Buddenbrooks | novel by Mann | Britannica.com novel by Mann Alternative Title: “Buddenbrooks, Verfall einer Familie” Similar Topics Pride and Prejudice Buddenbrooks, novel by Thomas Mann , published in 1901 in two volumes in German as Buddenbrooks, Verfall einer Familie (“Buddenbrooks, the Decline of a Family”). The work was Mann’s first novel, and it expressed the ambivalence of his feelings about the value of the life of the artist as opposed to ordinary, bourgeois life. The novel is the saga of the fall of the Buddenbrooks, a family of merchants, from the pinnacle of their material wealth in 1835 to their extinction in 1877. Learn More in these related articles: Thomas Mann June 6, 1875 Lübeck, Ger. Aug. 12, 1955 near Zürich, Switz.

German novelist and essayist whose early novels— Buddenbrooks (1900), Der Tod in Venedig (1912; Death in Venice), and Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain)—earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. in German literature: Aestheticism ...A novel by Thomas Mann, Buddenbrooks (1901; subtitled Verfall einer Famille, or “The Decline of a Family,” Eng. trans. Buddenbrooks), links aesthetic decadence with social and moral decline. Arthur Schopenhauer’s philosophy of the will and Nietzsche’s cultural pessimism are important ingredients in Mann’s... in Thomas Mann: Early literary endeavours This ambivalence found full expression in his first novel, Buddenbrooks, which Mann had at first intended to be a novella in which the experience of the transcendental realities of Wagner’s music would extinguish the will to live in the son of a bourgeois family. On this beginning, the novel builds the story of the family and its business house over four generations, showing how an...

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Please note that our editors may make some formatting changes or correct spelling or grammatical errors, and may also contact you if any clarifications are needed. Uh Oh There was a problem with your submission. Please try again later. Close Date Published: March 16, 2011 URL: Access Date: January 02, 2017 Share The New York Times: Book Review Search Article April 18, 1993, Sunday, Late Edition - Final Byline: By Theodore Ziolkowski; Lead: BUDDENBROOKS The Decline of a Family. By Thomas Mann. Translated by John E. Woods. 648 pp. New York: Alfred A. Knopf. $35. Text: LIKE Goethe, to whom he devoted a novel ("The Beloved Returns") and several thoughtful essays, Thomas Mann published his first and most enduringly popular novel at the age of 25.

Unlike "The Sorrows of Young Werther" (1774), Goethe's brief epistolary acc ount of the frustrations of life and love leading to the troubled hero's suicide, Mann's "Buddenbrooks" (1901) chronicles four generations in the history of a prosperous North German bourgeois family. "Buddenbrooks" was conceived as a novella not unlike "Werther," or Mann's own "Tonio Kroger." Initially fascinated by the figure of the sensitive young Hanno Buddenbrook, the music-loving scion with appalling teeth and miserable digestion whose death from typhoid marks the end of the family line, Mann planned to recount Hanno's story in a 250-page recit . Gradually the need for explanatory background drove Mann two generations back beyond Hanno's father, the fastidious Senator Thomas Buddenbrook. He appealed to his family for material: North German recipes, family gossip, the social history of Lubeck, medical details.

As Mann composed the novel over the next two and a half years -- first in Rome and then in Munich, where he was working as an editor for the satirical weekly Simplicissimus -- it grew until, in the summer of 1900, he mailed off a huge manuscript written on both sides of lined foolscap. The saga as first published in two volumes picks up the tale of the Buddenbrooks in 1835 at the peak of their financial prosperity and family stability. Old Johann Buddenbrook, son of the founder of the family firm, has just moved the family and the business into one of the most handsome houses in town. As the novel begins, he is holding his 8-year-old granddaughter Tony on his knee and testing her playfully on her Lutheran catechism. In the course of the short first chapter we meet his wife as well as his son and daughter-in-law, and we hear about his two grandsons, Thomas and Christian. By the time the novel ends 42 years later, the aging yet still spirited Tony is almost the only surviving member of the family. Her parents and grandparents, as well as Thomas and a younger sister, have died.

Christian is confined to an asylum, and the only male heir is dead. The house has been sold and the firm liquidated. In the course of hundreds of pages we have witnessed a succession of marriages, births, divorces and deaths punctuating the decline of the initially robust family -- a decline brought about (in Mann's Weltanschauung ) by the weakening of business acumen and ethics as the family succumbs to the enticements of wealth, with its inevitable concomitants of sickly religiosity, artistic inclinations and disease. Mann had no expectations of financial reward or popular acclaim from seemingly so unfashionable a topic. But within a year of its publication, after it was reprinted in a cheaper one-volume edition, the novel won enormous success -- first in German and then gradually in the more than 30 languages into which it was translated. Indeed, what Mann ironically termed the "Nordic pleasure" in family sagas was largely responsible for the Nobel Prize he received in 1929. "Buddenbrooks" constitutes a remarkable achievement for a first novel.

The 25-year-old high school dropout maintains an ironic detachment from a narrative that so closely paralleled characters and circumstances in his hometown that residents of Lubeck were scandalized. Incisive characterizations are achieved through a witty use of German dialects and the adaptation of leitmotif techniques borrowed from Wagner. And the fast-paced narrative is tightly controlled by a structure evident in the parallel between the first chapter and the last: both take place on rainy evenings in the fall, and both feature Tony Buddenbrook in conversations about religion -- first with her rationally skeptical grandfather and at the end with her aged teacher, who has always waged the good fight "against the onslaughts of reason." "Buddenbrooks" received a mixed response when it first appeared in English in 1924. Reviewers were respectful but regarded the novel as too long, and several felt that it betrayed a certain immaturity. The lukewarm reception can be attributed in part to a failure to grasp the book's theme. Because the publisher omitted the subtitle (which was later restored in British editions, but not in American ones), early readers did not understand that the book was about the decline of a family -- not a calendar of its social events.

Perhaps readers in the 1920's simply did not want to hear about Spenglerian decadence. However, benefiting from the growing appreciation of Mann's work after he received the Nobel Prize, the translation was eventually widely distributed in a Modern Library version and in a Vintage paperback edition. "Buddenbrooks" was the first product of the 30-year collaboration between Thomas Mann and the American translator Helen T. Lowe-Porter (1876-1963), through whose renditions most of his works became known to the English-reading public. Although its competence was acknowledged, it is not the strongest example of her craft. As she pointed out in her "Translator's Note," Lowe-Porter had special difficulties with the dialects, to which the novel owes much of its humor and the sharpness of its characterizations. "This difficulty is insuperable," she concluded. "Dialect cannot be transferred." Accordingly, she leveled Mann's colorful variety of speech into a uniformly even style, in certain cases simply omitting passages. As a result, much of the novel's humor was lost. These inadequacies alone would probably justify a new translation. John E.

