MANN, THOMAS

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MANN, THOMAS (1875–1955), writer; the premier literary figure of theWeimar era. Born in Lu¨beck to a prosperous businessman and city senator, hebegan writing small prose works as a youngster. Although he was a mediocrestudent—he repeated two classes in Gymnasium—his was nonetheless a disciplinedintellect that, with superb literary skill, merged profound ideas and humorinto loosely autobiographical writings. Abandoning Gymnasium in 1893, hemoved to Munich, where, upon forming a tie with his brother Heinrich (seeHeinrich Mann), he began writing. Buddenbrooks, a novel portraying the disintegrationof a prosperous family, appeared in 1901. Through his 1905 marriageto Katia Pringsheim, he gained financial independence and entered Munich'saffluent society.Stimulated by Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, Mann was intrigued bydecadence, decay, and death (all central to Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, TheMagic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus). But while he formulated a German visionof culture, his aesthetic speculation remained unpolitical. World War Iinfused his writing with politics. Imbued with a conservative patriotism commonin prewar Germany, he was converted to extreme nationalism; the change shatteredhis relationship with his Francophile brother. His wartime Betrachtungeneines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a nonpolitical man), while confused andrepetitious, highlights the theme of Kultur versus civilization that reappears ina more sophisticated form in Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).Mann's resolve to support the new Republic was first kindled by OswaldSpengler's* Decline of the West, a book that repelled him and then blossomedafter the 1922 assassination* of Walther Rathenau.* Der Zauberberg, his 1924novel symbolizing the varied appeal of sickness and decadence, marked hisbreak with the suppositions held through the war. (Upon awarding the NobelPrize in 1929, the committee conspicuously ignored Der Zauberberg in favorof Buddenbrooks.) After the September 1930 elections he began lecturing onthe necessity of the middle-class parties to ally themselves with the SPD; thiswas, he implored, the one means of defeating Hitler.*Mann's outspoken rejection of the NSDAP cost him long-held friendshipsand generated physical danger. While he was lecturing abroad in February 1933,he was warned not to return to Germany. From southern France and then Switzerlandhe joined the protest against the Third Reich. In 1937 he helped foundMass und Wert, a journal that published some of the best political opinion inthe late 1930s. He was stripped in 1936 of his citizenship and emigrated to theUnited States in 1939. While he maintained his literary activity—the tetralogythat comprises Joseph und seine Bru¨der (Joseph and his brothers) appearedbetween 1933 and 1942—he lectured tirelessly on the need to resist Nazi Germany.His last major work, Doktor Faustus, which appeared in 1947, evokedall the anger, agony, and frustrated love that Germany had aroused in him since1933.