SOURCE: "Text and History: Tonio Kröger and the Politics of Four Decades," in Publications of the English Goethe Society, n.s., Vol. LVII, 1988, pp. 39-54.

In the following essay, Reed examines Tonio Krioger within the political and cultural contexts of early twentieth-century Germany.

No one who knew Ida Herz will have been surprised by her wish that we should 'spread the word and work of Thomas Mann'. From 1925 on, when she catalogued Thomas Mann's increasingly unmanageable library for him and became part of his entourage, he was the central experience of her life. Later, the value of his writings for her, and for many Germans like her, was intensified by the horrors of twentieth-century German history. As Nazism engulfed Germany and then Europe, Thomas Mann became for them a light in the darkness. His work was comfortingly sane: in a world of vicious distortion and brutal propaganda...