Events |Thomas Mann’s Antifascist Radio Addresses: “Listen, Germany!” with Elaine Chen, Jeffrey L. High & Kalani Michell
Thomas Mann House Los Angeles | August 12, 2025
7 p.m. (PT) | Thomas Mann House
Join the Thomas Mann House for an engaging discussion on Thomas Mann’s BBC radio addresses delivered during his exile in the United States. This conversation features Jeffrey High, a distinguished Germanist specializing in literature, philosophy, and intellectual history, alongside Elaine Chen, a scholar of German Studies and Comparative Literature. The event will be moderated by Kalani Michell, Assistant Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles.
As part of our ongoing programs honoring Thomas Mann’s 150th anniversary, literary scholars Jeffrey Heigh and Elaine Chen, editors of the forthcoming book “Thomas Mann’s Antifascist Radio Addresses, 1940–1945” (Camden House), will engage in a conversation about Thomas Mann’s BBC radio speeches, which he delivered from exile in the United States to listeners in Germany, Switzerland and occupied Netherlands and Czechoslovakia during the war. From 1940 until 1945, Thomas Mann pleaded to thousands of listeners to resist the Nazi regime and thus became the most important German voice in exile. His conviction that the “social renewal of democracy” is condition and warrant for its victory seems more relevant than ever.
Upon Hitler’s rise to power in 1933, Nobel-laureate Thomas Mann chose exile, eventually moving to the United States in 1938. An early critic of National Socialism, he gave over 150 public lectures with titles such as “The Coming Victory of Democracy.” From 1940 to 1945, he authored and narrated a series of anti-Nazi radio addresses that were broadcast to Germany by the BBC; German listeners risked severe punishment. Mann’s radio addresses constitute his most sustained contribution to the Allied war effort. In them, he comments on the progress of the war, contrasts fascism with democracy, measures Hitler against Roosevelt, and counters German propaganda with international consensus, lies with facts. After initially encouraging the Germans to resist the Nazi regime, Mann prepares them for the consequences of defeat, but also instills hope in them for future reconciliation with the community of nations.
Today, when democracy is again endangered in much of the world, Mann’s antifascist radio addresses have once again acquired urgency. A new volume by Jeffrey High and Elaine Chen presents English translations of all of Mann’s 58 radio addresses for the first time, with a foreword by Mann’s grandson Frido Mann, an introduction by leading Mann scholar Hans Rudolf Vaget, careful annotations, and a selection of photographs.
This conversation in the living room of the Thomas Mann House, where Mann wrote a significant amount of his radio speeches, will explore the historic circumstances surrounding this collaboration with the BBC, as well as the impact and consequences of Mann’s speeches and what we can learn from them today.
Learn more about the 150th anniversary of Thomas Mann here.
Attendance
Attendance by invitation only
Participants
Elaine Chenis a Ph.D. candidate in Germanic Languages and Literatures and Comparative Literature at Harvard University. She holds an M.A. in German Studies from California State University, Long Beach, and was a Fulbright Combined Grant recipient in Salzburg, Austria. Her research focuses on the intersections of literature, exile, and political resistance, particularly in the works of Thomas Mann, Stefan Zweig, and Heinrich von Kleist. She has co-edited and contributed to multiple scholarly volumes and received the 2021 Kleist-Gesellschaft Award for Best Student Essay.
Jeffrey L. High earned his Ph.D. from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst, and is a professor of German Studies and Comparative and World Literature at California State University, Long Beach. He has also served as a Guest Professor at Portland State University’s German Summer School of the Pacific. His research explores the works of Schiller, Kleist, and Thomas Mann, as well as literary responses to political and social change. High has authored and edited numerous academic works and has received multiple awards for his excellence in teaching, advising, and scholarly mentorship at CSULB.
Kalani Michell is an Assistant Professor in the Department of European Languages and Transcultural Studies at UCLA. She previously taught at Goethe University Frankfurt and was a postdoctoral fellow with the research collective Configurations of Film. Her research spans film and media theory, sound studies, and media historiography. She is currently completing her monograph, Media Among Themselves: Unboxing Audiovisual Media from the 1960s and 1970s, and has published on topics including German cinema, intermediality, and the materiality of artistic production. Her work has appeared in CineAction, New German Critique, liquid blackness, and other scholarly publications.
This event is part of "Mann 2025: 150 Years of Thomas Mann".
