A CURIOUS and significant book was written during the war by Thomas Mann. It has just been published in Berlin under the title, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a Stranger to Politics). To judge by the number of editions exhausted since it appeared, a little more than a year ago, it has attracted much attention in Germany.

Mr. Mann has hitherto been known only as a novelist. He is a writer of great talent, one of the cleverest and most widely read which Germany has produced for twenty years. He is distinguished by gifts which are not peculiarly German: the power of keen psychological analysis, sureness and precision of style, an infallible sense of measure, good taste in humor, conciseness, ease, and variety. Neither is he purely German by blood, his grandmother having been a Brazilian. He himself asserts that before the war he regarded himself as a European rather than as a national man of letters.

When the war came it paralyzed Mann's creative faculties, and threw him into utter moral confusion. To this experience we owe the present book. It is not a book in the ordinary sense, as the author himself explains in his preface, but a sort of diary. It records day by day his problems of conscience, his swaying thoughts and alternating waves of feeling, until we have at last ‘a true document, which the men of to-day, and even those of the future, may read with profit, if only as a sidelight upon history.'

Mann inquires: What am I? Whence have I come? Why am I what I am? Why have I neither the wish nor the ability to be different? His mental anguish over the war fairly cried out these questions. A man of the highest culture, a cosmopolitan of universal sympathies, he believed himself first of all a good European; and yet he suddenly discovered that he was a violent patriot. Although indifferent to any material advantage for his country, he longs ardently for Germany's victory. He cannot endure to see the morality of his country attacked. All of a sudden the enemy's mentality becomes hateful to him. He finds that he is more German than he supposed. The three great geniuses who presided over his spiritual growth, and whom he hitherto thought super-national, were also, he now discovers, truly German. They were Wagner, Schopenhauer, and Nietzsche.

How, then, is the mentality of the German so opposite to that of the Frenchman or Briton?

Mann refuses to ascribe the war of 1914 to conflicting material interests and economic rivalry. For him it is the collision of two eternally opposed conceptions of life; the conception of the western nations on the one hand, and of the Germans on the other. He sees the Titanic struggle as the final hopeless revolt, perhaps the last 'protestation' of Germany against western ideals. It is a war of 'civilization' against a recalcitrant Germany.

Let us see, now, what these two hopelessly hostile life conceptions are.

In Mann's opinion, western Europe incarnates civilization; Germany incarnates culture. The 'civilized' nations are those which have preserved the Roman tradition of the unity of Europe, and which strive toward governmental uniformity, as an ideal political state. The people of the western democracies are absorbed in politics. Political and social problems monopolize their thought, to the disparagement of artistic and spiritual problems. The western nations, as heirs of the eighteenth-century philosophy of Rousseau, believe or imagine they believe in reason, progress, human betterment through institutions, a coming era of justice, liberty, and eventual earthly bliss. In a word, they are democracies.

The German does not at heart have faith in this kind of salvation. The German believes only in spiritual life. His race is profoundly resistant to political concepts. It attaches but slight importance to external institutions. It does not worship civilization but culture. Its interest centres upon the inner things of life, upon music, metaphysics, ethics. The Germans are pessimists, who do not lull themselves with an empty ideology, or intoxicate themselves with rhetoric. They are congenitally anti-radical and conservative.

This is why these Germans who try to make their country over into a democracy on the western model are utterly wrong. They are committing a crime against the soul of the race; for unconsciously they are laboring to denationalize it, to 'de-Germanize' it.

People have said that Germany is not ripe for democracy. It is not a question of ripeness, but of adaptation. Democracy is not suitable for Germany, because the German is congenitally averse to politics. Nietzsche, Wagner, all the great Germans, affirm this. Wagner said: 'Democracy is an imported notion in Germany. It exists only in the news

papers.' The rank and file of the German people are indifferent to domestic party controversies. They are at heart equally indifferent to matters of foreign policy. Their energy, their activity, their up-to-date industrial progress, forced them to deal much abroad. Bismarck was the pioneer in this path. Like Hamlet, a nation not born for action was compelled to act. Therein lies the tragedy of its fate.

No phase of democracy is truly at home in Germany. Its people do not believe in equality. Germany is naturally aristocratic. To be proud of obeying seems to have become a specific German sentiment. That normal instinct to serve, which the theory of the 'dignity of man' has destroyed in the western republics, is still a living force among the Teutons. The common people are not ready for power, they reason justly. Consider universal suffrage. It is based on a fundamental error; because the real will of the people may be something quite different from the sum total of the wills of the individuals who compose it. There is a metaphysical people, an organic part of the nation where its conscious spiritd wells and its true will resides. The accidental will of the masses is governed by the temporary interests of the present generation; but the will of the 'metaphysical people' serves the ultimate destiny of the race, and expresses itself by important acts in such great crises as war, when the interest of the moment are spontaneously sacrificed for the enduring interests of future generations.

