Thomas Mann

Life

Paul Thomas Mann was born to a Hanseatic family in Lübeck, the second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (a senator and a grain merchant) and his wife Júlia da Silva Bruhns, a Brazilian woman of German, Portuguese and Native Brazilian ancestry, who emigrated to Germany with her family when she was seven years old. His mother was Roman Catholic but Mann was baptised into his father's Lutheran religion. Mann's father died in 1891, and after that his trading firm was liquidated. The family subsequently moved to Munich. Mann first studied science at a Lübeck Gymnasium (secondary school), then attended the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität München as well as the Technische Hochschule München, where, in preparation for a journalism career, he studied history, economics, art history and literature.

Mann lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933, with the exception of a year spent in Palestrina, Italy, with his elder brother, the novelist Heinrich. Thomas worked at the South German Fire Insurance Company in 1894–95. His career as a writer began when he wrote for the magazine Simplicissimus. Mann's first short story, "Little Herr Friedemann" (Der Kleine Herr Friedemann), was published in 1898.

In 1905, Mann married Katia Pringsheim, who came from a wealthy, secular Jewish industrialist family. She later joined the Lutheran church. The couple had six children: Erika (b. 1905), Klaus (b. 1906), Golo (b. 1909), Monika (b. 1910), Elisabeth (b. 1918) and Michael (b. 1919).

Due to the Pringsheim family's wealth, Katia Mann was able to purchase a summer property in Bad Tölz in 1908, on which they built a country house the following year, which they kept until 1917. In 1914 they also purchased a villa in Munich (at Poschinger Str in the borough of Bogenhausen, today 10 Thomas-Mann-Allee) where they lived until 1933.

Pre-war and Second World War period

In 1912, Katia was treated for what was incorrectly diagnosed as tuberculosis for a few months in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where Thomas Mann visited her for a few weeks. This inspired him to write his 1924 novel The Magic Mountain. He was also appalled by the risk of international confrontation between Germany and France, following the Agadir Crisis in Morocco, and later by the outbreak of the First World War. The novel ends with the outbreak of this war, in which the hero enlists, with his survival uncertain.

As a "German patriot", Mann had the proceeds from their summer house used in 1917 to subscribe to war bonds, which lost their face value after the war was lost. His father-in-law did the same, which caused a loss of a major part of the Pringsheim family's wealth. The disastrous inflation of 1923 and 1924 resulted in additional high losses. The sales success of his novel The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, improved his financial situation again, as did the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. He used the prize money to build a cottage in the fishing village of Nida, Lithuania on the Curonian Spit, where there was a German art colony and where he spent the summers of 1930–1932 working on Joseph and His Brothers. Today, the cottage is a cultural center dedicated to him, with a small memorial exhibition.

In February 1933, having finished a book tour to Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris, Thomas Mann moved to Arosa (Switzerland) when Hitler took power, and Mann heard from his eldest children, Klaus and Erika in Munich, that it would not be safe for him to return to Germany. His political views (see chapter below) had made him an enemy of the Nazis. He was doubtful at first, because, with a certain naïveté, he could not imagine the violence of the overthrow and the persecution of opponents of the regime, but the children insisted, and their advice later turned out to be accurate when it emerged that even their driver-caretaker had become an informant and that Mann's immediate arrest would have been very likely. The family (except these two children, who went to Amsterdam) emigrated to Küsnacht, near Zürich, Switzerland, after a stopover in Sanary-sur-Mer, France. The son Golo managed, at great risk, to smuggle the already completed chapters of the Joseph novel and the (sensitive) diaries into Switzerland. The Bavarian Political Police searched Mann's house in Munich and confiscated the house, its inventory and the bank accounts. At the same time, an arrest warrant was issued. Mann was also no longer able to use his holiday home in Lithuania because it was only a few hundred yards from the German border and he seemed to be at risk there. When all members of the Poetry Section at the Prussian Academy of Arts were asked to make a declaration of loyalty to the National Socialist government, Mann declared his resignation on 17 March 1933.

