Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lübeck, the old Hanseatic port city on the Baltic, into a patrician merchant family that had been prominent there for generations. His father, Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, was a grain merchant and a senator of the Free City; his mother, Júlia da Silva-Bruhns, was born in Brazil to a German planter and a part-Portuguese, part-Creole mother, and her South American sensibility was a long-acknowledged counterweight in the family to the North German bourgeois rigor of the Manns. The father died when Thomas was sixteen; the firm was liquidated; the family moved to Munich. The decline of a merchant dynasty became, almost immediately, his subject.

He won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, primarily on the strength of Buddenbrooks (1901), which he had published at twenty-six. He left Germany in 1933, the month Hitler took power, eventually settling in the United States, where he became a vocal anti-fascist broadcaster and a naturalized American citizen. He left the United States during the McCarthy period and died in Zurich in 1955.

Buddenbrooks (1901), subtitled Decline of a Family, traces four generations of a Lübeck merchant family closely modeled on the Manns themselves. The book is long, patient, and unusually attentive to the small domestic registers of bourgeois life — meals, christenings, business transactions, the management of household servants — through which the larger pattern of decline becomes visible. Successive generations grow more refined, more aesthetic, more inward, and less able to do the practical work that sustained the firm. The final Buddenbrook, Hanno, is a musical child who dies of typhoid before adulthood. The novel is conservative in its sympathies and progressive in its analysis: a portrait of how artistic sensitivity and commercial competence sit in long-term tension in modern bourgeois life.

Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912) is a short novella of about eighty pages in which Gustav von Aschenbach, a famous and disciplined German writer, travels to Venice for a rest and becomes obsessively fixated on a Polish boy named Tadzio whom he watches on the beach of the Lido. Aschenbach does not act on his obsession; he watches. Cholera spreads through the city; the authorities suppress the news; Aschenbach refuses to leave; he dies in a beach chair watching Tadzio walk toward the sea. The novella braids Apollonian and Dionysian themes from Nietzsche with a long meditation on the relationship between artistic discipline and erotic disorder, and it has been read variously as a coded confession (Mann was a closeted homosexual married to a woman with whom he had six children), a critique of late-imperial German aestheticism, and a parable about the costs of repression. All three readings have textual support.

The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg, 1924) is the great philosophical novel of his middle period. Hans Castorp, a young engineer, visits his cousin at a tuberculosis sanatorium in Davos for a three-week stay and ends up remaining for seven years, his sense of time progressively dissolving as he is drawn into the closed world of the sick. The novel is a long debate — staged primarily between the Italian humanist Settembrini and the Jesuit-Marxist Naphta — about humanism, reason, faith, death, and the trajectory of European civilization on the eve of the First World War. It is one of the central works of European modernism and the most demanding of Mann's novels; it rewards slow reading.

His later work — Joseph and His Brothers (a four-volume biblical novel completed in exile), Doctor Faustus (1947, on a fictional composer whose pact with the devil parallels Germany's pact with Nazism), Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (unfinished, 1954) — is uneven and increasingly long. The John E. Woods translations (Knopf, 1990s) replaced the older H.T. Lowe-Porter renderings as the standard English versions and are noticeably more readable; if you find an old Lowe-Porter Magic Mountain on a shelf, replace it. For new readers, start with Death in Venice (one evening), then Buddenbrooks, then The Magic Mountain.