The Decision by Britta Böhler
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

Choosing Sides Artfully

This is a beautifully written (and translated) book. The epigraph from Wittgenstein is precisely apt for the book as well as for Thomas Mann: "ethics and esthetics are one."

For Mann, good art verged on the criminal. Its purpose is to expose reality, particularly to expose hypocrisy and the rationalisation of power. But Mann was an artist not a zealot (less like Nabokov, more like Prokofiev). He found the hypocrite and the abuser of power vulgar not merely dangerous. And he feared them on both counts. It is the manner in which Mann copes with his fear that makes him and The Decision interesting.

At the book's opening, Mann's physical safety from the Nazi regime has already been assured by his arrival in Switzerland. He is an established international literary celebrity, having received the Nobel Prize six years earlier, and recently having approved the adaptation of Death in Venice for cinema. But he is first of all a German, and therefore an heir to and a central part of an unparalleled cultural tradition. And he has just committed what amounts to cultural suicide, "national excommunication", by submitting a letter to the Zurich German-language press that unequivocally condemns the Nazi regime. Mann's fear is existential in the purest sense. "He had the feeling that his tree of life had been torn violently from the soil by the roots.", says Bohler's narrator. How could it have been otherwise than this?

This tree of life certainly included the bourgeois foliage of house, furniture, belongings, readership abandoned or vulnerable in Germany. But these are not the principle focus of Mann's fear. The tap-root of the matter is that all he has admired and valued as German contribution to the artistic world at large, including his own work, has become suspect as possibly infected with the same cultural toxins so aggressively promoted by the contemporary regime (his heroes Wagner and Nietzsche had been coopted by Nazi ideology). Could he be, as he had recurrently dreamt, "a fraud, a charlatan and worse?" But if his judgment has been fatally compromised by his cultural affinity with the regime, is it right to have criticised it so strenuously? This is alienation not only from one's homeland - friends, colleagues, children - but alienation from one's self, an acutely debilitating condition for an artist.

The rapid disintegration of the Weimar regime in 1933 - the unexpected rise of a right wing minority government, which is rabidly nationalistic, confronted by a befuddled opposition - has frightening similarities to recent political events in the United States. Those of us who find ourselves outside our native USA while it appears to be disowning its founding principles, may be able to appreciate as acutely as he did Mann's alienation and the emotional dislocation it produces. Can a government really be distinguished from the nation, for example? What are the duties and limits of resistance? At what point is decisive action, including action to leave a national community, warranted? Bohler captures this condition of existential uncertainty, essentially a sudden and profound fear of loss of self, wonderfully. Her American readership therefore deserves to increase substantially. Let's hope the Dutch Foundation for Literature is on the ball.

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