Thomas mann works list. Biography of Thomas Mann

Paul Thomas Mann (1875-1955) - German writer and essayist, recognized master of the epic novel, winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. He was born on June 6, 1875 in Lübeck, an ancient city in northern Germany. There were other famous personalities in the Mann family - the brother of the prose writer Heinrich, his children Klaus and Erica. However, it was Paul who became the most prominent representative of this family.

Young years

The future master of epic paintings was born into the family of a wealthy merchant and city senator Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann. Paul's mother, Julia da Silva-Bruns, was of Brazilian origin, she was a talented singer, fond of music.

The family also had two sons and two daughters. They never had problems with money, the children were brought up in a comfortable and comfortable atmosphere. But this idyll did not last long.

From an early age, Mann showed himself as a writer. He helped in the creation of the literary and philosophical journal "Spring Thunderstorm", and later sent his articles to the publication "XX Century", founded by his brother Heinrich. After leaving school, the writer gets a job in an insurance company, but does not forget about his passion for journalism.

In 1891, Thomas' father dies of cancer. In his will, he demanded the sale of the Mann farm and house in Lübeck. His children and wife had to be content with a percentage of the proceeds. After selling the farm, the family moved to Munich, where Paul lived until 1933. There was only one time when he and his brother went to Italy for a while in the mid-90s.

After returning from Italy, Thomas works in the editorial office of the satirical magazine Simplicissimus. At the same time, he publishes his first collection of short stories called "Little Mr. Friedeman".

But the prose writer's real fame is brought by his first novel, called Buddenbrooks. It was autobiographical in nature, the work told about the fate of a merchant family. The book was published in 1901. Shortly after this, a collection of short stories was published, the best of which is Tonio Kroeger.

In 1911, readers enthusiastically accepted the novel "Death in Venice" with a dramatic ending. In 1924, the novel "The Magic Mountain" was released, which finally consolidated the author's position in the world of literature. In 1929, the prose writer received the Nobel Prize for his novel about the Buddenbrooks.

Marriage and relocation

In 1905, Thomas marries the professor's daughter, Jewish Katya Pringsheim. In marriage, they had six children. Three of them later became writers. It was thanks to his marriage that Mann was able to enter the circles of the bourgeoisie. As a result, his conservative views became known to the general public.

The prose writer supported the First World War, sharply criticized pacificism and social reforms. He experienced a serious mental crisis and even devoted several works to this topic. In 1918, the novel "Reflections of the Apolitical" was published, dedicated to reflections on the war.

Because of his ultra-conservative views, Mann had a fight with his brother Heinrich. Only after Thomas realized he was wrong and went over to the side of democracy, they managed to reconcile. The reason for such a radical change in views was the murder by the nationalists of the Minister of the Weimar Republic, Walther Rathenau. This greatly influenced the writer.

In 1933, together with the Mann family, he emigrated from Nazi Germany. They settle in Zurich. At the same time, the first volume of his novel "Joseph and his brothers" was published. In it, Paul interprets the story of a famous biblical character in his own way. Later, three more volumes of this work were published.

Relationship with politics

The rulers of Germany tried to return the talented writer to the country, but he flatly refused. At that time, he and his wife traveled a lot and did not intend to return to their hometown. After several unsuccessful attempts, the authorities took away Mann's German citizenship and his doctorate from the University of Bonn. In 1949, the regalia were returned to him.

Against the backdrop of all these events, Thomas pays more and more attention to politics in his writings. At this time, the speech “To the Mind of Nations”, the poetic allegory “Mario and the Wizard” and other works are published. After renouncing German citizenship, the prose writer becomes a citizen of Czechoslovakia.

In 1938 he moved to America, earning a living by teaching at Princeton University. From 1941 to 1952, Thomas not only taught humanities students, but also advised the Library of Congress on German literature. A year later, his novel Lotta in Weimar appears on the bookshelves. In 1942 the Mann family moved to California. There, the writer conducts anti-fascist programs for German radio listeners. In 1947, he published his own interpretation of the novel about Dr. Faust, calling him Faustus.

