In 1949, Thomas Mann wrote an encomium for Extempore, a small Swiss magazine that he applauded for its moral lucidity and its plucky habit of describing the world as it truly was. The essay, intended for another periodical called Aufbau, went unpublished.

Equator has translated it into English for the first time, as much for its prescience about the American century as for its belief in the cultural import of magazines. This is a fitting moment to publish it, as we prepare to send out our first print issues – join us now to secure your copy.

Introduction by Pankaj Mishra

Writing to the scholar Erich von Kahler in 1951 from Los Angeles, while desperately trying to leave the US, his home since 1938, Thomas Mann referred to a joke that was then circulating among German writers and artists. They were free, in theory, to exit the states of internal and external exile they’d been confined to in Europe and the US during the long years of Nazism. And yet, as the American political establishment recruited ex-Nazis for the Cold War abroad and fanatically persecuted suspected socialists at home, a new kind of political depravity was entrenching itself on both sides of the Atlantic.

The joke acknowledges this sinister new reality: two friends pass each other in the Atlantic, one sailing from Europe to New York, the other in the opposite direction. Sighting each other on the high seas, they cry out simultaneously: “Have you gone crazy?”

As Mann saw it, the man heading to the US was “just a trace crazier”. Western Europe had turned into a “wretched American colony” after the war, but he was confident that “the European mentality does not come up to the barbarous infantilism we have here”. “Have people ever,” he wondered despairingly, “had to inhale so poisoned an atmosphere, one so utterly saturated with idiotic baseness?”

Mann’s loathing for political and journalistic cultures in his adopted country cannot but resonate today, as “idiotic baseness” becomes a broadly valued aspiration under the second Trump administration. But it is worth remembering how uncharacteristic such rage was in a writer considered to be the embodiment of aloof irony. His “anti-Americanism” is all the more striking because he was the most celebrated of the many “dissident” writers fetishised by the American elite in the past century. The Nobel Laureate appeared on the cover of Time in 1934, and received an honorary doctorate from Harvard in 1935. As a permanent resident of the US, he warned publicly about the allure of fascism, went on speaking tours, gave congressional testimonies and delivered regular radio broadcasts against the Third Reich.

His publisher Alfred A Knopf hailed him as Hitler’s most dangerous foe. (This was an exaggeration: that literary distinction surely belonged to the Soviet writer Ilya Ehrenburg, who spurred a vengeful Red Army on to Berlin in his widely read columns.) Many Americans revered him as the emblematic European writer, possessed of moral seriousness and intellectual complexity. Mann himself was more than grateful for American hospitality, paying endless tributes to the arsenal of democracy; he became a US citizen in 1944.

But the sudden death of the American president the following year marked a radical shift in Mann’s perceptions. Franklin D. Roosevelt’s social, political and cultural interventions had elicited sympathy and admiration among many German émigrés: Communists, Socialists and liberals. In their eyes, Roosevelt represented a genuine democratic alternative to the fascist and imperialist leaders of Europe. His replacement by a failed haberdasher from Missouri inaugurated a precipitous descent of American liberalism: from its New Deal summit, it now fell into a mire of Cold War paranoia.

Anti-communism, parasitic on an often-deliberate overestimation of Soviet capabilities, quickly replaced anti-fascism as the American establishment’s creed. Even the blandly humanitarian sentiments of many émigrés spawned thick files at the FBI; Einstein alone had around 1,500 pages devoted to his views. The left-leaning playwrights Lion Feuchtwanger and Bertolt Brecht were attacked by respectable periodicals as well as Hearst tabloids. The New York Times described Egon Erwin Kisch as a “Russian spy”. In 1949, Life magazine published a gallery of “dupes and fellow travelers” who “dress up communist fronts”.

Mann was not a communist of any kind, although, like many anti-fascists then, he was inclined to over-praise the Soviet Union for its indispensable and horrifyingly costly struggle against Nazi Germany. Still, he found himself on Life’s list, together with Einstein and Charlie Chaplin. His daughter Erika, who had actually served the FBI as an informant, found her application for US citizenship repeatedly denied; she withdrew it in 1950 in protest.

Like George Orwell, who saw the war against Hitler as a portal to socialism, Mann had hoped for a worldwide postwar acceptance of a cosmopolitan ethic founded on a rejection of nationalist and capitalist ideologies. In a 1940 essay titled “The War and the Future”, he pointed to a future that “belongs to the new idea of world community, to the restriction of national sovereignties and autonomies”. “To this new state,” he argued, “our emigration and the diaspora of our various cultures are merely the prelude.” He pinned his hopes on the US during the war; the latter’s swift postwar degeneration into a “police state” was therefore a terrible shock to him. He couldn’t but despise American cold warriors, and warm to those who kept a fastidious distance from them, such as Jawaharlal Nehru. Writing in 1949 to Hermann Hesse, whose mother was born in India, he reported meeting the Indian prime minister in San Francisco: “A charming, sensitive, intelligent man – definitely more intelligent than the people who are running this country.”

