Two German writers, united by their pen and their language, but sworn enemies in all other aspects.
Carl Schmitt wrote The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy in 1923 - then The Concept of the Political in 1932. Both were fierce attacks on parliamentary politics and presaged the rise of a new order in Germany from the ruins of the Weimar Republic.
The Concept of the Political would be the Weimar Republic’s tombstone - the next year, Schmitt would join the Nazi Party and he would end up providing the legal and philosophical underpinnings for Hitler’s rise.
Thomas Mann was the “European man of ideas”. After criticizing Wagner (one of Hitler’s favorite composers) in his talk "The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner", he was soon exiled in Los Angeles and served as the focal point of German culture outside of Nazi Germany.
In Mann's Magic Mountain, there is an oddly prophetic character - Naphta - who rants that humanity will desire terror and not liberation for this era.
Naphta’s "love of extremes and contempt for all forms of compromise make him defend the Inquisition and the authoritarian aspects of Catholicism and communism."
At the end of World War II, Mann would write Doctor Faustus, which told the tale of a composer who bargained his soul to the Devil for twenty-four years of creative genius (and a lifetime otherwise spent in neuro-syphilitic madness).
Of course, Nietzsche is the original inspiration, but it is not hard to discern a common trend in Mann’s writing: the rise and downfall of Nazi Germany and the bargain with nihilism it took to get there.
Perhaps he was thinking of Schmitt and certainly his emanations when Mann spoke in Germany and the Germans: “this story should convince us of one thing: that there are not two Germanys, a good one and a bad one, but only one, whose best turned into evil through devilish cunning.”
