Word: manne
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Dates: during 1940-1949
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...Thomas Mann, the greatest living German writer, is examining Germany's war guilt. He can do what neither Edmund Burke nor Nürnberg's Robert H. Jackson dared-indict a whole people. The evil that lay beneath the Wehrmacht, and the Nazi Party, and the factories, endures. The victors, who underestimated and misunderstood the evil, cannot extirpate it by battle, or military rule or reparations, or trial & punishment. They cannot even limit it until they understand it. So Thomas Mann, now a U.S. citizen, has written of "Germany and the Germans," in the current Yale Review...
...Arrogant Provincialism." Though his indictment is deeper and more damning than Jackson's, much of Mann's evidence against Germany conies from the experience of Thomas Mann, hunter and hunted, who scorns the unconscious Pharisaism of many German expatriates...
...beck youth Mann (now 70) recalls a Germany which, while pretending to universalism, actually lived in "arrogant provincialism . . . the modern nationalistic form, of the old German world-seclusiveness and melancholy world-unfitness . . . cosmopolitanism in a nightcap...
...Mann then contrasts the European and the German approach to politics. "The peoples born and qualified for politics instinctively know how to guard the unity of conscience and action, of spirit and power, at least subjectively. They pursue politics as an art of life and of power that cannot be entirely freed from a strain of vitally useful evil, but that never quite loses sight of the higher, the idea, human decency, and morality...
...Mann would not be Mann (or German) if, having written this, he did not take a step back to view himself as critic. "The tendency toward selfcriticism, often to the point of self-disgust and self-execration, is thoroughly German. . . ." As an example of German selfcriticism, Mann recalls: "In conversation, at least, Goethe went so far as to wish for a German Diaspora. 'Like the Jews,' he said, 'the Germans must be transplanted and scattered over the world. ... In order to develop the good that lies in them...