The Reflections is not an overly friendly read, even for a culturally curious reader. As Lilla notes, “[it] is the least-read and least-loved of Thomas Mann’s works. Most readers today will find the reactionary political views he expressed in it repellent, as Mann himself eventually did.” Not only that: it presents the spectacle of a truly superior, dauntingly educated mind and a writing genius of a particularly orderly and elegant kind in an alarming state of disarray, tortured and unmoored, floundering amid all sorts of confusions, qualifications, and needless repetitions. Mann was aware of this, declining to dignify his reflections as a “book” or a “work,” but rather “a remainder,” or “remnant,” of “a trail of suffering,” the end product of being “drafted,” not by the army or the state, “but by the times themselves: to more than two years of military service of the mind.” Still, he went ahead and published this remnant, which occupies twelve sections totaling 490 pages. Fortunately, the new edition includes Mann’s Thoughts in Wartime (1914, translated by Lilla and Cosima Mattner) and On the German Republic (1922, translated by Lawrence Rainey), which thus bracket the Reflections (1918), showing us the before and after of his dark night, and—agree or not with the views expressed—evincing the clarity and organization we expect from him.

There were two reasons, beyond a longstanding reverence for the author and a wish to see him through to the other side of his torment, that kept me plowing ahead through a “remnant” that did not so much repel me as dumfound me. One was a connection I immediately felt to Mann’s sense that a turning point in his own life (arrival at the age of 40—the life expectancy of the German male in1914 was about 47 years) coincided with “a thundering turning point in the world.” Mann knew that the world of the culture that had formed him as person and artist would be radically transformed by the war, no matter the military outcome. At the same time, some part of him, a deep part, wanted to deny this. The enthusiasm for the war shown in Thoughts in Wartime partakes of a fantasy of the triumph of the old culture. And no doubt it would have been possible, as a German, to have found the building blocks for such a fantasy, if one went searching for them. Germany, in Mann’s vision, had been “the protesting nation” since the time of Arminius, wedged between Eastern and Western Europe, holding back the tide of the Western “political-imperial” (indeed, the democratic-imperial) civilization, with its cant about the Family of Man and its “humbug-like side noises,” in the name of a spiritual culture that embraced a “German primeval individuality.” Mann was by no means entranced by the Bismarckian Greater German state (b. 1871, just four years before Mann’s birth), fearing that whereas the pre-unification Germans had constituted a culture without a state, they were now in danger of becoming a state without a culture. Nevertheless, there was no gainsaying the fact that Bismarck had accomplished this, had “put Germany into the saddle,” and that “now she must ride, for she must not fall.” It might not be altogether desirable, but it was necessary. And after all, Bismarck’s Prussia had triumphed in every conflict it had entered.