On his book Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters
Cover Interview of November 20, 2019
Lastly
The reception of Thomas Mann’s War has been
irrevocably altered by the events of 2016. The first major review of my book, for
example, was published in The National Interest, a policy journal that
steers a conservative but anti-Trump line. The reviewer, Jacob Heilbrunn, was
thoughtful and well informed. Nevertheless, it was clear he was drawn to my
book not because of Mann’s literary importance, but because he saw in the
author the very model of an impassioned conservative response to
authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism. Most audiences to whom I have
presented my project react in the same way.
I feel somewhat ambiguous about this reception, and not just
because I have my doubts about Thomas Mann’s often-postulated political
“conservatism.” The question also has to be asked what his example can actually
teach us in the present. We live in a radically different social moment, and
amidst a radically different media environment than did Mann. Somehow, I don’t
think that a cultural commentator with his undeniably patrician demeanor will
be able to reverse the damage done to our democracy on Twitter through thoughtful
opinion pieces in The New Republic or The Atlantic.
Still, the fact remains that Mann provides a powerful
illustration of the fact that it is possible to accept globalization without
losing one’s roots in a specific cultural tradition, and to reject nationalism
while simultaneously embracing patriotism. And Mann understood that
democracy—to summarize his words—“will die off, disappear, be lost, if it is
not cared for.” That is certainly a lesson that too many of us across Europe
and North America have learned far too late.
Beyond these political implications, I also hope that Mann’s
story will help illuminate the contemporary literary landscape. For example, I
had to think about Mann a lot during the turmoil that followed the announcement
of Peter Handke’s 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature. Handke, of course, is
infamous for denying that the Srebrenica massacre took place. His defenders in
the German-speaking press argue that these political missteps should not
matter, and that the Nobel Prize is awarded solely for aesthetic merits. This
is a line of reasoning familiar to any Mann scholar. When Mann won his Nobel
Prize in 1929, the influential member of the Swedish Academy Fredrik Böök
similarly let it be known that The Magic Mountain, Mann’s dissection of the
venomous ideologies that had led to World War I, had played no role in the
committee’s deliberation. Instead, the prize was awarded in recognition of the
thoroughly unpolitical Buddenbrooks.
My detailed reconstructions of Mann’s changing celebrity during
the 1930s shows how specious these arguments are. Mann’s esteem as a Nobel
laureate was very quickly tied to his political actions. Handke’s defenders not
only embarrass themselves by downplaying genocide denial, they also show
themselves to be insufficiently informed about the literary tradition that they
claim to serve.
[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
Lastly
The reception of Thomas Mann’s War has been irrevocably altered by the events of 2016. The first major review of my book, for example, was published in The National Interest, a policy journal that steers a conservative but anti-Trump line. The reviewer, Jacob Heilbrunn, was thoughtful and well informed. Nevertheless, it was clear he was drawn to my book not because of Mann’s literary importance, but because he saw in the author the very model of an impassioned conservative response to authoritarianism and anti-intellectualism. Most audiences to whom I have presented my project react in the same way.
I feel somewhat ambiguous about this reception, and not just because I have my doubts about Thomas Mann’s often-postulated political “conservatism.” The question also has to be asked what his example can actually teach us in the present. We live in a radically different social moment, and amidst a radically different media environment than did Mann. Somehow, I don’t think that a cultural commentator with his undeniably patrician demeanor will be able to reverse the damage done to our democracy on Twitter through thoughtful opinion pieces in The New Republic or The Atlantic.
Still, the fact remains that Mann provides a powerful illustration of the fact that it is possible to accept globalization without losing one’s roots in a specific cultural tradition, and to reject nationalism while simultaneously embracing patriotism. And Mann understood that democracy—to summarize his words—“will die off, disappear, be lost, if it is not cared for.” That is certainly a lesson that too many of us across Europe and North America have learned far too late.
Beyond these political implications, I also hope that Mann’s story will help illuminate the contemporary literary landscape. For example, I had to think about Mann a lot during the turmoil that followed the announcement of Peter Handke’s 2019 Nobel Prize in Literature. Handke, of course, is infamous for denying that the Srebrenica massacre took place. His defenders in the German-speaking press argue that these political missteps should not matter, and that the Nobel Prize is awarded solely for aesthetic merits. This is a line of reasoning familiar to any Mann scholar. When Mann won his Nobel Prize in 1929, the influential member of the Swedish Academy Fredrik Böök similarly let it be known that The Magic Mountain, Mann’s dissection of the venomous ideologies that had led to World War I, had played no role in the committee’s deliberation. Instead, the prize was awarded in recognition of the thoroughly unpolitical Buddenbrooks.
My detailed reconstructions of Mann’s changing celebrity during the 1930s shows how specious these arguments are. Mann’s esteem as a Nobel laureate was very quickly tied to his political actions. Handke’s defenders not only embarrass themselves by downplaying genocide denial, they also show themselves to be insufficiently informed about the literary tradition that they claim to serve.