"What Is Good and What Is Evil" – Thomas Mann as a Political Activist

Join the Leo Baeck Institute New York and the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles for a keynote lecture by German Studies scholar and literary critic Kai Sina on Thomas Mann’s political activism during his exile in the U.S., including his strong support for Zionism. The lecture will be followed by a conversation with writer and scholar Samantha Rose Hill, exploring how ideas and forms of political engagement crossed the Atlantic, how Mann’s activism can be understood within the U.S. literary discourse at the time, and how exiled writers spoke out in different ways. The conversation will be moderated by Benno Herz, Program Director at the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles.

For decades, Thomas Mann was rarely taken seriously as a political intellectual—when he wasn’t outright dismissed. This persistent misperception is rooted deeply in the (West) German postwar mentality and intellectual culture. It is time to revise it decisively. Mann was a public figure who, over many years, advocated for freedom and democracy—resolutely, independently, and often at personal risk.

At the center of Kai Sina’s recent book What Is Good and What Is Evil – Thomas Mann as a Political Activist (Propyläen Verlag, 2024) is not a systematic political theory, but a practice of public intervention that shaped Mann’s intellectual self-conception—a form of “social activism” he explicitly affirmed in 1930. In his lecture, Sina will show that Mann’s political activism did not begin in exile, but already in the Weimar Republic. Exemplary for this development is Mann's early and public opposition to antisemitism, which went hand in hand with a clear, outspoken endorsement of Zionism. Mann’s support for Zionism, far from being a gesture of abstract solidarity, was a deliberate and visible alignment with Jewish self-assertion at a moment of growing nationalist and antisemitic agitation. As early as 1921, he dismissed the rising right-wing ideology as “swastika nonsense”—a prescient response to the reactionary forces that would soon dominate Germany.

The lecture will be followed by a conversation and response with writer and scholar Samantha Rose Hill, author of Hannah Arendt (Reaktion Books, 2021).

This event is part of "Mann 2025: 150 Years of Thomas Mann.” Learn more about the 150th anniversary of Thomas Mann here.

This event is a collaboration between the Leo Baeck Institute New York and the Thomas Mann House.

Participants:

Kai Sina is a professor of modern German literature with a focus on transatlantic literary history at the University of Münster. He has been a Visiting Scholar at the University of Chicago and at Princeton University. He received the Fritz Behrens Foundation’s Science Prize, and in 2020 he was awarded a Lichtenberg Professorship by the Volkswagen Foundation. Together with Hans Rudolf Vaget, he is currently preparing an annotated edition of the essays Thomas Mann wrote during his exile. He recently published the books "What Is Good and What Is Evil” – Thomas Mann as a Political Activist and TransAtlantik: Hans Magnus Enzensberger, Gaston Salvatore, and Their Magazine for Western Germany.

Samantha Rose Hill is the author of the critically acclaimed book Hannah Arendt (2021) and the editor and translator of What Remains: The Collected Poems of Hannah Arendt (2017). She is associate faculty at the Brooklyn Institute for Social Research in New York City. Her work has appeared in the Los Angeles Review of Books, LitHub, OpenDemocracy, and the journals Public Seminar, Contemporary Political Theory, and Theory & Event.

Benno Herz is the Program Director at the Thomas Mann House Los Angeles. He is co-editor and co-author of the publications Thomas Mann’s Los Angeles: Stories from Exile 1940-1952 (2022) and Das Thomas Mann House – Politischer Denkort am Pazifik (2023). Herz is a lecturer at UCLA, teaching classes on German-speaking émigrés in Los Angeles, and covers related topics for international media outlets such as Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, KCRW, et al.