Stories and Episodes [antikvár]

w INTRODUCTION Thomas Mann, second son of Johann Heinrich Mann» grain merchant and senator, was born at Lübeck in 1875. He began writing at the age of twenty, and his development can be clearly traced in his work because he uses facets of himself as characters in his stories. His European reputation as a writer was already established before the War of 1914, and he was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. During the Great War he was an intensely patriotic German, but did not succeed in making his political ideas understood, and towards the end of the War began to write The Magic Mountain^ that great work of exploration into personality, by which he is chiefly known in the English-speaking world. The present time (1940) is opportune for an estimation of his works. To-day, at the age of sixty-five, he is at at the height of his power, and his country, Germany, is also at the height of her power. A thoroughgoing German, a product of the great influences which have moulded present-day Germany, a disciple of Goethe, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner, he is deprived of his nationality and his academic honours, and exiled from his country; he is openly at war with Hitlerism, and a price is on his head. Why is this ? If we could answer this question we might be near an answer to the larger question: Why is Germany at war in Europe? In considering this matter it must be borne in mind that Thomas Mann stands for judgment as an individual, and Adolf Hitler stands, or purports to stand, for a *A96a vii