Thomas Mann
H U G O' S L I T E R A R Y U N I V E R S E
Great Writers and Poets
Thomas Mann
The greatest German novelist of the 20th century, Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, and by the end of his life his works had acquired the status of classics both within and without Germany. His subtly structured novels and shorter stories constitute a persistent and imaginative enquiry into the nature of Western of bourgeois culture, in which a haunting awareness of its precariousness and threatened disintegration is balanced by an appreciation of and tender concern for its spiritual achievements. Round this central theme cluster a group of related problems that recur in different forms –the relation of thought to reality and of the artist to society, the complexity of reality and of time, the seductions of spirituality, eros and death. Mann’s imaginative and practical involvement in the social and political catastrophes of his time provided him with fresh insights that make his work rich and varied. His finely wrought essays, notably those on Tolstoy, Goethe, Freud and Nietzsche, record the intellectual struggles through which he reached the ethical commitment that shapes the major imaginative works.
Mann was born on June 6, 1875 in Lübeck, and died on August 12, 1955, near Zürich. After a brief career in business and as an editor, Mann, the younger brother of Heinrich Mann, devoted himself to writing. The German bourgeoisie and the problems of the creative artist provide the theme of his early novels and stories, Buddenbrooks (1900; Eng. Trans. 1924), Tonio Kröger (1903; Eng. Trans. 1929) and Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice, 1929).
The events of World War I led him to adopt an authoritarian political outlook, but that was modified by the time he published Der Zauberberg (1924: The Magic Mountain, 1927). The rise to power of Adolf Hitler confirmed Mann’s hostility to Fascism. He was exiled from Germany and settled in the United States, taking U.S. citizenship in 1944. His later works include Die Geschichten Jaakobs (1933; The Tales of Jacob; 1934), Lotte in Weimar (1939; Eng. Trans. 1940), Doktor Faustus (1947; Eng. Trans. 1948), Die Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1954; The Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, 1955) and essays on literary, political and philosophical subjects.
Mann’s style is finely wrought and full of resources, enriched by humor, irony and parody; his composition is subtle and many-layered, brilliantly realistic on level and yet reaching to deeper levels of symbolism. His works lack simplicity, and his tendency to set his characters at a distance by his own ironical view of them has sometimes laid him open to the charge of lack of heart.
He was, however, aware that simplicity and sentiment lend themselves to manipulation by ideological and political powers, and the sometimes elaborate sophistication of his works cannot hide from the discerning reader his underlying impassioned and tender solicitude for mankind.
