Laudator Temporis Acti

Thomas Mann (1875-1955), Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, tr. Walter D. Morris, from the Prologue:

“We Germans,” civilization’s literary man says in a manifesto that appeared at the turn of the years 1917–18, “now that we have grown up to democracy, have the greatest experience of all before us. A nation does not reach self-government without learning much about human nature and without managing life with more mature organs. The play of social forces lies in nations that govern themselves in full public view with the individuals educating one another and learning about each other. But if we act now at home, the barriers abroad will also soon fall; European distances will become shorter, and we will see our fellow nations as family members travelling the same paths. As long as we persisted in the national status quo, they seemed to us to be enemies—doomed because they did not also persist. Has not every revolution come just before the end? Was it not ruin to try to realize ideas in battles and crises? This destiny shall now be ours as well . . .”

What unspeakably painful resistance rises up in my inner being before this hostile gentleness, before all this beautifully stylized unpleasantness? Should one not laugh? After all, is not every sentence, every word in it, false, translated, basically mistaken, grotesque self-deception—the confusion of the wishes, instincts, and needs of a novelist who has been spiritually naturalized in France with German reality? “This destiny shall now be ours as well!” A sublime and brilliant but basically Latinized literary man who long ago renounced every feeling for the particular ethos of his people, yes, who even ridicules the recognition of such a special national ethos as bestial nationalism, and who opposes it with his humanitarian-democratic civilization and “social” internationalism.

The manifesto was written by his own brother — Heinrich Mann, "Leben, nicht Zerstörung," Berliner Tageblatt, Jg. 46, Nr. 657 (December 25, 1917), rpt. in his Essays (Hamburg: Claasen, 1960), pp. 381 ff.

More from the Prologue of Thomas Mann's Reflections of an Unpolitical Man:

Soon it will be fifty years since Dostoyevsky, who had the eyes to see, asked almost incredulously: “Can it be true that cosmopolitan radicalism has already taken roots in Germany, too?” This is a way of asking that is equivalent to astonished confirmation, and the idea of cosmopolitan, or more correctly, international radicalism, itself contradicts the protestation that it is a “mirage” of our present enemies that the national democracies could ever unite into an intellectually unified European or world democracy. By “cosmopolitan radicalism,” Dostoyevsky meant that intellectual tendency that has the democratic civilization-society of “mankind” as its goal; la république sociale, démocratique et universelle; the empire of human civilization. A mirage of our enemies? But mirage or not: those who see this mirage hovering before them must definitely be enemies of Germany, for it is certainly true that a union of the national democracies into a European, a world democracy, would leave nothing of the German character: the world democracy, the imperium of civilization, the “society of mankind,” could have a character that would be more Latin or more Anglo-Saxon—the German spirit would dissolve and disappear in it, it would be obliterated, it would no longer exist.