Against Politics - Tablet Magazine https://www.tabletmag.

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Against Politics
Communists and fascists are very o�en the same unpleasant people, wrote
Thomas Mann—literary champion of the German bourgeois. He was right.
BY DAVID MIKICS

JUNE 03, 2021

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the afternoon,” Franz Ka�a famously wrote in his diary on

“G Aug. 2, 1914. Thomas Mann couldn’t have read Ka�a’s words,

but during his wartime exile in Los Angeles he jotted down
something similar in his own diary. Mann’s entry for Aug. 6,
1945: “Went to Westwood to buy white shoes and colored shirts—First raid on
Japan using the energy of the split atom (uranium).”

The many denizens of Twitter who like to ravenously screech that everything is
political would no doubt be quick to judge Ka�a and Mann. What monsters of
vanity they were, thinking about swimming and (colored!) shirts while the
world around them was being laid waste! But cordoning o� the personal from
the political, even in times of war and mass death, is a necessity for a writer like
Mann or Ka�a. These artists of illness and isolation never stopped imagining
worlds apart: a burrow; a castle; a mountaintop sanitarium; deathly, plague-
soaked Venice. Mann’s children called him der Zauberer, the magician. His inner
sanctum, the study with its implacably closing door, was rarely violated.

Mann would have a hard time surviving present-day America, where we have all
been ordered to surrender our entire brains to politics—and to hold nothing
back. The meaning of the things we do or say is relentlessly referred back to our
gender or skin color, both of which have become just as omnipresent and ever-
malleable keystones of political propaganda as the divide between workers and
bourgeois parasites was in the old Soviet Union. Who you are is rapidly being
replaced by what you are, for the convenience of Facebook’s capitalists and
BLM’s moralists alike.

For that reason, the restlessly gnashing thousand-mouthed social media

barracuda will probably pay no attention to the recent reissue of Mann’s

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Re�ections of a Nonpolitical Man by NYRB Press, with a new introduction by

Mark Lilla, and new translations of two more essays by Mann—and therefore
won’t notice how e�ectively Mann’s book crushes some of their most cherished
and central assumptions.

In Re�ections, Mann takes an ornery stand on behalf of Germany during the

First World War, arguing bitterly against his brother Heinrich, who opted for
France. Heinrich, who saw French civilization facing o� against German
barbarism, was the social justice warrior; Thomas was the conservative,
skeptical patriot. Thomas sardonically quipped that for Heinrich, a renowned
novelist in his own right, French bombs were reasonable and peaceful, while
German ones were mere savagery.

Re�ections takes up arms for the nonpolitical. Mann combats the insistence on
turning every human a�air into a parlor crusade where partisanship rules and
enemies are satisfyingly bashed. The chief liberal slogans—democracy, human
rights, freedom—come under close and rather unfriendly scrutiny. At one point,
Mann even declares himself a monarchist.

Re�ections remains an embarrassment to those who want to see Mann as a

steadfast apostle of liberal democracy and its various causes. The usual tactic is
to call Re�ections an aberration corrected by Mann himself after World War I,
when he became a defender of the Weimar Republic. But Mann’s tome,
cantankerous and unwieldy as it is, can’t be shrugged o� so easily.

Re�ections of a Nonpolitical Man, Mann said, was “no book and no work of art.”
He was right. The volume, which came out in October 1918, when it was clear
that Germany was about to lose the war, veers wildly from one subject to
another. Mann is too often fumbling, strident and self-conscious, but if the
reader sifts the book for gems, she will �nd them. Here is one:

Complete justice, with no injustice remaining, is simply an ideal goal that can
only be approximated. If, for example, injustice is thrown out from one side,
it slips in again from the other, for injustice is deeply embedded in the human
character. Also, all experiments here are dangerous, because one is dealing
with the most unmanageable material, the human race, which is almost as
dangerous to deal with as high explosives.

Mann disapproves of America’s progressive push “to let pure, unalloyed justice
rule” via state power. The United States, Mann remarks, is rife with “base

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utilitarianism, ignorance, bigotry, conceit, vulgarity, and simple-minded

veneration of women, there is also enslavement and mistreatment of negroes,
lynch law, unpunished assassination, the most brutal of duels, open disdain for
justice and laws, repudiation of public debts, shocking political swindle of
neighboring provinces, continually increasing mob rule, and more to boot.”

Our list of sins is hard to beat, today as in Mann’s time. Yet Americans still
imagine that the state’s social engineering will make uncomplicated justice—
now called equity—triumph throughout the land. Equity means redistributing
goods to citizens based on their supposed victim status and punishing those
who cannot claim victimhood—producing new victims and only dubious
rewards for those they are supposed to bene�t. If injustice is thrown out of the
American house from one door, it slips in again through another.

