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| Mann, Thomas (1875-1955) |
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The outstanding German novelist of the twentieth century, Nobel Prize winner and an
unequivocal opponent of National Socialism, Thomas Mann was born on 6 June 1875, the son
of a wealthy merchant family in the Hanseatic city of Lubeck. The decline of precisely
such a family over three generations was the subject of his first great work, Buddenbrooks
(1900, Engl. trs. 1924). After the family moved to Munich, Mann worked in an insurance office and studied at university before turning to journalism and freelance writing. Early novels and short stories like Tonio Kroger (1903), Tristan (1903) and Der Tod in Venedig (1913, Engl. trs. Death in Venice, 1925) revealed Mann's preoccupation with the relationship between bourgeois life and the modern artistic sensibility, his fascination with death, and the philosophical influence of Wagner and Schopenhauer. During World War I, Mann expressed chauvinistic feelings in a highly sophisticated manner, in his essays on Frederick the Great - admiring the Prussian king's harshness, self-sacrifice and sense of destiny - and in his presentation of the war as a struggle between German Kultur and western civilization. Subsequently he was attacked for betraying the cause of German nationalism because of his courageous defence of Weimar democracy in Von Deutscher Republik (1923) and other writings and speeches. A conservative pessimist who nonetheless believed in progress, Mann's second full-length novel, Der Zauberberg (1924, Engl. trs. The Magic Mountain, 1927), which presented a tremendous panorama of the decay of European civilization, consolidated his reputation as Weimar Germany's leading novelist. In 1929 he received the Nobel Prize for Literature. His anti-fascist convictions found expression in Mario and the Magician (Engl. trs. 1930), set in Mussolini's Italy, which demonstrated the dangers of a charismatic conception of political leadership and the powerlessness of the audience in the hands of a hypnotic demagogue. With the advent of the Nazi regime, Thomas Mann, like his novelist brother, Heinrich, and the rest of the family, emigrated to Switzerland, before moving on to the United States in 1938. In 1936 he was officially deprived of his German citizenship and in the same year he was strip ped by the Bonn academic senate of his Honorary Doctorate. The Nazis avoided all mention of his name, attempting to expunge his memory from the German consciousness. For his part, Mann took an active part in the anti- Nazi struggle, denouncing the 'terrible complicity of the German universities' in breeding 'those ideas which are ruining Germany morally, culturally, and financially'. In America, where he taught for a time at Princeton University, Mann composed a number of anti-Nazi essays, including The Coming Victory of Democracy (1938). It was in his Swiss and American exile that he completed his monumental four-volume novel, Joseph und seine Bruder (Joseph and His Brothers), between 1933 and 1944, a moving tribute to the Jews in their darkest hour and to the freedom of the individual against a corrupt tyranny.
Mann's
final reckoning with Hitler's world, with the mixture of genius and madness in the German
'soul' and the horrors of a collapsing civilization came in his last major novel, Dr
Faustus (1949, Engl. trs. 1950). Mann died on 12 August 1955 in Zurich, Switzerland,
to which he had returned one year before his death.
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