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The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton
A unique look at Thomas Mann’s intellectual and political transformation during the crucial years of his exile in the United States
In September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain , fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Heralded as “the greatest living man of letters,” Mann settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where, for nearly three years, he was stunningly productive as a novelist, university lecturer, and public intellectual. In The Mind in Exile , Stanley Corngold portrays in vivid detail this crucial station in Mann’s journey from arch-European conservative to liberal conservative to ardent social democrat.
On the knife-edge of an exile that would last fully fourteen years, Mann declared, “Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me.” At Princeton, Mann nourished an authentic German culture that he furiously observed was “going to the dogs” under Hitler. Here, he wrote great chunks of his brilliant novel Lotte in Weimar ( The Beloved Returns ); the witty novella The Transposed Heads ; and the first chapters of Joseph the Provider , which contain intimations of his beloved President Roosevelt’s economic policies. Each of Mann’s university lectures―on Goethe, Freud, Wagner―attracted nearly 1,000 auditors, among them the baseball catcher, linguist, and O.S.S. spy Moe Berg. Meanwhile, Mann had the determination to travel throughout the United States, where he delivered countless speeches in defense of democratic values.
In Princeton, Mann exercised his “stupendous capacity for work” in a circle of friends, all highly accomplished exiles, including Hermann Broch, Albert Einstein, and Erich Kahler. The Mind in Exile portrays this luminous constellation of intellectuals at an extraordinary time and place.
In September 1938, Thomas Mann, the Nobel Prize–winning author of Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain , fled Nazi Germany for the United States. Heralded as “the greatest living man of letters,” Mann settled in Princeton, New Jersey, where, for nearly three years, he was stunningly productive as a novelist, university lecturer, and public intellectual. In The Mind in Exile , Stanley Corngold portrays in vivid detail this crucial station in Mann’s journey from arch-European conservative to liberal conservative to ardent social democrat.
On the knife-edge of an exile that would last fully fourteen years, Mann declared, “Where I am, there is Germany. I carry my German culture in me.” At Princeton, Mann nourished an authentic German culture that he furiously observed was “going to the dogs” under Hitler. Here, he wrote great chunks of his brilliant novel Lotte in Weimar ( The Beloved Returns ); the witty novella The Transposed Heads ; and the first chapters of Joseph the Provider , which contain intimations of his beloved President Roosevelt’s economic policies. Each of Mann’s university lectures―on Goethe, Freud, Wagner―attracted nearly 1,000 auditors, among them the baseball catcher, linguist, and O.S.S. spy Moe Berg. Meanwhile, Mann had the determination to travel throughout the United States, where he delivered countless speeches in defense of democratic values.
In Princeton, Mann exercised his “stupendous capacity for work” in a circle of friends, all highly accomplished exiles, including Hermann Broch, Albert Einstein, and Erich Kahler. The Mind in Exile portrays this luminous constellation of intellectuals at an extraordinary time and place.
280 pages, Hardcover
Published March 8, 2022
About the author
Stanley Corngold
38 books47 followersStanley Corngold is a professor emeritus of German and comparative literature at Princeton University and a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His highly acclaimed translations include Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis and Kafka's Selected Stories. He lives in Princeton, New Jersey.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
January 2, 2025
In his latest book, Stanley Corngold, professor emeritus of comparative literature at Princeton and one of the foremost living scholars of Franz Kafka, forays into the life of another twentieth-century literary giant – Thomas Mann – to look at the three formative years (1938-1941) he spent in Princeton, New Jersey. It was during these years at Princeton that the final steps in his conversion from a nationalist archconservative in the European mold to an ardent social democrat took place.
Mann was in Switzerland in 1933 when he first learned from two of his children that Hitler had seized power and that his return to Germany, to say the least, would be ill-advised. In the years during and shortly after World War I, Mann never explicitly espoused the nationalism that was in the air, but he did act like he was above the political fray, as the title of his series of essays Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (first published in 1918), suggests. In these essays, he washed his hands of politics in a Pontius Pilate gesture, claiming that the job of the intellectual was moral and cultural guidance, not engagement with the vulgar and political. That would all change with the rise of National Socialism. Learning that the new leader of your country has proclaimed you an enemy of the state does have an odd way of politically galvanizing you.
