Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann (1875-1955)

Thomas Mann’s prose seamlessly fuses the personal, the philosophical and the political. Time and again his work shows that the spiritual, social, sexual, natural and political are interlinked. He is sometimes regarded as detached (even narcissistic), but this misses the point. In fact his style consists of an ambivalent play between intellectual detachment and urgent emotional attachment. His protagonists fear and despise intimacy, and yet they long for it. Mann’s understanding that his own desires are fundamentally contradictory lends his work an incredible emotional subtlety. His ironic narrative style is perfectly suited to expressing emotional and intellectual ambivalence.

Thomas Mann’s work engages profoundly with the time periods in which he lived. He was born in Lübeck in northern Germany, and moved to Munich in 1891. From 1914 onwards he became convinced that he had a public duty to represent the concerns of the German people in his essays and in his fiction. He was a conservative nationalist during World War One, but his political views changed after 1919 and in October 1922 he delivered a speech in support of the Weimar Republic, ‘Von deutscher Republik’; ‘On the German Republic’. Mann publicly opposed Hitler’s rise to power and from 1933 until his death he lived in exile. Mann left Germany on 11 February 1933, shortly after Hitler became chancellor on 30 January 1933. Mann had hoped to return to Germany, but on 16 April 1933 he was denounced by public figures in Munich for having made critical comments about Richard Wagner. Shortly afterwards, in May, his assets were confiscated. Mann fled first to Sanary-sur-Mer in the south of France (from June-September 1933), and then moved to Küsnacht on Lake Zurich in Switzerland (1933-38). Whilst living in Switzerland he visited the USA three times (in 1934, 1935 and 1937). Then he moved to the USA (1938-52). From 1938-41 he was based in Princeton; and from 1941-52 he lived in Pacific Palisades near Los Angeles. From 1952 until his death in 1955 he lived in Erlenbach near Zurich.

Mann’s fiction explores history from the inside, showing how political and ideological structures interact with individual consciousness.

Thomas Mann intended his fiction to appeal to the general public and to an intellectual elite. He called this ‘the double optic’ (die doppelte Optik). Nietzsche had criticised Richard Wagner for using this two-pronged approach in Der Fall Wagner; The Wagner Case. But Thomas Mann liked this approach and used it in his fiction. Mann discusses the double optic enthusiastically in a letter of 1 April 1910 to Hermann Hesse, and in the Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen; Reflections of an Unpolitical Mann (see Thomas Mann, Gesammelte Werke in 13 volumes, vol. 12, p. 109).

Although he married a woman (Katia Pringsheim), Thomas Mann seems to have preferred men. Much of his fiction explores homosexual desire.

In 1896 – less than a year after the imprisonment of Oscar Wilde – Mann burned his diaries, and advised his friend Otto Grautoff to do the same. (Thomas Mann, letter to Otto Grautoff of 17 February 1896, GKFA vol. 21, pp. 70-74 (pp. 73-74)).

Thomas Mann married Katia Pringsheim in 1905 and they had six children, all of whom were also writers: Erika Mann, Klaus Mann, Golo Mann, Monika Mann, Michael Mann and Elisabeth Mann. Erika Mann was an actress and writer. Klaus Mann was a novelist. Golo Mann was a historian. Monika Mann was a memoirist. Michael Mann was a musician and a professor of German literature. Elisabeth Mann Borgese was a professor of oceanology and political science.

Much of Mann’s fiction is informed by his creative rivalry with his older brother Heinrich Mann.

Is Thomas Mann a modernist, and if so, what kind of modernist is he? Doktor Faustus is a modernist novel, but Buddenbrooks is more of a transitional work. Thomas Mann might be described as a conservative modernist, or a reluctant modernist: he recognised that modernism was an inevitable development, and he recognised that his own work could be described as modernist. But at the same time his work is imbued with nostalgia for the 19th-century tradition of German poetic realism (e.g. Theodor Storm; Theodor Fontane; Adalbert Stifter). The experts still disagree about the extent to which Thomas Mann is a modernist. The 'leitmotif' structure for example can be seen as an example of modernist patterning (according to Judith Ryan in The Cambridge Companion to Thomas Mann, ed. by Ritchie Robertson, see below); but T. J. Reed, author of the standard work on Thomas Mann in English (see below), emphasises Thomas Mann's debt to the literary tradition. So for Ryan, Thomas Mann is a modernist; for Reed, Thomas Mann is a more complex mediator between old and new.