February 15, 2023
The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton and Thomas Mann and the Kahler Circle in Princeton
Stanley Corngold
Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Emeritus,
Princeton University
Minutes of the 15th Meeting of the 81st Year
The meeting was called to order by President John Cotton at 10:15 AM. Julianne Elward-Berry read the minutes of the January 8 meeting. There were five guests reported: Harold James (guest of George Bustin), Anton and Alison Lahnston (guests of Ralph Widner), Audrey Cohen (guest of Michael Kaplan, and Marcia Snowden (guest of Laura Harvey). The meeting was attended by 107 viewers.
Professor Corngold was introduced by George Bustin, who said that Corngold had joined the faculty of Princeton in 1964 and retired in 2009. He is best known for his writings on Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka and has published eight books and over one hundred articles. He has also given many guest lectures in this country and abroad including at such prestigious universities as Harvard and Brown.
Thomas Mann, who was born in 1875 and died in 1955, spent the war years looking for safety outside Europe. He spent several of them (1938 to 1941) in Princeton. It was a highly productive period in Mann’s life, as he completed several of his novels while here, including Transposed Heads and Lotte in Weimar.
Mann was given a warm welcome in Princeton, by the likes of Christian Gauss, Dean of the College, and Caroline Newton, a clinical psychologist. The Institute for Advanced Study was another attraction, and he appreciated the tranquility of the town and commented on the beauty of its trees and the surrounding countryside. But the proximity of New York was also in its favor.
In 1938, right after the Anschluss in Austria, Mann gave a tirade against Nazism in Madison Square Garden, with 30,000 cheering people in attendance. He persuaded his old friend, Erich Kahler, whom he had first met in Switzerland, to come to Princeton and join him. Together, they formed a circle of intellectual and like-minded friends who became increasingly vocal in their opposition to Hitler. Although Einstein was equally opposed to Nazism, he and Mann did not get along with each other.
At Princeton, Mann was named a “lecturer in the humanities” although he did not even have a high school diploma. He was to give six public lectures in Alexander Hall, on such topics as Goethe’s Faust and “Freud and the future.” He had been courted by Harvard but thought he detected a whiff of pro-Nazi sentiment there, so he came to Princeton instead. Mann’s writing and lecturing (he gave lectures all across the U.S.A.) became increasingly political, devoted to tirades against Nazism, and demonstrating how the Hitler regime was opposed to German culture. Of himself he said, “Where I am, there is my Germany.”
The ghastly deportation to Germany of German intellectual émigrés in Prague deeply disturbed Mann, and he took the political action of writing to Cordell Hull, the U.S. Secretary of State, begging him to bring them to the U.S.A. However, since it was impossible to obtain such documents as birth certificates in Germany, they could not get passports and were unable to come.
Despite getting drawn into politics by the miseries of the war, Mann was determined to continue his life’s work as he had always done wherever he found himself. His highly accomplished translator, Helen Tracy Lowe Porter, was also by good fortune in Princeton. She, incidentally, was the great grandmother of Boris Johnson [recently prime minister of Britain].
A diverting part of Professor Corngold’s talk concerned Mann’s poodle named Nico, which at one point escaped but was permitted, when found, to sit beside Mann while he was at work. Apparently, Irwin Panofsky also had a poodle, and the two dogs fought each other!
At one point during the war, Mann received a letter from the German University of Bonn, revoking his honorary degree from that institution. He was indignant at this snub, but it put him in the same position as many other German ex-patriots in this country. All the time that Mann was in Princeton he felt the need to give both moral and political support to other German émigrés like himself who had fled Nazi Germany and, to the extent that he could, he did so, writing on their behalf to the authorities and corresponding with individuals.
The following are some questions Professor Corngold fielded in the Q&A session:
Did Mann speak English? Yes, but with a heavy accent.
What was Mann’s personality and his relationship with Einstein? Einstein as a scientist was scornful of Mann, a humanist, saying that Mann wanted to “correct” Einstein’s calculations.
