Thomas Mann in America

Thomas Mann, from the beginning of his career, took himself very seriously. Although his writing is difficult, he appealed to Germans familiar with their nation’s classics and was by 1929, when awarded the Nobel Prize in literature, a very popular writer. Moreover, emulating Goethe, he was not partisan. Seriousness meant standing above the fray, giving a hearing to both sides, which is one of the sources of Mann’s irony. This lack of partisanship led to a squabble with his brother Heinrich (the author of The Blue Angel), who, influenced by Émile Zola’s role in the Dreyfus affair, believed that writers had a duty to take sides. In response to this sibling contretemps, Thomas broke off work on his great opus The Magic Mountain to pen Reflections of a Non-Political Man, which appeared on the eve of Germany’s surrender in World War I. Only a German, one might hazard, would go to such lengths to tease out so excruciatingly the position of the artist vis-à-vis society. Proust never bothered, nor did such an earlier towering figure as Henry James. Even a later modernist such as Virginia Woolf did not contaminate her art with overt politics.