Woods, whose intrepidity in the face of linguistic difficulties is attested by his prize-winning renditions of such writers as Arno Schmidt ("Evening Edged in Gold") and Patrick Suskind ("Perfume"), is not dismayed by Mann's play with dialects. He has restored passages omitted by Lowe-Porter and found ingenious renderings for tricky puns: for example, a Latin teacher's rule of thumb for rules of gender: "What's good for the goose is good for the gender." He has also retrieved occasional passages that Lowe-Porter omitted for reasons of delicacy: some lines on flatulence, for instance, that aptly characterize Tony Buddenbrook's boorish son-in-law. Elsewhere Mr. Woods's vocabulary is closer to the earthiness of Mann's language, as when Hanno Buddenbrook, after gorging himself on Christmas sweets, states that he's about to "throw up" -- which Lowe-Porter ambiguously renders as, "I think I'll just have to give it all up." Mr. Woods not only remains closer in vocabulary to Mann; he renders Mann's style more faithfully than his predecessor, who did not hesitate to recast and shorten Mann's sentences.

It is a truism that every generation needs its own translations. Lowe-Porter provided a valuable service by making Mann's novel initially accessible to the English and American publics. In Mr. Woods's sparkling new translation, the reader approaching "Buddenbrooks" in English now encounters a work that is closer in style, vocabulary, idiom and tone to the original and can thus appreciate more fully the monumental achievement of the artist as a young Mann. Thomas Mann Dies at 80; Novelist Won Nobel Prize Thomas Mann Dies at 80; Novelist Won Nobel Prize By The Associated Press ZURICH, Switzerland, Aug. 12--Thomas Mann, a modern literary giant, died in the Cantonal Hospital here early tonight. He was 80 years old. His death followed a thrombosis, or blood clot. Until stricken during a holiday in the Netherlands last month, he lived a quiet life in his home above Lake Zurich. He wrote, read ravenously and took daily walks in his garden. Author of 'Buddenbrooks' Thomas Mann was probably the greatest of modern German novelists.

In his homeland, his fame had grown steadily since his novel "Buddenbrooks" was published in 1901, when he was 26 years old. The award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 stimulated world interest in his writings, which were translated into many languages. In Europe his name was linked with the intellectual movement that sought to bring closer harmony among peoples. Students of German literature found that, in his philosophy, Dr. Mann was highly Germanic and at the same time a citizen of the world. They considered him an heir of Goethe in expressing the German soul, of Heine in tenderness and beauty and of Kant in profundity. "Buddenbrooks" had gone through fifty editions in German before it was translated into English in 1924. American and British critics at the time compared it with John Galsworthy's "The Forsyte Saga," also telling the story of a family through several generations. What made "Buddenbrooks" particularly interesting to the literary student was the fact that the author, showing the social decline of a Luebeck Senatorial family, wove much of his own family history into the story. Dr.

Mann came from old Luebeck patrician stock. He was born there on June 6, 1875. In the house of his father, one of the merchant princes of that ancient and historic Hanseatic city, who was also a Senator and a Mayor, he came in contact with the traditions of his home town. Dr. Mann's great-grandfather was a courageous free-thinker of the eighteenth century, who became a consul of the Netherlands and, although originally a liberal, returned to orthodoxy after his marriage. Dr. Mann's mother, the former Julia Bruhn da Silva, was born in South America, daughter of a German planter who had married a Creole woman of Portuguese and Indian ancestry. It was because of these racial origins that Dr. Mann was regarded as and, in fact, became a good European. The father died when his son was 15, and the youth and his mother moved to Munich, where he started work with an insurance firm. At the age of 15 he decided definitely on a literary career and joined the staff of Simplicissimus, the well-known satirical weekly.

Like Goethe, he went to Italy and during a two-year sojourn in the South completed "Buddenbrooks." 'Magic Mountain' Published Four years after the latter was published here "The Magic Mountain" appeared. The novel offered a record of profound mental and spiritual experience by exploiting a tuberculosis sanitarium in the Alps, where the character of Hans Castorp, one of its patients, provided the novelist with the unusual background of a strange world. When the enchantment of the magic mountain is at last being lifted, it is death that takes off the victory. In 1938, with the publication of "Joseph in Egypt," it became evident that Dr. Mann's recreation of the biblical story of Joseph was a literary event of the first magnitude. This volume was preceded by "Joseph and His Brothers" and "Young Joseph" and succeeded by "Joseph the Provider," the last in the famed tetralogy. The sharp irony that was noticeable in his new work arose out of the inner unity of his creative power. The comic spirit reflected upon situations and characters to such an extent that in some scenes it became Aristophanic. At a time when most authors cease to grow, a new and essentially human note in Dr.

Mann's writings became apparent. It was a consequence of the author's whole evolution, the realization of his earlier youth that a man must "die to live" in order to become a great artist. In his "Tonio Kroeger" Dr. Mann considered himself as an oddity and a social outcast; then, in "Death in Venice" as the conscious and perfected artist who lived solely for beauty, willing, if need be, to die for it. One of his earliest novels, "Royal Highness," appeared in Germany as far back as 1905, but was long overlooked in this country, where it was not published until 1916. That it was republished in 1939 pointed to the fact that the author revealed in this work his prescience of world problems. Aided Political Causes Dr. Mann looked on political agitation as part of the series of distractions that prevent the artist from facing himself and the humanity in him, and prided himself that while he went through two world wars he concentrated on his own work.

Nevertheless, he made a considerable contribution of his talents to the political causes he held dear- -although he liked to point out that this noncreative political activity influenced him in his own work but did not distract him. Dr. Mann foresaw the major cultural problems of this century many years before they became acute and before they were made a subject of open conflict. His devotion to democratic principles made him one of the outstanding personalities of the Weimar Republic. To exchange ideas and the fruits of creative expression he went to Paris in 1929 to lecture on peace at the Carnegie Foundation. Then French nationalists regarded Dr. Mann's appearance in the French capital and the subject of his lecture as an affront to the French people. But the younger generation and French liberals hailed him as an intellectual ambassador and welcomed him with enthusiasm. When the idea of political democracy was vanishing before the onslaught of dictatorial rules, Dr. Mann still hesitated to give up his literary domain for the political battlefield. But with the rise of nazism in 1933 and with the ruthless persecution that marked the Hitler regime, his political consciousness awoke.

