Thomas Mann

“ Three times, at different stages of my life, have I lived under the prolonged tension of tasks, which had a certain affinity to greatness: at the age of twenty-five, when I tried my hand at the novel of the German bourgeoisie Buddenbrooks, at the age of fifty, when in the Magic Mountain I made a friendly alter ego pass through the adventures of European intellectual controversies, and between sixty and seventy, when I told mankind's fairy tale of Joseph and his brothers. ”

“ The claim of the human ego to central importance is the premise for the discovery of God, and from the very first the pathos for the dignity of the Ego is connected with that for the dignity of humanity.
At the same time, these humans remain confined in the mythical, the collective, to a large extent of their being. What they call spirit and culture, is just the conviction that their lives are the embodiment of the myth, and their ego detaches itself from the collective in much the same way as certain figures of Rodin wrest themselves out of the stone and awaken from it. ”

“ A symbol of humanity—in a certain way my work was entitled to this secret opinion of itself. After all, from the original and simple, the typical and canonical it led to the complicated, involved, late:; the way from Canaan to the Egypt of the New Kingdom is the way from the piously primitive, the God-creating, God-contemplative idyl of the archfathers to a highly developed and sophisticated culture with its luxuries and absurd snobberies, in a land of the grandchildren, a land whose atmosphere is so much to Joseph's taste because he is himself a grandchild and a late soul. ”

“ Occasionally I thought of this early incident while I was writing "Joseph in Egypt." A work must have long roots in my life, secret connections must lead from it to earliest childhood dreams, if I am to consider myself entitled to it, if I am to believe in the legitimacy of what I am doing. The arbitrary reaching for a subject to which one does not have traditional claims of sympathy and knowledge, seems senseless and amateurish to me. ”

“ But, then, we are indeed living in a totalitarian world, a world of totality, of spiritual unity and collective responsibility, before which all sovereignties have to abdicate. Unity is the word of the historic hour. The world wants to become one, all the way, into practical reality, down to economic matters. ”

“ In the idea of humanity, the human idea, the sense for the past and that for the future, tradition and revolution form a strange and, to my mind, infinitely attractive mixture. The slogan of the "conservative revolution" has played a pernicious part; fascism has seized it as it seized the myth, and has pretended to be the conservative revolution. ”

“ But explosion is equalization, and I think that here, in this hall, it is quite the right place to express the hope that after this war, we—or our children—will live in a world of happier equalization between spirit and reality, that we will "win the peace." The word peace always has a religious ring, and what it signifies is a gift of intelligence before God. ”

“ The diaspora of European culture which we are witnessing, the arrival of so many of its bearers, representatives of all categories of science and art, to these shores; their more or less involuntary decision, transformed, however, into an amor fati, to complete their work in the American air of life,—that is something very strange and unprecedented; it opens unexampled possibilities of exchange and equalization and may be supremely helpful in creating the new feeling of humanism of which I spoke. ”

“ For, after all, the typical is already the mythical, insofar as it is pristine pattern and pristine form of life, timeless model and formula of eld, into which life enters by reproducing its traits out of the unconscious. ”

“ Him; one who is not only the hero of his stories, but also their director, indeed the one who poetically "adorns" them; one who, it is true, still participates in the collective and mythical, but in a banteringly spiritualized and playful, purposefully conscious manner. In short, we see how the ego, in the process of its emancipation, soon becomes an artistic ego, attractive, delicate and—endangered, a tender concern for the respectable father, but with inborn possibilities of development and maturing, as have not existed before. ”

“ It is understood, that the spirit is always ahead_ of reality, that reality follows it clumsily. But never, perhaps, had there existed before such pathological, such unmistakably dangerous tension, in the social, political and economic life of the peoples, between truth and reality, between things long reached and accomplished by the spirit and between things which still took the liberty of calling themselves reality; and foolish disobedience to the spirit or, religiously speaking, to God's will, is undoubtedly the true cause for the world explosion which stuns us. ”

“ In its youth, the artistic ego is of inexcusable egocentricity: it lives under the dangerous assumption that everybody must love it more than himself. But due to a sympathy and friend liness which nonetheless it never renounces, it finds its way into the social, while it matures, and becomes the provider and benefactor of a foreign people and of its own: in Joseph the ego flows back from arrogant absoluteness into the collective, common ”

“ Nobody is more bored than he by the old and worn out, and more impatient for the new, although nobody, on the other hand, is more bound to tradition than he is. Audacity in confinement, fulfillment of tradition with exciting news, that is really his calling and his business, and the conviction that "such a thing has not been done before" is the indispensable motor of all his industry. ”

“ Europe, the world, was full of stale and outworn things, of evident obsolete and even sacrilegious anachronisms which had been clearly outdistanced by the world will, and which we permitted to continue, in dull mind and in disobedience to this will. ”

