Memorial Day and Literary Memory: Reading Thomas Mann's Diaries in Trump's America

by Barbara Roether

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Munich was full of pale ochre buildings flowing out in long angular avenues, calm and uniform in a way that American cities rarely are. I was walking there with my eccentric painter friend Denis, who had beckoned me to come and help write his memoirs. He was eager to show me where he’d struggled and worked. “So that you’ll understand,” he said.

It was early spring and wildly optimistic green grasses sprouted along the sidewalks on Goethestrasse.  Even the cemetery there, the Alter Südfriedhof, was lush with blooming yellow mustard.  The cemetery had first been laid out for victims of the plague, in the 15th century, but where we walked now the elaborate gravestones were from the 19th century; mostly marked as scions of the brewing industry. They were the beer barons, the stolid burghers of German lore. They reminded me of the families Thomas Mann wrote about in his first novel Buddenbrooks, which brought him wealth and acclaim in his early 20’s. The novel seems hopelessly irrelevant today; lots of ham, damask, and bags of grain; a noble family brought low by artists, and typhoid. It’s set in Lubek, a port city on the Baltic where Mann’s prosperous family once held sway. But as an adult (until he was forced into exile) Mann lived and worked in Munich (1891-1933). My preparation for Denis’s project had consisted mainly of reading a lot of German novels, along with Olga Tokarczyk’s novel about the German novel, so these were on my mind.

Munich, and environs, is where Mann’s masterpiece Dr. Faustus takes place. I had tried to convince the artist to come with me to the Munich Cathedral to see the purported devil’s footprint outlined in the tile of the entrance hall there. He refused on the basis of being Jewish. German lore holds that the cathedral’s master builder made a pact with the devil for his soul’s immortality if only he would hold off on making any windows. The devil stepped into the cathedral to see if the promise was kept but didn’t get far before seeing he had been duped. I went to see for myself too. There were windows. 

Our day had started at the Löwenbräukeller, one of several famous old beer gardens where the Nazis liked to hold rallies. Denis found this highly amusing.   “Go inside and look around” he urged, “and don’t forget to look in the men’s restroom.”  I did as instructed, to discover that the toilets in the men’s room are red and yellow to match the German flag. I wondered if there was something subtle, or significant about pissing on the national colors.  I looked for other traces of history, but there were only dark stone stairways leading downward, and groups of beefy waiters standing by the kitchen in their lederhosen. There are no “plaques” in Munich commemorating the horrors that took place there, and that absence itself feels somewhat sinister.

Similarly, what make Dr. Faustus such a truly frightening novel, is not the actual presence of the devil, (a flashy show biz guy), but the unspoken threat of evil. In everything Mann describes, in the structure of music, in the innocence of children, in sex, or friendship, wherever there is passion or beauty we know to worry.  (The main action follows the life and downfall of Adrian Leverkund, a musical genius who trades his soul for ever more brilliant compositions). The narrative strands are layered one upon the other in a dark richness that is itself unsettling, everything feels tainted by everything else.

Dr. Faustus is, in one sense, Mann’s retrospective effort to explain what had happened in Germany leading up to Hitler. It’s a primer of sorts, into German intellectual history, with its conflicting Catholic and Protestant theologies, its pure intellects, its revolutionary zeal, its Nazi’s.  The ironic thing is that Mann wrote Dr. Faustus in 1945-1947, after the horrors of the war were over, in the comfort and safety of his sun-drenched home in Pacific Palisades, California.

 But somehow, the devil we’ve seen, and can explain is never as frightening as the one that keeps threatening to appear. When Denis and I were talking in Munich it seemed impossible that Trump could be reelected in the fall. But he had been.

It was soon after the inauguration when I picked up Thomas Mann’s Diaries (1918-1939) in a used bookstore. I was thinking Mann might provide some escape from the political headlines, but the Diaries as it turns out, echo our current troubles with uncanny precision. Mann gives us a real time account of the creeping, tainted spread of the authoritarian regime that he and so many others had to flee. It’s a book of stunning relevance to events in America today.

