Thomas Mann

Novelist

• Born: June 6, 1875
• Birthplace: Lübeck, Germany
• Died: August 12, 1955
• Place of death: Zurich, Switzerland

German novelist

Mann wrote in the tradition of nineteenth century realism, depending on depth and breadth of treatment rather than stylistic innovation for his effectiveness. After receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, he was widely regarded as a sage as well as a great artist.

Area of achievement Literature

Early Life

Thomas Mann (toh-MAHS mahn) was born in Lübeck, Germany (later West Germany), an important city since the days of the Hanseatic League. His father, Johann Heinrich Mann, was an apparently prosperous grain merchant, who operated a family business dating back to the eighteenth century. His mother, Julia da Silva-Bruhns, was from Rio de Janeiro, a half Portuguese Creole. Johann Heinrich Mann was a senator and twice was mayor of Lübeck, while Frau Mann was romantic, temperamental, and musically gifted. He would serve as the prototype for the phlegmatic, psychologically healthy burghers and she for the sensitive, neurotic Latin artists who populate Thomas Mann’s fiction.

Thomas Mann was the second of five children. His elder brother Heinrich would also become a renowned writer. Thomas had a younger brother and two younger sisters, both of whom eventually committed suicide. He was not a good student. Like his fictional character Tonio Kröger, Mann was a romantic youth with artistic tendencies, who disliked the scientific emphasis at his gymnasium. Not until his father’s death in 1890 was it apparent that the family business was failing. The next year, the rest of the family left the Baltic and relocated in Munich. After having to repeat two years, Mann received his certificate and left school to rejoin them. The year was 1894, and Mann became an unsalaried apprentice with a fire insurance firm. After a year of copying out accounts, he realized that a future in business was not what he desired. He was eventually able to terminate the apprenticeship and free himself to attend university lectures in the arts, history, and political economy.

During his brief business career, Mann had been writing, sometimes at the desk where he was supposed to be copying accounts. The result was his first story, “Gefallen” (“Fallen”), published in 1896. It attracted the attention of the poet Richard Dehmel, who praised it. Mann then joined his brother Heinrich in Rome. He remained in Italy until 1898, reading voraciously and writing. His first book was published by the prestigious Berlin house of Fischer during this period. His literary career had auspiciously begun.

Life’s Work

For about a year, Mann served on the staff of the periodical Simplicissimus. On returning to Munich, he had turned his attention to a huge manuscript he had begun in Italy. His publisher was understandably nervous about the long autobiographical novel, Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie (1901; English translation, 1924). It was published in two expensive volumes, and, when it appeared in the closing days of 1900, its little-known author was only twenty-five years of age. The novel sold well, however, and almost thirty years later would be cited prominently by the Swedish Academy as it presented Mann with the Nobel Prize. Buddenbrooks traces the decline of a family through several generations from bourgeois self-confidence and adaptability to self-doubt and enervation as aesthetic and artistic elements are introduced into the family. For the next decade, in the novellas Tonio Kröger (1903; English translation, 1914) and Der Tod in Venedig (1911; Death in Venice, 1925) and in short stories such as “Tristan” (1903; English translation, 1925), Mann himself the child of a Nordic father and a Latin mother explored the conflicts between Northern European stolidity and Southern European passion, between the robust Philistinism of the middle class and the morbid sensitivity of the artist. Also during this period, he wrote the comic novel Königliche Hoheit (1909; Royal Highness, 1916).

During the early years of his career, Mann was heavily influenced by the pessimistic philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer and by Friedrich Nietzsche’s reevaluation of all values. His own life, however, entered a protracted period of happiness. He was lionized as the author of Buddenbrooks, which was eventually to sell more than a million copies in Germany alone. In February, 1905, he married Katja Pringsheim, the only daughter of a wealthy Munich family. On November 9 of that year, Erika Julia was born (she became an actress, journalist, author, and the wife of W. H. Auden, the English poet). On November 18, 1906, Klaus Heinrich was born (he became a novelist, essayist, and playwright). In all, six children were born to Mann and his wife. This happy period in the author’s life was marred in 1910 by the suicide of his beloved sister Carla and in 1914 by the outbreak of war in Europe. The youngest Mann child was born in the same year that his book of essays, Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918; reflections of a nonpolitical man), appeared. Mann, who supported his country in World War I, was widely criticized for the perceived conservatism and nationalism of this book.

