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Heinrich Mann
Photo: Keystone / picture alliance
You have enemies and are aware of it, but you can't believe that they are capable of anything. The friends wouldn't be either. These and those are just like you, because you too only love or hate them up to this point and no further. Then your skepticism will come through again, and that is to be welcomed for your physical as well as your spiritual well-being. An excessive hatred would not be healthy for you. Besides, he would be unworthy of your intelligence. You compare the enemy with the friend and realize that both are human after all.
– Heinrich Mann,
The Hatred
The beauty of writing about hate: that you don't have to hate yourself to understand it. All you have to do is come into contact with him once, as an observer or, if you're unlucky, as a victim.
Heinrich Mann was almost 62 years old when he capitulated to hatred. He had written a few fairly successful books, “Professor Unrat,” “Subject,” and he had campaigned for the republic earlier and more decisively than his brother Thomas. He understood what Hitler meant more decisively and earlier than most others.
Two calendar entries from February 1933, between which a chasm opens up: "20 h concert," that's what Heinrich Mann noted on February 19th, a Sunday.
At the beginning of 1933, Mann had co-signed an appeal calling for the SPD and KPD to unite in the fight against the Nazis; on February 14, the National Socialists expelled him from the Berlin Academy of Arts. Hitler was chancellor for just three weeks. A lot of things were still disordered, but one thing was obvious: that it would be difficult for anyone with decency to live in this Germany.
Two days later, on February 21st, the brief calendar entry: “left.” Without any luggage, with nothing but an umbrella, Heinrich Mann goes into exile, via Frankfurt he reaches Sanary-sur-Mer and later Nice. And gets to work immediately. His collection of essays about hate was published in French in the late summer of 1933 and at the same time in German by the Amsterdam exile publisher Querido. The tone is astonishment, indignation.
"You have enemies and are aware of it, but you can't believe that they are capable of anything," writes Mann, who himself would never be capable of anything. And he is currently learning how disastrous it is when so many people are capable of anything.
If you want to write about hate, you have to force yourself to distance yourself. Hatred requires coolness, precision. This should not be confused with indifference; If you want to counter hate, you have to replace it with something different, harder. With Heinrich Mann it is contempt.
Hate distorts, makes you stupid and small
He writes disgustedly about the "famous Göring", the "crazy young writer" Goebbels and about Hitler, whom he derisively calls the "great man". For him, National Socialism is a “worldview for Imbécile.” His essay, which is his greatest achievement, is a book about hate, written by someone who didn't want to hate back, because hate distorts, makes you stupid and small.
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Joseph Goebbels in Geneva in 1933, photographed by Alfred Eisenstaedt
Photo: Alfred Eisenstaedt / PIX INC. / IMAGO
Hate, Mann writes, insults intelligence. Everyone has enemies, everyone has friends, but in the end they are both people. Hate also has a limit, you hate “up to this point and no further.” Anyone who crosses the line where the fierce hatred turns into a deadly, devastating hatred becomes an inhuman.
In 1940, Mann arrived in America from the south of France, where he found a place to stay, but not a new home. “Where the home becomes a foreign country, the foreign country becomes a home,” says Thomas Mann in his speech on Heinrich’s 70th birthday. It was 1941 and they had both been in California for a long time. “The deepest stranger to us today is Germany, the wild, adventurous and dissolved country of our homeland and language, and compared to its deadly foreignness, every stranger seems familiar.”
Difference between humanism and barbarism
Heinrich Mann died in Santa Monica in 1951 and was buried there. He never returned to Germany.
There remain a few books and this clear-sighted essay, generous despite its relentlessness, which is still worth reading today. Is it possible that just the word “probably” in the first sentence marks the difference between humanism and barbarism?
And the word “departed” remains, energetically underlined, deliberately placed in the past tense: matter-of-fact, almost cool, resigned, final in a touching way and yet unbowed.
This is also a life's achievement: to bow to hatred without letting it destroy you.