German writer Registered in one XIX E preserving century by her origins and her culture, Thomas Mann is, by her experiments and her engagements, primarily a man of the XX E century: reflection of a world which dies, its work, made partly social criticism, analyzes and illustrates the abyss which separates the artist from the company or, in a more general and more tragic way, of the life.
Thomas Mann is one of the most known authors of the contemporary German literature. Its large novels, Buddenbrook, the magic Mountain, Doctor Faustus, and some of its news, for example Death in Venice, whose Luchino Visconti realized in 1971 the film adaptation, became universal references.
Middle-class man, humanistic and poet Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck on on June 6th, 1875. His/her father, rich negotiating, senator of the old Hanseatic city, incarnate the traditional rigor and the effectiveness of the Protestant merchants of Germany of North. His/her mother, of German and Brazilian ascent, represents the opposite slope: brittleness, imagination, a sharp inclination for art, in particular music. Such a contrast in its origins determines strongly and definitively the intellectual and psychological structure of the child.
He attends the college of Lübeck, where he is not distinguished as a pupil particularly shining. In 1893, after the death of his father, it leaves the college and the city to go to settle in Munich with its family. Having stopped its secondary studies before to have passed the baccalaureat, it makes initially a training course in an insurance company against the fire. But very quickly it starts to write: initially of short news in reviews, in particular Simplicissimus, weekly political and satirist founded in 1896. After two stays in Rome near his/her Heinrich brother, then a curtailed military service, it publishes into 1901 Buddenbrook, decline of a family.
At twenty-five years, Thomas Mann can regard himself as a writer. Five years later, he marries Katia Pringsheim. He lives Munich, where he continues his activity of writer, for which the Nobel Prize of literature will be decreed to him in 1929. In January 1933, at the time when Hitler seizes the power, it is in Switzerland and does not return to Germany. He spends some time to France, then returns to Switzerland before emigrating into 1938 in the United States, where he accepts the pulpit which the university of Princeton offers to him and where he also profits from the assistance of generous patrons.
The Nazi regime it which has waned German nationality in 1936, it had obtained Czechoslovakian nationality; in 1944, he becomes citizen of the United States. During its exile, without ceasing devoting itself to the literature, it publishes articles and fact of the short radio speeches against the Nazism. In 1947, he travels to Europe; in 1949, at the time of a stay in Germany, where the Goethe price comes from him to be decreed, the writer makes a speech in Frankfurt and Weimar. Returned definitively to Europe in 1954, Thomas Mann settles in Kilchberg, close to Zurich, where he dies on on August 12th, 1955.
A family of writers From four years the elder one of Thomas, Heinrich Mann (1871-1950) was also novelist. One him owes in particular Professor Unrat (1905) - adapted to the cinema in 1930 by Josef von Sternberg under the title the blue Angel, film which launched Marlene Dietrich - and the Subject (written in 1914, published in 1918). Large expert of the French culture - he is the author of a test on Zola and Youth and the Maturity of the king Henri IV (1935-1938) -, he gained France in 1933, after an exile in Czechoslovakia, before emigrating in the United States in 1940.
Children of Thomas Mann, Erika (1905-1969) was also writer, and Golo (1909-1994) historian. As for Klaus (1906-1949), the oldest son, ardently antifascist, he is the author of Mephisto (1936), which describes the career of opportunist under the III E Reich. He also had to exile himself: in California, the mediums of immigrants inspired the Volcano (1939) to him. Of return in Europe after the Second world war , but disillusioned, it committed suicide in Cannes.
Literature or policy The novelist, who is defined itself as “apolitical” - its Considerations of apolitical (1918) scramble it for a long time with his/her Heinrich brother, definitely on the left committed - and who affirms the priority of the literature on the policy, of the “irony” on “radicalism”, wrote many tests in which it tries to analyze the events and the changes of its time. Conditioned by the medium of the upper middle class of business in which it was born and grew, Thomas Mann is before very anxious to maintain the values traditional which make it possible to the individual to develop, against the radicalism of the political commitment, the forces of the dreams and the irony, essential to the artistic creation, of which it finds the model among romantic German such as the pietistic Christian Novalis (1772-1801). Only monarchy and the attachment with the nation can in its eyes guarantee these values, and the Thoughts of war (1914) testify clearly to its nationalist and preserving engagement. However, four years later, the Considerations, considered to be too intellectual, ensure to him near the line, if the young conservatives are excluded, neither credibility nor real influence.