Up until 1933, Mann lived the life of the author who is both critically and financially successful. He lectured throughout Northern Europe and took holidays in the South. As well as a fine home in Munich, he had a summer home and a vacation cottage. His second major masterpiece was Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain, 1927), on which he had been working since 1912. The novel, in which Mann again explores the conflicts within the middle-class German mind, has been called an epic of a civilization in decay. His much praised novella Unordnung und frühes Leid (1926; Disorder and Early Sorrow, 1929) was inspired by his favorite daughter, Elizabeth. On December 10, 1929, Mann received the Nobel Prize in Literature. His only reservation about the award was that the Swedish Academy had virtually ignored The Magic Mountain in its citation. By this time, also, Mann had entered the battle against fascism. His “Mario und der Zauberer” (1929; “Mario and the Magician,” 1936) explores the appeal and the inherent evil of this form of dictatorship. In 1933, Mann was lecturing in Holland and completing the first volume of his tetralogy, Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-1943; Joseph and His Brothers, 1934-1944), when events in Germany persuaded him not to return to his homeland.

Mann settled in Zurich. There he took up the editorship of the periodical Mass und Wert. Another three years passed before he publicly denounced the Nazi regime. When he finally did so in the most unambiguous of terms Adolf Hitler’s responses were swift and sweeping: Mann was stripped of his German citizenship, his honorary doctorate from the University of Bonn was rescinded, and Buddenbrooks (which the Nobel committee had praised as representative of the German people) was banned.

In 1938, Mann emigrated to the United States. He lived for several years in Princeton, New Jersey, where he lectured at Princeton University. He was named a Fellow of the Library of Congress, a consultant in German literature. Over the years, he had moved politically from the authoritarianism he seemed to advocate in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen to an endorsement of democracy in The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938). He gave antifascist lectures all across America. In 1941, he built a home in Santa Monica, California.

Mann became an American citizen in 1944 but returned to Switzerland in 1947. During his decade of residence in the United States, he published two short novels Lotte in Weimar (1939; The Beloved Returns, 1940), based on incidents in the life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and Die vertauschten Köpfe: Eine indische Legende (1940; The Transposed Heads: A Legend of India, 1941) and another major work, Doktor Faustus (1947; Doctor Faustus, 1948), simultaneously the fictional biography of a contemporary German composer and a retelling of the Faust legend. Here Mann returns to one of his favorite themes, the artist’s role in the world.

Mann’s last novels were Der Erwählte (1950; The Holy Sinner, 1951) and Bekentnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1954; Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, 1955). The genesis of the latter work was a short story, “Felix Krull” (first published in 1911 and translated into English in 1936). Mann had always viewed the humorous tale of a happy, unrepentant confidence man as a fragment of a novel. In fact, he conceived it to be in its final form a multivolume work. After the completion of the first volume, however, Mann turned his attention to a proposed book on Friedrich Schiller. Before he could complete this project, Mann, who had been healthy and productive to the very end of his life, developed phlebitis and died on August 12, 1955, in Zurich, Switzerland.

Significance

Thomas Mann was only four years younger than Marcel Proust and only seven years older than James Joyce, but, unlike these innovators in narrative form and language, he wrote novels that were superficially like their nineteenth century predecessors. By minutely examining his characters’ behavior and thought processes, he gave his work a seriousness of purpose that has demanded attention ever since the publication of Buddenbrooks. The air of profundity in Mann’s work is lightened by frequent flashes of humor, which are as much a part of his makeup as his philosophic turn of mind. His tendency to explore every nuance, to examine each incident in a narrative passage from every conceivable angle, has caused him to be compared to Henry James, the Anglo-American novelist. This tendency has also caused some readers to complain that Mann’s style is at times static and boring.