Anti-Nazi broadcasts

The outbreak of World War II, on 1 September 1939, prompted Mann to offer anti-Nazi speeches in German to the German people via the BBC. In October 1940, he began monthly broadcasts, recorded in the U.S. and flown to London, where the BBC German Service broadcast them to Germany on the longwave band. In these eight-minute addresses, Mann condemned Hitler and his "paladins" as crude philistines completely out of touch with European culture. In one noted speech, he said: "The war is horrible, but it has the advantage of keeping Hitler from making speeches about culture."

Mann was one of the few publicly active opponents of Nazism among German expatriates in the U.S. In a BBC broadcast of 30 December 1945, after the defeat of Germany, Mann said he understood why those peoples that had suffered from the Nazi regime would embrace the idea of German collective guilt. But he also thought that many enemies might now have second thoughts about "revenge". And he expressed regret that such judgement cannot be based on the individual:

Those, whose world became grey a long time ago when they realized what mountains of hate towered over Germany; those, who a long time ago imagined during sleepless nights how terrible would be the revenge on Germany for the inhuman deeds of the Nazis, cannot help but view with wretchedness all that is being done to Germans by the Russians, Poles, or Czechs as nothing other than a mechanical and inevitable reaction to the crimes that the people have committed as a nation, in which unfortunately individual justice, or the guilt or innocence of the individual, can play no part.

Last years

With the start of the Cold War, he was increasingly frustrated by rising McCarthyism. As a "suspected communist", he was required to testify to the House Un-American Activities Committee, where he was termed "one of the world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company". He was listed by HUAC as being "affiliated with various peace organizations or Communist fronts". Being in his own words a non-communist, rather than an anti-communist, Mann openly opposed the allegations: "As an American citizen of German birth, I finally testify that I am painfully familiar with certain political trends. Spiritual intolerance, political inquisitions, and declining legal security, and all this in the name of an alleged 'state of emergency'. ... That is how it started in Germany." As Mann joined protests against the jailing of the Hollywood Ten and the firing of schoolteachers suspected of being Communists, he found "the media had been closed to him". Finally, he was forced to quit his position as Consultant in Germanic Literature at the Library of Congress, and in 1952, he returned to Europe, to live in Kilchberg, near Zürich, Switzerland. Here he initially lived in a rented house and bought his last house there in 1954 (which later his widow and then their son Golo lived in until their deaths). He never again lived in Germany, though he regularly traveled there. His most important German visit was in 1949, at the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, attending celebrations in Frankfurt am Main (then West Germany) and Weimar (then East Germany), as a statement that German culture extended beyond the new political borders. He also visited Lübeck, where he saw his parents' house, which was partially destroyed by the bombing of Lübeck in World War II (and only later rebuilt). The city welcomed him warmly, but the patrician hanseatic families gave him a reserved welcome, since the publication of Buddenbrooks they had resented him for daring to describe their caste with some mockery, as they at least felt about it.

Along with Albert Einstein, Mann was one of the sponsors of the Peoples' World Convention (PWC), also known as Peoples' World Constituent Assembly (PWCA), which took place in 1950–51 at Palais Electoral, Geneva, Switzerland.

Death

Following his 80th birthday, Mann went on vacation to Noordwijk in the Netherlands. On 18 July 1955, he began to experience pain and unilateral swelling in his left leg. The condition of thrombophlebitis was diagnosed by Dr. Mulders from Leiden and confirmed by Dr. Wilhelm Löffler. Mann was transported to a Zürich hospital, but soon developed a state of shock. On 12 August 1955, he died. Postmortem, his condition was found to have been misdiagnosed. The pathologic diagnosis, made by Christoph Hedinger, showed he had actually suffered a perforated iliac artery aneurysm resulting in a retroperitoneal hematoma, compression and thrombosis of the iliac vein. (At that time, lifesaving vascular surgery had not been developed.) On 16 August 1955, Thomas Mann was buried in the Kilchberg village cemetery.

