Thomas Mann endorsed planned economy as the coming rational world order

Evidence

Even someone like Thomas Mann was putting his hopes in the planned economy at this time. In his lecture on `Goethe as a Representative of the Bourgeois Epoch’, given in March 1932 on the 100th anniversary of Goethe’s death at the Prussian Academy of Arts in Berlin, he stated: … The new, the social world, the organized world of unity and planning, in which humanity will be freed from subhuman, unnecessary suffering, which offends the dignity of reasonthis world will come, and it will be the work of that immense soberness in which all of those minds already believe who reject rotten, drab, petty-bourgeois sentimentalism, all of those who are worthy of consideration. This world will come, for an outward, rational order, suited to the stage which the human spirit has reached, must be createdor, in the worst case, must emerge through violent revolutionso that genuine sentiment can regain its right to exist, so that a good conscience, a human conscience, can be restored to it. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 502

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Thomas Mann used a composer’s life as a symbol of Germany’s cultural decline — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination: A History…, 588

Broader Connections

• Thomas Mann used a composer’s life as a symbol of Germany’s cultural decline #complicates (0.75) — Martin Jay, The Dialectical Imagination, 588