Why the fuck is Thomas Mann talking about ancient astronauts in here?

>>24550801 (OP)
because he KNOWS, Mann's a REAL ONE that BURNS LOCAL and you are a FAKE ONE that takes NAPS.

>>24550801 (OP)
Bcuz of Oskar Goldberg

>>24551295
What do you mean?
Seems to be where mann got Breisacher
>He argued secularisation in general is always already an obscuration of the empirical experience of transcendence.[8] For Goldberg each race has a magical connection to a deity and each god is the "biological centre" of a race.[9] People are possessed by gods which pre-exist them, and are animated by them in the process or shift of homo-sapients to self-reflective and creative intellect in a manner similar to infestation via cosmic parasite. A people can only maintain this magical connection by performing the appropriate rituals on territory controlled by its god(s).[9] Taking the Jewish example, Goldberg argues that before Solomon built his temple, the god of the ancient Hebrews walked with his people and had his dwelling place among them.[10] But Solomon transformed the Jews from a cultic community into members of a state and thereby severed their organic connection to god by replacing concrete ritual with abstract theological monotheism.[10] Goldberg's ideas confirmed metaphysically his opposition to the formation of all nation-states, including the state of Israel.[10]
It is notable that Goldberg's theoretical system has a great many similarities with other German systems mapping the metaphysics of race such as Oswald Spengler's,[11] or Ernst Junger's[11] and in this way it resembles the emerging ideological images that provide a jargon and onus for Hitler's applied use of these concepts first in the rhetoric of the Nazi movement, and later in the administration of the Third Reich.

The true reading of Doctor Faustus is not anti-Naziism but Mann’s disgust with himself for his moral cowardice
>The discussion focuses on Mann’s resolute support of Zionism, which after 1933 — and this, too, should be borne in mind by today’s critics — had put him in a precarious position himself: one of the reasons listed in the Bavarian State Ministry of the Interior’s petition from January 18, 1934 to revoke Mann’s German citizenship was his membership in the “German Committee Pro Palestine” (“Deutsches Komitee Pro Palästina”) and his public advocacy of its main goal, to sponsor the settlement of Jews in Palestine
>Thomas Mann fundamentally reconsidered this view in the decades that followed. Crucial to this was the beginning of his work on the Joseph novel in the 1920s, which brought him together with the Munich lawyer and Zionist Elias Straus. It was presumably him, who was able to win Mann for the Palestine Committee. At its official foundation in December 1926, Chairman Kurt Blumenfeld read a telegram in which Mann — in wording already suggestive of the humanism and universalism of Joseph and His Brothers — professed his support for the association and its goals:
>“I can only say that one need not be a Zionist nor even a Jew to find the idea of awakening the land from its barren state, where such a tremendous evolution in the history of mankind has taken place from the days of the exiled people, who immigrated there from the Babylonian city of the moon, to the death of the Nazarene on the cross, I say: to find this plan great and beautiful and touching and worthy of support. So much the less, I should think, would German Jews, in whose blood the memory of this original homeland is alive, need fear they would be doubted in their Germanness, if they were to support the plan.”
Anyway he supported Gaza genocide, or st least had no clairvoyance on the matter

>>24550801 (OP)
There are people on /lit/ who've read that book in its entirety? I've heard that he considered it his magnum opus.

>>24551375
Seems unlikely, ive only read 1 and 2. Bloom said the first book is superior to the rest

Is he worth learning German for?

>>24551394
>Bloom said the first book is superior to the rest
Really? Where did he say this? I see that he included the entire work in his canon.

>>24551405
Yes, he writes the cleanest German I have ever read.

>>24551419
I now find this judgement in the thomas mann bloom guide introduction which is like a page long but i remember reading it somewhere else
The western canon list by the way, he said he didnt want to do it and the publisher insisted and he regretts doing it. Forgot to put stuff in and put stuff he wouldnt put in. Did it in a night or two apparently.

>>24550801 (OP)
>>24551375
This is the best book I've ever read.

>>24551394
At first I was gonna disagree but I rechecked the chapters and honestly the first book has some of my favorite parables from the whole tome (Jacob vs Esau, Rape of Dinah, Laban + Rachel). If you don't enjoy these parts don't bother continuing. That being said the other books are just as good if not better, I finished Young Joseph in a few days and Joseph In Egypt was very climactic.

This is Mann at his most verbose and masturbatory. Power through the first 40 pages, read past shit you don't understand because there's a billion names and references that get thrown out and half the time when you Google shit no results come up.

>>24550801 (OP)
The moon man is Abraham btw you fool. It's ok OP I was confused at first too.

>>24551546
That’s great praise and I have to say I’m a bit ashamed that I haven’t yet read this book as a German…

>>24551572
Do you believe in the Holocaust?

>>24551441
Ah, okay. Didn't know that. Makes sense, there are some glaring omissions.

>>24551375
It’s kino. Rare that you get something with that kind of intellectual depth which is also a rip roaring epic tale, rags to riches, betrayal and forgiveness and so on.

>>24551546
>>24551775
Damn it, I'm going to read it.