Thomas Mann's attack, from 1922 onwards, against Nazism is exemplar in the sense that it was promoted by a writer committed to the defence of liberty and not by a militant. He underlines fiction and myth as ways of fighting against the charms of Nazism and proclaims the permanence of a cultural, cosmopolitan Germany, a source of a universality which is alien to all kinds of ethnic particularities. Goethe, someone he is identified with, is the prominent figure of this Germany.
Republic of Weimar; nazism; cosmopolitanism; German; literature