◆The Barbaric Yawp Project

The Devil Always Delivers I am Thomas Mann. I was the greatest living German writer when Germany decided it no longer wanted me. Not because I was unGerman — because I kept saying what I saw. And what I saw was a civilization surrendering itself. Not to conquerors from outside, but to the part of itself that had always found the argument less satisfying than the feeling, the institution less compelling than the myth, reason less compelling than the flood of national emotion that makes the crowd one body, and the one body invincible. I had been writing about that surrender for thirty years before it completed itself. I was not surprised by Hitler. I was horrified. I was not surprised. From 1940 to 1945 I sat before a microphone in Pacific Palisades, California, and spoke to Germany in German, where the exiles had gathered — Brecht, Schoenberg, the refugees of European civilization watching from the sunshine while their world burned. Deutsche Hörer. German listeners. This is what is being done in your name, I said. This is what it will cost. In The Magic Mountain, Hans Castorp arrives at a Swiss sanatorium for a three-week visit. He stays seven years. Two voices compete for his soul. Settembrini — the liberal, the democrat, arguing patiently for the lowland and its obligations. And Naphta — the brilliant nihilist, who said all of that is exhausted, all of that is weakness dressed as virtue; the iron will is not barbarism, it is liberation. Castorp was comfortable on the mountain. Going back down meant giving up the elevation, the feeling that up here one saw further than the people laboring in the valley below. The valley is democracy — accountability, the rule of law, the slow contentious work of people governing themselves. The mountain is the place where extraordinary men are freed from those obligations. Naphta always sounds more interesting than Settembrini. Settembrini is right. He is also, I admit, slightly tedious. And tedious-and-right is the condition of civilization. The interesting man who is wrong is the condition of catastrophe. In Doctor Faustus I wrote the allegory of Germany's bargain — the extraordinary energy, the electrifying rupture with the exhausted liberal order, in exchange for the humanity that makes civilization possible. The devil delivers. The price is the soul — and without it, the brilliance he gave you is worth nothing. The devil always delivers. That is what makes the bargain so dangerous. I am watching the mechanism again. Not in Germany. In America. The content is different. The structure is identical. The stolen golden age, the enemies to be named and cast out, the contempt for expertise — and the man who promises to shatter the exhausted order and give the crowd the feeling of being one body, invincible, chosen, finally fully itself. I know this man. I wrote him the better part of a century before he arrived. And the people who accept the bargain are not stupid. The devil is a good diagnostician. He is right about the sickness — that the reasonable, procedural, expert-run order left people hungry for meaning it could not give them. He is right about the hunger. He lies only about the cure. That is what makes him the devil, and not simply a liar. It was not enough in Germany. But I kept speaking anyway — because the alternative was to accept that the flood was stronger than the argument. The argument is insufficient. The argument is also what we have. It is what stands between civilization and the flood. I watched the flood. I know what it looks like when the argument stops. Use it.