An Appeal to Reason

Thesis: Thomas Mann viewed the rise of fascism and the extreme nationalism it exhibited as a rejection of Western rational tradition and a return to barbarism.

• The economic decline of the middle classes gave a feeling that here was a crisis which heralded the end of the bourgeois epoch that came with the French Revolution


• A new mental attitude was proclaimed for mankind, which should have nothing to do with bourgeois principles as freedom, justice, culture, faith in progress


• In philosophy it repudiated reason and expressed itself as an irrationalist throwback.


• Life is at the center of thought, and raised its standard on the power of the unconscious


• Mind was put under taboo as destructive to life


• This new nationalism is like a nature cult


• A new German ideology addresses Germany with a mystical good feeling and lends a fanatical cult barbarism


• The movement called National Socialism, which has displayed such a power of enlisting recruits to its banner, mingles with a mighty wave of anomalous barbarism and primitive popular vulgarity


• Humanity seems to have run away from the humanitarian, idealistic ninteenth century


• Everything permitted as a weapon against human decency.


• We have got rid of the idea of freedom as a relic of the bourgeois state of mind, upon which Europe was founded and such sacrifices have been made.


• Great demoralization and mockery of all human authority; giving a free rein to instincts, the emancipation of brutality, and the dictatorship of force.


• Violence demonstrates itself, and demonstrates nothing but violence


• Fanaticism turns into a means of salvation, enthusiasm into epilectic ecstasy, politics as an opiate for the masses, and reason veils her face.