The more the Nazi movement grew the more outspoken became the German writer, who had been a former member of the Prussian Academy of Art and a Senator of the German Academy, and the more he sided with the anti-Nazi forces the more he was hated by the rulers of the Third Reich. In 1938, Princeton University appointed Dr. Mann lecturer in the humanities and announced that he would aid the program of humanistic studies by his lectures. The German novelist welcomed the occasion, which offered him opportunities to continue his struggle for freedom and democracy. Soon an applicant for citizenship papers he stated the case for freedom against despotism as he saw it. In "The Coming Victory of Democracy"--published here in the summer of 1938--Dr. Mann continued his war against totalitarianism. "The revolutionary opportunism and the glow of false dawn in the Fascist tendencies are tainted magic," he wrote. "Fascism is so thoroughly false that honorable youth throughout the world should be ashamed to have anything to do with it." After the outbreak of the European conflict he wrote "This War." In it he continued his lucid and penetrating series of commentaries on the world and added to his already established fame as an outstanding pamphleteer.

The author, who had analyzed the German spirit in essays on Freud, Goethe and Wagner, wrote now realistically on the extension of Nazi power in terms of death, destruction, concentration camps and tyranny. On Radio During War During the war years, Dr. Mann delivered German radio addresses to his former countrymen that were beamed by the British Broadcasting Corporation to Germany. Twenty-five of these talks were published later in a volume, "Deutsche Hoerer" ("Listen, Germany"). He admonished the Germans that they must repent crimes to obtain reconciliation with the world and urged them to break with their Nazi leaders. But he did not believe that the Allies could draw a neat dividing line between nazism and the German people. "Today," he told his erstwhile countrymen, "I am an American citizen. Long before Germany's terrible defeat I declared publicly and privately, that I had no intention of ever turning my back to America." Till the middle of 1941 Dr. Mann and his wife resided in Princeton, where the author finished "Joseph the Provider," the fourth and concluding volume of a work of 8,000 pages based upon the Biblical story of Joseph.

After the English publication of "The Transposed Heads," a story of legendary India, he moved to Santa Monica, Calif., where he had built a home overlooking the Pacific. Dr. Mann joined the American League for German Cultural Freedom and published in Zurich, Switzerland, the magazine Mass und Wert (Standards and Values) in which he opened war on Nazi concepts and asked for recruits in the moral struggle. Frequently, over the heads of the Nazi leaders, the exiled German spoke to his countrymen at home, appealing to the truly German spirit and renewing his plea for preservation of traditional German culture. Yet, while Dr. Mann made his contributions to a new humanity, while he was fighting for the victory of a new humanism over twentieth-century decadence, he finished a novel whose sphere, Weimar, was dear to his heart, and whose spirit, Goethe, led the author to a new creative climax. The novel, "The Beloved Returns," with the subtitle "Lotte in Weimar," pictured Goethe at the age of 68 when he had just emerged from the most passionate love affair of his old age, receiving a visit from the greatest love of his youth.

He had not seen Lotte, heroine of his tragic romance, since she was 19 and he was 24. Third Biography Involved There was, however, more to this book than the biographies of Goethe and Lotte. Involved in the work was a third biography--that of the author. There was a trend noticeable during Dr. Mann's first twenty years of productive life, when he could not free himself of his pessimistic conviction that life was beautiful but dull and that death was the best possible release. But in his Goethe novel for the first time the artist had not to die to be creative. He had to live. It was Dr. Mann's credo. And his message for our time. The author's seventieth birthday was marked in June, 1945, by a dinner in the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel. Prominent Americans eulogized him while the author himself turned his address of thanks into tribute to the late President Franklin D. Roosevelt.

In an editorial, "Thomas Mann, American," The New York Times said upon the occasion: "Thomas Mann knew well where freedom lay; he had the courage to make his choice and gave his full allegiance to this new land." During the next five years the novelist was enabled to revisit the land he had left in 1933 in protest against the Nazis and he found himself occasionally accused of Communist sympathies. He did note a recrudescence of National Socialism in his homeland; but he repeatedly denied that he had ever been, or would ever be, a Communist or a fellow-traveler--"as long as the destination is totalitarianism." "Doctor Faustus," a novel published in 1948, was a Book-of-the-Month Club selection. Dr. Mann and his wife went to Switzerland to settle in 1953, after having spent fifteen years in the United States. Despite his American citizenship, Dr. Mann, who once said that his stay in the United States was one of the most productive and satisfying periods in his life, decided to return to Europe, where he felt that he had been most deeply rooted. Maintaining a heavy production schedule, Dr.

Mann celebrated his eightieth birthday with work on "Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man." In 1952, in his seventy-eighth year, in a statement on the theme, "This I Believe," the author of "Buddenbrooks" said: "Deep down I believe that creation of the universe out of nothingness and that of life out of inorganic state ultimately aimed at the creation of man. I believe that man is meant as a great experiment whose possible failure by man's own guilt would be paramount to the failure of creation itself. "Whether this belief be true or not, man would be well advised if he behaved as though it were." Last Book Published Here "The Black Swan," his last book published here, in 1954, was not a great success with critics or with the reading public. "Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man," was warmly welcomed in Germany last year and will be published here in translation this fall by Alfred A. Knopf. In May, 1955, just before his eightieth birthday, Dr. Mann became, almost in spite of himself, a symbol of German unity.

In Bonn, the West German capital, he opened the celebration of the 150th anniversary of the death of Friedrich von Schiller, poet and dramatist. In Weimar, across the East German border, he concluded the ceremonies there, receiving also an honorary doctorate from the Soviet-zone University of Jena. And in Luebeck, just west of the border, the birthplace that had disowned him more than half a century ago, the Senator's son accepted honorary citizenship. On Tuesday he was elected to membership in the cultural order established by the West German government, "Pour Le Merite," in recognition of his contributions to German literature. He is survived by his widow, the former Katja Pringsheim, after fifty years of marriage. They had six children: Erika, who made her home with them in Zurich; Klaus, also a novelist, who died in 1949; Angelus; Monika, wife of Janoe Lany, Hungarian historian; Elizabeth, widow of G. A. Borgese, Italian historian, and Michael. An older brother, Heinrich Mann, also a novelist and an exile from Hitler's Germany, died in California in 1950.

Project MUSE - Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks, and: Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann (review) Hugh Ridley. Thomas Mann: Buddenbrooks. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1987. 127 pp. $19.95 cloth; pb. $5.95. Judith Marcus. Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann. Amherst: U of Massachusetts P, 1987. 235 pp. $20.00. The fact to which these books attest, that interest in and respect for the work of Thomas Mann has not abated since his death over thirty years ago, also leads to the conclusion that the appeal of his novels must have had and still has a broad base. Since Buddenbrooks was only recendy transformed into an elaborate and lengthy television series, the popularity of this book, published in October 1901, which was very quickly established among all kinds of readers, has patently persevered, even though the urgency of the historical situation Mann describes has all but been obliterated by the recurring catastrophes that have marked the course of the twentieth century.

