“I believe that nothing living can avoid the political today,” Thomas Mann wrote to Herman Hesse, in 1945. “The refusal is also politics; one thereby advances the politics of the evil cause.”
The assassinations of the early postwar period and the rise of Nazism in Munich helped convince Mann that he had made a terrible wrong turn. Even while writing “Reflections,” though, he had felt tremors of unease, torn between German war fever and a cosmopolitan, pan-European sensibility. There is a tortuous pleasure in watching the book totter under the weight of its contradictions.
To claim, as Lilla does, that Mann held fast to some eternal principle of artistic freedom reverses the arc of his career and unlearns his hardest-won lessons. In fact, Mann came to believe that a just social order required limits in politics and art alike. Stanley Corngold underscores this point in “The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton,” which chronicles the time that the novelist spent at the university between 1938 and 1941.
In the years before the First World War, Mann labored to come up with a second masterpiece. He contemplated a novel about Frederick the Great and other weighty schemes. When none of them panned out, he busied himself with seemingly trivial subjects: a story about a charming confidence man; a tale involving tuberculosis patients at a Swiss clinic; a novella based on a beach vacation in Venice. The last, published in 1912, proved to be the breakthrough to Mann’s mature manner.
The political crisis of the First World War brings with it a parallel aesthetic crisis, which leads to another breakthrough.
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