What strikes one most about the novel in light of our present experience is the sense of how quickly an apparently stable world can be overthrown—how easily the assumed bulwarks of democracy may fold under pressure. It's just beyond belief, goes one of the refrains of a brief authorial interjection in the midst of Mann's novel (Smyth trans.) The regime was supposed at some point to run up against a barrier it could not surmount. Yet it gallops along, overturning the established order in a matter of years, erecting concentration camps, hunting down and torturing its enemies, driving opponents into exile.
We are something like the intellectuals Mann depicts observing the spectacle of Hitler's early rise to power. How strange, we say—and yet, surely, we think, at each individual moment in the unfolding process, this is where it all stops. There will be some norm that will prove inviolable, some institution that will provide a final check upon the abuse of power. But each one is worn away or circumvented—and in very little time at all. Yes, we are like these intellectuals.
Here we are, three-and-a-half years into the presidency of a man who openly invokes phrases associated with 1930s anti-Semitism; who smilingly applauds torture and police brutality, saying that they "work"; who talks about banning Muslims on the basis of their religion, then proceeds to do so, and acknowledges that he is doing so, telling his associates that he realized that openly discriminating on the basis of religion would be illegal, so he decided to "talk territory" and get it done by targeting immigrants on the basis of "nationality"; who bans Transgender people from the military and works to deny them access to health care....
A man who has systematically turned on everyone who ever worked for him, waging an endless "night of long knives" from the White House against perceived traitors; whose campaign officials and inner circle have all been revealed to be criminals and liars; a man who has chewed through career civil servants and one-time allies, firing everyone who provides any resistance to his will, bypassing Senate confirmation and leaving political hacks in an "acting" role in key cabinet positions in order to ensure their docility and personal loyalty; a man who is now using agencies headed by these politicized officials to abduct protesters without probable cause on the streets of a U.S. city...
A man who has used a global pandemic to shut down U.S. asylum processing by fiat, disappearing children to hotels and denying them access to attorneys, then expelling them to the countries they fled, without ever turning them over to the anti-trafficking screening and asylum process they are guaranteed by law.
Each step along the way we have said to ourselves: here, though, is where it ends. Surely. This time he has gone too far. People won't put up with it anymore. We tell ourselves this—I tell myself this—because it is the only way to survive amidst the constant anxiety. But then people do find a way to tolerate it. We find some reason to regard it as less exceptional and horrific than it at first appeared. Maybe it is bad, we say, but then we find some way in which it is reminiscent of what has gone before. We tie a tenuous thread between it and the past. And in so doing we make our psychic peace with it.
And all this in only three years! Truly, it's just beyond belief.
Turning to Mann's novel, one looks for some reason, some insight, into how and why this happens. And yes, one finds it excavated with merciless precision. Mann's novel reveals all the tricks the mind uses to accept and justify one's complicity with a system of evil. And in doing so, it provides one of the most gut-wrenching and mind-opening forms of political catharsis one could hope to find on one's bookshelves in this era of resurgent fascism.
Mann's novel, first published in 1936, was written by an exile from Nazi rule (who also happened to be the son of novelist Thomas Mann), witnessing from afar the full gallop of the new regime's ascendency in Germany. Here there is none of Wordsworth's "emotion recollected in tranquility"—and the book is all the stronger for that. It is written not only with the immediacy of time, however (the novel depicts events that were contemporaneous up to the very year of its first publication), but also with the intimacy of personal acquaintance. Mann's book is really a roman à clef—with even more of a clef than I had realized before I came to the end and turned back to the opening leaf to read the preface.
Not only does the book depict the descent into depravity of an actor remarkably similar in name and biography to Mann's erstwhile brother-in-law, Gustaf Gründgens; it turns out that many of the specific events depicted in the novel as features of our actor-anti-hero's career took place in real life, albeit in slightly altered form. Hermann Göring and his blonde actress-wife really did see Mann's brother-in-law performing the role of Mephistopheles, and invited him into their good graces on the strength of his performance.
One could not ask for a more fitting moral allegory to fall into one's lap; and it is no great surprise that Mann made use of it. Far from ruining the effect of this artistic parallel, the knowledge that these events had their basis in reality turns what might have been heavy-handed symbolism—the "Faustian bargain"— into an emotional punch to the gut.
It is the fact that Mann knew the people described in this book that no doubt gives it such poignancy and vividness. As Robert Lowell writes, "Why not say what happened?"—for no artwork has ever been made worse by hewing closely to its creator's own experience.
What makes the Gründgens stand-in—Hendrik Höfgen in the novel—succumb to the promised favors of the Nazi regime, despite his professed Communist and left-wing convictions earlier in the novel? Mann's diagnosis is simple: it is ambition; but ambition cleverly rationalized under layers of self-deception.
Höfgen tells himself that he is preserving his inner freedom and conviction, even while he is making outward shows of loyalty to the regime; that his genuflections before the Göring stand-in are clever and strategic dissimulations that allow him to bide his time. He tells himself that he can do more good from within the system that he even can outside it; that by being close to power, he can help to steer it in wiser directions, and even snatch a few victims out of Moloch's jaws. "[W]e must insinuate ourselves into the lion's den," he tells a skeptical former comrade.
And over time, he gradually forgets what he was supposedly gathering that power and influence to do. He overlooks that he had inwardly committed to one day deploy it for positive ends—to save people from the concentration camps and the torture chambers. Gradually, the dissimulation becomes reality.