Therefore, Hugh Ridley's guide to an appreciation of the novel, addressed to readers about to encounter the challenges of the twenty-first century, comes opportunely. It is, it must be noted, a scholarly work, clearly intended for students of literature who are assumed to be knowledgeable in matters of critical terminology. Ridley's study of Buddenbrooks begins with an eight-page "chronology," juxtaposing lists of events in the lives of Mann's ancestry and his life, literary events, and historical events in these eras. There is also a brief "chronology" of Buddenbrooks itself that pertains to the novel's structure and does not constitute a plot summary; nor is one to be found gratuitously elsewhere in the book, which, according to its author, might better be read as a "short introduction" prior to reading the text on which it is based. The overview that Ridley provides on the basis of an intimate acquaintanceship with Buddenbrooks and the literature that has evolved pertaining to it concerns basically the issue of the kind of novel Thomas Mann set about writing, involving characterization, narrative style, genre, and the issue of its reception, together with its relevance as an historical document.

Ridley's opinions in these matters tend to concur with those of other critics who have written on the subject, including Mann himself. Only on occasion does the author of this key to Buddenbrooks provide an emphasis to his conclusions that makes them stand apart. Thus, although he does not discredit the standard interpretation of practically each of the characters as a representation of a Mann family member or acquaintance (Mann indeed made a list, pairing the real-life and novelistic counterparts), Ridley begins his study with the assertion that Thomas Buddenbrook, the book's leading character, supposedly modeled on Thomas Mann's father, is just as much "a self-portrait" of Mann. In a later chapter, devoted to an analysis of Thomas Buddenbrook, Ridley underscores his point by posing that Thomas Buddenbrook "stands in a particular relationship to the narrator" (my emphasis), thus doubling the character's autobiographical import.

Ridley's analysis of these interrelationships lends support to his reading of the entire novel, which holds that, in accord with its subtitle "Decline of a Family," it is the story of the one Buddenbrook who most plainly represents the self-doubt and general malaise that enervated the bourgeois world in its pursuit of "progress" in the years before World War One. Summarizing these statements on the significance of Buddenbrooks, Ridley contends: "We should think of Thomas Mann as Thomas Buddenbrook freed from the constraints of societal representation and liberated for the work of art." This kind of insight, indicating knowledgeability of both the work and pertinent critical literature, provides [End Page 714] a challenge to the serious reader to read Buddenbrooks more skillfully. Equally scholarly, even to the point of being a definitive statement on a subject of some controversy, Judith Marcus' elucidation of the fragile personal relationship between the critic Georg Lukács and Thomas Mann and their mutual concerns in literary matters is bound to be of considerable interest to experts on the subject of the Thomas Mann canon and of much less interest, if any, to the ordinary readers of his work or even students of literature.

The sequence of names in the title indicates both the area of the author's profound expertise and the direction which her viewpoint takes (see also the subtitle: "A Study in the Sociology of Literature"). Despite the high regard in which they held one another, especially because of Lukács' discerning commentary on Mann's fiction (principally the early work, together with Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus), they met but twice and briefly in their relatively long lifetimes, and the correspondence which might and perhaps should have replaced personal contact never came about, no doubt because of Mann's inborn inability to relate easily to "strangers" (see Tonio Kröger's suspicion of gypsies in green wagons). In the first rather short part of her exposition of the meeting of the minds that took place in Lukács' essays on the themes in Mann's stories and Mann's acknowledgement of the perspicacity he found in the critic's exposition of them, Marcus gives a rather impressionistic account of the tenor of Lukács' observations and Mann's somewhat reserved, if unequivocally favorable response.

(Mann also went out of his way to plead for Lukács, whose polemical writings and political activities had for a time made him stateless.) The gist of the results of Marcus' investigation of the intellectual link between author and critic is contained in this clearly anticlimactic statement: "The problematic state of a 'literature at the end of a cultural period' . . . was a preoccupation shared by Lukács and Mann, as repeated references make clear." In the second, more extensive, and insightful part of her book, Marcus addresses the pressing literary question of whether or not Thomas Mann based the character of Leo Naphta in The Magic Mountain on Georg Lukács. She presents the obvious answer first: it cannot be said "that Lukács is Naphta or vice versa." As a fictitious person, however, he exists because of his likeness to Lukács—on the one hand, physically in that he has the appearance of the "stranger" and, on the other hand, intellectually in that, as a Jesuit and communist, he exhibits Lukács's revolutionary zeal.

The process by which Marcus arrives at this conclusion and makes it incontrovertible involves an examination of Mann's method of creating a character and giving it symbolic significance, a consideration of the characters in Mann's narratives who represent a preliminary stage of the Naphta figure (for instance, Dr. Sammet in Royal Highness) and also an evaluation of other possible models for Naphta (for instance, Nietzsche). Marcus does not hesitate to admit that the ultimate subtleties of this conversion of fact into fiction lie outside the scope of scholarly investigation; she writes: "Just how much of Lukács' 'religiosity' [ethical rigor] and the complex blend of his personality were conveyed to Thomas Mann by the early writings of Lukács and how much their personal meeting contributed to it cannot be determined." Otherwise, Judith Marcus has made her case by amassing all evidence at hand—through interviews, extensive reading (some of it in Hungarian editions, not yet translated), and a culling and reculling of the pertinent texts; she has documented her thesis with over forty [End Page 715] pages of footnotes in small print. Remarkably, they provide not only substantiation but also further insight and should not be skimmed over.

It is regrettable, but inevitable that, in the final analysis, the information this book provides will be of concern only to critics in the scholarly community. Kurt Fickert Buddenbrooks by Thomas Mann | LibraryThing vera7 | Jan 2, 2017 | Mann's sub-title for this book sets the whole tone and direction of the novel. Even in the first part, where the success - and trappings of success - are laid out in rich detail, he is giving us the seeds of decline which he then follows until the process is complete and the Buddenbrook family exists no more. He does this through a surprisingly narrow range of characters and plot, always leaving the political and economic upheavals of the nineteenth century firmly in the background. The philosophical and psychological development is increasingly spelt out through the finely detailed descriptions which have an almost still-life quality to them. He also makes extensive use of leitmotivs but my German reading speed is too slow to allow me to make many of these connections. In the end I have admiration for this book in the way I might have for a finely crafted work of art - but not one that I would hang in my living room.

27 October 2016 ( ) "Don't you think, darling, the Buddenbrooks rather give themselves airs?" By sally tarbox on 22 May 2013 Format: Paperback One of the best books I've ever read, probably up there with War and Peace, in that you totally get into the characters - you feel you know them, they are so brilliantly drawn. This novel covers forty years (1835-1876) in the lives of the well-to-do Buddenbrook family of Lubeck. When it opens, they have just moved into a grand new house, their children are young and life seems good. Very conscious of their place in society, they are - generally - aware of the need to act in line with that position. Mann never takes us far from their home; he shows us their business dealings, school life and relationships. An absolute classic. ( starbox | Jul 9, 2016 | Before there was The Magic Mountain and before Death in Venice Thomas Mann gained critical acclaim for Buddenbrooks.

