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  • On the German Republic
  • Thomas Mann

May I remind you, Gerhart Hauptmann, that you were among the audience when I gave a lecture, at the University of Frankfurt during the Goethe-Week celebrations, about belief and education, or about humanity? You were seated in the first row, and the auditorium behind you was filled to the rafters with students. It was a lovely occasion, and I hope that this one today will prove likewise. In my imagination, I can see you before me now, just as you were then, and address you as a distinguished man on your birthday; and when I raise my glance a bit higher, I can also see the youth of Germany in the hall, listening attentively, for I want to talk to them again today, and also talk about them, and yet again talk with them, to borrow a phrase that appears in a locution such as "to have a bone to pick with them." I have to speak, in short: about you, whose birthday we're celebrating today, and about other, more wide-ranging concerns, or yet once again about issues concerning humanity—issues that will always receive a receptive response from German young people, or else they would cease to be German. True, it is possible that they will stamp or shuffle their feet in disapproval over what I'm about to say. But that will not matter: I shall persist and bend my heart and mind to the task of winning them over. For they have to be won over, that much is clear; and they are ready to be won over, for they are not evil, and even those who stamp or shuffle their feet are only a bit proud and stubborn.

To begin once again, it is not surprising that I remember with pleasure the events in Frankfurt and imagine you once more before me: undoubtedly, as I became aware only later (for in the present we never feel gratitude), they marked a high point in my life as a writer. You sat before me, Gerhart Hauptmann, as I have already said, and to your left sat Reich President Ebert. "Before king and kingdom," as Lohengrin says, "I truly unveiled my secret"—with the word "kingdom," it is clear, meant to designate Friedrich Ebert, while the word "king" refers to you. For today indeed you are a king—and who would want to deny it?—truly a people's king, as you sit there before me—the king of the Republic. Does that phrase entail a contradiction? I call upon Novalis, a royalist of a special sort, who once said that people everywhere would soon be convinced that no king could last without a republic and no republic without a king—a democratic expression [End Page 109] in any case, and one that invites expansion with the observation that a republic could survive without a king longer than a king without a republic (feet shuffling in the background). One should not be surprised if you, Gerhart Hauptman, in your capacity as king, were to become a complete republican, for surely our republicanization has served to greatly strengthen and illuminate your kingdom—albeit after a brief wobble in your royal status during the time of revolution.

We live fast. The environment of each individual is changing in the blink of an eye; "today you're dead," runs a popular expression, "and tomorrow, until further notice, you're red." It's entertaining—and it is certainly no more than that—to look into the kaleidoscope of current affairs and values, especially insofar as our own moment of fateful choice is at stake. Intellectual radicalism, which accompanied the Revolution in the literary sphere, did not take kindly to a nature such as yours. Fashionable opinion was against you. But that mood has now passed. The younger voices that dismissed you as "unintellectual" are now mute; you stand on the crest of the wave, and the social as well as democratic trends of the time are suited to your greatness. The socialism of this moment reveres you as the compassionate poet of The Weavers and Hannele, the poet of the poor. And when everything...

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