Thomas Mann (born June 6, 1875,Lübeck, Germany—died August 12, 1955, nearZürich, Switzerland) was a German novelist and essayist whose early novels—Buddenbrooks (1900),Der Tod in Venedig (1912;Death in Venice), andDer Zauberberg (1924;The Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.

Early literary endeavours

Mann’s father died in 1891, and Mann moved toMunich, a centre of art andliterature, where he lived until 1933. After perfunctory work in an insurance office and on the editorial staff ofSimplicissimus, a satirical weekly, he devoted himself to writing, as his elder brother Heinrich had already done. His early tales, collected asDer kleine Herr Friedemann (1898), reflect the aestheticism of the 1890s but are given depth by the influence of the philosophersSchopenhauer andNietzsche and the composerWagner, to all of whom Mann was always to acknowledge a deep, ifambiguous, debt. Most of Mann’s first stories centre in the problem of the creative artist, who in his devotion to form contests the meaninglessness of existence, anantithesis that Mann enlarged into that between spirit (Geist) and life (Leben). But while he showed sympathy for the artistic misfits he described, Mann was also aware that the world of imagination is a world of make-believe, and the closeness of the artist to thecharlatan was already becoming a theme. At the same time, a certainnostalgia for ordinary, unproblematical life appeared in his work.

Thisambivalence found full expression in his firstnovel,Buddenbrooks, which Mann had at first intended to be anovella in which the experience of the transcendental realities of Wagner’s music would extinguish the will to live in the son of a bourgeois family. On this beginning, the novel builds the story of the family and its business house over four generations, showing how an artistic streak not only unfits the family’s later members for the practicalities of business life but undermines their vitality as well. But, almost against his will, inBuddenbrooks Mann wrote a tender elegy for the old bourgeois virtues.

In 1905 Mann married Katja Pringsheim. There were six children of the marriage, which was a happy one. It was this happiness, perhaps, that led Mann, inRoyal Highness, to provide a fairy-tale reconciliation of “form” and “life,” of degenerate feudal authority and the vigour of modern American capitalism. In 1912, however, he returned to the tragic dilemma of the artist withDeath in Venice, a sombre masterpiece. In this story, the main character, a distinguished writer whose nervous and “decadent” sensibility is controlled by thediscipline of style andcomposition, seeks relaxation from overstrain inVenice, where, as disease creeps over the city, hesuccumbs to an infatuation and the wish for death. Symbols of eros and death weave a subtle pattern in the sensuous opulence of this tale, which closes an epoch in Mann’s work.

World War I and political crisis

The outbreak ofWorld War I evoked Mann’sardent patriotism and awoke, too, an awareness of the artist’s social commitment. His brotherHeinrich was one of the few German writers to question German war aims, and hiscriticism of German authoritarianism stung Thomas to a bitter attack oncosmopolitan litterateurs. In 1918 he published a large politicaltreatise,Reflections of an Unpolitical Man, in which all his ingenuity of mind was summoned to justify theauthoritarian state as againstdemocracy, creative irrationalism as against “flat” rationalism, and inwardculture as against moralistic civilization. This work belongs to the tradition of “revolutionary conservatism” that leads from the 19th-century German nationalistic and antidemocratic thinkersPaul Anton de Lagarde andHouston Stewart Chamberlain, the apostle of the superiority of the “Germanic” race, toward National Socialism; and Mann later was torepudiate these ideas.

With the establishment of the German (Weimar) Republic in 1919, Mann slowly revised his outlook; the essays“Goethe und Tolstoi” and “Von deutscher Republik” (“The German Republic”) show his somewhat hesitant espousal of democratic principles. His new position was clarified in the novelThe Magic Mountain. Its theme grows out of an earlier motif: a young engineer,Hans Castorp, visiting a cousin in a sanatorium in Davos, abandons practical life to submit to the rich seductions of disease, inwardness, and death. But the sanatorium comes to be the spiritual reflection of the possibilities and dangers of the actual world. In the end, somewhat skeptically but humanely, Castorp decides for life and service to his people: a decision Mann calls “a leave-taking from many aperilous sympathy, enchantment, and temptation, to which the European soul had been inclined.” In this great work Mann formulates with remarkable insight the fateful choices facing Europe.

World War II and exile

From this time onward Mann’s imaginative effort was directed to the novel, scarcely interrupted by the charming personal novellaEarly Sorrow or byMario and the Magician, a novella that, in the person of a seedy illusionist, symbolizes the character of Fascism. His literary and cultural essays began to play an ever-growing part in elucidating and communicating his awareness of the fragility of humaneness, tolerance, and reason in the face of political crisis. His essays on Freud (1929) and Wagner (1933) are concerned with this, as are those onGoethe (1932), who more and more became for Mann anexemplary figure in his wisdom and balance. The various essays on Nietzsche document with particular poignancy Mann’s struggle against attitudes once dear to him. In 1930 he gave a courageous address in Berlin, “Ein Appell an die Vernunft” (“An Appeal to Reason”), appealing for the formation of a common front of theculturedbourgeoisie and the Socialist working class against the inhuman fanaticism of theNational Socialists. In essays and on lecture tours inGermany, to Paris, Vienna, Warsaw, Amsterdam, and elsewhere during the 1930s, Mann, while steadfastly attacking Nazi policy, often expressed sympathy with socialist and communist principles in the very general sense that they were the guarantee of humanism and freedom.

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When Hitler became chancellor early in 1933, Mann and his wife, on holiday inSwitzerland, were warned by their son and daughter in Munich not to return. For some years his home was in Switzerland, near Zürich, but he traveled widely, visiting theUnited States on lecture tours and finally, in 1938, settling there, first at Princeton, and from 1941 to 1952 in southern California. In 1936 he was deprived of his German citizenship; in the same year the University of Bonn took away the honorary doctorate it had bestowed in 1919 (it was restored in 1949). From 1936 to 1944 Mann was a citizen ofCzechoslovakia. In 1944 he became a U.S. citizen.

After the war, Mann visited bothEast Germany andWest Germany several times and received many public honours, but he refused to return to Germany to live. In 1952 he settled again near Zürich. His last major essays—on Goethe (1949), Chekhov (1954), and Schiller (1955)—are impressive evocations of themoral and social responsibilities of writers.