“ The exactness, the realism are fictional they are play and artful illusion, they are realization and visualization forcibly brought about by all the means of language, psychology, presentation and, in addition, critical comment; and humor, despite all human seriousness, is their soul. What, above all, is inspired by humor in the book is the analysis and scientific research, which are, just like the narrative and the descriptions, a means of establishing reality; and the command to the artist, to create forms and not to talk are invalid in this case. ”

“ It is the intelligent listening to what the world spirit wants, to the new truth and necessity; and a special, religious concept of stupidity follows from that: the stupidity before God, which does not know this concern, or complies with it as clumsily as Laban who still believes that he must slaughter his little son and bury him in the foundation of his house, a custom which once was quite beneficial but is so no longer. ”

“ Definitely, the attainment of the mythical viewpoint is of decisive importance in the life of the narrator; it signifies a peculiar enhancement of his artistic mood, a new serenity in recognizing and shaping which, as said before, is ordinarily reserved for the later years of life: for the mythical, it is true, represents an early and primitive stage in the life of humanity, but a late and mature one in the life of the individual. ”

“ Must I add, Ladies and Gentlemen, that we owe the tribulations which we now have to endure, the catastrophe in which we are living, to the fact that we lacked intelligence toward God to a degree which had long become criminal? ”

“ I dwelled on the birth of the Ego out of the mythical collective, the Abrahamitic Ego which is pretentious enough to assume that man should serve only the Highest, from which assumption the discovery of God followed. ”

“ That is an example for the character of the whole work, which seeks to blend a great many things; and, because it conceives and imagines everything human as a unity, it borrows its motives, memories, allusions, as well as linguistic sounds from many spheres. Just as all the Jewish legends are based on other, timeless mythologies, and made transparent by them, thus Joseph, its hero, is also a transparent figure, changing with the illumination in vexatory fashion: he is, with a great deal of consciousness, an Adonis—and Tammuz figure ”

“ Once again it came to pass that a work developed a much greater aspiration than was inherent in the rather skeptical and by no means ambitious nature of the one on whom it imposed itself, and from whom it exacted efforts far beyond all plans and expectations. ”

“ There the word humanity has been pronounced—in connection with the ideas of the timelessly-typical and the mythical it automatically made its appearance. I had been in readiness to feel productively attracted by a subject-matter like the Joseph legend, because of the turning of my taste away from the bourgeois toward the mythical aspect. ”

“ To live in sin is to live against the spirit, to cling to the antiquated, obsolete, and to continue to live in it, due to inattentiveness and disobedience. And whenever the book speaks about the "concern with God," it speaks about the just fear of this sin and folly. "Concern with God" is not alone the creating of God in one's thoughts, and de termining and recognizing Him, but principally the concern with His will, with which ours must coincide ”

“ There is a symptom for the innate character of a work, for the category toward which it strives, the opinion it secretly has of itself: that is the reading matter which the author prefers and which he considers helpful while working on it. ”

“ To begin is always terribly difficult: until one feels oneself master of a subject; until one learns the language it speaks, and can reproduce it;—much courting and laboring, a long inner familiarization is required. ”

“ For there is such a thing; you, too, live in a tradition here, walk in footsteps, in paternal foot steps, which you call your "Way of Life." The pioneer-like optimism and hearty faith in man, the mental youthfulness, the benevolent and confident ideas and principles upon which the Union was founded by the fathers, amounts to the American myth, which is alive today. In his biography, Goethe speaks about an "alleviation for humanity" effected by the American war of liberation ”

“ Now the famine assumes reality, and dramatically the well-known action takes its course, which is nothing but a precious childhood memory, and for which the curiosity of the reader can be captivated only by the most detailed presentation and visualization of every How and Why. ”

“ They would not be what they are, if their view of the play of life was a sober, phlegmatic view, and not, rather, a marvelling and animated, deeply entertained, a festive view, which knows, just through the medium of art, how to turn life into spiritually sublimated entertainment, and into a festival for others as well. ”

“ Our emigration thus assumes an entirely different significance from that of any former emigration, the significance of the coalescence of the hemispheres, of the unification of the earth. "Europe wants to become one" that is long obsolete; the earth wants to become one. ”

“ In a discreet and unpathetic manner, the case of mankind is tried in it, and therefore the manner in which this book treats the myth is so different from a certain contemporary manner of employing it: a malevolent and anti-human manner whose political name we all know. ”

“ It is probably a rule that in certain years the taste for all purely individual and particular phenomena, for the individual case, for the "bourgeois" aspect, in the widest sense of the word, fades out gradually. ”

“ In order to build up, or at least lay the foundations for the new, better, happier and more social world, freed from unnecessary suffering, which we want our children and grandchildren to have, the City of Man, as I should like to call it, we will need a binding and all-determining basic pathos, guiding us all the way to detailed and practical matters ”

“ To participate playfully in the consciousness of great creativeness and to acquire, thereby, the right to a more familiar celebration of greatness than the wholly inexperienced and uninitiated possess, that is something, that is worth a life. "That a man entertains himself and does not spend his life like dull catde," I have my Joseph answer a critic of his mythical temerity, "is after all what matters most ”