FATHERLAND

In 1936, Hitler’s government stripped Thomas Mann of his citizenship. In 1949, he walked back into Germany anyway, and both halves of a country about to be torn in two wanted him on their side.

He was the most famous German writer alive, a Nobel Prize winner who had spent sixteen years in exile, broadcasting to Germany from California while the regime tried to erase his name. Now Germany lay in ruins. Frankfurt wanted to honor him. Weimar wanted to honor him. The Cold War was dividing the country, his son had just died, and any speech he gave would be judged by both sides.

FATHERLAND tells the story of those sixteen years through the words that changed his fate: the speech that made him an open enemy of the Nazis, the lecture that sent him into exile, the letter that cost him his citizenship, the radio broadcasts that reached Germans under bombardment, and the two speeches he gave in 1949 in two Germanys.

Inside, you will discover:

Why a Munich lecture on Wagner in 1933 left him unable to go home

The letter to a Swiss newspaper that ended his silence and cost him his citizenship

How his radio talks reached Germans who risked punishment to listen

The bitter quarrel with writers who had stayed, and why he said he would not return

What he said in Frankfurt and Weimar, and why both sides claimed him

The price he paid in Cold War America, and why he left

How the people around him, including his wife Katia and his children Erika and Klaus, shaped every decision

Written for readers of history, biography and literature, and for anyone who has wondered what an exile owes the country that cast him out.

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