![]() But this is no mere character speaking: This is Mann himself – the erstwhile self-proclaimed “Unpolitical Man,” condemned to watch the Nazi tyranny’s horrors from the distance of his Californian exile, taking up the mighty pen that had gained him his Literature Nobel Prize and, through the voice of a narrator named Dr. Thus, the narrator of Thomas Mann’s last completed and, I think, greatest novel sums up Germany’s fate after the barbarities of national-socialism. It is over with Germany … an unnamable collapse, economical, political, moral and spiritual, in short, all-encompassing, is becoming apparent, – I don’t want to have wished for what is looming, because it is despair, it is madness.” * ![]() That is to say: the war is lost, but that means more than a lost military campaign, in fact it means that we are lost, lost is our substance and our soul, our faith and our history. It is partly inspired by an exchange with Bob, whose comments hereon are sorely missed. This review is dedicated, in friendship and grateful memory, to the late Bob Zeidler, one of ’s best and brightest customer reviewers. ![]()
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