“A Biographical Sketch of a great and enduring German novelist and short story writer, Thomas Mann, a writer for all ages and all generations”
“A Biographical Sketch of a great and enduring German novelist and short story writer, Thomas Mann, a writer for all ages and all generations”
My dear thinkers, readers and men and women of all thoughts, ideas and opinions and all you who love the great and time-tested literature of the past, today I have the privilege and honor of presenting the life and works of one of the greatest German writers and one of the greatest novelists, Thomas Mann. He is the author of books that are and will be forever the greatest literary treasures of the world, books that cannot be put down or ignored and once read through, engage our minds and spirits and souls as few works of prose can do.
I am a great fan of literature, English and American. When I read the works of these past masters, my mind and consciousness are raised to a different level. I acquire in reading these authors, whether poets such as Keats, Shelley, Byron or novelists such as Dickens, Kipling, E.M. Forster, Thackeray, Steinbeck, Melville, and Sinclair Lewis, a different level of understanding. In coming to know them I am lifted up intellectually, emotionally and spiritually. I will never regret the time I have spent in reading them and being exposed to them and absorbing their greatness, despite American society telling us on a constant basis that time spent with them has no practical value, producing no income. A life without this great literature is a life cheated and wasted of what these greatest of minds have to offer.
Thomas Mann was born in 1875 and died in 1955. He was a German novelist, short-story writer and essayist. He won the Nobel Prize in literature in 1929. His novels and novellas are noted for their psychological insight. He portrayed his family and class in his first novel, Buddenbrooks. When Hitler came to power in 1933, he fled to Switzerland. He moved to the US when World War II broke out and returned to Switzerland in 1952.
He was born in Lubeck and his family moved to Munich. He attended a secondary school and several universities in Munich. He published his first story in 1898 and married in 1905. In 1912 he moved to Davos, Switzerland to a sanatorium. In 1929 he had a cottage built in what is now Lithuania. In 1933 he moved to Switzerland and in 1939 he emigrated to the United States. He lived in Princeton, NJ and began to teach at Princeton University. In 1942 he moved to Los Angeles where he lived until 1952. In 1944 he became a US citizen. In October of 1940 he began a series of anti-Nazi broadcasts. With the start of the Cold War he was accused of being a communist sympathizer and was forced to quit his position at the Library of Congress. In 1952 he returned to Europe to live in Switzerland. He died in August of 1955.
Knopf became Mann’s American publisher and Helen Lowe Porter began to translate Mann’s books. His novel Buddenbrooks proved successful. Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in recognition of his books, which included Buddenbrooks, published in 1901, and The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, and his many short stories. Buddenbrooks relates the decline of a merchant family in Lubeck over the course of four generations, and the novel, The Magic Mountain, follows an engineering student who plans to visit his cousin at a Swiss sanatorium for three weeks but finds his departure delayed. His tetralogy, Joseph and His Brothers, is an epic novel written over a period of 16 years. His other novels include Lotte in Weimar, 1939, The Sorrows of Young Werther, Doctor Faustus, and The Confession of Felix Krull, unfinished at his death. There is some issue as to Mann’s homosexuality, as revealed in his diaries and which found reflection in his works, in particular his novel, Death in Venice. There are many references in other works, including Mann’s great novel, The Magic Mountain.
During World War I Mann supported the Kaiser and the war effort and also supported the Weimar Republic. He gradually shifted his views to the left. In the early 1930s he wrote numerous essays and gave lectures opposing the Nazis. He was advised by his family that, due to his strident anti-Nazi denunciations, he was not to return to Germany from Switzerland. In 1936 the Nazi government officially revoked his citizenship. He expressed sympathy for communism, at least as an idea and ideal.
I end this essay by saying that I have a number of Mann’s works in my home library and regularly dip into them. I particularly enjoy his short novels and short stories and have read and enjoyed Death in Venice and Doctor Faustus. I have his great novels, Buddenbrooks and The Magic Mountain on my library shelf and I look forward to the day when I have the leisure to read and absorb these great works of art. I urge young and old to take the time to read this great author.
For this essay I am indebted to the article in Wikipedia on this great writer’s life and works.