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Jan 1, 2008
(Lübeck, 1875 -- 1955, Kilchberg nr. Zurich),
was the son of a prosperous corn factor and patrician of Lübeck, who was a member of the Lübeck Senate. Mann's mother, Julia
da Silva-Bruhns, was of South American descent, part Portuguese and part Creole. The vivid contrast between the two parental lines provides a motif which runs through most of Mann's work. His elder brother was the novelist Heinrich
Mann. After the death of their father in 1891 the family moved to the more congenial atmosphere of Munich, where Thomas Mann stayed until 1933 with only the interruption of short spells in Italy, for a time with his brother Heinrich, in the late 1890s. In 1905 he married Katja
Pringsheim, the daughter of a professor of mathematics at Munich University who was also a well-known authority on R.
Wagner. The couple had six children.Thomas Mann's career as a writer began in the 1890s. He entered a bank in 1894, resigned to go to Italy, and on his return to Munich abstained from any formal study; an appointment on the editorial staff of
Simplicissimus
(1899 -- 1900) was abandoned with a sense of relief. At this time he was known as the author of short stories which appeared as Der kleine Herr Friedemann (the title of one of the stories) in 1898. In 1901 the two vols. of the epic family chronicle
Buddenbrooks
established his name as a writer and secured the family existence; its subject is the decline of a Lübeck patrician family through four generations. Mann's poised style and keen irony, basic features of his work, are clearly evident. In 1903 followed two of his principal Novellen,
Tonio Kröger
and
Tristan
. Both set burgher and artist in contrast, revealing the insensitiveness of the former and the decadence of the latter; both show the influence of Schopenhauer and Wagner on Mann's early phase of writing. In 1906 he made an unsuccessful excursion into drama with Fiorenza (performed 1907), and in 1909 published his second novel,
Königliche Hoheit
. ‘His Royal Highness’ is Klaus Heinrich (the name of Mann's oldest son, see Mann, K.), son of the fictitious Grand Duke Albrecht III and his consort Dorothea. Klaus Heinrich marries a commoner whom he loves, and the wealth of her American father becomes an asset to the state. The writing of Wälsungenblut (1921) falls into this period. In 1912 appeared Mann's third great Novelle,
Der Tod in Venedig
, in which the incompatibility of a respectable life with artistic talent is treated in a manner differing from that of the earlier works. A collection entitled Tonio Kröger and the Novelle Das Wunderkind appeared in the year of the outbreak of the 1914 -- 18 War. Mann's support of the war led to a radical change in his relationship with his brother Heinrich, with whom he had in the 1890s contemplated joint authorship in Buddenbrooks. Heinrich, a strong pacifist, scorned his brother in thin disguise in Emile Zola (1915) and, despite a partial reconciliation in 1922 and common soil in the USA in the 1940s, personal and political differences kept them apart. The immediate outcome of this sad chapter was the lengthy tract Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918). The transition into the 1920s was made with the agreeable story Herr und Hund (1919). The Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Buch der Kindheit (1922) was never completed, but appeared greatly extended as Mann's last novel in 1954 (
Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull
). It is a revival of the Schelmenroman or picaresque novel.In 1924 appeared the 2 vols. of Mann's second great novel,
Der Zauberberg
; it presents an assessment of the intellectual state of the period preceding the 1914 -- 18 War and acutely diagnoses its ills.
Unordnung und frühes Leid
(1926) portrays a cross-section of family life. In the 1920s Mann supported the Weimar Republic on his many lecture tours in Germany and abroad, and in 1929 was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature.With
Mario und der Zauberer
(1930) Mann first came to grips with fascism and its abuse of power. He was on holiday in Switzerland when he was warned about the political climate in Munich by his own children (Erika and Klaus). From February
1933 he stayed in Switzerland, and in 1936 publicly dissociated himself from the National Socialist regime in an open letter to Eduard
Korrodi (1885 -- 1955), the Swiss publicist who was on the editorial staff of the Neue Zürcher Zeitung. In 1938 Mann went as a visiting professor to Princeton before settling in Pacific Palisades in California (1941 -- 52), where he was in close touch with other distinguished German emigrant writers and artists. Deprived of his German citizenship, he was granted Czech citizenship in 1936, and in 1944 he became a citizen of the USA. He did not return to live in Germany, but spent the remainder of his life in Switzerland.In the 1930s Mann wrote the biblical tetralogy
Joseph und seine Brüder
(1933 -- 42). This work afforded him precious relaxation in years of stress; he regarded it as an elevated comedy. Another serene and penetrating work of reconstruction appeared in the year of the outbreak of the 1939 -- 45 War:
Lotte in Weimar
is based on a visit paid by Lotte Kestner (see Buff, Lotte) to Goethe's Weimar in 1816. A very different aspect of Mann found expression in
Doktor Faustus
(1947), in which the composer Leverkühn epitomizes the degeneration of Germany in Mann's lifetime. Mann wrote, as an appendix to this novel, Die Entstehung des Doktor Faustus (1949, see Doktor Faustus).
