Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann

Paul Thomas Mann (June 6, 1875 – August 12, 1955) was a German novelist, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and Nobel Prize laureate, lauded principally for a series of highly symbolic and often ironic epic novels and mid-length stories, noted for their insight into the psychology of the artist and intellectual. He is noted for his analysis and critique of the European and German soul in the beginning of the 20th century, and he is one of the last authors of German Modernism and one of the first to herlad the shattered aesthetic of German literature after the horrors of World War II.

Like other German authors who were already in their prime during the rise of Nazism and who lived to see the end of the Third Reich and the revelations of the deathcamps, Mann's writings fall broadly into two categories: those written in a clean, Realist style before the rise of Nazism, and those written in psycholoigcal, modern prose that searches for meaning after the revelations of just how catastrophic an end Germany had come to in the mid-20th-century. Mann was a master for both eras. It was on the strength of his early, plain, Realist fiction such as Buddenbrooks that Mann would win his Nobel Prize and largely cement his fame; yet, it is in the power and moving testament presented in such works as Doktor Faustus, an allegorical story of Germany's fall, and Josef und Seiner Bruder, a re-telling of the Biblical story of Joseph, that Mann today is most well-remembered. Mann was a champion of democracy, and he devoted his life to preventing and recording the disasters that ultimately consumed Germany in the 1930's and 40's. He is not only one of the finest novelists of the twentieth century, he is also one of its most heroic.

Life

Mann was born in Lübeck, Germany, second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann (a senator and grain merchant) and his wife Júlia da Silva Bruhns (who was born in Brazil and came to Germany when she was 7 years old). Mann's father died in 1891, and his trading firm was liquidated. The family subsequently moved to Munich. Mann attended the science division of a Lübeck gymnasium, then spent some time at the University of Munich where, in preparation for a career in journalism, he studied history, economics, art history, and literature. He resided in Munich from 1891 until 1933, with the exception of a year-long stay in Palestrina, Italy, with his older brother Heinrich, also a novelist. Mann's career as a writer began when he joined the writing staff of Simplicissimus, a German literary and political magazine based out of Munich well-known for its satires of the noble classes. Mann's first short story, "Little Herr Friedmann" (Der Kleine Herr Friedemann), was published in the same magazine in 1898.

In 1905, he married Katia Pringsheim, daughter of a prominent, secular Jewish family of intellectuals. They had six children—Erika, Klaus, Golo, Monika, Elisabeth and Michael Thomas Mann—who became literary and artistic figures in their own right. Mann emigrated from Nazi Germany to Küsnacht near Zürich, Switzerland, in 1933, then to the United States in 1939, where he taught at Princeton University, along with such other émigrés as Albert Einstein. In 1942, the family moved to Pacific Palisades, California, where they remained until after the end of World War II. In 1944, he became a naturalized citizen of the United States.

Thomas Mann returned to Europe in 1952, where he resided in Kilchberg near Zurich in Switzerland. He was never to live in Germany again, though he traveled there regularly and was widely celebrated. His most important visit to Germany was in 1949, at the occasion of the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, where he attended celebrations in both Frankfurt am Main and Weimar, making a clear statement that German culture extended beyond the political borders of East and West Germany.

In 1955, Thomas Mann died of Atherosclerosis in a hospital in Zurich.

Political Views

During World War I Mann supported Kaiser Wilhelm II's conservatism and attacked liberalism. In Von Deutscher Republik (1923), as a semi-official spokesman for parliamentary democracy, Mann called upon the German intellectual class to support the new Weimar Republic. After the close of World War I and Kaiser Wilhelm's defeat, Mann was disillusioned, and his political views gradually shifted toward liberal and democratic principles.

In 1930 Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason," in which he strongly denounced Nazism and encouraged resistance by the working class. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazis. At the same time, he expressed increasing sympathy for socialism and communism. In 1933 when the Nazis came to power, Mann and his wife were vacationing in Switzerland. Due to his very vociferous denunciations of Nazi policies, his son advised him not to return. Later, Mann's books, particularly Buddenbrooks, were amongst the many burnt by Hitler's regime.

