Thomas Mann: 70 years after his death, new publications reveal his fight against Nazism

On August 12, 1955 – exactly seventy years ago – Thomas Mann died in Zurich, leaving behind a literary body of work marked by all the contradictions of the first half of the 20th century and which anticipated some of the years to come, as well as a biography marked by successes and disasters , by internal struggles and also by political and cultural battles.

The anniversary of his death is part of what has been called the Thomas Mann Year , which also marks the 150th anniversary of his birth and in which there has been a wave of publications, events and exhibitions commemorating some of the most representative writers of German literature and, in general, of the literature of the first half of the 20th century.

There have been two recurring themes in the publications. One is his repressed homosexuality , something not new but which has been revisited with new elements, such as Tilmann Lahme's analysis in his biography , Thomas Mann, Ein Leben, of the writer's correspondence with his childhood friend, Otto Grautoff, in which he shows how the two, following a widespread trend at the time, sought formulas to "cure" themselves of their homosexuality .

The other theme has been the political theme and the role that Thomas Mann assumed from 1936 and, especially, from 1940 onwards as an opponent of National Socialism from exile. There have been new editions of his radio addresses against Nazism as well as other political texts, focusing on his defense of the Weimar Republic from 1922 onwards, his warnings against the rise of the Nazi Party, and his subsequent role as a spokesman for those in exile.

The director of the Thomas Mann Society, Hans Wisskirchen, has published a study in which he draws a parallel between the life and work of the author of The Magic Mountain and that of his brother Heinrich – author of The Subject , a novel published in 1918 and which many believe anticipates what would become National Socialism.

Both, Wisskirchen argues, only knew democracy as something threatened and questioned , which, according to him, in times of autocratic tendencies can shed light on our present.

Throughout his life, Thomas Mann held four nationalities. He was German, Czechoslovakian, American, and Swiss . His wish would have been to remain in the United States, in his home in California, where—as writer Walter von Molo explains his decision to return to Germany in an open letter—he wanted to complete his life and literary work.

However, the outbreak of the Cold War and the start of the hunt for communists or suspected communists in the US by the House Committee on Un-American Affairs – which would later become infamous when it was chaired by Senator Joseph McCarthy – led him to leave the country.

"I feel unhappy and can't shake off the memories of the advantages and comforts of home in California . But thinking about returning is completely impossible," he wrote in his diary on January 21, 1953.

Thomas Mann, who had fallen into the crosshairs of anti-communists, can't help but think back to 1933. "What's happening is not the Machtergreifung (the Nazi seizure of power) but something very similar," he says on the same page of the diary, referring to what was happening in the US.

There were two things that worried Thomas Mann. One was what, in a letter ultimately not sent to the New York Times correspondent in Geneva, he called a "deterioration of democracy in the United States." The other was the danger that anti-communist fervor would eventually lead to atomic war.

In any case, it can be said that his final years were marked by melancholy , at times compensated by a certain vanity at realizing that his work tended towards unity and continuity, in contrast to the turbulent times in which he lived.

He had documented the end of an era in two of his key novels, Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain . At the end of his life, he completed The Confessions of the Impostor Felix Krüll, which he had begun in the second decade of the 20th century and left unfinished.

With Dr. Faustus he had written a novel about Nazism and its relationship to certain German cultural traditions, which had not generated sympathy in Germany.

In one of her last public appearances in 1955, when she received honorary citizenship of her hometown of Lübeck—something that many conservatives had opposed—she recalled how many of her school teachers had predicted disaster for her —she had been a terrible student—and how many saw the Mann family as a family in decline after the death of her father, an important businessman and local politician.

His work, said Thomas Mann, showed that in the end, although in other ways, he had been a son worthy of his father .