The German Genius

assured him it was easier to make a living there. He made one Hollywood picture, Hangmen Also Die , not a success at the box office and he never really attempted to assimilate, not believing it possible. 83 He liked the “grace and generosity” of ordinary Americans but not their lack of dignity. As soon as he could, he went back to Germany, to the East.
    When Thomas Mann arrived in America in 1938, he was acclaimed as the world’s greatest living novelist, invited to dine at the White House and, along with Einstein, awarded an honorary degree from Harvard. He quickly became a public figure, and it was Mann who, in November 1941, was given the distinction of broadcasting, over the BBC (from the USA), the first news about the Holocaust. 84
    To begin with he adored America, in particular the leadership of President Franklin Roosevelt, although Mann’s family gave cause for despair. He had arrived with his wife, Katja, and their six children, plus his brother Heinrich and his wife. Thomas’s son Klaus, Heinrich’s wife, and two sisters all committed suicide during or soon after the war.
    Yet Thomas managed to produce a body of work while he was in America. In 1948 he published Doctor Faustus , arguably his masterpiece, about the life of a German composer, modeled on Schoenberg, who wasn’t entirely happy with Mann’s treatment. Leverkühn, the composer, is nihilistic, a man who concludes a Faustian bargain, contracts syphilis after a visit to a brothel, and destroys his lovers. There is more than a touch of Nietzsche in Leverkühn and there are several allusions to a figure who might or might not be Hitler; high art itself comes under cynical scrutiny, as do the Frankfurt school and the twelve-tone system itself. There is a more than passing reference to a true community of artists—the redemptive community that has so obsessed Germans of all stripes.
    Mann always remained a serious writer, continually upset by the glibness and what he saw as the unreflective nature of American culture and public life, in particular the American tendency to oversimplify—a dangerous stance, he felt, both fostering and deepening the Cold War that emerged after 1945. He was proud of having become a citizen of Roosevelt’s America but became appalled by the “barbarous infantilism” of American life and by the country’s decision, as he put it, “not to lead the world but to buy it.” In June 1952, he emigrated again, back to Europe, to Switzerland, a German-speaking country that wasn’t Germany. “America was as glad to see him go as it had been pleased to receive him years before.”
    In one way and another, because the language barrier proved too difficult, because the social-political-intellectual climate was so different in the New World, because they rarely had the popular successes of the filmmakers, most of the émigré writers returned to Europe when they could: Brecht, Bloch, Frank, Mehring, Döblin, Mann as we have seen, Remarque, and Zuckmayer. Several of them got only as far as Switzerland, a German-speaking country but not the country they had left. It could be said that Hitler had all but broken the spirit of an entire generation of writers, or at the least had deformed them out of recognition. In that sense, the monster had won. Anthony Heilbut quotes a letter Mann wrote to a friend shortly before he left America: “We poor Germans! We are fundamentally lonely, even when we are ‘famous’! No one really likes us.” 85
     
     
    The same could not be said of the scientists. Among the émigrés there were nineteen Nobel Prize winners, which shows their caliber and underlines Hitler’s extraordinary decision to let them—even encourage them—to go. And to an extent reinforces the sentiment of Sir Ian Jacobs, Churchill's wartime military secretary, that “the Allies won the [Second World] War because our German scientists were better than their German scientists.”
    The role of Leo Szilard in conceiving the notion of a self-sustaining chain reaction, which would make an atomic explosion possible, has already been introduced. After he emigrated to America, he joined with two others, Albert Einstein and Hans Bethe, in trying to convince the country’s military and political authorities not to pursue the atomic (and then the nuclear) bomb to its logical conclusion. Another émigré physicist, Wolfgang Pauli, refused point blank to have anything whatsoever to do with an atomic bomb project, while a fifth,