It is a typically German notionthis distinction between a people and the individual atoms which compose it. The author insists that we distinguish between the metaphysical man and the social man. The Germans are averse to politics because they are primarily metaphysicians. Their conception of liberty is spiritual liberty. Therefore

Germany cannot express its soul through the institutions created by western individualism with its 'rights of man.' Luther and the Protestant Reformation aided powerfully to divert Germany from political interests and to concentrate its vision instead upon the problems of the soul. Politics seem to Germans a lower order of activity, where compromise is necessary, and therefore where absolute liberty is impossible.

Consequently Germany consistently strives to separate its spiritual life from its national life. It is disposed to turn political management over to a government, to an agency specially designed to handle these practical matters, in order that the people may concentrate themselves upon things which seem to them of higher value. Germans look upon government and politics the way. the man of a family looks upon his wife's housekeeping. They regard politics as something to be entrusted to specialists.

As a matter of practical policy, Germany ought to adopt a sort of 'opportunist democracy,' in order to maintain its standing in the family of nations. Mann believes that in view of the large share which the common people have taken in the war, they should hereafter exercise more influence in political affairs. However, he would have Germany's future government different from conventional democracies, so that it might conform with the national genius. He would not have Germany a republic of middle class orators, like France.

It goes without saying that the author does not consider the incapacity of the Germans for democracy a mark of inferiority. The champions of democracy are wont to identify that institution with progress. Possibly it is a necessary step in the evolution of society; but that does not prove that society is better under democratic institutions than under any other kind. There

is no such thing as absolute progress. German thought, deeply pessimistic as it is at heart, has divined this long since. An irreconcilable antagonism exists between the individual and society. The interests of the two can never harmonize. Men who claim otherwise are mere flatterers of the mob. They dangle before the eyes of the populace the seductive dream of a coming social state where 'every one will be well-off.' To be well-off, in the eyes of the people, is first and foremost to have plenty to eat and drink. What value would life have in such a society, inspired by no higher ideal than that of a 'cud-chewing cow?' True happiness is something purely relative and personal, independent of material conditions. 'Any form of society humanly possible may prove in the end a tolerable one; for through it all the deeper experiences of life may be obtained, all the relative effects of joy and sorrow, of pleasure and suffering.'

So Germans should not become enthusiastic for the reforms which are the religion of the western nation. Antiradicalism is one of the most distinctive and well-marked qualities of the German mind. To that mind radicalisn is permissible only in the field of thought, of conventional morals, of individual comfort. Political radicalism invariably begets discontent and class hatred, producing an eternal round of alternating anarchy and tyranny.

The so-called 'enlightenment' so dear to the children of the French Revolution, likewise leaves the German mind cold. Rationalists shout: 'Give us justice, or truth, or liberty, though the world perish.' Now the German comprehends that truth is sometimes the enemy of life, and a profound instinct impels him in such cases to subordinate truth to life. Nietzsche was the first to question the invariable value of the loftiest moral principles as a

guide to human conduct. He even doubted the worth of truth itself, putting the most radical psychologies at the service of an anti-radical and anti-nihilist will. Similarly Kant supplemented his radical theoretical philosophy which destroyed all our accepted conventions - by a practical philosophy where absolute truth was discarded in favor of something more workable in every-day affairs.

Democracy claims to make reason and social virtue the mentors of human conduct. But the thought of erecting rationalism into an ideal inspires Mann with horror. Reason kills passion, it sterilizes, dissolves, dissociates. Where reason reigns art dies, and only psychology and letters flourish. Nothing could be less suitable for Germany, which is an unliterary land,'-a nation doomed never to express itself. Germany abhors the kind of psychology that dissects life and art to find out what they are. It is par excellence the conservative, the organizing, the rebuilding country. For its people virtue is something belonging to the person, to the soul. The alleged republican virtues are merely vain and hypocritical phraseologies. Mann cannot express forcibly enough his contempt for liberty, equality, fraternity, 'the great abstractions of the Phrygian cap!' More over, what is to become of a human race which is governed only by virtue? Art would soon die. Art has no relation to virtue. It is an irrational power, but a mighty power; and the fact that men love it, proves that they will not and cannot be contented with pure reason alone.'