Work

Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, principally in recognition of his popular achievement with the epic Buddenbrooks (1901), which relates the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck (based on Mann's own family) over the course of three generations. His next major novel was The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924), in which an engineering student who had planned to visit his tubercular cousin at a Swiss sanatorium for three weeks finds his departure delayed ultimately for seven years. During his time spent at the sanatorium, the protagonist of The Magic Mountain encounters a variety of characters who play out the ideological conflicts of early 20th-century European civilization. Other novels included Lotte in Weimar (1939), in which Mann returned to the world of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774); Doktor Faustus (1947), a deep meidtation on the nature of art and morality, told through the allegorical story of the composer Adrian Leverkühn and his corruption and ensuing madness in the years leading up to World War II, and often considered Mann's greatest work.

Mann himself devoted most of his productive years to producing the immense tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder, 1933–1942), a richly imagined retelling of the story of Joseph related in chapters 27-50 of Genesis in the Hebrew Bible. The first volume relates the establishment of the family of Jacob, who becomes the father of Joseph. In the second volume the young Joseph, not yet master of considerable gifts, arouses the enmity of his ten older brothers and is sold by them into slavery in Egypt. In the third volume, Joseph becomes the steward of a high court official, Potiphar, but finds himself thrown into prison after (mindfully) rejecting the advances of Potiphar's wife. In the last volume, the mature Joseph rises to become administrator of Egypt's graneries. Famine drives the sons of Jacob to Egypt, where the unrecogized Joseph adroitly orchestrates a recognition scene that results in the brothers' reconciliation and the reunion of the family.

Mann was a humanist who valued the cumulative achievements of Western culture and believed in the necessity of upholding civilization against the dangers of decay and barbarism. His work is the record of a consciousness of a life of manifold possibilities, and of the tensions inherent in the (more or less enduringly fruitful) responses to those possibilities. In his own summation (upon receiving the Nobel Prize): "The value and significance of my work for posterity may safely be left to the future; for me they are nothing but the personal traces of a life led consciously, that is, conscientiously."

Regarded as a whole, Mann's career is a striking example of the "repeated puberty" which Goethe thought characteristic of the genius. In technique as well as in thought, he experienced far more daringly than is generally realized. In Buddenbrooks he wrote one of the last of the great "old-fashioned" novels, a patient, thorough tracing of the fortunes of a family.

—Henry Hatfield in Thomas Mann, 1962

Doktor Faustus

Doktor Faustus is Mann's last complete novel, published in 1947 as Doktor Faustus. Das Leben des deutschen Tonsetzers Adrian Leverkühn, erzählt von einem Freunde ("Doctor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend"). The novel documents the life of a fictional composer, Adrian Leverkühn, from his early childhood near the turn-of-the-century to his tragic death towards the beginning of World War II. Mann's protagonist, Leverkühn, is intentionally modeled along mythic lines of the German medieval morality tale of Faust, who sold his soul to the devil in exchange for infinite knowledge. As Leverkühn, impassioned by demons, develops artistically toward a fated reckoning day, German society simultaneously moves politically toward its catastrophic fate. That the novel is an allegory for Germany selling its own soul is clear and is suggested not only by Mann but by the novel's mysterious narrator, Serenus Zeitblom. Yet the novel also tackles themes of much greater depth than simply a condemnation of political catastrophes. It examines in particular the growth of German intellectualism, from the early age of Romanticism to the nihilism of such philosophers as Friedrich Nietzsche and Arthur Schopenhauer, and the ultimate disaster of National Socialism; this transition is viewed, from Adrian's point of view, through the development of German music from Romanticism to Modernism, and in this respect the novel is perhaps one of the greatest works ever written on the relation between artistic and political ambition.

