Books: The Manns on Germany

THIS WAR-Thomas Mann-Knopf

($1)—THE LIGHTS Go DOWN-Erlka Mann-Farrar & Rineharf ($2.50).

Thomas Mann's life work is a series of huge, masked, intricate parables. His pamphlets are byproducts, but by no means negligible. This War, his most recent pamphlet, is a masterful piece of classical rhetoric, tinged, like much of his work, with Goethean pompousness. It is, in essence, an exhortation to the German people to rise up and remove the rulers they have permitted themselves, without fur ther poisoning their integrity by awaiting the war's outcome ; and to take active part in...