knopf and his patron Agnes E. Meyer—were incredibly skilled
in changing their marketing tactics to accommodate shifting demands.
Mann’s story forever changed the public role of the author
in modern society. Americans came to believe that he represented the true voice
of a great cultural tradition that Nazism had perverted. And this belief that
literature can give us insight into foreign cultures that are struggling with
war and authoritarian oppression is very much with us even today. It explains the
success of The Kite Runner, for example, Khaled Hosseini’s novel about
Afghanistan that was published in the wake of the 2001 U.S. invasion.
Ultimately, then, this is more than a work of literary
history. I hope it will lead readers to reflect on the ways in which they use
books in their everyday lives.
[T]he Holocaust transformed our whole way of thinking about war and heroism. War is no longer a proving ground for heroism in the same way it used to be. Instead, war now is something that we must avoid at all costs—because genocides often take place under the cover of war. We are no longer all potential soldiers (though we are that too), but we are all potential victims of the traumas war creates. This, at least, is one important development in the way Western populations envision war, even if it does not always predominate in the thinking of our political leaders.Carolyn J. Dean, Interview of February 01, 2011
The dominant premise in evolution and economics is that a person is being loyal to natural law if he or she attends to self’s interest and welfare before being concerned with the needs and demands of family or community. The public does not realize that this statement is not an established scientific principle but an ethical preference. Nonetheless, this belief has created a moral confusion among North Americans and Europeans because the evolution of our species was accompanied by the disposition to worry about kin and the collectives to which one belongs.Jerome Kagan, Interview of September 17, 2009
In a nutshell
My book tells the story of the German novelist Thomas Mann’s anti-fascist activities during the period of his American exile, which began in 1938. Mann had won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 and was one of the world’s most famous literary celebrities when he settled in the U.S. nine year later. At a time when many Americans still clung to the isolationist ideas that had governed U.S. foreign policy for the previous decades, Mann was adamant about the need to defend the ideals of liberal democracy against the threat posed by the Nazis. He wrote essays and op-eds, visited the White House, and embarked on lecture tours that reached hundreds of thousands of people.
On one level, then, this is a work about a forgotten chapter in the history of World War II. It’s also a book about the nature of literary celebrity, however. I’m very interested in how Mann came to be so famous in the United States. After all, the circumstances greeting him there were far from auspicious. During World War I, there had been a massive backlash against all things German, up to and including book burnings. And Mann was a difficult writer who barely spoke English when he first arrived in America. How did he become an anti-Nazi icon, an author who was not only followed by intellectuals, but publicly cheered by ordinary people?
To answer this question, I’ve documented in meticulous detail how Mann was advertised and promoted during the 1920s and 1930s. Doing so also forced me to engage with more fundamental questions, namely: what were Americans reading and what drove their choices? What, other than simple entertainment, did they hope to get out of books? As it turns out, the answers to these questions changed over time, and Mann’s American allies—foremost his publisher Alfred A. Knopf and his patron Agnes E. Meyer—were incredibly skilled in changing their marketing tactics to accommodate shifting demands.
Mann’s story forever changed the public role of the author in modern society. Americans came to believe that he represented the true voice of a great cultural tradition that Nazism had perverted. And this belief that literature can give us insight into foreign cultures that are struggling with war and authoritarian oppression is very much with us even today. It explains the success of The Kite Runner, for example, Khaled Hosseini’s novel about Afghanistan that was published in the wake of the 2001 U.S. invasion.
Ultimately, then, this is more than a work of literary history. I hope it will lead readers to reflect on the ways in which they use books in their everyday lives.