MANN, THOMAS

MANN, THOMAS (1875–1955), German writer.

Thomas Mann's standing as a modern classic rests securely on his singular accomplishments as a writer. Contributing to his pre-eminence was his role, first in Germany, later in the United States, as incisive public intellectual during the most tortured period of the twentieth century. Mann was the head of a family of six children, three of whom achieved fame in their own right: Erika as cabaret performer and journalist; Klaus as author and essayist; Golo as historian. In 2001, Die Manns became a popular television series in Germany—the most visible sign of a growing recognition that the members of the Mann family, including Heinrich, Thomas's older brother, embodied in their lives and works much of the genius, spirit, and unrest of recent German culture and history.

life

Paul Thomas Mann was the second of the five children born to Johann Heinrich Mann, the owner of a grain trading firm and a senator from the Hanseatic city of Lübeck, and Julia, née da Silva-Bruhns, his wife of Brazilian-German descent. After attending a performance of Lohengrin in 1893, Mann's love of music, kindled by his mother, grew into a passionate and lifelong interest in everything Wagnerian. Mann was a poor student who never obtained the high school diploma required for formal university study. He rather became a formidable autodidact, as evidenced in all his literary work, and outstandingly in Joseph and His Brothers.

In 1894, Mann moved to Munich, where he remained until 1933. Briefly, while Heinrich was its editor, he wrote for the nationalist journal Das zwanzigste Jahrhundert; he then held a job for two years with the satirical weekly Simplicissimus. Having established himself as a major writer in 1901, he married, in 1905, Katia Pringsheim (1883–1980), the daughter of a distinguished Jewish family. Although Mann was profoundly shaped by the homosocial culture prevalent in artistic circles of the day, the marriage was by all standards a success. Nonetheless, his essentially homoerotic imagination remained a most profound source of his creativity, as evidenced in nearly all his works, and notably in Death in Venice.

When war broke out in 1914, Mann was carried away by the prevailing nationalist fever. In an inspired five-hundred-page essay, Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man (1918), part intellectual autobiography, part analysis of German culture, he aggressively defended Germany's right to preserve its unique music-centered culture and, pitting Western Zivilisation against German Kultur, to reject Western-style democracy. The book made him a hero in conservative circles. However, by entering the political arena Mann began a learning process that soon led him to revise his wartime views of France and the West. In 1922, in one of his most consequential public interventions, he irritated his conservative admirers by enjoining German youth to support the unloved Weimar Republic. Much of Mann's spiritual journey of those years is reflected in The Magic Mountain.

As an early critic of fascism (Mario and the Magician, 1929) and of National Socialism (An Appeal to Reason, 1930), Mann was forced to leave Germany in 1933 when, in the wake of the powerful speech he gave to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of Richard Wagner's death, an opportunistic alliance of prominent cultural figures and Nazis singled him out for denunciation as un-German and unwanted in the new Germany. During the first three years of his exile (in France and Switzerland), he maintained a tactical silence about the Nazi regime, largely to protect his publisher. When he did begin to speak out, in February 1936, Mann rose from the German exiles as the most implacable foe of Adolf Hitler and the Third Reich, expressing himself nowhere more effectively than in the open letter to the University of Bonn in response to having been stripped of his German citizenship and honorary doctorate.

In 1938, Mann moved to the United States, first to Princeton, New Jersey, where he was a lecturer at the university, then, in 1941, to Los Angeles, where he became the central figure of an illustrious German exile community (the so-called Weimar on the Pacific) that included Bertolt Brecht, Arnold Schoenberg, and Theodor W. Adorno. Long before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, in speeches across the country, Mann sought to convince a reluctant America of the necessity to go to war against Germany. With Albert Einstein and Arturo Toscanini, he was one of the politically most outspoken intellectuals in America, broadcasting, from 1940, monthly radio messages to Germany (Listen, Germany!).

Having entered the country on a Czech passport, Mann became an American citizen in 1944. In 1945, after the defeat of the Third Reich, he was asked to return to Germany to help to heal the wounds. He refused to do so, citing his "national excommunication" of 1933 and rebuking his colleagues for having continued to publish under the Nazi regime. This only deepened the rift between Germany and its most prominent writer. Dismayed by the policies of the Truman administration and publicly branded as a communist dupe, Mann left America in 1952 to spend the last years of his life in Switzerland. Helies buried in Kilchberg, near Zurich.

work

Mann's work embraces short fiction; novels; a play; essays on literature, music, and philosophy; and political commentary. He left thousands of letters and ten volumes of diaries covering the years from 1918 to 1921 and 1933 to 1955, all others having been destroyed by the author.

At first, Mann considered the short story in the manner of Guy de Maupassant and Anton Chekhov to be his particular forte. In fact, all his novels were conceived as novellas, including Buddenbrooks (1901), a family saga spanning four generations and tracing the decline of a once robust Hanseatic merchant family as its members display a growing interest in matters of the mind, music in particular. With the death of sixteen-year old Hanno, intoxicated by the music of Wagner and unfit for the harsh realities of life, the family becomes extinct, thus making room for the rise of a rival Jewish family. Drawing on Theodor Fontane's late novels and Wagner's Ring of the Nibelung, philosophically shaped by Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche, Buddenbrooks remains Mann's most popular novel. It was this book that earned him the Nobel Prize in 1929. The theme of the artistically inclined outsider, personified by Hanno, is continued in several early novellas, most felicitously in Tonio Kröger (1903), a portrait of the artist as a young man. The competing claims of art and society long remained at the center of Mann's work; however, under the weight of historical experience he both broadened and sharpened his vision with a focus on the nexus of culture and politics that eventually produced Doctor Faustus.

