Address at the Dedication of the Thomas Mann Collection at Yale University

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The address was given before a large audience in Woolsey Hall, New Haven, on the afternoon of February twenty-fifth, when the Thomas Mann collection of books and manuscripts was presented to the Yale University Library.

Actually we may say that modesty, the soberly skeptical, ironically astonished attitude towards one’s own existence, is wholly natural to the man of creative imagination, that is, to the artist. The dignity, the solemnity or, let us say, the bumptiousness which he evinces, is nothing but overcompensation for self-distrust, for which there are very good reasons indeed. Art is a thing of grave importance, a solemn concern of human culture, to which even nations and governments show their official respect. It ranks in the consciousness of humanity with its highest and most spiritual interests—with the religious impulse, with scientific discovery. Philosophy has gone so far as to characterize the aesthetic state of mind—the creative as well as the receptive one—as the highest human development, inasmuch as it implies the clear perception of the idea in reality, and the liberation of the will through sublime contemplation. For by this perception and liberation the artist becomes the greatest benefactor of humanity and his creation the essential and the only product of genius. All this might well imbue the individual in whom art manifests itself—its vehicle, the artist—with the highest and most presumptuous self-consciousness, might deprive him of all sobriety in regard to himself, and develop in him the most intoxicating pride.

But the fact is that in its individual realizations and expressions, art in every case begins all over again, from the beginning, in the same way. Masked in naïveté, unconscious of itself, without cognition of itself, or more exactly stated, without recognition of itself, art is born over entirely anew, for a first and singular random existence. Each one of its manifestations is a highly individual, personal case, and a specially determined, special phenomenon which can be subsumed under the great and general idea of art only with the utmost difficulty by the individual who embodies it. Nay more, to do this does not even occur to him. As an illustration, I will tell a little story. In the winter of 1929 in Stockholm, I was seated at breakfast in the new home of the publisher Bonnier beside Selma Lagerlöf, the great fiction writer, winner of the Nobel prize for literature and member of the Swedish Academy—an unassuming looking woman, grown somewhat serious through work, but a friendly being without any of the facial stigmata of genius, and lacking any grandeur of profile or pretentious mannerisms. The conversation turned to her most popular work, the world-famous saga of Gösta Berling, and its astonishing course through every language and across all borders. “Dear me, yes”— she observed —”that all came about, but you must not imagine that I ever gave it much weight while I was doing it. I wrote it for my little nieces and nephews. It was just an entertainment like any other. The whole thing was a kind of joke.” I was enchanted with this remark, for I had exactly the same experience, as I told my neighbor—with the book which played about the same rôle in my literary career as “Gösta Berling” did in hers, namely, “Buddenbrooks.” This also started as a family affair and family entertainment, the almost nonsensical scribbling of a somewhat unconventional twenty-year-old youngster, which I read to my family amidst roars of laughter. That the world would ever take it seriously, that this novel, or whatever it was, should ever, to put the matter briefly, be the cause of my sitting there in Stockholm next to the author of “Gösta Berling”—such possibilities never occurred to us in the midst of our laughter.

These stories which I exchanged with Selma Lagerlöf, I am telling here to illustrate how famous art in its individual appearances, never recognizes itself, but looks upon itself as a more or less newly discovered private and peculiar form of play, which cannot be brought into any relationship with the highly regarded human enterprise called art, and for which the sympathy and esteem of the world are in no wise expected. Certainly the originator of such playfulness does not have the feeling of applying himself to a particularly estimable occupation. According to his conception— and for a while he won’t be the only one to think so–he is just raising Cain, so to speak, snapping fingers at the seriousness of life in an irreverential and inexcusable way, and his conscience as a member of society whose demands are being neglected for frivolous inclinations, is usually not of the best. I am now describing the Bohemian mood of the artist: for Bohemianism, psychologically interpreted, is nothing but social disorderliness, a bad conscience which resolves itself into recklessness, humor, and self-irony with respect to the demands of an orderly society.