That same year, he wrote the following essay, convinced that America’s “terrifying moral decline” was irreversible. There is much in it that remains unimpeachable in 2026. America still supports oil-rich despotisms in the Middle East while claiming to advance freedom and democracy, and passes off legalised practices of banditry and exploitation as “free enterprise”. The American media persists in its “fascistic obfuscation” of inconvenient truths. Europeans have not shed their “general obsequiousness towards American wealth”. “Publishing it requires much thought,” Mann confided in his diary after drafting the essay, “since it could bring about my downfall here.”

A year later, an event Mann was scheduled to address at the Beverly Wilshire Hotel was called off – the latest of many attempts to cancel him. Reporting the incident in a letter to Theodor Adorno, he added:

The hatred, the taste for persecution, the terrorising of attitudes and opinions, the enforced silence, the nameless hypocrisy, mendacity and self-righteousness, the hopeless weakness and cowed reticence of those who know better, the fact alone that someone like McCarthy cannot be neutralised, that he can rely on ever-increasing financial support, that his shady methods and techniques have effectively become established practice – all this only encourages the thought of taking flight yet again. But of taking flight to where, you will naturally ask. And you are right, there is nowhere to escape these things.

Mann’s bleak vision is extensively shared today. Many exiles and expatriates mutter “You are crazy” as they pass each other on routes between Asia, Africa, Europe and Latin America. But as Mann’s own literary activism in his last decades magnificently demonstrated, and as he clarifies in this essay, the dignity and autonomy of the life of the mind must be resourcefully defended when societies are overrun by corrupt and philistine forces. Periodicals explicitly committed to an internationalist and cosmopolitan ethos can still offer a refuge from “the stupid headlines and the vulgar smear campaigns of the ordinary press”. They can move beyond “the dreary and noxious slogans of the day”. In a time of extensive intellectual and spiritual homelessness, they can offer a new home.

In this distinguished publication, whose readership spans the entire globe, I would like to draw attention to a small, courageous magazine. It is called Extempore and is printed as a manuscript (and very well printed, I might add) by the Vita Nova publishing company in Lucerne. Its language is entirely free of the dreary and noxious slogans of the day, of maniacal hatred and bigoted self-glorification, of the monotonous denunciation of others from the tribune of righteousness, and of crude self-interest disguised as ideology.

Since I love Switzerland, I am proud that it is precisely there that a publication dares to speak the truth openly: the truth that the modern world is not in a state of dangerous confusion because the principles on which Western civilisation prides itself have no validity in the “East”, but because the effort to defend these principles in the West is plagued by insincerity, and because that same West has done more to discredit its ideals than to realise them.

A reluctance to take a clear stand against the imposition of an “order” has robbed Europe of a sense of its real problems. To reject the idea of a communist world order, or one that is purely anti-communist, because they are both an escape into a violent power structure and can only be realised in fascist and imperialist forms; to advocate instead for peaceful development between East and West, because only the end of the Cold War can lead both sides to renounce the abuse of power – isn’t that pro-communism?

Here a personal interjection is necessary. There has recently been a great deal of outrage, especially in the West German press, about my “communism”, my “betrayal of freedom”, my “glorification of lawlessness and violence”. There’s not a word of truth in it. What is true is that I consider the Russian Revolution a historical event of the highest significance, and I believe the currently raging socioeconomic conflict between East and West will one day resolve itself and, like earlier polarities, be dissolved into civilisation. Then it will probably become clear that the West’s receptiveness to so-called Eastern ideas was stronger than the other way around.

But I have repeatedly expressed my deep aversion to the methods of the police state: to the “picking up” and disappearing of people, to legal uncertainty and concentration camps, to the totalitarian control of culture and prescribed art. But it so happens – or at least it seems natural to me – that people draw their moral feelings from the life that is near at hand, not from a distant one in which they have no part. Things may or may not be as bad in the Soviet state as our newspaper headlines loudly proclaim – but they don’t look particularly good on our side either.