After World War II, US authorities accuse Thomas of complicity with the USSR because of his socialist views. Because of this, in June 1952 the family returned to Switzerland. They live there until Mann's death on August 12, 1955. The cause of his death was atherosclerosis.

Thomas Mann is the most famous member of the Mann family of writers. An outstanding German prose writer, author of Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, Mario and the Magician, Nobel laureate in 1929, lived for eight decades, changed several ideologies, raised three talented writers and forever inscribed his name on the tablets of the history of world culture.

The German family of Manns has always been well known. In the 19th century, they were famous as successful merchants, senators, real kings of their native city. In the 20th century, the Manns were talked about as outstanding writers. The elder Heinrich (the author of the novels In the Same Family, The Empire, The Young Years of King Henry IV) was actively published, Thomas Mann bathed in the laurels of world fame, his children Klaus, Golo and Erika were successfully published. No matter what these people do, they always succeed. So the prose writer Thomas Mann can rightfully be called the best of the best.

His father, Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, was a very wealthy entrepreneur, owner of several industries, an active public and political figure, holding a high position in the Senate. As the biographer and translator of the prose writer Solomon Apt writes, Johan was "not just a well-known businessman and respected father of the family, but one of the most famous and respected citizens, the one who is called the fathers of the city."

He was a dry practical man. He saw his sons Heinrich, Thomas and Victor as worthy successors of the century-old firm, which was created by his father. However, the children did not show a desire for entrepreneurship. The elder Heinrich was fond of literature, which provoked constant quarrels with his father. The unrest of the head of the family in relation to the heir is evidenced by the line in the will: “I ask my brother to influence my eldest son so that he does not embark on the wrong path that will lead him to misfortune.” Here Johann means the literary path. Since the eldest son was already causing concern, special hopes were placed on the middle Thomas.

Shortly after writing his will, Senator Mann died of cancer. The company was sold and a large family quite successfully healed on solid interest from the enterprise. Reality anticipated the fears of the dying father. Heinrich really became a writer, but his beloved Thomas achieved even greater success in this field. And even the daughters of Julius and Karla were far from their father's practicality. The younger Carla went into acting. Due to failures on stage and in her personal life, she committed suicide at the age of 29. Unbalanced, emotional Julia also took her own life two decades later.

Thomas Mann will write about the degeneration of bourgeois society in the novel Buddenbrooks, using the example of the decline of his own patriarchal family. Published at the dawn of his creative career, this work brought Mann worldwide fame and the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Sleek childhood and carefree youth

The story of Paul Thomas Mann begins in Lübeck (Germany) in 1875. “My childhood was happy, well-groomed,” the writer later recalls. It began in his grandmother's old house on a narrow cobblestone street and continued into the elegant mansion that Johann built for his growing family.

Thomas had all the toys that his little contemporary could only dream of. The writer will remember some of them (the puppet theater, the rocking horse Achilles) in his works. But often, young Mann absolutely did not need toys, because more than anything in the world he loved to invent. For example, one morning he woke up and imagined himself as the crown prince of a distant state. The whole day the boy behaved arrogantly and reservedly, as befits an august person, rejoicing in his soul that none of those around him knew about his secret.

Thomas disliked the school with its dictatorial teachers, noisy classmates, thoughtless cramming. Moreover, she distracted him from his beloved home. The same fate befell the gymnasium - Mann several times remained in the second year, without receiving a certificate of graduation from the educational institution. It is fundamentally important to understand that it was not study that bothered him, but the musty spirit of bureaucracy and drill that reigned in the Katharineum gymnasium, the one-sided learning process, the stupidity and philistine narrow-mindedness of many teachers, not excluding the director of the educational institution.

The future of the schoolboy Mann was very vague. He was going to leave Lübeck, to travel, to think, to go on a search for himself, characteristic of the "golden youth". But everything changed when Wagner's music burst into his life.

In 1882, Thomas Mann gets to a concert where they play the music of Richard Wagner. It was she who became the driving force that awakened the literary talent of the future prose writer. Now young Thomas knows - he will write!

