Thomas Mann and his family were forced to flee Germany shortly after the Nazi seizure of power in 1933. Goebbels consigned the Nobel Prize winner’s books to bonfire. In 1938 Thomas Mann made to America’s shores where he was already a major celebrity. His American publisher — Alfred A. Knopf — had launched a brilliant marketing campaign anointing Mann as “the greatest living man of letters” as well as the most important German nemesis of Adolf Hitler. Mann quickly was able to capitalize on his celebrity by engaging in a cross-country lecture tour of more than 30 cities, including Lewiston, Maine. At each stop he delivered his lecture "The Coming Victory of Democracy" (originally his 1937 essay "Vom kommenden Sieg der Demokratie" most likely translated for American audiences by his daughter Erika). Thousands of Americans flocked to these lectures, and Mann received an honorarium of $1,000 per speech ( a considerable sum in 1938, surpassed on by speeches of H.G.Wells and Aldous Huxley).
It is important to remember that in 1938 not all American’s had negative views of Hitler and Nazi Germany. The German American Bund held pro-Nazi events around the country — culminating in a Madison Square Garden rally with 20,000 in attendance. The Republican Party was deeply isolationist and Charles Lindbergh’s America First Committee had a million members. Meanwhile radio hosts such as Father Coughlin — the Rush Limbaugh of his time — attracted millions of listeners with his anti-Semitic and racist harangues. Even major newspapers had sympathetic articles about Germany and Hitler: just days before the Nazi invasion of Poland the New York Times published a glowing piece about “Herr Hitler’s” tasteful decor in his mountain retreat (Herr Hitler At Home in the Clouds).
I downloaded the text of Thomas Mann’S lecture -”The Coming Victory of Democracy” to get a sense for what Americans were experiencing and also to compare it to Mann's last gasp attempt to preserve democracy in Germany - his 1930 Appell an die Vernuft speech which was disrupted by Hitler's goon squad. Appeal to Reason could have been subtitled: "The Coming Victory of Fascism in Germany."
What I admire about The Coming Victory of Democracy is that Mann doesn't presume to lecture to Americans about the virtues of democracy; after all, America is one of the oldest and most successful democracies. Rather, speaking from experience, Mann emphasizes the fragility of democracy, that it must continually be nourished not only intellectually -with Vernunft - but with passion.
"America needs no instruction in the things that concern democracy. But instruction is one thing — and another is memory, reflection, re-examination, the recall to consciousness of a spiritual and moral possession of which it would be dangerous to feel too secure and too confident. No worth-while possession can be neglected. Even physical things die off, disappear, are lost, if they are not cared for, if they do not feel the eye and hand of the owner and are lost to sight because their possession is taken for granted. Throughout the world it has become precarious to take democracy for granted — even in America… Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without, that it has once more become a problem. America is aware that the time has come for democracy to take stock of itself, for recollection and restatement and conscious consideration, in a word, for its renewal in thought and feeling."
It is a lesson we are in dire need of today as we watch democracy slip away in Trump's America. We need another Democracy lecture tour, but who would deliver the lecture? Who today has the stature of a Thomas Mann? And would any Americans bother to attend?