When does a democracy tip into crisis? When is simply defending it no longer enough, and when does resistance become necessary? These were the questions that Thomas Mann (and many others) faced in the fall of 1930. For his “German Address,” subtitled “An Appeal to Reason,” he returned to Berlin’s Beethoven Hall — the same hall where, eight years earlier, he had declared his decisive support for democracy in his speech “On the German Republic.” Now, it seemed, his role as a political intellectual required a redefinition. This redefinition came in the wake of a dramatic, almost explosive surge in votes for the Nazi Party in the Reichstag election of September 14, 1930. Nearly one in five voters had cast their ballot for Adolf Hitler and his party. Just two years earlier, in May 1928, they had garnered a mere 2.6 percent. When Mann gave his speech, the newly elected Reichstag had just met for the first time. Nazi deputies marched in wearing brown shirts and swastika armbands — a deliberate provocation and breach of parliamentary norms. In the days that followed, they and their supporters stepped up intimidation and violent attacks on political opponents. Jewish-owned shops and department stores came under assault as well. For Mann, these developments marked a turning point — not only for the country, but also for his own political thinking and commitment to politics. 18.3 percent: this figure transformed Mann, the committed republican and democrat, into a resolute activist and outspoken anti-fascist. His address begins with an apparently unambiguous disclaimer. “I am no follower of relentless social activism,” he told his audience. The age of aesthetic idealism was irretrievably gone, but that did not mean one had to accept an “activistic equation of idealism and frivolity.” The disclaimer is a rhetorical gesture. Its function is to make the exception to the rule appear inevitable: “Nevertheless there are hours, moments in communal life when such a justification of art practically fails,” he explained, “when the artist can no longer create from within, because pressing necessities push aside the thought of art — when the crisis of public distress shakes him to the core, so that the playful, passionate immersion in the eternal-human, which we call art, . . . becomes psychologically impossible.” “Immediate thoughts of necessity,” “crisis of public distress”: in the eloquent flow of his words, the sharpness and urgency of Mann’s description of the situation in the fall of 1930 almost fade. But only against this background does the Lutheran resolve of his confession reveal its full pathos: Hier stehe ich. Ich kann nicht anders. Here I stand. I cannot do otherwise. Above all else, the speech aimed to explain the rise of National Socialism and, at the same time, to rhetorically discredit the movement. “Purely economically,” Mann began his analysis, Nazism could not be adequately understood — it was not merely the result of unemployment, hunger, and cold that shaped social life in the wake of the global depression. Rather, two tendencies converged. On the one hand, a pseudo-intellectual program “from the academic-professorial sphere,” consisting of “mystical philistinism and extravagant nonsense,” which, with “vocabulary such as racial, national, fraternal, heroic,” had “flooded and glued together the brains of Germans in 1930.” On the other hand, a “giant wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive mass-democratic fairground vulgarity” that swept through the modern world of consumption, nervousness, technology, and noise. From this fatal combination emerged a grotesque and orgiastic political style: “Fanaticism becomes a principle of salvation, enthusiasm epileptic ecstasy . . . and reason veils her face.” Having identified the activism in the speaker’s confession, it is important to understand his manner of speaking as a manifestation of activism, too. In rapid-fire style, the speaker hurls vividly charged labels one after another, beating down the very subject he describes: “fanaticism,” “principle of salvation,” “ecstasy,” and so forth. It is unmistakably a rhetoric of attack — fast, hard, precise. What is good and what is evil: in the “German Address” this distinction is framed in rhetorical and performative terms. And therein lies the most striking contrast with the speech “On the German Republic” delivered eight years earlier. There the speaker sought to “win over” his audience for his position, to engage them in a democratic contest of arguments. But now he was confronted with a political and social phenomenon that could no longer be debated — it had to be fought. In 1930, he no longer dealt with political opponents. They were enemies. And they were enemies not only in an abstract sense. That October evening in Berlin, a group of disruptors had mingled with the bourgeois audience — including the brothers Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger, two leading figures of what would later be called the “Conservative Revolution.” Joining them were twenty SA men, disguised in borrowed tuxedos, dispatched personally by Joseph Goebbels. What began with heckling soon grew into a tumult that required police intervention. A photograph documents the scene: while the audience turns, wondering what is happening in the back rows, Thomas Mann stands at the podium, his gaze fixed in stone. It must have been an uncanny situation: the very behavior he feared took shape in the moment he addressed it. Democratic debate was obstructed by force. The Nazi press exploited the scene for propaganda. They claimed the audience had turned away from the speaker, that no one wished to hear his appeal to reason, that he stood isolated in his political views. In fact, the opposite was true: the audience’s sustained applause had helped prevent the disruption from succeeding. The lie of Nazi propaganda served no other purpose than to recast the true failure of their actions as a triumph in the media. It is precisely the logic of fake news: turn reality upside down and present defeat as victory. The Beethoven Hall speech marked a deep break in Mann’s political biography. His status as a public adversary of National Socialism had become irreversible. When does a democracy begin
Thomas Mann’s Exemplary Fury