Mann does not languish in anticipation of the muse, but begins to act. Already in the fifth year of the gymnasium, together with his comrades, Mann published the literary magazine "Spring Thunderstorm", where young editors published their own prose, poetic and critical creations. When the Thunderstorm ceased its short existence, Mann began to be published on the pages of the Twentieth Century periodical, which was led by his brother Heinrich.

Several attempts at writing, signed with the pseudonym Paul Thomas, a small collection of stories - and Mann publishes a monumental work - the novel "Buddenbrooks". The work was started in 1896. It took 5 years to create it. In 1901, when The Buddenbrooks, subtitled The History of the Death of a Family, became available to the general public, Thomas Mann was talked about as an outstanding writer of our time.

Almost 30 years later, in 1929, the Buddenbrooks became the main basis for awarding the writer the Nobel Prize in Literature. The wording of the Nobel committee said: "First of all for the great novel "Buddenbrooks", which has become a classic of modern literature, the popularity of which is constantly growing."

At the beginning of the First World War, the Mann family (in 1905, Thomas married the professor's daughter Katya Pringsheim) was part of the highest circles of the German bourgeoisie. This led to the fact that at first the writer adhered to conservative views and did not share the pacifism of many cultural figures, which he publicly stated in the collection of philosophical and journalistic articles Reflections of the Apolitical.

It is fundamentally important to understand that Mann supported Germany, not Nazism. The writer stood up for the preservation of the national identity of European cultures, primarily German - dearly beloved to his heart from early childhood. He was extremely distasteful of the "American way of life" everywhere imposed everywhere. The Entente, thus, becomes for the writer a kind of synonym for literature, culture, civilization.

Over time, when Nazism showed its dark face, and the beloved country lowered its hands to the elbow in the blood of innocent victims, Thomas Mann could no longer justify the actions of Germany under any pretext. In 1930, he gives a public anti-fascist speech, "A Call to Reason", in which he sharply criticizes Nazism and encourages the resistance of the working class and liberals. The speech could not have gone unnoticed. It was no longer possible to stay in Germany. Fortunately, the Mann family was allowed to emigrate. In 1933, Mann moved to Zurich with his wife and children.

In exile: Switzerland, USA, Switzerland

Emigration did not break the spirit of Thomas Mann, because he had a huge privilege - he continues to write and publish in his native language. So, in Zurich, Mann finalizes and publishes the mythological tetralogy "Joseph and his brothers". In 1939, the novel "Lot in Weimar" was published - an artistic stylization of a fragment of the biography of Johann Wolfgang Goethe, namely his romantic attachment to Lotte (Charlotte Buff), who became the prototype of the female image of "The Suffering of Young Werther".

In 1947, Dr. Faustus was published, telling about the composer Adrian Leverkühn, who created a stylization of his life under the medieval story of Dr. Faust, who sold his soul to Mephistopheles. The fictional world of Leverkün is intertwined with the realities of modern reality - fascist Germany, which is poisoned by the ideas of Nazism.

Retribution for dissent

Mann never managed to return to his homeland. The Nazis stripped his entire family of German citizenship. Since then, the writer has been visiting Germany as a lecturer, journalist, and literary consultant. Since 1938, at the invitation of the leadership of Princeton University, Mann moved to the United States, where he was engaged in teaching and writing.

In the 1950s, the prose writer returned to Switzerland. Mann writes until his death. His sunset works were the novella The Black Swan and the novel Confessions of the Adventurer Felix Krul.

Homoeroticism as a representation of same-sex love was characteristic of a number of works by Thomas Mann. The most striking example is the short story "Death in Venice", written in 1912. In the short story, the writer Gustav von Aschenbach's sudden flare-up of feelings for the fourteen-year-old boy Tadzio is dissected.

The scandalous fame of "Death in Venice" led to increased attention to the private life of Thomas Mann. An exemplary family man, the father of six children, did not compromise himself in public. The path to the spiritual secrets of Mann lay through his diaries, which the writer regularly kept throughout his life. The records were destroyed several times, and then immediately restored, were lost during an unexpected emigration, but returned to their rightful owner through a lawsuit.

