Dialogue on the Threshold

Schwellendialog

09 February 2021

The People

 Here let me be bold enough to express an opinion born of the experiences of our own time. To a friend of enlightenment the word and conception 'the folk' has always something anachronistic and alarming about it; he knows that you need only tell a crowd that they are 'the folk' to stir them up to all sorts of reactionary evil. What all has not happened before our eyes - or just not quite before our eyes - in the name of 'the folk,' though it could never have happened in the name of God or humanity or the law!

Thomas Mann, Doctor Faustus (1947), Chapter VI, trans. H. T. Lowe-Porter

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