Thomas Mann sits in his study, thinking and writing, consciously and deliberately distancing himself from the distractions of daily life around him. This is how the great author is portrayed in many books. But, as Kai Sina points out, an important facet is missing: Thomas Mann was also a political activist who passionately argued that it is everyone's responsibility not just to endure politics, but to make it their own cause. “It has been placed in our hands,” he declared to the opponents of the democratic state in 1922, “in the hands of each individual.”
Thomas Mann’s complex political engagement is particularly evident in the debate about Zionism. As early as the 1920s, he was a member of a pro-Zionist support group. After the Second World War, he emphatically advocated for the founding of a Jewish state that would offer the survivors of the Shoah—a horror and scale that Thomas Mann, as one of the first intellectuals, had named before the world—a safe homeland. In Kai Sina’s masterfully written portrait, this lesser-known side of Thomas Mann comes vividly and compellingly to life, revealing his full humanity.
Kai Sina, born in 1981 in Flensburg, is the Lichtenberg Professor of Modern German Literature and Comparative Literature at the University of Münster, where he also heads the Thomas Mann Research Center. Together with Hans Rudolf Vaget (Northampton, USA), he is editing the essays Thomas Mann wrote in American exile (1939–1945). The volume will appear as part of the Great Annotated Frankfurt Edition of Thomas Mann’s works (GKFA).
Moderator: Friedhelm Marx, Bamberg