Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann a German novelist and essayist (1875-1955), winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929 and one of the greatest writers of the twentieth century. His novels examine the tension between art and life, the decline of the bourgeois family and the political crises of his age, culminating in the monumental tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers.

Life and Family

Paul Thomas Mann was born in Lubeck in 1875 into a prosperous merchant family. After the death of his father the family moved to Munich, where he worked in an insurance office and on the staff of a satirical magazine while beginning to write. His elder brother Heinrich Mann was also a distinguished novelist, and his children, notably Erika and Klaus, became writers and public figures in their own right.

He married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a wealthy and cultivated family, in 1905, and their household became a centre of German cultural life. The family left Germany after the Nazis came to power in 1933, living first in Switzerland, then in the United States, where Mann taught and broadcast. He returned to Switzerland after the war and died in Zurich in 1955.

His experience of exile and his opposition to National Socialism shaped both his later fiction and his public role. He became an emblem of the free and cosmopolitan culture that the regime sought to destroy, and his voice reached a wide international audience.

Early Fiction and Buddenbrooks

Mann's early stories and his first novel, Buddenbrooks, published in 1901, established his reputation. The novel traces the decline of a Hanseatic merchant family across four generations, showing how the vitality that built the business gives way to reflection, sensitivity and, eventually, artistic sensibility. It was awarded the Nobel Prize decades later.

The work is remarkable for its detailed realism and for its symbolic handling of illness and decline. Mann drew on his own family history and on the philosophy of Arthur Schopenhauer, whose ideas about will and resignation pervade the book. Its irony and its patient accumulation of domestic detail made it a classic of the German novel.

Other early works, such as Tonio Kroger and Death in Venice, developed the theme of the artist divided between the ordered world of ordinary life and the seductive but dangerous realm of beauty and passion. Death in Venice, a novella of extraordinary density, became one of his most admired works.

The Magic Mountain and the Great War

The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, is set in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss mountains, where a young engineer, Hans Castorp, plans a short visit and stays for seven years. The closed world of the institution becomes a stage for the intellectual conflicts of prewar Europe, with the rationalist Settembrini and the radical Naphta debating politics, science and death.

The novel is a philosophical comedy about time, illness and education, and it ends with the outbreak of the First World War, whose catastrophe shatters the enchanted isolation of the mountain. Its themes of decline and renewal reflect Mann's own struggle to come to terms with the war and with the collapse of the old European order.

During the war Mann initially defended German culture against Western civilisation, a position he later revised. His essay Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man expressed the conservative nationalism of his early years, and his subsequent embrace of democracy was one of the notable intellectual conversions of the period.

Joseph and His Brothers and Political Exile

Mann's great project of the exile years was Joseph and His Brothers, a tetralogy based on the biblical story of Joseph. Written over more than a decade, it retells the narrative with elaborate psychology, humour and myth, treating the ancient tale as a study of time, providence and the growth of human consciousness. Mann regarded it as his masterpiece.

He also wrote Doctor Faustus, published in 1947, the story of a composer who sells his soul to the devil, told by a friend and admirer. The novel is an allegory of Germany's descent into barbarism, and its musical and theological meditations make it one of the profoundest treatments of the relation between art and evil.

In exile Mann gave many speeches and broadcasts against the Nazi regime, and his essays defended democracy and the values of humanist culture. The Confessions of Felix Krull, an unfinished comic novel, showed that his invention and irony remained undiminished in his later years.

Style, Ideas and Legacy

Mann's style is characterised by elaborate periodic sentences, the use of leitmotif borrowed from music, and a pervasive irony that holds opposing views in suspension without resolving them. He was a master of the reflective novel in which ideas are embodied in character and incident rather than merely stated.

His fiction is preoccupied with the opposition between the bourgeoisie and the artist, between health and disease, between life and the fascination of death. He drew deeply on Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner, and his work is also a sustained meditation on the German cultural tradition that produced both high art and political catastrophe.

He is remembered as the greatest German novelist of his century and as a public moralist who used his fame in the service of freedom. His novels continue to be read as both works of art and documents of the crisis of European civilisation, and his exploration of the artist's place in society remains unsurpassed.

See also

• The Magic Mountain
• Buddenbrooks
• Nobel Prize in Literature
• German exile literature