Thoughts on war: Thomas Mann – recognizing what is true (Published on 28/07/2023)
In addition to letters from the war and immediate post-war period, literature sources from the time also provide a vivid impression of what war means for people and what a high price all soldiers and their families have to pay in war – mostly in complete contrast to those who have politically fomented and initiated it. It is of central importance to keep alive the memory of the times of war and its consequences in order to prevent the same mechanisms from being set in motion once again and history from repeating itself with ever more fatal consequences.
On 17/08/1952, standing at the graves of the dead buried in the military cemetery in Hürtgen, the then German Federal President Theodor Heuss formulated the importance of war commemoration in his speech at the opening of this cemetery as follows (translated from German language):
“They were human beings like us. But at these crosses we hear their voices: ‘Take care, you who are still in life, that peace may remain, peace among men, peace among nations.’”
To this end, under the title “Thoughts on War”, excerpts from literature describing war and its consequences for those involved will be reproduced here as a reminder of what war means to man and mankind. To provide food for thought and in the unshakable hope that this may make a difference.
Hardly anyone has put into words the talents of the Germans on the one hand and their pitiful character trait, on the other, of following their political leadership with uncritical obedience even to the most unspeakable human abysses as aptly as Thomas Mann. Just as remarkable as disturbingly topical are his remarks in the preface to his daughter Erika Mann’s book “Zehn Millionen Kinder – Die Erziehung der Jugend im Dritten Reich” (English-language first edition published in 1938 under the title “School for Barbarians. Education under the Nazis”), where he writes the following (translation from German language):
“(…) The whole doggedness of today’s German leaders in the one idea of state power, their deadly determination to subordinate everything to this idea – if it is an idea – to let it determine the entire spiritual and mental life of the nation without any human reserve, is painted in the educational plan analysed here, which has been developed from many details that can only be characterised, and which is, after all, a programme for the future, the inexorable blueprint of the German image of man of tomorrow.
The whole fanatical prudence, consistency, accuracy, and completeness with which this one idea is put into practice educationally and applied to every single subject taught, so that it is never really about the subject itself, not the development of its contents in terms of educational possibilities, knowledge, and human advancement that constitutes the meaning of the lessons, but only its often enough forcibly established relations to the fixed idea of martial prowess and national supremacy. The result is clear: it is the radical and, in a vicious sense, ascetic denial of the spirit if we group together under this name the ideas of »truth«, »knowledge«, »justice«, i.e. surely the highest and purest goals of humanity. The definition of being German, which means doing something for its own sake, has lost all validity. The German youth does not have to devote itself to any cause for its own sake, but the occupation with any cause is politically conditioned, restricted and modelled, it is, under strict mortification of the objective sense of truth, related to an outside of the cause, a will that has to be the German will: the will of the state for absolute power over the minds within and for the spread of its power outwards.
A voluntarism of this kind, such a politicization of truth and research, instils a less moral than natural shudder. It has something convulsive, violent and unhealthy about it, which indicates how little it is actually in keeping with the nature of the people on whom it is imposed or who believe they must impose it on themselves. The glory of the German nation has always consisted in a freedom that is the opposite of patriotic narrow-mindedness: in a special relationship to the objective spirit. In it, the word could be spoken: »Patriotism corrupts history«. It was Goethe who spoke it. The actually un-political and super-political nature of this people, its actual vocation to the spirit, becomes clear precisely through the immoderateness, the »thoroughness« with which it today, according to the prescription of leaders for whom it costs nothing, renounces its best and classical qualities and sacrifices them to total politics. This people of the »middle« is in truth an extreme people. Politics? Power? Then nothing at all of spirit, truth, justice, free knowledge and education. It throws – heroically – its humanity overboard, in the opinion that this will get it in shape for world domination.
Is it not necessary to recall the words of Scripture: »What good would it do a man if he gained the whole world and yet suffered damage to his soul?« This word does not want to deny power; it only wants to recognize as true what is true: that power must have a content and meaning, an inner justification, in order to be real, humanly recognised and therefore tenable power, and that this justification always comes only from the spirit. Is it not hopeless and foolish to want to gain a good by means that completely undermine and devalue this desired good itself? How do the German people, how do their leaders imagine the exercise of a European hegemony paid for by moral and intellectual sacrifices, as demanded by the National Socialist educational plan? What about the vocation to power of a people that must make such sacrifices to gain it? A people that has to bring its lowest, basest, worst, crudest, most alienated and hostile to the spirit to the top, to give it absolute power over itself, in order to win the »world«?
Is the world to be won in such a way, even if one dominates it? Is it possible to exercise and maintain a power that would have to stand up to all the pressure of hatred and contempt that such means necessarily generate? Yes, is it not a sad illusion to believe from the outset that one can be victorious in the condition in which the German people today find themselves or allow themselves to be placed? A spiritually degraded and impoverished, morally reduced people, wanting to conquer the world. That is absurd. One does not outdo the others by going to the dogs, and nothing is more stupid than to consider all idealism mere stupidity. Truth and free research are not debilitating luxuries that make a people unfit for the struggle for life; they belong to life, they are the daily bread, and the slogan »True is what is useful to me« is a slogan of misery, an idealistic-anti-idealistic spasm with which one does not overreach and exploit anyone, but with which one degenerates at the greatest speed. The scientific decline of Germany, its rapid falling behind in all fields of the spirit, is already a public secret. It will come to an ominous conclusion and reach a comprehensive, irreparable practical effect if the terrible types who have a say in Germany today are given enough time to execute their malignant programme of education.
Let us hope with the author of this book that the nobler dispositions and needs of the German people will in time prevail against such false and anti-life impositions.
New York, 7 May 1938“
In 1938, this hope was disappointed. In 2023, unfortunately, things do not look much different.
(Head picture: German military cemetery Ysselsteyn/Netherlands, May 2023)
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