Mann’s inhumanity to Mann
the-tls.co.uk
the-tls.co.uk
Als ob Stillgelegen nicht ein ebenso
gutes Kommando wäre wie Stillgestanden!
As if "At ease!" were not just as
good a command as "Attention!"
As if "Lie there peacefully!" were not just
as good a command as "Stand at attention!"
Edit: Before I revised it, the first line of this post originally read, "To flesh out the the writer's portrait of Thomas Mann as a 'great respecter of authority' and a Nazi flunky ...", which is what mturmon's post below refers to.
He was in exile from 1933 on. He worked against Nazi Germany during the war. The only part of that assertion that is true is that there were others who were more outspokenly anti-Nazi, earlier than he was. But, given Mann's personality, that's not surprising.
Mann became an outspoken opponent of the Nazi regime after he emigrated, especially after his arrival in America, but like many other prominent Germans of his era, he was silent during Hitler's rise to power. Despite abhorring what Nazism stood for (and despite having a Jewish mother and being a gay man—but also for those reasons), Mann did not publicly denounce the Nazis until 1936.
There were reasons for his passivity that did not amount merely to his being a "great respecter of authority." My intention in posting (aside from sharing a favorite line of his writing) was to point out that the reviewer's portrait of him as such lacked nuanced.