After the death of the writer, his mental anxieties were repeatedly analyzed. It became known about his first innocent passions, an intimate attachment to a school friend Villri Timpe (his gift - a simple wooden pencil - Mann kept all his life), a youthful affair with the artist Paul Ehrenberg. According to Gomo Mann (the writer's son), his father's homosexuality never sank below the waist. But rich emotional experiences gave rise to images of his short stories and novels.

Another significant work of Thomas Mann is the novel "Death in Venice", discussions and disputes about which still do not stop among critics and ordinary readers.

Undoubtedly, another unique book is Mann's novel "Magic Mountain", in which the author depicted the life of people undergoing treatment in a mountain sanatorium, and who do not want to delve into the events taking place outside the walls of the hospital.

Mann, in fact, knew how to feel more and more subtle. Without this skill, there would be no poetic male images of Hans Castorp from The Magic Mountain, Rudy Schwerdtferger from Doctor Faustus, Gustav Aschenbach from Death in Venice and many others. Digging into the sources of inspiration is the inglorious lot of contemporaries, the chanting of its fruits is a worthy privilege of descendants.

Biography of German prose writer Thomas Mann

German writer. Born June 6, 1875 in Lübeck, in a family of wealthy merchants, who played a significant role in Lübeck and other Hanseatic cities in Northern Germany. Mann's childhood passed in Lübeck, he studied in Lübeck and Munich, where the family moved after the death of his father in 1891. As a university student, he independently and enthusiastically studied A. Schopenhauer, F. Nietzsche and R. Wagner. After an unsuccessful attempt at a business career, Mann went to Italy in the mid-1890s, where he stayed for two and a half years, devoting them mainly to working on the first significant novel, The Buddenbrooks (1901), which became a bestseller. Upon his return to Munich, Mann until 1914 led the life usual for prosperous "apolitical" intellectuals of that time. Germany's role in World War I and its subsequent unpopularity abroad sparked Mann's interest in national and international politics. His Meditations of the Apolitical (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 1918), as well as short wartime essays, are an attempt by a German conservative patriot to justify his country's position in the eyes of the democratic West. By the end of the war, Mann moved closer to the Democratic positions. After receiving the Nobel Prize in Literature (1929), he gained recognition throughout Europe and beyond. In the 1920s and early 1930s, the writer repeatedly warned his compatriots against the threat of Hitlerism; in 1933 his voluntary emigration began. Having become a US citizen in 1944, Mann decided not to return to Germany after the war, and a few years later he left the United States and settled in Switzerland, in Kilchberg near Zurich. The last years of his life were marked by new literary achievements. A few days before his death, which followed on August 12, 1955, he was awarded Germany's highest Order of Merit. The Buddenbrooks are based on Mann's observations of his family, friends, the customs of his native city, the decline of a family belonging to a hereditary middle class. The book "Royal Highness" (1909), like all the works of Mann, is in a certain sense autobiographical. Among the early novels, Tonio Kröger (1903) and Death in Venice (1912) are especially noteworthy; Mario and the Magician (1931), which deals with freedom, occupies an outstanding place among later novels. Perhaps Mann's most important book is The Magic Mountain (1924), a novel of ideas. The monumental tetralogy "Joseph and his brothers" (1934–1944), even more clearly than the Magic Mountain, is oriented towards "friendliness to life". The novel Lotta in Weimar (1940) reflected Mann's growing interest in Goethe. This is a story about the second meeting of the aging Goethe with Charlotte Buff, who in his youth inspired the book that brought him European fame - The Sufferings of Young Werther. Throughout his creative career, Mann wrote a number of large and small essays, drawing on topics in the field of culture until the First World War, then connecting the sphere of politics. A number of major essays by Mann are devoted to three idols of his youth - Schopenhauer, Nietzsche and Wagner, as well as I.V. Goethe, L.N. Tolstoy, F.M. Dostoevsky, F. Schiller, Z. Freud and others. it is a reflection on the two world wars and the rise of Hitlerism.

Thomas Mann - German writer, essayist, master of the epic novel, Nobel Prize in Literature (1929), brother of Heinrich Mann, father of Klaus Mann, Golo Mann and Erica Mann.

