[1][2] In a letter to his friend Ernst Bertram, he decried the "darkness in the minds of these barbarians" (Finsternis in den Köpfen dieser Barbaren).

[1] After the assassination he wanted to reason with the German youth – which he saw as very conservative and romantic[3] – by making a speech in support of the republic around Gerhard Hauptmann's 60th birthday.

[6] In his lecture, Mann compares the seemingly antithetical writers Novalis – an 18th-century German romantic – and Walt Whitman – a 19th-century American "poet of democracy" and explains that they have more in common than one initially assumes.

The American academic Lawrence S. Rainey counts 75 quotations from 12 persons (Gerhart Hauptmann, Stefan George, Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Friedrich Nietzsche, Gustave Flaubert, Richard Wagner, Novalis, Walt Whitman, Adalbert Stifter, Dmitry Merezhkovsky, August von Platen-Hallermünde and Lothair I).

The German middle classes, unwilling to acknowledge the lost war's consequences as such, held the young Republic responsible for all the hardships.

Lawrence S. Rainey remarks that the work "offers pleasures, both in content and form" and that "its complex affirmation of the Weimar Republic was indeed a brave and prescient step."

[14] The work was translated into English for the first time in 1942 by Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter, albeit without the passages on homoeroticism, which Mann wanted to omit for an American readership.