In January 1926, the 50-year-old author of *Buddenbrooks*—and the recently published *The Magic Mountain*—traveled to Paris for a week-long visit. His goal was to re-establish intellectual ties and seek a new basis for relations between two nations that had spent more than four years locked in mutual slaughter. During his stay, he met with intellectuals, government ministers, Russian émigrés (such as Bunin, Shestov, Shmelev, and Merezhkovsky), and American admirers; he spoke at various gatherings, attended the theater, and dined in elegant restaurants. Recording his impressions with his characteristic fastidiousness, Mann interspersed these mundane observations with expansive reflections on dictatorship and democracy, war and pacifism, Europe’s "anti-idealistic turn," the "putrid, heaven-stinking decay of the justice system," the light and dark sides of German Romanticism, and the destinies of nations and literature. In doing so, he opened a door into his own private inner world—and offered a glimpse into the future he foresaw.