Indifferentism, anti-Semitism, the Holocaust, and Zionism: Thomas Mann and Max Brod

Compares the tone of decadence in the early works of both Mann and Brod and their later conversion to democratic and humanistic values. Analyzes the attitudes of each to Jews and Zionism. Brod adopted Zionism as the realization of a new concept of nationalist humanism. Mann came to know Jews through the family of his wife, through Jews who promoted his work, and through his research for the Joseph trilogy. Although his early novels and even the post-Holocaust "Doktor Faustus" contain unsavory Jewish characters, and anti-Jewish sentiments also appear in his diaries, on the whole he was sympathetic to Jews. He assisted Jewish exiles from Nazism; and although originally skeptical of Zionism, he recognized its importance after he learned with horror of the Holocaust, and lent his name to the struggle for the Jewish state.