Interlude IV: Joseph the Provider (1944)

Abstract

Mann’s increasingly spectral presence on the European continent during the early 1940s precipitated a crisis of confidence in the United States as well. The author was already well into his sixties when the Second World War broke out, and he had never thought of himself as anything else but a German writer. Publicly, he unflaggingly reiterated his confidence that the Nazis would be defeated. But privately, he entertained doubts whether he would ever see the country of his birth again, and increasingly, he was not even sure he wanted to....