Timely warning from Heinrich Mann on dangers to democracy

Long before Thomas Mann achieved fame as a writer – and earned a Nobel Prize for Literature – his older brother Heinrich was already a notorious novelist.

His satire Der Untertan (literally: The Subject) is a merciless takedown of late-stage imperial Germany under Kaiser Wilhelm II. Cutting a little too close to the bone, its serialisation was halted during the first World War, and it appeared in book form only in 1918. Now an exhibition about the novel in Lübeck, at the city’s Buddenbookhaus Museum, has taken on a new, uncomfortable relevance.

And not just because last week’s raids to break up an alleged planned coup in Germany threw up a cast of suspected conspirators – an aggrieved aristocrat, a conspiracy-loving judge, an opera singer and a gourmet cook – that could have come straight from the pages of Heinrich Mann’s novel.

It tells the story of Diederich Hessling, the soft son of a factory owner who understands the art of survival in imperial Germany’s militarist, hierarchical atmosphere thus: kick those below you, bow to those above you.

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When he inherits the family factory, Hessling warns his workers, “now that I hold the rudder, my course is the correct one”.

“Those who want to be helpful to me are very welcome,” he announces, “and those who want to get in my way in this work – I will smash them.”

German journalist and satirist Kurt Tucholsky was delighted with the novel with its displaying, like dried plants, of all the varieties of the German man: “Here he is in his entirety: addiction to giving orders and to obeying, in his crudity, in his religiosity, in his adoration of success and in his civil cowardice.”

The tragic irony of Der Untertan, Heinrich Mann’s most successful novel, is that the weaknesses he saw in the German DNA were, a few short years later, exploited so ruthlessly by German fascists.

When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Mann fled Germany, was stripped of his citizenship and died in 1950 in Californian exile. Though later overshadowed by his brother’s fame – not to mention early anti-Jewish tracts and, later again, pro-Stalin views – with Der Untertan Heinrich Mann secured a place in Germany’s literary canon and curriculum: the novel is one of the options on this year’s school-leaving exams.

The Lübeck exhibition, pitched at secondary school children, asks intriguing questions about then and now. Is Donald Trump, grandson of a German emigrant, a latter-day Diederich Hessling? Is Elon Musk a new kaiser and his “followers” today’s new subjects?

Visiting the exhibition just days after last week’s alleged coup revelations, the exhibition crystallised for me a question hanging uncomfortably in the air these days in Germany. After triggering two world wars, fuelled by imperialism and nationalism, and after seven post-war decades of post-nationalist state-building, just how immune are modern Germans – and, indeed, the rest of us – to the very things Heinrich Mann warned about a century ago?

Last year German president Frank Walter Steinmeier cited the writer as a timely role model in this age of anxiety. “We are seeing again how democracy is made contemptuous, how hatred poisons public debates, how authoritarian thinking allies itself with irrationality.”

He was referring to the Covid-19 conspiracy theorists and the far-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD), anxious to win over disaffected voters in the so-called Reichsbürger movement. With elements of the US QAnon conspiracy and prepper scene, the diffuse Reichsbürger movement – with an estimated 23,000 members – rejects the legitimacy of the modern German state in favour of a previous reich or kingdom, though there is no agreement on which.

That last week’s alleged putschists were reportedly Reichsbürger sympathisers but not fringe crazies has set alarm bells ringing in Germany.

Former interior minister Gerhart Baum, who faced down extreme-left RAF terrorists in the 1970s, sees an even greater danger in today’s far-right extremism “because an acceptance of far-right ideas has always been there in Germany, even in the post-war years”.

“The danger is coming from the centre, not the fringes, and the danger is that the centre is infected,” he warned. “Weimar democracy ended because the middle classes didn’t defend democracy.”

If the centre is to hold, Steinmeier suggested last week, then the post-war German state, built on the rule of law and so-called “constitutional patriotism”, needs to grow up. It must become what he called a “fortified democracy” and be able to tackle its enemies.

Der Spiegel magazine went further, demanding changes to the political funding system for elected parties to financially squeeze the AfD. “A well-fortified democracy,” it argued, “should not provide the means for itself to be undermined.”

Leaving Lübeck’s intriguing Der Untertan exhibition, visitors are left with food for thought from Heinrich Mann himself: “At its heart, democracy is the recognition that, in social terms, we are all responsible for each other.”