It is a long, beautifully written account of a declining bourgeois family, that some have suggested was inspired by his reading of Tolstoy among others. While the book has lighter moments it is overwhelmingly bleak. The Buddenbrooks' family success is behind them and there are few of the current and upcoming generations that are up to the task of maintaining the family much less improving it. When we first meet the family one is immediately impressed by their conservatism and traditional ways. It is set in the 1830s in a northern German trading city and the fine mansion where they live and everything else about them exudes the feeling of haute bourgeoisie. The central characters are introduced, Johann and Elisabeth the father and mother with three children, Antonie (Tony), Thomas, and his younger brother Christian. It is their lives that form the center of the story for the first half of the novel. With Thomas Mann every detail is important, so as time goes by (and it seems to fly by decade after decade) the background of the changes resulting from both the Industrial Revolution and the politics of the German states is as important as the family social struggles.

And struggles they have as the Grandfather dies and the firm passes on to Johann who too few years later passes the firm on to his eldest son Thomas. If there is one central figure in the family saga it is TOny who first marries an older man rather than her young love as her father demands only to see that marriage end in divorce due to the bankruptcy of her husband who (wrongly) assumed the Buddenbrook family would bail him out. I hope you are beginning to get a feeling for the theme of decline. Buddenbrooks reminds me a bit of Booth Tarkington's The Magnificent Ambersons, a noel about another family who fails to change with the times and struggles to maintain their social standing. Mann's satirical side is borought home often and is best seen in a set piece when the workers challenge the leaders of the Town. The mini-revolt (it pales in comparison to the real revolution of 1848) is defused by Consul Johann while one of the town elders is parodied as he shows more concern for his carriage than anything the workers (who like children should be silent) might have to say.

One of the keenest issues for me is the position of women in the Buddenbrooks family and society in general. That is the lack of standing and choice that they have. This is evident not only in Tony's failed marriages (she has a second divorce before the midpoint in the novel) but also in other female members of the family, particularly Tony's younger sister Clara who is considered unmarriageable until a Minister, Sievert Tiburtius, takes an interest in her. Most woman in this society are prepared for nothing in life with limited choices and the prospect of life as second class citizens. Throughout the novel Mann develops themes through the use of lietmotifs. These stem from his admiration for the operas of Richard Wagner, in the case of Buddenbrooks an example can be found in the description of the color – blue and yellow, respectively – of the skin and the teeth of the characters. Each such description alludes to different states of health, personality and even the destiny of the characters. Aspects of Thomas Mann's own personality are manifest in the two brothers, Thomas and Christian, whose find it difficult to live together.

Christian is much the free spirit who cannot be happy working in the family firm, the leadership of which Thomas has inherited as the eldest son. It should not be considered a coincidence that Mann shared the same first name with one of them. The influence of Schopenhauer is also present and it is through the brothers that both Buddenbrooks reflect a conflict lived by the author: departure from a conventional bourgeois life to pursue an artistic one, although without rejecting bourgeois ethics. ( ) 1 jwhenderson | Feb 22, 2016 | A fantastic plunge into 19th-century German society. This book carries you along like a comforting drug trip gone just a little wrong, such that you wind up where you did not want to go. Recommended to anyone who likes Anna Karenina or Vanity Fair. ( ) Buddenbrooks | The BMJ Tanya Genthe, teacher, Leigh-on-Sea, Essex r.genthe{at}nhs.net A patient complains about pain in various parts of his body. Finding no physical explanation, we might diagnose fibromyalgia.

Our professional predecessors had to be more imaginative, however, and might have decided that all the nerves in the left side of the patient’s body were too short. When medical nomenclature was a less internationally agreed convention and more the result of the individual physician’s creativity, this diagnosis may have seemed as plausible as the next. Thomas Mann (1875-1955) is one of the greats of German literature and was awarded the Nobel prize in 1929. Mann is best known in the medical world for his depiction of patients with tuberculosis in The Magic Mountain, and had a keen eye for symptoms and described them with eerie accuracy. Readers of Buddenbrooks will feel challenged to come up with a diagnosis or two. This book charts the gradual decline of an eminent merchant family throughout four decades in the mid-1800s. The family’s decline is set against a backdrop of the changing social and political reality of the 19th century, which saw a more ruthless type of capitalist emerging. Mann himself came from a merchant family, rich in wealth and traditions, whose younger generation preferred a literary or artistic path to that of the bourgeois businessman.

The family’s decline is paralleled by the various ailments suffered by the younger generation, real and imaginary, and in describing these, Mann may well have given us one of the earliest descriptions of fibromyalgia. Christian Buddenbrook, the hapless younger brother of the head of the family, has several complaints throughout his life. The worry that he might not be able to swallow his food bothers him from childhood, but it is as an adult that he develops the condition that prevents him from doing any productive work. This periodic pain, all down his left side, he shares in great detail with his unsympathetic family. One can almost picture the quietly exasperated physician running out of medical wisdom, one day crying out, “All the nerves in your left side are too short!” With this diagnosis Christian now feels he can legitimately give up a business career and seek distraction among his bachelor friends at his club and the theatre. In German literary criticism, Christian is diagnosed as having the rather esoteric cenesthopathic schizophrenia. Presumably, this is because he admits to having hallucinations. This happens only once in the novel, however, and bear in mind that Buddenbrook has a weakness for Swedish punch.

The character of Christian Buddenbrook was modelled on the author’s uncle, Friedrich Mann, whose anger at being exposed in this way led him to publish a denunciation of his nephew in a local newspaper. The retreat behind a diagnosis will have been seen by most doctors in real patients. While sometimes patients are relieved by a diagnosis because, even if there is no cure, they feel that their mystery has been solved, others will use the diagnosis as a justification to revel in their disability and shy away from the demands of the world. Which makes you wonder whether naming a condition can, at times, prove counterproductive. Poor Christian marries a woman of dubious reputation in the end, much to the displeasure of his remaining family, mainly because she sympathises with him when he feels ill. It does not work out, though, and his new wife soon has him committed to an asylum. We will never know for sure exactly what it was that plagued him. But among the various diagnoses proffered, fibromyalgia seems as good as any. Notes Thomas Mann facts, information, pictures | Encyclopedia.com articles about Thomas Mann COPYRIGHT 2004 The Gale Group Inc.

