Cultural Amnesia (64 page)

GOLO MANN

Golo Mann (1909–1994), modern Germany’s greatest historian, was the third child of its
greatest modern novelist, Thomas Mann. After making a shaky start as the unbeloved son outshone by his brilliant siblings Klaus and Erika, the awkward Golo rose gradually to his later status
as the family’s scholastically most distinguished representative. Some of his historical works were written in the American exile that began in 1940, but by 1952 he was back in Germany
for a succession of professorships and for the composition of his major books.
Wallenstein
, widely proclaimed as his masterpiece, is a hard read in the
original and not much easier in English, but his monumental (a thousand pages plus)
Deutsche Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts
has the pace of a
thriller and is easily seen to be the finest history of modern Germany. A separately published extract from it,
Deutsche Geschichte 1919–1945
, is
probably the best single introduction to Germany’s twentieth-century tragedy, and an ideal book from which to start learning to read German. His memoir
Erinnerungen und Gedanken
(Memories and Thoughts) has the story of his youth and mental development under the Weimar Republic. As so often with the great
historians, Golo Mann is perhaps best approached
through his ancillary writings, where his opinions are highlighted. The volumes of essays
Geschichte und Geschichten
and
Wir alle sind, was wir gelesen
(We Are All What We Read) show his capacity to get a
book’s worth of reflections into an article. His detailed trouncing of A. J. P. Taylor’s chic views about the purportedly inevitable nature of Nazi foreign policy is a valuable
instance of a serious political engagement knocking the stuffing out of a fad. If one writer could represent the recovery of liberal thought in Germany after World War II, it would be Golo
Mann.

To attribute foreseeable necessity to the catastrophe of Germany
and the European Jews would be to give it a meaning that it didn’t have. There is an unseemly optimism in such an assumption. In the history of mankind there is more that is
spontaneous, wilful, unreasonable and senseless than our conceit allows.

—GOLO MANN,
Geschichte und Geschichten
, P. 170

T
HROUGHOUT HIS
distinguished career as an historian, Golo Mann tried to warn us against the consequences of attributing inevitability to what happened in Germany when he was growing up. This paragraph is one
among many statements of that theme. What makes it especially notable is the way it traces a bad intellectual habit to a psychological propensity. Optimism, cocksureness, Professor Hindsight,
call it what you like: there is a disposition of personality that likes to impose itself on the past and turn it into a self-serving cartoon. One becomes a seer in the safest possible way:
retroactively. One predicts the past as a dead certainty. Golo Mann, who had been there when it happened, always remembered the uncertainty. According to him, the Weimar Republic didn’t
have to collapse: after it did, to say that it had to was yet another way of undermining it—sabotage after the fact. Similarly, the Jews didn’t have to die, or even have to be
classified as Jews. The classification was Hitler’s idea, as was the massacre: the second thing following with awful logic from the first. But the first
could have
stayed in his sick mind, and he could have stayed out of power. If even one of the main factors had been subtracted from the Weimar equation—the inflation, the Depression, the
unemployment—then out of power he would have stayed, to haunt the back alleys of lunatic fringe politics where he belonged. Facing the possibilities that were real even though they did not
happen, Golo Mann found the most resonant and lasting application of his principle that the surest way to deprive an historical event of its significance is to abdicate from the task of tracing
it back to its origins, which will be the more distant the more the event seems like ineluctable fate. And in that long chain of circumstances, anything could have been different.

Golo Mann’s first book, published in 1947, was a treatise on the diplomat Friedrich von Gentz, the man whose claim
to fame was that he was not as famous as Metternich. An historian’s first book is characteristically rich in themes that will occupy him for the rest of his career, but part of the richness
usually comes from their entanglement: he knows what he thinks, but tries to say it all at once. Golo Mann’s book on Gentz is unusual for what can only be called a precocious maturity. To
some extent this was imposed on him: because of the political disruptions in his early life, he was already in his late thirties when he began to publish. Undoubtedly his limpid view came from
what he had experienced in the time of the Weimar Republic, and not from what he had read about the time of Metternich. He called the pre-revolutionary period before 1848 a hopeful time. People
were full of ideas about how life could be more free and more just.
Aber diese Ideen hatten zu ihrer Verwirklichung durchaus nicht der Revolution bedurft
.
But these ideas didn’t need a revolution to make them real. This is still a key sentence; and was, at the time he first wrote it, a marker put down for the view of history he would unfold
throughout his books, culminating in his masterpiece—which, in my view, is not his
Wallenstein
(1971) but his
Deutsche
Geschichte des 19. und 20. Jahrhunderts
(1958). Without question
Wallenstein
is a mighty book. Its true worth is hard to assess in English because
Golo Mann’s prose style, when he wrote the book, was at its most dense and therefore at its least susceptible to being translated with decent respect for its unfaltering rhythm. Like his
father Thomas, Golo Mann was accustomed to writing a sentence at the full length allowable by German grammar. Like any other language
with arbitrary genders, German permits
far longer flights of unambiguous coherence than English. The translator of
Wallenstein
fatally attempted to translate block-long sentences without breaking
them up. The result is a meal of nougat, with molasses to wash it down.

