The German Genius

country” of Germany. 28 A new political category was needed: he put Prussianism and socialism together to come up with National Socialism. This would lead men to exchange the “practical freedom” of America and England for the “inner freedom…which comes through discharging obligations to the organic whole.” Among those impressed by this argument was Dietrich Eckhart, who helped form the Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (DAP) or German Workers Party (GWP), which adopted the symbol of the Pan-German Thule Society Eckhart had previously belonged to. This symbol of “Aryan vitalism,” the swastika, now took on a political significance for the first time. Alfred Rosenberg was also a fan of Spengler and joined the GWP in May 1919. Soon after, he brought in one of his friends just back from the Front, a man named Adolf Hitler.
     
     
    When war broke out, Thomas Mann—as we have seen—was as nationalistic as many others. He was not yet one of the giants of European literature, but he did have a growing reputation. He volunteered for the Landsturm, or reserve army, but the doctor who examined him was familiar with his work and, reasoning that he would make a greater contribution to the war effort as a writer rather than as a soldier, failed him physically for active service.
    Like other intellectuals, Mann also saw the fighting as a clash of cultures, a battle of ideas. His first essay, “Thoughts in Wartime,” written in August 1914, claimed he had seen the war coming, that Germany had been coerced into war by its “envious” adversaries and that, altogether, war was “a tremendous creative event,” helping to stimulate “national unity and moral elevation.” 29
    After “Thoughts in Wartime,” Mann intended to spend the following months and years completing his next major work, Der Zauberberg ( The Magic Mountain ), which would contain much implied criticism of the corrupt prewar world that had led Europe to the abyss. But that was to reckon without his brother Heinrich. In his own lifetime, Heinrich would pass through the entire political spectrum, from (as we saw earlier) the editor of a racialist publication to become a supporter of Stalin. But in 1916, he published an essay on Émile Zola in a new dissident journal and in the essay there were a number of disparaging references to Thomas. Heinrich insisted that politics were important and he accused his brother of ignoring this dimension. 30
    So upset was Thomas by Heinrich’s attack that he broke into work on The Magic Mountain , and devoted several months to a long essay, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen ( Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man ), which reached the bookshops just before the armistice in 1918. In this work, he discovered that he was more nationalistic than he had anticipated but, more important, he found he was a “profoundly apolitical being.” This was not due to any failings in his education, he said, but as a matter of principle. Politics, he thought, “was not a fit occupation for aristocrats of the spirit.” He therefore wrote about the war, in Walter Lacquer’s words, with great confidence and “almost total abstraction.” 31 “Mann thought of the war mainly as great drama, a conflict of ideas…He had attached certain attributes to the German spirit and also to the French, the Russian and the British; America had no civilisation and did not count.” 32 His view, directly contradictory to Heinrich’s, was that the “ultimate questions of mankind” could not be solved by politics.
    A rambling but powerful (and in parts shrewd) critique of democracy, Mann pointed out its weakness and predicted it would not suit the Germans who, he thought, wanted and needed authority. He was dismissive, too, arguing that a democratic Germany would be “boring.” Walter Lacquer again: “He lived to realise that the boredom of the 1910s was greatly preferable to the excitement of the 1930s.” 33
    T HE D ADA V IRUS
     
    During the war many artists and writers retreated to Zurich in neutral (but German-speaking) Switzerland. James Joyce wrote much of Ulysses there; Hans Arp, Frank Wedekind, and Romain Rolland were also there. They met in the cafés of Zurich which for a time paralleled in importance the coffeehouses of Vienna at the turn of the century—the Café Odeon was the most well known. For many of those in exile in Zurich, the war seemed to mark the end of the civilization that had spawned them. It came after a period in which art