Thomas Mann The German novelist and essayist Thomas Mann (1875-1955) was perhaps the most influential and representative German author of his time. Born in the free Hanseatic city of Lübeck on the Baltic Sea, the second son of a north German patrician merchant and senator in the city government, Thomas Mann often stressed his twofold heritage: his South American mother, from Rio de Janeiro, was the daughter of a German planter who had emigrated to Brazil and married a woman of Portuguese-Creole origin. Mann's family can be compared to that of the brothers August Wilhelm and Friedrich von Schlegel, leading poet-critics in German romanticism: his elder brother Heinrich was an outstanding novelist and essayist. A younger brother, Viktor, a civil servant in Germany, made a name for himself as author of an important family chronicle, Wir waren fünf (1948). Two of Mann's six children, Erika and Klaus, were talented writers in their own right, and his son Golo was a noted historian. Early Career As a pupil of the "Katherineum" in Lübeck, Mann hated school.

Devoted to music and above all to writing, at the age of 17 he edited a school periodical, Frühlingssturm (Spring Storm), in which his first prose and poetry appeared under the pseudonym Paul Thomas. After the death of her husband and the liquidation of the family's grain business, Senator Mann's widow moved to Munich. Thomas, however, remained at school in Lübeck until he passed the qualifying exam for the 1-year military service certificate. When he finally joined his mother, two sisters, and younger brother in Munich in 1894, he worked briefly as a clerk in an insurance company. There he wrote his first story, Gefallen (Fallen), published in the avant-garde naturalistic monthly Die Gesellschaft. Soon the young author gave up his job and, under the pretense of becoming a journalist, attended lectures at the university without formally enrolling as a student. For a while he was a member of the editorial staff of the satiric magazine Simplicissimus, in which his next story, Der Wille zum Glück (The Will to Happiness), appeared.

In 1895 Mann joined his brother Heinrich in Italy, and together they spent most of the next 3 years in Rome and Palestrina. Isolated from Italian society, he read voluminously, mostly Scandinavian, French, and Russian literature. It was here that he began writing the novel which climaxed this first phase of his literary career, Buddenbrooks. While he was living in Rome, Mann's first book, Der kleine Herr Friedemann (1898), a collection of naturalistic short stories, was published by S. Fischer in Berlin. These sharply drawn, youthful narratives are variations of a single theme; they deal, for the most part, with the "marked" man, the isolated individual, the artist and his relationship to life. These stories foreshadow many characteristics of Mann's later works: dualism, or the divided mind; the opposition of spirit to life; and the resulting antithesis of artist and bourgeois. Also evident here is his frequent and effective use of the leitmotiv, which calls to mind his admired masters, Theodor Fontane and Richard Wagner.

In these stories of his youth the leitmotiv is handled in a more obvious, mechanical way than in his later work, where it is applied with far greater subtlety. Buddenbrooks and Death in Venice Most representative of the work from Mann's first stage as a writer (1896-1906) was his first novel, Buddenbrooks. Originally envisioned as a brief novel of some 250 pages, to be written jointly with his brother Heinrich, it was executed by Thomas alone and assumed massive proportions. It appeared in 1901 and became a best seller both at home and abroad. Again, the technique of the linguistic leitmotiv is present, but this time it is lifted from the external, mechanical basis into the musical sphere. Written in the tradition of the Scandinavian genealogical novel, Buddenbrooks gives a broad account of the rise and fall, through several generations, of a fictitious Hanseatic family, patterned after that of the author, and immediately calls to mind John Galsworthy's Forsyte Saga, with which it has much in common.

The first two generations, who created the family wealth, are sturdy and aggressive burghers, and for their bourgeois code, their rigorous ethical standards, Mann shows profound respect. Only the last two generations are marked by decadence, both physical and mental, but they, at the same time, show increased intellectual gifts and greater artistic sensibility. The fourth generation is represented by little Hanno, a pathetic, sickly, neurotic boy whose only love is his music. With his death at the age of 16, the once distinguished family comes to an end. After Buddenbrooks came Tristan (1902), a parody of Wagner's opera, set in an Alpine sanatorium. Mann's next work, his most lyrical artist's story, Tonio Kröger, (1903), exceeded even Buddenbrooks in popularity. It deals with a gifted writer, Tonio Kröger, from north Germany, again a marked man isolated from his environment, and his unrequited love for Hans Hansen and Ingeborg Holm, who represent the blond and the beautiful, the normal and bourgeois world.

In February 1905 Mann married Katharina (Katja) Pringsheim, the daughter of a famous Munich mathematician. The first fruit of his marriage was a fairy tale, or light comedy, in the form of a novel, Königliche Hoheit (1909; Royal Highness). Marking the beginning of his second stage as a writer, this book reveals an optimism thus far unknown in Thomas Mann's work. Decadence, Mann now believed, could be overcome, and a synthesis of life and art could be attained. A visit to the Lido in May 1911 provided the raw material for Mann's most complex novella, Der Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice). A series of sinister circumstances and strange impressions almost immediately suggested to him the basis for this story, which truly reflects Mann's preoccupation with the irrationalism of Arthur Schopenhauer, Richard Wagner, and Friedrich Nietzsche.

Its hero, Gustav von Aschenbach (resembling, in some ways, the composer Gustav Mahler), is a fictitious German writer in his early 50s whose self-discipline makes him what Mann calls a Leistungsethiker, a man who has sacrificed everything for the sake of achievement. Having suppressed his emotions for too long, he goes on a trip to Venice, ignoring all warnings not to visit the cholera-infected city. It is not cholera, however, but Italy itself which disintegrates his carefully calculated self-control. He is obsessed by a homoerotic love for 14-year-old Tadzio, who represents both death and Apollonian beauty, but he excuses his passion on the grounds of classical precedent and Nietzche's conception of Dionysian Greece. Death comes to him, finally, as he sits in a deck chair on the beach, looking out to the sea and longing for the boy.

The Magic Mountain A 3-week stay in a Davos sanatorium during the summer of 1912 gave Mann the impetus for his next book, Der Zauberberg (1924; The Magic Mountain), the highlight of the second phase of his career (1912-1933). His first major novel since Buddenbrooks, this work attempts to overcome the dualism that had marked Mann's youthful stories and to reconcile the enmity of life and spirit that dominated those works. It deals with the intellectual development of an ordinary young man who spends 7 years in a tuberculosis sanatorium in the mountains of Switzerland, against a broad panorama of European society in the 7 years preceding World War I. Hans Castorp, the simpleminded hero, stands between two men engaged in an ideological battle: an Italian humanist and liberal, Settembrini, a champion of reason and life who believes in progress, and Naphta, a Polish Jew turned Jesuit, representing the nonrational forces, who combines a fervent belief in Catholicism with Marxist doctrines.

