Thomas Mann's War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters
ISBN: 9781501745003
Platform/Publisher: Oxford Academic / Cornell University Press
Digital rights: Users: Unlimited; Printing: Unlimited; Download: Unlimited
Subjects: Literary Studies (European);

Boes (Formative Fictions), an associate professor of German at the University of Notre Dame, poses a deceptively simple question in this outstanding study of Thomas Mann: what is the author's continued relevance to the "world republic of letters?" The answer involves understanding the significance of Mann's decision in 1938 to flee Nazi Germany for the U.S. Boes examines Mann's time in the U.S., which lasted until 1954, at the height of McCarthyism, and follows his evolution from holding that art should be separate from politics (a long-held belief expressed in his 1918 book Reflections of an Nonpolitical Man) to becoming the de facto voice of German intellectualism in exile during WWII. In addition to analyzing Mann's key works of the time, such as the Joseph novels and Doctor Faustus, Boes also discusses the role of his publishers, Fischer in Germany and Knopf in the U.S., in shaping his career; the part played by middlebrow culture, in particular the Book of the Month Club, in popularizing Mann with American audiences; and Mann's own mixed feelings towards his resulting celebrity. Revealing how this writer "instinctively grasped" the important yet fraught role of writers in an emerging "globally interconnected world," Boes's exhaustive, meticulous survey should come to represent an exemplar for scholarship seeking to document the lasting significance of an author's work. (Nov.)

Tobias Boes is Associate Professor of German at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Formative Fictions . Follow him on X @tobiasboes.


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