From My 'Commonplace Book,' No. 9: Thomas Mann, Richard Wagner, and Adolf Hitler

In 1933 , Thomas Mann gave a lecture at the University of Munich on " The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner " Richard Wagner was already known to be a particular favorite of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi regime.

Wagner 's operas, with all their eroticism and incestuous longings and Oedipal conflicts and death wishes, were "fertile ground for Freudian psychoanalysis".

An Open Letter attacked Thomas Mann for his "aestheticism" and "cosmopolitanism" in having defamed, in their view, the "great embodiment of the German spirit" Mann , who was out of the country on a lecture tour when the "Protest" was published, received multiple warnings from his children and friends back in Munich .

Heeding their warnings, he stayed in exile abroad.

U.S. Senate considering nomination of B-List TV celebrity to oversee military armada and nuclear arsenal.

Mann 's predicament resonates far more deeply with me than it would have 10 or 20 years ago .

I suspect that is because his situation bears structural similarity to where I find myself these days .