Who would deny that, since the days when Franklin Roosevelt (“the great president”, as the Swiss magazine still refers to him) called for a charitable ordering of the world economy and a fusion of the economic interests of all races and peoples; since he proclaimed a peace that would emerge from the subordination of the economy to a legal order; since he declared: “In the future world, the misuse of power, as implied in the term ‘power politics’, must not be a controlling factor in international relations” – who would deny that, since then, a terrifying moral decline has occurred in this country, accompanied by a shattering collapse of its global standing? That so many people are completely ignorant of this doesn’t change a thing.

It is very easy to kick a humiliated Europe aside and declare “I choose America”, simply to feel mentally at ease and in harmony with one’s surroundings. An author who has earned the right to be called a “man of letters” not merely through his talent ought to be more inclined to worry about the welfare of a great and good people, among whom he is very pleased to live, but whose sense of justice is confused; a people whose mental health must suffer from the moral infirmity of a politics that, for the sake of “order”, accepts anything that is not communism, even the most extreme social decay, corruption and feudal depravity; a politics that only knows the propagandistic use of moral arguments in one direction, always the same, and which amounts to a messianic claim to economic world domination.

We are filled with every manner of anger and indignation towards the Soviet state, whose government is formed, through violence, in contempt of the opinion of the people. And yet the fingers on both hands are not enough to count the non-communist states in Europe, America and Asia whose governments are similarly constituted without it bothering us in the least. His Majesty, the Shah of Iran, monarch of a country that has degenerated into farce, is our honoured guest. His antiquated regime, which recognises no rights for the poor, is defended in the name of democracy against Russia’s demand for oil concessions!

Our accusations against the Soviet Union, of the most serious human rights violations – namely, sentencing innocent people to forced labour, bordering on slavery – rise to the farthest reaches of heaven. But we avoid making statements against states that formally tolerate slavery within their territories or colonies. We are even on the warmest of terms with Saudi Arabia. The big Saudi landowners, in alliance with American oil companies, have surrendered half their land for prospecting and exploitation, and suffocated all attempts at progress-oriented land management.

Yes, we know how to make people rich! In Germany it has come to light (the American military government has confirmed this incident, which occurred in the British zone) that the Bremen Cotton Merchants’ Association – these few honourable businessmen –pocketed around 40 million Deutschmarks by withholding goods during the “currency reform”. They call this the “rediscovery of the creative personality in the economy”; they call it “private initiative”. Under these labels, a barbaric class of speculators, coolly indifferent to the plight of the people, have made new fortunes.

The Russians, as uncivilised as they are, would make short work of such scoundrels. We haven’t even mustered the cruelty to revoke the fortunes that the beneficiaries of the Nazi system plundered under its protection. That would have constituted a revolutionary act, and thus an offense against “order”. Order does not mean the organisation of production and ownership according to reasonably decent social principles, orallowing for the genuine renewal of German public life. Order prevails when the “entrepreneurial spirit” reigns freely; when housing construction is neglected because the building industry is run by the privileged classes; when 40% of the population is limited to the most basic consumption for survival; when more than two million are unemployed; when everything that goes beyond private sector purposes is denounced as communist, un-American, and therefore presumably also un-German. Nevertheless, there are Germans who are convinced that, without comprehensive social reform, this fateful country is heading towards a new catastrophe.

The unscrupulous – one might even say nefarious – inclusion of German militarism in the “European Front” is, despite all the European anxiety about it, a done deal. The aversion to Soviet communism blends with new but all-too-familiar speculations regarding the services of a kindly treated nationalism, with the protection and renewed mobilisation of the Nazi underworld. Everything that in 1945 momentarily – and even then, unjustly – believed it had to go into hiding now brazenly raises its head again, and dominates the scene.

Not since 1930 has the better, higher, purer German spirit found itself so isolated. People no longer feel the need to assert that, in their heart of hearts, they were never National Socialists. On the contrary, all the advantage lies with those who were National Socialists at heart – and who have remained so. Increasingly, the denazification tribunals are turning into demonstrations of national reverence for the leaders and beneficiaries of the Third Reich, and the denazification process has become a farce, reduced to a political diversion.

I am by no means excluding Germany, but rather defending its resistance to economic exploitation, when I express my horror at the attitude of this great colonial power, America. That it can treat Europe, the cradle of Western culture, as a colony; as a useful strategic outpost for its war with Russia; as a cluster of nations whose internal politics are dictated to them, and whom one pays and arms to fight on one’s behalf. One can predict that they will not do so. It would be a fatal mistake to interpret the general obsequiousness towards American wealth as a willingness to allow the whole of Europe to be reduced to the state of Dresden and Würzburg for the sake of American world domination.

