Five Years of Democracy in Germany E-Book

Thomas Mann

• Herausgeber: FISCHER E-Books
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Serie: Fischer Klassik Plus
• Sprache: Deutsch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2009

Seitenzahl: 33

Beschreibung

In zwei Ländern wurde dieser Text veröffentlicht, in welchem Thomas Mann für die deutsche Republik wirbt: Zunächst in den USA in der Juniausgabe 1923 von The Current History und anschließend im Dezember desselben Jahres in einer ausführlicheren Version in der Stockholmer Tageszeitung Dagens Nyheter (auf Schwedisch). Der letzte Abschnitt ist beinahe identisch mit dem Schlussteil der ebenfalls im Juni 1923 veröffentlichten ›Gedenkrede auf Rathenau‹. Es ist wahrscheinlich, dass der Text im Frühjahr 1923 ursprünglich auf Anfrage der Redaktion von The Current History entstand.

Leseprobe

Thomas Mann

Five Years of Democracy in Germany

Essay/s

Fischer e-books

In der Textfassung derGroßen kommentierten Frankfurter Ausgabe(GKFA)Mit Daten zu Leben und Werk

{664}Five Years of Democracy in Germany

The writer’s skeptical modesty, in face of the great international problems, finds itself continually at odds with a vague but impelling and oppressing feeling of responsibility, which is not of the personal kind, but is typical of the German intellectual of today, and of which the natal hour can be determined exactly; it was at the critical time of 1914, at the outbreak of the war. That was the moment when, all problems fused, one realized that henceforth it was impossible to keep strictly apart the spiritual and political sphere and to dwell undisturbed in the ivory tower of estheticism as an individualistic hermit; when one realized the inescapable interlacing of all living spiritual values with the national and political interests; in short, it was the natal hour of democracy for Germany.

In addressing recently certain of our youths and citizens who are still resisting the inward facts, I said: »Whether we like it or not, the State has fallen to us. Into our hands it has been placed, into the hands of each and every one. It has become our affair which we have to attend to; that is the republic; it is nothing else.«

But is not the republic, just because of that, also something else, and has it not a further meaning? Does it not mean the ending of a schism from which German life has suffered so long that the German believed himself obliged to accept it as imposed by nature and fate? I refer to the separate existence of political and national life. However excellent may appear the arguments which the opponents of the republican principle advance, however inadequate and corrupted that principle may be and may have been in its actually realized forms – as a principle, as an idea, it will prove to be immensely attractive; for that idea is the unity of State and civilization.

{665}There is no greater political thought. In that thought politics ceases to be mere politics; in it it rises to the level of humanism, and here I am touching on a great concept, on a problem which, if my foreboding is right, is in the last analysis at the bottom of all the spiritual and political struggles that are moving the German people at the present time.

Those unsettled conflicts which are conducted with embittered intensity concern an alternative, an antithesis which I may briefly designate as the antithesis of mysticism and ethics. I understand by »mysticism« the absorption in spiritual things; an individualistic »culture-consciousness«; the mind directed toward the cultivation, shaping, deepening and completion of the personality or, speaking in religious terminology, the mind interested in the salvation and justification of one’s own life. By »ethics« I understand the mind which, turned to the outward world, conceives as its immediate human duty the judgment, admonition, shaping, perfection of the world (with which mysticism never wanted to have much to do). I understand by it all that can also be epitomized by the name of »politics,« an ethical tendency which is distinguished from spiritual absorption, as the disposition of Saint Ignatius differs from that of Meister Eckhart.

THE GERMAN A NON-POLITICAL BEING

It cannot be said that it was only the Reformation which made the German citizen what he has remained for so long a time – the non-political human being par excellence – though it greatly strengthened his conception of his individual cultural mission. The real epoch of the burgher in our history, which followed the ecclesiastical and feudal age, the time of the Hanseatic Union, the time of the cities, was purely a period of {666}