We all have a right to be apolitical – for many it might be a matter of mental health

It feels improper to watch a film as (literally) dark as Fatherland and then step out into the west Los Angeles sunshine. But its subject, Thomas Mann, would have understood; the most important German writer since Goethe spent the Nazi era in the Pacific Palisades, among other havens.

Detachment is the film’s theme. When Mann goes “home” to a nation that is now split east-west, neither the communists nor the capitalists can get a clear endorsement out of him. His liberal son wishes he would condemn the incomplete denazification, as well as J Edgar Hoover’s goons in Washington. A mysterious intruder begs for help to free imprisoned dissenters. Through it all, Mann’s political aloofness is godlike. And, the film implies, absurd. Fatherland is made for an era that regards neutrality as impossible or unconscionable: that didn’t, for instance, let Ed Sheeran avoid the Israel-Palestine issue for long.

Let me put in a word, then, for the apolitical. Or at least for those who keep their own counsel, which is not the same thing.

Their most attractive trait is humility. The following is hard for people to hear, especially those in the arts, but here goes. You very likely have nothing additive to say about politics. Most opinions are correct but banal, or distinctive but wrong – while quite a few are both banal and wrong. To air them is no great service to the public realm. To hold back, to abstain, often is. In the UK and US, electoral turnout sank around the millennium. Those countries have seldom been as well governed before or since, though which way the causality runs is an open question.

What German intellectuals used to call “inner emigration” is the way people can dissociate from social turmoil without physically leaving

Mann’s career shows the difficulty of “doing” politics. You wouldn’t know from Fatherland that, well into his 40s, before he became a Weimar Republic man, he was a mystical reactionary, peddling non-fiction mumbo-jumbo about the German soul and such. Buddenbrooks, the greatest of his novels – I could remove the possessive from that statement – is the least political of his major works. But of course it is. (The Nobel committee, which tends to reward a whole oeuvre, put unusual stress on that one book when crowning him in 1929.) In comparison, The Magic Mountain is a philosophical seminar and Doctor Faustus too didactic.

Even those who have things of real penetration to say about politics might legitimately avoid the subject, to stay sane. For them, retreat from a darkening world is a matter of mental health.

This column once suggested that western citizens would become the new refugees, escaping civil strife and a pan-European war. A less drastic option for them is what German intellectuals used to call “inner emigration”. That is, withdrawal into private life. Through immersion in personal relationships and interests, people can dissociate from social turmoil without physically leaving. Is this a state of denial? A Palisades of the mind? Maybe, but to nag them out of it is thoughtless, and weirdly at odds with an age that otherwise cherishes mental self-care. There is, or should be, a right to forget.

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In fact, Fatherland is at its best and most humane when it treats Mann’s detachment – which doesn’t break, even when he receives the worst news of all – as a survival technique, not an Olympian pose. (Coincidentally or not, his son is ultra-political, and a wreck.)

There is one more reason to push back against the Apathy Is Not An Option merchants, and that is their insincerity. Almost everyone who asks others to be more political really means “politically aligned with me”. Even as a child watching MTV in the 1990s, I surmised that “Rock the Vote” did not mean “Rock the Vote for George HW Bush”.

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Of course, in the world that Mann knew – which included the worst regime ever, or thereabouts, and then the wryly named German Democratic Republic – the issues were clear-cut. Perhaps he could and should have used his immense voice a bit more. But most things in politics now are arguable either way, and lower-stakes. In this context, the demand that all must opine is not just invasive, but silly. There is such a thing as enlightened indifference and the social peace that we lost a decade ago rested on it. – The Financial Times Limited 2026