Out of Reich when Hitler Came, He Kept Out, Mann Declares

One of the first things Thomas Mann, German novelist and Nobel Prize winner, did yesterday morning after sighting the never-before-seen skyline of New York from the deck of the Holland-American steamer, Volendam, was to make it plain to the reporters who had swarmed up from the revenue cutter that he had not been exiled from Germany by Hitler. His status, as he put it, was that of a German citizen who chooses to live in Switzerland. Herr Mann, however, did not forbid you to reach your own conclusion that he was a voluntary exile from Hitler’s Germany and would choose to remain one until Hitler descended from the high place of his Chancellorship.

Later, in his suite at the Savoy-Plaza, with the shrewd and good-humored Frau Mann acting as interpreter, he told a Bulletin reporter that he had been in Zurich, Switzerland, on a lecture tour when the Hitler revolution burst. He decided to stay in Zurich, as his brother, Heinrich, a novelist, only less important than himself, decided to stay on in Nice, and his son, Klaus, decided to make his home, temporarily, at least, in Amsterdam.

Herr Mann made it clear that there is no reason in law to prevent him from returning to Germany; that he is not in the same position as Lion Feuchtwanger, whose property was confiscated; that his books continue to be published in the original German editions from Berlin, and not from any part of Holland, as is the case of the hundred per cent exile authors.

In answer to the question as to why he does not prefer to return to Germany, Herr Mann said that he did not choose to return because “the public spirit of the country at this moment is not sympathetic, because I could not possibly work in the prevalent atmosphere.”

“I am not a man without a country,” he had explained earlier in the day on shipboard. “I am a German, a German citizen, whose citizenship has never been revoked.”

He is visiting the United States for a ten-day period on a temporary permit issued to himself and his wife by the American consul at Zurich. His German passport has lapsed and has not been renewed, his application for the renewal having been turned down.

The Mann are here as the guests of Herr Mann’s American publisher, Alfred A. Knopf. On June 6, on the eve of his return to Zurich, he will be the guest of honor at a dinner being arranged by Mr. Knopf, at which will be present such shining lights of letters as Sinclair Lewis and Willa Cather, as well as Walter Damrosch, Thomas W. Lamont and Owen D. Young. He will give his only lecture at New Haven, as the guest of Yale University. The evening of the dinner will signalize also the publication of the American edition of “Joseph and His Brothers.”

This is Herr Mann’s first visit to the New World and to New York. He calls New York different from all other cities of the world in that it seems to have been built not by and for human beings but by and for Cyclopean giants.