Mannhood: When Thomas Mann and Stefan Zweig Had Lunch Together

January 2025

Thomas Mann, hinter einem Tischchen stehend, Profil nach rechts, ein Buch lesend.

This essay is the first installment of Morten Høi Jensen’s Mannhood Sidebar Series on all things related to Thomas Mann, which will continue throughout 2025 to mark the 150th anniversary of Mann’s birth. 

On January 4, 1939, the Austrian writer Stefan Zweig arrived at a stately, imposing home on 65 Stockton Street in Princeton, New Jersey. Originally built for President Garfield’s son in 1908, its current resident was Thomas Mann, the author of Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, and The Magic Mountain. When Mann first heard of Zweig’s arrival in New York a week or so earlier, he’d written at once to invite him to lunch on January 4 at 1:30pm. He was “eager to discuss the whole thing with you,” as he put it in his letter.

“The whole thing” meant, of course, the fact that both writers were living in exile from their respective countries. Mann had left Germany and spent five years in Switzerland before emigrating to the United States; Zweig, now cut off from Vienna by the Nazi annexation of Austria, had been in London since 1934. Many of their literary colleagues, they knew, had not been so lucky. The writer and revolutionary Erich Mühsam was tortured to death in Oranienburg in 1934. The Austrian cultural historian Egon Friedell threw himself from his apartment window in Vienna when Sturmabteilung troops came knocking in March 1938. The Nobel Prize-winner Carl von Ossietzky had died just a few months prior while in Nazi captivity. There were innumerable other grisly examples, and many more to come.

Mann and Zweig had practical matters to discuss, too. They had both received an appeal for financial aid from the Italian translator whom they shared, Lavinia Mazzucchetti. There was Mann’s idea of publishing brochures — Aufkläringsbroschüren — to force the German people to see what was really happening to their country. More urgently, there was the continuing silence of Secretary of State Cordell Hull, who had not responded to Mann’s letter of October 25, 1938, pleading for the administration’s aid in the case of a number of German émigré intellectuals in Prague. “Would it be possible for higher authorities to give the consulate in Prague power to facilitate entry to America for these imperiled and extremely worthy persons?” Mann had asked.

Perhaps they also discussed the obsequious composer Richard Strauss, who had been forced to resign as president of the Reich Chamber of Music in 1935 when the Gestapo intercepted an irate letter from Strauss to Zweig. Zweig had written the libretto for Strauss’s comic opera Die schweigsame Frau but for obvious reasons did not wish to go on collaborating with the composer. In the intercepted letter, Strauss had accused Zweig of “Jewish obstinacy” and defended his own groveling to the Nazi regime, claiming he was doing it “for good purposes and to prevent greater disasters!” When the letter was brought before the Führer, Strauss’s stint as the most prominent cultural puppet of the Third Reich was cut short. A letter to Hitler seeking a private audience in order to “justify my actions to you personally” went unanswered.

Mann had followed the ignominious affair with interest. He, too, had once provoked the ire of Richard Strauss. In fact, Mann’s exile might be said to have begun with Strauss’ bitter blessing. Warned not to return to Germany following a lecture tour in February 1933, Mann and his wife were staying temporarily in Lugano when a letter denouncing Mann for his essay “Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner” appeared in the Münchner Neueste Nachrichten. Titled “Protest by Munich, the Wagner City,” it accused Mann of being an “unreliable” interpreter of Wagner and chastised him for his “cosmopolitan-democratic views.” One of its forty-five signatories was Richard Strauss. Mann was shocked. “It strongly confirmed our decision not to return to Munich,” he noted in his diary at the time. 

Then again, Mann and Zweig may have felt there was nothing more to say, at least for the time being, about the sad spectacle of the regime’s lackeys. (In Lion Feuchtwanger’s 1933 novel The Oppermanns, Strauss and his ilk appear in the guise of Friedrich Wilhelm Gutwetter, a gullible writer exploited by the Nazis for publicity and whose pleasure in all the attention “was that of an adult taking part in children’s games.”) 

And maybe, having finished their lunch and while indulging in a glass of vermouth and a cigar, these two eminent mustachioed writers discussed that other fellow with a noteworthy mustache—the one who was, after all, the reason they were having lunch in Princeton and not Munich or Salzburg. I like to imagine they did. Mann would have been eager to: while giving a lecture in Salt Lake City the previous year, he had declared himself to be “Hitler’s most intimate enemy.” By the time of Zweig’s visit, he had already written the essay which grew naturally out of that sentiment. It would appear on March 3, 1939 in Esquire magazine under the somewhat anodyne title “That Man is My Brother.” (By the time it was included in Mann’s 1942 collection Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades, published by Knopf, its title had been further reduced to “A Brother.”) 

