Letters

For a year, however, I have read almost only essays and non-fiction. Perhaps it’s because the book I’m currently writing refuses to become a novel, or perhaps it’s my age. Not all essays age well; that goes for Thomas Mann too, but with such a large body of work and a no less complicated personality, that is no great surprise. I too reserve the right to alter my opinion.

I am working on a very personal piece about my grandmother’s escape from the Wehrmacht, her survival, the Shoah, and my relationship to Germany. There is of course plenty of writing on this subject already, and I don’t think mine has anything extraordinary to add. And yet there is Maria Stepanova’s In Memory of Memory, featuring a passage in which the narrator describes her research in the Washington Holocaust Museum: A historian asks about her book, and once she has finished explaining, the man says merely that it’s another book in which the writer goes around the world in search of her roots, and that there are plenty of those already.¹ The narrator replies that there will soon be another. That passage brought me great consolation.

Particularly interesting for my work is the Letter to Germany: Why I Am Not Returning to Germany. And, of course, Thomas Mann’s style and literary motifs have deeply influenced me, though I find it increasingly difficult to view my own work in retrospect. I have not yet reread any of my books after they went to print – apart from the short passages I read aloud at events. And I often entirely forget what I actually wrote, once the books are published. That makes it easier for me to focus on what is important for my work at any given moment – and right now, that is the Letter to Germany.

Thomas Mann went into exile in 1933, first to Switzerland, then to the USA. During the war, he took a clear stance against the Nazi regime and gave many political speeches, including some surprisingly polemical ones, including for the BBC. The Letter to Germany is a response to an open letter by the writer Walter von Molo, who had called on Thomas Mann to return to Germany as early as August 1945, stating his opinion that the Germans bore no collective guilt and millions had been unable to leave their country because there was no other place for them »than at home.« And then Molo also compares life in Germany to that in a concentration camp, betraying his utter fixation with the Germans’ »unspeakable suffering.« Shortly after that came an intervention by Frank Thieß, a well-known writer at the time, accusing emigrated writers in the Münchener Zeitung of watching »the German tragedy from the boxes and stalls of foreign lands.«² An impressively repulsive statement.

Thomas Mann responded: »Can these twelve years and their events be wiped from the slate and can we pretend they never happened?«³ His position on internal emigration was equally clear: »The individual, if he did not happen to be Jewish, always faced the question: ›Why though? The others are playing along. It can’t be all that dangerous.‹«⁴

The same reflexes are at work today; it is often said there has to be an end to the commemorations and the shame, that those Germans born after the Shoah are blessed with innocence, or that the Nazi regime was merely a »bird-shit in over a thousand years of successful German history.« It seems Thomas Mann has not earned himself a place in today’s imagined canon of German leitkultur. And yet the Letter to Germany boasts clear argumentation and style, the opposite of the present-day zeitgeist of certain political representatives. And that’s what I find so impressive about many of Thomas Mann’s essays, his clear positioning, always political but never co-opted, and expressing all that in brilliant style while arguing with utter stringency.

My relationship to Germany is not exactly a love story. I emigrated from Azerbaijan to Germany with my parents and brother in 1996; we were Jewish quota refugees. None of us wanted to come to Germany; my mother, the daughter of a Shoah survivor, said at the time: »The ashes are still warm.« But as Azerbaijani passport-holders, we had limited possibilities – and Germany was at least part of Europe. There was no war here and my brother and I would have better opportunities, my parents hoped. I stayed in Germany, though I still have regular fantasies about leaving the country. But where would I go?

I have not solved this dilemma; it has only intensified. I became a German-language novelist who can only write in German. My children were born in Germany and are growing up here. My ambivalence toward Germany is a thread running through my life. I am raising my children multilingually, not so that they’ll have better career chances or because it’s a matter of identity, but because I don’t trust this country. Thomas Mann writes: »I am now an American citizen and I declared publicly and privately long before Germany’s terrible defeat that I did not intend to turn my back on America ever again. My children, of whom two sons are still serving in the U.S. Army, are rooted in this country; English-speaking grandchildren are growing up around me.«⁵

Most of what Thomas Mann wrote about exile and Germany in World War II is essential for my present work. This unease, and perhaps also the will (and for many also the impossibility) for reconciliation that Thomas Mann formulates at the end of his letter is also the foundation of contemporary German-language literature and our entire society. That, aside from his novels, is where his work is most current. Not only for me.

Thomas Mann did leave the USA in the end, settling in Switzerland. His new country distrusted him too; he had to appear before the Committee for Un-American Activities and was described in Congress as Stalin’s defender. The »enrooting« did not work.

1 Stepanova, Maria: In Memory of Memory, tr. Sasha Dugdale, Fitzcarraldo Editions 2021
2 Rüther, Günther: Die Unmächtigen, Schriftsteller und Intellektuelle seit 1945, BPB 2016, 42f.
3 Mann, Thomas: Brief nach Deutschland: Warum ich nicht nach Deutschland zurückgehe, Fischer Verlag, Kindl-Ausgabe, 20.
4 Mann, Thomas: Brief nach Deutschland: Warum ich nicht nach Deutschland zurückgehe, Fischer Verlag, Kindl-Ausgabe, 32.
5 Mann, Thomas: Brief nach Deutschland: Warum ich nicht nach Deutschland zurückgehe, Fischer Verlag, Kindl-Ausgabe, 45