Thomas Mann extolled World War I as "a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope." In 1918, with Germany in a state of collapse, he proclaimed that democracy was anti-German (and that leftist intellectuals such as his brother Heinrich were Zivilisationsliterat--outsider cosmopolitans). Yet, in the 1930s and '40s, Mann was among the world's foremost defenders of democracy, a pronounced anti-Nazi, and, in exile, a neighbor and companion to the German-speaking intellectual cosmopolitans he once derided--Arnold Schoenberg, Bertolt Brecht, Max Horkheimer, and Theodor Adorno, among others. How can we understand Mann's political trajectory--from monarchist to liberal to, by some lights, radical--and what kind of light does it cast on his written work, from the metaphysical Magic Mountain to the allegorical Doctor Faustus (written partly with the assistance of Adorno) and beyond?
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