
Mann’s inhumanity to Mann - drjohnson
http://www.the-tls.co.uk/articles/public/manns-inhumanity-to-mann/
======
pash
To flesh out and challenge the writer's portrait of Thomas Mann as a "great
respecter of authority" who rolled over for the Nazis (a basically unfair
portrait, as the comments below develop), I will submit one of my favorite
sentences from _The Magic Mountain_ :

    
    
      Als ob Stillgelegen nicht ein ebenso
      gutes Kommando wäre wie Stillgestanden!
    

John Woods's translation:

    
    
      As if "At ease!" were not just as
      good a command as "Attention!"
    

But _Stillgelegen_ does not literally mean "At ease!" It's a play on words
contrasting with _Stillgestanden_ , the military command to stand at
attention; literally it means something like "lie there peacefully." So the
line could be rendered as something like,

    
    
      As if "Lie there peacefully!" were not just
      as good a command as "Stand at attention!"
    

A delightful and curiously German sentiment. ...

 _Edit: Before I revised it, the first line of this post originally read, "To
flesh out the the writer's portrait of Thomas Mann as a 'great respecter of
authority' and a Nazi flunky ...", which is what mturmon's post below refers
to._

~~~
mturmon
Calling Thomas Mann a Nazi flunky is shamefully ignorant of his history.

He was in exile from 1933 on. He worked against Nazi Germany during the war.
The only part of that assertion that is true is that there were others who
were more outspokenly anti-Nazi, earlier than he was. But, given Mann's
personality, that's not surprising.

~~~
pash
I re-phrased my summary of the reviewer's portrayal of Thomas Mann before you
posted—but, yes, I agree that it's an unfair and misleading picture of Mann.

Mann became an outspoken opponent of the Nazi regime after he emigrated,
especially after his arrival in America, but like many other prominent Germans
of his era, he was silent during Hitler's rise to power. Despite abhorring
what Nazism stood for (and despite having a Jewish mother and being a gay
man—but also _for_ those reasons), Mann did not publicly denounce the Nazis
until 1936.

There were reasons for his passivity that did not amount merely to his being a
"great respecter of authority." My intention in posting (aside from sharing a
favorite line of his writing) was to point out that the reviewer's portrait of
him as such lacked nuanced.

