Thomas Mann's War
Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters
Publisher Description
In Thomas Mann's War, Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most prominent anti-fascists and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted.
Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature and author of such world-renowned novels as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, began his self-imposed exile in the United States in 1938, having fled his native Germany in the wake of Nazi persecution and public burnings of his books. Mann embraced his role as a public intellectual, deftly using his literary reputation and his connections in an increasingly global publishing industry to refute Nazi propaganda. As Boes shows, Mann undertook successful lecture tours of the country and penned widely-read articles that alerted US audiences and readers to the dangers of complacency in the face of Nazism's existential threat. Spanning four decades, from the eve of World War I, when Mann was first translated into English, to 1952, the year in which he left an America increasingly disfigured by McCarthyism, Boes establishes Mann as a significant figure in the wartime global republic of letters.
Open access edition funded by the National Endowment for the Humanities.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Boes (Formative Fictions), an associate professor of German at the University of Notre Dame, poses a deceptively simple question in this outstanding study of Thomas Mann: what is the author's continued relevance to the "world republic of letters?" The answer involves understanding the significance of Mann's decision in 1938 to flee Nazi Germany for the U.S. Boes examines Mann's time in the U.S., which lasted until 1954, at the height of McCarthyism, and follows his evolution from holding that art should be separate from politics (a long-held belief expressed in his 1918 book Reflections of an Nonpolitical Man) to becoming the de facto voice of German intellectualism in exile during WWII. In addition to analyzing Mann's key works of the time, such as the Joseph novels and Doctor Faustus, Boes also discusses the role of his publishers, Fischer in Germany and Knopf in the U.S., in shaping his career; the part played by middlebrow culture, in particular the Book of the Month Club, in popularizing Mann with American audiences; and Mann's own mixed feelings towards his resulting celebrity. Revealing how this writer "instinctively grasped" the important yet fraught role of writers in an emerging "globally interconnected world," Boes's exhaustive, meticulous survey should come to represent an exemplar for scholarship seeking to document the lasting significance of an author's work.
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