A third "educator," introduced toward the end of the book, is a Dutch planter from Indonesia, Mynheer Peeperkorn, who, anything but an intellectual, impresses Hans through the power of his personality, which is patterned after dramatist Gerhart Hauptmann. Der Zauberberg is largely a romantic book, a book about the "sympathy with death," and in the author's own words, Hans Castorp's dream, his vision of the good life, could not have appeared in any of his previous works. While lost in the mountains (in the chapter "Snow"), Hans dreams that "for the sake of goodness and love, man shall let death have no sovereignty over his thoughts." Surely, this is an impossible dream, either in the alpine sanatorium with its eccentric patients or down in the flatland of bourgeois triviality from which Hans has come. In the end he accepts life and, when the war breaks out, returns to his homeland, leaving the sheltered atmosphere of the magic mountain for military service, only to meet his death on a battlefield in Flanders.

Political Views Until World War I Mann's tastes and cultural tradition had been those of a nationalist and a German patriot, and he was convinced of the superiority of its authoritarian constitution over the democratic institutions of France and England. During the years 1914-1918 he interrupted his work on the novel Der Zauberberg to embark upon "war service with the weapon of thought." In a series of highly introspective essays, examining the very foundations of his own philosophy, he presented a vigorous defense of the German Reich (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 1918; Reflections of an Unpolitical Man). But when this book appeared, Mann was already evolving from a romantic conservative to a believer in democracy who was to become a champion of the Weimar Republic. With his speech honoring Hauptmann on his sixtieth birthday, on Nov. 15, 1922, Von deutscher Republik, the process of his transformation was complete, and for the next 10 years, the decisive period of his second, or middle, phase, he was the spokesman of the Weimar Republic.

Mann's first works published after the 1918 armistice are largely autobiographical: Gesang vom Kindchen (The Song of a Child), written in hexameter and dealing with the birth and baptism of his youngest daughter, and Herr und Hund (Bashan and I), an account of his life in Munich with his dog, Bashan (both published in 1919). Two of his finest novellas were written in that decade: Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925; Disorder and Early Sorrow), an affectionately ironic, melancholic treatment of the relations between the generations in a middleclass German family in Munich in the 1920s and the moral and social confusion which resulted from the chaotic inflation of values in postwar Germany, and Mario und der Zauberer (1930; Mario and the Magician), a "tragedy of travel with moral and political implications," as Mann himself called it. Again largely autobiographical, Mario presents a terrifying picture of the rise of fascism in Italy and clearly warns against its dangers.

Cipolla, the hypnotist who is shot to death by Mario, the goodnatured waiter whose human dignity he has outraged, stands symbolically for Mussolini, and his end foreshadows that of the dictator in 1945. In 1929 Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in literature. As early as 1930 he warned publicly against the dangers of Hitler and his followers in his courageous philippic against the Nazis, Appell an die Vernunft (An Appeal to Reason). On Feb. 10, 1933, Mann delivered a lecture in Munich on the occasion of the fiftieth anniversary of the death of Richard Wagner (Leiden und Grösse Richard Wagners; The Sufferings and Greatness of Richard Wagner), and the next day he left Germany with his wife to repeat his lecture in Amsterdam, Brussels, and Paris, a trip from which he was not to return for 16 years. Finding himself a voluntary exile from Nazi Germany, Mann spent the summer in southern France and settled in Küsnacht, near Zurich, where he remained until 1938.

He attacked the Nazi regime in an open letter published by the Neue Züriche Zeitung on Feb. 3, 1936. Soon the Nazis deprived him of his German citizenship and banned his books, and the University of Bonn withdrew the honorary doctorate awarded him shortly after World War I. Mann's reply became his best-known political tract, the famous Letter to the Dean of the Philosophical Faculty of Bonn, published early in 1937. As a further manifestation of his political engagement, he founded in 1937 a literary magazine devoted to the ideals of the "Third Humanism": Mass und Wert (Measure and Value), edited in cooperation with Konrad Falke and published in Zurich until 1940. In 1938 Mann and his family emigrated to the United States. For 2 1/2 years they lived in Princeton, N.J., where he served as a lecturer in the humanities at the university.

In 1941 he moved to southern California, built a home in Pacific Palisades outside Los Angeles, and became one of a colony of German and Austrian exiles which included, in addition to his brother Heinrich, Lion Feuchtwanger, Bruno Frank, Lotte Lehmann, Erich Maria Remarque, Arnold Schoenberg, Bruno Walter, and Franz Werfel. In 1944 he became an American citizen. During the war years Mann's life was filled with numerous activities: he was actively engaged in helping refugees from Europe through the Emergency Rescue Committee; he served as a consultant in Germanic literature for the Library of Congress; he lectured in many American cities and appealed to the German people over the British Broadcasting Corporation. Whatever time was left, he devoted to his literary work. At Princeton, he completed a "Goethe novel," Lotte in Weimar (1939; The Beloved Returns), relating the historic visit of Charlotte Kestner to Weimar in 1816, 44 years after the love affair which had become common knowledge through the European success of Goethe's Werther.

Later Works During the first 2 California years Mann completed his gigantic Joseph cycle, on which he had been working, with interruptions, since 1926. At that time he had found in the story of Joseph a theme embracing, as he called it, "the typical, the eternally human, eternally recurring, timeless—in short, the mythical." Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-1943; Joseph and His Brothers), his version of the biblical story, was to become his greatest critical success in the United States, ending on an optimistic note with its fourth volume, Joseph der Ernährer (Joseph, the Provider). In California between 1943 and 1946 Mann wrote what is usually considered his most difficult and complex book, Doktor Faustus: The Life of the German Composer Adrian Leverkühn as Told by a Friend (1947). In contrast to the optimistic tone of the Joseph tetralogy, this is a deeply pessimistic, somber book, a bitter accusation against his former country, which, like Doktor Faustus, has made a pact with the devil.

But it is also a self-accusation, for Mann does not distinguish between a good and a bad Germany. He finds some negative characteristics manifest in every German of all times. In this fictional biography Mann writes about an artist, a musician—since music, in Mann's thinking, is closely linked with decay, decadence, disease, danger, and death and since it is the one art he considers most characteristically German. In describing the life of an artist (closely patterned after that of Nietzsche), Mann shows himself as a master of the technique of montage by succeeding in combining several time levels. Of the third phase of Mann's writing career (1933-1955), this book represents the highlight, the climax. In 1952 Mann returned to Europe to spend his remaining years in Switzerland, taking up the life he had lived there from 1933 to 1938. Mann's last major work, Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man), was published in 1954 as Der Memoiren Erster Teil.