A devoted diarist, Mann made daily entries for much of his life, though he destroyed most of his diaries. The ones he chose to keep, from the war years, make a selection that is strangely prophetic, as if he knew we would need them. Apparently, he had labelled the box in his estate, “Diaries/ without literary merit.” by which he may have been suggesting that their true value was political.  He had won the Nobel Prize in 1929 and was a leading figure of German culture when, in 1933, criticism of the Nazi regime led to his initial exile. His passport was confiscated when he was on a lecture tour to Switzerland. The diaries begin with his ongoing concern & uncertainty about going back to Munich, where his family’s home and possessions are. The diaries record his exile through Switzerland, France, Sweden, and finally, starting in 1939 in the United States.

Mann’s claims that the diaries were without literary merit are false of course, it is his novelist’s telegraphic sense of detail and pith that make them so powerful, so intimate, Diaries have the special quality of (verisimilitude) the imprint somehow of the day they were written, the DNA of moments. Mann’s friends are exiled as the newspaper unfolds, after tea, when it’s raining outside. It gives him a headache. We feel the measure of these world events through his body, through his family’s urgent conversations, their travels. There is a tense aliveness to events. We are living inside his day, awake with him in the middle of the night when he goes to see what some noise was and encounters his naked adolescent son. How aroused he felt, how moved he was by the beauty of the boy’s body. We walk the dog with him. We listen in on his phone calls, find out he has washed his hair, find out his publisher was fined. Find out Poland has been invaded. 

Most prominently, Mann’s diaries trace the growing shock as he and his very civilized friends (Herman Hesse, Bruno Walter et al.) witness the unbelievable rise to power of Hitler and the Nazi political machine. The parallels between the events he describes, and our current situation is uncanny. There are always discussions about how far things will go, “certainly there will be international outrage if or “they wouldn’t dare.” But then they do. Reading the Diaries, it becomes impossible not to feel Mann’s growing sense of unease spread over our own. Depending on the day’s headlines, the diaries can resonate in multiple directions. What they remind me of, and what they might suggest to the reader is various, so I’ve tried to keep my comments minimal.

[April 20, 1933]

  “The events in Germany are constantly on my mind. Later on when I have liquidated my affairs there, I will surely write about this. The return of barbarism, in olden times introduced by primitive peoples from elsewhere now introduced by deliberate choice as “revolution” with the help of a youth strongly conditioned to think in simplistic terms. The expulsion of middle-class, human intellectual elements, …But this regime lacks any feeling for moral imponderables. To them cleverness consists in believing only in power politics, and the action in the House of Commons is taken to be only a ploy of some sort. This is the greatest stupidity of all.“

Proud boys, January 6th. What more “simplistic terms” can there be than blue and red?  Our schools fail to teach anything like critical thinking, the young men who voted for Trump have nothing like an intellectual life. Moral imponderables? This morning we had news of a 7 year old with cancer being deported without his mother. The disdain Musk (the “smartest guy”) and DOGE show for our government, our courts, and the rule of law, as if the whole apparatus is a woke conspiracy, “a ploy of some sort,” still may be the “greatest stupidity of all”.

[Friday June 2, 1933]

"Burning the works of Sigmund Freud in Dresden as a demonstration against the “soul destroying over valuation of drives for idealism” …When it is precisely such drives that the anti-intellectual movement holds sacred. A disgruntled but well-meaning petty bourgeoisie is forever at odds with the barbaric, dynamic, and irrational aspects of the movement."

A few days ago I spoke with my niece, a Berkeley neuroscientist whose years long research had just been defunded. “Science is struggling,” she noted. It struck me that the extreme aspects of the movement want, and need, science to struggle, so that their irrational claims can flourish. Science and reason challenge, and confuse those holding baseless beliefs. Mann’s novels are full of  this conflict between reason and hysteria. Liberals rarely stress that the conservative/red states are, by and large, the welfare states; that they contribute less to the GDP and are supported by the innovation and energy of the educated “liberals."

[Saturday August 4, 1933]

"Low hanging clouds. Rain and wind all day long….Once more worked on the political notes but probably will be unable to continue feeling the uselessness of the whole undertaking, and deeply depressed by the wretched and senseless developments, by Hitler’s successful coup d’etat and the obvious impressions his triumphs make. It is all too ludicrous and disgusting and I do wrong to let it affect me so. ….Many see danger in the ruthless enforcement of National Socialist ideals that may now take place. But no, the dog can enforce nothing as he does not know how. But he and his system will keep going and “the power” will remain in his hands, power for it’s own sake, empty of content and purpose. … Penetrating cold, caused by the endless rain. Repositioned my writing desk so that the light comes onto it from the left."

