Princeton University Library

“The Best of Worlds”: Thomas Mann in Princeton

Author(s): Hans Rudolf Vaget
Source: The Princeton University Library Chronicle , Vol. 75, No. 1 (Autumn 2013), pp. 9-
37
Published by: Princeton University Library
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.25290/prinunivlibrchro.75.1.0009

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 J. J. Muller, pencil portrait of Thomas Mann, December 17, 1938. Thomas
Mann Collection, box 8, folder 33a, Manuscripts Division, Department of
Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Library. Gift of
Caroline Newton.

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 “The Best of Worlds”
Thomas Mann i n Pri nceton
h ans ru do l f vage t

T h e Pri nceton chapter of Thomas Mann’s biography ac-

tually began in Salt Lake City, of all places, the ninth stop on
his first transcontinental lecture tour.1 There, on March 22, 1938,
Mann (1875–1955) received a telegram with a message from Agnes
Meyer (1887–1970), his devoted admirer and generous friend. The
message was a follow-up to the conversation he had had with her two
weeks earlier, in Washington, D.C., on the morning after his lecture
at Constitution Hall. Meyer, who was co-owner and co-editor with
1.  The following account of Mann’s Princeton years is based on two earlier publica-
tions: Thomas Mann/Agnes Meyer, Briefwechsel 1937–1955, ed. Hans Rudolf Vaget
(Frankfurt/M: S. Fischer, 1992), henceforth tm/am ; and Hans Rudolf Vaget, Thomas
Mann, der Amerikaner: Leben und Werk im amerikanischen Exil, 1938–1952 (Frankfurt/M:
S. Fischer, 2011). These two books draw on the papers of Agnes E. Meyer, housed
in the Library of Congress; on manuscript collections (Thomas Mann, Molly Shen-
stone, Borgese Family, Erich Kahler, and Caroline Newton) and University Archives
in the Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, Princeton University Li-
brary; and on the Thomas Mann Collection in the Yale Collection of German Lit-
erature, Beinecke Rare Book and Manuscript Library. Mann’s diaries are an indis-
pensable source: Thomas Mann, Tagebücher, 1937–1939, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn
(Frankfurt/M: S. Fischer, 1980); Tagebücher, 1940–1943, ed. Peter de Mendelssohn
(Frankfurt/M: S. Fischer, 1982); henceforth Tb. [date]. The English-language digest,
Diaries 1918–1939, selected and with a foreword by Hermann Kesten, trans. Richard
and Clara Winston (New York: Harry Abrams, 1982), offers an all-too brief selection
from the first two Princeton years (295–345). See also Herbert Lehnert, “Thomas
Mann in Princeton,” Germanic Review 34 (1964): 15–32, and Princeton University
Library’s memorial publication on the occasion of Mann’s hundredth anniversary,
Thomas Mann 1875–1955 (Princeton: Princeton University Library, 1975), contain-
ing contributions by Stanley Corngold, Victor Lange, and Theodore Ziolkowski. The
Princeton chapters in all the full-scale biographies of Mann are generally sketchy
and contain many inaccuracies: Donald Prater, Thomas Mann: A Life (Oxford and
New York: Oxford University Press, 1995); Ronald Hayman, Thomas Mann: A Biog-
raphy (New York: Scribner’s, 1995); Klaus Harpprecht, Thomas Mann: Eine Biographie
(Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1995); Anthony Heilbut, Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1996); and Hermann Kurzke, Thomas Mann, Life as a Work of
Art: A Biography, trans. Leslie Willson (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University
Press, 2002; German original, 1999).

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 her husband, Eugene, of the Washington Post, had taken Mann to the
Lincoln Memorial in order to discuss with him in private the various
options that could facilitate his move from Switzerland to America—
a move she had been urging him to make for some time. She thought,
for a variety of reasons, that Princeton would be the ideal sanctuary
for Mann’s settling in the States. “I am sure,” she explained, “you will
feel yourself to be more part of our country if you are associated with
one of its institutions.” 2 Now, after preliminary inquiries, she was
telegraphing him to let him know that the prospects of securing an
appointment at Princeton looked very promising indeed.
In light of the dramatic developments in Europe at that time, this
news was most welcome. Only one week earlier, in Philadelphia, Mann
had been shocked to learn that Austria had been annexed by Ger-
many—henceforth touting itself as the “Großdeutsche Reich.” He
saw this move, correctly, as Nazi Germany’s opening gambit in its
expansionist and hegemonic plans that could have only one outcome:
another major European war. This meant that his current abode-in-
exile, in Küsnacht, Switzerland, uncomfortably close to the German
border, was no longer safe, for Hitler could surely not be trusted to re-
spect Swiss neutrality. Settling in the United States would provide him
with a base from which he could conduct his own personal war against
the German dictator. He was certain that in the coming war between
the fascist countries and the democracies, the democracies would pre-
vail—and for good reason. Ever since his first visit to the White House,
in 1935, he was convinced that President Franklin D. Roosevelt was
the strongest guarantor of the eventual “victory of democracy,” as he
signaled in the title of his speech for the 1938 lecture tour.3
On receipt of the promising news about Princeton, Mann immedi-
ately let it be known that he planned to settle in the United States and
to apply for American citizenship. On each subsequent stop on his
tour, whenever he mentioned this decision, the prospect was greeted
with warm applause. What was beginning gradually to take shape was
a momentous personal metamorphosis that would transplant this thor-
oughly German and European author to the New World and transform
2.  tm/am , 121.
3.  Thomas and Katia Mann’s dinner with the Roosevelts, arranged by the journal-
ist and historian Hendrik Willem Van Loon, took place at the White House on June
29, 1935; Vaget, Mann, der Amerikaner, 76–88. See Thomas Mann, The Coming Victory
of Democracy, trans. Agnes E. Meyer (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938).

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 Agnes Meyer, Mann’s admirer and benefactor. Courtesy of the Library of
Congress.

him, in due course, into an American citizen. That transformation

was to have a lasting impact upon his standing in postwar Germany,

D
where many would regard him as a traitor.

