Clarence K. Streit, (Left), Chairman of the Federal Union, Inc., Thomas Mann, (Center), and Lord Marley, English Statesman, are shown at the United States for the World Dinner at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel.
(Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four gen...)
Buddenbrooks is a minutely imagined chronicle of four generations of a North German mercantile family, a work so true to life that it scandalized the author's former neighbours in his native Lübeck.
(The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculos...)
The Magic Mountain takes place in an exclusive tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted to sickness that serves as a fictional microcosm for Europe in the days before the First World War.
(Lotte in Weimar is a vivid dual portrait, a complex study...)
Lotte in Weimar is a vivid dual portrait, a complex study of Goethe and of Lotte, the still-vivacious woman who in her youth was the model for Charlotte in Goethe's widely-read The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Thomas Mann was one of the foremost twentieth-century German novelists and essayists, who gained fame for ironic and philosophical works that reflected the doubts and fears of his era. His early novels, Buddenbrooks, Der Tod in Venedig, and Der Zauberberg earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
Background
Thomas Mann was born on the 6th of June, 1875 in Lübeck, Germany. The second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, a north German patrician merchant and senator in the city government, he often stressed his twofold heritage. His South American mother, Júlia da Silva Bruhns, from Rio de Janeiro, was the daughter of a German planter who had emigrated to Brazil and married a woman of Portuguese-Creole origin. Faced with Lübeck's failing economy, Mann's father wished that two of his sons, Thomas and Heinrich, would take over positions at the helm of the family business.
Education
Thomas Mann received his formal education in Lübeck. Then he studied at the Ludwig Maximilian University of Munich and Technical University of Munich.
Thomas devoted himself to writing after perfunctory work at the South German Fire Insurance Company (1894 - 1895) and on the editorial staff of Simplicissimus, a satirical weekly. The start of his writing career was with a short story Little Mr. Friedemann which was published in 1898. His first novel Buddenbrooks was a story about a merchant family that grabbed the interest of the public making Mann rich and famous. He also wrote a novel in the drama genre but this failed to gain similar success. So Mann decided to focus more on novellas or short novels. His reputation as a writer escalated with his novel Death in Venice published in 1912. This book described the experiences of a writer who goes to Venice and falls in love with a young boy.
In 1918 Mann published a large political treatise, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, in which all his ingenuity of mind was summoned to justify the authoritarian state as against democracy, creative irrationalism as against flat rationalism, and inward culture as against moralistic civilization.
Mann wrote many fictional novels including Royal Highness in 1916 and Early Sorrow in 1929. The Magic Mountain which is considered to be Mann’s most critically acclaimed work was published in 1924. It is said that it took him ten years to complete this novel.
When Hitler became chancellor early in 1933, Mann and his wife, on holiday in Switzerland, were warned by their son and daughter in Munich not to return. For some years his home was in Switzerland, near Zürich, but he traveled widely, visiting the United States on lecture tours.
In 1938, Mann moved to the United States, first to Princeton, New Jersey, where he was a lecturer at the university, then, in 1941, to Los Angeles, where he became the central figure of an illustrious German exile community, the so-called Weimar on the Pacific, that included Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, and Theodor W. Adorno. Long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in speeches across the country, Mann sought to convince a reluctant America of the necessity to go to war against Germany. With Albert Einstein and Arturo Toscanini, he was one of the politically most outspoken intellectuals in America, broadcasting, from 1940, monthly radio messages to Listen, Germany!. In his famous Doctor Faustus (1947), Mann retold the famous myth as a composer who sells his soul to the devil in return for fame. Based on his friend, composer Arnold Schoenberg, the work expresses Mann’s despair over German Nazism.
