On the gruesomeness – Gordon A. Craig in NY Books in 1982:

‘From the time he was a schoolboy in Lübeck until his death in Zurich in 1955, Thomas Mann kept a diary. Its purpose in the early years seems to have been to serve as a repository for stylistic exercises, drafts of stories, and copies of letters, but we have no exact knowledge of its contents because he burned all of the early volumes in 1896.’

(…)

‘Perhaps most of all, the literary importance of the diaries lies in the evidence they provide of the dedication and unfailing energy that Mann brought to his work. In February 1934 we find him, exiled from his country, horrified by the daily news of Nazi outrages and the loss of friends, suffering from headaches and insomnia, but nevertheless recording that he had been reading about Goethe and Hamann and Moritz after dinner and, before going to bed, had come upon “some new material for Joseph: some things on gardening, the care of palm trees, and the mystical connection between Ishtar and Ischallanu. The crucial conversation between Joseph and Potiphar became clearer to me.”’

(…)

‘And, two weeks later, I could have a certain amount of understanding for the rebellion against the Jewish element, were it not that the Jewish spirit exercises a necessary control over the German element, the withdrawal of which is dangerous: left to themselves, the Germans are so stupid as to lump people of my type in the same category and drive me out with the rest.
As time passed and the enormity of the Nazi regime was revealed, he was appalled, but less, one feels, because of the human suffering caused by Germany’s new rulers than because Hitler’s revolution pretended to be a cultural renascence and was accepted as such by the German people. In an interesting foreshadowing of his essay “Brother Hitler,” Mann wrote in his diary on September 8, 1933, that the totalitarian state had at least one philosopher, a simple laborer whose head has been set spinning by the times, and who has been brought to power by the calamitous disorder of the day, a man who confounds his hysteria with artistic sensibility, his inner confusion with deep thinking, and without the least doubt or compunction undertakes to impose upon a people with an intellectual tradition as great as Germany’s his own thickheaded opinions.’

(…)

‘Meanwhile, what he called “the gruesomeness of German history” had to play itself out and, as it did, the exile, moving from Switzerland to Princeton to California, went methodically about his work. “Detachment, detachment!” he wrote at the height of the Sudeten crisis. “One must restrict oneself to his own immediate concerns and the life of the mind. I require serenity and the consciousness of my favored existence. Impotent hatred must not consume me.’

Read the article here.

The Jewish spirit controlling the German element?

The gruesomeness of German history played itself out, and we cannot say that the gruesomeness of history itself came to an end.