To effect such change, Mann required the assistance of an extraor-

dinary woman—extraordinary in her devotion, in her willingness to
use her many contacts to help him, and in her amazing ability to get
things done. Still, bringing Thomas Mann to Princeton, negotiating
the terms of his appointment, finding a suitable house, and accom-
plishing all within the span of three short months was by no means an
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 easy task. Indeed, rather than settling at Princeton, Mann might easily
have landed at Harvard. This story, unfolding in the spring of 1938
between the conclusion of the lecture tour and the return to Switzer-
land, illuminates, as we shall see, the completely exceptional nature
of Mann’s case. No other German émigré would enjoy such smooth
sailing because no other émigré could rely on a benefactor as well
intentioned and well connected as Agnes Meyer. Mann belonged to
that very small number of individuals (Lion Feuchtwanger and Franz
Werfel among them) whom his younger fellow émigré Walter Mehring
called “first-class refugees.” 4 Most of the others, Mehring included,
had a much harder time.
Although Agnes Meyer, a Barnard graduate, had no affiliation
with Princeton, she proved to be remarkably skillful and efficient in
dealing with the university’s administration. In fact, the refuge she
initially had in mind for Mann was not the university but the Insti-
tute for Advanced Study, an independent entity that was the aca-
demic home of Albert Einstein and a place that would burden her
protégé with no teaching obligations other than an occasional lecture.
Through a mutual friend, she contacted the Institute’s director, Abra-
ham Flexner, and drove from Washington to speak with him in person.
It was on hearing Flexner’s cordial and encouraging reaction that she
telegraphed the good news to Mann. Flexner realized, however, that
her idea was impractical and that the university would be a better fit.
He wrote to President Harold Dodds, who was quick to recognize the
potential importance of bringing the celebrated Nobel Prize winner
to the Princeton campus. Dodds immediately signaled to Meyer his
eagerness to have Mann associated with the university. Princeton, he
explained in his letter of April 28, 1938, was making great efforts to
strengthen its Humanities division; the presence of Mann would under-
score the university’s commitment to that goal and would greatly ben-
efit students and faculty alike.5 As “Resident Lecturer in Literature,”
Mann would certainly find Princeton a most suitable place. Dodds
was nonetheless constrained to add that the university was running a
deficit and that the funding of Mann’s lectureship, in the amount of
4.  Mehring’s description is to be found in an unpublished letter to Richard and Clara
Winston, cited by Krishna Winston, “ ‘Second-Class Refugees’: Literary Exiles from
Hitler’s Germany and Their Translators,” in The Dispossessed: An Anatomy of Exile, ed.
Peter I. Rose (Amherst and Boston: University of Massachusetts Press, 2005), 309–27.
5.  tm/am , 40.

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 $6,000 (the salary of a full professor), would have to come from outside
sources.
Funding Mann’s appointment seems in no way to have worried
Agnes Meyer. But the idea of seeing him bound to a teaching posi-
tion did not please her, nor did it sit well with Alfred Knopf, Mann’s
publisher. Both wanted their protégé to remain entirely unencumbered
by academic routine and free to complete his various literary projects,
notably the tetralogy of biblical novels, the third of which, Joseph in
Egypt, had just been published to great critical acclaim.
Responding to President Dodds on April 29, Agnes Meyer thus
let it be known that Mann was considering other offers—one from
a university in California, two from universities in the East—and
that “the whole matter” was still “entirely in the air�” 6 In fact, she
was bluffing. There were no other concrete offers to speak of, but she
nonetheless shrewdly repeated the sticking point—Mann should not
be burdened with mundane academic work. No doubt her decision
to play the “other offers” card was predicated on Mann’s affiliations
with Yale and especially with Harvard. In 1935, Harvard was the first
American university to award Mann an honorary degree. Two years
later the university invited him to deliver a series of three lectures on
Goethe, but he was unable to accept.7 Agnes Meyer had good reasons
to assume, then, that Harvard might be interested in hosting Thomas
Mann.
In addition, Alfred Knopf was urging Mann to move to Boston, with
or without an appointment at Harvard. Knopf invested in two din-
ners at Passy, his favorite French eatery, to persuade his star author of
the advantages of Boston over Princeton. The first of these took place
on May 8, the very eve of Mann’s initial visit to Princeton, where he
would meet with both Flexner and Dodds. According to Mann’s diary,
the interview went well. One week later, Knopf again took the Manns
to dinner, this time with Willa Cather as his special guest. We do not
know where she stood on the question of Boston versus Princeton, but
Knopf on this occasion was more convincing, because in several let-
ters subsequent to that dinner Mann announced that his future address
would indeed be Boston, Massachusetts.8
6.  tm/am , 41.
7.  Tb. December 11, 1937.
8.  Thomas Mann to Hermann Weigand, May 20, 1938: “unser dauernder Wohn-
sitz wird dann wohl Boston sein.” See Klaus W. Jonas, “Thomas Mann, Hermann

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 He was now constrained to inform Agnes Meyer of this change of
plans, which he did during a visit to the Meyers’ baronial estate at
Mount Kisco in New York’s Westchester County. She could hardly
have been thrilled by this turn of events, for she understandably wanted
her protégé closer to Washington. Furthermore, she was still hoping
that President Dodds would make some concessions regarding Mann’s
teaching load. On May 19, she nonetheless wrote loyally to James B.
Conant, president of Harvard, to inform him that “Thomas Mann has
decided to live near Boston now that political conditions in Europe
have obliged him to renounce his home in Switzerland.” 9 She contin-
ued, “it occurred to me that Harvard University might care to offer
him an honorary professorship,” adding that outside funding would
not be a problem.
At this juncture, when the scales were about to be tipped from
Princeton to Boston and Harvard, President Conant’s schedule pro-
vided a decisive counterweight. When Meyer’s letter arrived in Cam-
bridge on Friday, May 20, Conant was out of town. He remained
away from his office for the entire following week. During that time,
President Dodds made the move that sealed the deal for Princeton.
When Conant returned to campus and realized what had happened, he
apologized: he was sorry that he had been away when her letter about
“Professor Mann” arrived; he was sorry to learn that in the meantime
she had “made other arrangements”; and he was appreciative of her
“kindness in first writing to Harvard about the possibility of Mann’s
being with us.” 10
Thomas Mann received the letter from President Dodds on May
24, 1938. He would have a one-year appointment starting in the fall of
that year. No teaching obligations, no faculty meetings, no committee
work. His sole responsibility was to give four lectures.11 These condi-
tions satisfied his own and Agnes Meyer’s wishes. In Rhode Island for
a desperately needed working vacation, and aware that it would have
been churlish to quibble with the offer, Mann was prepared to accept.
“The needle is turning toward Princeton,” he noted in his diary. But
Weigand und die Yale University: Versuch einer Dokumentation,” Philobiblon 38
(1994): 97–147, 217–32.
  9.  tm/am , 45–46.
10.  tm/am , 47.
11.  Harold Dodds to Thomas Mann, May 20, 1936, Office of the President Pa-
pers, box 122, folder 8, Princeton University Archives (hereafter President Papers).

