Mark Lilla, editor of this new edition, accepts Mann’s claim, but warns it is not the voice of the liberal public intellectual who opposed the Nazis during World War II. The Mann we hear in Reflections is fulminating against democracy. Lilla asks us to listen nevertheless, for we are living in reactionary times ourselves and have something to learn from Mann’s thinking in the darkness of those years. But listen, he suggests, rather like a therapist. It is good advice, for what lies behind Mann’s peculiar brand of patriotism during the Great War is soon audible. It is fear: ‘If Germany were beaten … her belief in herself broken … I would not want to live.’ Mann’s belief in himself is at stake too.

Like many others, Mann welcomed the war initially. In his 1914 essay ‘Thoughts in Wartime’ (included in this new edition), he declared: ‘The world, our world could no longer go on as it had.’ And he develops this theme at length in Reflections. The old burgher culture – with which he identified – was being undermined by modernisation. Looking back on Death in Venice (1912), he describes it as ‘the late work of an epoch on which the uncertain lights of a new era were falling’. The old era, like Venice, was in a state of terminal decay, and he who had been ‘appointed to be a chronicler and analyst of decadence’ was ‘bound in pessimism to it’ – so he was facing an impasse. The war arouses apocalyptic visions; it is a revelation, a great ‘visitation’: a victorious Germany would (somehow) revitalise Europe’s dying culture. Then, as the war drags on, it gradually dawns on Mann that he, too, needed to change. Reflections becomes the record of his search for a new mission as a writer.

The search was greatly complicated by a bitter contemporaneous quarrel with his brother, Heinrich, author of satirical novels, such as The Loyal Subject (1918). Heinrich believed that all writers, Thomas included, should stop agonising about the state of the soul – Europe’s and their own – and work together to end this catastrophic war. He was part of an international pacifist network that included Albert Einstein and that was predictably ineffectual. Heinrich’s politics and aesthetics were anathema to Thomas. For him, writing was ‘an intellectual-moral effort on behalf of a problematic ego’, which involved exploring the effects of conflicting ideas within the minds of individuals. This was only possible, he said, if writers were above politics, like Goethe, who had famously warned: ‘The politician in you will eat up the poet.’ Thomas could never be ‘political’ in the way his brother expected.

They were rehearsing an old nineteenth-century argument, promoted by German thinkers and poets, that opposed the Romantic notion of the ‘soul’ to Enlightenment ideals and the ‘spirit’ of the French Revolution. This idea developed gradually into a mythical overvaluation of German culture as deeper and richer than the mere civilisation of other Europeans. This argument took a nasty turn during the war. French propagandists declared they were fighting for ‘civilisation’ against German militarism; German intellectuals saw it as a war against their ‘culture’. Mann sprang to its defence. He thought he could serve his country best by developing an ideological justification for war. Describing it as ‘a fundamental life force’, truly daemonic, just as ‘intimately connected to art as religion and sex’, he gave the already loaded term ‘culture’ a nationalistic, militaristic twist – which would later lead German reactionaries to think of him as an ally.

By 1916, millions were dying in the trenches, but the only echo of the guns of Verdun in the Mann household in Munich was Thomas thundering at his brother. Heinrich had published an essay celebrating Zola’s political courage and criticising apolitical aesthetes as mere ‘entertaining parasites’. Outraged, Mann retaliated in Reflections: a certain partisan of French ‘civilisation’, a ‘radical literary man’, was a mere dilettante and – since he was so keen on French-style republican democracy – also a ‘Jacobin’. The writing is bitter, shrill, self-pitying, but undeniably moving: ‘How do you then stand before me, human being, artist, brother … ossified in bigotry … Have you no regard for suffering, for experience?’ Fearing that he will be left behind by history, his identity as defender of ‘true’ German culture denied, Mann engages in identity politics with a vengeance.

But it is not all vengeance. Mann laughs at himself occasionally: ‘Thunderous words do not suit me … they are probably best reserved for cannon’ – a hint of the wry self-irony characteristic of pre-war stories like Tonio Kröger. But Mann did not recover his equilibrium until he realised how potentially dangerous Reflections could be, with its description of democracy as inimical to the German soul. In 1922, he delivered a remarkable speech, ‘On the German Republic’ (included here), which urged Germans to support their fragile new democracy. The warring brothers were reconciled and turned to face the vicious extremist enemy together, united by a common concern for humanity. While Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man is too tormented to be a well-made work, it is a truthful account of a fearful time when ideological confusion almost overwhelmed a brilliant mind – a cautionary tale that, as Lilla remarks, is indeed ‘timely’.