Der Erwählte
(1951), which attracted less attention than most of Mann's novels, is a retelling of the legend recounted in Hartmann
von Aue's
Gregorius
. Mann's last completed work is the Novelle Die Betrogene (1953). It was written while he was fashioning Krull, the figure of the artist, in new, frankly immoral form, as the accomplished swindler and impostor.After the 1914 -- 18 War, Mann became a prolific essayist, writing on political and cultural themes, and using the essay as an instrument of education. His published collections include Rede und Antwort (1922), which contains notable essays on Th.
Fontane and G.
Keller, Von deutscher Republik (1923), Bemühungen (1925), Pariser Rechenschaft (1926), Die Forderung des Tages (1930), a renewed appeal in support of the Weimar Republic, Leiden und Größe der Meister (1935), Freud und die Zukunft (1936), Achtung Europa!, Dieser Friede (both 1938), Das Problem der Freiheit (1939), Neue Studien (1948), and Goethe und die Demokratie (1949). Though Mann wrote no full-length studies of authors or artists, his essays include many stimulating and penetrating excursions into criticism: Goethe und Tolstoj (1923), Freud, Goethe, Wagner (1937), Schopenhauer (1938), Michelangelo in seinen Dichtungen (1950), and Versuch über Schiller (1955). A collection of previously published essays appeared in 1945 as Adel des Geistes. Mann also delivered notable addresses, including Lübeck als geistige Lebensform (1926), Goethe als Repräsentant des bürgerlichen Zeitalters (1932), Deutschland und die Deutschen (1947), Ansprache im Goethejahr (1949), and Meine Zeit (1950). Prosa 1951–1955 appeared posthumously (1956).Mann's decision to settle after the war in Switzerland was influenced by the attitude of sections of the German public as well as writers of the ‘inner emigration’ (see Innere Emigration). His prestige outside Germany, especially in the USA, was remarkable, and to the Anglo-Saxon world he represented what he felt himself to be at a time of bitter controversy, a good German. Mann possessed immense creative and intellectual power, and a faculty for assimilating knowledge and injecting life into it, which is perhaps most clearly demonstrated in Joseph und seine Brüder and Lotte in Weimar. His vision, especially after 1918, embraced the temper and the problems of the Europe of his day. His style is intentionally mannered, yet lucid, and as an analyst he shows penetrating acuteness. He established as the dominant feature of his work a pervasive irony, which he sometimes directs upon himself but applies universally to his characters, whom he appears to survey from an eminence. He himself considered his many nuances of parody, which culminated in his portrayal of Krull, to be his peculiarly constructive contribution to the German literary tradition since Goethe and Schiller.Mann's immense correspondence is documented in
Die Briefe Thomas Manns. Regesten und Register (5 vols.), ed.
Y.
Schmidlin
,
H.
Bürgin
,
H.-O.
Mayer
, and
G.
Heine
, 1976 -- 87. A collection of correspondence,
Briefe (3 vols., 1889 -- 1955), ed.
Erika
Mann
, appeared 1961 -- 5;
Thomas Mann und Heinrich Mann. Briefwechsel 1900–1949, ed.
H.
Wysling
, 1984 (ext. edn.); correspondence with Erika
Mann, Briefe und Antworten. 1922–1950, ed. A.
Zanco
Prestel, 1984; with Klaus
Mann, Briefe und Antworten. 1922–1937, ed. M.
Gregor-Dellin, 1975; with his publisher (see Fischer, S.),
Briefwechsel mit seinem Verleger Gottfried Bermann Fischer, ed.
P.
de Mendelssohn
, 1973;
Briefwechsel mit Autoren, ed.
H.
Wysling
, 1988. Other editions include correspondence with Paul Amann (1959), E.
Bertram (1962), Karl
Karényi (1960), R.
Faesi (1962), H.
Hesse (1975, ext. edn.), Otto
Grautoff and Ida
Boy-Ed (1975), A.
Neumann (1977), and E.
Agnes
Meyer (1992). Meine ungeschriebenen Memoiren by Mann's wife Katja appeared in 1974.Editions of Mann's work include Gesammelte Werke (10 vols.), 1922 -- 5, 1929 ff.; the Stockholmer Gesamtausgabe (12 vols.), 1938 -- 65; Gesammelte Werke (12 vols.), 1960 (supplementary vol. 13, 1974); Gesammelte Werke in Einzelbänden, Frankfurter
Ausgabe (20 vols.), ed.
P.
de Mendelssohn
, 1980 ff.; Tagebücher 1918–1955 (10 vols.), ed. P.
de Mendelssohn and Inge
Jens, 1979 -- 95. A detailed, documented, but incomplete biography by Peter
de Mendelssohn (1908 -- 82) appeared as Der Zauberer. Das Leben des deutschen Schriftstellers Thomas Mann, ‘Erster Teil 1875 -- 1918’ (1975); a second volume, ‘Jahre der Schwebe: 1919 und 1933’ (1992), contains posthumous chapters with index of the complete work and postscript by A.
von Schirnding.
© Oxford University Press, 1976, 1986, 1997, 2005
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