When one looks for parallels to our own time, many of the members of the president's party in Congress come to mind. Republican Senators who tell us, when asked, that they don't have time to read the president's Tweets. That they'd rather focus on the economy than spend their days criticizing or voting to impeach the man in the White House. Surely, they are telling themselves inwardly all the while that they are doing this because they can do more good from within the party than outside of it. They, like Höfgen, want innocence without risk. They both wish to distance themselves from the president while doing none of the things that lie within their abundant power to resist him.
And why? Because of a job. Because they are more afraid of losing a Senate seat than allowing the country to drift over the precipice.
The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity, as Yeats famously put it. If one sees this factor operating in the right today, however, one must also acknowledge that one sees it in the left as well. One sees it in oneself.
One sees it in the leftists who are spending more time and energy defaming liberal intellectuals for small deviations from accepted positions than they are working against the crimes of the administration. In a left that—because it has failed to get Trump removed from the office where he can do so much damage to the world—focuses its efforts on hounding private individuals out of work.
Whether one believes in the existence of such a thing as "cancel culture" or not, I suspect any of us can give an example that has crossed our paths in recent memory of a person being unfairly ejected from their job for a political transgression. One that has been on my mind recently that you may have seen: a man was filmed in a supermarket by a stranger because he was not wearing a mask during the pandemic. Losing his temper, the man screamed "I feel threatened!" That was all that happened, as far as I can discover.
But for some reason, this outburst was deemed sufficient grounds for him to be out of a job. The video went viral, and the man was widely mocked and reviled. Then the insurance company that employed him threw him out of work, announcing that the behavior displayed in the video does not reflect "their values." Why, because he didn't wear a mask? Is that a fireable offense? Is that dismissal for just cause?
Every time an employee is terminated for not hewing strictly to a progressive political line, a fascist somewhere is born. And we find that Klaus Mann's Mephisto has a lesson for us on this score too. Those who say that it is wrong for liberal intellectuals to worry about "cancel culture" when Trump and the right pose such a more imminent threat to our freedoms and way of life should do well to pick up Mann's novel. They will discover there that it is both possible and necessary to worry about both.
Mann encloses in a subplot of his novel a sort of parable of the leftist fetishizing of ideological purity. Early in the story, when Höfgen is still married to Barbara (the daughter of a prominent liberal professor) and himself espouses ardent Communist views, the couple encounter a young member of the Nazi party, Hans Miklas, who works at the the theater. Barbara tries to engage him in conversation, patiently waiting as he expounds his opinions in order to try to shed some light into his darkness.
Höfgen, meanwhile, proceeds to get into a fight with the young fascist, then undertakes a campaign against him amongst his colleagues. Eventually, he succeeds in getting him fired from the company. All the time as he does so, he denounces Barbara for her yielding attitude to the fascist enemy, predicting that she will ultimately take the side of the Nazis if they ever come to power.
Yet this is not how events proceed. Ultimately, it is Barbara, the "soft-hearted" liberal intellectual, who becomes a leader of the opposition to Nazi rule in exile; meanwhile, it is Höfgen, the supposed revolutionary and militant adversary of fascism, who makes his peace with the regime and rises to glory under its aegis. Hans Miklas, meanwhile, the "canceled" Nazi, eventually becomes disillusioned with the regime he helped to bring to power. After manifesting his grievances, he is taken out and shot by Gestapo agents, with the killing being politely chalked up to "suicide."
How much of today's left is pervaded by Höfgens—convinced of their own righteousness, persuaded that it is an act of courage to humiliate the weak—a sign of the strength of their conviction—when in reality it is a sign of their weakness of spirit—the fact that they will ultimately bend a knee to whatever power gains the upper hand? And how few among us on the left today are modeling the spirit of Barbara?
Indeed, the spirit of Barbara—the true moral hero of Mann's book—is held in contempt in many sectors of the left. People do not think common cause can be made with any elements on the right. They say that to try to listen to people who voted for Trump or to celebrate people for making a late arrival to the progressive side of the issue is to compromise with racism and evil. "I shouldn't have to applaud someone for finally doing the bare minimum to be a decent person," they say; "People shouldn't expect an 'ally cookie'."
If they open the Gospels, though, they will discover that at least one revolutionary leader was an advocate for passing out 'ally cookies'—for celebrating the small steps that individuals take toward trying to do the right thing, even if others might regard it as too little too late. Telling his followers that a shepherd spends more time searching for one sheep who has gone astray than ninety-nine who never left home, Jesus sums up the lesson of the parable: "I tell you that in the same way there will be more rejoicing in heaven over one sinner who repents than over ninety-nine righteous persons who do not need to repent." (NIV)
This is the spirit Barbara embodies, in lending an ear to the young fascist. When she does so, Höfgen asks her in effect, as the teachers did of Jesus, why she would be seen keeping company with sinners and tax-collectors. Does it not indicate she is one of them?
To the contrary, she is the far better anti-fascist in the end than her husband. Her acceptance of the humanity in her enemy makes her a better warrior against the anti-human ideology of Nazism.
She offers us a path of liberalism between two totalitarianisms—the much reviled and mocked path that the adversaries of liberalism on both right and left have always detested—but the only one in which the human conscience can survive. It is a difficult path to walk, hedged round with evils on either side, but why should we expect otherwise? As the Gospels again remind us: strait is the gate and narrow is the way.
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