On the Moses by Thomas Mann
18,90€
In 1943, self-exiled in the United States, Thomas Mann published the novel The Law, centered on the character of Moses. On the occasion of this work, Jean-Michel Rey approaches the contribution of Judaism to German culture, emphasizing the consequences of the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime in the field of culture.
In 1943, Thomas Mann self-exiled in the United States, published a fairly extensive novel entitled The Law, focusing on Moses’s personality. On the occasion of this relatively unrecognized work, which would be part of the collective volume “The Ten Commandments”, Jean-Michel Rey approaches Judaism’s contribution to German culture, emphasizing the consequences that the persecution of Jews by the Nazi regime had in the field of culture.
As part of this approach, J.-M. Rey refers to texts by older authors, such as Heine and Nietzsche, contemporaries of Thomas Mann, such as Kafka and Nelly Sachs, but also to Freud’s well-known text – with which there were mutual admiration and some rivalry – “The Man of Moses and the monotheistic religion”.
J.-M. Rey, by focusing, among other things, on the Nazis’ vocabulary (“the people,” “the blood,” “the Leader”), a professor of philosophy and aesthetics, also illuminates the distortion -or even “infection”- of the German language through its propaganda use by the Hitler regime. At the same time, he analyzes the catastrophic consequences that the period 1933-45 had for Germany and German culture and emphasized the portrait of a figure like Moses by Thomas Mann, J.-M. Rey seeks to understand and analyze the reasons that pushed a nation with such a long history as the German to renounce its Jewish component, an integral part of its culture.
“In his brilliant study, the author demonstrates how one of Germany’s most significant self-exiles, the great Thomas Mann, having escaped the Nazi regime in the USA, presents the Old Testament’s fundamental personality, Moses, as a kind of anti-Hitler. Mann sees Moses as an artist, a “sculptor” who knows, through the law, how to build a society from a nomadic slave people. Against a nationalist culture that brought the country to ruin under the leadership of a paranoid, Mann and Rey’s Moses embodies the triumph of the democratic spirit.”
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Jean-Michel Rey
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