Legacy

Mann's work influenced many later authors, such as Yukio Mishima. Joseph Campbell also stated in an interview with Bill Moyers that Mann was one of his mentors. Many institutions are named in his honour, for instance the Thomas Mann Gymnasium of Budapest.

Career

Blanche Knopf of Alfred A. Knopf publishing house was introduced to Mann by H.L. Mencken while on a book-buying trip to Europe. Knopf became Mann's American publisher, and Blanche hired scholar Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter to translate Mann's books in 1924. Lowe-Porter subsequently translated Mann's complete works. Blanche Knopf continued to look after Mann. After Buddenbrooks proved successful in its first year, the Knopfs sent him an unexpected bonus. Later in the 1930s, Blanche helped arrange for Mann and his family to emigrate to America.

Nobel Prize in Literature

Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, after he had been nominated by Anders Österling, member of the Swedish Academy, principally in recognition of his popular achievements with Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924), and his numerous short stories. (Due to the personal taste of an influential committee member, only Buddenbrooks was cited at any great length.) Based on Mann's own family, Buddenbrooks relates the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck over the course of four generations. The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924) follows an engineering student who, planning to visit his tubercular cousin at a Swiss sanatorium for only three weeks, finds his departure from the sanatorium delayed. During that time, he confronts medicine and the way it looks at the body and encounters a variety of characters, who play out ideological conflicts and discontents of contemporary European civilization. The tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers is an epic novel written over a period of sixteen years and is one of the largest and most significant works in Mann's oeuvre. Later novels included Lotte in Weimar (1939), in which Mann returned to the world of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774); Doctor Faustus (1947), the story of the fictitious composer Adrian Leverkühn and the corruption of German culture in the years before and during World War II; and Confessions of Felix Krull (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, 1954), which was unfinished at Mann's death. These later works prompted two members of the Swedish Academy to nominate Mann for the Nobel Prize in Literature a second time, in 1948.

Influence

The writer Theodor Fontane, who died in 1898, had a particular stylistic influence on Thomas Mann. Of course, Mann always admired and emulated Goethe, the German "poet prince". The Danish author Herman Bang, with whom he felt a kindred spirit, had a certain influence, especially on the novellas. The pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer provided philosophical inspiration for the Buddenbrooks' narrative of decline, especially with his two-volume work The World as Will and Representation, which Mann studied closely while writing the novel. Russian narrators should also be mentioned, he admired the Russian Literature's ability for self-criticism, at least during the 19th century, in Nikolai Gogol, Ivan Goncharov and Ivan Turgenev. Mann believed that in order to make a bourgeois revolution, the Russians had to forget Dostoevsky. He particularly loved Leo Tolstoy, whom he considered an anarchist and whom he lovingly and mockingly admired for his "courage to be boring."

Throughout Mann's Dostoevsky essay, he finds parallels between the Russian and the sufferings of Friedrich Nietzsche. Speaking of Nietzsche, he says, "his personal feelings initiate him into those of the criminal ... in general all creative originality, all artist nature in the broadest sense of the word, does the same. It was the French painter and sculptor Degas who said that an artist must approach his work in the spirit of the criminal about to commit a crime." Nietzsche's influence on Mann runs deep in his work, especially in Nietzsche's views on decay and the proposed fundamental connection between sickness and creativity. Mann believed that disease should not be regarded as wholly negative. In his essay on Dostoevsky, we find: "but after all and above all it depends on who is diseased, who mad, who epileptic or paralytic: an average dull-witted man, in whose illness any intellectual or cultural aspect is non-existent; or a Nietzsche or Dostoyevsky. In their case something comes out in illness that is more important and conducive to life and growth than any medical guaranteed health or sanity.... [I]n other words: certain conquests made by the soul and the mind are impossible without disease, madness, crime of the spirit."

