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On June 6, 1875, Thomas Mann, German novelist (Magic Mountain-Nobel 1929), was born in Lübeck, Germany (d. 1955). From the article:
"Thomas Mann | Biography, Books, & Facts
Thomas Mann, (born June 6, 1875, Lübeck, Germany—died August 12, 1955, near Zürich, Switzerland), German novelist and essayist whose early novels—Buddenbrooks (1900), Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), and Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
Early literary endeavours
Mann’s father died in 1891, and Mann moved to Munich, a centre of art and literature, where he lived until 1933. After perfunctory work in an insurance office and on the editorial staff of Simplicissimus, a satirical weekly, he devoted himself to writing, as his elder brother Heinrich had already done. His early tales, collected as Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898), reflect the aestheticism of the 1890s but are given depth by the influence of the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the composer Wagner, to all of whom Mann was always to acknowledge a deep, if ambiguous, debt. Most of Mann’s first stories centre in the problem of the creative artist, who in his devotion to form contests the meaninglessness of existence, an antithesis that Mann enlarged into that between spirit (Geist) and life (Leben). But while he showed sympathy for the artistic misfits he described, Mann was also aware that the world of imagination is a world of make-believe, and the closeness of the artist to the charlatan was already becoming a theme. At the same time, a certain nostalgia for ordinary, unproblematical life appeared in his work.
This ambivalence found full expression in his first novel, Buddenbrooks, which Mann had at first intended to be a novella in which the experience of the transcendental realities of Wagner’s music would extinguish the will to live in the son of a bourgeois family. On this beginning, the novel builds the story of the family and its business house over four generations, showing how an artistic streak not only unfits the family’s later members for the practicalities of business life but undermines their vitality as well. But, almost against his will, in Buddenbrooks Mann wrote a tender elegy for the old bourgeois virtues.
In 1905 Mann married Katja Pringsheim. There were six children of the marriage, which was a happy one. It was this happiness, perhaps, that led Mann, in Royal Highness, to provide a fairy-tale reconciliation of “form” and “life,” of degenerate feudal authority and the vigour of modern American capitalism. In 1912, however, he returned to the tragic dilemma of the artist with Death in Venice, a sombre masterpiece. In this story, the main character, a distinguished writer whose nervous and “decadent” sensibility is controlled by the discipline of style and composition, seeks relaxation from overstrain in Venice, where, as disease creeps over the city, he succumbs to an infatuation and the wish for death. Symbols of eros and death weave a subtle pattern in the sensuous opulence of this tale, which closes an epoch in Mann’s work.
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World War I and political crisis
The outbreak of World War I evoked Mann’s ardent patriotism and awoke, too, an awareness of the artist’s social commitment. His brother Heinrich was one of the few German writers to question German war aims, and his criticism of German authoritarianism stung Thomas to a bitter attack on cosmopolitan litterateurs. In 1918 he published a large political treatise, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, in which all his ingenuity of mind was summoned to justify the authoritarian state as against democracy, creative irrationalism as against “flat” rationalism, and inward culture as against moralistic civilization. This work belongs to the tradition of “revolutionary conservatism” that leads from the 19th-century German nationalistic and antidemocratic thinkers Paul Anton de Lagarde and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the apostle of the superiority of the “Germanic” race, toward National Socialism; and Mann later was to repudiate these ideas.
With the establishment of the German (Weimar) Republic in 1919, Mann slowly revised his outlook; the essays “Goethe und Tolstoi” and “Von deutscher Republik” (“The German Republic”) show his somewhat hesitant espousal of democratic principles. His new position was clarified in the novel The Magic Mountain. Its theme grows out of an earlier motif: a young engineer, Hans Castorp, visiting a cousin in a sanatorium in Davos, abandons practical life to submit to the rich seductions of disease, inwardness, and death. But the sanatorium comes to be the spiritual reflection of the possibilities and dangers of the actual world. In the end, somewhat skeptically but humanely, Castorp decides for life and service to his people: a decision Mann calls “a leave-taking from many a perilous sympathy, enchantment, and temptation, to which the European soul had been inclined.” In this great work Mann formulates with remarkable insight the fateful choices facing Europe.
World War II and exile
From this time onward Mann’s imaginative effort was directed to the novel, scarcely interrupted by the charming personal novella Early Sorrow or by Mario and the Magician, a novella that, in the person of a seedy illusionist, symbolizes the character of Fascism. His literary and cultural essays began to play an ever-growing part in elucidating and communicating his awareness of the fragility of humaneness, tolerance, and reason in the face of political crisis. His essays on Freud (1929) and Wagner (1933) are concerned with this, as are those on Goethe (1932), who more and more became for Mann an exemplary figure in his wisdom and balance. The various essays on Nietzsche document with particular poignancy Mann’s struggle against attitudes once dear to him. In 1930 he gave a courageous address in Berlin, “Ein Appell an die Vernunft” (“An Appeal to Reason”), appealing for the formation of a common front of the cultured bourgeoisie and the Socialist working class against the inhuman fanaticism of the National Socialists. In essays and on lecture tours in Germany, to Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Amsterdam, and elsewhere during the 1930s, Mann, while steadfastly attacking Nazi policy, often expressed sympathy with socialist and communist principles in the very general sense that they were the guarantee of humanism and freedom.
