A Blooming Flower

Abstract

This chapter highlights the extent to which media featured as weapons in Thomas Mann's struggle against Nazism. Mann benefited from government–industry collaborations, for example, by acquiring access to American studios to record propaganda broadcasts that were then carried into Nazi-occupied Europe. His main intermediary on the continent, however, was his old German publisher Gottfried Bermann Fischer, who fought a battle of his own to keep Mann's books available in those countries that had not yet been conquered by the Nazis. Both forms of transmission—the transmission of Mann's voice via radio waves and the transmission of his books via increasingly convoluted distribution networks—were beset by all sorts of difficulties during wartime. But both were essential in keeping the author's influence alive in a time when he was unable to personally connect to his readership.