Among many other distinctions, including the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, Thomas Mann accumulated an impressive number of addresses in his lifetime (1875–1955). In their geographic and architectural variety, many of those residences reflected the writer’s peripatetic wandering and his cosmopolitan spirit, from the Baltic austerity of his wealthy Hanseatic family’s town home at Mengstraße 4 in Lübeck to the red-brick colonial at 65 Stockton Street in Princeton, New Jersey, where he briefly taught, to the Pacific Palisades glass-and-steel modernist masterpiece at 1550 San Remo Drive, where he lived in California exile, and finally to Alte Landstraße 39 in Zurich, Switzerland, where he spent his last days. Yet it was the most stereotypically Teutonic of his dwellings, his Bavarian summer home in Bad Tölz, that represented Mann at his most nationalistic.
That porticoed, red-tile roofed summer home was where Mann was living in August of 1914, when German troops marched into Belgium and the Allies went to war against the Kaiser. By the armistice four years later, nearly seventeen million combatants would be dead, garroted on barbed wire and blinded in trenches by mustard gas, shredded by bullets from MG 08s, or blown apart by TNT. So committed was Mann to the German cause that during the Great War he sold the summer cottage and used the proceeds to purchase war bonds, becoming an exile, of a sort, and not for the last time.
“Unhappy German nation,” Mann once declared, “how do you like the Messianic role allotted to you, not by God, nor by destiny, but by a handful of perverted and bloody-minded men?” Mann could have put that question to the Prussian generals of World War I, but it comes from a 1939 radio interview on the BBC, when Mann was a refugee fleeing from a later and darker period of German militarism. It was the sort of thing—humane and liberal in spirit—that one would expect of the author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain.
“Democracy is timelessly human,” Mann wrote in the unambiguously titled 1938 tract The Coming Victory of Democracy. It was a Whiggishly sanguine pronouncement on democracy’s inevitable triumph over totalitarianisms of both the right and left, and the sort of earnest bromide that moved the Marxist playwright Bertholt Brecht (a fellow German refugee in Los Angeles) to dub his countryman a “starched collar.”
In truth, the neck beneath that collar had once been quite hot. In 1914, when Mann was 39 and resting at Bad Tölz, his political views were infused with militaristic and anti-democratic nationalism. In an essay entitled “Thoughts in Wartime” published shortly after the outbreak of the conflict, Mann thundered against democracy, declaring that “Volk is a truly holy sound” and denouncing what he understood as modernity’s decadence, “swarming with vermin of the spirits like maggots…. [with the] stink of civilization’s decay.” When his brother Heinrich, a left-wing novelist, condemned those sentiments, Mann responded with the ironically titled Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, a fevered and rambling five-hundred-page denunciation of democracy, humanism, and liberalism published just weeks before armistice, vigorously celebrating German militarism as “a purification, a liberation, and a tremendous hope.”
For all those earlier enthusiasms, Mann’s eventual about-face and his anti-fascist bona fides are unassailable. Among the most important authors of Exilliteratur composed by anti-Nazi Germans living abroad, a category that included Brecht, Erich Maria Remarque, Hannah Arendt, Theodor Adorno as well as Mann’s own brother and oldest son Klauss, Mann was the most illustrious. From his Pacific Palisades home, his anti-Nazi broadcasts (later collected as Listen, Germany!) provided moral clarity, as in the uncompromising claim that “With a Hitler there can be no peace, because he is thoroughly incapable of peace, and because the word in his mouth is nothing but a dirty, pathological lie.” No less damning was his characterization of the dictator as an “Austrian smear comedian” with a “misshapen brain.”
Perhaps more telling of his own personal transformation was his critical reevaluation of German culture and character, one that included himself. With Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man clearly haunting his conscience, he delivered a speech in 1940 rejecting the idea that Nazism was sui generis and that his countrymen were innocent, arguing rather that “National-Socialism is the poisonous perversion of ideas which have a long history in German intellectual life.” Later, speaking at the Library of Congress shortly after VE Day, he asserted that, with Hitler, “German Romanticism had broken out into hysterical barbarism.” And at the level of artistic expression, his 1947 masterpiece, Doctor Faustus, allegorized Germany’s descent, explaining how the nation of Mozart and Goethe could become that of Dachau and Auschwitz by deploying the trope of the Devil’s contract to show how “this old, folkish layer survives in us all,” leaving humanity forever suspended between heaven and hell, equally apt to listen to the angels or the demons.
