 
Choose another writer in this calendar: by name: by birthday from the calendar.
TimeSearch |
|
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) |
|
German essayist, cultural critic, and
novelist, who was awarded
the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. Among Thomas Mann's most famous works
is Buddenbrooks (1901), which
appeared when he was 26. He began writing it during a one-year stay in
Italy and completed it in about two and a half years. The book outraged
the citizens of Lübeck, who saw it as a thinly veiled account of local
incidents and figures, although Mann never mentions the name of the
city. The 1000-page-long Der Zauberberg (1924, The Magic Mountain) was an immediate popular and critical success. Originally it was conceived as a long short story. "A man lives not only his personal life, as an individual, but also, consciously or unconsciously, the life of his epoch and his contemporaries. He may regard the general, impersonal foundations of his existence as definitely settled and taken for granted, and be as far assuming a critical attitude toward them as our good Hans Castorp really was; yet it is quite conceivable that he may none the less be vaguely conscious of the deficiencies of his epoc and find them prejudicial to his own moral well-being. All sorts of personal aims, ends, hopes, prospects, hover before the eyes of the individual, and out of these he derives the impulse to ambition and achievement." (from The Magic Mountain, by Thomas Mann, translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter, Secker & Warburg, 1971, p. 32) Paul Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck, where he was baptized as a Protestant in St. Mary's Church. He was the son of a wealthy father, Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, who owned a grain firm and was elected the senator overseeing taxes for Lübeck. Mann's mother Julia, née da Silva-Bruhns, came from a German-Portugese-Creole family. After Mann's father died in 1891, his trading firm was dissolved, and the family moved to Munich. Mann was educated at the Lübeck gymnasium and he also spent some time at the University of Munich. He then worked for the south German Fire Insurance Company for a short period. Mann's career as a writer started in the magazine Simplicissimus. Mann's first book, Der kleine Herr Friedmann, came out in 1898. While at university, Mann became immersed in the writings of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as in the music of composer Richard Wagner. In Buddenbrooks, Mann's early masterpiece, he used the technique of the leitmotif, which he adapted from Wagner. Mann had started the book in 1897 as a small story about one member of the family. However, the "protracted finger practice with no ulterior advantages" enlarged into a saga of a wealthy Hanseatic family, which declines from strength to decadence. ". . . the Buddenbrooks appear not simply as a family on the downgrade but, despite their decadent tinges, as upholders of a bourgeois culture which was once Germany's pride and could still be the source of its resurgence, could provide an organic continuation of the glorious past. In this sense the Buddenbrooks saga is the story of what happens to Germany's cultural traditions in the nineteeth century." (Essays on Thomas Mann by Georg Lukács, translated from the German by Stanley Mitchell, Merlin Press, 1964, p. 21) The last Buddenbrook, the musically gifted young Hanno who dies of a typhoid infection, is the first of many similar, often morally suspect aesthetes in Mann's novels, continuing in Tonio Kröger, Gustav Aschenbach, Felix Krull, and Adrian Lewerkühn. After Buddenbrooks, Mann concentrated on short novels
or novellas. In 1902 he published Tonio
Kröger, a spiritual autobiography exploring art and discipline.
He married in 1905
Katja Pringsheim, the daughter of a wealthy Munich family; they had a
total six children over the ensuing years. Königliche Hoheit (1909, Royal
Highness) reflected Mann's views of duty and sacrifice. Der Tod in Venedig (1912, Death in
Venice), Mann's famous multilayered novella, was inspired by a young,
sailor-suited boy, Wladyslaw Moes, to son of Baron Moes, whom the
author saw in Venice in 1911. Later in life Wladyslaw remembered "the
old man", who had been watching him, and noticed after reading the
story in Polish translation, how accurately Mann had described his
linen suit and his favorite jacket. Other characters have also their
counterparts in real life. However, Tadzio in the book is 14, but
Wladyslaw was actually ten and a half. In the story an author, Gustav von Aschenbach, fells hopelessly in love with a young teenager, Tadzio, redicovers his creativity, and begins to write again. Obsessed with the boy, he stays in Venice during a cholera epidemic, and also dies of cholera on the beach, watching Tadzio playing on the sand. The story was adapted into screen by Luchino Visconti, starring Dirk Bogarde and Bjorn Andresen. As a theme Visconti used the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Tadzio character is said to be based on the composer Gustav Mahler, who died in 1911. Mann changed Aschenbach's occupation from musician to writer. During World War I Mann supported Kaiser's policy and expressed his scorn for the concept of democracy. But in Von Deutscher Republik
(1923), as a semi-official spokesman for parliamentary democracy, he
called the German intellectuals to support the new state. The menace of
Nazism prompted Mann to make a political statement in an address
entitled 'Deutsche Ansprache: Ein Apell and Die Vernuft' (1930,
An Appeal to Reason) in which he argued that "the political place of
the German citizen is today with the Social-Democratic Party". When the
Nazis celebrated Goethe as the embodiment of German character and an author whose Bildungsroman Wilhelm Meisters Wanderjahre
