Demonstrates how four books by dissident German intellectuals served as a rebuke to the Nazi regime.During 1942 the decisive battles of Stalingrad and El Alamein raged and the Nazi genocide was at its lethal peak. The Pen Confronts the Sword examines the shared motives behind four remarkable texts German exiles began writing that year Thomas Manns Doctor Faustus 1947 Ernst Cassirers The Myth of the State 1946 Erich Auerbachs Mimesis The Representation of Reality in Western Literature 1946 and Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adornos Dialectic of Enlightenment 1944. Each identified a specific danger in Nazi ideology and mustered new theories approaches and sources to combat it. The books aimed to expose the encompassing catastrophes of German culture Mann politics Cassirer philology Auerbach and philosophy and sociology Horkheimer and Adorno. Their scope mastery and sense of urgency constitute a comprehensive Kulturkampf culture war against Nazi barbarism. Avihu Zakai cogently analyzes each work explains the context of its creation and draws connections between these four landmark books in Western intellectual history.