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 before responding, he wrote to his friend in Washington, who was
“delighted” that he was going to Princeton. “All is well in the best of
worlds!” she exclaimed.12 Making sure that her protégé would live in
that best of worlds and under the most favorable conditions possible
had been her goal ever since she had decided the previous year to take
the creator of Joseph in Egypt under her wing—and it remained her goal
for the remainder of Mann’s time in America. Experienced as she was
in dealing with the powerful, she suggested to Mann that in his reply
to Dodds he “enumerate the points” in the president’s letter and “say
that you are very glad to accede to these” and these alone. She also
urged him to “save the letter very carefully for future use, in case any
encroachments upon its conditions are made.”
In his letter of acceptance, dated May 27, 1938, and written in
German, Mann agreed to the conditions set out in President Dodds’s
letter, specifying that he would give one lecture on Goethe’s Faust in
the Modern Languages department’s series of conferences on liter-
ary masterworks and three further lectures. This seemed to be a rea-
sonable arrangement; but, as his guardian angel in Washington had
suspected, Mann’s involvement in the university would considerably
exceed those agreed-upon terms.
During these negotiations, Mann was kept in the dark about the
funding of his position. Half of his $6,000 salary, it transpired, was
contributed by the Rockefeller Foundation; the other half came from
funds made available to the university administration.13 During an-
other stay at Mount Kisco, shortly before Mann’s return to Switzer-
land, Meyer explained to him how his position was to be funded. With
palpable pride in her accomplishment, and with a touch of coquett-
ishness, she added that all the trustees of the Rockefeller Foundation
were friends of hers. Impressed and exhilarated by this news, Mann
noted in his diary that a prolongation of his contract would in all like-
lihood not be a problem.14 This assumption, too, proved to be false.
The contract for 1938–1939 was renewed for the following spring

12.  tm/am , 121.
13.  The university applied for and received a grant of $2,000 from the Emergency
Committee in Aid of Displaced German Scholars of the Institute of International
Education in New York. Stephen Duggan to Harold Dodds, May 12, 1938, President
Papers, box 122, folder 8. Members of the Princeton Club of New York also contrib-
uted $250 to the Thomas Mann Fund.
14.  Tb. June 27, 1938; Diaries 1918–1939, 301–2.

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 65 Stockton Street, the Mann family’s residence from September 29, 1938, to March
17, 1941. Photograph by Ulli Steltzer, 1967. Mann Collection, box 8, folder 26.

semester alone because funding of the position for the full academic
year could not be secured.15 Of the two and a half years that the Manns
lived in Princeton, he was formally associated with the university for
only three semesters.
Just before the return to Switzerland, the housing question in Prince-
ton was most satisfactorily resolved. The Manns agreed to rent a stately
residence on Stockton Street large enough to accommodate, as needed,
the six Mann children, their partners, and their friends. With ten bed-
rooms and five bathrooms, the mansion definitely represented a big
step up from their house in Küsnacht, as Mann noted with under-
standable satisfaction.16 “65 Stockton Street” immediately became a
prized destination for many fellow exiles from Germany and Austria.
And it offered a space where the likes of Bruno Walter, Roger Ses-
15.  Harold Dodds to Thomas Mann, May 15, 1939, President Papers, box 122,
folder 8.
16.  Diaries 1918–1939, 302.

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 The Mann family in Princeton. From left to right: W. H. Auden, Christopher Isher-
wood, Erika, Thomas, Katia, Elisabeth, and Klaus Mann. Carl Mydans/The LIFE
Picture Collection/Getty Images.

sions, Rudolf Serkin, and members of the Busch Quartet could come
to visit and perform. Katia Mann (1883–1980), in charge of the fam-
ily’s finances, cleverly negotiated a lower-than-market-value rent of
$250 rather than $300 per month. She convinced the British owners,
Flora and Rupert Mitford, that they would eventually be able to sell
the house for a higher price if they were to advertise it as the former
home of Thomas Mann.17
D
The Manns moved into their Princeton home on September 28. The
academic year had just begun, and Mann’s first speaking date was
some two months down the road. At this stage, what mattered most was
the resumption of his religiously observed work routine: three undis-
turbed hours at his familiar desk after breakfast, which would yield, on
17.  Ibid.

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 average, a page and a half of finely wrought German prose. But before
resuming this routine—his unfinished Goethe novel, Lotte in Weimar,
and the imminent lecture on Goethe’s Faust were pressing—he needed
to be reunited with that desk, which had yet to arrive from Switzer-
land. It was a matter of the greatest urgency.
In fact, the story of Mann’s desk is as improbable as the story of
his exile as a whole. Mann’s writing table stands as a symbol of the
impressive continuity in his career and of his triumph over the ad-
versities of exile. The desk has been carefully preserved and can now
be admired in the Thomas Mann Archives in Zürich.18 It is a practi-
cal, comfortably proportioned piece of furniture, made of mahogany,
which he appears to have acquired after receiving the Nobel Prize
in 1929, although no record of its purchase is available.19 After the
unforeseen decision in March 1933 not to return to Munich after his
winter vacation in Arosa, Switzerland, the fate of the desk became a
major concern, as did, of course, the fate of the manuscript of his Jo-
seph novel and, even more troubling, the fate of his diaries, which were
stored in a hidden compartment inside the desk. The diaries contained
compromising confessions that would constitute a mortal threat, he
thought, if they were to fall into the hands of the Nazis. But, like the
diaries, smuggled out of Munich by Mann’s son Golo (1909–1994), so,
too, were the desk, desk chair, and reading chair able to make a clan-
destine escape. Under the pretext of requiring repair from a specialist,
they were shipped to Réné Schickele, a colleague and friend who lived
near the Swiss border. Schickele, an Alsatian who held both French
and German citizenship, had no trouble forwarding the furniture first
to France and then to Mann’s address in Switzerland.
The desk’s trip from Switzerland to America was less circuitous and
adventuresome. Still, its eagerly awaited arrival in Princeton on Octo-
ber 7 marked a joyous event. In his diary Mann speaks of the almost
hallucinatory unreality of finding himself on American soil and re-
united with his desk.20 He took great delight in arranging its props on
its polished surface. Everything had to be just so—just as it had been

18.  For a series of photographs documenting the bewildering order on Mann’s

desk, see Im Geiste der Genauigkeit: Das Thomas-Mann-Archiv der ETH Zürich, 1956–2006
(Frankfurt/M: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006).
19.  For the complete story of Mann’s desk, see Inge Jens, Am Schreibtisch: Thomas
Mann und seine Welt (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 2013).
20.  Tb. October 7, 1938.

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 Thomas Mann
and Helen T. Lowe-
Porter, his transla-
tor, in his Princeton
study, with Mann’s
desk in the fore-
ground. Princeton
Sunday News, April
14, 1940, Princeton
University Archives,
Department of
Rare Books and
Special Collections,
Princeton University
Library.

in Küsnacht and, before that, in Munich. There was the bracket clock
on its brass foundation, the flip calendar, the ivory letter opener, and
the fountain pen holder with its onyx base. There was also the mot-
ley collection of paraphernalia that Mann was accustomed to seeing
before him when writing: the photographs of his wife and his favorite
daughter, Elisabeth (1918–2002); a bronze plaque with the image of
Leo Tolstoi; a miniature portrait of Savonarola, the hero of Fiorenza,
his only work for the stage; and various Egyptian and East Asian statu-
ettes, including one representing a Siamese warrior. Among the other
objects whose mere talismanic presence aided the superstitious collector
as he put pen to paper were the two mood-setting brass candelabras that
we know from Death in Venice. For Gustav von Aschenbach, the story’s
hero, writing “with two tall wax candles in silver candlesticks placed
at the head of his manuscript” is an almost religious exercise.21 The
nearly three dozen items on Mann’s desk made for a rather crowded
surface and left little room for the most essential component of his work

21.  Death in Venice and Other Stories, trans. and with an introduction by David Luke
(Toronto, New York: Bantam Books, 1988), 202.

