Literature: 1929

Mann, Thomas pronounced mahn, (1875-1955), a German novelist, won the 1929 Nobel Prize for literature. His writings combine wisdom, humor, and philosophical thought. His intellectual scope, keen psychological insight, and critical awareness of cultural and political conditions made him one of the foremost humanistic writers of his time. His writing has a tone of gentle irony, which creates an atmosphere of artistic detachment and tolerance. He often wrote in a highly stylized, stilted manner as a parody of earlier writers, especially Johann Wolfgang von Goethe.

A superb literary craftsman, Mann maintained a balance in his writings between the traditional realism of the 1800's and experimentation with style and structure. He was a critical, yet sympathetic, analyst of European middle-class values and attitudes. The central theme in his writings is a dualism between spirit and life. Mann expressed spirit as intellectual refinement and creativity, and life as naive and unquestioning vitality. He often presented this dualism through the conflict between the attitudes of the artist and the middle class.

Mann's first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), made him famous. It describes the physical decline and accompanying intellectual refinement of a merchant family similar to Mann's. Variations on this theme appear in two shorter works, Tristan (1903) and Tonio Kroger (1903). The short novel Death in Venice (1912) portrays a writer's moral collapse through an uncontrollable and humiliating passion for a young boy.

Mann completed the novel The Magic Mountain in 1924, after working on it for 12 years. In the book, patients of a tuberculosis sanitarium represent the conflicting attitudes and political beliefs of European society before World War I. Mann's longest work is Joseph and His Brothers (1933-1943), a series of four novels. In this series, Mann expands on the Biblical story of Joseph by analyzing it from the standpoint of psychology and mythology.

Doctor Faustus (1947) is Mann's most despairing novel. In it, a German composer rejects love and moral responsibility in favor of artistic creativity. His story symbolically parallels the rise of Nazism. Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1954) is a delightful novel about a rogue's adventures in middle-class society.

Mann's essays deal with politics, literature, music, and philosophy. Collections include Order of the Day (1942) and Essays of Three Decades (1947). Last Essays was published in 1959, after his death. Many volumes of his letters and diaries have also been published.

Mann was born into a wealthy merchant family in Lubeck. He left Germany when the Nazis took power and lived in Switzerland from 1933 to 1938, when he moved to the United States. He became a U.S. citizen in 1944. He returned to Switzerland in 1952 and died there. His brother, Heinrich Mann, and his son, Klaus Mann, were also writers.

Contributor: Werner Hoffmeister, Ph.D., Professor of German and Comparative Literature, Dartmouth College.