Written, naturally, before the Second Great War, and before Mann’s democratic conversion, if we may put it so. The words here quoted, as those at the end of this same essay, come from his Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, one of the most passionate outcries ever scribed against the encroaching liberalism of the early part of the last century. This remarkable book — remarkable even despite its rambling, despite its being, as Mann himself described it, a “continual digression” — makes one stop and think about a number of things: as, what would Mann have been, what Faust he might he have brought into this world, had it not been for a series of pure accidents — not least of all, the accident of his marriage.