For years, I thought that Mephisto was just a critically acclaimed movie (which I owned and
never watched, clearly) – then a friend gave me this as a birthday present,
because it was his father’s favourite book, and the rise of Nazism and all that.
In one go I found out that the movie was taken from a book, and that Thomas
Mann had a son who could also write, although not as well as him.
The book is a great and fairly quick read. It
is fascinating, in particular when one thinks that it was published in 1936, at
a time in which the rest of Europe hadn’t yet understood the full depravity of
the Nazi regime. It’s a metaphor of the entire German society in the 20’s and
30’s, but I’m not excessively fond of ground-sweeping generalizations, so I
prefer to read this book as a demonstration of the fickleness of over-ambitious
people, ready to compromise on all their principles (which, probably, they often
don’t have in the first place).
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