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 space, the leather folder containing a supply of writing paper. Yet so
attached was Mann to the particular if bizarre order on his desk that
he guarded it against any intrusion. Because her English was better
than his, he asked his daughter Erika (1905–1969) to instruct John
and Lucy, the Manns’ black domestics, to touch nothing on the desk

D
as they went about tidying up the study.22

Mann’s three-semester stint at Princeton would include not merely

the four lectures agreed to but a total of nineteen events, seven taking
place in the academic year 1938–1939 and twelve in the closing weeks
of the spring semester of 1940. For his inaugural lecture in Alexander
Hall on November 28, 1938, Mann had offered to speak in English
about Goethe’s Faust. The text he prepared turned out to be too long
for a single lecture and had to be cut in half, with the second part pre-
sented on the following day.
There is no mistaking Mann’s intention: he wanted to highlight
certain features of the work, including the risqué and ribald elements
that he considered to be particularly appealing to his mostly young
male audience. To that end he drew attention to the personality and
character of the work’s author, painting Goethe as a “vastly pleasing,
broad-minded and unique combination” of “demonic” and “urbane”
elements.23 Mann finds in the creator of Faust a “deep and radical be-
nevolence,” a basic human goodness. He buttresses this view by show-
ing that in the last analysis the sprawling drama itself takes a kindly
and compassionate view of the figure of Faust and of humankind as
a whole.
This somewhat starry-eyed reading of Goethe’s work is no longer
fashionable, but at the time it was the prevailing view. In this particular
case it also carried an implicitly political thought in linking Goethe’s
benevolent view of humankind to what Mann took to be a core ele-
ment of the American character and, more precisely, a basic element
of the eminently American character of Franklin Delano Roosevelt.
Although nowhere mentioned in the lecture, Roosevelt looms large

22.  See Erika Mann, Mein Vater, der Zauberer, ed. Irmela von der Lühe and Uwe
Naumann (Reinbek: Rowohlt, 1996), 258.
23.  “Goethe’s Faust,” in Thomas Mann, Essays of Three Decades, trans. H. T. Lowe-
Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1947), 3–42, 4.

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 in Mann’s vision. This becomes apparent when we link the charac-
ter traits that he highlights in the Faust lecture to what Mann thought
about America—“the land of good will”—and to what he thought
about fdr —“who desires the good—or at any rate the better.” 24 In
both cases good will is the preeminent feature, which is to say, a fun-
damental benevolence that emanates from the winning amalgamation
of what he termed the demonic and the urbane. To today’s reader,
Mann’s effort to fuse what he considered to represent the very best of
German and American culture seems touching, but a little far-fetched.
Mann, however, clung to the belief that the unshakable good will ex-
emplified by Goethe and Roosevelt was in the long run the best anti-
dote to the ills of the era.
For his next performances Mann recycled two lectures from 1937:
“Richard Wagner and the Ring,” given in Zürich, and “Freud and
the Future,” given in Vienna in honor of Sigmund Freud’s eightieth
birthday. These, too, are imbued with discrete political meaning. In the
first, Mann protests vehemently against the misuse by Nazi Germany
“of the great phenomenon that is Richard Wagner.” He specifically
rejects the Nazi claim that the creator of Der Ring des Nibelungen was a
prophet of the Third Reich. Mann assures his listeners that if Wagner
were alive today he would be an exile “seeking his grave in a foreign
land” rather than in a country under the yoke of a “soul-destroying
state totalitarianism.” 25 Here as elsewhere Mann considered it his re-
sponsibility to denounce the Nazis’ claim to be the unique represen-
tatives of German culture and to remind the world of the existence of
an “other Germany.”
In “Freud and the Future” Mann celebrates the Viennese pioneer
of psychoanalysis as a liberator and hails the new science of the soul as
the foundation of a more enlightened and productive attitude toward
the unconscious, especially in this “neurotic, fear-ridden, hate-ridden
24.  Thomas Mann, “Land of Good Will,” La Voix de France (New York), n.s., no.
17 (May 15, 1942); letter to Agnes Meyer, January 24, 1941, tm/am , 255. See also
Letters of Thomas Mann, 1889–1955, selected and trans. by Richard and Clara Winston,
introduction by Richard Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1971), 355.
25.  “Richard Wagner and the Ring,” in Essays of Three Decades, 353–71, 371. James
N. Bade, in his invaluable annotated edition based on the lecture typescripts, Thomas
Mann: On Myself and Other Princeton Lectures (Frankfurt/M: Peter Lang, 1996), 10, re-
minds us that the version published in Essays of Three Decades is “quite different” from
Mann’s actual Princeton lecture.

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 world.” 26 In Germany, that new science of the soul was rejected as
Jewish in spirit and origin.27 Mann links both Freud and Wagner to
Goethe’s Faust, claiming them for the New Humanism in the spirit of
Goethe that he had been promoting ever since his political conversion
in 1922 from monarchist to republican and democrat. In the Wagner
lecture, Mann concludes by asserting that Götterdämmerung and Faust
share the same final idea, that is, redemption through love. In the same
vein, in the Freud lecture, he likens the eighty-year-old psychoanalyst
to the hundred-year-old Faust: the latter is a colonizer in the literal
sense, the former a colonizer in the figurative sense. Like Faust, who
reclaims land from the sea and envisions a free people on free soil, the
psychoanalyst, too, discloses new avenues of liberation. In the realm
of culture, Freud’s epigrammatic maxim, “Where id was, there shall
ego be,” is comparable to the labor Faust performs by draining the sea
in order to wrest from it new land. Both are guided by the vision of a
liberated mankind—“free from fear and hate, and ripe for peace.” 28
The rest of Mann’s academic work during the first year amounted to
two more airings of the Faust lecture in the more informal “precepto-
rial conferences” that supplemented the large lecture course “Modern
Languages 310” and, for his final appearance, a talk on a new subject.
Responding to a request from Dean of the College Christian Gauss to
discuss the genesis of The Magic Mountain, Mann produced a lecture
called “The Making of the Magic Mountain” that has since served as
the introduction to several English-language editions of the novel. Here
he drew liberally from Hermann Weigand’s pathbreaking monograph
of 1933, the first in-depth study of the work in any language.29 He also
quoted from a paper that a nineteen-year-old Harvard undergraduate
had sent him, entitled “The Quester Hero: Myth and Universal Symbol
in the Works of Thomas Mann.” Mann, who never subscribed to the

26.  “Freud and the Future,” Essays of Three Decades, 411–28, 427.