When Hitler became chancellor early in 1933, Mann and his wife, on holiday in Switzerland, were warned by their son and daughter in Munich not to return. For some years his home was in Switzerland, near Zürich, but he traveled widely, visiting the United States on lecture tours and finally, in 1938, settling there, first at Princeton, and from 1941 to 1952 in southern California. In 1936 he was deprived of his German citizenship; in the same year the University of Bonn took away the honorary doctorate it had bestowed in 1919 (it was restored in 1949). From 1936 to 1944 Mann was a citizen of Czechoslovakia. In 1944 he became a U.S. citizen.
After the war, Mann visited both East Germany and West Germany several times and received many public honours, but he refused to return to Germany to live. In 1952 he settled again near Zürich. His last major essays—on Goethe (1949), Chekhov (1954), and Schiller (1955)—are impressive evocations of the moral and social responsibilities of writers.
Later novels
The novels on which Mann was working throughout this period reflect variously the cultural crisis of his times. In 1933 he published The Tales of Jacob (U.S. title, Joseph and His Brothers), the first part of his four-part novel on the biblical Joseph, continued the following year in The Young Joseph and two years later with Joseph in Egypt, and completed with Joseph the Provider in 1943. In the complete work, published as Joseph and His Brothers, Mann reinterpreted the biblical story as the emergence of mobile, responsible individuality out of the tribal collective, of history out of myth, and of a human God out of the unknowable. In the first volume a timeless myth seems to be reenacted in the lives of the Hebrews. Joseph, however, though sustained by the belief that his life too is the reenactment of a myth, is thrown out of the “timeless collective” into Egypt, the world of change and history, and there learns the management of events, ideas, and himself. Though based on wide and scholarly study of history, the work is not a historical novel, and the “history” is full of irony and humour, of conscious modernization. Mann’s concern is to provide a myth for his own times, capable of sustaining and directing his generation and of restoring a belief in the power of humane reason.
Mann took time off from this work to write, in the same spirit, his Lotte in Weimar (U.S. title, The Beloved Returns). Lotte Kestner, the heroine of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, his semi-autobiographical story of unrequited love and romantic despair, visits Weimar in old age to see once again her old lover, now famous, and win some acknowledgment from him. But Goethe remains distant and refuses to reenter the past; she learns from him that true reverence for man means also acceptance of and reverence for change, intelligent activity directed to the “demand of the day.” In this, as in the Joseph novels, in settings so distant from his own time, Mann was seeking to define the essential principles of humane civilization; their spacious and often humorous serenity of tone implicitly challenges the inhuman irrationalism of the Nazis.
In Doktor Faustus, begun in 1943 at the darkest period of the war, Mann wrote the most directly political of his novels. It is the life story of a German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, born in 1885, who dies in 1940 after 10 years of mental alienation. A solitary, estranged figure, he “speaks” the experience of his times in his music, and the story of Leverkühn’s compositions is that of German culture in the two decades before 1930—more specifically of the collapse of traditional humanism and the victory of the mixture of sophisticated nihilism and barbaric primitivism that undermine it. With imaginative insight Mann interpreted the new musical forms and themes of Leverkühn’s compositions up to the final work, a setting of the lament of Doctor Faustus in the 16th-century version of the Faust legend, who once, in hope, had made a pact with the Devil, but in the end is reduced to hopelessness. The one gleam of hope in this sombre work, however, in which the personal tragedy of Leverkühn is subtly related to Germany’s destruction in the war through the comments of the fictitious narrator, Zeitblom, lies in its very grief.
The composition of the novel was fully documented by Mann in 1949 in The Genesis of a Novel. Doktor Faustus exhausted him as no other work of his had done, and The Holy Sinner and The Black Swan, published in 1951 and 1953, respectively, show a relaxation of intensity in spite of their accomplished, even virtuoso style. Mann rounded off his imaginative work in 1954 with The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, the light, often uproariously funny story of a confidence man who wins the favour and love of others by enacting the roles they desire of him.
Mann’s style is finely wrought and full of resources, enriched by humour, irony, and parody; his composition is subtle and many-layered, brilliantly realistic on one level and yet reaching to deeper levels of symbolism. His works lack simplicity, and his tendency to set his characters at a distance by his own ironical view of them has sometimes laid him open to the charge of lack of heart. He was, however, aware that simplicity and sentiment lend themselves to manipulation by ideological and political powers, and the sometimes elaborate sophistication of his works cannot hide from the discerning reader his underlying impassioned and tender solicitude for mankind.
