The Humanism Problem of European Culture in the Epistolary Dialogue of Benedetto Croce and Thomas Mann

Abstract

The article is based on the analysis of the correspondence of two intellectuals who had a significant impact on the formation of the liberal discourse of Europe in the 1930s, when the concept of “humanistic front” (die humanistische Front) appears. The ideas of humanism and totalitarianism occupied a central place in the cultural and philosophical reflections of Thomas Mann; the problem of hu­manism in connection with the philosophy of freedom attracted Croce. There­fore, in the center of their intellectual exchange are ideas and texts that somehow relate to the problem of preserving humanistic values ​​and freedom in front of to­talitarianism and the moral and political “savagery”. In the 1920s, humanism was important for both as the preservation of the highest achievements of the culture that the people of the masses are advancing on. They both contrast the “apolitical humanism” that developed the culture of Germany, the politicized “Latin civilization” (Croce’s review of Mann's Reflections of the Apolitical). The correspondence was initiated by Croce, who sent the German writer in the early 1930s his article “Antihistorism”, which focuses on the problem of “humanism of history” and the European cultural and political crisis associated with the “fall of liberal ideas” (Croce) and “political anti-humanism” (Mann) and as a result the emergence of totalitarian ideologies. They oppose totalitarianism to the idea of ​​a pan-European “new humanism” (humanitas nova), the bearers of which, “the embodied children of freedom” are European intellectuals who have re­tained a “natural psychological connection” with classical culture. The circle of these ideas is developed both in the book History of Europe in the 19th Century, which Croce devotes to Thomas Mann, and in Thomas Mann's essay Goethe and Tolstoy, published with the subtitle Fragments to the Problem of Humanismand with a reference to Croce’s philosophy. Dante and Goethe become an example of how the individual can become culturally significant, it is the classic that embod­ies the cultural “balance”, where the moral and the rational dominate the chaotic material chaos, where a single esprit européen is born – between nationalism and cosmopolitanism, between aristocracy and democracy, between individuality and state, where the mood of “humanity” for justice and freedom appears.