27.  Cf. Manfred Dierks, “Thomas Mann und die ‘jüdische’ Psychoanalyse: Über
Freud, C. G. Jung, das ‘jüdische Unbewußte’ und Manns Ambivalenz,” in Thomas
Mann und das Judentum: Die Vorträge des Berliner Kolloquiums der deutschen Thomas-Mann-
Gesellschaft, ed. Manfred Dierks und Ruprecht Wimmer (Frankfurt/M: Vittorio Klos-
termann, 2004), 97–126.
28.  “Freud and the Future,” 428.
29.  Hermann J. Weigand, Thomas Mann’s Novel “Der Zauberberg”: A Study (New
York: D. Appleton-Cenury, 1933); reprint, The Magic Mountain: A Study of Thomas
Mann’s Novel, Der Zauberberg (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1964).

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 Harvey Hewett-Thayer,
Professor of German
in the Department of
Modern Languages,
n.d. Faculty Photo-
graphs, Princeton
University Archives.

popular belief that the author is the best interpreter of his work, liked
the notion of the “quester hero” as a modern seeker of the Grail and
adopted the idea for his lecture. The young man turned out to be How-
ard Nemerov, who would soon distinguish himself as a poet and critic.
Although contractually obliged to make himself available during
only the second semester of 1939–1940, Mann agreed to make a guest
appearance on November 17, 1939, in Harvey Hewitt-Thayer’s course,
“The Development of the European Novel.” He had no difficulty in
putting together a new lecture on Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther,
finishing it in less than a week and concluding it with a little in-joke.
Reminding his listeners that Charlotte Buff, the real-life model for
Werther’s Lotte, actually visited Goethe in Weimar many years after
the turbulent summer of 1772 that gave rise to the novel, Mann re-
marked that this intriguing historical anecdote could serve as the start-
ing point for a penetrating study of Goethe. And, he added—with a
sly smile, one imagines—perhaps one day “a writer” will take up this
idea.30 Unbeknownst to his audience, he himself was that writer, hav-
ing just then completed Lotte in Weimar, one of his finest achievements
as a novelist.

30.  “Goethe’s Werther,” in Bade, ed., Princeton Lectures, 111–35.

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 Mann’s teaching load in the spring of 1940 seems to us to have been
very light indeed, but it did not feel so to him because he had decided,
perhaps foolishly, to crowd all his speaking engagements into the last
weeks of the semester. To be sure, some of them occasioned no extra
work because the texts came from the previous year. In one instance
Mann repeated an abbreviated version of the Faust lecture, and in two
others he recycled the introduction to The Magic Mountain. He also sat
in on two of Hans Jäger’s German classes, where Mann’s most beloved
novella, Tonio Kröger, was on the syllabus. If these outings required no
preparation, the remaining assignments did. Having agreed to write
an autobiographical piece, Mann developed a lecture entitled “On
Myself”; it is the most detailed and informative text of its kind.31 Di-
viding it into two parts, Mann presented it first in German in Hans
Jäger’s course, then in English in Hewitt-Thayer’s course, “European
Literatures and Cultures.” In his final contribution to that same course
Mann lectured on “The Art of the Novel,” again a two-part affair,
bringing the total number of his appearances that semester to twelve.
More distressing than the extra labor his lectures required was the
growing sense that lecturing in English, and having to rely on trans-
lations of questionable quality, meant putting forth his thoughts in a
shape that almost certainly failed to reflect the subtlety, elegance, and
wit he always worked hard to achieve. It meant constantly to undersell
himself. For someone of Mann’s sensitivity to all matters of style, this
was a painful and discouraging experience.
The problem of translation had surfaced at the end of the first aca-
demic year. On May 18, 1939, Princeton awarded Mann the degree of
Doctor of Letters honoris causa. When Katia and Klaus Mann (1906–
1949) looked at Helen Lowe-Porter’s translation of Mann’s acceptance
speech, they found much to criticize and determined to make some
adjustments of their own. The brief speech that Mann proceeded to
deliver had also been “fixed” by Samuel B. Bossard (Class of 1933),
a junior member of the Department of Modern Languages and Lit-
eratures.32 The result was definitely not an improvement of Lowe-
Porter’s text. In the aftermath of this embarrassment, Mann took the
ill-advised step of entrusting his secretary, James Hans Meisel, with
the English version of “On Myself.” Meisel was a promising German

31.  “On Myself,” in Bade, ed., Princeton Lectures, 23–79.

32.  Bade, “Introduction,” in Princeton Lectures, 12.

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 Harold Dodds and Thomas Mann at the honorary degree ceremony, May 18, 1939.
Mann Collection, box 8, folder 13.

author and not a native speaker of English; the version he produced

sounded awkward, as Mann himself realized. This discouraged him
from writing a new essay on “The Art of the Novel.” He gave Meisel
an outline and asked him to piece together a text on the basis of older
relevant essays, which Meisel did.
What did those in attendance at Mann’s lectures actually hear?
Mann’s English during the early years in America was shaky. Before
he spoke to the big crowds that streamed to his lectures during the
cross-country tours, he was wise enough to practice the pronunciation
of tricky words with a native speaker, preferably Helen Lowe-Porter,
who had moved to Princeton in 1937, and, when she was available,
Agnes Meyer. But in the deceptively informal setting of academe he
seems to have thrown caution to the wind. Bernhard Ulmer, profes-
sor of German at Princeton from 1936 to 1976, attended the lectures
and matter-of-factly reported that Mann’s German accent “garbled
the English and made it mostly incomprehensible.” Ulmer remembers
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 feeling “that if he had spoken in German rather than in ‘English,’ at
least a few of us would have understood him.” 33 Helen Lowe-Porter,
Mann’s official translator, reports that “at that time his English lec-
tures impressed me as being in a tongue unknown, which by a stroke
of luck I happened to understand.” 34
Freed from all academic work by mid-May 1940, Mann could turn
back to his nearly finished novella, The Transposed Heads. At the end
of the semester he was officially notified by Robert Root, dean of the
faculty, that the Rockefeller Foundation would no longer continue its
support and that his affiliation with Princeton would therefore come to
an end. To soften the blow to Mann’s elevated sense of dignity, Root
added that Mann would, of course, be welcome to continue to profit
from the university’s library, faculty club, and other facilities and that
he could take solace from the fact that by awarding him an honor-
ary degree the university had “adopted” him “for all time as a son of
Princeton.” 35 To someone who, in that sense, had also been adopted
by Harvard, Yale, and Columbia, such a consolatory remark did not
carry much weight. That the ingratiating dean incorrectly referred to
his honorary degree as “Doctor of Law” rather than “Doctor of Let-
ters” furthermore left something of a bitter aftertaste. Mann nonethe-
less replied politely that he had “greatly enjoyed” his association with

D
so distinguished an institution as Princeton University.36

It was with a sigh of relief, knowing that the academic pages of the
Princeton chapter lay behind them, that the Manns boarded a train
for Los Angeles. The reservations expressed by Alfred Knopf and
Agnes Meyer about taking on teaching obligations had proven to be
well founded after all. In truth, the lectureship had become quite bur-
densome. In a letter to his son Golo he confessed that he was tired of
playing professor. And to his vigilant lady friend in Washington he
33.  Bernhard Ulmer, in a personal communication of 1994 to James Bade; Bade,
“Introduction,” 14n30.
34.  “On Translating Thomas Mann,” in John C. Thirlwall, In Another Language:
A Record of the Thirty-Year Relationship between Thomas Mann and His English Translator,
Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A Knopf, 1966), 178–209, 205.
35.  Robert K. Root to Thomas Mann, May 21, 1940, Faculty Files, Princeton
University Archives; see also Bade, “Introduction,” 11.
36.  Mann to Robert K. Root, May 28, 1940, Faculty Files, Princeton University
Archives; quoted in Vaget, Mann, der Amerikaner, 524n39.

