Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters by Tobias Boes (review)

This book significantly expands the argument sketched out in Tobias Boes's earlier article "Thomas Mann, World Author: Representation and Autonomy in the World Republic of Letters" (2015) and builds on Hans Rudolf Vaget's extensive work on Thomas Mann's American exile, especially the 2011 monograph Thomas Mann, der Amerikaner. Leben und Werk im amerikanischen Exil 1938–1952. It also joins last year's exhibition "Thomas Mann in Amerika" at the Deutsches Literaturarchiv in Marbach in arguing for a renewed relevance of Thomas Mann in the current political climate.

Thomas Mann's War chronicles in great detail Mann's myriad involvements in American and European politics during his exile in the US, providing—in a highly engaging and readable form—a valuable contextualization of Mann's literary writing and personal life, both of which form the usual focus of academic scholarship on the author. As Boes states in the introduction, his study is neither a biography of Mann, nor a study of his literary production, but rather analyzes Mann's international career from the 1920s until his death in 1955 to reconstruct "forces in US cultural history (for example, the rise of middlebrow publishing in the 1920s, or the Popular Front in the 1930s) that changed the ways in which ordinary Americans thought about the relationship between literature and the world" (13). Drawing on extensive archival research in addition to published material, Boes is able to discuss in this context Mann's political essays and speeches, lecture tours, press conferences, and radio broadcasts, as well as a range of documents that provide insight into Mann's reception and circulation in the US, from newspaper articles and reviews to his publishers' advertising copy.

Meanwhile, and in a reversal of the usual hierarchy in studies written by literary scholars, the novels and short stories published during Mann's exile form merely the background to Boes's project. Their insightful but brief discussion takes the form of a series of "interludes" that "can [be] skip[ped] without danger of losing the thread of the narrative" (18). This is a highly interesting approach, not least because Mann's political essays and speeches sold much better in the US than his fiction, a fact that Boes investigates by discussing the rise of the American "Great Books" publishing series and university courses, in which literary texts featured alongside political and even scientific treatises.

And yet, Mann's fame in America "rested on the quietly dignified aura of culture and tradition with which he surrounded himself and which seemed to emanate from every page that he wrote" rather than his political writings as such (4). Most instances of Mann's political commentary quoted in the book are rather trite and vague; even Boes himself occasionally concedes that a lot of Mann's political writing of the time might strike us as "rather banal pronouncements" (105). Examples include statements such as "the different spheres of humanity—whether artistic, cultural, or political—are really inseparable" (100); "totality: there is only one, the totality of humanity, of the human" (105); and "the 'political' … is the matter of ultimate values, of the basis of our civilization, of the very idea of humanity" (144). This, coupled with the ineffectiveness of any political action endorsed by Mann—unless, as Boes clearly demonstrates, it happened to coincide with a preexisting political or military agenda—suggests that Mann can hardly be described as a political thinker or commentator, let alone an activist during his American exile, and intimates a rather skeptical take on the problem—central to both Mann and Boes—of the relationship between intellectuals and political action. Perhaps Mann's wartime radio programs broadcasted by the BBC in occupied Germany might form an exception to this narrative, although Boes leaves open the question of the extent of their actual impact on German listeners.

Boes argues that Mann...