Structure

Doktor Faustus consists of a vast array of characters, fables, world events, theories, memories, ideas, and places, sometimes directly and sometimes tangentially linked to the story of Adrian Leverkühn's life. The entire novel is told through the character of Serenus Zeitblom, a childhood friend of Adrian who loves his friend so dearly (and can perceive his genius, even at an early age) that he devotes the rest of his life to following Adrian and writing his biography. That fictional biography is the text of Doktor Faustus. Zeitblom is a fascinating character in and of himself: he is a philologist and schoolteacher, deeply devoted to the philosophy of moral humanism, and he is shy to the point of being comical. He famously begins the first half-dozen chapters of the novel by apologizing for how lengthy the previous chapter had been. He is so unlike the daring artist Adrian that the two are almost antithetical; yet, in complementing one another, they create a complete story of tremendous force and beauty.

Plot Summary

Zeitblom begins the novel by recounting his and Leverkuhn's shared childhood in the German township of Kaiseraschern. Leverkuhn's father is a tinkerer and amateur scientist, and he shows the boys a variety of scientific wonders, such as an amoeba under a microscope. Even at this early stage, however, the difference between the two boys is clear: Zeitblom reacts to the amoeba and other wonders with awe and a slight tinge of fear; young Leverkuhn reacts by bursting into fits of uncontrollable laughter.

As the two grow older, Leverkuhn's genius becomes undeniable. His parents hire a tutor for him, only to have the tutor cocnlude in a matter of months that there is nothing more he can teach the boy. Leverkuhn finds solace, however, by studying with the local organist, a German-American named Kretzschmar who happens to have an extensive musical education and who takes the young prodigy under his wing. During these early chapters concerning Kretzschmar and Leverkuhn's musical education, the narrator Zeitblom reproduces huge lectures (given by Kretzschmar to Leverkuhn, Zeitblom, and a few other listeners) on such topics as Beethoven's sonatas, the ultra-primitive choral music of an extreme isolationist church in Pennsylvania, and the relation between the visual arts and music. Again, as Leverkuhn readily absorbs all of Kretzschmar's knowledge, he cannot help himself from fits of laughter at each new epiphany.

The novel proceeds on as the two characters grow up and proceed into their adult lives. When Leverkuhn comes of age he surprises his parents and his teacher Kretzschmar by announcing that he will pursue a career in theology, not music; Zeitblom devotedly follows, even though he himself has no interest in theology. Leverkuhn enrolls at a theological seminary in Giessen, and only after bouncing around the theology and philosophy departments for a number of years does he at last consider becoming a composer. It is at this crucial point in the book that the central event of the novel occurs:

One night, a pale man, dressed in suit and tie, appears to Leverkuhn as he awakens from a mild dream. The man never identifies himself, though as the two converse it readily becomes clear who He is; the closer he comes to Leverkuhn, the colder the room seems to become, and as their conversation continues he readily changes shape, taking on the voices and personas of variety of people that Leverkuhn knows. The man makes a deal with Leverkuhn: he will grant him the artistic genius he needs to compose great works, in exchange for his soul. At first, Leverkuhn laughs at this offer, but the man continues making clear exactly what he means: when he leaves the room, Leverkuhn will be granted musical genius; but in return, he will never again be able to love another human being. Leverkuhn agrees to the terms; the man disappears; and the novel is never the same again.

After these events, the novel rapidly picks up speed as Leverkuhn begins a repeated process of composing more and more ambitious masterworks while simultaneously falling further and further into insanity. Each new work Leverkuhn composes is preceded by a period of intense illness and migraines, which gradually become more severe as he ambitious spread wider. As Leverkuhn begins to win fame and renown as a major composer, it becomes clear to him just what he's sacrificed. He attempts, desperately, to win the affections of a young woman, only to have those very advances result inadvertently in her own tragic death. Terrified, he flees to a rustic village much like the one he and Zeitblom grew up in and commits himself to composing his greatest work, a massive opera entitled The Damnation of Faust.