Thematic and stylistic focuses

Many of Thomas Mann's works have the following similarities:

A "gravely-mischievous" style that is very popular with readers, with superficial solemnity and an underlying ironic humor, mostly benevolent, never drastic or bitter and only rarely degenerating into the macabre. Thomas Mann took this "mild irony" from his literary predecessor and role model Theodor Fontane, at first in Buddenbrooks where it is modified into local sedateness through Low German sprinkles and quotations. He continued this style, with variations, throughout his life (the contemporary, much more avant-garde author Alfred Döblin mocked that Mann had "elevated the pressed crease to a style principle"). In Joseph and His Brothers the tone takes on something fairytale-biblical, but here too the irony often shines through. In Doctor Faustus, Thomas Mann adopts a predominantly serious tone in view of the sinister theme, although the critical irony does not completely disappear there either, for which the description of the nationalist milieu in the Weimar Republic in particular provides ample reason.

The amusingly entertaining, mostly ironic descriptions of contemporaries as well as people of the past and their views and lifestyles based on his own observations or research, often very detailed, similar to his contemporary Marcel Proust, are combined with various profound components: in Buddenbrooks with the motif of economic and spiritual decline of a family, in The Magic Mountain with the philosophical disputes of the time before the First World War, in Lotte in Weimar with the circumstances of Goethe's Weimar Classicism and the complicated effect between real and literary love, in Joseph and his brothers with biblical-mythical motifs and the question of origins as well as the eternal recurrence of the same "mythical" stories, in Doctor Faustus with the historical-political circumstances of the rise, success and fall of Nazism.

Attachment to home regions: Lübeck (Buddenbrooks, Tonio Kröger) and Munich (Gladius Dei, At the Prophet, Disorder and Early Suffering) are in the foreground of important works.

Classical music already plays a central role in Buddenbrooks and Tristan (Mann loved Richard Wagner's operas and, in his 1933 essay The Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner, defended him against the Nazis' attempt to appropriate Wagner as a nationalist icon) and Neue Musik plays the main role in Doctor Faustus (about which Mann sought advice from Theodor W. Adorno and gave his hero's music features of Arnold Schoenberg's compositional style).

Political views

During World War I, Mann supported the conservatism of Kaiser Wilhelm II, attacked liberalism, and supported the war effort, calling the Great War "a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope". In his 600-page-long work Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), Mann presented his conservative, anti-modernist philosophy: spiritual tradition over material progress, German patriotism over egalitarian internationalism, and rooted culture over rootless civilisation.

In "On the German Republic" (Von Deutscher Republik, 1922), Mann called upon German intellectuals to support the new Weimar Republic. The work was delivered at the Beethovensaal in Berlin on 13 October 1922, and published in Die neue Rundschau in November 1922. In the work, Mann developed his eccentric defence of the Republic based on extensive close readings of Novalis and Walt Whitman. Also in 1921, he wrote an essay Mind and Money in which he made a very open assessment of his family background: "In any case, I am personally indebted to the capitalist world order from the past, which is why it will never be appropriate for me to spit on it as it is à la mode these days". Thereafter, his political views gradually shifted toward liberal-left. He especially embraced democratic principles when the Weimar Republic was established.

Mann initially gave his support to the left-liberal German Democratic Party before urging unity behind the Social Democrats, probably less for ideological reasons, but because he only trusted it to provide sufficient mass and resistance to the growing Nazism. In 1930, he gave a public address in Berlin titled An Appeal to Reason, in which he strongly denounced Nazism and encouraged resistance by the working class. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazis. At the same time, he expressed increasing sympathy for socialist ideas. When the Nazis came to power in 1933, Mann and his wife were on holiday in Switzerland. Due to his strident denunciations of Nazi policies, his son Klaus advised him not to return. In contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus, Mann's books were not among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929. In 1936, the Nazi government officially revoked his German citizenship.

During the war, Mann made a series of anti-Nazi radio-speeches, published as Listen, Germany! in 1943. They were recorded on tape in the United States and then sent to the United Kingdom, where the British Broadcasting Corporation transmitted them, hoping to reach German listeners.

