10 - The End of the First World War

Summary

IN CHAPTERS 33 AND 34 MANN EXPLAINS the basis of the great gulf that opens up between Zeitblom and his friends and Adrian and Rudi in the second part of the novel. Zeitblom describes six different aspects of the period just after the end of the First World War: his personal attitude towards the political situation; the political theories of the Kridwiß Kreis and his explanation of the conclusions reached; Adrian's activities both during and after the war; Adrian's Apocalipsis cum figuris; its reception by Zeitblom and his associates; and Adrian's and Rudi's decision to cooperate in support of the Weimar Republic.

There is strong opposition among critics to identifying Zeitblom with National Socialism, and more or less universal agreement among them that Mann does not present him as supporting National Socialism. Certainly, Zeitblom makes a few remarks to the effect that he is not entirely in agreement with Hitler's policies. However, he makes clear statements, glossed over by the critics, that identify him as definitely sympathetic to fascism in the abstract. In these chapters he is clearly and unmistakably shown by Mann to be one of those intellectuals he described in 1931 in “Die Wiedergeburt der Anständigkeit”: in the 1920s, says Mann, these people fell into the fashionable sickness of deifying the irrational and are, therefore, guilty of complicity in the triumph of the anti-intellectuality of the political mass movements. They made it easier for its leaders to appeal openly to irrational motivations.