Still, Mann’s characters wrestle with the central problems of family, social, and political life. He was first praised as the master interpreter of German life. Later, he was viewed as a spokesperson for the best of European values during a savage period. By his last years, he had become a world figure, whose books were required reading for the student of Western culture. Many of Mann’s protagonists are artists. One could even argue that, in practicing his art of deception without regard to any moral or societal restraints, Felix Krull is the complete artist or, conversely, that every artist is something of a confidence man. Mann was fascinated by the function of the artist in society and devoted several books to the subject. Few writers besides Mann have explored as effectively the mixed blessing and curse that is the artist’s patrimony.

Further Reading

Bauer, Arnold. Thomas Mann. Translated by Alexander and Elizabeth Henderson. New York: Frederick Ungar, 1971. This short study points up each of the major phases in the subject’s life. It is an entry in the Modern Literature Monographs series and was originally published by Colloquium Verlag, Berlin. It contains a bibliography and is indexed.

Bergsten, Gunilla. Thomas Mann’s “Doctor Faustus”: The Sources and Structure of the Novel. Translated by Krishna Winston. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1969. This close examination of the genesis of Mann’s masterpiece emphasizes the author’s refugee status at the time of composition. Bergsten notes the paradox that this most German of all Mann’s novels was written in the United States while his adopted country was at war with his native country.

Brennan, Joseph Gerard. Thomas Mann’s World. Reprint. New York: Russell & Russell, 1970. This work originally appeared in 1942, while Mann was residing in the United States. It takes as its point of departure Mann’s questions about the nature of the artist and applies them to Mann himself. It contains an annotated bibliography and a very thorough index.

Clark, Mark W. Beyond Catastrophe: German Intellectuals and Cultural Renewal After World War II, 1945-1955. Lanham, Md.: Lexington Books, 2006. Clark examines the lives and works of four German intellectuals to determine their contributions to the nation’s postwar cultural reconstruction. Mann is featured in chapter 3, “Thomas Mann: Insider as Outsider.”

Feuerlicht, Ignace. Thomas Mann. Boston: Twayne, 1968. This entry in the Twayne’s World Authors series will give the general reader a concise introduction to Mann. It contains a chronology, a selected bibliography, and an index.

Hamilton, Nigel. The Brothers Mann: The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann 1871-1950 and 1875-1955. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1979. In sixteen chapters the author explores the interlinked lives of what he calls the most distinguished literary brotherhood in modern history. While noting that no definitive biography of either brother has yet been done in English, Hamilton seeks to do justice to both. The book, which was first published in England in 1978, is thorough and well documented, running to more than four hundred pages of text, with extensive notes and a bibliography arranged chronologically within categories.

Kaufmann, Fritz. Thomas Mann: The World as Will and Representation. Reprint. New York: Cooper Square, 1973. This book, by a professor of philosophy, devotes its first two chapters to Mann’s philosophy and its last six to how this philosophy is adapted to fiction in the major works.

Kurzke, Hermann. Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art, a Biography. Translated by Leslie Wilson. Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2002. Scholarly biography, tracing the events of Mann’s life and their relation to his writing.

Lukács, Georg. Essays on Thomas Mann. Translated by Stanley Mitchell. Reprint. New York: Howard Fertig, 1978. The essays in this book were written over a period of many years and under a variety of circumstances. They profit from Lukács’s personal relationship with Mann.

Maar, Michael. Bluebeard’s Chamber: Guilt and Confession in Thomas Mann. Translated by David Fernbach. New York: Verso, 2003. Focuses on Mann’s homosexuality, with Marr contradicting other biographers, who claimed Mann’s homosexuality was a cause of his guilt. Marr maintains that Mann was remarkably open about his sexual orientation and examines the treatment of sexuality in Mann’s fiction.