Thomas Mann and the Ten Commandments

"His birth was disorderly. Therefore he passionately loved order, the immutable, the bidden and the forbidden."  So begins the novella The Tables of the Law by Thomas Mann which was published in 1944.  In the novella, Mann retells the biblical story of Moses from the Book of Exodus. Mann had been commissioned to write the novella by Armin L. Robinson, an Austrian music publisher, as part of Robinson’s attempt to make an anti-Nazi movie about the Ten Commandments. Robinson had also invited several other international authors to contribute including Rebecca West, Franz Werfel, John Erskine, Bruno Frank, Jules Romains, Andre Maurois, Sigrid Undset, Hendrik Willem Van Loon and Louis Broomfield.

The film was never made but Robinson published the literary contributions in a book entitled The Ten Commandments: Ten Short Novels of Hitler’s War Against the Moral Code.
In his introduction to the book, Hermann Rauschning, a reformed Nazi Party member, equates Hitler's attacks against humanity with an attack against the Ten Commandments themselves:

The horrible destruction which now shakes the world makes clear to each of us today that the demonic forces of disruption are more than mere expression of the National Socialist's and Imperialist's thirst for power….  It concerns all of us, Christians, Jews and freethinking humanists alike. It deals with the deliberately planned battle against the dignified, immortal foundation of human society: the message from Mount Sinai. Let us name it clearly and simply: Hitler's Battle against the Ten Commandments.

Mann's contribution was the only commissioned work he had ever done; he finished it in only eight weeks, receiving $1000 for it. The Ten Commandments was published in 1943. According to literary critic Michael Wood, Mann thought that his novella was superior to the other stories in the book and considered the book a great failure.

Robinson's hope for the book was that it would “open the eyes of those who still do not recognize what Nazism really is.”

We have recently come across the original manuscripts for the book with the contributions by Mann, and Bruno Frank in German and in English and the contribution of Andre Maurois in French and English. You can find these typescripts in Special Collections by asking for MS-216.