MARGINAL COMMENT
By HAROLD NICOLSON
THOMAS MANN—a "good German" if ever there was one, and the greatest living master of German prose—has been passing through London on his way to Zurich. He has delivered a lecture on Nietzsche, he has attended numerous receptions, and he has everywhere been received with the respect that is his due. It was a curious experience to meet him again and to recall the afternoon, nearly twenty years ago, which I spent with him at Munich. Already at that date he was regarded as one of the greatest of living German writers, and one approached him with a sense of awe. He lived in a small modern villa, with a neat garden, and his study was lined with books and smelt of narcissus. It was a time when the German people were just beginning to recover from the horrors of inflation, when they were beginning even to forget their defeat in the first war and the humiliations of the Treaty of Versailles, and when it seemed as if the Weimar Republic, guided by Stresemann and assisted by a rich inflow of American loans, would after all be able to establish itself as a calm and not inefficient Social Democracy. As we talked there in his secluded study we did not foresee that within a year or two the world economic crisis would threaten Germany with a second inflation, and that Hitler (who at that date was wholly dis- credited by the part he had played in the Ludendorff putsch) would profit by the panic which was thereby caused to infect his com- patriots with his own daemonic hysteria. It seemed even at that date that the decay of liberal bourgeoisie, which Mann himself had foreshadowed in his first novel, Buddenbrooks, was not now an inevitable development ; and that Germany herself might settle down to a contented small-town existence, blessed with a modest but expanding economy, and enriched by a revival of music, architecture and poetry. We could not foresee that within a handful of months a wave of madness would sweep the country, that Mann himself would be driven into self-imposed exile, and that the whole of Europe would be riven by fire and slaughter.
I can still recall the quiet of that room, the clock ticking slowly, the scent of narcissus and the objective calm with which Thomas Mann discussed the world at large. The amazing success of Buddenbrook's, which he had written at the age of twenty, had pro- duced in him its own reaction. His brother Heinrich had criticised him for "being too mature too young " ; he had thereafter turned his back upon popular applause, retreated to his ivory tower, and concentrated upon the perfecting of his own intricate style and the study of the relation between art and action. It seemed at that date, when Thomas Mann was fifty-three years of age, that fate had finally decided that he must henceforth eschew the dust of the arena and pass the rest of his life in his calm study, seeking to restore to the German language some at least of the native forms and tones which it had lost since Luther, detaching himself from all controversy that was not intellectual and academic, and abandoning himself wholly to the life of the artist. Then Hitler came. Suddenly, in his later middle age, the life of art was snatched from him and in its place there was imposed upon him the life of action. He left his study and his little Munich home. He went to Switzerland and thereafter to the United States. And from there, in fulminating words, he de- nounced the whole Nazi system, accused Hitler of perverting the true German character, and tried to convince the world of the menace underlying this insane, unscrupulous, and terribly dynamic force.
I have before me a pamphlet which he wrote at Princeton in October, 1938, and which was published in the same year by the Fischer Verlag in Stockholm. In this he recalled and emphasised the speech which he had recently made in Madison Square Garden. "It is too late today," he said in that early autumn of 1938, "for the British Government to save the peace. They have had opportunity after opportunity of doing so, but they have evaded these oppor- tunities. If peace is to be saved, then it can only be saved by the peoples of the world. Hitler must fall—that is our only hope of
preserving peace." "In opposing a thing like Hitler," he wrote in his pamphlet, "a man is universally right. The road upon which, under his guidance, ' history ' has entered, is so filthy, is such a donkey-path of lies and meanness, that no man need be ashamed in refusing to tread it." Those were brave words for a German to utter in the year 1938, and it is not surprising that the Nazis sought to vent their impotent rage upon this intellectual who had dared to expose them. He was denounced as a traitor to his country ; his name was struck off the list of German authors ; his books were banned ; and he received from the University of Bonn a curt letter telling him that the honorary degree which they had conferred upon him must now be regarded as cancelled and that no longer must he add the tide " Doctor " to his name. Thomas Mann replied to this communication in an open letter which remains one of the most dignified and trenchant protests which any individual has addressed to tyranny. He began by pointing out that, since he already held honorary degrees at Yale and Harvard Universities, he had every right to continue to call himself, if he so desired, Doctor Mann. And he then proceeded for several pages to point out, in calm but incisive tones, that when ancient universities lost their conscience, then the soul of a people must decay.
Throughout his life Thomas Mann has been preoccupied by two main themes. There is in the first place the eternal conflict between the man of action and the artist, between the public arena and the ivory tower. There is in the second place the problem of the rela- tion between the individual and society. His attitude towards this latter problem has passed through interesting stages. As a young man he was influenced by the prevailing nationalism ; he regarded bourgeois liberalism with a detached and somewhat ironical pes- simism ; he did not believe that it would survive. His distrust of liberal institutions, during this first stage, was founded, not so much on disbelief in liberalism, but on a dislike of institutions. He then came to feel that even inefficient institutions which aimed at pre- serving the rights and freedom of the individual were preferable to the most efficient institutions under which those rights and freedoms were disregarded. The advent of Hitler enabled him to enforce this conviction in fulminating tones ; he became the most potent voice in German liberalism. Now that the world is riven by the two tremendous materialisms of the East and West one might suppose that Thomas Mann would have reverted to the early pessimism which was implied in Buddenbrooks. But this is not so. He is aware that we are all Socialists today and his aim is to discover whether Socialism can be rendered what he calls "humanistic." He believes that Great Britain and the British Commonwealth—with our long experience, our habits of toleration, our dislike of extremes— have a major and perhaps dominant part to play in this evolution. Even as in the nineteenth century we were able to achieve political liberty without revolution so also in the twentieth we may be able to show the world that it is possible to achieve social justice without reducing the individual to a soulless cog in the machine.
That is not a pessimistic doctrine. It is the doctrine of a great humanist, who has foreseen many things that other men have failed to see, who has suffered much for his beliefs, and who has had the tragic experience of seeing his gloomiest prophecies fulfilled. When such a man, in the angry world that seethes around us, can still prophesy a lightening of our darkness, can assign to the people of this country the renewed responsibility of setting an example, one feels that the harsh fortunes of his later years have cleansed him of all irony, have enabled him to bring hope and energy to spirits less lucid and less courageous than his own. When twenty years ago in Munich I spoke with Thomas Mann I was talking to a man of letters living in retirement ; this week I was talking to a humanist who refuses to surrender.
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