Having entered the country on a Czech passport, Mann became an American citizen in 1944. In 1945, after the defeat of the Third Reich, he was asked to return to Germany to help to heal the wounds. He refused to do so, citing his national ex-communication of 1933 and rebuking his colleagues for having continued to publish under the Nazi regime. This only deepened the rift between Germany and its most prominent writer. Dismayed by the policies of the Truman administration and publicly branded as a communist dupe, Mann left America in 1952 to spend the last years of his life in Switzerland. His last major essays, on Goethe that was written in 1949, Chekhov in 1954, and Schiller in 1955, are impressive evocations of the moral and social responsibilities of writers.
Until World War I Mann's tastes and cultural tradition had been those of a nationalist and a German patriot, and he was convinced of the superiority of its authoritarian constitution over the democratic institutions of France and England. During the years 1914-1918, he interrupted his work on the novel Der Zauberberg to embark upon war service with the weapon of thought. In a series of highly introspective essays, examining the very foundations of his own philosophy, he presented a vigorous defense of the German Reich (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 1918; Reflections of an Unpolitical Man). But when this book appeared, Mann was already evolving from a romantic conservative to a believer in a democracy who was to become a champion of the Weimar Republic. With his speech honoring Hauptmann on his sixtieth birthday, on the 15th of November, 1922, Von deutscher Republik, the process of his transformation was complete, and for the next 10 years, the decisive period of his second, or middle, phase, he was the spokesman of the Weimar Republic.
Becoming an American citizen in 1944, Mann began to tackle the Nazis through his fiction, writing a series of books about ancient Jewish history and eventually moving on to an outspoken critique of German culture and its contribution to the oppressive Nazi regime.
In Franklin D. Roosevelt's politics, Mann saw what he called the social democracy which in the economic and political realms will have to replace the liberal kind. It supplied the spiritual basis for his anti-Nazism. Mutual appreciation tied the two men together. Mann publicly endorsed Roosevelt and went so far as to campaign for his fourth term. If, as has been pointed out, Mann retained certain reservations about some facets of traditional democracy, his anti-fascism was uncompromising.
Views
Mann’s style is finely wrought and full of resources, enriched by humour, irony, and parody, his composition is subtle and many-layered, brilliantly realistic on one level and yet reaching to deeper levels of symbolism. His works lack simplicity, and his tendency to set his characters at a distance by his own ironical view of them has sometimes laid him open to the charge of lack of heart. He was, however, aware that simplicity and sentiment lend themselves to manipulation by ideological and political powers, and the sometimes elaborate sophistication of his works cannot hide from the discerning reader his underlying impassioned and tender solicitude for mankind.
He was influenced by Schopenhauer, Wagner, Nietzche, Goethe. Under the influence of their estheticism, he began to lower the shield of protection which he had held around the traditional social and political order of his own upper-middle-class milieu. Their writings enhanced his understanding of himself as a lost bourgeois, and he became immediately fascinated by the polarity between artist and bourgeois, spirit and nature, death, and life.
His writings are very delicately composed with a deep and meaningful approach on one level and even deeper levels of representation. Quite in keeping with the psychologically mature realism of the Russian writer Tolstoy, whose works he had come to admire, Mann refused to follow what he considered the exaggerated pathos and flights of fancy of the expressionists of his day. Especially Mann's refusal to use his art as a medium for liberal political thought led to a growing alienation between him and his brother Heinrich, a well-known novelist himself. At the beginning of World War I, when Thomas Mann justified Germany's expanding militarism by referring to it as the right of ascending power, the break between the brothers became complete. It was only after the war, when Thomas began to change his views, most comprehensively laid down in his autobiographical Reflections of a Non-Political Man that was written in 1918, that they became reconciled and remained full of respect for each other's work until Heinrich's death in 1950.
Quotations:
"A writer is someone for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people."
"Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous, to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite, to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."
"It is love, not reason, that is stronger than death."
"Tolerance becomes a crime when applied to evil."
"In books, we never find anything but ourselves. Strangely enough, that always gives us great pleasure, and we say the author is a genius."
"Laughter is a sunbeam of the soul."
