Mann’s wartime journalism

Thomas Mann was in his summer home in Bad Tölz when war broke out in the summer of 1914. Although no one knew at that point how long the war would last or how devastating its effects would be, Mann quickly sensed that it was a life-changing event. “What a fateful blow!” wrote Mann to Heinrich on August 7, 1914. He wondered what Europe would look like when it was all over, but for the time being expressed his “deepest sympathy with Germany,” not realizing that his brother felt rather differently. Heinrich had just completed Man of Straw (Der Untertan), a devastating satire of the German Kaiserreich that the publisher hastily withdrew from circulation until the end of the war. Heinrich Mann nevertheless soon emerged as one of the few German intellectuals who did not share in the patriotic fervor that swept the nation in August 1914. His brother, Thomas, in contrast, stood firmly with the majority in his initial enthusiasm for the war.

Mann was already thirty-nine years old at the beginning of the First World War and until this time he had been what he termed “a nonpolitical man.” While his father had been a high-ranking official in the local government of Lübeck, Mann seemed content to focus his energies on his art and to leave the business of government to those in charge. When called upon, Mann fulfilled his civic duty: he reported promptly when drafted into the army in 1900, although he was happy to accept the medical discharge for flat feet that his mother helped engineer with a compliant doctor a few months later. He also worked as a literary censor for the Bavarian government before the war, where he proved liberal in his taste – for instance, Mann argued that Frank Wedekind’s shocking depictions of adolescent sexuality should be permitted, even while making no secret of his distaste for the man – but there is no indication that he was opposed to the notion of government censorship per se. His literary works certainly revealed no socialist sympathies: Consul Buddenbrook makes the angry mob look foolish in the 1848 Revolution, and if the aristocrats in Royal Highness are portrayed as mildly eccentric and ineffectual rulers, they are nothing like the pompous blowhards in Man of Straw – and in any case, as Mann insisted, the novel was really about the plight of the artist.