proved his belief in the "Führerprinzip," Mann emphasized Goethe's
cosmopolitanism and humanism in his lectures in Berlin and Weimar. After ten years of work Mann completed his second major work, Der Zauberberg (1924, The Magic Mountain), a novel about ideas and of lost humanism. It depicted again a fight between liberal and conservative values, enlightened civilized world and nonrational beliefs. Hans Castorp, the protagonist, goes to the elegant tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos, to visit his cousin. Castorp is not really ill, but he stays for a period of seven years, and undergoes an advanced education on the Magic Mountain, primarily through speaking and listening. Two men struggle for his soul, Settembrini, an Italian humanist, and Naptha, a radical reactionary, who speaks of blind and irrational faith. Naptha cries out a prophecy that came true in Germany only a decade after publication of the book: "Liberation and development of the individual are not the key to our age, the are not what our age demands. What it needs, what it wrestles after, what is will create - is Terror." (Ibid., p. 400) Naphta challenges Settembrini to a duel with pistols. Settembrini fires into the air, Naphta kills himself in a rage. Another weird character is Mynheer Peeperkorn, who arrives at the Mountain in the company of the beautiful Claudia Chauchat. Castorp falls in love with her at first sight. Claudia returns to Peeperkorn, and Castorp yearns her deeply. The vitalistic Peeperkorn, who confronts his own impotence, also kills himself. Castorp leaves the sanatorium to join the army at the outbreak of the war. Mann tells the reader that while the young man's chances of survival are not good, the question must be left open. Mann's next major work was Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-42, Joseph and his Brothers), set in the biblical world. The story about the conflict between personal freedom and political tyranny was based on Genesis 12-50. "The function of the myth in the Joseph novels is to give as concrete a picture as possible of the consequences for the present of Thomas Mann's perspective of the future. For this reason the cycle takes place both in an actual time, Mann's self-made mythical world, and outside time, that is outside history proper." (Georg Lukács, 1964, p. 126) The first volume recounts the early history of Jacob, and introduces then Joseph, the central character. He is sold to the Egypt, where he refuses Potiphar's advances and gains her enmity. Joseph develops into a wise man and the savior of his people. During the writing process of Joseph and his Brothers the political control in Germany was seized by the Nazis. On Hitler's accession to power, Mann moved to Switzerland, where he edited the literary journal Mass und Wert. Having no illusions about Nazi intentions, he was appalled by Chamberlain's appeasement policies and correctly predicted that Hitler would annex Austria. Mann
settled finally in the
United States. From September 1938 to March 1941 he lived in Princeton.
He was the most famous of the refuge writers community. "Where I am the
is German," he declared on his arrival. "I carry my German culture in
me." (Weimar in Princeton: Thomas Mann and the Kahler Circle by Stanley Corngold, 2022, p. ix) Albert Einstein lived only a few steets away from Mann. Lotte in Weimar (1939, The Beloved Returns) focused on the world of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774). In 1941 Mann moved to Santa Monica, California. The Manns were frequent visitors to Salka Viertel's Santa Monica salon. The Sunday tea parties were also attended by Bertolt and Helli Brecht, Bruno and Liesel Frank, and various other intellectuals exiled from Nazi Germany. Mann lived in the U.S. some ten years, but was disappointed with the American persecution of Communist sympathizers. Moreover, Mann himself was under surveillance by the House Un-American Activities Committee. Mann admired greatly Russian literature and wrote several essays about on Leo Tolstoy and his "undying realism." Especially he loved Anna Karenina. However, later he considered Tolstoy less noble than Goethe. In the essay 'Dostoevsky – in Moderation', published as the preface to The Short Novels of Dostoevsky (1945), Mann dealt with the author's supposed confession to Turgenev that he had violated an underage girl: "In St. Petersburg, when he was forty years old and had attained fame as the author of The House of Death, which had moved even the Czar to tears, in a family circle that included a number of very young girls, he once narrated the plot of a story he had planned in his youth, a novel in which a landed proprietor, a sedate and substantial man, suddenly remembers that two decades ago, after an all-night drinking bout with dissolute companions, he had raped a ten-year-old girl. . . . Yes, he must have been a very remarkable citizen, this Fyodor Mikhailovitch." (Ibid., translated from the Russian by Constance Garnett, p. xi) René Wellek has dismissed in A History of Modern Criticism, Volume 7 (1991) these speculations and considers the whole business of Dostoevsky's criminality totally misconceived. Doktor Faustus (1947), Mann's last great work, told about composer Adrian Lewerkühn and the progressive destruction of German culture in the two World Wars. "Goethe's Faust ends with the scenes in Heaven, which are tangible because they spring from Utopian hope in a renewal and liberation of man based on economic foundations and a social morality. Mann's Faustus is tragic in atmosphere precisely because these foundations have been undermined and shattered." (Georg Lukács, 1964,p. 50) In the
background of the novel was the innovative 12-tone music of Arnold
Schönberg. Mann's account of the genesis of Doctor Faustus appeared
in 1949. (Faust theme / Pact with the Devil, see J.W.
