"...The difference is still more marked between the attitude of the English and the German educated man towards political activity, at least until the time of the Weimar Republic, and the revival of democratic ideas after the National-Socialist interlude. A characteristic German pronouncement is that of Thomas Mann in the Reflection of a Non-political Man (1917) about the special strength of the Germans which lies in cultivation and obedience. 'Politics makes men coarse, vulgar and stupid. Only the cultivation of the mind makes men free. Institutions are of little account, states of mind of supreme account. Become better yourself and everything will be better.' Later, of course, he saw that 'this dangerous indifference to freedom had fearfully avenged itself, and the absence of political experience in the cultivated Germans and their scorn for freedom had resulted in the enslavement of the citizen to the state and to power-politics', and in exile he made every effort to correct what now seemed to him a fatal tendency in German intellectuals."
-- Culture and Society in Classical Weimar, 1775-1806, W. H. Bruford, 1962, p. 406.
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