What is good and what is evil

At what moment does a democracy begin to falter? When do arguments in public discourse no longer suffice, and when does resistance become a moral imperative? These were the questions confronting Thomas Mann in the autumn of 1930. For his GERMAN ADDRESS, subtitled AN APPEAL TO REASON, Mann returned to Berlin’s Beethoven Hall—the very venue where, eight years earlier, he had delivered his speech ON THE GERMAN REPUBLIC, a passionate endorsement of democracy.

The backdrop to this return was stark: the National Socialist German Workers’ Party (NSDAP) had achieved a dramatic surge in votes during the Reichstag election on September 14, 1930. Nearly one-fifth of voters had now endorsed Adolf Hitler and his party—an extraordinary leap from just 2.6 percent two years earlier.

For Mann, this electoral outcome marked not only a watershed moment for Germany but also for his own political engagement. The figure of 18.3 percent transformed Mann from a staunch defender of republican democracy into an outspoken activist and antifascist.

Urgent existential concerns

Mann opened his address with what appeared to be an unequivocal disclaimer: “I am not a follower of relentless social activism,” he declared to his audience. While the age of aesthetic idealism had irrevocably passed, he argued, this did not necessitate accepting an “activist equation of idealism and frivolity.” This defensive posture served as a rhetorical device, designed to make the exception to his general principle appear inevitable. In his words:

Yet there are hours, moments in communal life when such justification of art practically fails, when the artist cannot proceed inwardly because immediate thoughts of crisis push aside artistic contemplation, when the emergency afflicting society shakes him so profoundly that the playfully passionate immersion in eternal human truths—what we call art—truly takes on the temporal character of luxury and idleness and becomes psychologically impossible.

“Urgent existential concerns,” “collective distress”—beneath the eloquent flow of his words, the severity with which Mann described Germany's social condition in 1930 almost becomes obscured. Yet against this backdrop, his almost Luther-like stance emerges in full pathos: He could do no other. The fundamental aim of his speech was to explain the rise of National Socialism while simultaneously dismantling its legitimacy through rhetoric.

Swift, Sharp, Precise

“Purely economic factors,” Thomas Mann began his confrontation with Nazism, could not explain this phenomenon—it was not merely a consequence of unemployment, hunger, and cold that had come to define social life in the wake of the Great Depression. Such an explanation, he insisted, would be far too simplistic.

Instead, he identified two converging forces at play. On one hand, there was a pseudo-intellectual program emerging from the “academic-professorial sphere,” steeped in “mystical small-mindedness and grotesque tastelessness.” This ideology, with its vocabulary of 'racial,' 'völkisch' (folkish/nationalist), 'bündisch' (youth-league ethos), and 'heroic,' had 'waterlogged and glued shut' the minds of Germans in 1930. On the other hand, there was a “massive wave of eccentric barbarism and primitive, mass-democratic carnival vulgarity” that had engulfed society—a world defined by consumerism, nervous energy, technology, noise, and the unbridled chaos of modernity. From this toxic fusion arose a grotesque and orgiastic style of politics: “Fanaticism becomes salvation; enthusiasm turns into epileptic ecstasy […], and reason hides its face.”

The activism of Mann’s address was evident not only in his explicit denunciations but also in his language itself. With a compressed and rapid-fire nominal style, Mann unleashed a barrage of vivid descriptions to dismantle his target. Words like “fanaticism,” “salvation,” and “ecstasy” were wielded as rhetorical weapons in an unrelenting assault. His rhetoric was unmistakably combative—a clean hit: swift, sharp, precise.

Enemies in Evening Wear

In his GERMAN ADDRESS, the distinction between good and evil emerges through both rhetoric and performance. This marks a stark departure from his speech on the republic eight years earlier, delivered in the same venue—a choice of location that carries its own subtle significance. While his previous address sought to “win over” his audience through democratic debate and reasoned argument, Mann now confronted a political and social phenomenon that defied democratic discourse. He faced not political opponents in 1930, but enemies.

These enemies were present that October evening in Berlin in more than just a metaphorical sense. Among the bourgeois audience lurked a group of agitators, including the brothers Ernst and Friedrich Georg Jünger. They were joined by twenty SA men in borrowed tuxedos, dispatched to the hall on Joseph Goebbels' personal orders. What began as occasional heckling soon erupted into general chaos, eventually requiring police intervention. A now-famous photograph captures the scene: as the audience turns to investigate the commotion in the back rows, Thomas Mann stands at the podium, his face frozen in a stony expression. It must have been chilling to witness the very thing he had warned against in his speech materializing before his eyes: the violent suppression of democratic discourse.

Despite calls for him to abandon his speech amidst the uproar, Mann refused to yield—a decision rooted in his belief that doing so would signify defeat both as a speaker and as a democrat. Nevertheless, fearing for his safety, he left swiftly after delivering his final sentence.

Fake News against the opponent

The Nazi press deliberately weaponized the evening's now-famous photograph to spread disinformation. Their fabricated narrative claimed that the audience had turned away from Mann in protest, that no one wished to hear his APPEAL TO REASON, and that he stood isolated in his political convictions.

The reality proved starkly different. The audience's sustained applause had actually helped thwart attempts to disrupt the event. The Nazi propaganda machine's lies served a single purpose: to transform their failed disruption into a perceived victory in the media.

For Thomas Mann's political trajectory, the Beethoven Hall address marked a point of no return. He emerged transformed from the experience, his position as a public adversary of National Socialism now irrevocable. The fundamental questions he posed—when does a democracy begin to falter, and what conclusions must be drawn—had found their answer in his own resolute stance.