Legacy
Mann was the greatest German novelist of the 20th century, and by the end of his life his works had acquired the status of classics both within and without Germany. His subtly structured novels and shorter stories constitute a persistent and imaginative enquiry into the nature of Western bourgeois culture, in which a haunting awareness of its precariousness and threatened disintegration is balanced by an appreciation of and tender concern for its spiritual achievements. Round this central theme cluster a group of related problems that recur in different forms—the relation of thought to reality and of the artist to society, the complexity of reality and of time, the seductions of spirituality, eros, and death. Mann’s imaginative and practical involvement in the social and political catastrophes of his time provided him with fresh insights that make his work rich and varied. His finely wrought essays, notably those on Tolstoy, Goethe, Freud, and Nietzsche, record the intellectual struggles through which he reached the ethical commitment that shapes the major imaginative works."
"Thomas Mann | Biography, Books, & Facts
Thomas Mann, (born June 6, 1875, Lübeck, Germany—died August 12, 1955, near Zürich, Switzerland), German novelist and essayist whose early novels—Buddenbrooks (1900), Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), and Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.
Early literary endeavours
Mann’s father died in 1891, and Mann moved to Munich, a centre of art and literature, where he lived until 1933. After perfunctory work in an insurance office and on the editorial staff of Simplicissimus, a satirical weekly, he devoted himself to writing, as his elder brother Heinrich had already done. His early tales, collected as Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898), reflect the aestheticism of the 1890s but are given depth by the influence of the philosophers Schopenhauer and Nietzsche and the composer Wagner, to all of whom Mann was always to acknowledge a deep, if ambiguous, debt. Most of Mann’s first stories centre in the problem of the creative artist, who in his devotion to form contests the meaninglessness of existence, an antithesis that Mann enlarged into that between spirit (Geist) and life (Leben). But while he showed sympathy for the artistic misfits he described, Mann was also aware that the world of imagination is a world of make-believe, and the closeness of the artist to the charlatan was already becoming a theme. At the same time, a certain nostalgia for ordinary, unproblematical life appeared in his work.
This ambivalence found full expression in his first novel, Buddenbrooks, which Mann had at first intended to be a novella in which the experience of the transcendental realities of Wagner’s music would extinguish the will to live in the son of a bourgeois family. On this beginning, the novel builds the story of the family and its business house over four generations, showing how an artistic streak not only unfits the family’s later members for the practicalities of business life but undermines their vitality as well. But, almost against his will, in Buddenbrooks Mann wrote a tender elegy for the old bourgeois virtues.
In 1905 Mann married Katja Pringsheim. There were six children of the marriage, which was a happy one. It was this happiness, perhaps, that led Mann, in Royal Highness, to provide a fairy-tale reconciliation of “form” and “life,” of degenerate feudal authority and the vigour of modern American capitalism. In 1912, however, he returned to the tragic dilemma of the artist with Death in Venice, a sombre masterpiece. In this story, the main character, a distinguished writer whose nervous and “decadent” sensibility is controlled by the discipline of style and composition, seeks relaxation from overstrain in Venice, where, as disease creeps over the city, he succumbs to an infatuation and the wish for death. Symbols of eros and death weave a subtle pattern in the sensuous opulence of this tale, which closes an epoch in Mann’s work.
Facts Matter. Support the truth and unlock all of Britannica’s content.
World War I and political crisis
The outbreak of World War I evoked Mann’s ardent patriotism and awoke, too, an awareness of the artist’s social commitment. His brother Heinrich was one of the few German writers to question German war aims, and his criticism of German authoritarianism stung Thomas to a bitter attack on cosmopolitan litterateurs. In 1918 he published a large political treatise, Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, in which all his ingenuity of mind was summoned to justify the authoritarian state as against democracy, creative irrationalism as against “flat” rationalism, and inward culture as against moralistic civilization. This work belongs to the tradition of “revolutionary conservatism” that leads from the 19th-century German nationalistic and antidemocratic thinkers Paul Anton de Lagarde and Houston Stewart Chamberlain, the apostle of the superiority of the “Germanic” race, toward National Socialism; and Mann later was to repudiate these ideas.
With the establishment of the German (Weimar) Republic in 1919, Mann slowly revised his outlook; the essays “Goethe und Tolstoi” and “Von deutscher Republik” (“The German Republic”) show his somewhat hesitant espousal of democratic principles. His new position was clarified in the novel The Magic Mountain. Its theme grows out of an earlier motif: a young engineer, Hans Castorp, visiting a cousin in a sanatorium in Davos, abandons practical life to submit to the rich seductions of disease, inwardness, and death. But the sanatorium comes to be the spiritual reflection of the possibilities and dangers of the actual world. In the end, somewhat skeptically but humanely, Castorp decides for life and service to his people: a decision Mann calls “a leave-taking from many a perilous sympathy, enchantment, and temptation, to which the European soul had been inclined.” In this great work Mann formulates with remarkable insight the fateful choices facing Europe.
