HEml UIU3AHN DEJAURECUI
103
show an impassioned
CrItIC
of the Cold War-a war since won by the
country he left once agaIn at the age of seventy-seven. He uses words
which one hardly dares use today, so powerful are our internal censors . He
talks of the "dictator-dollar" and "economic imperialism," of the
"Marshallization" and "colonization" of Europe, is pained by Europe's
willingness to prostitute itself, n:gards the term "free nations" as an empty
turn of phrase, and says that it is becoming increasingly "embarrassing to
have to travel with an Alllerican passport." 13ut he mistrusted the Germans
even more; he visited Germany in 1040 for the first time since his emi–
gration on the occasion of the two celebrations in honor of Goethe-and
did so expressly as an American citizen. He did insist early on that
America's goal was world conquest. He remarked that the United States
was paying out lllillions of dollars to "stop the revolution in Asia and pre–
vent much-needed socialism in Europe." ])uring the Korean War he wrote
that "the lie of self-defellSe" was so illSufTerable that he had been "on the
verge of tears" for hours. The "unpolitical" man, in 1052, was already pre–
dicting a brilliant future tor Germany, maintaining that "its hegemony in
Europe" is "absolutely inevitable." A character in one of his novels of the
I93()s says that general hUlllan conduct consti tutes a "shameless disloyal–
ty"
to
the vanquished ideal and a "capitulation in the face of success" and
that the age delllonstrates humani ty's "servili ty."
In the I05()s he quotes words which had been spoken twenty years
before: "The new, the social world, the organized world of uni ty and plan–
ning... will arrive because an external rational order which corresponds to
the stage reached by the human spirit will have been achieved or, at the very
worst, will have been put in place by a vio lent and radical change." To this
he adds, "If one said and wrote such things at that time, in that way one
remained at least partly a man of honor." He quotes from one of his talks
on Goethe-and in a manner that strikes us today as extremely odd-he
ends by asking "whether it isn't more likely that today Goethe's gaze would
be directed towards R.ussia rather than towards America." And as far as a
certain "disdain for despotism" on Goethe's part is concerned, it is, says
Mann, well known that this gave way in the face of "the phenomenon that
was Napoleon." He asks how Goethe's vision of the "collaborative act of
losing oneself in the ordered and active masses" can hope to occur if it isn't
"under the control of the state and under a certain amount of despotism."
Even the failed master from Weimar had none of our tearfulness, immers–
ing himself shortly before he died in the radical ideas of the French socialist
Saint-Simon. When Thomas Mann is asked by a Viennese correspondent if
he doesn't share the opinion that western democracy is a "thousand times"
preferable to forms of government in the east, the author replies succinctly,
"Young man, allow me not to answer your question." The old Thomas
