Thomas Mann 1929 (167)

Thomas Mann 1929 (167)

Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and 1929 Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and ironic epic novels and novellas, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and the intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer.

When Hitler came to power in 1933, the anti-fascist Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952. Thomas Mann is one of the most known exponents of the so called Exilliteratur.

He is considered one of the most important writers of the 20th century. Thomas Mann’s novels, novellas and essays not only left a lasting mark on German literature, they also established him as a global literary figure. Translated into almost 40 languages, his works such as Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers and Doctor Faustus have sold millions of copies. They combine precise social analysis with philosophical depth, subtle irony and a complex linguistic style.

Born on 6 June 1875 in Lübeck, Thomas Mann grew up in a wealthy merchant family. After the death of his father in 1891 and the liquidation of the company, the family moved to Munich, where Mann immersed himself in the literary scene. His extraordinary talent became apparent early on, such as in the novella Little Herr Friedemann (1898). In 1905 he married Katia Pringsheim, who was from a wealthy Jewish family. With their six children – including Klaus and Erika Mann, who became successful authors in their own right – the Mann family developed over the decades into a kind of intellectual dynasty .

Mann began his writing career in Munich, where he worked as an editor for a satirical magazine. His early works, including “Buddenbrooks” (1901) and “Death in Venice” (1912), established him as a major literary talent. These novels explored themes of decadence, sexuality, and the conflict between art and life. During World War I, Mann initially supported Germany’s war efforts. However, his views changed over time, and he became increasingly critical of German nationalism. This shift in perspective was reflected in his monumental novel “The Magic Mountain” (1924), which examined the intellectual and cultural climate of pre-war Europe.

In 1933, with the rise of Nazi Germany, Mann and his family left Germany for Switzerland. He later moved to the United States, where he became a vocal critic of the Nazi regime. During World War II, Mann made radio broadcasts to Germany, urging resistance against Hitler’s government.

The novels on which Mann was working throughout this period reflect variously the cultural crisis of his times. In 1933 he published The Tales of Jacob (U.S. title, Joseph and His Brothers), the first part of his four-part novel on the biblical Joseph, continued the following year in The Young Joseph and two years later with Joseph in Egypt, and completed with Joseph the Provider in 1943. In the complete work, published as Joseph and His Brothers, Mann reinterpreted the biblical story as the emergence of mobile, responsible individuality out of the tribal collective, of history out of myth, and of a human God out of the unknowable. In the first volume a timeless myth seems to be reenacted in the lives of the Hebrews. Joseph, however, though sustained by the belief that his life too is the reenactment of a myth, is thrown out of the “timeless collective” into Egypt, the world of change and history, and there learns the management of events, ideas, and himself. Though based on wide and scholarly study of history, the work is not a historical novel, and the “history” is full of irony and humour, of conscious modernization. Mann’s concern is to provide a myth for his own times, capable of sustaining and directing his generation and of restoring a belief in the power of humane reason.

After the war, Mann returned to Europe, settling in Switzerland. He continued to write, producing works such as “Doctor Faustus” (1947), which used the story of a composer to explore Germany’s descent into Nazism. Mann’s later years were marked by public recognition of his literary achievements and his role as a moral voice in post-war Europe. Throughout his life, Mann struggled with his sexuality, a theme that appeared in his works and was later revealed in his posthumously published diaries. This and other personal experiences often informed his writing, contributing to the depth and complexity of his characters. Mann’s work was influenced by earlier German writers and philosophers, including Johann Wolfgang von Goethe and Friedrich Nietzsche. In turn, his novels and essays had a significant impact on 20th-century literature and thought.

