Thomas Mann

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Thomas Mann
Born	6 June 1875(1875-06-06) Lübeck, Germany
Died	12 August 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, August von Platen-Hallermünde, Grimmelshausen, Heinrich Mann, Melville
Influenced Hesse, Susan Sontag, Lukacs, Adorno, Kafka, Heinrich Mann, Klaus Mann, Frederic Tuten, Orhan Pamuk, Joseph Campbell, Michel Houellebecq, Heinrich Böll, K.J. Stevens

Paul Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 – 12 August 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 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.

[edit] Life

Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck, Germany and was 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:

[edit] Children

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 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, 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, in west Los Angeles California, where they lived until after the end of World War II On 23 June 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, as 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's works were first translated into English by H. T. Lowe-Porter. Her translations have become classics in their own right and have contributed enormously to 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 13 October 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 left 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 socialist ideas. 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 among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929 (see below). Finally in 1936 the Nazi government officially revoked his German citizenship. A few months later he moved to California.

However, already in 1933, in a personal letter dated 26 October 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 made a series of anti-Nazi radio-speeches, "German listeners!" - which were the words each broadcast started with. They were locally taped and then sent to Great Britain, where BBC-radio transmitted it for reaching the population of Germany not via unpersonal messages, but by one of their own people. While not widely listened to, they had a dedicated following. [source for the last sentence?]

"Images of Disorder", by social critic Michael Harrington in his collection The Accidental Century, is an account of Mann's political progression from the right to the left.^{[citation needed]}

[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 Buddenbrooks was 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. 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. 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 27-50 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.

A classic about an intellectual succumbing to passion, 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 was friends with violinist and painter Paul Ehrenberg for whom he had feelings as a young man. Despite certain homosexual overtones in his writing, Mann fell in love with Katia Mann -- whom he married -- in 1904. His works also present other sexual themes, such as incest in "The Blood of the Walsungs" (Wälsungenblut) and "The Holy Sinner" (Der Erwählte).

Throughout his Dostoyevsky essay he finds parallels between the Russian and the sufferings of Frederich 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." (Crime and Will in Mann) 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 held that disease is not to be regarded as wholly negative. In his essay on Dostoyevsky 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 conductive to life and growth than any medical guaranteed health or sanity… in other words: certain conquests made by the soul and the mind are impossible without disease, madness, crime of the spirit." ("Crime and Will in Mann")

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" of which Mann speaks 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.

"Magic Mountain (after Thomas Mann)" is a painting made by Christiaan Tonnis in 1987. "The Magic Mountain" is a chapter in his 2006 book "Illness as a Symbol" as well.

The 2006 movie "A Good Year" directed by Ridley Scott, starring Russell Crowe and Albert Finney, features a paperback version of Death in Venice. It is the book the character named Christie Roberts is reading while she visits her deceased father's vineyard.

In the Philip Roth novel The Human Stain, several references are made to Mann's Death in Venice.

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.

[edit] Works

• 1896 Disillusionment (Enttäuschung)
• 1897 Little Herr Friedemann ("Der kleine Herr Friedemann"), collection of short stories
• 1897 "The Clown" ("Der Bajazzo"), short story
• 1897 The Dilettante
• 1897 Tobias Mindernickel
• 1897 Little Lizzy
• 1899 The Wardrobe (Der Kleiderschrank)
• 1900 The Road to the Churchyard (Der Weg zum Friedhof)
• 1901 Buddenbrooks (Buddenbrooks - Verfall einer Familie), novel
• 1902 Gladius Dei
• 1902 The Hungry
• 1903 Tristan, novella
• 1903 Tonio Kröger, novella
• 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"), novella
• 1907 Railway Accident
• 1908 Anekdote
• 1909 Royal Highness (Königliche Hoheit), novel
• 1911 The Fight between Jappe and the Do Escobar
• 1911 Felix Krull (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull), short story, published in 1922
• 1912 Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig), novella
• 1915 Frederick and the Great Coalition (Friedrich und die große Koalition)
• 1918 Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen), essay
• 1918 A Man and His Dog (Herr und Hund; Gesang vom Kindchen: Zwei Idyllen), novella
• 1921 The Blood of the Walsungs (Wälsungenblut), novella
• 1922 The German Republic (Von deutscher Republik)
• 1924 The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), novel
• 1925 Disorder and Early Sorrow ("Unordnung und frühes Leid")
• 1929 "Mario and the Magician" (Mario und der Zauberer), novella
• 1930 A Sketch of My Life (Lebensabriß)
• 1933–43 Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder), tetralogy
  • 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, novel
• 1940 The Transposed Heads (Die vertauschten Köpfe - Eine indische Legende), novella
• 1943 Listen, Germany! (Deutsche Hörer!)
• 1944 Mose, a commissioned novella (Das Gesetz, Erzählung, Auftragswerk)
• 1947 Doctor Faustus (Doktor Faustus), novel
• 1947 Essays of Three Decades, translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter. [1st American ed.], New York, A. A. Knopf, 1947. Reprinted as Vintage book, K55, New York, Vintage Books, 1957.
• 1951 The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte), novel
• 1954 The Black Swan (Die Betrogene: Erzählung)
• 1954 Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren erster Teil), novel expanding upon the 1911 short story, unfinished

[edit] See also

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

[edit] Notes

1. ^ "Thomas Mann Autobiography". Nobel Foundation. http://nobelprize.org/nobel_prizes/literature/laureates/1929/mann-autobio.html. 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

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Thomas Mann

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Wikimedia Commons has media related to: Thomas Mann Sammlung Dr. Haack Leipzig

• Works by Thomas Mann at Project Gutenberg
• The Nobel Prize Bio on Mann
• FBI File on Thomas Mann (archived 2004)
• Thomas Mann 'Bookweb' on literary website The Ledge, with suggestions for further reading.