“What these peoples lack is not an awareness of the gulf between a catalogue of human rights and the conditions behind the Iron Curtain, but rather confidence in the sincerity of those who make policy based on the human rights agenda.” This is arguably the most important sentence Extempore has printed. Because really, where is the agenda when it comes to politics? A National Bolshevik country like Yugoslavia suddenly elicits all our sympathy, simply because it wants to break away from the Russian organisation of eastern and southern Europe. Communism, it seems, need only pair itself with another form of separatism (even if it has historically proved disastrous) in order to win our favour.

Isn’t there something repugnant about the pampering of communist renegades who are prepared to testify before our committees against former comrades and against the country they once believed in, and whose word carries more weight than that of any American citizen, whom they accuse of the same political vices they’ve put behind them? Am I alone in being disturbed that we glorify ex-Stalinist shrews who would sell out their own flesh and blood, and that we shower their denunciations with gold?

But however much I acknowledge the varying degrees of legal uncertainty, terror remains terror. And the secret police’s surveillance remains what it is, even when carried out under the guise of democracy. If things continue in this vein, we will soon have nothing left to reproach communism for – even in matters of pure and free science, which does not exist in Russia, whereas here…

Whereas here, as early as 1946, Business Week was able to write: “Federal support for pure science is today almost completely under military control. Its general direction is being set by military needs… The odds are getting better all the time that pure scientific research will become, permanently, a branch of the military establishment.” A distinguished physicist at Stanford University added in 1947: “The Army and Navy have set aside so many scientists for research in the military field that pure science and teaching are likely to suffer as a result… Since the Army favours projects that may be of value for warfare, research in general will be steered in a different direction.”

Dr. DuBridge, the president of the California Institute of Technology, has just published a 90-page report in which he argues very persuasively that independent research has been “hampered” – that is to say: its legs have been cut off – by the federal government’s practice of funding agencies whose sole concern is to develop weapons of war: namely, the National Military Establishment and the Atomic Energy Commission. In competition with the construction of warships, aircraft and atomic bombs, science is bound to lose out. On top of everything else, pressure is increasingly being exerted to extend the secrecy that necessarily prevails in the field of weapons production to independent research as well. An excellent means, the text bitterly notes, of crippling science is to deprive it of financial resources; an even better one is to force it to work in secrecy. A third method is omitted – namely, the expulsion of capable scholars at the slightest suspicion of a flaw in their political convictions.

Anti-communism, as a moral tool of agitation against the alliance with which Russia seeks to counter the consolidation of two-thirds of the world’s military and economic resources under American leadership, is inherently powerless so long as it shows no interest in changing a world order under which some one billion people suffer from hunger. Communism sets out to remedy this world order, which, given the current state of science and technology, can no longer be excused by anything – and therein lies its appeal.

The appalling bluntness of its methods does not worry the starving, exploited and underprivileged masses of the world in the slightest. As long as the bourgeois world has nothing to set against the communist utopia other than the now-obsolete ideal of private enterprise, profit, competition and the struggle for the top spot – as long as that is the case, our prospects of eradicating communism will remain bleak.

The unbridled rage and hysteria into which a word like ‘communism’ plunges people today has often filled me with horror. Twenty years ago, when one said and wrote (as I did in my frequently reprinted speech on Goethe): “The new, socialised world, the world of planning and co-operation, will come; humanity will get rid of unnecessary sufferings that are a disgrace to intelligence; and this will be achieved by a great and sober effort that has already enrolled under its banner all who have turned their backs upon a cult of musty, obscurantist, petty bourgeois sentiment. It will come; for a rational outward order of things in keeping with the present stage of human enlightenment must be created, or, if the worst happens, will be produced by violent convulsions. Only then can the heart reassert its rights with good conscience” – if one said and wrote that back then, one remained, at least to some extent, a man of honour. Today, uttering such words brings down upon you the uniform fury of all the Cold Warriors, the red-faced men and nagging women, who dismiss you and your life’s work as forever disgraced.

Let those who consider the truth un-American call me a traitor. I believe that the American people not only deserve to hear it, but that they themselves sense and feel it, filled as they are with deep unease and anxiety about being led into disaster.

There is nothing in what has been said that I could take pride in as my own intellectual property. Extempore says much of this and much else besides, and its editors are finding that “the number of people waiting for a voice that dares to stand in opposition even to the economic imperialism of our time is not quite as small as it may often seem”. Still, it ought to be given strong encouragement to persevere, and its articles ought to be reprinted so that its free and commendable efforts may reach a wider audience. Wherever in the world great minds have grown tired of the stupid headlines and the vulgar smear campaigns of the ordinary press, Extempore has its devoted readership.