The assassination “led directly to Mann’s decision to make a public declaration in support of democracy.” Part of that shock was Mann’s “deep concern that his Betrachtungen played a part in fomenting that anti-democratic sentiment which had encouraged extremist violence.”īade also shows that Thomas Mann’s reconciliation with his brother Heinrich Mann ran “parallel” to his new defense of democracy. “Rathenau, a liberal Jew who had become such an outstanding and internationally well respected politician, and who for so many had represented Germany’s hope for the future, had been cut down in his prime in the name of anti-Republicanism,” Bade explains. The Weimar Republic’s foreign minister was killed by right-wing terrorists in 1922. He argues that the catalyst for this transition was the shock of the assassination of Walther Rathenau. Bade charts Mann’s course from Kaiserreich-monarchist to champion of democracy. He died in 1955, never living in Germany again. Eventually he reached the United States, where he became a naturalized citizen. On vacation in France when the Nazis came to power in 1933, he went into exile. Mann would become one of the most vocal German anti-Nazis, literally in the case of his German-language broadcasts over the BBC during World War II. Only a few years later, however, Mann was an ardent defender of the Weimar Republic, the democratic government that replaced the Kaiser after the war. The conservatives who once lionized him now anathematized him.
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