The good European in the Great War: Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man and the politics of self,nation and Europe

Abstract

This article interprets Thomas Mann’s Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (1918) as a document of the reimagining of self, nation and Europe during the First World War. In this messy and mostly forgotten work, Thomas Mann created an identity that he adopted for the rest of his life: the artist-intellectual as the self-overcoming decadent and saviour of culture. He did this by mapping his heroic vision of Germany as the saviour of Europe onto his own artistic ethic of the self-overcoming decadent. I show how the Reflections allowed Mann to probe the unanswered questions operative in his own work and in his conflicting identities as an artist, an intellectual, a German and a European. Constructing the crisis of modernity according to the opposition of décadence v. Bildung, Mann called for a particularly German and artistic irony to mediate this conflict and preserve the authentic identities of self, nation and Europe. This heroic irony – used as a conservative defence of German culture during the war – would become, ironically, the basis of Mann’s endorsement of the Weimar Republic in 1922 and his future identity as a defender of liberal Europe.