The Bohemian attitude of the artist, which he never entirely abandons, would not, however, be completely characterized if one did not include among its elements a feeling of spiritual and even moral superiority towards the hostile bourgeois society. This element of superiority makes the Bohemian attitude a transitional stage between the first individual playful unawareness of art and the realization of its utterly impersonal dignity in which the individual trusts himself to participate. As a result, the irony of the Bohemian attitude acquires at least a double character and becomes irony towards self as well as irony towards bourgeois society. As this day marks the foundation of a collection of documents, permit me to contribute a small additional one, which seems to me to be a fairly exact expression of this double irony.

About thirty years ago, a German literary magazine asked various artists and writers to contribute short autobiographies or self-analyses, which were published from time to time under the title “In the Looking Glass.” I also accepted the invitation, and I ended the humorous description of my irregular career with the words: “Those who have turned the pages of my books will recall that I have always regarded the artist’s or poet’s mode of life with extreme distrust. Indeed, my astonishment at the honors which society bestows upon this species will never cease. I know what a poet is, since according to all accounts, I am one myself. A poet, in short, is a fellow who is thoroughly useless in every domain of serious activity, who wastes time on trivialities, one who is not only not useful to the state but actually rebelliously inclined towards it. He need not even possess distinguished mental gifts but may be as slow and dull as I have always been. Moreover, inwardly childish, inclined to dissoluteness, he is in every respect a disreputable charlatan who should expect nothing from society—and actually expects nothing else—but silent contempt. But the fact is that society gives this type of humanity the opportunity to achieve in its midst prestige and a life of luxury. That suits me; I profit by it. But it should not be so. It only encourages vice and enrages virtue.”

These facetious sentences come to my mind because they are typical evidence of the Bohemian mood and the dual nature of its irony. At the same time, they give evidence of the derisive defense which the artist who begins to participate in the completely impersonal dignity of art, sets up against success, against worldly honors and advantages out of attachment to the wholly individual, wholly useless, and utterly playful first state of art, before art knew itself as “art,” and still laughed at itself.

Nevertheless, together with this loyalty and this ironic defense, there go hand in hand from the very beginning totally different, sharply contrasted wishes, dreams, ambitions, that get along with them in strange and childlike fashion. This can be shown by another little personal document which dates back to an even earlier period of my life and which now comes to my mind. As it is not in prose but in verse, I will give it in German, trusting that its simple meaning will not escape most of you:

The dream of a boy, as may be seen, in which there is opposed to sincere insight into one’s own weakness and childishness, the hope that, nevertheless, sometime, some thing worthy of life, worthy of humanity, may come of it. A dream without irony. And if many a fulfilment was granted it, probably beyond my dessert, it could, perhaps, only have happened because this Bohemian irony left room for the tender pathos of such dreams. Irony, by itself, can be of no service to life. Life demands that it be taken seriously; art, too, demands it. Even in its free and disinterested playfulness, the guise in which the artist sees it, when it first appears in him—and, to a certain extent, art always remains just such playfulness—even at this stage, there can be recognized traits of deep and unqualified seriousness. Early in life he upon whom art has laid its hold, experiences the truth of Goethe’s words: “Art concerns itself with the grave and the good.” Life and art accord no gratitude to nihilism—they bestow no laurel wreaths upon it. Wherever there are laurels, wherever there is love and any degree of trust, there, too, must have been faith and something of that which we call piety.

But this faith belongs to art itself, and scarcely belongs at all to this strange, unique, inadequate manifestation of its inner being which the individual himself represents. And I do not doubt that to every artist has come a feeling of shame in the presence of art, the sudden blush before the masterly accomplishments of his contemporaries and his predecessors. It is due to the fact that every exercise of art constitutes in itself a new and on its part an already very artful adjustment of the personally and individually conditioned factors to art itself. And the individual, even after recognized and successful achievement, asks himself when comparing his work with the masterful creations of others: “How is it possible even to mention my personal composition in the same breath with those things?”—How is it possible? That is the question which springs from the sober modesty of the artist in the presence of art. It is also the question which I feel hovering over this hour, an hour in which you accord my life so much honor and serious attention that you almost endanger my sobriety and modesty. But let that be as it may. It is the least of my troubles. But there is another question that weighs more heavily, which perhaps involves a matter of conscience—the question is this: 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? For that attitude has a bearing on the fact that I am standing before you to-day, in this place, rather than in the Germany of Herr Hitler, where, as a member of the Reich Chamber of Literature, I should be writing what is permitted to be written there.

