Thomas Mann (1875 - 1955) was a German novelist, short-story writer and essayist who received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. [2] His fiction, from the family chronicle Buddenbrooks to the late Doctor Faustus, examined the tension between bourgeois order and artistic vocation and the cultural crisis of Germany, and after 1933 he became one of the most prominent literary voices against the Nazi regime from exile. [1]
Early life
Mann was born on 6 June 1875 in Lübeck, the son of a grain merchant and senator of the Hanseatic city and of a mother born in Brazil to a German father and a Brazilian mother. [1] His father's death in 1891 led to the liquidation of the family firm, and the household moved to Munich.
He worked briefly for an insurance company and attended university lectures in Munich without taking a degree, writing for the satirical magazine Simplicissimus. His elder brother Heinrich was also a novelist, and the two maintained a long, often strained literary relationship. [3]
Early novels and stories
Buddenbrooks (1901), written in his twenties, follows four generations of a Lübeck merchant family as commercial vitality gives way to introspection and artistic sensibility. Its success established him and was cited when the Swedish Academy awarded him the Nobel Prize nearly three decades later. [2]
The novellas Tonio Kröger (1903) and Death in Venice (1912) refined his central preoccupation: the artist as an outsider whose gift is inseparable from disorder and decline. Mann married Katia Pringsheim in 1905; several of their six children, among them Erika and Klaus Mann, became writers in their own right. [1]
The Magic Mountain and political change
During the First World War Mann defended German cultural conservatism in Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918). He revised that position in the following years and, in a 1922 address, publicly committed himself to the Weimar Republic, a shift that made him a target of the nationalist right. [3]
The Magic Mountain (1924), set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, uses the enclosed world of the patients to stage a debate between humanist, authoritarian and irrationalist currents in pre-war Europe. It is generally regarded as his most ambitious work. [1]
Exile
Mann was abroad when the Nazis took power in 1933 and did not return to Germany. He was deprived of his citizenship in 1936, took Czechoslovak nationality, and moved to the United States in 1939, teaching at Princeton before settling in Pacific Palisades, California. He became an American citizen in 1944. [1]
Through the war he recorded monthly broadcasts for the BBC addressed to German listeners, condemning the regime and its crimes. He completed the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers in exile and wrote Doctor Faustus (1947), in which a composer's pact with demonic forces serves as an allegory of Germany's descent into Nazism. [3]
Later years and legacy
Uncomfortable with the political climate of the McCarthy era, Mann left the United States in 1952 and returned to Switzerland. He died in Zurich on 12 August 1955, leaving the comic novel Confessions of Felix Krull unfinished. [2]
His diaries and essays, published after his death, have become important sources for the intellectual history of the period. Mann is read as the central German novelist of the twentieth century, and his account of how a cultivated society can turn toward barbarism remains the aspect of his work most frequently revisited. [1]
