At Thomas Mann’s House, the German President Defends Democracy

On June 23, 1944, Thomas Mann becomes a US citizen. From the article:
"A small army of German media attended the ceremony: there were as many TV cameramen and reporters as there were cater-waiters. The American media was largely absent—a symptom of disparate priorities, no doubt. In the mid and late twentieth century, Mann was widely read in America; “Death in Venice” was a fixture of the syllabus. But, as the scholar Hans Rudolf Vaget has observed, Mann is no longer a common point of reference in American literary circles, even as his reputation in Germany has steadily ascended. At the Mann house, two younger Americans standing next to me were uncertain about who was being celebrated. One asked, “So, is Thomas Mann the architect?” I tried to explain briefly who Mann was, and recommended “Mario and the Magician,” his 1929 tale of a fascistic hypnotist manipulating a crowd.

In a speech the following day, at the Getty Center, Steinmeier gave good reasons for revisiting Mann’s writing. It was pleasantly jarring to hear a head of state speaking in an intellectual register, alluding not only to Mann but also to Kant, Whitman, and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. Steinmeier ably sketched Mann’s political meanderings, from strident nationalism to an embrace of democracy during the Weimar Republic era. Steinmeier went on: “It seems to have been only in the United States that Thomas Mann changed from a democrat-by-reason into a democrat-in-heart. And all his enthusiasm was focussed on a single person: Franklin Roosevelt. Frido Mann, you gave us such a wonderfully vivid description of some of your childhood memories—how, at the breakfast table in San Remo Drive, your grandfather spoke with flashing eyes and great, dramatic gestures of the charismatic yet physically depleted President.” After Roosevelt’s death, though, the atmosphere began to change:

Only a few years lay between Roosevelt’s shining example and the descent into a toxic political climate of intolerance and polarization, prejudices and conspiracy theories, and the state-led erosion of fundamental rights and an independent judiciary. While the Marshall Plan was enabling the ruined Germany to start afresh, economically and morally, in California Thomas Mann found his friends, exiles, artists, intellectuals, his own children Erika, Klaus, and Golo, and eventually himself the target of McCarthy’s zealous Communist hunters. Under the heading “Dupes and Fellow Travelers,” Life magazine counted him among the illustrious ranks of suspects ranging from Charlie Chaplin and Leonard Bernstein to Arthur Miller and Albert Einstein.

And so Mann went into exile once again, in Switzerland. Yet, as Steinmeier pointed out—and as Vaget emphasizes in his book “Thomas Mann, der Amerikaner”—Mann died an American citizen. He never renounced the Roosevelt dream."