Thomas Mann

Literature / Writer's Datebook: June 6

 

German Novelist, Short Story Writer, Essayist, Social Critic, Philanthropist, Nobel Laureate

Brief biography of German writer and social critic Thomas Mann, Nobel laureate for Literature in 1929. Famous for Death in Venice and The Magic Mountain.

Thomas Mann became one of the leading novelists of the 20^th century Germany at the young age of twenty-five. He was novelist, short story writer, essayist, social critic, and a philanthropist. A 1929 Nobel Prize in literature, he is famous for his novels The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, and Doktor Faustus, among others. His most powerful books were derived from experiences during the World War II in which he opposed fascism. 

He married Katia Pringsheim in 1905. His wife comes from a prominent Jewish family of intellectuals. They had six children, who also became pursued literary and artistic careers. Mann took US citizenship in 1944 and settled in Zurich in 1952 where he died at the age of 80, on August 12, 1955.     

Early Life

Paul Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875 in Lübeck, Germany from a wealthy, middle-class German family. In his early 20s he worked in business but wanted to be a writer. When his father died in 1891 and the family business was liquidated, they eventually moved to Munich. A change in his family's fortunes inspired him to write a long, detailed family novel, Buddenbrooks, which was an immediate success and made his reputation. For such a young man this was a remarkably mature work. 

Later Life

During the next 20 years or so Mann concentrated on short novels, or novellas. But at age 49 he published his second long novel, The Magic Mountain. This book, set in a hospital for patients recovering from tuberculosis, had started as a short story but grew into a long and serious novel. It earned Mann the 1929 Nobel Prize for literature and established him as a novelist of international fame. 

Work Legacy 

Mann's famous novella  Death in Venice (German: Der Tod in Venedig), was published in 1912. It presents an ennobled writer who visits Venice and is liberated, uplifted, and then increasingly obsessed by the sight of a boy in a family of Polish tourists—Tadzio, nicknamed for Tadeusz. The story itself is fiction, however, Tadzio was based on a real boy named Władzio whom Mann had observed during his 1911 visit to the city. A film of the same name (Italian: Morte a Venezia) was produced in a 1971 historical drama directed and produced by Luchino Visconti, adapted from this novella by Thomas Mann. The easily recognisable soundtrack features Gustav Mahler's glorious Symphony No. 5  "Adagietto". Death in Venice offers several themes, among them, the sensuality of Venice the place, the conflict between intellect and inspiration, beauty, passion, youth and art. The major messages lie mostly in the mind of Aschenbach - within the relationship between the main character and the young boy, Tadzio.

Mann also embarked on his most ambitious work, a modern version of the biblical story of Joseph and his brothers. Published in four volumes between 1933 and 1943 and together known as Joseph and His Brothers, the work concerns the conflict between personal freedom and political tyranny. During the writing he was forced, as a free and outspoken spirit, to leave Germany, which was then under the control of the Nazis. He went to the United States, where he produced his final great work, Doctor Faustus. It is a version of a German legend in which a man, Faust, makes a deal with the devil. In Doctor Faustus Mann was probably making a comment on the destructive course of Nazi Germany. 

 

Works by Thomas Mann

Buddenbrooks, 1901

Tonio Krüger, 1903

Royal Highness, 1909

Death in Venice, 1912

The Magic Mountain, 1924

Joseph and His Brothers, 1933-43

Lotte in Weimar, 1939

Doctor Faustus, 1947

Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, 1954

 

Image Credit:

Thomas Mann. Wikipedia Commons / Public Domain

 

Resources:

Chambers Biographical Dictionary, New Edition, edited by Una McGovern, Chambers Harrap Publishers, 2002

Death in Venice. en.wikipedia.org

Larousse Dictionary of Writers, edited by Rosemary Goring, Larousse plc, 1994

 

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