The Role of the Modern Writer

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Though Mann lived in Princeton and later Los Angeles, Yale University was, from the beginning, the anchor of his new life in America. It was Yale University’s Hermann J. Weigand, a scholar of German literature, who in 1933 published Thomas Mann’s Novel Der Zauberberg: A Study, a pioneering monograph on The Magic Mountain. And it was a Yale graduate student, Joseph Warner Angell, who in 1937 took the first steps toward preserving Mann’s manuscripts in the event of a continental European war. Thanks to him, Yale University was able to celebrate the opening of the Thomas Mann Collection in 1938, mere days after Mann arrived in America. On the same day the RMS Queen Mary pulled into the New York harbor, he famously uttered the defiant words: “Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me.” As “Germany and the Germans,” Mann’s final contribution to the TYR archive shows, these words were perhaps far more ambivalent than even he knew at the time.


Mann’s oeuvre for TYR touches on myriad issues, from the role of the university in America to the Reformation in Europe. But no theme unites these texts more than an idea Mann returned to again and again as he grappled with his German identity: What is the relationship between the artist and society? How fitting, therefore, that Mann’s first contribution to TYR is his famous essay on Goethe. Originally delivered as a speech in 1932, just a few months before the Nazis became the largest party in the Reichstag, the essay was a provocative attempt to claim Goethe as an antecedent to Mann’s own understanding of the role of the modern writer. (In response to Mann’s condemnation of the Nazis’ success in the Reichstag elections of July 1932, stones were thrown at his house in Munich, and a burned copy of his novel Buddenbrooks was deposited in the bushes.)

Mann’s portrait of Goethe bears little resemblance to the august poet-genius, the warbler of Weimar, enshrined in the German cultural tradition. Instead, Mann describes Goethe as an anxious, calculating, and self-conscious modern writer and world citizen, a “representative of the half millennium that we call the bourgeois age, which extends from the fifteenth century to the close of the nineteenth.” (Elsewhere, Mann had dared profane Goethe’s legacy by referring to him as a Schriftsteller, a mere writer, rather than a Dichter, or poet.) Mann lists as evidence certain traits of Goethe’s that are paradigmatically bourgeois: his “outward manner of living, the attention he gave to dress”; his “love of order” and “pedagogical imperative to finish things”; the “deliberateness and slowness” of his creative process. “Goethe is much more the laborious artist than the dashing improviser,” Mann writes. “He never really relaxes.”

Goethe, in Mann’s essay, sounds less like the bard of Weimar Classicism and more like one of Mann’s neurotic fictional creations—like Thomas Buddenbrook, wearing himself out at thirty-seven, or Gustav von Aschenbach, the aging literary master of Mann’s novella Death in Venice, his brow furrowed by decades of the “enervating daily struggle” his artistic labor demands. But as with Mann’s fictional heroes, the bourgeois mask always threatens to slip, revealing the dark and irrational forces churning underneath. Mann attributes to Goethe a strain of “ironic nihilism [. . .], that eerie absence of innermost conviction characteristic of the poet.” The word “nihilism” links Goethe to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, those two great bourgeois apostates, and is therefore the point at which Mann’s portrait most clearly begins to resemble the self-portrait he clearly intended his essay to be.

This strain of “ironic nihilism” is the artist’s dangerous, unhealthy interest in what is opposed to life: death, disintegration, dissolution. It is the “great, general disillusion” invoked in Mann’s lone fictional contribution to TYR, the youthful sketch “Disillusion” (published in TYR in 1936 but originally written in 1896, when Mann was in his early twenties), in which a mysterious gentleman in Venice dreams of “a life free from limitations.” Recalling the day he saw the ocean for the first time, he says: “The ocean is mighty, the ocean is wide; and my glance roved far out from the shore, in search of freedom. But there was the horizon. Why must I have a horizon?”

But a life without a horizon, free of limitations, is not a life; it is death. (In The Magic Mountain’s most famous chapter, Hans Castorp loses his way in the snow and is tempted to lie down in the “white, whirling nothing” and die.) The idea that an artist is always half in love with easeful death, is in some sense unfit for an ordinary, healthy life, was a theme Mann would keep returning to in his fiction. In his “Address at the Dedication of the Thomas Mann Collection at Yale University,” published in TYR in 1938, Mann calls this “the Bohemian attitude of the artist,” his “social disorderliness, a bad conscience which resolves itself into recklessness, humor, and self-irony with respect to the demands of orderly society.” The artist is always opposed to the status quo; he undermines the established order by virtue of the disintegrating critical analysis inherent in modern art. He is, like Tonio Kröger, the eponymous protagonist of an early Mann novella, a “bourgeois manqué, a bourgeois on the wrong path.”

But the artist’s bohemian irony can only ever be part of the equation. “Irony, by itself, can be of no service to life. Life demands that it be taken seriously; art, too, demands it,” Mann writes. In the Goethe essay, he recalls coming across the word “lebenswürdig,” which roughly translates to “worthy of life,” and finding it an expression of “an affirmation of life that rises above pessimism and constitutes, to my mind, a very high and abstract form of the bourgeois idea.” What Mann means by this can be illustrated by pointing to “Reminiscences of Thomas Mann,” a brief memoiristic sketch by his onetime secretary Konrad Kellen, published in TYR in 1965: “The quality that permitted Mann to write long novels without outlines and yet never waste words was the tense yet great and sober calmness with which he approached his task every day.” For these labors, Mann needed the health of the bourgeois but not his happiness. “I distrust pleasure, I distrust happiness, which I regard as unproductive,” Mann once wrote.


The bourgeois ethos of disciplined work was, for Mann, not merely the key to productivity; it was a way of giving shape and form to the artist’s innate tendency toward dissolution. For it is the danger of the artist that, in his separation from society, in his sympathy with death, he risks actually becoming sick. In “Germany and the Germans” (1945), his final contribution to TYR and a strikingly early public reckoning by a German with the Second World War, Mann speaks of “the germ of morbidity” in German Romanticism, its “seduction to death.” Looking back on the freshly defeated country of his birth, he traces the germ of Nazi ideology back five centuries to Martin Luther and the Protestant Reformation, demonstrating that Nazism did not arise out of nowhere but drew instead on elements that had long been a part of German cultural tradition: Romanticism, musicality, pessimism, the irrational and demonic forces of life.

What is especially astonishing about the essay is that, unlike many other German émigré intellectuals, Mann refused to differentiate between those who supported the Hitler regime and those (like himself) who didn’t. “There are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one,” he wrote, “but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning. Wicked Germany is merely good Germany gone astray, good Germany in misfortune, in guilt, and in ruin.” In other words, and because the roots of National Socialism can be extended so far back, all Germans bear some portion of guilt for what happened. Thomas Mann did not let himself off the hook: “Not a word of all that I have just said about Germany, or tried to indicate, came out of alien, cool, objective knowledge,” he writes; “it is all within me, I have been through it all.”

As the critic Henry Hatfield observes in his essay “Achieving the Impossible: Thomas Mann,” which appeared in TYR in 1977, Mann “generally included an element of self-portraiture in his essays on figures which especially interested him.” These reflections were part of the larger self-examination of his life and work, the adhesive that binds his fictional and political writings. To the question raised in “Address at the Dedication”—“how can the natural modesty and the ironical disposition of the artist be reconciled with a certain unironic, rather decisive, and somewhat moral attitude towards the outer world and its social problems?”—Mann offered the drama of his innermost being.