Asked in 1965 by the television interviewer Günter Gaus how in the last days of the Weimar Republic he had avoided being pulled like so many of his generation to the political extremes of either the right or left, Mann suggested it had been a matter not only of analysis but also of temperament. Figures like Calvin or Robespierre, Trotsky or Lenin, he had "always hated". Mann described his own outlook as broadly conservative. But conservatism too he rejected when presented as an "ism"—when represented by those believed they had a monopoly of truth (as if they had "eaten the truth with a spoon").
