Im Dienst der Politik. Thomas Manns "Deutsche Hörer!"

At the service of politics. Thomas Mann’s “Deutsche Hörer!” Invited in October 1940 by the American representative of the BBC to work for its German service, Thomas Mann took this opportunity - it was the first time that such a chance came up to him after the official ban by the Nazis on the diffusion of his works - to put himself into direct contact with his countrymen in Germany. In fact, changing the original idea of the radio project according to which comments to American news should have been broadcasted, the writer, speaking from his exile in the new world, seeks to assert the weight of his spiritual authority over the Germans in homeland, as a “Praeceptor Germaniae” precisely, with the purpose of stimulating a movement of internal resistance against the Hitler regime. So doing, the initiative of “Deutsche Hörer!” - more than fifty radiograms (the average duration was around eight minutes each) aired by the BBC from then until the end of the war, almost once a month - is, thanks to this operational motivation, the most concrete evidence, among his journalistic texts, of the civilizing role to which he felt progressively called. But, to achieve the desired efficacy of that political action, his figure of great poet strongly emerges, intervening by means of his own instruments (i.e. “persuasio”) and making in this way that challenge a rhetorical masterpiece of creativity.