The Manns on Germany

THIS WAR-Thomas Mann-Knopf

($1)--THE LIGHTS Go DOWN-Erlka Mann-Farrar & Rineharf ($2.50).

Thomas Mann's life work is a series of huge, masked, intricate parables. His pamphlets are byproducts, but by no means negligible. This War, his most recent pamphlet, is a masterful piece of classical rhetoric, tinged, like much of his work, with Goethean pompousness. It is, in essence, an exhortation to the German people to rise up and remove the rulers they have permitted themselves, without fur ther poisoning their integrity by awaiting the war's outcome ; and to take active part in creating, with the rest of Europe, the possibilities of freedom and of a lasting peace: a European Confederation.

Less grandly and more directly, Thomas Mann's daughter Erika describes those whom such a plea might -could it reach them move. Her method is not oratori cal but artfully journalistic. Her book, subtitled Middletown -Nazi Version, is a narration of fact throughout, and she has taken convincing care that her characters and her facts shall be typical. In a prologue and ten stories she brings into detailed focus the nature of a nameless German city shortly before the war: the sickness of all its parts, the inchoate readiness of its people to overthrow the leaders they had accepted. By the time she is done she has left little untouched that makes up a community or a nation: industry, small shopkeeping, the peasantry, law, marriage, the arts, medicine, religion, labor.

Sample stories: A shopkeeper fakes his accounts (upward) to the 10,000-mark income which will permit him to stay in business; he is afraid to tell even his wife.

A peasant boy is imprisoned for feeding barley to a hen; a pastor for calling his congregation to account before God for their cowardly acceptance of evil. A professor of law delivers, to the delight of his students, a perverse, seditious lecture on theories of Nazi justice. A sailor is shot for having attended a workers' mass meeting in Manhattan. The local head of the Gestapo cracks under the strain to his decency, warns the city's Jews on the eve of the pogrom of November 1938. In the closing story a mediocre Nazi writer rediscovers his honesty, gets out of Germany by the skin of his teeth as war breaks, sails with his family for the U. S. on the Athenia.

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