Conservative at the Crossroads

Abstract

This essay addresses the question of whether Thomas Mann and his major political work, Reflections of a Non-Political Man (1918), have a place in the intellectual heritage of the movement commonly known as the ‘Conservative Revolution’. It describes how Thomas Mann, during the Great War and the ensuing German revolution, found himself in a dilemma characteristic of the bourgeois conservatism of that time. Whilst many of his contemporaries increasingly radicalized their position, this essay argues that Mann’s irony was not only a literary device, but led him towards a moderate political position which, although it was not fully articulated until after the war, can be traced to Reflections. Drawing on Reflections and Mann’s correspondence and diaries of that period, as well as on previous scholarship both on Mann and on German conservatism, this essay argues that not only was and is Mann unsuitable for appropriation by the extreme right, but that the very concept of the ‘Conservative Revolution’ should be reconsidered.