World War II and exile
From this time onward Mann’s imaginative effort was directed to the novel, scarcely interrupted by the charming personal novella Early Sorrow or by Mario and the Magician, a novella that, in the person of a seedy illusionist, symbolizes the character of Fascism. His literary and cultural essays began to play an ever-growing part in elucidating and communicating his awareness of the fragility of humaneness, tolerance, and reason in the face of political crisis. His essays on Freud (1929) and Wagner (1933) are concerned with this, as are those on Goethe (1932), who more and more became for Mann an exemplary figure in his wisdom and balance. The various essays on Nietzsche document with particular poignancy Mann’s struggle against attitudes once dear to him. In 1930 he gave a courageous address in Berlin, “Ein Appell an die Vernunft” (“An Appeal to Reason”), appealing for the formation of a common front of the cultured bourgeoisie and the Socialist working class against the inhuman fanaticism of the National Socialists. In essays and on lecture tours in Germany, to Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Amsterdam, and elsewhere during the 1930s, Mann, while steadfastly attacking Nazi policy, often expressed sympathy with socialist and communist principles in the very general sense that they were the guarantee of humanism and freedom.
When Hitler became chancellor early in 1933, Mann and his wife, on holiday in Switzerland, were warned by their son and daughter in Munich not to return. For some years his home was in Switzerland, near Zürich, but he traveled widely, visiting the United States on lecture tours and finally, in 1938, settling there, first at Princeton, and from 1941 to 1952 in southern California. In 1936 he was deprived of his German citizenship; in the same year the University of Bonn took away the honorary doctorate it had bestowed in 1919 (it was restored in 1949). From 1936 to 1944 Mann was a citizen of Czechoslovakia. In 1944 he became a U.S. citizen.
After the war, Mann visited both East Germany and West Germany several times and received many public honours, but he refused to return to Germany to live. In 1952 he settled again near Zürich. His last major essays—on Goethe (1949), Chekhov (1954), and Schiller (1955)—are impressive evocations of the moral and social responsibilities of writers.
Later novels
The novels on which Mann was working throughout this period reflect variously the cultural crisis of his times. In 1933 he published The Tales of Jacob (U.S. title, Joseph and His Brothers), the first part of his four-part novel on the biblical Joseph, continued the following year in The Young Joseph and two years later with Joseph in Egypt, and completed with Joseph the Provider in 1943. In the complete work, published as Joseph and His Brothers, Mann reinterpreted the biblical story as the emergence of mobile, responsible individuality out of the tribal collective, of history out of myth, and of a human God out of the unknowable. In the first volume a timeless myth seems to be reenacted in the lives of the Hebrews. Joseph, however, though sustained by the belief that his life too is the reenactment of a myth, is thrown out of the “timeless collective” into Egypt, the world of change and history, and there learns the management of events, ideas, and himself. Though based on wide and scholarly study of history, the work is not a historical novel, and the “history” is full of irony and humour, of conscious modernization. Mann’s concern is to provide a myth for his own times, capable of sustaining and directing his generation and of restoring a belief in the power of humane reason.
Mann took time off from this work to write, in the same spirit, his Lotte in Weimar (U.S. title, The Beloved Returns). Lotte Kestner, the heroine of Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther, his semi-autobiographical story of unrequited love and romantic despair, visits Weimar in old age to see once again her old lover, now famous, and win some acknowledgment from him. But Goethe remains distant and refuses to reenter the past; she learns from him that true reverence for man means also acceptance of and reverence for change, intelligent activity directed to the “demand of the day.” In this, as in the Joseph novels, in settings so distant from his own time, Mann was seeking to define the essential principles of humane civilization; their spacious and often humorous serenity of tone implicitly challenges the inhuman irrationalism of the Nazis.
In Doktor Faustus, begun in 1943 at the darkest period of the war, Mann wrote the most directly political of his novels. It is the life story of a German composer, Adrian Leverkühn, born in 1885, who dies in 1940 after 10 years of mental alienation. A solitary, estranged figure, he “speaks” the experience of his times in his music, and the story of Leverkühn’s compositions is that of German culture in the two decades before 1930—more specifically of the collapse of traditional humanism and the victory of the mixture of sophisticated nihilism and barbaric primitivism that undermine it. With imaginative insight Mann interpreted the new musical forms and themes of Leverkühn’s compositions up to the final work, a setting of the lament of Doctor Faustus in the 16th-century version of the Faust legend, who once, in hope, had made a pact with the Devil, but in the end is reduced to hopelessness. The one gleam of hope in this sombre work, however, in which the personal tragedy of Leverkühn is subtly related to Germany’s destruction in the war through the comments of the fictitious narrator, Zeitblom, lies in its very grief.