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 wrote that he wanted never again to engage in “jests” such as these.
He was itching to get to the concluding part of the Joseph cycle. Even
before arriving in Princeton, he had confided to his son Klaus that he
was apprehensive about the academic atmosphere that awaited him
there and that deep down he preferred the “movie-types” he had met
in Hollywood.37
Princeton was never intended to be more than a transitional stage in
Mann’s biography. Although apparently sincere when, in his speech on
the occasion of the honorary doctorate, he said that he felt “at home”
in Princeton, Mann was simultaneously aware that the arrangement
was a stroke of luck, for which he felt unaffected gratitude. One can-
not help suspecting, however, that the warmth of his remarks reflected
more his customary good manners than his deepest sentiments. Mann
never quite got over the feeling that his very exile was a grave stylistic
mistake on the part of History. In retrospect, we can see that Prince-
ton was viewed from the beginning as a port of call on the way to the
West Coast. When the Manns had first visited the City of Angels in
the spring of 1938, it was almost a case of love at first sight, not only
because of Southern California’s Mediterranean climate but also be-
cause of the presence in Hollywood of a strong German cohort. In
the summer of 1940, after the frustrations of the spring semester,
Los Angeles looked more attractive than ever. During the three sum-
mer months they spent in the Brentwood section of Los Angeles, the
Manns decided to buy a plot of land in Pacific Palisades and to build
a Bauhaus-style house that would became their home after the defini-
tive departure from Princeton early in 1941.
In his first letter to Mann, President Dodds had expressed confi-
dence that the presence of the famous author would be of benefit to
the students and young faculty at Princeton. Was it? Evidence re-
garding students is hard to come by. Mann was not accustomed to the
give-and-take process of the typical American seminar; nor, after a
lecture, did he like having to answer questions. In his diaries, not a
note can be found about the kinds of questions students asked him,
and we do not know whether he regarded the young men as in any
way startling or smart.
37.  Thomas to Klaus Mann, May 12, 1938: “ich fürchte mich etwas vor der Ge-
lehrten-Atmosphäre, und das Movie-Gesindel ist mir im Grunde lieber.” Klaus
Mann, Briefe und Antworten, ed. Martin Gregor-Dellin, 2 vols. (Munich: Spangen-
berg, 1975), 2: 41.

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 Evidence of interaction with faculty is likewise thin. As already
noted, the junior English instructor Samuel Bossard helped check the
translations of various lectures and articles. The Manns did befriend
Allen and Molly Shenstone. Allen, a Canadian, was chair of the Phys-
ics department; his English wife offered her help with the English
correspondence and became fast friends with Katia. The Shenstones
were then in their forties. So, too, was the composer Roger Sessions. A
member of the Music department, he gave advice to Mann about music
lessons for Michael (1919–1977), his youngest son, who would go on
to play in the viola section of the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra
and become a professor of German literature at Berkeley. Sessions also
had close professional ties to Guiseppe Antonio Borgese (1882–1952),
who, as we shall see, would soon become Mann’s son-in-law.

Roger Sessions at the piano in the crypt of the Princeton University Chapel. Prince-
ton Alumni Weekly, February 5, 1937.

The only undergraduate with whom Mann seems to have had sig-
nificant interaction was Frederick Morgan, Class of 1943, co-chairman
of the Nassau Lit, Princeton’s venerable literary magazine. Morgan
had the presence of mind to ask Mann for a contribution to an issue
dedicated to him during the Lit ’s one-hundredth anniversary year.
Mann obliged with a ten-page autobiographical reminiscence, “Lit-
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 tle Grandma,” which is a delightful portrait of Katia’s beautiful and
charming grandmother, Hedwig Dohm, who had been a feisty feminist
to boot.38 With a smile, Mann recounts that “Little Grandma,” as she
was called even in German, tolerated but did not really approve of his
marriage to her brilliant granddaughter because of his attitude toward
women. Originally written for the Reader’s Digest series on the theme
of “The most remarkable person I ever met,” “Little Grandma” opens
the September 1942 issue of the Lit, which also contains articles by
Morgan himself on “The Mann Microcosm,” by Professor Bernhard
Ulmer on The Magic Mountain, and by Wallace J. Williamson, Class
of 1943, on Schiller’s celebrated treatise “On Naïve and Sentimental
Poetry,” one of Mann’s favorites. Frederick Morgan soon made a name
for himself as a poet and in 1948 founded (with two other Nassau Lit
editors) the Hudson Review, which in several of its early issues published
pieces about Thomas Mann, including one by Morgan offering “Notes
on the Joseph Novels.” Mann continued to show Morgan his appre-
ciation by allowing the Hudson Review to bring out a chapter from his

D
new novel, Doctor Faustus, in its third issue.

In Mann’s biography the name of “Princeton” stands for a great deal

more than the town, the university, and the writer’s valiant attempt
to play professor. During the Princeton years Mann was almost inces-
santly immersed in the dramatic political events that were taking place
in Europe. Hitler’s early military triumphs battered the writer into one
depression after another. He managed to absorb these blows by join-
ing the Allied war effort in October 1940 as a propagandist, writing a
monthly commentary for broadcast over the bbc to clandestine listen-
ers in Germany. At the same time, he strove to understand the ways
of Washington and grappled with the shenanigans of congressional
politics, listened to Roosevelt’s radio addresses, and rooted ardently for
the success of fdr ’s effort to ready the United States for war.
Under these circumstances, it is not surprising that the literary har-
vest of the Princeton years, when compared with that of the preceding
years in Switzerland and the ensuing years in Los Angeles, was mea-
ger. Mann finished Lotte in Weimar, which was begun on the heels of
38.  Mann to Frederick Morgan, June 12, 1942, Hudson Review Archives, box 79,
folder 7, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Special Collections,
Princeton University Library.

