Thomas Mann: Deutsche Hörer!, address from November 1941

Photography: Thomas Mann by Eric Schaal
Thomas Mann in a New York radio studio, 1938, photograph: Eric Schaal
Deutsches Exilarchiv 1933-1945 der Deutschen Nationalbibliothek, Nachlass Eric Schaal, EB 2003/051, © Weidle-Verlag, Bonn

Thomas Mann: Deutsche Hörer!, address from November 1941

Die Hölle, Deutsche, kam über euch, als diese Führer über euch kamen. Zur Hölle mit ihnen und all ihren Spießgesellen! Dann kann euch, immer noch, Rettung, kann euch Friede und Freiheit werden.

[Hell, Germans, came over you when these rulers came over you. To hell with them and all their accomplices! Then there can still be salvation for you, and peace and freedom. (ed. trans.)]

Thomas Mann, Deutsche Hörer!, address from November 1941


As part of his Deutsche Hörer! radio address series broadcast through the German service of the BBC, in November 1941 Thomas Mann looked back over his own anti-Nazi engagement. The writer gave particular attention to his Deutsche Ansprache [German Address] in 1930, with which he drew the wrath of the Nazis in those early days. His decision back then, Mann said, to “overcome his nature ... [and] enter the political arena” did “more to calm” his conscience today than all of his artistic achievements and successes.

Despite the clear political orientation of his speech, the literature Nobel laureate continued to think in terms of aesthetic and cultural-historical categories. Mann spoke of “dignity”, “brutalisation” and “decay”. He set the current conditions in the NS regime against the glorious tradition of a German nation of culture in the spirit of Herder – a “Germany that is both good and great”. Mann concluded his address – typically for the Deutsche Hörer! series – with an appeal to his countrymen to put an end to the “outrages” of the Hitler government.

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