Engagement
In 1922, Thomas Mann starts a political conversion: on June 24th, Walther Rathenau, Foreign Minister of the Weimar Republic, is assassinated by members of the Consul organization, of far right. It is for the writer the sign that it is time to adopt the democracy of Weimar, which it tries to do in a speech made in Berlin - then published - at the time of the sixtieth birthday of the playwright and novelist Gerhart Hauptmann, but in which the republican profession of faith misses conviction somewhat. Hans Castorp, the hero of the magic Mountain (1924), will commit himself in the German army defending the nation. But it is necessary to await the rise of National Socialism and the seizure of power by the Nazis to note a major engagement - more humanistic and humanitarian that policy - for the reason against cruelty, for social democracy against what Thomas Mann describes as “politically dangerous romantic archaism” (Call to the reason, 1930). Consequently, its position, illustrated in the superb tragedy of Doctor Faustus, his Romance last but one, does not cease being confirmed, during the exile and afterwards.
Portrait of a company All the work of Thomas Mann can be regarded as a fresco representing the company of its time, or, more exactly, its end. As of the twenty-five years age, writing the large family saga of Buddenbrook, it puts in scene the dangers which threaten the system of the traditional middle-class values in which it believes. There is not trace of revolt or social dispute in the work of Thomas Mann. The evocation of the company rests on radical contrast between two types of individuals. On a side, one finds the traders industrial, all those which base their existence and that of their family on the moral and commercial value of the work, and which the novelist sometimes evokes with serious, sometimes with humor, almost always with tenderness. Other side, there are the singular temperaments, protestors by inaptitude with social integration (Christian Buddenbrook), or thorough towards art and the spirit by an irresistible force (Hanno Buddenbrook, Tonio Kröger, Adrian Leverkühn). When Thomas Mann speaks about the company, it is always in relation to the fundamental topic which crosses all its work: is there or not compatibility between art and the life?
The artist
Many are the figures of artists who, always more, populate the novels and news of Thomas Mann. In its first publications, the conflict between the middle-class man and the artist seem a central theme. Emergent expansion of work the child musician Hanno Buddenbrook, the adolescent poet Tonio Kröger, and two men, two composers: Gustav von Aschenbach in Death in Venice and Adrian Leverkühn in Doctor Faustus. As of childhood, the artist is characterized by a sensitivity which isolates it from its solid middle-class entourage. He has, very early, the prescience of his tragic destiny, the certainty of a brittleness which makes it inapt for the life. Thus , pushed by a premonitory inspiration, small Hanno Buddenbrook, in the ledger of the family, draws a feature under its name: it knows, or it feels, that it will be the last. Except for Tonio Kröger, that Thomas Mann decides to reconcile - in humor - with the world of health and the life, the artists are dedicated to a tragic destiny. The meeting with the beauty is generating of death, and it does not matter that Gustav von Aschenbach dies of the cholera in Venice - in fact, it is with the meeting with the Tadzio young person that it cannot survive, illustrating these worms of the Platen poet, placed by forward Visconti with his film: “Which has its eyes looked at the beauty,/It is since then dedicated to die.” Comparable with the destiny of the artist, it is necessary to announce that of certain women, fragile, sensitive, carried towards art, forced to adapt to the life that impose their husband to them and the company, giving themselves the life whereas they are unable to live (Gabrielle Klöterjahn in Tristan).
Obsessed by this tension between art and the life, Thomas Mann is fascinated by the writer who, in his eyes, could reconcile both, and for which art, far from representing the ignorance of the conflict, allows the going beyond of it: Goethe, which it evokes in 1923 in its test Goethe and Tolstoï, and in 1939, on the mode of the fiction, in its Lotte novel in Weimar.
Style The art of Thomas Mann can be defined as that of the “romantic novel” in the most traditional direction. As of the first page of a novel or a news, the reader enters a universe which retains it by an extraordinary force of reality. Thomas Mann can create characters, evoke places, return atmospheres which give to the reader the impression of living interior the history which is told to him. The intrigue is sometimes even without interest: is it the case in Joseph and his brothers, where Thomas Mann borrows her subject from the Bible and, starting from some pages of the Genesis, built a tetralogy of 1? 800 pages. Consequently, the interest is not any more in the action, but in the magic of the account, which rests as well on the richness of the language as on the malicious technique of the narrator. Because one would not have to be let misuse by the concept of “romantic novel”.
Thomas Mann is not a naive writer. It uses of the literary kinds which it takes again or parodies, and the Confessions of the crook Felix Krull (1954, unfinished) are at the same time a reference to the picaresque novel and a parody of Wilhelm Meister de Goethe. Of a novel, from one news to another, often inside the same text, he plays with the various narrative prospects. He introduces the reader into a universe that he makes him discover at the same time as the characters, a little in the manner of detective carrying out a survey in certain American black novels: it is the beginning of Buddenbrook.
But it as well can, in the same passage, to intervene as an author and to address themselves to his reader by a remark announcing at the same time its presence and its omniscience. Sometimes, it is presented in the form of a chronicler (the Elected official) or as the childhood friend of the character of which it tells the life (Doctor Faustus), which enables him to mingle with its tragic account with the considerations on present not least tragic with National Socialism. From this infinite play with all the resources of narrative art is born this impression from expansion which characterizes the work of Thomas Mann.