Awards

• Winner of DAAD/GSA Book Prize for the Best Book in Germanistik and Cultural Studies 2020 (United States)

Overview

In Thomas Mann's War, Tobias Boes traces how the acclaimed and bestselling author became one of America's most prominent anti-fascists and the spokesperson for a German cultural ideal that Nazism had perverted. Thomas Mann, winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature and author of such world-renowned novels as Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain, began his self-imposed exile in the United States in 1938, having fled his native Germany in the wake of Nazi persecution and public burnings of his books. Mann embraced his role as a public intellectual, deftly using his literary reputation and his connections in an increasingly global publishing industry to refute Nazi propaganda. As Boes shows, Mann undertook successful lecture tours of the country and penned widely-read articles that alerted US audiences and readers to the dangers of complacency in the face of Nazism's existential threat. Spanning four decades, from the eve of World War I, when Mann was first translated into English, to 1952, the year in which he left an America increasingly disfigured by McCarthyism, Boes establishes Mann as a significant figure in the wartime global republic of letters.

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9781501761706

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Reviews

Boes's exhaustive, meticulous survey should come to represent an exemplar for scholarship seeking to document the lasting significance of an author's work. * Publishers Weekly * Boes's superb account is based on extensive archival research, including Mann's personal letters, as well as keen assessments of his novels. * The National Interest * Thomas Mann's War is important and timely. It is a reminder that literature is one of the first things to come under attack when authoritarianism takes hold, something for which there is ample evidence in our present moment, from China to Russia, from Turkey to Saudi Arabia. * The Wall Street Journal *

Thomas Mann's War is important and timely. It is a reminder that literature is one of the first things to come under attack when authoritarianism takes hold, something for which there is ample evidence in our present moment, from China to Russia, from Turkey to Saudi Arabia. * The Wall Street Journal * Boes's exhaustive, meticulous survey should come to represent an exemplar for scholarship seeking to document the lasting significance of an author's work. * Publishers Weekly * Boes's superb account is based on extensive archival research, including Mann's personal letters, as well as keen assessments of his novels. * The National Interest *

Boes's exhaustive, meticulous survey should come to represent an exemplar for scholarship seeking to document the lasting significance of an author's work. (Publishers Weekly) Boes's superb account is based on extensive archival research, including Mann's personal letters, as well as keen assessments of his novels. (The National Interest) Thomas Mann's War is important and timely. It is a reminder that literature is one of the first things to come under attack when authoritarianism takes hold, something for which there is ample evidence in our present moment, from China to Russia, from Turkey to Saudi Arabia. (The Wall Street Journal)

Boes's exhaustive, meticulous survey should come to represent an exemplar for scholarship seeking to document the lasting significance of an author's work. * Publishers Weekly * Boes's superb account is based on extensive archival research, including Mann's personal letters, as well as keen assessments of his novels. * The National Interest * Thomas Mann's War is important and timely. It is a reminder that literature is one of the first things to come under attack when authoritarianism takes hold, something for which there is ample evidence in our present moment, from China to Russia, from Turkey to Saudi Arabia. * The Wall Street Journal *

Author Information

Tobias Boes is Associate Professor of German at the University of Notre Dame. He is author of Formative Fictions. Follow him on X @tobiasboes.

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