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 completing  Joseph in Ägypten in November 1936. In Princeton he wrote
the novel’s last three chapters, which include, in chapter vii , a virtuosic
stream-of-consciousness portrait of Goethe as a man of sixty. Then, as
a bagatelle, before returning to Joseph, Mann wrote Transposed Heads, a
novella also partly based on Goethe. This tongue-in-cheek fantasy on
a theme from Indian mythology is among Mann’s most grotesque and
amusing tales. He enjoyed writing it because it provided a distraction
from the increasingly distressing news that arrived daily from Europe.
In Princeton, finally, he wrote the early parts of Joseph, the Provider (ac-
tually begun in Los Angeles in August 1940). By the time the Manns
moved from Princeton to California, on March 17, 1941, Parts One
and Two and the first chapter of Part Three were completed.
Aside from the five new academic lectures, Mann wrote the first four
of his radio messages for the bbc , which by the time the war ended
would number fifty-five.39 He also wrote three substantive political es-
says that he used for the lecture tours of 1939 and 1940: This Peace, in
which he denounced the infamous Munich Agreement of September
30, 1939; The Problem of Freedom, in which he argued for a wise and
prophylactic limitation of freedom for the sake of greater social justice;
and This War, in which he predicted that Germany would be taught
some bitter lessons and that in the new world that emerged from the
present conflict the idea of the nation-state would have to play a di-
minished role.40
This War was written in the final weeks of 1939 for the third lecture
tour of January and February 1940, which took Mann to Ottawa, the
Midwest, and Texas. He had for some time been hoping for war; now
that it had finally arrived, he was torn. He reminded his listeners that
from the beginning National Socialism had war on its mind—war for
German supremacy in Europe and the world—and that the present
war was only the logical outcome of its political program. Never doubt-
ing the eventual victory of democracy over fascism, Mann was pleased
39.  Thomas Mann, Listen, Germany! Twenty-Five Radio Messages to the German People
over BBC (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1943). The remaining thirty radio messages
are, as yet, unavailable in English.
40.  Thomas Mann, This Peace: Together with the Address of November 9, 1938, in New
York, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1938), also in Thomas
Mann, Order of the Day: Political Essays and Speeches of Two Decades (New York: Alfred
A. Knopf, 1942), 167–85; Thomas Mann, The Problem of Freedom (New Brunswick:
Rutgers University Press, 1939); Thomas Mann, This War, trans. Eric Sutton (New
York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1940), also in Order of the Day, 186–227.

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 to see that after years of Nazi terror against Socialists, Communists,
and Jews, the time of payback had finally come. It nonetheless pained
him more than a little to think that defeating Hitler meant defeating
Germany and destroying it in the process. Still, he was adamant in
declaring that, given so many Germans’ misguided loyalty to Hitler,
such an outcome was unavoidable—because only a catastrophic defeat
would make the Germans give up their infatuation with power and
renounce their striving for supremacy. From an author who during
World War I prided himself on being a nonpolitical artist, this view
of World War II turned out to be a remarkably insightful prediction.
In the most prescient passage of the lecture, Mann declared that the
ultimate goal of the present war had to be the establishment of a Eu-
ropean “Commonwealth,” which would entail the adjustment of the
idea of national sovereignty in order to establish a new political order
aimed at peace.
This War marks a crucial stage in Mann’s obsessive reflection on the
roots and causes of the German catastrophe, which would soon lead to
the trenchant critique of German culture in two of his addresses at the
Library of Congress—The War and the Future (1943) and “Germany and
the Germans” (1945)—and, most controversially, in his dark, unspar-
ing novel Doctor Faustus. Now that England had been drawn into the
war and was being threatened by Germany, Mann no longer criticized
Britain. In fact, when Winston Churchill was appointed prime min-
ister in May 1940, Mann became a staunch admirer and defender of
the United Kingdom. In a small but telling gesture during his stop in
the Canadian capital, Mann made a point of visiting the residence of the
governor general, representing the British crown, in order to sign the
visitors’ book and thereby express his support for the besieged country.41
In addition to the grueling lecture tours, Mann further engaged
in political affairs during the Princeton years by participating in the
“City of Man” project and by making a two-day visit to the White
House in January 1941. The encounter with President Roosevelt, his
third, undoubtedly marked a high point in Mann’s American years.
The City of Man project was the fruit of a conference held at the Had-
don Hall Hotel in Atlantic City, May 23–26, 1940, under the auspices
of a group of American, German, and Italian intellectuals known as
the “Committee on Europe.” 42 The group was led and convened by
41.  Tb. January 25, 1940.
42.  The City of Man: A Declaration on World Democracy (New York: Viking Press, 1940).

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 Giuseppe Antonio
Borgese, Mann’s son-in-
law. From the souvenir
program of the Interna-
tional Goethe Bicenten-
nial Convocation and
Music Festival, Aspen,
Colorado, June 27–July
16, 1949. Rare Book Di-
vision, Department of
Rare Books and Special
Collections, Princeton
University Library.

Guiseppe Antonio Borgese, a prolific writer and intellectual of wide-

ranging interests, including German literature.43 Borgese was the au-
thor, most recently, of Goliath: The March of Fascism (1937), a scathing
critique of fascism and of Mussolini. The goals of the Committee on
Europe were noble, lofty, and ahead of their time, which is to say, im-
practical. What these visionaries and idealists envisioned was nothing
less than a “world democracy,” the chief stipulation of which was, if
not the overcoming of it altogether, at least the significant deflation of
the idea of the nation-state.
Today, the City of Man project has been virtually forgotten, but
it deserves to be remembered as a forerunner of the various new be-
ginnings that came to fruition after the war with the founding of the
United Nations in 1945 and with the formation of the European Coal
and Steel Community in 1951, which eventually led to the European
Union. At the conference in Atlantic City, Mann presented his lecture
on the “Problem of Freedom,” and he chaired one of the committee’s
sessions.
43.  For the best recent appreciation, see Giovanni di Stefano, “ ‘Italienische Optik,
furios behauptet’: Giuseppe Antonio Borgese—der schwierige Schwiegersohn,”
Thomas-Mann-Jahrbuch 8 (1995): 139–65.

