Thomas Mann

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Thomas Mann
Born	June 6, 1875(1875-06-06) Lübeck, Germany
Died	August 12, 1955 (aged 80) Zürich, Switzerland
Occupation	Novelist, short story writer, essayist
Genres	Bildungsroman, Historical novel, Picaresque
Notable work(s)	Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain "Death in Venice"
Notable award(s)	Nobel Prize in Literature 1929
Influences Dostoevsky, Stirner, Fontane, Freud, J.P. Jacobsen, Goethe, Hesse, Hoffmann, Jung, Lessing, Luther, Nietzsche, Poe, Schlegel, Schopenhauer, Wagner, Schoenberg, von Platen, Grimmelshausen, Heinrich Mann, Melville
Influenced Hesse, Lukacs, Adorno, Kafka, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Frederic Tuten, Orhan Pamuk, Joseph Campbell, Michel Houellebecq, Heinrich Böll

Paul Thomas Mann (June 6, 1875–August 12, 1955) 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 mid-length stories, 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.

[edit] Life

Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck, Germany, the second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (a senator and a grain merchant), and his wife Júlia da Silva Bruhns (a Brazilian with partially German ancestry who emigrated to Germany when seven years old). His mother was Roman Catholic, but Mann was baptised into his father's Lutheran faith. Mann's father died in 1891, and his trading firm was liquidated. The family subsequently moved to Munich. Mann attended the science division of a Lübeck gymnasium, then spent time at the University of Munich and Technical University of Munich^[1] where, in preparation for a journalism career, he studied history, economics, art history, and literature. He lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933, with the exception of a year in Palestrina, Italy, with his novelist elder brother Heinrich. Thomas worked with the South German Fire Insurance Company 1894–95. His career as a writer began when he wrote for Simplicissimus. Mann's first short story, "Little Herr Friedemann" (Der Kleine Herr Friedemann), was published in 1898.

In 1905, he married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a prominent, secular Jewish family of intellectuals. They had six children—Erika, Klaus, Golo, Monika, Elisabeth, and Michael—who became literary, artistic figures in their own right.

The summerhouse of Thomas Mann in Nida (German: Nidden)

In 1929, Mann had a cottage built in the fishing village of Nidden (Nida, Lithuania) on the Curonian Spit, where there was a German art colony, and where he spent the summers of 1930-32 there, working on Joseph and his Brothers. The cottage now is a cultural center dedicated to him, with a small memorial exhibition. In 1933, after Hitler assumed power, Mann emigrated to Küsnacht, near Zürich, Switzerland, in 1933, but received Czechoslovakian citizenship and a passport in 1936. He then emigrated to the United States in 1939, where he taught at Princeton University. In 1942, the Mann family moved to Pacific Palisades, California, where they lived until after the end of World War II; on June 23, 1944 Thomas Mann was naturalized as a citizen of the United States. In 1952, he returned to Europe, to live in Kilchberg, near Zürich, Switzerland.

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 and Weimar, a statement that German culture extends beyond the new political borders.

In 1955, he died of atherosclerosis in a hospital in Zürich and was buried in Kilchberg. Many institutions are named in his honour, most famously the Thomas Mann Gymnasium of Budapest.

Thomas Mann is buried at Kilchberg

Thomas Mann was first translated to English by H. T. Lowe-Porter, whose renditions created Mann's popularity in the English-speaking world.

[edit] Political views

During World War I Mann supported Kaiser Wilhelm II's conservatism and attacked liberalism. Yet in Von Deutscher Republik (1923), as a semi-official spokesman for parliamentary democracy, Mann called upon German intellectuals to support the new Weimar Republic. He also gave a lecture at the Beethovensaal in Berlin on October 13, 1922, which appeared in Die neue Rundschau in November 1922, in which he developed his eccentric defence of the Republic, based on extensive close readings of Novalis and Walt Whitman. ^[2] Hereafter his political views gradually shifted toward liberal and democratic principles.

