104
PAIUISAN REVIEW
Mann and the young, who in the mid-l <J20s defended in
Paris Diary
the
notion of a " benevolent dictatorship" because he already felt there was an
"excess of parliamentary democracy and party mismanagement," are not
completely dissimilar.
Still, throughout his entire life he kept his promise not to commit him–
self to one side or the other. He didn't become a coml11unist. He liked having
streets and buildings in the east named after hinl but wished officials there
could have the tact not to expressly ask his permission. When public cere–
monies were held, he would honor both Germanys with a visit. He no
longer had any desire to live in either of them, preferring "admittedly solid–
ly pro-American" Swi tzerland. He was struck (;lVorably by the attentions
West Germany's President Heuss paid him on the occasion of the Schiller
festival in Stuttgart. In the east he was struck by something else, something
which I could hardly detect any more during the final days of the CDR, and
which today is described only in derisive terms: "I looked into faces ... there
is an ascetic seriousness in them, stern calm, resolve, a piety devoted to the
improvement of the earthly. From a purely human standpoint it is hard to
resist. It must be avoided if one hopes to truly hate it, if one hopes to whol–
ly retain the pleasure of playing ideals off it, ideals which have so many times
over already become hypocri tical pretexts for selfish interests." He recog–
nized that these same peopl e were the only ones to agree whol eheartedly
when he spoke of the "great tradi tions of bourgeois cui tun:." Nevertheless,
he protested every "communist surge," wanted to maintain "his position in
complete freedom" in the middle of the "tragically divided world" and val–
ued protection for both sides. Like Heine, the other ironist in the German
language, he was convinced of the need for a new organic, socialist world, a
planned and unified world. And just like Heine, he was fi·ightened; he
believed that "a great deal that is evil, what justice cannot suffer" would have
to be pushed away before such a world could becollle "world-feasible."
This concept of " world-feasibility"-of cOllling to terms with what is
not obvious, with, for example, such enigmas as the desire for "audacity in
propriety ," for "subjectivi ty reconciled to objectivi ty"-seems to come
entirely from Goethe. The whole thing smacks of classicism, and he was
aware early on how easily classici
Sill
can lead to a "moral simplification of
the world and in the end, as a dire result of this simplification, to a
'strengthening of evil.'" His reference to "evil Germany," which he main–
tained was "good gone wrong," is a product of this classicist perspective,
which loathes fragmentation and looks always for the roots. He had trou–
ble getting Nietzsche out of his system, but we owe to the task-of
rejecting the morally despicable and vaguely histrionic in [wor of a digni–
fied illumination and a "joyful dawning of consciousness"- as Wolfgang
Harich puts it, the "most radical settling of accounts with the intellectual
