On Feb. 11, 1933, Thomas Mann took a train from Munich to Amsterdam to deliver a lecture version of his essay "Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner." On the same day, the great liberal paper Vossische Zeitung gave a skeptical account of a speech by the recently appointed Reich Chancellor: "Once again Hitler dodged the question of his concrete working program as head of the government and instead cobbled together a sequence of loose thoughts about Volk and nation in numbered points of a 'program.'" The previous day, the Zentrumspartei issued a "decided protest" against Göring's "unconstitutional" dissolution of the Prussian parliament. Mann had no idea at this time that he was going into exile, but he would not return to Germany until 1949.