In 1930 Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason," in which he strongly denounced National Socialism 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 socialism and communism. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Mann and his wife were on holiday in Switzerland. Due to his very vociferous denunciations of Nazi policies, his son Klaus advised him not to return. But Thomas Mann's books, in contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus, were not amongst the many burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933; apparently, since he was the literature Nobel laureate for 1929 (see below), they did not dare that so early. Finally in 1936 the Nazi government officially revoked his German citizenship. He had by then gone into exile in the United States.

However, already in 1933, in a personal letter dated October 26, 1933 but published only recently (in the feuilleton section of the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung dated Oct. 30, 2007), Thomas Mann expressed views on Nazism, which corresponded to the much later novel Doktor Faustus. In the novel, the author refers in several places to the historical debt of the German population, leading to World War II with all its cruelty.

During the war itself, Mann regularly made anti-Nazi broadcasts from California (transmitted by the BBC to Germany), each broadcast beginning with the words "German listeners!" While not widely listened to, they had a dedicated following.

"Images of Disorder", by social critic Michael Harrington in his collection The Accidental Century, is a highly literate account of Mann's political progression from the right to the left.

[edit] Work

"Modern Book Printing" from the Walk of Ideas in Berlin, Germany - built in 2006 to commemorate Johannes Gutenberg's invention, c. 1445, of movable printing type.

Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, principally in recognition of his popular achievement with the epic Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg 1924), and his numerous short stories. (Precisely, due to the personal taste of an influential committee member, only the Buddenbrooks were explicitly cited.)^[3] Based on Mann's own family, Buddenbrooks relates the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck over the course of three 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 for seven years. 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 civilisation. Later, other novels included Lotte in Weimar (1939), in which Mann returned to the world of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774); Doktor Faustus (1947), the story of 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 still unfinished at Mann's death.

In the Buddenbrooks, at several places he uses the Low German of the northern part of the country.

To his greatest works belongs the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder, 1933–42), a richly imagined retelling of the story of Joseph related in chapters 37-50 of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. The first volume relates the establishment of the family of Jacob, the father of Joseph. In the second volume the young Joseph, not yet master of considerable gifts, arouses the enmity of his ten older brothers, who then sell him into slavery in Egypt. In the third volume, Joseph becomes the steward of a high court official, Potiphar, but finds himself thrown into prison after rejecting the advances of Potiphar's wife. In the last volume, the mature Joseph rises to become administrator of Egypt's granaries. Famine drives the sons of Jacob to Egypt, where the unrecognized Joseph adroitly orchestrates a scene that discloses his identity, resulting in the brothers' reconciliation and the reunion of the family.

Mann's diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his sexuality, which found 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) was widely acclaimed for uncovering the centrality of Mann's sexuality to his oeuvre. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of Władysław Moes, an 11-year-old Polish boy.

Considered a classic of homosexual passion (if unconsummated) Death in Venice has been made into a film and an opera. Blamed sarcastically by Mann’s old enemy, Alfred Kerr, to have ‘made pederasty acceptable to the cultivated middle classes’, it has been pivotal to introducing the discourse of same-sex desire to the common culture.^[4] Mann himself described his feelings for young violinist and painter Paul Ehrenberg as the "central experience of my heart." Despite the homosexual overtones in his writing, Mann chose to get married and have children. His works also present other sexual themes, such as incest in "The Blood of the Walsungs" (Wälsungenblut) and "The Holy Sinner" (Der Erwählte).

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. Balancing his humanism and appreciation of Western culture was his belief in the power of sickness and decay to destroy the ossifying effects of tradition and civilization. Hence the "heightening" that Mann speaks of in his introduction to The Magic Mountain and the opening of new spiritual possibilities that Hans Castorp experiences in the midst of his sickness. In Death in Venice he makes the identification between beauty and the resistance to natural decay, embodied by Aschenbach as the metaphor for the Nazi vision of purity (akin to Nietzsche's version of the ascetic ideal that denies life and its becoming). He also valued the insight of other cultures, notably adapting a traditional Indian fable in The Transposed Heads. His work is the record of a consciousness of a life of manifold possibilities, and of the tensions inherent in the (more or less enduringly fruitful) responses to those possibilities. In his own summation (upon receiving the Nobel Prize), "The value and significance of my work for posterity may safely be left to the future; for me they are nothing but the personal traces of a life led consciously, that is, conscientiously."