The composition of the novel was fully documented by Mann in 1949 in The Genesis of a Novel. Doktor Faustus exhausted him as no other work of his had done, and The Holy Sinner and The Black Swan, published in 1951 and 1953, respectively, show a relaxation of intensity in spite of their accomplished, even virtuoso style. Mann rounded off his imaginative work in 1954 with The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, the light, often uproariously funny story of a confidence man who wins the favour and love of others by enacting the roles they desire of him.
Mann’s style is finely wrought and full of resources, enriched by humour, irony, and parody; his composition is subtle and many-layered, brilliantly realistic on one level and yet reaching to deeper levels of symbolism. His works lack simplicity, and his tendency to set his characters at a distance by his own ironical view of them has sometimes laid him open to the charge of lack of heart. He was, however, aware that simplicity and sentiment lend themselves to manipulation by ideological and political powers, and the sometimes elaborate sophistication of his works cannot hide from the discerning reader his underlying impassioned and tender solicitude for mankind.
Legacy
Mann was the greatest German novelist of the 20th century, and by the end of his life his works had acquired the status of classics both within and without Germany. His subtly structured novels and shorter stories constitute a persistent and imaginative enquiry into the nature of Western bourgeois culture, in which a haunting awareness of its precariousness and threatened disintegration is balanced by an appreciation of and tender concern for its spiritual achievements. Round this central theme cluster a group of related problems that recur in different forms—the relation of thought to reality and of the artist to society, the complexity of reality and of time, the seductions of spirituality, eros, and death. Mann’s imaginative and practical involvement in the social and political catastrophes of his time provided him with fresh insights that make his work rich and varied. His finely wrought essays, notably those on Tolstoy, Goethe, Freud, and Nietzsche, record the intellectual struggles through which he reached the ethical commitment that shapes the major imaginative works."
Thomas Mann | Biography, Books, & Facts
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Thomas Mann: His Life and Work (documentary)
The documentary examines the life and work of German literary icon Thomas Mann, beginning with Mann's nomination for the 1949 Goethe Prize. His symbolic repr...
Thank you, my friend SGT (Join to see) for making us aware that June 5 is the anniversary of the birth of German novelist and Nobel Laureate for Literature in 1929 Thomas Mann.
Thomas Mann: His Life and Work (documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTAJXJ_ptMY
Image: 1929 Thomas Mann The Nobel Prize Logo.jpg
Background from nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1929/mann/biographical/
Thomas Mann Autobiography for Noble prize
Biographical
I was born in Lübeck on June 6, 1875, the second son of a merchant and senator of the Free City, Johann Heinrich Mann, and his wife Julia da Silva Bruhns. My father was the grandson and great-grandson of Lübeck citizens, but my mother first saw the light of day in Rio de Janeiro as the daughter of a German plantation owner and a Portuguese-Creole Brazilian. She was taken to Germany at the age of seven.
I was designated to take over my father’s grain firm, which commemorated its centenary during my boyhood, and I attended the science division of the «Katharineum» at Lübeck. I loathed school and up to the very end failed to meet its requirements, owing to an innate and paralyzing resistance to any external demands, which I later learned to correct only with great difficulty. Whatever education I possess I acquired in a free and autodidactic manner. Official instruction failed to instill in me any but the most rudimentary knowledge.
When I was fifteen, my father died, a comparatively young man. The firm was liquidated. A little later my mother left the town with the younger children in order to settle in the south of Germany, in Munich.
After finishing school rather ingloriously, I followed her and for the time being became a clerk in the office of a Munich insurance company whose director had been a friend of my father’s. Later, by way of preparing for a career in journalism, I attended lectures in history, economics, art history, and literature at the university and the polytechnic. In between I spent a year in Italy with my brother Heinrich, my elder by four years. During this time my first collection of short stories, Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898) [Little Herr Friedemann], was published. In Rome, I also began to write the novel Buddenbrooks, which appeared in 1901 and which since then has been such a favourite with the German public that today over a million copies of it are in circulation.
There followed shorter stories, collected in the volume Tristan (1903), of which the North-South artist’s novella Tonio Kroger is usually considered the most characteristic, and also the Renaissance dialogues Fiorenza (1906), a closet drama which, however, has occasionally been staged.
In 1905 I married the daughter of Alfred Pringsheim, who had the chair of mathematics at the University of Munich. On her mother’s side my wife is the granddaughter of Ernst and Hedwig Dohm, the well-known Berlin journalist and his wife, who played a leading role in the German movement for women’s emancipation. From our marriage have come six children: three girls, of whom the eldest has gone into the theatre, and three boys, of whom the eldest has also devoted himself to literature.
