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August 25, 2025

When Thomas Mann Stood against the Nazis

And visited Israel’s national library.

Moving forward a few decades in German history, we get to Thomas Mann, one of the great modernist of writers, who won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. Mann was for much of his life a staunch German patriot. He also married a Jewish woman, enthusiastically supported German democracy, and sharply opposed the Nazi party and regime from the beginning. Writing on the blog of the National Library of Israel, Stefan Litt details Mann’s anti-Nazi activities as well as his relationship with that library: 

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