But even in the original, where the style is merely condensed,
Wallenstein
suffers from its inclusiveness: the points are buried in documentary detail, and in the effort to isolate and remember them you feel that your enemy is the
book itself.
Deutsche Geschichte
isn’t like that. Memorable from paragraph to paragraph, the book sends you back to itself before you have finished
it, just for the enjoyment of seeing complexity put so clearly.
Deutsche Geschichte
was one of the books from which I taught myself German, and we always
have an immoderate affection for the books that brought us into another language. But since I first read it right through with dictionary to hand, I have re-read it twice from cover to cover, and
am always using various bits of it as starting points for opening up a specific topic. At its height, Golo Mann’s prose approaches the ideal of the continuous aphorism: you find yourself
learning it like poetry. In the fascicle marked
Deutsche Geschichte 1919–1945
his analysis of the Weimar Republic’s permanent crisis centres on
a single formulation. He says that the split between capital and labour was at the centre of politics—the centre from which “the public was indeed governed, but always in a divisive
manner.” That was the fissure Hitler got in through, like a plague rat through a crack. Not that Golo Mann found the collapse of the Weimar Republic inevitable. There were many times it
could have consolidated itself, if circumstances had not conspired against it. In an essay collected in
Gecshichte und Geschichten
(1963), he excoriated A.
J. P. Taylor for Taylor’s pernicious certitude on the subject. Taylor said that from the viewpoint of foreign policy the advent of the Nazis meant a return to political realism from the
previous liberal dreamland. Golo Mann knew that the liberal dreamland had contained all the real hopes, and that Hitler’s political realities were lethal fantasies.

In his
Zeiten und Figuren
(Times and Figures) (1979), Golo Mann expounded his key
concept of
Offenheit nach der Zukunft hin—
openness to the future. He didn’t just mean it as a desirable trait of personality but as a necessary
qualification for the historian. By an effort of the imagination, the historian must put himself back into a present where
the future has not yet happened, even though he is
looking back at it through the past. If a narrator knows the future of his hero, he, the narrator, “is bound to tinge even the simplest narrative with irony.” Succumbing too easily to
the ironic mode is a cheap way of being Tacitus. The true high worth of Tacitus depended on his being always aware that tragic events had been the result of accidents and bad decisions, and the
depth of the tragedy lay in the fact that the accidents need not have happened and the decisions might have been good. In a predetermined world there would be no tragedy, only fate. With his
revered Tacitus as an example, Golo Mann was able to form the view that fatalism and frivolity were closely allied: to be serious about history, you had seriously to believe that things might
have been otherwise.

Golo Mann could have his weak moments. Too quick to understand Ernst Jünger’s flirtation with
the idea of a powerfully rearmed Germany, he allowed the possibility of Jünger’s genuine detachment from the awfulness of Nazi reality, as if Jünger’s aesthetic refinement
had been a part excuse for his political indifference. But the part excuse was wholly a defence mechanism. Jünger’s
Tagebücher
should have
revealed to Golo Mann—otherwise the most acute of stylistic analysts, on top of his other virtues—that Jünger took refuge in the exquisite as a way of not thinking about the
obvious. One is reminded of the indulgence Gitta Sereny extended to Albert Speer: she convicted him only of not wanting to know. But he did know. He always knew. To be civilized is not a
hindrance to recognizing the barbaric. The hindrance is the barbaric within oneself. Jünger was wedded to the idea of a strong, militaristic Germany. The wedding made him slow to see what
the Nazis were actually doing. Why Golo Mann should have been slow to see what Ernst Jünger was doing is another question. The answer might have had something to do with Golo Mann’s
long passion for putting a liberal German intellectual tradition back together. He didn’t want to throw away an attractive fragment.

It could have been that he just didn’t like the idea of denouncing a misfit bookworm. He had been one of those
himself. The Manns were not a dysfunctional family, but they were a family of dysfunctional people, and the young Golo had been an oddball even among the Manns. There is a desperately touching
passage in his memoirs
Erinnerungen und Gedanken
(1986) when he recollects, as if it were yesterday (and
obviously he always felt as if
it were), how he was shut out from some yodelling youth movement. He had an urge to fit in. When he volunteered for the crucial job of going back to Munich to save Thomas Mann’s
compromising private diaries from the Nazis, he became indispensable at last. But his homosexuality always troubled him more than the same condition troubled his elder siblings, Klaus and Erika.
Fractured character is probably what made him an artist among historians. Artists complete themselves in their works. Golo Mann’s works are not so much the expression of a complete
personality as of a personality completing itself as it writes: he is working himself out before your eyes, the way artists do. With an internal scope to energize his view of the external world,
he set the measure for all the liberal German historians to come. E. H. Gombrich’s irascible but useful complaint that his generation of assimilated Jews did not regard themselves as Jewish
was already there in Golo’s writings, enshrined as a principle. (It should be noted that Golo and his siblings were only quarter Jews, which might have got them by; but their mother was a
half Jew, which would surely have meant trouble; so he had reasons near home for pondering the matter as the Nazis came closer to assuming power.)