There’s a really nice and kind and generous introduction to this novel written by Thomas Mann that really sets up the context the two writers found themselves in in their pre-WWII context and then in the immediate aftermath. Two German-language writers (both born in various German pre-states around the time of unification) who rejected Nazism, were exiled, and dealt with the remaining conflicting feelings afterward. This fits the novel itself, about a young man who feels out of sync with the moral order of the […]