For similar reasons we must not expect war to cease. Democracy's champions promise the world permanent peace. Though the people are more pacific than their rulers, war is deeply rooted in human nature. 'Men do not consider civilization, progress, and safe

ty, unqualified blessings. There exists in men a primitive heroic impulse which never dies; a profound longing for the terrible.' A society from which war had utterly disappeared would be a weakened, anæmic society, bereft of virility. Pacifists lament in the name of human sentiment the suffering caused by war. Mann says he is an enemy of brutality, that he has as lively a sentiment of pity as any one. However, he loathes the humanitarianism of western democracy. There is a humanity which 'goes of itself,' and which we unconsciously practise every day. But supreme crises come, when this every-day humanity no longer holds good. Pacifist sentimentalism ends by robbing life of its most admirable qualities, of its dignity, of its gravity, of its responsibility. It deprives existence of the 'tragic accent.' A man who truly honors, loves and venerates humanity must wish first of all that it remain complete, and therefore will not proscribe war.

This is the indictment which Mann brings against democratic ideals. Our brief and dry analysis fails utterly to convey the passionate patriotism, the accent of pride and of tortured revolt, the note of tragedy, which inspires the book. It reproduces nothing of its richness of expression, and the delicacy of certain of its distinctions. It is a book written by an artist tortured by his finer sentiments; who is too dominated by the circumstances of his environment to be just. Mann himself is conscious of this. He denies, however, that he has written solely under the inspiration of the war. The war has merely brought to the surface ideas which he has unconsciously cherished for a long period. They are not original with himself. He insists: 'I know that my aversions and my protests are not personal, mere petty things of the individual, a passing phase of sentiment; but that they spring from the soul of

my race, which expresses itself through me.' We do not propose to debate Mann's theories regarding democracy. It seems worth while, however, to call attention to this evidence, so forcibly expressed, of the German soul's antipathy for the great currents of modern opinion in the West.

Under the stress of war the Entente nations interpreted the psychology of their enemies too simply. It is a good thing to hear what a German himself has to say upon this subject. We are entitled to ask, however, how far Mann was right in identifying his personal aversions with those of his compatriots, and in affirming that his antipathies are part of the German soul. He affirms repeatedly that the democratic mind of the West can never acclimate itself in Germany. At the same time he admits elsewhere that this mind, which he abhors, is making conquests there, and he feels that he is already a man of the past in his own country. Is he not furthermore a poet of decadence? And does not an affection for dying things form one of the principal elements of his talent and personality? We do not share his regrets. Reflections of a Stranger to Politics will, in spite of the eminence of its author, but strengthen the desire of his readers to see the Germans completely reverse their attitude toward democracy.

Mann constantly tries to throw into relief his idea that the German mind naturally distinguishes between spiritual life and practical life, and to confine morality to the spiritual sphere and to relations between individuals. It is on this fundamental basis that he builds all the rest of this theory. That is a very just idea: Is it not in this psychological dualism that we must seek the constantly recurring error of the Westerner, whether he be French or AngloSaxon, when he tries to judge the German? Mann represents this attitude

as a quality of mind. He considers it not only legitimate but fruitful. Even after the tragic events from which we are just emerging, he does not realize its dangers.

In his eyes the Great War is to be compared with some cosmic cataclysm. Now Germany is the only country which seems to have envisaged the war in this form. It has been deeply distressed by the obstinate refusal of its enemies to see that world-shattering event which, like all elementary forces has thrust itself resistlessly into our civilization, under that aspect; at their insistence upon making the war an affair of sentiment and morals or even legal pettifogging and upon adulterating it with notions of guilt and innocence, of justice and injustice. Mann adds: 'A large share of my patriotism is begotten and sustained by comparing the German conception of the inevitable tragedy of events, with the purely legal and moral interpretation given them by our enemies.'

He conceives war as a predestined process which follows its orbit 'in a sphere above good and evil,' and believes that 'public policies are directed and controlled by mechanical laws, which have their source outside of the human race and outside of the sphere of morals,' and which consequently are neither good nor evil. Who can fail to see that it is might and not right that rules the world? Is it not then revolting and stupid to make Germany the scapegoat of nations, merely because it has been more honestly pessimistic in its thinking and in its language than its enemies? Because it has been unable to intoxicate itself as they have with mere lofty rhetoric?

Moreover, the inability of the western nations to separate philosophy from politics, their perverse persistence in trying to apply their petty moral standards to the mighty movements of war,