Thomas, the most famous representative of his family, rich in famous writers, was born on June 6, 1875 in the family of a wealthy Lübeck merchant Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, who served as a city senator. Thomas' mother, Julia Mann, née da Silva-Bruns, came from a family with Brazilian roots. The Mann family was quite numerous. Thomas had two brothers and two sisters: older brother Heinrich (1871-1950), younger brother Viktor (1890-1949) and two sisters - Julia (1877-1927) and Karla (1881-1910).

The Mann family was prosperous, and Thomas's childhood was carefree and almost cloudless. In 1891, Thomas's father died of cancer. According to his will, the family company and the Mann house in Lübeck are sold. The children and wife had to be content with a percentage of the proceeds. The family moved to Munich, where Thomas lived (with short breaks) until 1933. In the mid-1890s, Thomas and Heinrich went to Italy for a while. However, even in Lübeck, Thomas began to show himself in the literary field as the creator and author of the literary and philosophical journal Spring Storm, and later wrote articles for the journal XX Century published by his brother Heinrich.

Upon his return from Italy, Thomas briefly (1898-1899) worked as the editor of the popular German satirical magazine Simplicissimus, completed a year's military service and published his first short stories.

However, fame came to Thomas Mann when his first novel, The Buddenbrooks, was published in 1901. In this novel, based on the history of his own family, Thomas describes the story of the decline and degeneration of a merchant dynasty from Lübeck. Each new generation of this family is less and less able to continue the work of their fathers due to the lack of inherent burgher qualities, such as: thrift, diligence and commitment - and more and more moves away from the real world into religion, philosophy, music, vices, luxury and depravity. The result of this is not only the gradual loss of interest in commerce and the prestige of the Buddenbrock family, but also the loss of the meaning of life, the will to live, which turns into ridiculous and tragic deaths of the last representatives of this family.

The Buddenbrocks were followed by the publication of an equally successful collection of short stories called Tristan, the best of which was the short story Tonio Kröger. The protagonist of this novel renounces love as something that brings him pain, and devotes himself to art, however, having accidentally met Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm - two opposite-sex objects of his unrequited feelings - he again experiences the same confusion that once enveloped him when looking at them.

In 1905, Thomas marries the professor's daughter Katya Pringsheim. From this marriage they had six children, three of whom - Klaus, Golo and Erika - subsequently proved themselves in the literary field. According to Golo Mann, the mother's Jewish origin was carefully concealed from her children. The marriage contributed to the entry of Thomas into the circles of the big bourgeoisie, and this largely strengthened his political conservatism, which for the time being was not manifested in public.

In 1911, the short story "Death in Venice" was born - about the lust of the elderly Munich writer Gustav Aschenbach, who went on vacation to Venice, to an unknown boy named Tadzio he saw there, ending with the death of the artist in Venice.

During the First World War, Thomas Mann spoke in support of it, as well as against pacifism and social reforms, as evidenced by his articles, which were later included in the collection Reflections of the Apolitical. This position leads to a break with brother Heinrich, who had opposing views. Reconciliation between the brothers came only when, after the assassination by the nationalists of the Minister of Foreign Affairs of the Weimar Republic, Walter Rathenau

Thomas revised his views and began to advocate democracy and even socialism. In 1924, Thomas Mann's new major and successful work, The Magic Mountain, was released after the Buddenbrocks. The main character, a young engineer Hans Castorp, comes to visit his cousin Joachim Zimsen, who is ill with tuberculosis, for three weeks and becomes a patient of this sanatorium, where he spends seven years of spiritual apprenticeship and maturation.

In 1933, Thomas Mann emigrated from Nazi Germany with his family and settled in Zurich. In the same year, the first volume of his tetralogy novel Joseph and His Brothers was published, where he interprets the story of the biblical Joseph in his own way. In 1936, after unsuccessful attempts to persuade Thomas to return to Germany, the Nazi authorities deprive him and his family of German citizenship, and he becomes a citizen of Czechoslovakia, and in 1938 he leaves for the United States, where he makes a living teaching at Princeton University.

