Golo Mann: German History in the 19th and 20th Centuries (1958)
Golo Mann was one of the most prominent German intellectuals of the second half of the 20th century. His two major works include German History…, the subject of this article, a biography of Wallenstein, a general in the Thirty Years’ War, his autobiography, and a number of essays and literary criticism. The two 1000-pagers have brought him recognition and financial success during his life. He engaged in frequent and long discussions with German chancellors Konrad Adenauer and Willy Brand, acting thus as an informal advisor at a very important time in German history, marked by rapid economic recovery after WW2, and maneuvering foreign politics during the time when Germany was the unlucky center of the cold war.
He considered himself a historian, but it is immediately apparent that he preferred stories to facts, and that he was celebrated more as a writer than as a historian. Even his formal education was not historical, as he wrote his doctoral thesis in philosophy under Karl Jaspers. The famous Heidelberg philosopher gave him a B, which is said to have deeply saddened him.
His main interest was in explaining history to the general public. And there was plenty of explaining to do in German history. Germany has seen extreme highs and lows in culture, morality, science and economics – arguably the highest and lowest of any nation ever. It takes a lot of storytelling to explain how you get from Beethoven, Goethe, Kant, Humbold Brothers and the Brothers Grimm to the First World War, from there back to Max Planck, Albert Einstein, Thomas Mann and Bertold Brecht, and then, within a few years, to the Second World War and the Holocaust.
And storytelling is what he does. In reading him we cannot help but be reminded of an interesting peculiarity of language. In German, a story, which may be a fictional or a non-fictional one, is: “die Geschichte.” At the same time the English word “history” occupies the exactly same word in German: “die Geschichte”. The same is the case in most Germanic and Romance (l’histoire in French or storia in Italian) languages, and it was the case in Old and Middle English up to the 15th century, when history separated from story. This close semantic relationship is worth some thought.
It is through stories that we interpret reality and, by extent, history. We have built-in narratives (collections of stories) that we acquired through the social environment and the education system, and we bend and break the life around us to have it fit in those narratives. A very simple example: a person who has heard or seen nothing else but left-wing pseudo liberal politics, and has never truly reexamined these, will view everything from this bubble. One could even argue that reality is able to enter our consciousness only if it is framed as an “interesting” story, in terms of importance and acceptance. The left-wing person will never accept the fact that a right-wing party member might have a point on some issues and will not even go in discussion with him. At the same time, the reality is much more complex, and in some cases a “leftist” solution is the best one, and in other, a “right” option is better. But even if we fully recognize the narrative that we are in, it is not so easy to leave our camp, since you are indeed likely to leave your camp, and not just as a metaphor. If a socialist politician starts to advocate for “right-wing” solutions to a problem he will loose his following, even though his might be the right path. And if you are not a politician, you will be sanctioned by friends and family if you become too eclectic in your opinions.
Other fields are not much different. Take science for example. Scientists are supposed to be critical-thinking people, right? Well, they are not. They may be above-average within their own field of work, but their epistemology is just as flawed as anybody’s. It took decades and centuries to introduce some of the most basic ideas to the practice of medicine: Semmelweis was derided, excommunicated and impoverished for his radical idea that doctors should wash hands before treating patients instead of, well, treating them with dirty hands. And Lister faced fierce opposition for his ideas that surgeons should sterilize the surgical field before operating. It took a hundred (yes: 100) years after the work of both these gentleman for surgeons to accept wearing (sterile) gloves during surgery. Paradigms in science do not change because one group of scientists succeeds in persuading others with the superior quality of their arguments, but because older ones die off or stop going to conferences.
Reexamining the narratives that make up our worldviews is the path to becoming an educated person. This is, I believe, the basic idea behind Paulo Freire’s “Pedagogy of the Oppressed”. And this is why Golo Mann takes great care to steer the Titanic of his storytelling between the extremes, while still accounting for the events and stories that made those extremes possible and viable. His own position is the only reasonable, and so seldomly selected, one: he is more conservative than not but he is always moderate, never leaning too much one side or the other. It is a remarkable achievement that the ship of his “German History” ends her journey from the beginning of 19th until mid-20th centuries in one piece, consistent, commonsensical and meaningful, despite all the storms, rocks and pirates it had to run away from and, sometimes, fight back, on its journey.
