Thomas Mann and the tradition of Western humanism

Thomas Mann immerses himself in Cervantes's Don Quichotte from 1933 to 1934 after having left Nazi Germany to settle in Zurich with his family. At this time, white working on the third volume of his tetralogy Joseph and his brothers, he tried to collect information on the social mechanism of occidental. myths. He realized the danger that the Third Reich's political propaganda, based on a mythical Germanism, represents for humanistic values. In the meanwhile, he is invited to New York and travels there by boat in May and June 1934. When he returns, he works on a travel story, in which he mixes his sea crossing experiences and his former reading notes from his Diary. To this text, published in November 1934, he gives a symbolic meaning. This literary artifice is a way to suggest that the contradictions between Ideal and Reality, Nature and Culture, are never solved but to the "human kind" benefit. He follows there the Long occidental humanistic tradition to which Cervantes's famous novel precisely belongs.