Kultur Man

When Thomas Mann came to America in 1938, he said simply: "Wherever I am is German culture." To Germans rallying against Hitler, or, like himself, driven into exile, the declaration was a defiant battle cry; to non-Germans it was something of a portent. "The plot of every one of his novels," said a critic, "concerns an organism whose vitality is threatened; one can never be sure whether the crisis will end ineluctably in death or whether it is not instead the critical point in a rebirth." Because the vitality of that old organism Europe appeared to be ebbing towards destruction, Mann's work seemed prophetic; Mann, transplanted to America, seemed a waiting symbol of Europe's rebirth.

Mann himself was a product of the old European order and tradition. He had been born to a life of large and splendid ease in the Hanseatic city of Luebeck, one of the historic free cities of North Germany. When he was born, Wilhelm I was Kaiser, Bismarck was Chancellor; his father, a prosperous merchant, had been Senator and twice Mayor of Luebeck. His mother was the daughter of a German planter in South America who married a Portuguese Creole. Mann studied literature in Munich, journeyed to Rome, and at 25 had a stupendous success with his first full-length novel, the story of the decay of a bourgeois family similar to his own. Buddenbrooks sold more than a million copies in Germany, brought Mann the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.

The Housecleaning. He married Katja Pringsheim, the daughter of a professor at Munich University, and it was out of his wife's experience in a sanitarium for tuberculosis patients that he built another great success, The Magic Mountain, this time a parable of civilization in decay. The Magic Mountain outsold Hitler's Mein Kampf, but Hitler's quarrel with Mann was based on Mann's nonliterary championing of the old German tradition. One day in 1933, when Mann and his wife were vacationing in Switzerland, Klaus and Erika, their two eldest children, telephoned. "Stay in Switzerland," they advised. "Bad weather is coming." When Mann did not understand, they added: "The housecleaning will be too much for you." The housecleaning was done by the Nazis: the burning of his books, the revocation of his citizenship.

In America, established at Princeton University as lecturer in the humanities, Mann carried on the fight against "Europe's Dark Age." He wrote polemic pamphlets, lectured with a certain dry sententiousness, and broadcast to Germany. His books were translated and were bestsellers. It did not seem to matter that his writing was loaded with obscure symbolism and mythological references, was ironic in outlook, discursive in method and difficult to translate; Mann stood for European culture at its best. In 1941 the family (six grown-up children) moved to Pacific Palisades, Calif., where Mann completed a four-volume work called Joseph and His Brothers, which he had begun in Europe. The Joseph books sold altogether 250,000 copies, but it is doubtful if their readers grasped an aspect of that long and difficult work, recently described to a New York Times correspondent by Mann: "My conception of Joseph was in part distilled from my personal experience of Franklin D. Roosevelt. And my view of Joseph's administration in Egypt has traces of my impression of the New Deal."

The Native's Return. In 1944 Mann became a U.S. citizen, but with the passing of the New Deal, he found a growing dissatisfaction with America. He made a trip to postwar Germany and was repelled by Germany's indifference to her recent crimes. But later, 15 years after taking refuge in America, he went back to Europe to live there permanently. "My feeling of being a European became so strong that I had to come back," he said.

He visited the Soviet zone of Germany and was lionized there, wrote a letter of praise for an old friend, now a Soviet literary commissar, and finally settled near Zurich, Switzerland.

In America his vast popularity had waned, and critics were finding his later work "disappointing." He had been praised as one of the "world's great literary figures." But such evaluations are for posterity, which would judge Mann against his world contemporaries: Kipling, Conrad, Gorky, Gide, Joyce, Henry James, Shaw, Galsworthy, d'Annunzio. Mann himself was sensitively aware that one enters this hall of fame treading lightly. "There has been far too much talk about me," he wrote in 1951, adding: "It is not without a measure of embarrassment and dis may . . . that I note . . . that some people judge me from my books to be a downright universal intellect, a man of encyclopedic knowledge. What a tragic illusion!"

But measured against his contemporaries in the German language--Gerhart Hauptmann, Rilke, Kafka, Stefan Zweig et al.--Mann was still a giant. And against charges that he was "Olympian," "pompous," "ponderous," he could well defend himself: "My endeavor," he wrote, "is to make the heavy light; my ideal is clarity; and if I write long sentences--a tendency inherent in the German tongue--I make it my business, not without success, to maintain the utmost transparency and spoken rhythm." In German he was an exquisite stylist, and he brought to that language a new sensitivity in the art of storytelling.

They were reading Mann once again in Germany. A new novel, a wryly ironic account of a gifted swindler (based on an old sketch), was having a great success. Last March his home town, Luebeck, which had once resented Buddenbrooks, made him an honorary citizen. In May in Stuttgart he opened the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the death of Poet-Dramatist Friedrich von Schiller. Almost in spite of himself, Mann had become a symbol of German unity. His 80th birthday in June was the occasion for celebrations in the Western world, but none so satisfactory to Mann as those in Germany. A month ago Mann was hospitalized in Zurich with phlebitis. Last week, at the age of 80, he died.

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