I shall soon begin a lecture tour through the United States in the course of which I shall speak on democracy in numerous cities, universities, and town-halls; I intend to speak of its eternally human youthfulness, to defend it against the false claims to youthfulness and future importance of transitory counter-tendencies. And I shall declare my faith in the future triumph of democracy. It seems, does it not, that in so doing, I am leaving the sphere of art and the artist, as an agitator interfering in world strife, taking a stand with respect to it, and attempting by means of words that were given me to achieve indirect and noncommittal symbolic effects, to influence directly the thoughts, the will, and the conscience of men. As if I were a preacher of morality instead of an artist, “a teacher who could help or convert his fellow creature.”

Does that not indicate disloyalty towards the modesty, towards that innocent, first state of art wherein still unself-conscious, it still laughed at itself? Does it not mean that sobriety is forgotten and supplanted by a pretense at dignity and solemnity which certainly belong to art itself, but not to its altogether too individual single expression? And does it not, above all things, imply that the boundary line has been crossed which separates the playful from the serious, and art from life?

Permit me to close my little address of gratitude with a word of justification on this point. And allow me to direct this word especially to the young people among you. I readily admit, and this I include without argument in every confession of political faith I make, that there is a certain contradiction between, on the one hand, the artist’s life and his attitude towards it and, on the other hand, his partisanship in political matters, a partisanship frankly acknowledged and actively seeking supporters. I likewise admit that such an intervention in politics inevitably comes as a concession wrung from his artistic modesty. But to-day this conquest of self seems to me to be imperative, and I do not believe that I am thereby making myself guilty of exceeding presumptuously the bounds of modesty. The borderline between art and life, indeed the borderlines in general between the various fields of human endeavor, are fading away. There is much talk, to-day, of totalitarianism, and to the extent that this concept is applied to the state, it is terrible, monstrous, and inhuman; used in this connection, it is precisely the concept against which people like myself utter human protest, the protest of humanity, whenever they address their words to the questions of our communal life. But another totalitarianism is more than ever an inner reality to-day, the totalitarianism of humanity, the unity of the question concerning man himself. This question looms above us all as a challenging problem towards which we are obliged to take a stand and from which spirit and art cannot be isolated as separate spheres of interest. “He is a prince,” someone says of Tamino in Mozart’s “Magic Flute,” and the reproachful reply is: “He is more than that, he is a man.” Just so to-day it may, in fact it must, be stated: “Is he an artist? He is more than that, he is a man.” And if in this latter capacity, he should be found wanting and silent, what value would he have in the former? The confidence which he earned as an artist is not merely an aesthetic but also a human confidence. Should he not, must he not, use it to strive for the good in life as he attempted to do in the realm of art?

“Art concerns itself with the grave and the good.” Well, then, the grave and good thing that is at stake in the world to-day, is peace. It is the problem of peace that sets humanity its tasks to-day, and only in a state of peace can these tasks be accomplished. War has become a shameful and infantile futility, the exact antithesis of all creative effort. The artist out of the depths of his creative instinct is bound to despise war, together with everything that serves it and furthers it, as, for example, the totalitarian state. The unnatural and self-destructive behavior of an artist who speaks in favor of war, the horrible responsibility which he would take upon himself, these are things I hate to think of. He is the one who would truly be overstepping his bounds. But to support with one’s whole personality, that same personality which took its art seriously, the human and no less holy cause of peace, that, it seems to me, is the right of an artist and the duty of a man.