Thomas Mann’s Dilemma

Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, Thomas Mann’s agonized 500-page tract on the rights and wrongs of World War I, appeared in September 1918, just weeks before the war ended in a German defeat. In the following decades, Mann became one of the world’s most famous writers, a Nobel laureate, and, after 1933, a leading symbol of German culture’s opposition to Hitler. In time, most of his books were translated into English, but he made sure that Reflections wasn’t one of them. The first English version wasn’t published until 1983, almost three decades after Mann’s death, and soon went out of print. Even many of his admirers have probably never heard of it, much less read it.