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.
Thomas Mann’s Exemplary Fury
