Hans Reisiger's Edition of Walt Whitman: A Letter

Dear Herr Reisiger,

I am thoroughly delighted with owning a copy of your The Work of Walt Whitman and cannot thank you enough—as I am sure that the German public will also not be able to thank you enough for this great, important, indeed sacred gift. Ever since I acquired the two volumes, I have been constantly taking them up, reading now here and now there. I have read the biographical introduction in its entirety and deem it a minor masterpiece infused with love. It is truly a service of the highest order that you have rendered us, expending patient devotion and enthusiastic labor to acquaint us with this powerful mind and a profoundly new form of humanity—us Germans, who are at once old and immature, for whom contact with this future-shaping humanity can become a blessing, provided we know how to take up its challenge. For me personally, as someone who has inwardly busied himself with the idea of Humanity for years, laboring with a slowness uniquely my own, as someone persuaded that Germany faces no task more pressing than that of filling this concept with meaning, this otherwise empty shell that has become little more than a catch-phrase used in schools—for me this book has been nothing less than a gift from heaven, for now I really see that what Whitman calls "democracy" is nothing other than what we, in an old-fashioned usage, call "humanity"; just as I also see that it cannot be done with Goethe alone, that a shot of Whitman will be necessary to achieve the feeling of the new humanity, even though these two fatherly figures have much in common, above all the sensual element, the "Calamus," a sympathy with the organic. In short, your achievement—and that word is neither too strong nor too grand—can have incalculable effects; and I, who am no longer so young at this point, would like to be among the first of those who, with a clear conscience, will congratulate you on it.

I greet you many times over and remain your devoted,

Thomas Mann.