Instead of returning home to Germany, he went to Switzerland where he remained until the verge of World War II, when he finally moved to Princeton in 1938. Here, he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Einstein, historian Erich Kahler, and fellow novelist Hermann Broch. This is where Corngold’s story of Mann begins. Aside from his teaching duties at the university and his novel writing (he wrote “Lotte in Weimar,” “The Transposed Heads,” and the final volume of “Joseph and His Brothers” there), Mann produces an impressive number of political essays in which he bemoaned what was happening to Germany. He also traveled the United States and gave dozens of radio addresses which Mann referred to as “rocks thrown into Hitler’s window.”
Chapter 2 (“Reflections of a Political Man”), which takes up 120 pages of Corngold’s 216-page book, contains an analysis of the major speeches and articles that Mann produced in this short period. The common themes are obvious: the threat of appeasement in the form of the 1938 Munich Pact, National Socialism as both a sign of moral and intellectual crisis and an existential danger to the possibility of Bildung (or, what concerned Mann more, the “German spirit”), and the moral and artistic duty of intellectuals to fight all strains of totalitarian thought and support democracy. Mann also advocated for the United States to take up a more assertive, stabilizing role in protecting democracy around the world. While he understood the isolationist sentiments in the United States leading up to World War II, he criticized Roosevelt for waiting until 1941 to declare war.
While Mann’s politics did take a turn toward the humanist, international and democratic, they always kept their patina of elite European conservatism. Judging from his articles and speeches alone, Mann was more concerned with the protection of artistic freedoms than political ones. While far from a zealot, he also thought Christianity had a unique role in promoting the values that undergirded his humanist project. While it can be argued that he became more secular in his later years, he never stopped believing that Christianity was central to “Western” ideas of ethics and personhood. Nevertheless, the shift his politics took on in the interwar years amounted to a sea change so drastic that even after the defeat of Hitler at the end of the war, he still chose not to return to his home country, at least partially because he was so sickened at what Germany had allowed to happen.
Despite Corngold’s handwaving about Mann’s supposed full-throated conversion to democracy, there are aspects of the book that remain not fully fleshed out or that Mann hadn’t fully considered himself. There are several times, for example, in Mann’s articles where he displays a tin-eared concern with artistic expression while barely mentioning that Hitler was engaged in systematic genocide. Mann spoke out against Hitler, but it was usually because of the harm that he was doing to intellectual freedom or the amorphous thing he calls the “German Spirit.” Consequently, despite it taking the cataclysmic entry of Hitler into German life to register Mann’s interest in politics, his concern never rises above that of the woolly, disinterested intellectual watching things unfold from afar. For all his opposition to Nazi Germany, Mann’s furor was much more directed at totalitarian thought and how it targeted him as an artist specifically than it was ever at the idea that millions of people were killed in the name of racial “purification.”
Mann may have never known what it was like to live under Hitler until he discovered that his time in the United States had earned him a 100-page long file compiled by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) under the assumption that he held Communist sympathies. Only then, when he himself had suddenly become the subject of suspicion, did he finally realize that no one was safe from the pernicious logic of fascism. By then, the war had already been won and lost. If anything, Mann’s transition into a political figure during the rise of Hitler can only serve as an object lesson for the rest of us: when you speak out for yourself, ensure that your own narrow sense of privilege doesn’t prevent you from also speaking out for others in times when they need it most.
Mann was in Switzerland in 1933 when he first learned from two of his children that Hitler had seized power and that his return to Germany, to say the least, would be ill-advised. In the years during and shortly after World War I, Mann never explicitly espoused the nationalism that was in the air, but he did act like he was above the political fray, as the title of his series of essays Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (first published in 1918), suggests. In these essays, he washed his hands of politics in a Pontius Pilate gesture, claiming that the job of the intellectual was moral and cultural guidance, not engagement with the vulgar and political. That would all change with the rise of National Socialism. Learning that the new leader of your country has proclaimed you an enemy of the state does have an odd way of politically galvanizing you.
