Die bereinigte Moderne

Abstract

This is the first detailed socio-historical study of Heinrich Mann's novel "Der Untertan" (available in English translation in Penguin Books under the title "Man of Straw"). Completed in July 1914 and published in an edition of 100,000 in November 1918, Mann's powerful settlement of accounts with the Wilhelmine bourgeoisie occupies a strategic and controversial position in the debates about continuity and change from the German Empire (1871-1918) through the Weimar Republic to the Third Reich. No historian, as Hans-Ulrich Wehler has written, could have described the growth and development of radical German nationalism as penetratingly as H. Mann does in "Man of Straw". In addition to the considerable diagnostic value of the novel, Alter's study also analyses the symptomatic importance of H. Mann's literary and political development from the Wilhelmine Empire until the triumph of National Socialism in 1933 and sees this development in the context of the problematical history of German liberalism. The failed revolution of 1918/19 brings to light H. Mann's difficulties in confronting the full import of his own diagnoses: he is loath to admit that the 'middle' class (which since the 18th century had delegated itself to represent the whole of 'humanity' against the feudal-aristocratic order) was now more than ever a class itself. Mann convinced himself in the 1920s and early 1930s that the 'authoritarian personality' he had diagnosed in the "Man of Straw" had proved to be an historical aberration in the history of the German middle classes. Accordingly National Socialism, too, was anomalous in the course of German history. As a temporary throw-back to anachronistic conditions, H. Mann believed, National Socialism had no future in Germany.