In 1905 Mann married Katja Pringsheim. There were six children of the marriage, which was a happy one. It was this happiness, perhaps, that led Mann, in Royal Highness, to provide a fairy-tale reconciliation of “form” and “life,” of degenerate feudal authority and the vigour of modern American capitalism. In 1912, however, he returned to the tragic dilemma of the artist with Death in Venice, a sombre masterpiece. In this story, the main character, a distinguished writer whose nervous and “decadent” sensibility is controlled by the discipline of style and composition, seeks relaxation from overstrain in Venice, where, as disease creeps over the city, he succumbs to an infatuation and the wish for death. Symbols of eros and death weave a subtle pattern in the sensuous opulence of this tale, which closes an epoch in Mann’s work. Mann was the greatest German novelist of the 20th century, and by the end of his life his works had acquired the status of classics both within and without Germany. His subtly structured novels and shorter stories constitute a persistent and imaginative enquiry into the nature of Western bourgeois culture, in which a haunting awareness of its precariousness and threatened disintegration is balanced by an appreciation of and tender concern for its spiritual achievements. Round this central theme cluster a group of related problems that recur in different forms—the relation of thought to reality and of the artist to society, the complexity of reality and of time, the seductions of spirituality, eros, and death. Mann’s imaginative and practical involvement in the social and political catastrophes of his time provided him with fresh insights that make his work rich and varied. His finely wrought essays, notably those on Tolstoy, Goethe, Freud, and Nietzsche, record the intellectual struggles through which he reached the ethical commitment that shapes the major imaginative works.

When the Great War broke out, the “European” Heinrich and the “German” Thomas found themselves in profound and public opposition.  Heinrich pessimistically attacked Germany’s disastrous role in the war, while the misguided Thomas, who had previously evaded military service, became the self-appointed spiritual spokesman for the “detested” nation. Thomas won the Nobel Prize in 1929.  The publication of the first volume of his Joseph and His Brothers tetralogy during the Nazi regime in 1933 provoked violent attacks from German émigrés and he was eventually forced to take a political stand.  As Hamilton remarks: “The urge to be involved—to cast aside questions of Nobel dignity or literary reputation—was a sign of courage; and without that courage, that pride, could Thomas have ever survived the years of physical and spiritual deprivation in exile, the envy and sniping that would dog him until death?”

Thomas Mann reached the height of his fame in the 1920s and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, primarily for his early novel Buddenbrooks (see below). Although he considered himself politically conservative for a long time, Thomas Mann became an advocate of democracy during the period of the Weimar Republic. When the National Socialists came to power in 1933, he was forced to leave Germany. Initially moving to Switzerland, he later moved to the USA, where he obtained American citizenship and actively campaigned against the Nazi regime. Under the title “German listeners!”, his radio speeches were aimed at the German population, openly calling on them to put up resistance to Hitler. Of his role in exile he said: “Where I am is where Germany is”. After the war he returned to Europe and lived mainly in Switzerland, where he died on 12 August 1955.

Richard Winston (1917-79), who translated Mann’s Letters, was ideally suited to write Thomas Mann: The Making of an Artist, 1875-1911 (1982).  Though he did not interview many people who knew Mann and rarely refers to unpublished letters and diaries, he has a clearer focus than Peter de Mendelssohn’s massively detailed German biography, Der Zauberer (“The Magician”).  Winston has a thorough knowledge of Mann’s works, a mastery of the social and literary life of Wilhelmine Germany, and an elegant prose style.  He’s particularly good on the relationship of the life to the fiction.  He provides sensitive readings of early stories such as “Tristan” and “Blood of the Walsungs”; notes that “even at his simplest and most youthful, Mann was complex and mature”; and is excellent on the genesis of the partly  autobiographical Buddenbrooks.

Between 1978 and 2002 six writers — three English, two American and one German — published Lives of Thomas Mann (1875-1955).  These biographers also had other interests and achievements.  Nigel Hamilton wrote military and presidential histories.  Richard Winston translated Mann and wrote lives of Charlemagne and Thomas Beckett.  Ronald Hayman was a dramatist and actor.  Donald Prater, soldier and diplomat, wrote lives of Rilke and Stefan Zweig.  Anthony Heilbut, rather incongruously, produced records of gospel music.  Hermann Kurzke was a Catholic theologian and professor at the University of Mainz. In The Brothers Mann (1978), Nigel Hamilton (born 1944) convincingly argues that Thomas and Heinrich Mann had the most significant literary brotherhood of all time.  In their  lives “German history was mirrored—and borne out—in all its agony.  From outright mutual hostility in the First World War they became reconciled, stood with consistent courage for democracy in an age of rising fascism, and presided over the German émigré movement in exile.”  Hamilton is perceptive about the relationship of the brothers—the dominant theme of the book—as it moves from rivalry, jealousy and ideological conflict to mature friendship and mutual respect.