Thomas ● Adolf ● AfD
The struggle against Nazi Germany from exile included not just Thomas Mann but also people like Bertolt Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno, and many others.
Thomas Mann’s 59 speeches were by no means unknown. But they have not been appreciated for a long time. Sadly, they were even dismissed as merely being secondary texts.
Today, we know better. The speeches are a real find and have taken on heightened importance in a time where a strengthened neo-fascist AfD has gained tremendous support in Germany.
Posted by Thomas Klikauer
The 6th of June 2025 marked the 150th birthday of novelist and Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann. In 1933, at the age of almost 60, Thomas Mann had spent his summer on exile in France’s Sanary-sur-Mer.
Escaping from Hitler-dominated Nazi Germany, he travelled on to Switzerland and later emigrating to the USA.
Back in Germany, Hitler’s regime started to burn books and later, people. The books of Thomas Mann were among the books burned.
Without much doubt, were Thomas Mann to remain in Germany, he would have suffered a similar torturous mistreatment as his Nobel Prize winning colleague Carl von Ossientzky – death in a German concentration camp.
Thomas Mann’s 150th birthday is also a moment at which to celebrate Thomas Mann as an anti-fascist. On this occasion, his famous radio lectures – called “German Listeners” – have been newly published.
Thomas Mann’s words signify a voice that speaks deep into the conscience of the Germans. During the early 1940s, Mann’s inspirational lectures were about Hitler’s Nazism. In 2025, Mann’s words seamlessly apply to the AfD’s Neo-Nazism.
With the rise of the neo-fascist AfD, a voice like Thomas Mann is, once again, bitterly needed in Germany and beyond. Today, Germany remains a country in which a sizable part of the population seemingly have learned next to nothing from Nazism.
Back then and in his own voice, he read his text out loud – that was important to him. At the time, Thomas Mann was in all likelihood one of the most famous living writers in the world.
Mann was driven to a recording studio in Hollywood once a month starting in March of the year 1941. He didn’t drive a car himself. He never had a driver’s license in his life.
In the recording studio, Thomas Mann – the writer in his sixties, dressed appropriately, of course, even in otherwise rather casual California, sat down in front of a microphone and spoke his prepared text.
He did this for the rest of the Second World War and for a few months after that, until November 1945. The foreign language service of the BBC wanted five minutes from him. He upgraded the British channel to eight minutes and had the freedom of content assured to him.
Mann’s speeches were recorded on vinyl records. Each record was brought to the airport by a messenger taking the next plane to New York.
A telephone connection to the BBC in London was established and the records played the spoken words on the other side of the Atlantic.
Finally, each speech was broadcast. Thomas Mann’s voice was transmitted to Germany, where listening to the enemy transmitter was punished. The BBC was obstructed by Nazi jammers.
Today, it is still rather unclear how many people actually listened to Thomas Mann. Thomas Mann also reported – with recognisable satisfaction – on the technical implementation of his speeches.
In that way, his recordings from sunny California made it to London – bombed out by Hitler’s German Luftwaffe.
The struggle against Nazi Germany from exile included not just Thomas Mann but also people like Bertolt Brecht, Theodor W. Adorno, and many others.
Thomas Mann’s 59 speeches were by no means unknown. But they have not been appreciated for a long time. Sadly, they were even dismissed as merely being secondary texts.
Today, we know better. The speeches are a real find and have taken on heightened importance in a time where a strengthened neo-fascist AfD has gained tremendous support in Germany.
In the speeches, Thomas Mann talks about the “devilish shit of Nazism” and expresses his revulsion towards Nazism.
He describes Hitler as a “pathetic historical swindler”, as a “stupid genocidal maniac”, “disgusting”, “a hollow nut”, “idiotically obscene man”, the “most repulsive figure on whom the light of history has ever fallen”. Many of these descriptions would fit today’s AfD apparatchiks to perfection.
He depicts Nazi Germany as a “rampaging killer” regime. At times, one can feel his need to be given free rein to express his disgust towards Nazism.
Additionally, Thomas Mann describes Hitler as obnoxious and a “most repulsive figure”. This is an author speaking in combat mode.
From the year 1930 when Hitler’s Nazi party received 18.3% of voter support in Germany’s Reichstag election – the parliament – the Nazis were no longer mere political opponents for him. They were his enemies – a mortal enemy of democracy, peace, and human decency.
Thomas Mann discusses what is good and what is evil as a political activist in support of democracy. He also informed the Germans about the course of the war.
When Hitler’s Wehrmacht was still marching forward, Thomas Mann asks whether the Germans really want Hitler to win. He noted,
“the world that would be the result of Hitler’s victory would not only be
a world of universal slavery, but also a world of total cynicism”.
Soon, the war turned, and Thomas Mann admonishes the Germans emphasising that peace would not be possible under Hitler’s criminal Nazi regime.
Thomas Mann confronts his listeners with the Holocaust early on. In November 1941, he addressed the “inexpressible” on what “is happening in Russia … with Poles and Jews”.
In the course of Hitler’s Nazi war, Thomas Mann has to put the number of victims he reported higher and higher. He also asked listeners directly, “do you know about Hitler’s extermination camp?”
It already seems clear to Thomas Mann that Auschwitz will signify the entire epoch. In his address in February 1941, Thomas Mann describes his impression of a speech by Adolf Hitler at Berlin’s Sport Palace. He does not skimp on expressions of disgust.
He writes of “Hassgebrüll” – a shouting match of hatred – and being ever the Nobel Prize winning poet, talks about the “vilification of the German language”.
Thomas Mann cannot tolerate the fact that the German language is associated with the voice of Adolf Hitler.
Thomas Mann says, “every time you hear my own voice, it is the voice of a friend, a German voice”. The voice of Thomas Mann is a voice against Hitler.
Yet, Thomas Mann is fully aware that his voice against Hitler is not enough to besiege the German war machine. Still, he bears witness.
By stepping into the ring raising his voice against Hitler, he also denies the legitimacy of the Nazis to represent Germany as a whole.
However, when discussing how it could have come to all this, he does not spare Germany at all. Thomas Mann says that Nazism has “deep roots in German life”.
He also refers to Germany’s pathway of Romanticism – a form of degeneration that “always contains the germ of murderous corruption”.
Thomas Mann outlines that Hitler’s “Germany forms an explosive mixture that threatens the whole civilization”. Thomas Mann had also taken speeches of President Theodore Roosevelt and Winston Churchill as examples.
Thomas Mann also opposes what we today call fake news and the mass propaganda of the Nazis set against democracy.
The Nazis acclaimed to define “The right to be German” is false. Particularly when it comes from Austria-born Adolf Hitler. It remains worthwhile to delve deeper into Thomas Mann’s radio addresses – especially today.
One can find many arguments that can be used in the current situation with a strengthened AfD. What Thomas Mann writes about freedom sounds completely up to date,
Nazi-Germany’s concept of freedom was always directed only to the outside;
it meant the right to be German, only German and nothing else.
And further, he notes that freedom is the term set against everything that wanted to condition and restrict it to Hitler’s ideology of a Völkisch egoism – a kind of Aryan self-centredness.
Today’s AfD’s apparatchiks who demand that more German classics should be read in schools should read Thomas Mann’s radio lectures.
Thomas Mann can by no means be appropriated for the AfD’s Völkisch ideology and for authoritarianism, in general. Thomas Mann stands in opposition to Hitler’s Nazism (then) and the neo-fascist AfD (today).
Photo: (source: https://www2.lunapic.com)
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