Thomas Mann, un Don Chisciotte senza casa. L'esilio fra impegno e reticenza (1933-1936)

The first three years of exile from Nazi-Germany can be considered the most delicate period in Thomas Mann’s public life. His silence about Hitler’s misdees outrages his contemporaries, who interpret it as cowardice and opportunism. Mann’s cautions are even stranger, when we consider the battle he fought during the Twenties against philosophical irrationalism, the very fertile ground for the Nazi movement. In the years between 1933 and 1936 Voyage with Don Quixote (1934) is one of the very few interventions which contains traces of polemic against Nazi regime. The journalistic report of his first transoceanic voyage, at first sight heedless and frivolous, has in it a precise rethoric strategy, wich is used by Mann to outflank censorship and keep in touch with his german public. The volume set the book against the background of Mann’s work and thinking, and wonder about possibilities and limits of literature in times of barbarianism.