Newspaper Reader.
Jan 22, 2026
Editor: Here are the opening paragraphs of the perpetual, self congratulatory chatter of Bret Stephens, garnished via Thomas Mann. But carefully elided from the vision, the amerness of NYT reader, Mann’s sexual longing for other men! Reader look to the Diaries. Even though incompleat Stephens can’t erase Mann’s sexuality !
Decades before this Swiss village became famous as a pilgrimage site for global elites attending the annual meeting of the World Economic Forum, it was best known as a destination for well-to-do invalids seeking respiratory relief in the crisp Alpine air. It was that reputation that brought Thomas Mann to Davos (where his wife was convalescing) for a three-week visit in 1912, inspiring his great novel, “The Magic Mountain,” published 12 years later.
The book is set in the years before World War I, and one of its aims is to address the moral and psychological unraveling of European civilization on the eve of its catastrophe. At its heart lies a long argument between two fiercely held and fatally flawed worldviews. The first is represented by the character of Lodovico Settembrini, an earnest but naïve pacifist and internationalist. The second comes from Leo Naphta, a proto-totalitarian figure who thinks that the ideals of freedom are an illusion and that humanity’s “deepest desire is to obey.”
Both men are dying of tuberculosis. In the book’s climactic scene, they face off in a duel in which Settembrini fires his gun in the air and Naphta shoots himself — emblematic of the soft liberalism that lacks the nerve to defend its values, and the despotic will to power that ultimately destroys itself.
That could almost be Davos this week. Officially, the theme of this year’s meeting is “A Spirit of Dialogue” — emollient pablum to suit a modern-day Settembrini. Unofficially, we have entered the territory of Naphta — of open menace and nervous apprehension and calculations of available power. The underlying spirit of Davos this year is fear.
Editor: Reader in these paragraphs Stephens wallows in shopworn pastiche!
Editor: Gordon A. Craig offers a review of the duel biography of the Brothers Mann!
The Brothers Mann: The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1871-1950 and1875-1955. By Nigel Hamilton.New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. Pp. x+422. $16.95.
In one of his essays on French and German literature, Robert Minder has commented upon the distinction drawn in Germany between the Dichter andthe Literat. The former was a term of honor reserved for artists who dealtwith the great and abiding themes of human existence; the latter was alwaysfaintly derogatory and was reserved for writers who insisted upon concerningthemselves with social questions or problems of contemporary politics.That this was not only an artificial distinction used by people who compiledhandbooks of literature is shown by the lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann.It played an important role in defining their relationship in the years whenthey were establishing their reputations as writers, and it was a source offriction and bitterness between them. Thomas disapproved, and was a bitcontemptuous, of his older brother’s strong democratic convictions and hisinability to leave them out of anything he wrote and, in 1908, in an essayentitled Der Literat und der Kiunstler, it was obviously of Heinrich that hewas thinking when he wrote patronizingly, “The Literat is radical, becauseradicalism means purity, nobility and profundity. . . . [He] is upright to thepoint of absurdity, he is honorable to the point of saintliness….” Heinrich,although with nothing of the censoriousness that often crept into his brother’sreferences to him, disapproved of Thomas’s refusal to become engaged inmovements critical of the course of Wilhelmine policy, and Thomas wassurely in his mind when he wrote in 1910 that for years the German artist hadbeen betraying his proper function either by silence or by unabashed ‘jus-tification of the unspiritual [and] sophistical exculpation of the unjust, . . . hisenemy to the death, Power.”The fragility of the relationship between the brothers reached its breakingpoint during the First World War, which Thomas Mann saw as a strugglebetween German Kultur, which he equated with honor, nobility, and moral-ity, and French ZiOilisation, which he associated with skepticism, the disso-lution of values, and cultural decay. He did not hesitate in his wartimewritings to indicate that he regarded his brother, whose Im Schlaraffenlandand Professor Unrat had attacked the materialism of the Second Reich andwhose essays “’Voltaire-Goethe’ (1910) and “Zola” (1915) had praised thesocial conscience of the great French writers, as a Zivilisationsliterat.This contorted and protracted Bruderzwist is the subject of Nigel Hamil-ton’s splendid double biography, and he has reconstructed it with careful attention to both the interesting parallelism of their literary production andthe contrast between what today would be called their life-styles, thebourgeois propriety of Thomas’s circumstances and the bohemian tendenciesof his brother. But the story he tells is one of a conflict ending in a reconcilia-tion, and the second half of his book is essentially the story of ThomasMann’s development after the First World War, his gradual acknowledgmentof the ideals his brother stood for, their participation, in different ways andwith different weapons, in the fight to save the Weimar Republic, and theirlife and activities in exile.Mr. Hamilton suggests (pp. 189-90) that we may see in the brothers Mann’the most significant literary brotherhood of all time,” not a mere collabora-tion like that of the brothers Grimm or one marked by the complementarycreativity of the Rossettis or the Bronte sisters, but one in which the tragicevolution and agony of a nation’s history was mirrored. “The tragedy,” hewrites, “was that history itself could not simply be reconciled, that theWeimar Republic was only paper thin, and