The first literary fruit of my new status was the novel Königliche Hoheit (1909) [Royal Highness], a court story that provides the frame for a psychology of the formal-representative life and for moral questions such as the reconciliation of an aristocratic, melancholic consciousness with the demands of the community. Another novelistic project followed, the Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1922) [Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man]. It is based on an idea of parody, that of taking an element of venerable tradition, of the Goethean, self-stylizing, autobiographic, and aristocratic confession, and translating it into the sphere of the humorous and the criminal. The novel has remained a fragment, but there are connoisseurs who consider its published sections my best and most felicitous achievement. Perhaps it is the most personal thing I have written, for it represents my attitude toward tradition, which is simultaneously loving and destructive and has dominated me as a writer.
In 1913 the novella Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] was published, which beside Tonio Kroger is considered my most valid achievement in that genre. While I was writing its final sections I conceived the idea of the «Bildungsroman» Der Zauberberg (1924) [The Magic Mountain], but work on it was interrupted in the very beginning by the war.
Although the war did not make any immediate demands on me physically, while it lasted it put a complete stop to my artistic activity because it forced me into an agonizing reappraisal of my fundamental assumptions, a human and intellectual self-inquiry that found its condensation in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen [Reflections of an Unpolitical Man], published in 1918. Its subject is the personally accented problem of being German, the political problem, treated in the spirit of a polemical conservatism that underwent many revisions as life went on. An account of the development of my socio-moral ideas is found in the volumes of essays Rede und Antwort (1922) [Question and Answer], Bemühungen (1925) [Efforts], and Die Forderung des Tages (1930) [Order of fhe Day].
Lecture tours abroad began immediately after the borders of countries neutral or hostile during the war had been re-opened. They led me first to Holland, Switzerland, and Denmark. The spring of 1923 saw a journey to Spain. In the following year I was guest of honour of the newly established PEN Club in London; two years later I accepted an invitation of the French branch of the Carnegie Foundation, and I visited Warsaw in 1927.
Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1924, after many prolonged delays the two volumes of Der Zauberberg were published. The interest of the public, as revealed by the hundred printings the book ran into within a few years, proved that I had chosen the most favourable moment to come to the fore with this composition of ideas epically conceived. The problems of the novel did not essentially appeal to the masses, but they were of consuming interest to the educated, and the distress of the times had increased the receptivity of the public to a degree that favoured my product, which so wilfully played fast and loose with the form of the novel.
Soon after the completion of the Betrachtungen I added to my longer narratives a prose idyll, the animal story Herr und Hund (1919) [Bashan and I]. Der Zauberberg was followed by a bourgeois novella from the period of revolution and inflation, Unordnung und frühes Leid (1926) [Disorder and Early Sorrow]; Mario und der Zauberer [Mario and the Magician], written in 1929, is for the time being my last attempt at compositions of this size. It was written during my work on a new novel which in subject matter and intention is far different from all earlier works, for it leaves behind the bourgeois individual sphere and enters into that of the past and myth. The Biblical story for which the title Joseph und seine Brüder is planned, and of which individual sections have been made known through public readings and publications in journals, seems about half completed. A study trip connected with it led me to Egypt and Palestine in February-March-April, 1930.
Ever since his early days the author of this biographical sketch has been encouraged in his endeavours by the kind interest of his fellow men as well as by official honours. An example is the conferment of an honorary doctor’s degree by the University of Bonn in 1919; and, to satisfy the German delight in title, the Senate of Lübeck, my home town, added the title of professor on the occasion of a city anniversary. I am one of the first members, nominated by the state itself, of the new literary division of the Prussian Academy of Arts; my fiftieth birthday was accompanied by expressions of public affection that I can remember only with emotion, and the summit of all these distinctions has been the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy last year. But I may say that no turmoil of success has ever dimmed the clear apprehension of the relativity of my deserts or even for a moment dulled the edge of my self-criticism. 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.
Biographical note on Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) moved to Switzerland in 1933 shortly after the Nazis had come to power and begun a campaign of abuse against him. He was formally expatriated in 1936. In 1937 the University of Bonn deprived him of his honorary doctorate (restored in 1946), which aroused Mann to a famous and moving reply in which he epitomized the situation of the German writer in exile. Mann, who had anticipated and warned against the rise of fascism during the Weimar Republic (e.g., in Mario and the Magician), continued to combat it in many pamphlets and talks throughout the period of the Nazi regime and the Second World War. He became an American citizen in 1940 and, from 1941 to 1953, lived in Santa Monica, California. After the war he frequently revisited Europe: in 1949 he received the Goethe Prizes of Weimar (East Germany) and Frankfurt (West Germany), but when he finally returned to Europe he settled near Zürich, where he died in 1955.