After years of total isolation, Leverkuhn invites Zeitblom, Kretzschmar, and anyone else who is willing to meet him at his home as he presents the finished manuscript of his opera. Instead of presenting the opera, however, Leverkuhn tells the gathered audience of all his sins, of having lived the past three decades of his life in service of the Lord Satan, and of being responsible for the murders of his nephew Nepomuk and a woman he loved. As the ghastly confession continues all the members of the audience with the exception of Zeitblom slowly drift away, and the novel closes with Leverkuhn falling into a fit of migraine and lapsing into a coma from which he never recovers.

Themes

The novel is concerned with the intellectual fall of Germany in the time leading up to World War II. Leverkühn's own moods and ideology mimic the change from humanism to irrational nihilism found in Germany's intellectual life in the 1930s. Leverkühn (the name means "live audaciously") becomes increasingly corrupt of body and of mind, ridden by syphilis and insanity. In the novel, all of these thematic threads—Germany's intellectual fall, Leverkühn's spiritual fall, and the physical corruption of his body—directly analogue to the political disaster of fascistic Germany. Mann's sense of the inseparable nature of art and politics may be seen in the published version of his 1938 United States lecture tour, The Coming Victory of Democracy, in which he said, ""I must regretfully own that in my younger years I shared that dangerous German habit of thought which regards life and intellect, art and politics as totally separate worlds."" In Doktor Faustus, Leverkühn's personal history, his artistic development, and the shifting German political climate are tied together by the narrator Zeitblom as he feels out and worries over the moral health of his nation (just as he had worried over the spiritual health of his friend, Leverkühn).

Another central theme is music. In the novel, Adrian Leverkühn develops the twelve-tone technique actually invented by Arnold Schoenberg. Schoenberg, who lived near Mann in Los Angeles as the novel was being written, was very upset that Mann had appropriated the method without attributing it to him, and at his insistence, later editions of the novel included a disclaimer at the end describing Schoenberg's invention of the technique.

Major Influences

• The Bible
• Fyodor Dostoevsky
• Theodor Fontane
• Sigmund Freud
• Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
• Hermann Hesse
• E.T.A. Hoffmann
• Carl Jung
• Gotthold Ephraim Lessing
• Martin Luther
• Friedrich Nietzsche
• Edgar Allan Poe
• Friedrich von Schlegel
• Arthur Schopenhauer
• Richard Wagner

Works

• 1897 Little Herr Friedemann (Der kleine Herr Friedemann)
• 1897 The Clown (Der Bajazzo)
• 1900 The Road to the Churchyard (Der Weg zum Friedhof)
• 1901 Buddenbrooks (Buddenbrooks - Verfall einer Familie)
• 1902 Gladius Dei
• 1903 Tristan
• 1903 Tonio Kröger
• 1909 Royal Highness (Königliche Hoheit)
• 1912 Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig)
• 1918 Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen)
• 1922 The German Republic (Von deutscher Republik)
• 1924 The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg)
• 1926 Disorder and Early Sorrow (Unordnung und frühes Leid)
• 1930 Mario and the Magician (Mario und der Zauberer)
• 1933–43 Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder)
  • 1933 The Tales of Jacob (Die Geschichten Jaakobs)
  • 1934 The Young Joseph (Der junge Joseph)
  • 1936 Joseph in Egypt (Joseph in Ägypten)
  • 1943 Joseph the Provider (Joseph, der Ernährer)
• 1937 The Problem of Freedom (Das Problem der Freiheit)
• 1938 The Coming Victory of Democracy
• 1939 Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns
• 1940 The Transposed Heads (Die vertauschten Köpfe - Eine indische Legende)
• 1942 Listen Germany! (Deutsche Hörer)
• 1947 Doctor Faustus (Doktor Faustus)
• 1951 The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte)
• 1922/1954 Confessions of Felix Krull Confidence Man, The Early Years (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren erster Teil); unfinished

External links

• Works by Thomas Mann. Project Gutenberg

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