What was Mann’s relationship with Agnes Meyer? She was instrumental in bringing Mann to Princeton and ensured he had a salary to live on; she found him a position at the Library of Congress where he had to give only a couple of lectures a year but for which he was paid, thanks to Meyer, by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Respectfully submitted,
Joan Fleming
Professor Corngold was introduced by George Bustin, who said that Corngold had joined the faculty of Princeton in 1964 and retired in 2009. He is best known for his writings on Thomas Mann and Franz Kafka and has published eight books and over one hundred articles. He has also given many guest lectures in this country and abroad including at such prestigious universities as Harvard and Brown.
Thomas Mann, who was born in 1875 and died in 1955, spent the war years looking for safety outside Europe. He spent several of them (1938 to 1941) in Princeton. It was a highly productive period in Mann’s life, as he completed several of his novels while here, including Transposed Heads and Lotte in Weimar.
Mann was given a warm welcome in Princeton, by the likes of Christian Gauss, Dean of the College, and Caroline Newton, a clinical psychologist. The Institute for Advanced Study was another attraction, and he appreciated the tranquility of the town and commented on the beauty of its trees and the surrounding countryside. But the proximity of New York was also in its favor.
In 1938, right after the Anschluss in Austria, Mann gave a tirade against Nazism in Madison Square Garden, with 30,000 cheering people in attendance. He persuaded his old friend, Erich Kahler, whom he had first met in Switzerland, to come to Princeton and join him. Together, they formed a circle of intellectual and like-minded friends who became increasingly vocal in their opposition to Hitler. Although Einstein was equally opposed to Nazism, he and Mann did not get along with each other.
At Princeton, Mann was named a “lecturer in the humanities” although he did not even have a high school diploma. He was to give six public lectures in Alexander Hall, on such topics as Goethe’s Faust and “Freud and the future.” He had been courted by Harvard but thought he detected a whiff of pro-Nazi sentiment there, so he came to Princeton instead. Mann’s writing and lecturing (he gave lectures all across the U.S.A.) became increasingly political, devoted to tirades against Nazism, and demonstrating how the Hitler regime was opposed to German culture. Of himself he said, “Where I am, there is my Germany.”
The ghastly deportation to Germany of German intellectual émigrés in Prague deeply disturbed Mann, and he took the political action of writing to Cordell Hull, the U.S. Secretary of State, begging him to bring them to the U.S.A. However, since it was impossible to obtain such documents as birth certificates in Germany, they could not get passports and were unable to come.
Despite getting drawn into politics by the miseries of the war, Mann was determined to continue his life’s work as he had always done wherever he found himself. His highly accomplished translator, Helen Tracy Lowe Porter, was also by good fortune in Princeton. She, incidentally, was the great grandmother of Boris Johnson [recently prime minister of Britain].
A diverting part of Professor Corngold’s talk concerned Mann’s poodle named Nico, which at one point escaped but was permitted, when found, to sit beside Mann while he was at work. Apparently, Irwin Panofsky also had a poodle, and the two dogs fought each other!
At one point during the war, Mann received a letter from the German University of Bonn, revoking his honorary degree from that institution. He was indignant at this snub, but it put him in the same position as many other German ex-patriots in this country. All the time that Mann was in Princeton he felt the need to give both moral and political support to other German émigrés like himself who had fled Nazi Germany and, to the extent that he could, he did so, writing on their behalf to the authorities and corresponding with individuals.
The following are some questions Professor Corngold fielded in the Q&A session:
Did Mann speak English? Yes, but with a heavy accent.
What was Mann’s personality and his relationship with Einstein? Einstein as a scientist was scornful of Mann, a humanist, saying that Mann wanted to “correct” Einstein’s calculations.
What was Mann’s relationship with Agnes Meyer? She was instrumental in bringing Mann to Princeton and ensured he had a salary to live on; she found him a position at the Library of Congress where he had to give only a couple of lectures a year but for which he was paid, thanks to Meyer, by the Rockefeller Foundation.
Respectfully submitted,
Joan Fleming