the two sons whose quarrel andrapprochement had suggested such high hope for the destiny of Germany,were exiled, dispossessed and reviled as un-German.”These last words refer to the ironies that accompanied the last years of thetwo great novelists. When Heinrich Mann died in California in March 1950,he was an unknown in the land of his exile except to the few who remem-bered that he had some kind of a connection with Marlene Dietrich’s film TheBllie Angel. This was perhaps understandable. But although copies of hisbooks were selling by the thousands in the Soviet sector of Germany and inRussia itself, and although he was offered the presidency of the Academy ofArts in East Berlin if he would become a citizen of the DDR, his death wasgreeted with official silence in the Bonn Republic, despite his known recordas a courageous fighter for German democracy in the pre-Hitler years.His brother, meanwhile, was at the height of his literary fame, for theJoseph tetralogy had been finished in 1943 and Dr. Faustus, his parable onthe seductive power of Nazism, in 1947. Yet his refusal to return to Germanyas soon as the fighting was over made him the object of abuse from writerswho now sought to argue that their refusal to leave Germany during the Hitlerperiod was somehow nobler than his exile and that there was somethingfaintly treasonable about his anti-Nazi broadcasts during the war. When hedid go back for a visit in 1949 and, ignoring the division of the country, notonly lectured in Frankfurt am Main but went to Weimar to receive theFreedom of the city, he was accused in both the Bonn Republic and theUnited States of being a fellow-traveler, had a lecture that he had planned togive in the Library of Congress cancelled, and was attacked in the House ofRepresentatives as “one of the world’s foremost apologists for Stalin andcompany.” Hamilton’s point about the brothers’ lives mirroring history is,in short, as true for the Cold War as for the two bloodier conflicts that pre-ceded it.
Gordon A. Craig of Stanford Universitv offers this.
https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/epdf/10.1086/242187
…
Editor: The expanded version of the above!
The Mann Nobody Knew
Gordon A. Craig
…
There is much evidence of his continued competitiveness, and his desire to be considered up to date is as strong as ever. Reading Beckett’s Molloy in Merkur, he writes: “Music after my time. A kind of Joyce discipleship,” but adds hastily that the comic element he finds in Beckett is not absent from his own work, as one can see in Felix Krull. He thinks often of Goethe, with whom he has long identified himself, and notes after being received by the Pope in April 1953, “Through the standing audience [I was] reminded of Napoleon with Goethe in Erfurt.” His jealousy with respect to honors is unappeased, and in May 1955 he is fretting because the West German Order Pour le Mérite, which he has been told will be offered him and “which lesser men have long worn,” may not arrive before his eightieth birthday.
Inevitably he worried about the slackening of his productive powers, writing in August 1953:
Took a pill and found peace for the night which has become the best part of the day. That’s the way it is when one survives oneself. When he was almost 70, Wagner wrote his concluding work, Parsifal, and died not long afterwards. At about the same age, I wrote my last work of consequence, the Faust, a concluding work in every sense of the word, but went on living. Der Erwählte (The Holy Sinner), still charming, and Die Betrogene (The Black Swan) are excess appendages…. What I’m leading now is an afterlife, which struggles in vain for productive supports. To regard the Krull as a Faust worth bringing to a conclusion, is hardly possible. [He did finish it, however, and 80,000 copies of it were sold before his death.] To go on living is a mistake, especially since I live mistakenly. Eating is a burden and a plague. My only comfort is smoking and drinking coffee, both bad for me.
He was not always so gloomy, and he was too busy to think much about death, and when the thought came his reaction was, on the whole, positive. In October 1954, he wrote: “Thinking about the erection of my bust in stone in a city square in Germany. Duration in sun, rain and snow. Peculiarly reassuring about death and fortifying existence. Death, where is thy sting.” In June 1955, after his eightieth birthday and six weeks before his death, it was life and his own fame that preoccupied him.
The word goes around that seldom or never has a person been so celebrated. Curious, curious. A remarkable thing this life.
Editor: Having read both Barbara W. Tuchman’s ‘The Guns of August’, published in 1962, and Philipp Blom’s ‘TheVertigo Years’ published in August 1, 2008, represents not just a generational shift of nearly 50 years?
Editor: Bret Stephens continues to employ his meager execise in self-serving historical patisch!
All this recalls the diseased Europe that Mann sought to capture in “The Magic Mountain” — the one in which old conventions and pieties were evaporating under the heat of new ideas and new technologies, unfulfilled longings and uncontrollable rages. The cultural historian Philipp Blom called the era “the Vertigo Years” and noted the similarities to the present: “Then as now, the feeling of living in an accelerating world, of speeding into the unknown, was overwhelming.” What it wound up speeding into was, of course, a colossal civilizational tragedy.
Critics of the forum meetings like to point out that what happens up here is very far from ordinary life; that an annual confab of the very rich, powerful and influential (and the journalists dispatched to write about them) isn’t representative; that nothing good that happens in Davos is real and that nothing real that happens here is good.
But the Davos that Mann wrote about was not just a microcosm of civilization as it was but also a portent of what it was becoming.
It feels very much the same today.
Newspaper Reader.
StephenKMackSD's Blog 