Thomas Mann wrote this engaging novella in a few weeks in 1943. (The new translation by Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann, which is brisk and direct, is a welcome replacement of the fussier and less accurate English version done by Helen Lowe-Porter for the original publication.) The novella was written after Mann helped pitch a film on the Ten Commandments to MGM. The film never got off the ground, but this text appeared as part of a rather uneven volume on the subject to which ten prominent writers contributed. The obvious intention of the volume, assembled at a dark moment in the war, was to offer a defence of the Bible's ethical code at a time when it was being vilified by the Nazis. The stories in the 1943 volume were prefaced by the account of a purported conversation involving Hitler, Goebbels and Streicher, in which Hitler, striking a vulgarised Nietzschean note, ranted about liberating the German people from the slave morality of Judaism and Christianity.

LRB 2 December 2010 | PDF Download