Mann’s essay is remarkable for several reasons. Most obviously, the unexceptional son of an Austrian customs officer was not the sort of character with whom Mann, a product of the educated upper bourgeoisie known as the Bildungsbürgertum, naturally identified. His initial disdain for Hitler was tinctured with classicist prejudice. In a diary entry on September 8, 1933, for instance, he describes the Führer as “a typical product of the lower middle class, with a limited education and an acquired taste for philosophizing [whose] dreadful solecisms are those of a hard-working but hopelessly limited grade-school pupil.” A few months later, Mann again remarked upon Hitler’s “low-level, ill-educated reliance on obsessive ideas.” (Zweig, in his memoir The World of Yesterday, made the point that Hitler’s lack of education and shady background explains why so many intellectuals didn’t take him seriously. The idea of him occupying the same position as Bismarck or Prince Bülow was dismissed out of hand as absurd). 

But by the time he wrote his Hitler essay Mann had come to the uncomfortable realization that although he grew up in and inhabited a social world many rungs above Hitler’s, he and the Führer were nevertheless kindred spirits, perverse as it may sound. The radical challenge of his essay is to regard Hitler with the “objective contemplation,” the ironic freedom, of the artist rather than as an outraged citizen. Setting aside his moral horror, if only for a moment, he is able to regard Hitler as “an artist-phenomenon”:

Mortifyingly enough, it is all there: the difficulty, the laziness, the pathetic formlessness in youth, the round peg in the square hole […] The lazy, vegetating existence in the depths of a moral and mental bohemia; the fundamental arrogance which thinks itself too good for any sensible and honorable activity, on the ground of its vague intuition that it is reserved for something else — as yet quite indefinite, but something which, if it could be named, would be greeted with roars of laughter.

This was nothing if not a familiar type to Mann. His early stories are filled with failed artists of this kind, artists in whom an unbridgeable divide constantly threatens to pull them under. Theirs are stories of loneliness and loathing, intense self-pride mixed with intense self-hatred. There is “Little Herr Friedemann,” in which the central character has resigned himself to “going his own way and not sharing the interests of other people,” or the narrator of “The Joker,” who describes himself as “an absolutely useless individual.” These characters all sprang from the chaos of Mann’s own inner being, a formlessness he managed, through intense self-discipline, to give shape to through writing.  

But writing is also, in Iris Murdoch’s words, “close dangerous play with unconscious forces,” and by viewing fascism as the evil fruit of German Romanticism, Mann incriminates himself for having eaten the fruit of the same tree. In Death in Venice, written in 1912, he had seen the “tendencies and aspirations of the time […] ideas which twenty years later were to be the property of the man in the street.” If Nazism is partly, in Walter Benjamin’s words, “the aestheticization of politics,” then it is the responsibility of the artist to defend the realm of aesthetics against Nazi appropriation. As Tobias Boes has shown in his important book Thomas Mann’s War, that’s precisely the struggle Mann engaged himself in during the years of the Second World War. 

Did Mann share any of these ideas with Zweig? If so, one can only imagine the Austrian’s unease. In contrast to Mann’s essay, the pages devoted to Hitler in The World of Yesterday are lucid but not especially illuminating. Zweig simply had no desire to get close to Hitler, not even imaginatively. The fact that he could see across the border from his home in Salzburg to the mountain on which Hitler’s Berchtesgaden house stood was already too close for comfort. “Having Hitler as a neighbor was an unedifying and extremely disturbing situation,” Zweig wrote. He could never get far enough away from the villain. After London he and his second wife, Lotte, moved to New York and then Brazil, where Zweig said he longed only for “a state of inner spiritual detachment.” But then he began to fear the Nazis would eventually invade South America, too. In the end, there was nowhere left to go. The world was too small.

Mann, on that cold January day in 1939, might have advised Zweig to try to come to terms with his fate as an exile, and to the responsibility this new condition conferred. They were after all both public figures with a duty to their readers and to the daily growing number of refugees fleeing Europe who lacked their material advantages. They couldn’t just bury their heads in the sand or hide behind the convenient fiction of purely private lives. Mann’s own home had become a rescue bureau in all but name, filled with the cries and clamor of people in danger, people in need.   

Little wonder, I suppose, that when Zweig returned home that evening his wife noted in her diary that he was “exhausted.” There are men who can bear to hear the cries for help, and there are men who can’t. Our age is similarly populated. Which are we?

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