Mann, Thomas (1875–1955)

Paul Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875, in Lübeck, Germany, and died August 12, 1955, in Zurich, Switzerland. He wrote numerous novels, novellas, and essays and was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in1929.

Mann's parents, Julia née da Silva Bruhns and Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, belonged to the wealthy Lübeck bourgeoisie. Thomas was the second of five children. His older brother Heinrich also became an important author. After his father's death and the liquidation of the family firm in 1891, his mother moved with the three younger children to Munich while Thomas stayed at school in Lübeck. In1894, he followed his mother to Munich and began to work for an insurance company but quit after 4 months. During this time, he wrote his first story, “Fallen” (Gefallen). During the same time, he attended some lectures at the Technical University of Munich, his only academic education. In 1898,the story collection Little Herr Friedemann (Der kleine Herr Friedemann) was published, followed by Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks, in 1901. In his novel, Mann described the decline of the family Buddenbrook that was inspired by his own family's history. The financial decline was associated with an unfolding of aesthetic sensibility. The opposition between art and Bügertum (the middle classes/bourgeoisie)was one of Mann's main themes, especially in his early works, and also was taken up in his novellas Tristan and Tonio Kröger in 1903.

In 1905, Mann married Katia Pringsheim, who belonged to a wealthy family of Jewish decent. The [Page 1528]couple had six children. Mann's second novel, Royal Highness (Königliche Hoheit), was published in 1909. After some difficult years of low productivity, his novella Death in Venice (Tod in Venedig) was published 1912.

In reaction to World War I, Mann wrote his voluminous essay “Reflections of an Unpolitical Man” (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen) in 1918. In his novel The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg) in 1924, he showed the decline of the bourgeois world of the 19th century by describing the stay of Hans Castorp, a young engineer from a wealthy family, in a sanatorium in Davos,Switzerland. In 1929, Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. In 1930, his story “Mario and the Magician” (Mario und der Zauberer) depicted the psychology of fascism using the example of a family's holiday experiences in Italy. Twelve days after Adolf Hitler became chancellor of Germany in1933, Mann left Germany for a lecture journey and did not return. After visits to several countries, he settled in Switzerland. In 1933, the first part of his tetralogy about “Joseph and His Brothers” (Joseph und seine Brüder)was published, and the last part followed in 1943. This epos described the biblical mythos of Joseph in a psychological perspective. In 1936,Mann became a citizen of the Czech Republic and was deprived of his German citizenship. In 1938, he settled in the United States, where he taught German literature at Princeton University. In 1939, he finished his Goethe novel Lotte in Weimar, which gave a psychological portrait of Goethe and his environment. Doktor Faustus, published in 1947, described the life of the composer Adrian Leverkühn as told by his friend Zeitbloom in Germany during the end of World War II. The novel dealt with the problems of Germany's intellectual identity. Mann's final novels, The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte) and Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull), were published in 1952 and 1954,respectively. Alarmed by the anti-Communist hysteria of the Joseph McCarthy era in the United States, Mann moved to Switzerland in 1952. His final work was his essay on Friedrich Schiller in 1955. Mann died that year in Zurich.

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