Thomas Mann (1875-1955)




German essayist, cultural critic, and novelist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. Among Mann's most famous works is BUDDENBROOKS (1901), which appeared when he was 26. He began writing it during a one-year stay in Italy and completed it in about two and a half years. The book outraged the citizens of Lübeck who saw it as a thinly veiled account of local incidents and figures.

"Regarded as a whole, Mann's career is a striking example of the "repeated puberty" which Goethe thought characteristic of the genius, In technique as well as in thought, he experienced far more daringly than is generally realized. In Buddenbrooks he wrote one of the last of the great "old-fashioned" novels, a patient, thorough tracing of the fortunes of a family." (from Thomas Mann by Henry Hatfield, 1962)
Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck. He was the son of a wealthy father, who had been elected twice as the burgomaster of Lübeck. His mother, Bruhn da Silva, came from a German-Portugese-Creole family.

Mann's father died in 1891 and his trading firm was dissolved. The family moved to Munich. Mann was educated at the Lübeck gymnasium and he also spent some time at the University of Munich. Mann then worked with the south German Fire Insurance Company (1894-95). His career as a writer started in the magazine Simplicissimus. Mann's first book, DER KLEINE HERR FRIEDMANN, was published in 1898.

During these years Mann became immersed in the writings of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as in the music of composer Richard Wagner. In Buddenbrooks, Mann's early masterpiece, he used the technique of the leitmotif, which he adapted from Wagner. Mann had started the book in 1897 as a small story about one member of the family. During the writing process the "protracted finger practice with no ulterior advantages" enlarged into a saga of a wealthy Hanseatic family, which declines from strength to decadence. The last Buddenbrook, the young Hanno, becomes a decadent artist.

After publishing Buddenbrooks Mann concentrated on short novels or novellas. In 1902 he published the novella TONIO KRÖGER, a spiritual autobiography exploring art and discipline. He married in 1905 Katja Pringsheim, the daughter of a wealthy Munich family; they had a total six children over the ensuing years. KÖNGLICHE HOHEIT (1909) reflected Mann's views of duty and sacrifice. DER TOD IN VENEDIG, 1912, Death in Venice), Mann's famous novel, was inspired by a young, sailor-suited boy, Wladyslaw Moes, whom the author saw in Venice in 1911. Other characters have also their counterparts in real life. However, Tadzio in the book is 14, but Wladyslaw was 11. In the story an author, Gustav von Aschenbach, fells hopelessly in love with a young teenager, Tadzio. Obsessed with the boy, he stays in Venice during a cholera epidemic, and also dies of cholera. The story was adapted into screen by Luchino Visconti, starring Dirk Bogarde and Bjorn Andresen. During World War I Mann supported Kaiser's policy and attacked liberalism. In VON DEUTSCHER REPUBLIK (1923), as a semi-official spokesman for parliamentary democracy, he called the German intellectual to support the new Weimar state.

"A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries." (from The Magic Mountain, 1924)
After ten years of work Mann completed his second major work, DER ZAUBERBERG (The Magic Mountain, 1924), a novel about ideas and of lost humanism. It depicted again a fight between liberal and conservative values, enlightened civilized world and nonrational beliefs. Hans Castorp, the protagonist, goes to the elegant tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, to visit his cousin. Castorp is not really ill, but he stays for a period of seven years, and undergoes an advanced education on the Magic Mountain, primarily through speaking and listening. Two men struggle for his soul, Settembrini, an Italian humanist, and Naptha (see: Georg Lukacs), a radical reactionary, who speaks of blind and irrational faith. Naptha cries out a prophecy that came true in Germany only a decade after publication of the book: "No!" Naphta continued. "The mystery and precept of our age is not liberation and the development of the ego. What our age needs, what it demands, what it will create for itself, is - terror." Naphta challenges Settembrini to a duel with pistols. Settembrini fires into the air, Naphta kills himself in a rage. Another weird character is Mynheer Peeperkorn who arrives at the Mountain in the company of the beautiful Claudia Chauchat. Castorp falls in love with her at first sight. Claudia returns to Peeperkorn, and Castorp yearns her deeply. The vitalistic Peeperkorn, who confronts his own impotence, also kills himself. Castorp leaves the sanatorium to join the army at the outbreak of the war. Mann tells the reader that while the young man's chances of survival are not good, the question must be left open.

"I always feel a bit bored when critics assign my own work so definitely and completely to the realm of irony and consider me an ironist through and through, without also taking account of the concept of humor." (Thomas Mann, from Harold Bloom's How to Read and Why, 2000)
Mann's next major work was the trilogy JOSEPH UND SEINE BRÜDER (1933-42), set in the biblical world. The story about the conflict between personal freedom and political tyranny was based on Genesis 12-50. The first volume recounts the early history of Jacob, and introduces then Joseph, the central character. He is sold to the Egypt, where he refuses Potiphar's advances and gains her enmity. Joseph develops into a wise man and the savior of his people. During the writing process the political control in Germany was seized by the Nazis.

"He belonged to that cut of present-day lesser artists who don't ask too much of themselves, wish first of all to be happy and amiable, utilize their comfortably small talent to enhance their personal appeal, and play the naïve genius in society. Intentionally childlike, unscrupulous, beyond morality, enjoying everything, and contented with themselves as they are, they are healthy enough to enjoy their little illnesses; and their vanity is in reality quite delightful so long as it is not wounded. But woe to these lesser mimes and their amusements, if they meet with some serious misfortune, some sorrow that can't be toyed with and in which they can find no self-contentment! They will fail at being properly miserable; they will not know how to approach their sorrow; they will go all to pieces . . ." (from 'Loulou', 1921)
On Hitler's accession Mann moved to Switzerland, where he edited the literary journal Mass und Wert, and settled finally in the United States in 1936, where he worked among others at the University of Princeton. LOTTE IN WEIMAR (1939) returned to the world of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). In 1941 he moved to Santa Monica, California. Mann lived in the U.S. some ten years, but was disappointed with the American persecution of Communist sympathizers.

Mann admired greatly Russian literature and wrote several essays about on Leo Tolstoy and his "undying realism". Especially he loved Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. However, he disliked the later Tolstoy and considered him less noble than Goethe. In the essay 'Dostoevsky - With Moderation' (1945) he deals with the author's supposed confession to Turgenev that he had violated an underage girl. René Wellek has dismissed Mann's speculations and considers the whole business of Dostoevsky's criminality totally misconceived (A History of Modern Criticism, vol. 7, 1991).

Mann's last great work was DOKTOR FAUSTUS (1947), the story of composer Adrian Lewerkühn and the progressive destruction of German culture in the two World Wars. In the background of the story was the innovative 12-tone music of Arnold Schönberg. Mann's account of the genesis of Doctor Faustus appeared in 1949. (Faust theme / Pact with the Devil, see J.W. Goethe.) In 1947 Mann returned to Europe. Demonstratively he avoided Germany and lived mostly in Switzerland, near Zürich, where he died on August 12, 1955. Mann's parodic and light-hearted novel Confessions of Felix Krull was left unfinished.