The text This War is a testimony, a confession, an attempt at redemption, and at the same time a prophecy from a great writer about his homeland, his fellow citizens, the world of his time, and himself.

It was written in December 1939 and was intended for the New York Herald Tribune. At the beginning of the following year, it was published in German, but the Nazis confiscated all copies when they invaded Amsterdam.

National Socialism exploited the historical and economic hardships of the German people to the fullest. The dictatorship found fertile ground in their passions, exacerbated them, and manipulated them. When a people becomes an entire prey to a coarse, shrill, semi-mad voice and allows itself to be hypnotized by suggestive mass ceremonies of collective initiation in order to make up for what it has supposedly lost, what power of discourse can resist here? The mental, spiritual, moral, and political tradition had already been accomplished much earlier. This story contains an eternal reminder and warning for democracies.

Thomas Mann's action is, I think, symbolic and expresses his need to speak without hope. As a national writer, he cannot hope.

Nevertheless, he makes a series of interesting observations that are not simple statements but, if we pay attention, have a deeply moral character, something like symbolic redemption of an entire nation. The Germans are swept away by the wretched propaganda and criminal agitation of anti-Semitism and racism, and they stoop to a spurious relief of their passions: by demonizing the Jews and others, they can finally feel superior, strong, invincible. However, as Mann rightly points out, the feeling of racial superiority was little joy to those who, by their choices, not only laid the foundations for their future destruction but were above all themselves witnesses to their slow and torturous moral death.

From the Afterword by Konstantinos Papageorgiou.

Thomas Mann's book Doctor Faustus is also published by Polis Editions.