It surprised me that incompetence and mismanagement was also part of the Nazi’s progress. We tend to think of them as so well organized; while Trump’s constant reversals on tariffs and federal agencies, seem unique to his stupidity. Mann’s note reminds us that authoritarians rarely know what they are doing or might be able to get away with. They stop only when forced to. This section also reminds me of the one moment of fun Trump has given us, when the Danish parliament reacts with widespread guffaws of laughter to his suggestion that he buy Greenland. “It is all too ludicrous!”

[November 10, 1935]

"Angered over the Germanic blood humbug of the writer Burte, who pleads for understanding for Germany’s Renaissance. It is too idiotic. Name me anything about Germany that a writer might rightfully experience and refer to as a “Renaissance.”

When questioned on the administration’s brutal disregard for the rule of law, Trump’s spokesperson keeps using the phrase, “We are making America great again, “ then repeats “This is what the American people voted for.”  A claim made as hundreds of thousands of Americans are in the streets protesting.

[Thursday August 13, 1936]

“At dinner discussed with the boys the fact that basically all the higher and better minds the world over find fascism abhorrent. And that no revolution or world movement thus condemned by the intellect can be genuine or historically meaningful. Or has the world changed in this regard, so that there is now some dynamic force other than the mind, over which the mind and its critical intelligence have not the slightest influence? Is it obsolete idealism to hold that this cannot be so? The two half-grown kittens we have just acquired named Pizzi and Cato, are extremely comical with each other.”

Social media, and the materialism of late stage capitalism, seems to have replaced “critical intelligence” some time ago. Does this mean we are in a weaker position to fight facism?  Shall we throw in AI?  When Mann mentions here that fascism can’t be historically meaningful, we know this was written before the holocaust. Does it seem quaint now to talk to children about the forward moral progress of humanity? And why are kittens always the answer to our angst?

  The last entries here sample the varied richness, and timeliness of the “Diaries” for American readers today. If you’ve been to any of the recent demonstrations you might have heard the introductory chant of “This is what democracy looks like,” if you want to know what rising fascism looks like, Thomas Mann's diaries can show you.

[November 12, 1935]

"What I dread more than…anything else that has served the purposes of Nazi propaganda so far are the Olympic Games, the winter portion of which is to begin in January, in Garmisch and threatens to become a vast advertisement of the Third Reich. If only their wretched and cynical lie of bringing peace and friendship to the world could be exposed!"

[January 16, 1936]

“Remarkable article in the Neue Zurcher Zeitung on Sorel’s study on violence. Interesting that he should have anticipated many elements of fascism, for instance the idea of the “mythos” the political fiction that captivates the masses though flying in the face of truth and common sense."

[May 13, 1936 ]

"Spoke with Benes…. I remarked that the Nazi’s knew only two principles, lies and terror. He remarked that he had been under the impression that they had no principles at all, which is also nice to hear. Have crossed the border. Our papers and luggage have been checked."

[September 19, 1939 Princeton]

“We made it” (the Mann’s had arrived two days earlier on September 18. Journalists and photographers greeted the ship to photograph Thomas). After shaving at noon took a walk with Katia in hot sun. Before lunch listened on the radio to Hitler’s speech in Danzig; the expected peace offensive, the web of lies, frequent invocation of God. Utterly repulsive. Good lunch. Coffee out in the garden."

The Men's Room in the Lowenbrauhoff, Munich. All photos by Barbara Roether

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BIBLIOGRAPHIC NOTE:

Thomas Mann Diaries: 1918-1939: Selection and Foreword by Herman Kesten, Translated from the German by Richard and Clara Winston. Published by Robin Clark Ltd. 1984. The book is currently out of print but isn’t hard to find on-line. This English edition is a selection from the longer collection of diary entries that make up the original German edition. A primer in the developments of 20th century European literature as well as politics can be found in the excellent annotations and notes first assembled by Peter de Mendelsssohn for the German edition and included here.