In 1939, the novel Lotta in Weimar was published, describing the relationship between the aged Johann Wolfgang Goethe and his youthful love Charlotte Kestner, who became the prototype of the heroine of The Suffering of Young Werther, who met the poet again many years later.

In 1942, Thomas moved to Pacific Palisades and hosted anti-fascist broadcasts for German radio listeners. In 1947, his novel "Doctor Faustus" was born, the main character of which largely repeats the path of Faust, despite the fact that the action of the novel takes place in the 20th century. There are no two Germanys, good and evil... Evil Germany is the good one, which has gone down the wrong path, has fallen into trouble, is mired in crimes and is now facing a catastrophe. That is why it is impossible for a person who was born a German to completely renounce evil Germany, weighed down by historical guilt, and declare: “I am a good, noble, just Germany; Look, I'm wearing a snow-white dress. And I give you the evil one to be torn to pieces.

After the Second World War, the situation in the United States takes on an increasingly less favorable character for Thomas Mann: the writer begins to be accused of complicity with the USSR. In June 1952, the Thomas family returned to Switzerland. Despite the reluctance to move to a divided country for good, he nevertheless willingly visits Germany (in 1949, as part of the celebration of Goethe's anniversary, he manages to visit both the FRG and the GDR).

In the last years of his life, he actively published: in 1951, the novel The Chosen One appeared, in 1954 - his last short story, The Black Swan. And then Thomas continues to work on the novel “Confessions of the Adventurer Felix Krul”, begun before the First World War - about the modern Dorian Gray, who, possessing talent, intelligence and beauty, chose to become a fraudster and, with the help of his scams, began to rapidly climb the social ladder, losing human form and turning into a monster. Thomas Mann died on August 12, 1955 in Zurich from atherosclerosis.

Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875 in Lübeck, in northern Germany, into the family of a wealthy merchant. But in 1891, his father died, and his shipping company went bankrupt.

When Thomas was 16, his family moved to Munich. Here, the future writer worked in an insurance company and was engaged in journalism. After a while he became an editor in a satirical weekly and began to try writing books.

In 1901, Mann's first novel, The Buddenbrooks, was published. In 1903, the short story "Tonio Kroeger" was published. These works were a great success.

In 1905, Mann married Katya Pringsheim, the daughter of a prominent mathematician, a descendant of an old Jewish family of bankers and merchants. They had six children, three girls and three boys.

Thomas Mann and his wife Katja Pringsheim. Photo 1929

In 1913, the short story "Death in Venice" was published. During First World War Mann wrote the book Reasoning of the Apolitical (1918). In this work, he criticized liberal optimism and opposed rationalistic Enlightenment philosophy.

After the war, Mann again took up literary activity. In 1924, the novel The Magic Mountain was written.

Literary Nobel. Thomas Mann

In 1929, Mann received the Nobel Prize in Literature "primarily for the great novel The Buddenbrooks, which has become a classic of modern literature and whose popularity is steadily growing."

After receiving the Nobel Prize, Mann began to pay a lot of attention to politics. He advocated the creation of a common front of socialist workers and bourgeois liberals to fight against the Nazi threat. In 1930, the political allegory "Mario and the Magician" was created. Mann was highly critical of the Nazis.

When Hitler became Chancellor of Germany in 1933, Mann and his wife, who were in Switzerland at the time, decided not to return home. In 1938 they moved to the United States. For about three years, Mann lectured in the humanities at Princeton University, in 1941-1952. he lived with his wife in California.

In 1936, Mann was deprived by the Nazis of German citizenship and an honorary doctorate from the University of Bonn (awarded to him in 1919). But in 1949, at the end of World War II, the honorary degree was returned to him.

For many years (1933-1943) Mann worked on a tetralogy about the biblical Joseph. In 1939, the novel "Lotta in Weimar" (1939) was created, in 1947 - "Doctor Faustus", in 1954 - "The Adventures of the Adventurer Felix Krul".

In 1949 Mann received the Goethe Prize. This prize was awarded to him jointly by West and East Germany. In addition, he held honorary degrees from Oxford and Cambridge universities.

Mann loved his wife, but marriage could not save him from the homosexual attraction that haunted the writer all his life.