Among the chief works of Mann’s later years are the novels Lotte in Weimar (1939) [The Beloved Returns], in which the fictional account of a meeting of the lovers of Werther grown old provides the framework for a psychologically and technically ingenious portrait of the old Goethe; Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-43) [Joseph and his Brothers], a version of the Old Testament story which interweaves myth and psychology; and Dr. Faustus (1947), the story of an artist who chooses to pay with self-destruction for the powers of genius, a fate that echoes the last days of the Third Reich; the collections of essays Leiden und Grösse der Meister (1935)[ Suffering and Greatness of the Masters]; and the essay on Schiller, Versuch über Schiller (1955). A complete edition of his works in twelve volumes was published in Berlin (1956) and in Frankfurt (1960)."
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Thomas Mann: His Life and Work (documentary)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CTAJXJ_ptMY
Image: 1929 Thomas Mann The Nobel Prize Logo.jpg
Background from nobelprize.org/prizes/literature/1929/mann/biographical/
Thomas Mann Autobiography for Noble prize
Biographical
I was born in Lübeck on June 6, 1875, the second son of a merchant and senator of the Free City, Johann Heinrich Mann, and his wife Julia da Silva Bruhns. My father was the grandson and great-grandson of Lübeck citizens, but my mother first saw the light of day in Rio de Janeiro as the daughter of a German plantation owner and a Portuguese-Creole Brazilian. She was taken to Germany at the age of seven.
I was designated to take over my father’s grain firm, which commemorated its centenary during my boyhood, and I attended the science division of the «Katharineum» at Lübeck. I loathed school and up to the very end failed to meet its requirements, owing to an innate and paralyzing resistance to any external demands, which I later learned to correct only with great difficulty. Whatever education I possess I acquired in a free and autodidactic manner. Official instruction failed to instill in me any but the most rudimentary knowledge.
When I was fifteen, my father died, a comparatively young man. The firm was liquidated. A little later my mother left the town with the younger children in order to settle in the south of Germany, in Munich.
After finishing school rather ingloriously, I followed her and for the time being became a clerk in the office of a Munich insurance company whose director had been a friend of my father’s. Later, by way of preparing for a career in journalism, I attended lectures in history, economics, art history, and literature at the university and the polytechnic. In between I spent a year in Italy with my brother Heinrich, my elder by four years. During this time my first collection of short stories, Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898) [Little Herr Friedemann], was published. In Rome, I also began to write the novel Buddenbrooks, which appeared in 1901 and which since then has been such a favourite with the German public that today over a million copies of it are in circulation.
There followed shorter stories, collected in the volume Tristan (1903), of which the North-South artist’s novella Tonio Kroger is usually considered the most characteristic, and also the Renaissance dialogues Fiorenza (1906), a closet drama which, however, has occasionally been staged.
In 1905 I married the daughter of Alfred Pringsheim, who had the chair of mathematics at the University of Munich. On her mother’s side my wife is the granddaughter of Ernst and Hedwig Dohm, the well-known Berlin journalist and his wife, who played a leading role in the German movement for women’s emancipation. From our marriage have come six children: three girls, of whom the eldest has gone into the theatre, and three boys, of whom the eldest has also devoted himself to literature.
The first literary fruit of my new status was the novel Königliche Hoheit (1909) [Royal Highness], a court story that provides the frame for a psychology of the formal-representative life and for moral questions such as the reconciliation of an aristocratic, melancholic consciousness with the demands of the community. Another novelistic project followed, the Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1922) [Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man]. It is based on an idea of parody, that of taking an element of venerable tradition, of the Goethean, self-stylizing, autobiographic, and aristocratic confession, and translating it into the sphere of the humorous and the criminal. The novel has remained a fragment, but there are connoisseurs who consider its published sections my best and most felicitous achievement. Perhaps it is the most personal thing I have written, for it represents my attitude toward tradition, which is simultaneously loving and destructive and has dominated me as a writer.
In 1913 the novella Tod in Venedig [Death in Venice] was published, which beside Tonio Kroger is considered my most valid achievement in that genre. While I was writing its final sections I conceived the idea of the «Bildungsroman» Der Zauberberg (1924) [The Magic Mountain], but work on it was interrupted in the very beginning by the war.
Although the war did not make any immediate demands on me physically, while it lasted it put a complete stop to my artistic activity because it forced me into an agonizing reappraisal of my fundamental assumptions, a human and intellectual self-inquiry that found its condensation in Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen [Reflections of an Unpolitical Man], published in 1918. Its subject is the personally accented problem of being German, the political problem, treated in the spirit of a polemical conservatism that underwent many revisions as life went on. An account of the development of my socio-moral ideas is found in the volumes of essays Rede und Antwort (1922) [Question and Answer], Bemühungen (1925) [Efforts], and Die Forderung des Tages (1930) [Order of fhe Day].
