24 PREFACE TO SOME RECENT WRITINGS BY THOMAS MANN1
I HOLD it a great honor to preface this little book. Thomas Mann is one of the rare men to-day whom we can admire without reserve. In his work there is not one failure, and there is not one in his life. His retort to an absurd Hitlerian insult is worthy of the author of Buddenbrock, of the Magic Mountain and of the Joseph trilogy. The importance of the work gives its importance and its powerful significance to the gesture.
Henceforth Thomas Mann is Czechoslovakian. Recently I saw him again at Kusnacht, in the vicinity of Zurich, where he had taken exile. I recognized with deep feeling that gentleness of manners and that delicate charm which conceal a great firmness of character and an inflexible determination. The same that I admire in his wife too, and that can be encountered again in his children with, sometimes, a charming boisterousness.
For Thomas Mann was not banished; the Germans in Germany insist on that point.
“Nothing,” say they, “forced him to leave a country from which no particular proscription drove him. It was up to him alone to remain, just as we are doing, and to recognize with us that one can very well accommodate himself to a regime that asks us, after all, only to acquiesce. He was “pig-headed.” So much the worse for him. Everything else came as a result of it; both the confiscation of his property in Bavaria; and the final withdrawal of his German citizenship and his title at the University of Bonn.”
Thomas Mann took no part in public affairs. “I was born to bear witness in serenity rather than in martyrdom, to bring a message of peace to the world rather than to nourish conflict and hatred,” he tells us in the beautiful letter to be read. Doubtless; but he was “born to bear witness”; that is his role; that of a man of letters; and when a despotic government projects the subordination of the mind, not to let one’s mind be twisted is taking part in politics. What Sainte-Beuve said of the “politics” of André Chénier could be applied to him: “It is not a concerted and sustained action; it is an individual protestation, logical in its persistency, lyrical in its source and flow, the protestation of an upright man who braves those whom he refutes at the same time that he does not fear to provoke the sword against himself.” Fortunately it is no longer a question of the guillotine in this case; but Thomas Mann is absolutely correct in writing: “If I had remained in Germany, or if I had returned to it, I should probably be no longer living.” Thomas Mann was contrained by his very honesty to assume a political role, in a country where “honest people” who still meddle with thinking become nuisances and sedition-mongers. As for us, we have enough love for Germany to recognize her voice much better in Thomas Mann’s protestations than in the letter of the Dean of the University of Bonn. In that protestation, indignation is still restrained; Thomas Mann will let it appear more where Spain is concerned, in the third of the writings that are collected here. And I see with admiration that this indignation shows itself more lively where personal interest is less involved. That is how we can recognize the perfect sincerity of those pages; not only are they from the same man, but from the same ink, the same inspiration; an equal conviction animates them. No, it is not personal interest that dictates them; Mann remains genuinely on the spiritual side; a humanist, in the fullest sense of the word.
Humanism — he explains to us in a discourse pronounced at Budapest on the occasion of debates organized recently by the Institute of Intellectual Cooperation—“Humanism … is scholarly in nothing and has, directly, nothing to do with erudition. Humanism is rather a spirit, an intellectual disposition, a state of the human mind that implies justice, liberty, knowledge and tolerance, amenity and serenity; doubt also, not as an end in itself, but as a search for the truth, an effort filled with concern to free this truth from the presumptions of those who put that truth under a bushel.” He said first: “Would not the best and simplest be to look on humanism as the contrary of fanaticism?”
Humanism, such as Thomas Mann presents it here, may seem, in these calm periods, related to a sort of pleasing Renanism; but don’t be deceived; let the time come when force will try to bend the mind, to submit it to some arbitrary and brutal regulation, immediately the genuine humanist takes consciousness of his role; refusing to bow, he opposes to material force another force: that indomitable force of the mind whose signal merit every tyrant, whether he will or no, has to recognize.
If I have insisted on quoting the sentences just read, it is because the discourse from which they are extracts does not figure in this volume. But all the pages that can be read further on render the same true, full sound. Certain truths that are set forth there should invite young people to reflect; in particular this one: “The youth (of to-day) do not know culture in its most elevated and deepest sense. They know nothing of the work on oneself. They no longer know anything about individual responsibility, and find all their comforts in collective life. Collective life, compared to individual life, is the sphere of ease. Ease which goes to the worst of relinquishments. This generation wants only to say farewell forever to its own personality. What it wants, what it loves, is intoxication. It will find its final end in a new war where our civilization will perish.
The flood of barbarism that Thomas Mann anxiously sees unfurling over our old world has not yet reached France; and that is why, perhaps, I, a Frenchman, feel a little less cast down than he. But how can I help recognizing the justice of the reflections he develops in his Warning to Europe? “The highest values are no longer safe from destruction,” he says, “and, perhaps, the destiny of our entire civilization.” He refuses to hold the war of 1914 responsible for the present degradation. His Buddenbrock, by painting us through three generations, “the history of the decline of a family,” gives witness to the torment that already dwelt in him in 1901. “I repeat,” he writes, “today, that the failure of European culture is not the achievement of the war, which only hastened it and made it more apparent.” And very subtly, but very wisely too, he tries to demonstrate that, having arrived at a certain stage, culture reaches the point of taking up a position against itself. “In all humanism, there is an element of weakness,” he remarks, “which comes from its repugnance for fanaticism, from its tolerance and its leaning toward indulgent scepticism; in a word: from its natural beauty. And that can, in certain circumstances, become fatal.”
Without a doubt, the present Hitlerian regime puts culture in great danger; but Thomas Mann sees the worst danger in this that, in our times, reason. is generally scoffed at, and the one who denies reason, in the name of Life, appears more intelligent than the reasonable being.
“Perhaps the world is lost already,” he concludes. “It surely is if it does not succeed in tearing itself away from that hypnosis and becoming conscious of itself once more.” That is the labor of the pages you have here. And, thanks to them, I may think: No, Thomas Mann; no; our world is not yet lost; it can not be so as long as a voice like yours is still raised to warn it. As long as consciences like yours remain awake and faithful, we shall not despair.
1 Collected in the volume Avertissement à l’Europe (Warning to Europe), translated from the German by Rainer Riemel (Gallimard, end of 1937).