The Mind in Exile
Thomas Mann in Princeton
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- $27.99
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- $27.99
Publisher Description
A unique look at Thomas Mann’s intellectual and political transformation during the crucial years of his exile in the United States
In September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain, fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Heralded as “the greatest living man of letters,” Mann settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where, for nearly three years, he was stunningly productive as a novelist, university lecturer, and public intellectual. In The Mind in Exile, Stanley Corngold portrays in vivid detail this crucial station in Mann’s journey from arch-European conservative to liberal conservative to ardent social democrat.
On the knife-edge of an exile that would last fully fourteen years, Mann declared, “Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me.” At Princeton, Mann nourished an authentic German culture that he furiously observed was “going to the dogs” under Hitler. Here, he wrote great chunks of his brilliant novel Lotte in Weimar (The Beloved Returns); the witty novella The Transposed Heads; and the first chapters of Joseph the Provider, which contain intimations of his beloved President Roosevelt’s economic policies. Each of Mann’s university lectures—on Goethe, Freud, Wagner—attracted nearly 1,000 auditors, among them the baseball catcher, linguist, and O.S.S. spy Moe Berg. Meanwhile, Mann had the determination to travel throughout the United States, where he delivered countless speeches in defense of democratic values.
In Princeton, Mann exercised his “stupendous capacity for work” in a circle of friends, all highly accomplished exiles, including Hermann Broch, Albert Einstein, and Erich Kahler. The Mind in Exile portrays this luminous constellation of intellectuals at an extraordinary time and place.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Corngold (Franz Kafka: The Necessity of Form), a professor of literature at Princeton University, shapes a "cultural memory" of German Nobel laureate Thomas Mann (1875–1955) during his stint at Princeton from 1938 to 1941 in this savvy appraisal. Having been stripped of his German citizenship by the Nazis in 1936 for his critiques of fascism, Mann secured a lectureship at Princeton and, driven by his "insistent moral sense," continued to speak out. Corngold depicts Mann as he strives to balance his dueling functions as a political exile and a writer devoted to his craft, all the while trying to solve "the problem of freedom," which he saw as the challenge of leveling individualism with social equality. Mann, Corngold writes, "declared that an authentic Germany lived on—elsewhere. It lodged in the spiritual plenty of German literature, kept alive by writers in exile—by Mann and those whom he inspired to carry on." This, though, isn't a hagiography, and Corngold makes no bones about Mann's biases and antiquated arguments, namely his lack of awareness about his relative affluence and his affirmation of colonialism in the form of his "admiration of the British Empire." While the writing can be repetitive and dense, Corngold offers a shrewd and balanced take on a much-studied figure. This sharp, focused work will impress historians and scholars of German literature.
