Thomas Mann Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man

As Walter D. Morris, editor and translator, notes in the Introduction, Thomas Mann showed little interest in politics before the war, and he was indeed the nonpolitical man of the title. The fact of war often focuses the attention on the issues involved and in some way radicalizes people who otherwise would be nonpolitical, and Mann was a man who was affected in this way. Mann believed that Germany, his country, was in the morally superior position and that the actions of the German people were morally correct. In this book, he tries to explain his feelings on this matter and to show the war was not a German invention, that Germany had in fact been attacked, and that the nature of the war was based on the fact that Germany was defending her culture and her wa

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n of Germany and German-ness is described by him as something that is itself German: . . .I am not completely forgetting that it is almost part of higher German culture to present oneself as un-German and even anti-German; that a tendency toward cosmopolitanism that undermines the sense of nationalism is. . . inseparable from the essence of German nationality. . . (48). These sorts of ambiguities--that to be German one must lose the sense of nationalism that is the essence of German nationality--color the argument throughout this book. The image of the writer that emerges is of a man struggling with his intellectual understanding in the face of the emotional and visceral power of the war. This struggle makes much of his discussion even more difficult, as if he has not yet made up his own mind as he offers his arguments to the reader. Again and again, though he is writing here about the strength of the German culture and character, he shows that the greatest proponents of the culture of the German character have included something un-German or have tired to be more than German. He cites the case of Wagner and states: Thus no matter how powerful and true Wagner's German character may be, it is refracted and broken up in a m
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Some common words found in the essay are:
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Approximate Word count = 1602
Approximate Pages = 6 (250 words per page)