In the year marking the 150th anniversary of Mann’s birth, it is edifying to look back at the political evolution of a prominent man of letters who had edged up to the abyss but nonetheless turned back—and was all the wiser for it. As Alex Ross in The New Yorker observed, “Mann succumbs to the disease of nationalist resentment just before it becomes endemic in Germany. He effectively ‘immunizes’ himself against Hitlerism.” His political conversion represented a genuine reformation of the soul and an enlargement of the spirit. Furthermore, Mann was willing to expound upon his own sins (as all genuine converts must), because he understood that his own deficiencies of character reflected broader national malignancies. What makes Mann’s anti-Nazi writings and his move toward a liberal cosmopolitanism so compelling is that, temperamentally and philosophically, Mann remained a conservative. More than a position for this or that policy, Mann’s conservatism was defined by wry intelligence, irony, and an alert suspicion of utopianism.
There is no real inconsistency here, of course. Conservatism is itself a venerable ideological commitment within liberalism, and there were any number of anti-Nazi conservatives who suffered as much for their resistance as those on the left did. What’s significant about Mann’s anti-Nazi conservatism is that even as he bravely denounced Hitler, he remained the author of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man. That is, unlike many Marxists, he could never reduce all aspects of human experience to material conditions and class conflict. He understood, almost too well, the allure of tradition and irrationalism, of the poetic and the mystical. True to his conservative inclinations, Mann was drawn to metaphors of disease and infection—cholera in Death in Venice, tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain, even tooth decay in Buddenbrooks. When he wrote Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, he named democracy a disease, but he came to see that the opposite was true. For Mann, the method of analysis remained unchanged, but he would put it to different ends. Thinking like a man of the right, he would work for left-of-center ends—and do so even more effectively precisely because of his fundamentally conservative disposition.
Reading Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man in 2025, as authoritarianism again emerges from the shadows, makes for a bracing experience. Mark Lilla, in his introduction to the 2021 NYRB Classics rerelease of Walter D. Morris’s translation, noted that today the book is most often understood as providing “moral-political lessons into Mann’s transformation into a supporter of democracy.” If that were so, Reflections would be of interest mainly to biographers or to literary historians interested in a book that seems to consist largely of material that was intended for, but fortunately not included in, The Magic Mountain. Nor should Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man be shoehorned into contemporary culture-war critique—it would be a grave mistake to read the tract as an invocation for the sovereignty of the artist against “woke” scolds, as Lilla does.
The greater importance of Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man is that it shows Mann’s intimate understanding of the power of the politics of meaning that fascism both exploits and exults in. He also understood that the only way to combat such a politics is to fashion one with equivalent energy and mystique. In a 1930 speech delivered while still in Germany, Mann condemned fascism’s supplication before the “Mother-Cthonic, the darkness of the soul, the holy procreative underworld,” but he did not reject the power of the Cthonic, the soul, or the underworld. He never became a technocrat or a merely proceduralist liberal, rejecting the importance of the intangible and ineffable and indeed any substantive source of meaning. As he said in a crucial 1922 speech that signaled his lifelong break from the right, democracy and liberalism needed to acquire “at least as firm and warm a hold in men’s hearts, emotions and belief, as, in their days, feudalism or ecclesiasticism.”
Having surveyed the rubble of the Great War, Mann would come to judge his sentiments from Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man as embarrassing, though he didn’t abandon a sense of the importance of the mystic element of meaning in life, of vitality and vibrancy. He understood that to defeat fascism, democracy would need to tell a story every bit as engaging and powerful.
What seems to have been a decisive factor in Mann’s embrace of democracy was the unlikely influence of Walt Whitman, whom he compared to the best of the nineteenth-century German Romantic tradition even while extolling the American poet as “the lover of mankind across the ocean.” Standing before an audience of hundreds at the Berlin Beethoven Auditorium, later destroyed by Soviet bombing, Mann told the assembled that the “day came (an important day for me personally)” when he read these lines from the good, grey poet’s “Calamus”: “For you these from me, O Democracy, to serve you…/ For you, for you I am trilling these songs.” In Whitman’s poetry, Mann found not only empathy and beauty in the poet’s queer sensibilities, which spoke to Mann’s own conflicted sexuality, but also enchantment in the creed from Leaves of Grass enjoining all to “despise riches, give alms to every one that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants… take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men.”
As much as Mann loved the United States—indeed, as he had loved Germany—his earlier experiences taught him that a nation’s greatest virtues are not synonymous with the nation itself. By 1952, thirty years after his address embracing the Weimar Republic, Mann continued his advocacy for democratic values, joining efforts to end the Korean War alongside black intellectuals like W.E.B. Du Bois and Paul Robeson and associating himself with labor politics and civil rights. As a result, the House Un-American Affairs Committee began to question Mann’s patriotism. Seeing the ominous parallels with what had driven him from Germany, he moved for the last time, to Switzerland. Understanding that authoritarianism is never foreign to the body politic but always lying dormant within it, ready to pervert the values of a nation, Mann said, “Let me tell you the whole truth. If ever fascism should come to America, it will come in the name of freedom.”