Like many German intellectuals of his generation, Thomas Mann (1875-1955) had been quite a-political before the outbreak of World War I, but in September 1914 he rallied behind the war effort in an essay that treated the conflict as a struggle between the deep, philosophical culture of his nation and the superficial, cosmopolitan culture of France and Britain.  However it was the publication of an essay by his brother, Heinrich Mann (1871-1950), also a prominent writer, that caused him to throw his full energies into a defense of the German war effort.  Heinrich Mann had implicitly questioned the role of intellectuals who unthinkingly defended the authoritarian German Empire.  The article led to a break between the brothers, and Thomas began a lengthy defense of German culture and political traditions that was published as Reflections of a Non-Political Man in 1918.  In the 1920s Mann become a supporter of the democratic Weimar Republic, but his wartime writings show how linked the idea of Kultur had become with authoritarian politics.

Thomas Mann

“I am, in what is intellectually essential, a genuine child of the century into which the first twenty-five years of my life fall: the nineteenth. . . since, as I say, my traditions and artistic tendencies reach back to this native world of German masterfulness that charms and strengthens me by an idealistic confirmation of myself as soon as I come into contact with it, my intellectual center also lies on the other side of the turn of the century.  Romanticism, nationalism, burgherly [roughly equivalent to the middle class] nature, music, pessimism, humor – these elements from the atmosphere of the past age form in the main the impersonal parts of my being as well. . . . When in the following pages, I have held that democracy, that politics itself, is foreign and poisonous to the German character;  when I have doubted or argued against Germany’s calling to politics, I have not done so – personally or  impersonally – with the

laughable purpose of spoiling my nation’s will to reality, of shaking its belief in the justice of its international claims.  I myself confess that I am deeply convinced that the German people will never be able to love political democracy simply because they cannot love politics itself, and that the much decried ‘authoritarian state’ is and remains the one that is proper and becoming to the German people . . . in doing so, I not only intend no derogation of the German nation in the intellectual or in the moral sense – I mean just the opposite – I also believe that its will to power and worldly greatness (which is less a will than a fate and a world necessity) remains completely uncontested in its legitimacy and its prospects. . . . history has nothing but praise for the organizing and administrative powers of the completely nonpolitical German Nation. . . . What provoked the deepest element in me, my national instinct, was the cry for ‘politics’ in that meaning of the word that belongs to the intellectual sphere; it is the ‘politicization of the intellect,’ the distortion of the concept of intellect into that of reforming enlightenment, of revolutionary

Friedrich August von Kaulbach, Germania, 1914

humanitarianism, that works like poison and orpiment on me . . .  The difference between intellect and includes that of culture and civilization, of soul and society, of freedom and voting rights, of art and literature; and the German tradition is culture, soul, freedom, art, and not civilization, society, voting rights, and literature. . . .”

. . . it is above all advisable to emphasize that one desires a German victory in a disinterested way.  I am neither a power-proud Junker not a shareholder in heavy industry, nor even a social imperialist with capitalist connections.  I have no life-and-death interest in Germany’s trade dominance, and I even entertain oppositional doubts about Germany’s calling to grand politics and to an imperial existence.  Finally, for me it is also a matter of intellect, of ‘domestic policy.’  With all my heart I stand with Germany, not as far as she is competing with England in power politics, but as far as she opposes her intellectually. . .

 . . .  a union of national democracies into a European, a world democracy, the imperium of civilization, the ‘society of mankind,’ could have character that would be more Latin or more Anglo-Saxon – the German spirit would dissolve and disappear in it, it would be obliterated, it would no longer exist.”