Recounting stories and narratives leaves less room for dry facts: dates, persons, events. But let me, in the best dialectic tradition, use Golo Mann himself to make an opposite point and to defend rote learning. Golo Mann was legendary for his knowledge of German poetry. He was able to recite German poets from memory for hours. When asked about this, he said that only a poem which is memorized is a poem truly understood, because every time you reproduce it from memory, you are creating it anew. Perhaps it is similar in a way a musician is reinventing a well-known piece of music every time he goes on stage. He said that, by learning them by heart, he owns hundreds of poems which he feels he is allowed to use at liberty in his own writing. Fair enough. In reading him, one has the feeling that he skips over the basic dates and big historical events because he owns this information in much the same way, and he does not consider it worthwhile repeating. And he expects you to have a similar background. So yes, overarching stories are important for grasping context, but they do not work if we do not memorize stuff: poems, dates, even drawing maps from memory. Have you ever tried to draw a map of a piece of land? If you were a commander in a battle on that piece of land, or just a historian trying to understand geopolitics, you would want to able to do that. There is simply no other way to “own” it. Looking at the map might evoke the feeling that you know the land, but that is not true knowledge which you can use.
By now, you should have noticed that I avoided the troublesome relationship with his much more famous father. In doing this, I am likely to (almost) have produced the first article on Golo Mann that does not go into that. The poor man lived his whole life as “a son”. It was only after his father’s death that he was able to write his works. I think that we should respect him and do him the favor of examining him and his work on their own right. Indeed, developing his own voice was a hard battle, and of all the Mann’s children (of a total of 6) he made it furthest on his own.
The closing words of the thousand-odd page treatise are as beautiful as they are revealing of the author’s love for language. I am thinking that, if Golo Mann allowed himself such a sharp digression at the end of his life’s work, I will surely get away with the same digression at the end of a small article. Freely ad hoc translated, he goes:
We are left hoping that that, which always has separated and always will separate our nation from the other nations, even when ephemeral differences between them disappear, namely our beautiful language, will not dry out and become vulgar, but that it will keep finding its nobility, and with it all the things, which find their expression in those noble words. If this failed to happen, what good would all the hard earned prosperity and supposed power be to us?
en life and writing. He perfected observation of things that revolve around him, and he perfected such a simple style that it can hardly be called a style at all. Only a person to whom writing comes as natural as breathing can write like that. In this perfect style he wrote about what he lived, saw, heard, and read. Another point is that he cares about his characters. He is not arrogant towards people, he does not place them beneath him and try to explain their actions like some superior being (a common occurence with writers). He observes people with respect regardless of how little they and their problems might be in the eyes of someone else. He is sincere in doing this, and that is why we cannot stop reading his texts – because we start to care as well and we want to see what happened with these people.
his entourage, Jesus, and the rest of the usual deities have eternal lives, but also a bunch of other people including Pilates. At the end of the book, The Master and the Margarita are also awarded immortality. Margarita’s maid is, upon her own request, also given powers and made into a which. All of this gives me the feeling of someone who is playfully using some motives from the history of Christian religion, rather than being pious and respectful about religion.
these two people in the same sentence), she was brought up in a German environment and her mother tongue is German. Ms. Müller was oppressed by the Ceauşescu regime, she emigrated to Germany where she married and where she became (so we are told) a successful author. Herztier is about a woman oppressed by the regime in Romania and who, at the end of the book, flees to Germany. How is the story told? It is told in a series of details, rarely do we get to see the big picture. For example: the writer, when her characters and brought to Securitate offices for questioning, doesn’t write about the reasons for this, or what exactly transpires during the questioning, or what effect it had on her characters. She writes about the police commissioner’s dog and his bold head. This approach needn’t necessarily be that bad, in itself. Unfortunately – it is. Surely, rarely does something big happen in life. Life is a series of more or less significant details that shape us, what we do and who we are. Accordingly, if we accept this, we can go on to claim that it is a great gift to actively look for these details, like a detective, and to store these little symptoms of different conditions for later use in writing. A person, situation, feeling, just about anything, can be described more vividly with a single well-observed and well-placed detail than with many paragraphs of trying to contain the illusive. Great masters of effective usage of details are Raymond Chandler and John Le Carré. If you’ve read them, you know what I mean.
Then something happens and the comparisons with primitive animals unfortunately disappear from the book. This happens about the time when the two brothers reach maturity. Sociological commentaries are also reduced, and place is made for a huge amount of sexual commentary. I suppose this is what people find shocking. I don’t find it shocking , I find it boring. Do you really care about every time one of the characters masturbated? Sure, the frustration and general bleakness of a person’s life can be portrayed effectively by a scene of lone, desperate onanism, but things need to be done with good taste and measure. Later in the book he goes on to describe orgies and sex parties that his protagonists participate in and this is supposed, I guess, to be a discussion on increasing sexual consumerism of our age. Why? What is the point and what did he want to say?
On Writing 