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.

—Henry Hatfield in Thomas Mann, 1962.

[edit] Cultural References

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.

"Magic Mountain" by the band Blonde Redhead, is based on Mann's novel of the same title

[edit] Works

• 1896 "Disillusionment" (Enttäuschung)
• 1897 "Little Herr Friedemann" ("Der kleine Herr Friedemann")
• 1897 "The Clown" ("Der Bajazzo")
• 1897 "The Dilettante"
• 1897 "Tobias Mindernickel"
• 1897 "Little Lizzy"
• 1899 "The Wardrobe"
• 1900 "The Road to the Churchyard" (Der Weg zum Friedhof)
• 1901 Buddenbrooks (Buddenbrooks - Verfall einer Familie)
• 1902 "Gladius Dei"
• 1902 "Tristan"
• 1902 "The Hungry"
• 1903 "Tonio Kröger"
• 1903 "The Infant Prodigy" ("Das Wunderkind")
• 1904 Fiorenza (play)
• 1904 "A Gleam"
• 1904 "At the Prophet's"
• 1905 "A Weary Hour"
• 1905 "The Blood of the Walsungs" ("Wälsungenblut")
• 1907 "Railway Accident"
• 1908 "Anekdote"
• 1909 Royal Highness (Königliche Hoheit)
• 1911 "The Fight between Jappe and the Do Escobar"
• 1911 Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig)
• 1915 Frederick and the Great Coalition (Friedrich und die große Koalition)
• 1918 Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen)
• 1918 A Man and His Dog (Herr und Hund; Gesang vom Kindchen: Zwei Idyllen)
• 1922 The German Republic (Von deutscher Republik)
• 1924 The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg)
• 1925 "Disorder and Early Sorrow" ("Unordnung und frühes Leid")
• 1929 "Mario and the Magician" ("Mario und der Zauberer")
• 1930 A Sketch of My Life (Lebensabriß)
• 1933–43 Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder)
  • 1933 The Tales of Jacob (Die Geschichten Jaakobs)
  • 1934 The Young Joseph (Der junge Joseph)
  • 1936 Joseph in Egypt (Joseph in Ägypten)
  • 1943 Joseph the Provider (Joseph, der Ernährer)
• 1938 This Peace (Dieser Friede)
• 1937 The Problem of Freedom (Das Problem der Freiheit)
• 1938 The Coming Victory of Democracy
• 1939 Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns
• 1940 The Transposed Heads (Die vertauschten Köpfe - Eine indische Legende)
• 1943 Listen, Germany! (Deutsche Hörer!)
• 1947 Doctor Faustus (Doktor Faustus)
• 1944 Mose, a commissioned novella (Das Gesetz, Erzählung, Auftragswerk)
• 1951 The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte)
• 1954 The Black Swan (Die Betrogene: Erzählung)
• 1911/1954 Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren erster Teil); unfinished

[edit] See also

• Dohm-Mann family tree
• Erich Heller (esp. s.v. Life in Letters)
• Pederasty
• Terence James Reed
• First Editions

[edit] Notes

1. ^ Thomas Mann Autobiography. Nobel Foundation. Retrieved on 2008-01-25.
2. ^ See a recent translation of this lecture by Lawrence Rainey in Modernism/Modernity, 14.1 (January 2007), pp. 99-145.
3. ^ Nobel Prize website, accessed 11 November 2007
4. ^ The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, Edited by Ritchie Robertson, p.5[1]

[edit] External links

Wikiquote has a collection of quotations related to:

Thomas Mann

Wikisource has original works written by or about:

Thomas Mann

Wikimedia Commons has media related to:

Thomas Mann

• Works by Thomas Mann at Project Gutenberg
• The Nobel Prize Bio on Mann
• FBI File on Thomas Mann
• Thomas Mann 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading.
• Thomas Mann