Meine Zeit

In Meine Zeit, delivered in 1950 around his seventy-fifth birthday, Thomas Mann reflects on his formation in the nineteenth century, his literary influences and his turn from nationalism toward democracy. He discusses totalitarianism, the Cold War and the reconciliation of freedom with equality, ending with an appeal for peace.

0:01 — Goethe and a lifetime of historical upheaval
3:56 — The nineteenth century and continuity between epochs
5:06 — Childhood in Bismarck's Germany
8:41 — Bourgeois fear of Social Democracy
11:31 — Security, gold and the manners of the bourgeois age
15:22 — Technology, liberal security and revolt against the fathers
18:06 — Decadence and Mann's literary formation
22:00 — Buddenbrooks and the decline of a world
24:15 — Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man and the break with nationalism
28:17 — The Magic Mountain and humanism
34:00 — Totalitarianism, truth and belief in lies
39:19 — Political religion and the desire for liberation from freedom
43:16 — The Russian Revolution and autocratic power
47:26 — The wartime alliance and the damage of the Cold War
51:13 — America, Russia, freedom and equality
56:06 — A world peace conference and the financing of peace
58:53 — Time, human maturity and the hope for peace
1:00:46 — Broadcaster's closing announcement

Thomas Mann — 1 recording in the archive.

Ladies and gentlemen, at the age of seventy-five Goethe said to Eckermann: “I have the great advantage of having been born at a time when the greatest events in world history came onto the agenda and continued throughout my long life, so that I was a living witness to the Seven Years’ War, then the separation of America from England, the French Revolution, and finally the entire Napoleonic era, down to the hero’s downfall and the events that followed.” Here an old man boasts of the historical experience allotted to him, which, as he says, helped him reach quite different conclusions and insights from those that would be available to people being born now—that is, in 1824. Well, that generation, and every generation since, has also had no shortage of remarkable world events and transformations to witness. It is always risky to take pride in the particular historical richness of one’s own lifespan. Things can always become more extraordinary. They always do. It is no small thing to have been born just after the Franco-Prussian War and the end of the Second French Empire, to have witnessed Germany’s continental supremacy under Bismarck and the flowering of the British Empire under Victoria, and, almost simultaneously, with personal awareness already awakened, the intellectual undermining of bourgeois standards of life throughout Europe; the catastrophe of 1914, America’s entry into world politics, the fall of the German Empire, and the complete transformation of the moral atmosphere through the four bloody years of the First World War; the Russian Revolution, the rise of Fascism in Italy and National Socialism in Germany, the terror of Hitler, the alliance of East and West against him, the war won and the peace lost once again. If, I say, this is a generous amount of outward drama for one human life, quantitatively comparable to Goethe’s experience, I would nevertheless not guarantee that today’s infants—if technology running amok allows them their turn at all—will not, in old age, boast of upheavals and spectacular world transformations quite different from those witnessed by someone now turning seventy-five. I wish them well. As the old German Christmas song says, let us not look enviously at one another’s gifts. No generation goes short. And yet I should like to acknowledge one advantage that someone born in 1875 can claim over someone born in 1914 or later. It is no small thing to have belonged…