The National Interest, June 22nd, 1996
Was there ever a great writer whose relationship to his own country was as anguished as that of Thomas Mann with Germany? Dante, perhaps, who can be said to have made Italy, and who certainly made the Italian language. But Dante did not suffer Italy in the way that Mann suffered Germany. Mann's first great novel - Buddenbrooks - was subtitled "The Decadence of a Family" and recounted the downfall of that North German patriarchal bourgeoisie from which he came. In due course, his own life was to become the record of a similar collapse. His family life, so apparently ordered and set in its ways,...
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