Page 64 - The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand Vol.XIII-2021

The International Journal of the Royal Society of Thailand
Volume XIII – 2021

many ways,” he said, he felt connected to the Unitarians “personally and intellectually”.

In 1950, he wrote: “My interest in and warm sympathy for Unitarianism are of
long standing […] (Detering, Heinrich 2012). Moreover, the First Unitarian Church
of Los Angeles is particularly close to my heart and mind.” Only a few months before
his death in Kilchberg in Switzerland, he wrote to the Unitarian minister in Los
Angeles, whom he called a friend: “The spirit of your church […] – it is this spirit that
I find attractive since I got to know it.” (Detering, Heinrich 2012). Thomas Mann did

not speak of any other religious community in the same way. Seldom, if ever, did
he feel closer to any confession than Unitarianism.

This partiality became apparent in private life and ritual. His youngest
daughter and her husband were married in Princeton by a Unitarian minister; the
Unitarian Service Committee helped his brother Heinrich and his son Golo Mann
to escape from Europe during the war. All four grandchildren were baptized in the
Unitarian Church, his brother Heinrich was buried there. Thomas Mann wrote for
the parish newsletter and spoke in the pulpit during a service as a guest. And his
3
friend, the minister Stephen Fritchman , continued to remember him as “one of
our most cherished friends.” And there is little reason to doubt that Mann felt the
same.

For a long time, none of this has played any role in the ongoing discussions
about Thomas Mann and religion. This remarkable lack of interest might have to do
with a transatlantic bias and lack of knowledge about specifically American traditions.
Thomas Mann’s turn to the Unitarian church epitomizes his effort to combine the
political, philosophical, and religious traditions of his background with those rooted
in an American culture, which he tried to adopt as far as possible and make his new
home.

3 Stephen Fritchman (1902-1981) was born in Cleveland, Ohio. He received an AB degree from Ohio
Wesleyan University in 1924, a BD from Union Theological Seminary in 1927, and an MA from New York
University in 1929. He was ordained in the Methodist Church in 1929 but left that denomination and was
ordained as a Unitarian minister in 1930 in Petersham, Massachusetts.
Stephen H. Fritchman was a Unitarian Universalist minister who was editor of the Unitarian journal
“The Christian Register,” from 1942 to 1947. From 1947 to 1949 he was minister at the First Unitarian
Church in Los Angeles, California where he supported peace movements, civil liberties, and disarma-
ment. In 1976 he received the annual award of the UUA for Distinguished Service to the Cause of Liberal
Religion.

54 Unitarianism as “Applied Christianity” Thomas Mann and the Unitarian Church in the USA