At one point or another in the Reflections, Mann declares himself—or at least appears to declare himself—against most of the worldly, useful things I believe in. It’s dizzying. Among the things he says he’s against are democracy, including universal suffrage; civilization; liberalization; literalization; psychology; the Enlightenment (125 years after the fact, he’s still fighting the French Revolution—on the royalist side); the “perfection of our social contract;” reason itself; and politics themselves. What’s left? Well, there is something left, which I’ll come to in a moment. But here is the second reason I resolved to trek onward through the remnant: what, really, did he mean by these declarations? What was the context in which this formidable intellect, however disturbed and however conservative in temperament, might issue them? What world, in short, was Thomas Mann coming from at this “thundering turning point?” We know that much of his roiled state of mind owed to the bitter quarrel with his brother Heinrich, also a writer and thinker of standing, who had taken up the Allied cause and had publicly broken with Thomas over the war. As Lilla says in his intro, where Mann writes scornfully of “civilization’s literary man” (“Zivilationsliterat“), who believes that literature and politics have ultimately the same goal, we may as well read “Heinrich.” This sharp personal grievance (this “nagende Herzensnot,” in the words of Wagner’s Wotan) notwithstanding, the ideas are still the ideas, the opinions still the opinions. I hoped that by reading on, I might penetrate further into the culture that had shaped this mind, a culture I felt I had a rough handle on, but into which, in terms of any depth of comprehension, I quickly realized I’d barely ventured into the shallows.

Mann’s philosophical fathers were Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, and Wagner (Kant levitating in the background); in On the German Republic he harks back often to the mystical Novalis. His literary ideal was Goethe, followed by Schiller, Heine, and the other German Romantics. Beyond these, as we learn not only from the Reflections but from the essays that preceded and followed it, lay dozens of thinkers and writers with whom he had not just a familiarity, but an intimate understanding. They include all those that anyone who’s brushed up against German culture of the 18th and 19th Centuries have an awareness (Lessing, Fontane, Chamisso, Herder, Fichte and Feuerbach, et. al), but others whom only specialists would recognize (e. g., Herwegh, Stifter, Per Hallström, Emil Hammacher, Paul Lagarde). As the names surface, non-German ones enter the discussion: Macaulay, Taine, Ruskin, Carlyle. Dostoyevsky, another counter-Revolutionary, who knew firsthand of Tsarist injustice, oppression, and punishment, yet remained opposed to “radical cosmopolitanism,” is called to testify. Mann has not simply encountered these thinkers, or learned something of and from them; he has ingested them. This applies to his adversaries, too. When he attacks Romain Rolland, he does so in full understanding of his work, and there is always an undertone of a fellowship of artist-to-artist understanding beneath the contention.

Mann’s clearest statement about the distinction between “culture” and “civilization” comes in the opening of Thoughts in Wartime. I recommend reference to this passage as a whole, but will try to capture the gist of it here. “Civilization and culture,” says 1914 Mann, “are not only not the same, they are opposites.” He goes on: “Culture represents . . . a particular spiritual-intellectual organization of the world, no matter how adventurous, bizarre, wild, bloody, and terrible. Civilization, on the other hand, involves reason, enlightenment, moderation, moral education, skepticism—in a word, spirit.” Genius, Mann concedes, especially of the artistic sort, may embrace spirit. But it belongs “entirely to the other side, [to] an emanation of a deeper, darker, impassioned world whose transfiguration and taming through style we call culture [my italics] . . . Art, like all culture, is [my emphasis again] the sublimation of the daemonic.” Elsewhere, Mann cites approvingly a passage from a letter of Bizet’s, who is inveighing against civilization’s “perfection of our social contract:” “Miserable creatures that you are, your inevitable and inexorable progress [B.’s italics this time] is killing art! My poor art! I am sure of this . . . show me that we can have an art of reason, of truth, of exactness . . . To sum up briefly: art declines in proportion to the progress of reason . . . if you suppress the chimeras, then naturally imagination comes to an end. No more art!” 1914 Mann goes on to associate art with sex and religion, and then with war, and the artist with the soldier. (It’s here that many a modern reader will, understandably, snap the remnant shut. But it’s worth exploring where Mann thinks the connection lies.)