German essayist, cultural critic, and novelist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, Thomas Mann can easily be termed as one of the most enlightened intellectuals of the Nazi era. Thomas Mann moved to Switzerland in 1933 shortly after the Nazis had come to power and begun a campaign of abuse against him. He was formally expatriated in 1936. Among Mann’s most famous works is Buddenbrooks, which appeared when he was 26. In the following letter written to fellow writer Ludwig Lewisohn, Mann laments the death of his friend Menno Ter Braak.
September 30, 1940Dear Ludwig Lewisohn,
Your book has arrived, has occupied me a good deal, and I would have written to you sooner were it not that my morbidly swollen correspondence, the product of these times, some days keeps me from my own writing. Today I received the news—or rather the confirmation of a report I had not yet brought myself to accept—that a good friend of mine, the Dutch writer and eminent critic, Menno Ter Braak, took his own life when the Germans invaded. It’s heartrending. Two other important Dutch writers have likewise fallen victim to this new variety of world history. The very best are those who are destroyed—which I suppose is only natural when ultimate baseness is victorious. Much trash has found refuge in America because such people raise a ruckus, while the nobler types go under silently. Your book, now: I read it some time ago, very quickly, almost at one sitting, and understandably with keen interest, for American as it is, it breathes in, if not out, a most European atmosphere. In literary terms it is close to the French, English, German spirit, so that I felt at home with it. In addition there was the emotion aroused by the human document—a somewhat mixed emotion, I will have to add, inclining toward the side from which, evidently, a state of being filled with one’s own ego, one’s own fate, one’s own errors and own happiness, one’s own loving and being loved, which antagonizes people—not only out of ill-will and a petty insistence on discretion, but also out of an irritated pudeur. And at least in times of great public tribulations, when there is a certain justification for that feeling. I might put it this way: The book really needs the shield and protection of posthumous publication. Let us assume that your considerable literary achievement were crowned and completed by a few more powerful works; that after you had become entirely what you are, you had departed this earth and friends had published these pages from your posthumous papers—in that case not only would there be nothing to be said against them, but they would be a real contribution. But as it is now, coming out in the midst of life, the book does constitute, if you will (I don’t “will” at all, but others do, so it seems, and I cannot entirely blame them) a kind of imposition, an act of naïveté, which to be sure is probably a condition for your productivity and without which your works (for this is scarcely a work) probably would not have been written—and yet the nakedness does, after all, have something disturbing about it.
As you see: interested, moved, but not entirely in agreement—that is how I feel. A public statement of mine on Haven would necessarily turn out somewhat tortuous, and since I have reservations about the book’s public existence, I have even more about my giving a public opinion on it. Thanks for something so personal had better remain personal. The occasion for my testifying once more to your literary gifts will come again—I prefer to wait for a new work cast more objectively, confident that you will not make us wait long.
Yours
TM
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