One week ago, on Saturday, 6th of June, the German writer Thomas Mann would complete his 140th birthday. He was a human rights defender, a democratic voice when many thought, wrongly that dictatorship was the solution. The answer is never less democracy, on the contrary. This post is a summary of five articles. The first was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/title=Thomas_Mann. The second was published at http://www.editoreric.com/greatlit/authors/MannT.html. The third was published at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Coming_Victory_of_Democracy. The fourth was published at https://www.nytimes.com/books/97/09/21/reviews/mann-obit.html. The fifth was published at http://www.vqronline.org/ways-preserving-democracy
Paul Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate. His highly symbolic and ironic epic novels are notted for their insight into the psychology. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul, modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche and Schopenhauer. His mother, Julia da Silva Bruhns, was born in Petrópolis, a Brazilian of German and Portuguese ancestry who emigrated to Germany when was seven years old. In 1930, Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason", in which he strongly denounced National Socialism. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazism. During the W.W. II, he made a series of anti-Nazi radio speeches. They were taped in the U.S. and sent to London, where the BBC transmitted them, hoping to reach German listeners. In 1905 he married Katia Pringsheim. The couple had six children. His first great work and still his mostly highly regard, Buddenbrooks (1901), follow the fortunes of a promiment German family over several generations, like many English, French or Russian novel of the 1800s. A realistic novel in the tradition of Dickens, Balzac and Tolstoy. At the same time, Buddenbrooks has been admired for its clear-eyed, quietly ironic detachment from its subjects, and has been cited as a model for many a great family history to come in 1900s.John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga comes to mind, along with countless novels of multi-generational conflict into the current era. No wonder this novel has repeatedly been adapted for films. By the end of the First World War, Mann's thoughts were shifting from his high-purposed intellectual notions toward more down-to-earth progressive and political ideas. In the post-War period he became a spokesman for democracy and humanism in the Germany. His novel, The Magic Mountain (1924), portrays a fight with the forces of enlightenment and rationality on one side and reaction and irrationality on the other, presaging the clash with nazi-fascism that was soon to engulf Europe. His next major work, Joseph and His Brothers (1933), retells the Bible story as a conflict between freedom and tyranny. The Holy Sinner (1955) is a fanciful account of the life of Pope Gregory, in a style that later, as practised by Latin America writers, might be called Magic Realism.
The Coming Victory of Democracy(1938), this book by Thomas Mann, contains the abbreviated text of a lecture series delivered by the author from February to May in 1938, which was broadcast all over the U.S. Mann's intent was to rally support in North America for fighting the Nazism regime in Germany. In the text, the German expatriate author explains his moral, political, and artistic reasons for desiring and predicting the victory of democracy over the nazi-fascism of his own native country.
Thomas Mann was probably the greatest of modern German novelists. In his homeland, his fame had grown steadily since his novel Buddenbrooks was published in 1901, when he was 26 years old. In Europe his name was linked with the intellectual movement that sought to bring closer harmony among people. Students of German literature found that, in his philosophy, he was highly Germanic and at the same time a citizen of the world. They considered him an heir of Goethe in expressing the German soul, of Heine in tenderness and beauty and of Kant in profundity. He made a considerable contribution of his talent to the political causes he held dear, although he liked to point out that his noncreative political activity influenced him in his own work but did not distract him. Mann foresaw the major cultural problems of this century many years before they become acute ans before they were made a subject of open conflict. His devotion to democratic principles made him one of the personalities of the Weimar Republic. When the idea of political democracy was vanishing before the onslaught of dictatorial rules, Mann hesitated to give up his literary domain for the political battlefield. But with the rise of nazism in 1933 and with the ruthless persecution that marked the Hitler regime, his political consciousness awoke. The more the Nazi movement grew the more outspoken became the writer, and more he sided with the anti-Nazi forces. He wrote in 1938, "the opportunism and the glow of false dawn in the nazi-fascist tendencies are tainted magic, nazi-facism is so false that honorable youth throughout the world should be ashamed to have anything to do with it." Thomas Mann and his wife went to Switzerland to settle in 1953, after spent fifteen years in the U.S.
Within the dictatorship countries no opposition is permitted to exist. The dictators maintain as their necessary stock in trade an aggressive front that claims success and continuos victories over democracy and ruthlessly stamps out contrary views. Only democracies have civil liberties. By its very nature democracy must entertain the expression of conflicting ideas and ideologies. To this degree itis defenseless against even the doubt that is inspired about existing institutions. Doubtless this author is correct, however, when he insist that, "the power of the democratic states to avoid war does not depend om armaments. It depend on our recovering the capacity to appear formidable, which is a quality of will and demeanor."
Within the dictatorship countries no opposition is permitted to exist. The dictators maintain as their necessary stock in trade an aggressive front that claims success and continuos victories over democracy and ruthlessly stamps out contrary views. Only democracies have civil liberties. By its very nature democracy must entertain the expression of conflicting ideas and ideologies. To this degree itis defenseless against even the doubt that is inspired about existing institutions. Doubtless this author is correct, however, when he insist that, "the power of the democratic states to avoid war does not depend om armaments. It depend on our recovering the capacity to appear formidable, which is a quality of will and demeanor."