Views on Soviet communism and German Nazism

Mann expressed his belief in the collection of letters written in exile, Listen, Germany! (Hör zu, Deutschland!) that equating Soviet communism with Nazi fascism on the basis that both are totalitarian systems was either superficial or insincere in showing a preference for Nazism. He clarified this view during a German press interview in July 1949, declaring that he was not a communist but that communism at least had some relation to ideals of humanity and of a better future. He said that the transition of the communist revolution into an autocratic regime was a tragedy while Nazism was only "devilish nihilism".

Sexuality and literary work

Mann's diaries reveal his struggles with his sexuality and paedophilia, his attraction to men and young boys finding frequent reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature (1997) uncovered the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio (2001) describes how, in 1911, Mann had stayed at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Venice Lido with his wife and brother, when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław (Władzio) Moes, a 10-year-old Polish boy (the real Tadzio). While the story found acclaim, his wife would later recall that her own uncle was disgusted to hear of this attraction: "I still remember that my uncle, Privy Counsellor Friedberg, a famous professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged: 'What a story! And a married man with a family!'"

In the autobiographical novella Tonio Kröger from 1901, the young hero has a crush on a handsome male classmate (modeled after real-life Lübeck classmate Armin Martens). In the novella With the prophet (1904) Mann mocks the believing disciples of a neo-Romantic "prophet" who preaches asceticism and has a strong resemblance to the real contemporary poet Stefan George and his George-Kreis ('George-Circle'). In 1902, George had met the 14-year-old boy Maximilian Kronberger; he made an idol of him and after his early death in 1904 transfigured him into a kind of Antinous-style "god".

Mann had also started planning a novel about Frederick the Great in 1905/1906, which ultimately did not come to fruition. The sexuality of Frederick the Great would have played a significant role in this, its impact on his life, his political decisions and wars. In late 1914, at the start of World War I, Mann used the notes and excerpts already collected for this project to write his essay "Frederick and the grand coalition" in which he contrasted Frederick's soldierly, male drive and his literary, female connotations consisting of "decomposing" skepticism. A similar "decomposing skepticism" had already estranged the barely concealed gay novel characters Tonio Kröger and Hanno Buddenbrook (1901) from their traditional upper class family environments and hometown (which in both cases is Lübeck). The Confessions of Felix Krull, written from 1910 onwards, describes a self-absorbed young dandyish imposter who, if not explicitly, fits into the gay typology, at one point considering, but ultimately refusing, the advances of a Scottish lord to accept him as his sugar daddy and in return be adopted and named as heir. The 1909 novel Royal Highness, which describes a young unworldly and dreamy prince who forces himself into a marriage of convenience that ultimately becomes happy, was modeled after Mann's own romance and marriage to Katia Mann in February 1905.

Cultural references

The Magic Mountain

Several literary and other works make reference to Mann's book The Magic Mountain, including:

Frederic Tuten's 1993 novel Tintin in the New World features many characters (such as Clavdia Chauchat, Mynheer Peeperkorn and others) from The Magic Mountain interacting with Tintin in Peru.

Andrew Crumey's novel Mobius Dick (2004) imagines an alternative universe where an author named Behring has written novels resembling Mann's. These include a version of The Magic Mountain with Erwin Schrödinger in place of Castorp.

Haruki Murakami's novel Norwegian Wood (1987), in which the main character is criticized for reading The Magic Mountain while visiting a friend in a sanatorium.

The song "Magic Mountain" by the band Blonde Redhead.

The painting Magic Mountain (after Thomas Mann) by Christiaan Tonnis (1987). "The Magic Mountain" is also a chapter in Tonnis's 2006 book Krankheit als Symbol ("Illness as a Symbol").

The 1941 film 49th Parallel, in which the character Philip Armstrong Scott unknowingly praises Mann's work to an escaped World War II Nazi U-boat commander, who later responds by burning Scott's copy of The Magic Mountain.