In Re�ections, Mann portrayed himself as a German burgher, inward looking

and dutiful, averse to crass nationalism but eager to defend his nation in time of
war. He was the spiritual heir of a long line of Nuremberg craftsmen, he wrote,
hard workers who cared about their art above all else. While left-leaning
humanitarians like his brother Heinrich trumpeted the universal rights of man
(while simultaneously accepting France’s alliance with the arch-reactionary
Russian czar), Thomas stressed how culture tells us who we are. Reverent
toward German tradition, he was not ready to overthrow the past in the service
of a drab new anonymous ideal in which every person was to be equal to and
indistinguishable from every other. Legal personhood, he knew, cannot capture
very much about human personality, since it ignores our cultural roots. Here
Mann anticipated late-20-century thinkers like Charles Taylor, with his
emphasis on how culture makes the self.

MORE BY DAVID MIKICS

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Against Politics - Tablet Magazine https://www.tabletmag.com/sections/arts-letters/articles/against-politics

Louis Menand’s Cultural Death
March
The critic’s American intellectual
history, ‘The Free World’, spurns
strong convictions for
meandering cocktail party cha�er
BY DAVID MIKICS
André Aciman’s Quiet Bliss A Fierce, Brie
A brilliant and charming new Holocaust
collection of essays, ‘Homo Wendy Lower
Irrealis,’ starts in Egypt, travels looks at a pho
to Rome, and ends on the other refuse to face
side of an Eric Rohmer �lm, by
way of Billy Wilder, Fernando BY DAVID MIKIC
Pessoa, and W.G. Sebald

BY DAVID MIKICS

Mann’s trust in culture is still meaningful, but in the 21st century, culture has
lost much of its holding power against the global forces that de�ne us down into
faceless persons who labor and consume. We enjoy abstract rights (often
violated) to health and happiness that can seem as meaningless as the rights
supposedly guaranteed by the Soviet constitution. Identity, because it is �imsy,
even at times imaginary, cannot root us the way that culture could, or make a
compelling argument against global capitalism, the dragon whose leveling
shadow extends everywhere we turn.

From a literary standpoint, the writing of Re�ections was an intermezzo,

something Mann had to get out of his system before he could return to his work
on his epic novel The Magic Mountain, which he had started in 1913, inspired
by his wife Katia’s sojourn at a Davos sanitarium stocked with eccentric
characters. Mann went back to writing the novel in 1919 and �nished it �ve
years later.

The Magic Mountain is, like Joyce’s Ulysses or Proust’s Search, a book you can
settle into and make a home in. Mann’s sanitarium, the Berghof, is a cozy,
uncanny world unto itself, where before you know it another year has gone by.
The novel lives on quarantine time—for as the author tells us in his preface,
“only thoroughness is truly entertaining.”

Mann’s genial, prosaic young hero, Hans Castorp, spends seven years in the
Berghof, though the reader suspects that he never really has tuberculosis, but
has been seduced by its atmosphere, which is full of illness and frivolity, deadly

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serious ideas, and cool �irtation. Hans is a steady, untroubled lover of routine—
he always drinks a glass of porter with breakfast and then smokes a Maria
Mancini cigar—and his relaxed bourgeois nature appealed to Mann, as Hans was
the antithesis of his own high strung, passionate personality. The agonized 21-
year-old Mann wrote in his diary, “What am I su�ering from? Sexuality ... Will
it destroy me? ... How can I rid myself of sexuality?”

Mann was erotically drawn toward men, a preference he apparently never acted
on beyond a kiss or two; he would marry and have six children. His homoerotic
desire was not repressed, he insisted in his diary: He didn’t wish to have sex
with men, an act he found repulsive, but instead to adore them.

Mann’s tormented reverence for male beauty, so perfectly realized in Death in

Venice, gives his work its bright erotic �ame. He is a master at depicting the
near-miss romances of men and women as well. In The Magic Mountain, for my
money the most erotic book ever written, Mann portrays the monthslong silent
�irtation between Hans Castorp and Clavdia Chauchat, a slinking, faintly louche
Russian woman with taunting Kirghiz eyes and close-bitten �ngernails. She is
an enigma—Hans’ muse and his adversary. The sexual tension at long last leads
to a one-night stand during Mardi Gras, when her punk meets his twee.

