Vital humanism: Thomas Mann, Jose Ortega y Gasset, and the revolt against decadence in self-nation-Europe, 1900-1949

This dissertation investigates how liberal European intellectuals in the first half of the twentieth century understood political conflict as a cultural problem and how European cultural identity took shape in the crucible of the politics of culture. Through a comparative historical study of the German novelist Thomas Mann and the Spanish philosopher José Ortega y Gasset, I show how these two important public intellectuals attempted to preserve liberal humanism by refashioning it into a mobilizing myth and a historically-rooted cultural identity. Building upon recent historiographical interpretations of fascism as a "revolt against decadence," I argue that the twentieth-century construction of Europe as a liberal cultural ideal also sprang from turn-of-the-century modernist preoccupations with decadence and the desire for cultural renewal. I show how Mann and Ortega, representative of a European-wide discourse of cultural crisis, interpreted decadence as a problem of the authentic identity of self, nation, and Europe, arising from a sense of historical rupture. For them, the political crises of Germany, Spain, and the whole of Europe were expressions of this underlying cultural problem. Overcoming decadence meant achieving an integrated, authentic identity of self-nation-Europe that could solve the problems of the perceived rupture effect of modernity, the collapse of universal ideals, and the erosion of the humanist ideal of self-cultivation [Bildung]. From World War One through World War Two, this renewal mission shaped Mann's and Ortega's cultural-political visions of a vital humanism and a unified European identity. With attention to the differing national contexts of Germany and Spain and drawing on unpublished material from personal archives, I examine how Mann's and Ortega's identities as public intellectuals and defenders of liberal humanism changed and persisted amid war, revolution, fascism, and exile. By showing how the politics of decadence and authenticity shaped the imagining of Europe as a liberal cultural unity, I aim to redefine our understanding of the politics of European culture during the first half of the twentieth century.