Mann's second novel, Royal Highness (1909), an allegorical romance set at the court of a small German principality, proved to be a artistic dead end. It was the polished, neoclassical form of Death in Venice (1912) with its elaborate mythological subtext that opened the way to the future. The story's hero, Gustav von Aschenbach, bears more than a superficial resemblance to its author; but while Aschenbach's life is tragically destroyed by his passion for a fourteen-year-old Polish boy, Mann himself emerged from writing Death in Venice artistically strengthened. Conceived in 1912 as a comic and satirical counterpart to the tragedy of Aschenbach, The Magic Mountain (1924) grew into a modernist bildungsroman and an epicex position of prewar Europe an cultural issues. Set in a Swiss sanatorium, the novel traces the emotional and intellectual adventures of an engineering student from Hamburg and concludes with the "thunderclap" of the outbreak of war.

For most of the sixteen years from 1927 to 1943, Mann was preoccupied with his four-part epic, Joseph and His Brothers, a meticulous, often humorous retelling of the biblical story through the lens not only of modern scholarship but also of Freudian and Jungian psychology. Part III, Joseph in Egypt, contains what may well be the most elaborate and moving erotic scene in all modern literature. Part IV, Joseph the Provider, written entirely in the United States, contains a covert tribute to Roosevelt's New Deal. Joseph and His Brothers is above all a loving tribute to the exemplary humanity and spirituality of the Jewish people at a time when they were under assault from Mann's native country.

A tribute of a different sort—to Goethean humanism—is manifest in Lotte in Weimar (1939), a lovingly amplified episode drawn from the life of Charlotte, the real-life model of Goethe's Young Werther, who, forty years after the events immortalized in the novel, comes to Weimar to visit the now famous, emotionally distant author.

In 1943, as it became evident that Germany would be defeated, Mann began to write Doctor Faustus, a largely self-critical probing into the psychological and cultural root causes of the "German catastrophe." Designed as a biography of a fictitious composer as narrated by a friend, the novel draws on the Faust myth and on the invention, by Schoenberg, of twelve-tone composition; it suggests that the "German catastrophe" may be traced to the Faustian hubris of German aspirations to translate musical supremacy into political hegemony. Despite expert help from Adorno, Mann became embroiled in a public spat with Schoenberg about the true authorship of the method of composition with twelve tones. The book remains controversial for its apparently wholesale implication of German music in the failure of German culture.

The Holy Sinner (1950), a linguistically virtuosic retelling of the medieval story of Pope Gregory, was eclipsed by the popular success of Felix Krull (1954), one of the great comic novels of modern literature, the origins of which date from 1905. Mann had returned to the story intermittently but was unable to complete it until the final years of his life.

controversy

Mann's career was punctuated by rivalries and occasional clashes with other writers. Stung by his politically more conscious brother's criticism of his lack of political awareness, Mann caricatured, in Reflections, Heinrichasa Zivilisationsliterat (a politicizing littérateur). Relations with Gerhart Hauptmann, the uncrowned king of German literature at the time, were equally complex. Mann's caricature of Hauptmann as Peeperkorn in The Magic Mountain may well have been motivated by his regicidal desire to take Hauptmann's place. Mann and Brecht were ideological opposites, and no love was lost between them; in Los Angeles, in 1943, they clashed over a political manifesto concerning the future of Germany. Virtually all of Mann's colleagues who remained in Nazi Germany resented him for his harsh criticism of their comportment.

Mann admired Kafka when he discovered him posthumously and was moved to learn that Kafka had wept over Tonio Kröger. Relations with Hugo von Hofmannsthal and Arthur Schnitzler were cordial and mutually respectful. He enjoyed a lasting, warm friendship with Hermann Hesse who, in a brief obituary, offered this generous thought about Mann:

Beneath his irony and virtuosity—and completely unappreciated for decades by the German public—he possessed great courage, loyalty, a sense of responsibility, and a capacity to love that will keep both his work and memory alive far beyond our own confused times. (13 August 1955)

See alsoEinstein, Albert; Germany; Hofmannsthal, Hugo von; Kafka, Franz; Modernism; Schnitzler, Arthur.

bibliography

Fetzer, John F. Changing Perceptions of Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: Criticism 1947–1992. Columbia, S.C., 1996.

Hamilton, Nigel. The Brothers Mann: The Lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1871–1950 and 1875–1955. New York, 1979.

Koopmann, Helmut. Thomas-Mann-Handbuch. Stuttgart, 1990; 3rd ed., 2001.

Kurzke, Hermann. Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art, translated by Leslie Wilson. Princeton, N.J., 2002.

Lehnert, Herbert, and Eva Wessel, eds. A Companion to the Works of Thomas Mann. Rochester, N.Y., 2004.

Lubich, Frederick A. "Thomas Mann's Sexual Politics: Lost in Translation," Comparative Literature Studies 31 (1994): 107–127.

Minden, Michael, ed. Thomas Mann. London, 1995.

Reed, T. J. Thomas Mann: The Uses of Tradition. Oxford, U.K., and New York, 1974. 2nd ed., 1996.

Robertson, Ritchie, ed. The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann. Cambridge, U.K., and New York, 2002.

Shookman, Ellis. Thomas Mann's Death in Venice: A Novella and Its Critics. Rochester, N.Y., 2003.

Vaget, Hans Rudolf. "National and Universal: Thomas Mann and the Paradox of 'German' Music." In Music and German National Identity, edited by Celia Applegate and Pamela Potter, 155–177. Chicago, 2002.

Hans Rudolf Vaget