The Magic Mountain is a novel of ideas as well as eros, with Hans Castorp the
model student sitting at the feet of two antagonistic debaters: Ludovico
Settembrini, a gentle Italian liberal humanist, and Leo Naphta, a Jew by birth
but now a �re breathing Jesuit who defends both the medieval church and the
Bolsheviks, praising torture and persecution in the service of faith. Mann based
Naphta on Georg Lukács, one of many Jewish intellectuals who turned to
communism. He admired Lukács’ literary criticism, which he discusses in
Re�ections, but he was disheartened when Lukács started defending the
communists’ use of terror against innocent people.

Naphta, like Lukács, tra�cs in paradoxes, a slippery logician with a forked

tongue. “The Absolute, the holy terror these times require, can arise only out of
the most radical skepticism, out of moral chaos,” Naphta terrifyingly proclaims.
Settembrini’s humanism, by contrast, is mere pablum, Naphta charges, since “its
sole objective was for a person to grow old, rich, happy, and healthy—period;
[Settembrini] considered a philistine gospel of reason and work to be ethics.”

In 1918 Lukács was still against Lenin’s movement, though late that year he

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would change his mind and join the Communist Party. Before his communist
conversion, Lukács wrote, “Bolshevism rests on the metaphysical notion that
good can come from evil. That it is possible, as Razumikhin said in Crime and
Punishment, to lie our way to truth. This writer cannot share this faith, and
hence, sees an insoluble moral dilemma at the root of Bolshevism.”

By 1923, when Lukács published his magnum opus, History and Class
Consciousness, he had decided that you could in fact lie your way to truth. The
party’s leadership was infallible, since working-class consciousness actually
resided not in the masses but in Lenin and his cronies. In History and Class
Consciousness, Lukács praises the “revolutionary character of the Bolshevik
‘suppression of freedom.’” Lukács derided Rosa Luxemburg because she rejected
terror and praised freedom of argument. The revolution relied on terror, and it
could not a�ord freedom for anything else than the Leninist point of view—
which would soon become enshrined and puri�ed by Stalinist terror. Out of
these necessary evils would come forth good, Lukács argued.

Lukács never recognized himself in Naphta, Mann sardonically noted in the

1940s. Lukács remarked that Naphta was a fascist, thereby missing Mann’s point
completely. Naphta, alias Lukács, stands for a radical leftism which, like the
medieval priesthood that tortured in the name of God, really amounts to
nihilism—if human life cannot be made to serve a simplistic, violent idea, it
must be destroyed as worthless.

The dystopian death cult whose spiritual outlines Mann saw in Lukács has
infected societies from Pol Pot’s Cambodia to Yahya Sinwar’s Gaza. The price
may be endless war, but at the end of the rainbow, they preach, stands a workers
paradise or an Islamic heaven freed from the presence of exploiters and Jews. It
is no accident that today’s leftists favor Hamas over democratic Israel—they
recognize the a�nity between theocracy and left radicalism, as did Mann when
he made Naphta both a Jesuit and a Bolshevik.

Mann knew that Nazism’s seeds were deeply embedded in German history yet
realized too that with the ascent of Hitler something horrifyingly new was born.
On March 27, 1933, he called the Nazi victory “a revolution of an unprecedented
kind: without ideas, against ideas, against everything that is good, noble and
decent, against freedom, truth, and justice. Nothing comparable has ever
happened in the whole history of mankind.” Hitler, Mann recognized, meant the
total, disastrous triumph of politics over the whole of human existence. There
was no space left for ideas, decency or truth, since these must be discovered by
the private individual, whose worth Nazism had canceled.

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Mann knew in Re�ections that individual freedom, which he identi�ed with the
writer’s talent for playing with ideas, must stand against all political demands. It
is on behalf of that life-giving freedom that Mann celebrates “art’s lively
ambiguity, its deep lack of commitment, its intellectual freedom ... someone who
is used to creating art, never takes spiritual and intellectual things completely
seriously, for his job has always been rather to treat them as material and as
playthings, to represent points of view, to deal in dialectics, always letting the
one who is speaking at the time be right.”

The higher playfulness that Mann espouses in these sentences from Re�ections
perfectly suits his dazzling, many-faceted Magic Mountain, so di�erent from
today’s prizewinning novels, which present uplifting lessons endorsed by the
socially conscious author and his or her tenure committee. In Mann, each
character is right when he or she speaks, and the whole revolves in crystal.
Staging a debate between two sides of himself, passionate lover and staid
bourgeois, Mann the magician proves his freedom. High up there in the
mountains, he remains miles above the cheap political fervor that contaminates
his time, and ours.

David Mikics is the author, most recently, of Stanley Kubrick (Yale Jewish Lives). He
lives in Brooklyn and Houston, where he is John and Rebecca Moores Professor of
English at the University of Houston.

#THOMAS MANN

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