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Thomas Mann, “On the German Republic” (1922)

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Our students, our student associations, by no means lack democratic tradition. There have been times when the national idea was far from coinciding with the monarchical and dynastic; when they were in irreconcilable opposition. Patriotism and republic, so far from being opposed, have sometimes appeared as one and the same thing; and the cause of freedom and the fatherland had the passionate support of the noblest youth. Today the young, or at least considerable and important sections of them, seem to have sworn eternal hatred to the republic and forgotten what might have been once upon a time—for remembering must have exercised a restraining effect upon such hatred.

[ . . . ]

The republic is our fate; the only correct attitude to which is amor fati, none too solemn a phrase for the content, for it is no light fate. Freedom, so called, is no joke, I do not say that. Its other name is responsibility; the word makes it only too clear that freedom is truly a heavy burden, most of all for the intellectual.

[ . . . ]

The State has become our business; a situation profoundly hated by considerable sections of citizens and young people who will simply have none of it because, forsooth, it did not come to birth in triumph and the exercise of free choice but in defeat and collapse, making it seem bound up forever with weakness, shame, and foreign domination. “We are not the republic,” these patriots tell me, averting their faces. “The republic is foreign domination—insofar (why cannot we too quote Novalis?) as weakness is only the other side of foreign power, taking the upper hand, controlling, setting its mark.” True, true. But in the first place it is also true, as the poet says, that “a man can ennoble everything, make it worthy of himself, by dint of willing it”—a very true saying, very fine, and almost sly in the bargain, a shrewd expression of aptitude for life. In the second place, it is not true, and I deliberately repeat that it is utterly and entirely untrue, that the republic as an inner fact (I am not now referring to established public law) is the creation of defeat and humiliation. It is the issue of honor and exaltation.

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Students and citizens, your resistance to the republic and the democracy is simply a fear of words. You shy at them like restive horses; you fall into unreasoning panic at the sound of them. But they are just words: relativities, time-conditioned forms, necessary instruments; to think they must refer to some outlandish kind of foreign humbug is mere childishness. The republic—as though it were not still and always Germany! Democracy! As though one could not be more at home in that home than in any flashing and dashing and crashing empire! Have you heard the Meistersinger von Nürnberg lately? Nietzsche made the scintillating remark about it that it was “directed against civilization” and incited “the Germans against the French.” But meanwhile it is democratic through and through, as pronouncedly and exemplarily as Shakespeare’s Coriolanus is aristocratic. It is, I repeat, German democracy; its honest-hearted pomp and circumstance, its fervid romanticism, are evidence that the expression German democracy, so far from being an offence to nature or a logical impossibility, is as a compound organically correct, as correct as perhaps only one other combination could be—I mean the German people.

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What you will answer me now, I very well know. You will say: “No, no—that is precisely what it is not. What has the German soul to do with democracy, republic, socialism, let us boldly say Marxism? All this economic materialism, this fine talk about the ‘ideological superstructure’ and the rest of the nineteenth-century twaddle, all this is simply childish now. It would be unfortunate if it came to be realized in fact at a time when it had become intellectually defunct! And is not the same true of the other fine things for which you are most surprisingly trying to stir up the enthusiasm of German youth? Do you see the stars above us? Do you know and revere our gods? Do you know who were the heralds of our German future—Goethe and Nietzsche, were they liberals, pray? [Friedrich] Hölderlin and [Stefan] George—is it your notion that they were democratic spirits?”—No, they were not. Of course, of course, you are right. My dear friends, you behold me crestfallen. I was not thinking of Goethe and Nietzsche, Hölderlin and George. Or, rather, I was thinking of them to myself, and asking myself which is the more absurd notion: to plead for the republic in their name, or to preach the restoration in their name as well.

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