Lecture tours abroad began immediately after the borders of countries neutral or hostile during the war had been re-opened. They led me first to Holland, Switzerland, and Denmark. The spring of 1923 saw a journey to Spain. In the following year I was guest of honour of the newly established PEN Club in London; two years later I accepted an invitation of the French branch of the Carnegie Foundation, and I visited Warsaw in 1927.
Meanwhile, in the autumn of 1924, after many prolonged delays the two volumes of Der Zauberberg were published. The interest of the public, as revealed by the hundred printings the book ran into within a few years, proved that I had chosen the most favourable moment to come to the fore with this composition of ideas epically conceived. The problems of the novel did not essentially appeal to the masses, but they were of consuming interest to the educated, and the distress of the times had increased the receptivity of the public to a degree that favoured my product, which so wilfully played fast and loose with the form of the novel.
Soon after the completion of the Betrachtungen I added to my longer narratives a prose idyll, the animal story Herr und Hund (1919) [Bashan and I]. Der Zauberberg was followed by a bourgeois novella from the period of revolution and inflation, Unordnung und frühes Leid (1926) [Disorder and Early Sorrow]; Mario und der Zauberer [Mario and the Magician], written in 1929, is for the time being my last attempt at compositions of this size. It was written during my work on a new novel which in subject matter and intention is far different from all earlier works, for it leaves behind the bourgeois individual sphere and enters into that of the past and myth. The Biblical story for which the title Joseph und seine Brüder is planned, and of which individual sections have been made known through public readings and publications in journals, seems about half completed. A study trip connected with it led me to Egypt and Palestine in February-March-April, 1930.
Ever since his early days the author of this biographical sketch has been encouraged in his endeavours by the kind interest of his fellow men as well as by official honours. An example is the conferment of an honorary doctor’s degree by the University of Bonn in 1919; and, to satisfy the German delight in title, the Senate of Lübeck, my home town, added the title of professor on the occasion of a city anniversary. I am one of the first members, nominated by the state itself, of the new literary division of the Prussian Academy of Arts; my fiftieth birthday was accompanied by expressions of public affection that I can remember only with emotion, and the summit of all these distinctions has been the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature by the Swedish Academy last year. But I may say that no turmoil of success has ever dimmed the clear apprehension of the relativity of my deserts or even for a moment dulled the edge of my self-criticism. 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.
Biographical note on Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) moved to Switzerland in 1933 shortly after the Nazis had come to power and begun a campaign of abuse against him. He was formally expatriated in 1936. In 1937 the University of Bonn deprived him of his honorary doctorate (restored in 1946), which aroused Mann to a famous and moving reply in which he epitomized the situation of the German writer in exile. Mann, who had anticipated and warned against the rise of fascism during the Weimar Republic (e.g., in Mario and the Magician), continued to combat it in many pamphlets and talks throughout the period of the Nazi regime and the Second World War. He became an American citizen in 1940 and, from 1941 to 1953, lived in Santa Monica, California. After the war he frequently revisited Europe: in 1949 he received the Goethe Prizes of Weimar (East Germany) and Frankfurt (West Germany), but when he finally returned to Europe he settled near Zürich, where he died in 1955.
Among the chief works of Mann’s later years are the novels Lotte in Weimar (1939) [The Beloved Returns], in which the fictional account of a meeting of the lovers of Werther grown old provides the framework for a psychologically and technically ingenious portrait of the old Goethe; Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-43) [Joseph and his Brothers], a version of the Old Testament story which interweaves myth and psychology; and Dr. Faustus (1947), the story of an artist who chooses to pay with self-destruction for the powers of genius, a fate that echoes the last days of the Third Reich; the collections of essays Leiden und Grösse der Meister (1935)[ Suffering and Greatness of the Masters]; and the essay on Schiller, Versuch über Schiller (1955). A complete edition of his works in twelve volumes was published in Berlin (1956) and in Frankfurt (1960)."
FYI LTC Jeff Shearer Maj Robert Thornton SGT Philip RoncariCWO3 Dennis M. SFC William Farrell TSgt Joe C.] SGT (Join to see)PO3 Bob McCordSGT Jim Arnold PO3 Phyllis Maynard SPC Douglas Bolton Cynthia Croft PO1 H Gene Lawrence PO2 Kevin Parker PO3 Craig Phillips SPC Margaret Higgins SSgt Boyd Herrst
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"The Magic Mountain" was among the novels one of my roommates and I read for a course entitled "20th Century European Novels".
My roommate (now a Professor Emeritus of English), dejectedly reported to me that "It's a thick book, with small print". Shortly after, when we took up "The Stranger" by Camus, he gleefully reported "It's thin --- and BIG PRINT!!"
My roommate (now a Professor Emeritus of English), dejectedly reported to me that "It's a thick book, with small print". Shortly after, when we took up "The Stranger" by Camus, he gleefully reported "It's thin --- and BIG PRINT!!"
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