"Nothing is more curious and awkward than the relationship of two people who only know each other with their eyes, who meet and observe each other daily, even hourly and who keep up the impression of disinterest either because of morals or because of a mental abnormality. Between them, there is listlessness and pent-up curiosity, the hysteria of an unsatisfied, unnaturally suppressed need for communion, and also a kind of tense respect. Because man loves and honors man as long as he is not able to judge him, and desire is a product of lacking knowledge."
"Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd and the forbidden".
"There are so many different kinds of stupidity, and cleverness is one of the worst."
"No man remains quite what he was when he recognizes himself."
"A solitary, unused to speaking of what he sees and feels, has mental experiences which are at once more intense and less articulate than those of a gregarious man. They are sluggish, yet more wayward, and never without a melancholy tinge. Sights and impressions which others brush aside with a glance, a light comment, a smile, occupy him more than their due, they sink silently in, they take on meaning, they become experience, emotion, adventure. Solitude gives birth to the original in us, to beauty unfamiliar and perilous, to poetry. But also, it gives birth to the opposite: to the perverse, the illicit, the absurd."
"War is only a cowardly escape from the problems of peace."
"Nothing is stranger or more ticklish than a relationship between people who know each other only by sight, who meet and observe each other daily, no hourly and are nevertheless compelled to keep up the pose of an indifferent stranger, neither greeting nor addressing each other, whether out of etiquette or their own whim."
"He who loves the more is the inferior and must suffer."
"It is remarkable how a man cannot summarize his thoughts in even the most general sort of way without betraying himself completely, without putting his whole self into it, quite unawares, presenting as if in allegory the basic themes and problems of his life."
"The observations and encounters of a solitary, taciturn man are vaguer and at the same times more intense than those of a sociable man; his thoughts are deeper, odder and never without a touch of sadness. Images and perceptions that could be dismissed with a glance, a laugh, an exchange of opinions, occupy him unduly, become more intense in the silence, become significant, become an experience, an adventure, an emotion. Solitude produces originality, bold and astonishing beauty, poetry. But solitude also produces perverseness, the disproportionate, the absurd, and the forbidden."
"I know I am talking nonsense, but I’d rather go rambling on, and partly expressing something I find it difficult to express than to keep on transmitting faultless platitudes."
"There is only one real misfortune: to forfeit one's own good opinion of oneself. Lose your complacency, once betray your own self-contempt and the world will unhesitatingly endorse it."
"This was love at first sight, love everlasting: a feeling unknown, unhoped for, unexpected, in so far as it could be a matter of conscious awareness; it took entire possession of him, and he understood, with joyous amazement, that this was for life."
"Yes, they are carnal, both of them, love and death, and therein lies their terror and their great magic!"
"All interest in disease and death is only another expression of interest in life."
"Distance in a straight line has no mystery. The mystery is in the sphere."
Personality
Thomas Mann was an ironist, highly intelligent, and a complex person. His diaries reveal his struggles with his homosexuality.
Quotes from others about the person
"His commitment was always half-hearted, weakened by self-criticism; his no, however, was clear and strong." - Gob.
Interests
Philosophers & Thinkers
Schopenhauer, Nietzsche
Connections
Mann was married to Katja Pringsheim in 1905 and the couple had six children.
Father:
Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann
Mother:
Júlia da Silva Bruhns
Wife:
Katja Pringsheim
Brother:
Heinrich Mann
Friend:
Paul Ehrenberg
References
Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition
T. J. Reed details the main currents in Mann scholarship over the last two decades, suggesting how we should now see the writer, the man, and the political figure, and, above all, the complex relationship between the three.
1974
A study guide for Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain"
Thomas Mann's "The Magic Mountain" concise study guide includes plot summary, character analysis, author biography, study questions, historical context, suggestions for further reading, and much more.
Thomas Mann's The Magic Mountain: A Casebook
This collection seeks to illustrate the ways in which Thomas Mann's 1924 novel, The Magic Mountain, has been newly construed by some of today's most astute readers in the field of Mann studies.