The Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton

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The two new books published by Stanley Corngold in 2022 are dedicated to Thomas Mann and the European refugee scholars who met and cooperated at Princeton University and the city’s Institute for Advanced Studies during the Second World War. Among the two publications, the book reviewed here foregrounds Mann’s Princeton oeuvre rather than his interactions with other émigré intellectuals. Corngold holds the magnifying glass over the writings that emerged from the two and a half years—28 September 1938 to 17 March 1941—that Mann spent in Princeton as lecturer in the humanities. Himself affiliated with Princeton University for decades and overseeing many courses on European and German literature, Corngold’s aim ‘is to shape a cultural memory of Thomas Mann during his American exile in Princeton’ and to bring to the fore ‘what can be remembered of Mann’s work and personality in Princeton today’ (p. xi). Corngold has divided his study into five chapters. Chapters 2 and 4, analysing (respectively) Mann’s political and literary writings of the Princeton months, are by far the longest and form the heart of the book; chapters 3 and 5, each only a few pages long, may be described as their conclusions. Corngold begins by recounting Mann’s steps in the US until he received the offer of a teaching position at Princeton, an opportunity mediated by the writer’s ‘determined patroness’ (p. 2) Agnes E. Meyer. Meyer also secured ‘a substantial one-year’s grant for him from the Rockefeller Foundation to support the appointment’, Corngold explains (p. 3). Mann’s time in Princeton was divided between artistic and political work. One novel was completed here, Lotte in Weimar, along with numerous lectures, speeches, newspaper articles and pleas before the American authorities for European friends fleeing from the Nazis. It was ‘a stunningly productive period’, as Corngold quotes his protagonist (p. 211).