The Company He Keeps

Thomas Mann, one of the century's authentic literary giants, often uses his famous name for causes that have nothing to do with literature. Two years ago Mann hailed the Reds' big "Peace Congress" in Manhattan's Waldorf-Astoria as a "ray of hope." He denied signing the Stockholm Peace Appeal, though the New York Daily Worker had carried a photostat of what seemed to be his signature on the petition; Mann claimed the signature was forged.

Last week Manhattan's anti-Communist weekly, the New Leader, published more evidence of Mann's political activities. It was a letter to Stalin's cultural commissar in East Germany, Poet Johannes Becher. More worshipful of Russia's boss than Pravda, Becher turns out such drivel as: "How happy must be the letter 'i' as it is permitted to form a letter in the name of Stalin." Cries he in his "Hymn to the Soviet Union":

You are the citadel of humanity

In the storm of barbarism!

You are the world's best.

A cantata by Becher for East Germany's Communists gushes:

Look to the East for victory,

In the dawn, What a glow!

On the occasion of Becher's 60th birthday last May, Mann wrote him: "I love and honor in Johannes R. Becher the man--this deeply stirred heart ... an ethos of continuity which predestines him emotionally to be a Communist and which politically has become a Communist creed. His Communism has positively patriotic color; as a matter of fact, it fulfills itself in patriotism . . . The day will come when all the German people will thank him . . ."

The German Communist press, which knows a plug when it sees one, joyously spread Mann's panegyric to Becher across its front pages. In Pacific Palisades, Calif., where Mann, now a U.S. citizen, is completing a new novel, his wife explained that her husband does not share Becher's political views but "is convinced of Mr. Becher's idealism." Said Daughter Erika: "Father feels badly that it is not possible to write a letter to a man any more without stirring up this kind of thing."

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