Editorial note — EPILOGUE
Reading edition
A. This quotation is second-hand; I have taken it from the Au-dessusAu-dessus de la Mélée of Romain Rolland. We know that he belongs to the small number of those men, if I may dare call them so, who at the moment when their family is massacred, their house set on fire, their old father shot, their sister violated, isolate themselves in a tower of ivory, from the top of which, looking on at these crimes, and striving to hold an even balance between the assassins and the victims, they proclaim themselves “Above the conflict.”... This state of mind is at least a guarantee to us of the accuracy of the expressions which he quotes from the profession of faith of his “brother” Thomas Mann.