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 D
No account of Mann’s Princeton years would be complete without
mention of the wedding, on November 23, 1939, of Elisabeth Mann
and Guiseppe Antonio Borgese. It was quite the event in the annals
of this “amazing family,” as Harold Nicolson aptly characterized the
Manns.44 Borgese, after professorial stints at the University of Califor-
nia at Berkeley and at Smith College, was teaching at the University
of Chicago. He visited Princeton regularly because at Smith he had
become friends with the composer Roger Sessions, now professor of
music at Princeton. They would collaborate on an opera, Montezuma,
depicting Cortez’s victory and the clash of civilizations in Mexico. On
one of his visits to Princeton and New York, Borgese had succeeded
in seducing Mann’s youngest daughter, Elisabeth, nicknamed Medi.
When the couple then announced their intention to get married, many
an eyebrow was raised: Borgese was fifty-seven and divorced; Medi was
only twenty-one. True to type, Borgese enjoyed boasting of his manly
vigor, something that gave Erika and Klaus, Medi’s sharp-tongued sib-
lings, many openings for much good-natured teasing. Mann, writing
to his brother Heinrich, observed: “Medi has married her antifascist
professor, who at the age of fifty-seven probably harbored little hope
of winning so much youth. But the child wanted it and brought it off.
He is a brilliant, charming, and excellently preserved man, that much
must be granted, and he bitterly hates his ‘Duce’�” 45
Whatever reservations the family harbored, there was no disputing
the fact that Medi had brought into the family not only a distinguished
intellectual but also a colorful personality and theatrical conversation-
alist who at the slightest provocation could be relied on to deliver a
sarcastic diatribe against Mussolini or the pope. In Mann’s eyes, what
counted most was Borgese’s impeccable record of antifascism. In 1930
he had refused to sign the oath of loyalty to Mussolini and decided to
leave the country. In fact, in a somewhat macabre family ritual, Mann

44.  He did so in his review of Erika Mann’s School for Barbarians in the Daily Tele-
graph, April 14, 1939. The phrase “that amazing family” became a household byword
in the Mann family.
45.  Letter to Heinrich Mann, November 26, 1939, Letters of Heinrich and Thomas
Mann, 1900–1949, ed. Hans Wysling, trans. Don Reneau, with additional transla-
tions by Richard and Clara Winston (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998),
229. Translation adjusted.

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 Elisabeth, Thomas, and Katia Mann in the garden of their Princeton home shortly
before Medi’s wedding to G. A. Borgese. Molly Shenstone Collection on Thomas
Mann, box 2, folder 1, Manuscripts Division, Department of Rare Books and Spe-
cial Collections, Princeton University Library.

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 and Borgese would vie for the dubious distinction of having as their
national leader the greatest scoundrel of them all. Borgese insisted that
Il Duce, more wicked and dangerous than der Führer, was “the worst
of the worst.” Mann suspected that Borgese made such a claim “out of
pure nationalism”; as far as he was concerned, Mussolini, compared
to Hitler, was almost a demi-god.46
The wedding ceremony took place in the Princeton University
Chap­el, with Roger Sessions, the exiled Austrian writer Hermann
Broch, and Klaus Mann acting as best men. The father of the bride,
strangely tight-lipped about this big family occasion, was in poor spir-
its. He had been feeling distraught all day long, and as he gave away
his favorite daughter, he wept.47 What was troubling him? Everyone
in the family knew that Borgese was not Medi’s first choice. She had
earlier lost her heart to a younger man, Fritz Landshoff, the brilliant
editor of the work of a number of important exiled writers, including
Klaus Mann. But Fritz, a ladies’ man, was not available—and he was
insensitive enough to visit the Manns in Princeton in the company
of his latest consort, an actress.48 Indeed, this impropriety may well
have precipitated Medi’s decision to wed Borgese. But perhaps what
bothered Mann was his fear that the fiery Sicilian with the outsized
ego would stunt the development of his intelligent and multi-talented
daughter. Or perhaps he dreaded the pain of the absence of Medi,
who held a special place in his heart and even in his work. He had
celebrated her baptism in a brief epic idyll in the style of Goethe, the
Gesang vom Kindchen (1919), and he immortalized little Medi in his no-
vella Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925). Perhaps, finally, he darkly sus-
pected that his daughter’s choice of a much older man—a man only
seven years younger than himself—revealed a potentially troublesome
father fixation.
With the ceremony in the chapel behind them, the wedding party
continued the celebration at the home of Roger Sessions, who had
lunch served for the gathering. Mann was still feeling distraught, but
his mood improved during the actual wedding dinner, at 65 Stock-
ton Street, where the family was joined by a group of friends that
46.  See the interview with Mann, Berliner Morgenpost, October 20, 1930, and Frage
und Antwort: Interviews mit Thomas Mann 1909–1955, ed. Volkmar Hansen and Gert
Heine (Munich: Knaus, 1983), 173.
47.  Tb. November 23, 1939.
48.  Tb. October 23, 1938.

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 included W. H. Auden, the bride’s brother-in-law. We know from the
diary that Mann addressed the obligatory toast to the groom (“Worte
an Borgese”), but we do not know what he said.49 It fell to Sessions
to provide the evening’s musical entertainment from the bench of
the Manns’ grand piano. The high point, however, was furnished by
Auden, Erika Mann’s pro forma husband since 1935. The celebrated
poet had composed an elaborate nuptial poem in praise of the bride
and the groom, a classical epithalamion running to eight stanzas and
128 lines.50 In a thoughtful gesture, Auden had had the poem printed,
one copy for each guest. Best of all, Auden, in that unmistakable voice

D
of his, recited the poem himself.

By its glamour and class, Medi’s wedding marked the climax of Thomas
Mann’s social life in Princeton. Had he been in higher spirits he might
have said of that brilliant occasion what he later wrote about a similar
gathering at the Manns’ residence in California: “Neither the Paris
nor the Munich of 1900 could have provided an evening so rich in
intimate artistic spirit, verve, and merriment.” 51
Mann’s lectureship in Princeton, viewed from afar, was an extraor-
dinarily fortuitous development. The small town and its Ivy League
university offered—precisely as Agnes Meyer had imagined—almost
ideal conditions for Mann’s acculturation to America, to the extent
that one can speak of acculturation in the case of a sixty-three-year-old
writer. When he was awarded the honorary doctorate, Mann spoke of
the gratitude he felt for having been given a place that he could call
home, and he concluded his address by saying, “I shall pray my good
genius that my gratitude may bear fruit.” 52 And it did. The Princeton
years were an astonishingly active and productive period of Mann’s
life. If the literary harvest of those two-and-a-half years was, for him,
modest, and if his success as Lecturer in the Humanities was at best
49.  Tb. November 24, 1939.
50.  W. H. Auden, “Epithalamion (For Antonio Borgese and Elizabeth [sic] Mann,
Nov. 23, 1939),” in The English Auden: Poems, Essays, and Dramatic Writings, 1927–1939, ed.
Edward Mendelson (New York: Random House, 1977), 453–56. See John Fuller, W. H.
Auden: A Commentary (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1998), 295.
51.  Thomas Mann, The Story of a Novel: The Genesis of Doctor Faustus, trans. Richard
and Clara Winston (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1961), 94.
52.  Mann’s acceptance speech is reprinted in “Princeton Honors Thomas Mann,”
Princeton Alumni Weekly, May 26, 1939, 727.

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 mixed, there can be no doubt that it was during the period in Princeton
that Thomas Mann cemented his position as Germany’s preeminent
literary figure, came to prominence as the most vocal and passionate
opponent of Hitler in America, and, by dint of his remarkable political
clairvoyance and moral strength, assumed the role of the undisputed
leader of the “Other Germany”—a role he would maintain during the
longest and darkest years in the history of his native country.

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