Goethe.) This novel and Adorno's Philosophy of New Music
had an enormously liberating influence on the composer György Ligeti
(1923-2006), who escaped from the Communist Hungary in 1956 and became
known for his exploration of modernist techniques and styles. After lung cancer operation and finishing Doctor Faustus Mann was ready to abandon Califirnia and return to
Europe, where he spent the last tree years of his life. Demonstratively he avoided Germany, but Mann was made an honorary
citizen of his hometown of Lübeck and he supported the rebuilding of
its Marienkirche. Mostly Mann lived in
Switzerland, near Zürich. He died on August 12, 1955, and was buried at the cemetery in Kilchberg. Mann's
parodic and light-hearted novel Confessions of Felix Krull was
left unfinished. He had first shelved the manuscript in favor of Death in Venice. On the completion of Joseph and his Brothers the manuscript was resumed. However, Mann felt that he had moved beyond the artist-bourgeois problem which had been his most dominant concern. For further reading: Thomas Mann by Henry Hatfield (1951); Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays, edited by Henry Hatfield (1964); Essays on Thomas Mann by Georg Lukács (1964); Thomas Mann by J.P. Stern (1967); Thomas Mann by Ignace Feuerlicht (1968); Thomas Mann by Hans Bürgin and Hans-Otto Mayer (1969); Thomas Mann: The Devil's Advocate by T.E. Apter (1979); The Borthers Mann by Nigel Hamilton (1979); Thomas Mann by Erich Heller (1979); Thomas Mann by Martin Swales (1980); The Ironic German by Erich Heller (1981); Thomas Mann by Richard Winston (1981); Thomas Mann and His Family by Marcel Reich-Ranicki (1989); Thomas Mann by Martin Travers (1992); Thomas Mann: A Life by Donald Prater (1995); The Real Tadzio: Thomas Mann's "Death in Venice" and the Boy Who Inspired it by Gilbert Adair (2001); The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, edited by Ritchie Robertson (2001); Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art by Hermann Kurzke (2002); The Architecture of Narrative Time: Thomas Mann and the Problems of Modern Narrative by Erica Wickerson (2017); Thomas Mann’s War: Literature, Politics, and the World Republic of Letters by Tobias Boes (2019); Mann's 'Magic Mountain' by Karolina Watroba (2022); Thomas Mann in München: Religion und Narration by Yvonne Nilges (2022); Weimar in Princeton: Thomas Mann and the Kahler Circle by Stanley Corngold (2022); Mind in Exile: Thomas Mann in Princeton by Stanley Corngold (2022) - See also: Elias Canetti, Abraham Polonsky, W.H. Auden who was married to Thomas Mann's daughter. Brother Heinrich Mann was a noted writer. Klaus Mann, his son, published several novels, among them Kindernovelle (1926), Flucht in der Norden (Pako pohjoiseen, 1934), Mephisto (Mefisto, 1936), Der Vulkan (1939). His autobiography The Turning Point (1942), appeared in Germany in 1952. Klaus Mann was born in Munich. He worked as a theater critic, actor and journalist. His play, Anja and Esther, produced in Munich and Hamburg in 1925, dealt with homosexual relationships. On stage, Klaus and his sister Erika interprered their own roles, Esther was played by her lover Pamela Wedekind. In the 1930s he emigrated in the United States, becoming an U.S. citizen in 1943. From 1939 he wrote mostly in English. Klaus Mann died in Cannes. His restless life ended in suicide. Selected works
|