Instead of returning home to Germany, he went to Switzerland where he remained until the verge of World War II, when he finally moved to Princeton in 1938. Here, he rubbed shoulders with the likes of Einstein, historian Erich Kahler, and fellow novelist Hermann Broch. This is where Corngold’s story of Mann begins. Aside from his teaching duties at the university and his novel writing (he wrote “Lotte in Weimar,” “The Transposed Heads,” and the final volume of “Joseph and His Brothers” there), Mann produces an impressive number of political essays in which he bemoaned what was happening to Germany. He also traveled the United States and gave dozens of radio addresses which Mann referred to as “rocks thrown into Hitler’s window.”
Chapter 2 (“Reflections of a Political Man”), which takes up 120 pages of Corngold’s 216-page book, contains an analysis of the major speeches and articles that Mann produced in this short period. The common themes are obvious: the threat of appeasement in the form of the 1938 Munich Pact, National Socialism as both a sign of moral and intellectual crisis and an existential danger to the possibility of Bildung (or, what concerned Mann more, the “German spirit”), and the moral and artistic duty of intellectuals to fight all strains of totalitarian thought and support democracy. Mann also advocated for the United States to take up a more assertive, stabilizing role in protecting democracy around the world. While he understood the isolationist sentiments in the United States leading up to World War II, he criticized Roosevelt for waiting until 1941 to declare war.
While Mann’s politics did take a turn toward the humanist, international and democratic, they always kept their patina of elite European conservatism. Judging from his articles and speeches alone, Mann was more concerned with the protection of artistic freedoms than political ones. While far from a zealot, he also thought Christianity had a unique role in promoting the values that undergirded his humanist project. While it can be argued that he became more secular in his later years, he never stopped believing that Christianity was central to “Western” ideas of ethics and personhood. Nevertheless, the shift his politics took on in the interwar years amounted to a sea change so drastic that even after the defeat of Hitler at the end of the war, he still chose not to return to his home country, at least partially because he was so sickened at what Germany had allowed to happen.
Despite Corngold’s handwaving about Mann’s supposed full-throated conversion to democracy, there are aspects of the book that remain not fully fleshed out or that Mann hadn’t fully considered himself. There are several times, for example, in Mann’s articles where he displays a tin-eared concern with artistic expression while barely mentioning that Hitler was engaged in systematic genocide. Mann spoke out against Hitler, but it was usually because of the harm that he was doing to intellectual freedom or the amorphous thing he calls the “German Spirit.” Consequently, despite it taking the cataclysmic entry of Hitler into German life to register Mann’s interest in politics, his concern never rises above that of the woolly, disinterested intellectual watching things unfold from afar. For all his opposition to Nazi Germany, Mann’s furor was much more directed at totalitarian thought and how it targeted him as an artist specifically than it was ever at the idea that millions of people were killed in the name of racial “purification.”
Mann may have never known what it was like to live under Hitler until he discovered that his time in the United States had earned him a 100-page long file compiled by the House Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC) under the assumption that he held Communist sympathies. Only then, when he himself had suddenly become the subject of suspicion, did he finally realize that no one was safe from the pernicious logic of fascism. By then, the war had already been won and lost. If anything, Mann’s transition into a political figure during the rise of Hitler can only serve as an object lesson for the rest of us: when you speak out for yourself, ensure that your own narrow sense of privilege doesn’t prevent you from also speaking out for others in times when they need it most.
February 25, 2024
Thoughts on The Mind in Exile. It is frightening how ineffective the loud and anguished arguments and protests of Germany’s intellectual elite were against the barbarisms of Hitler and his mass followers, and how passive and acquiescent the burgeoning upper middle and capitalist classes were in turning a blind eye.
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