Thomas Mann (like Karl Jaspers) exiled himself to Switzerland after World War II probably because he thought of himself more as a European than a German. His Last Essays show that his evolution from Germanism to Europeanism was a steady process. The essays on Goethe, Schiller, Nietzsche and Chekhov carry implications beyond the realm of German literature. Mann used Goethe as a standard to judge not merely his own work and that of his contemporaries but also European civilization itself. Goethe devoted his major dramatic work to the Faust legend, and Mann his most ambitious, although in the estimation of some critics, it was not Mann’s most successful novel. Mann states that the folk-oriented Teutonic temper and the European-oriented Mediterranean temper came together in Goethe. Mann does not add that the Goethean synthesis proved ineffective in the long run-- it was repudiated even by those Germans who did not want to go all the way back to the Teutoburg forest. Mann’s attitude towards Nietzsche is ambivalent: he praises Nietzsche’s genius but blames him for immoral utterances. Nietzsche was a liberating influence on Mann’s generation; the catastrophe came later. Given that Nietzsche was a compound of contradictory attitudes, an interesting question is why the effect he had on the Germans was so disastrous, because there were other ways of interpreting him. Theologians have noted that certain elements of Nietzsche’s thought are already traceable in Goethe. The road from self-worship to humanity is perhaps shorter than the age of Goethe supposed it to be. Mann does not have much to say on this topic.[1959]