In Ken Kesey's novel Sometimes a Great Notion (1964), character Indian Jenny purchases a Thomas Mann novel and tries to find out "just where was this mountain full of magic..." (p. 578).

Hayao Miyazaki's 2013 film The Wind Rises, in which an unnamed German man at a mountain resort invokes the novel as cover for furtively condemning the rapidly arming Hitler and Hirohito regimes. After he flees to escape the Japanese secret police, the protagonist, who fears his own mail is being read, refers to him as the novel's Mr. Castorp. The film is partly based on another Japanese novel, set like The Magic Mountain in a tuberculosis sanatorium.

Death in Venice

Many literary and other works make reference to Death in Venice, including:

Luchino Visconti's 1971 famous film version of Mann's novella: Death in Venice (film)

Benjamin Britten's 1973 operatic adaptation in two acts of Mann's novella.

Woody Allen's film Annie Hall (1977) refers to the novella.

Joseph Heller's 1994 novel, Closing Time, which makes several references to Thomas Mann and Death in Venice.

Alexander McCall Smith's novel Portuguese Irregular Verbs (1997) has a final chapter entitled "Death in Venice" and refers to Thomas Mann by name in that chapter.

Philip Roth's novel The Human Stain (2000).

Rufus Wainwright's 2001 song "Grey Gardens", which mentions the character Tadzio in the refrain.

Alan Bennett's 2009 play The Habit of Art, in which Benjamin Britten is imagined paying a visit to W. H. Auden about the possibility of Auden writing the libretto for Britten's opera Death in Venice.

David Rakoff's essay "Shrimp", which appears in his 2010 collection Half Empty, makes a humorous comparison between Mann's Aschenbach and E. B. White's Stuart Little.

Two main characters in Me and Earl and the Dying Girl make a spoof film titled Death in Tennis.

'A Good Year' 2006 film.

In the MTV animated series Daria, Daria Morgendorffer receives from Tom Sloane a first-edition English translation as a present ("One J at a Time", Season 5, Episode 8, 2001) and is ridiculed by her sister, Quinn, for having a boyfriend who only gives her "a used book".

Other cultural references

Hayavadana (1972), a play by Girish Karnad, was based on a theme drawn from The Transposed Heads and employed the folk theatre form of Yakshagana. A German version of the play was directed by Vijaya Mehta as part of the repertoire of the Deutsches National Theatre, Weimar. A staged musical version of The Transposed Heads, adapted by Julie Taymor and Sidney Goldfarb, with music by Elliot Goldenthal, was produced at the American Music Theater Festival in Philadelphia and the Lincoln Center in New York in 1988.

Mann's 1896 short story "Disillusionment" is the basis for the Leiber and Stoller song "Is That All There Is?", famously recorded in 1969 by Peggy Lee.

In a 1994 essay, Umberto Eco suggests that the media discuss "Whether reading Thomas Mann gives one erections" as an alternative to "Whether Joyce is boring".

Mann's life in California during World War II, including his relationships with his older brother Heinrich Mann and Bertolt Brecht is a subject of Christopher Hampton's play Tales from Hollywood.

Hans Pleschinski's 2013 novel Königsallee fictionalizes an actual visit by Thomas Mann to Klaus Heuser's parents in Düsseldorf in 1954. He lets Mann's former lover come along with his boy named Anwar, as well as Mann's children Erika and Golo. Everything gets complicated.

Colm Tóibín's 2021 fictionalised biography The Magician is a portrait of Mann in the context of his family and political events.

Fatherland, a 2026 film written and directed by Paweł Pawlikowski, is based on an episode from Tóibín's The Magician where Mann and his daughter Erika embark on a road trip across Cold War-era Germany, culminating in Mann's visits to Frankfurt am Main and Weimar to commemorate the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe. Mann is portrayed by Hanns Zischler, and Sandra Hüller portrays Erika Mann. The film premiered to critical acclaim at the 2026 Cannes Film Festival, where Pawlikowski won the prize for Best Director.