The Magic Mountain

by Thomas Mann

the difference, or even contradiction, between external and internal freedom—and at the same time the ticklish question as to which form of unfreedom was least or most likely, hee hee, to be compatible with a nation’s honor. Freedom was in fact probably more an idea of Romanticism than of the Enlightenment, for as a concept it shared with Romanticism the same complex, never-to-be-disentangled interlocking of the human instinct to expand and the passionate, constricting thrust of the individual ego. The thirst for individual freedom had brought forth the bellicose cult of nationalism, which humanitarian liberalism called sinister, although it, too, taught the doctrine of individualism, but from a slightly different angle. Individualism was romantically medieval in its belief in the infinite, cosmic importance of each single creature, from which came the doctrine of the immortality of the soul, the theory of geocentrism, and astrology.