Having begun the book in 1911, the author had published additional fragments in 1922 and 1937. The projected second part, however, was never written. Following the tradition of the picaresque, or rogue, novel, Mann presents a humorous portrait of the artist as mountebank, or criminal, a thought that had always caught his imagination. Felix Krull is among his most vivid and effective books and attracted huge audiences in many countries. With its publication Thomas Mann achieved an immediate popular and critical success. His last completed work was his brilliant essay on Friedrich von Schiller. Mann's eightieth birthday, on June 6, 1955, brought him honors from all sides, both East and West. Respected throughout the world as Germany's greatest man of letters since Goethe, Mann died 2 months later, on August 12, in Kilchberg near Zurich. Further Reading The most comprehensive biography of Mann in English, well documented and illustrated, is Hans Bürgin and Hans-Otto Mayer, Thomas Mann: A Chronicle of His Life (trans. 1969).

Of the large number of books about Mann, the best introductions in English for the nonspecialist are Henry C. Hatfield, Thomas Mann (1951; rev. ed. 1962), and Ignace Feuerlicht, Thomas Mann (1968). The more advanced student will find a selection of the best critical opinion on Mann in Henry Hatfield, ed., Thomas Mann: A Collection of Critical Essays (1964). Also recommended is the excellent critical analysis of Erich Heller, The Ironic German: A Study of Thomas Mann (1958). Erich Kahler, The Orbit of Thomas Mann (1969), is a collection of five excellent essays by a close friend of Mann. A critical essay on Mann's major novels is J. P. Stern, Thomas Mann (1967). Gunilla Bergsten, Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus: The Sources and Structures of the Novel, translated by Krishna Winston (1969), deals with one of Mann's best-known works.

Two studies that discuss Mann in the context of philosophy are Joseph Gerard Brennan, Three Philosophical Novelists: James Joyce, André Gide, Thomas Mann (1963), and Peter Heller, Dialectics and Nihilism: Essays on Lessing, Nietzsche, Mann and Kafka (1966). For a treatment of the German literary background see Ronald Gray, The German Tradition in Literature, 1871-1945 (1965). A guide to the worldwide literature on Mann is in a two-volume bibliography of criticism by Klaus W. Jonas, Fifty Years of Thomas Mann Studies (1955), which covers the years 1901-1954, and its supplement, Klaus W. Jonas and Ilsedore B. Jonas, Thomas Mann Studies: A Bibliography of Criticism (1967), which continues the bibliographical record to 1966. Additional Sources Hamilton, Nigel, The brothers Mann: the lives of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1871-1950 and 1875-1955, New Haven: Yale University Press, 1979, 1978.

□ Cite this article Pick a style below, and copy the text for your bibliography. MLA The Columbia Encyclopedia, 6th ed. Copyright The Columbia University Press Thomas Mann (tō´mäs män), 1875–1955, German novelist and essayist, the outstanding German novelist of the 20th cent., b. Lübeck; brother of Heinrich Mann . A writer of great intellectual breadth, Mann developed literary themes that not only delved into the inner self but also related inner problems to changing European cultural values. To coordinate this dual focus Mann often wrote in a symbolic vein, although in general he was less experimental than many of his contemporaries. Fiction Mann became famous with the publication of his first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901, tr. 1924), which depicts the rise and disintegration of a merchant family. Shorter works of fiction followed, among them Tonio Kröger (1903, tr. 1913–15); the verse drama Fiorenza (1905); and the classic Der Tod in Venedig (1912, tr.

Death in Venice, 1925), a novella in which the hero, a great writer, falls prey to an uncontrolled passion, weakens, and eventually dies. These works show Mann's preoccupation with the interaction of cultural and psychological problems. The proximity of creative art to neurosis and the affinity of genius and disease are his largest themes, along with a strong interest in the nature of repressed, often homoerotic sexual desires. Artistic values in a bourgeois society is a main theme in his rather comic second novel, Königliche Hoheit (1909, tr. Royal Highness, 1916). Among Mann's other important shorter works of fiction are Unordnung und frühes Leid (1925, tr. Early Sorrow, 1929), a story; and the short novel Mario und der Zauberer (1930, tr. Mario and the Magician, 1930), an allegorical attack on fascism. Translations of his shorter fiction are collected in Stories of Three Decades (1936). Mann's third novel, Der Zauberberg (1924, tr.

The Magic Mountain, 1927, 1995), occupied him for 12 years. Here the protagonist is a young man from a middle-class background who, after spending seven years in the midst of discussions of disease and death in a tuberculosis sanatorium, finds fulfillment in leaving to re-enter the larger world. Mann then began his tetralogy Joseph und seine Brüder (1933–43, tr. Joseph and His Brothers, 1934–44), on which he worked intermittently for 16 years. This erudite and detailed recreation of the biblical story of Joseph is a brilliant study of the psychological and the mythological. In Doctor Faustus (1947, tr. 1948), Mann used the Faust motif to delve into the conflict between spirituality and sensuality. His last works include the novels Der Erwählte (1951, tr. The Holy Sinner, 1951) and Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1954, tr.

Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, 1955), a picaresque comedy adapted from an earlier fragment. Essays Mann's essays fall into two general categories—political and literary. His autobiographical essay Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918, tr., Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1983) marks his decision that the artist must participate in politics in order to preserve a creative society; Mann later became an outspoken critic of fascism. Translations of his major political speeches and essays are published in Order of the Day (1942). Mann's own selection of his literary essays appeared in English as Essays of Three Decades (1947). These elaborate the recurrent themes of his fiction through studies of thinkers who influenced him. Mann left (1933) Hitler's Germany for Switzerland in self-imposed exile, was deprived (1936) of his citizenship by the Nazis, and after 1938 lived in the United States until he returned to Switzerland in 1953. Despite his roots in romanticism, Mann was a skeptical rationalist who opposed the anti-intellectualism of many 20th-century German theorists.

Mann was awarded the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature. The Children of Thomas Mann Mann's daughter, Erika Mann, 1905–69, was an actress and author. Mann's son Klaus Mann, 1906–49, was a novelist, essayist, and playwright. He left Germany in 1933 and edited the anti-Nazi journal Sammlung in Amsterdam. A resident of the United States from 1935, he became a citizen in 1943 when he entered the U.S. army. His writings include Alexander: A Novel of Utopia (1929, tr. 1930); Pathetic Symphony (1936, tr. 1948), a novel about Tchaikovsky; the autobiographical Turning Point (1942); and André Gide and the Crisis in Modern Thought (1943). With his sister he wrote Escape to Life (1939) and The Other Germany (tr. 1940). Bibliography See Thomas Mann's letters (tr. 1971); H.

Wysling, ed., Letters of Heinrich and Thomas Mann, 1900–1949 (1998); his autobiographical Sketch of My Life (1960); G. Mann, Thomas Mann (1965); E. Mann, The Last Year of Thomas Mann (tr. 1958, repr. 1970); biographies by R. Winston (1981), R. Hayman (1995), and D. Prater (1995); studies by J. P. Stern (1967), E. Heller (1958, repr. 1973), W. E. Berendsohn (1973), and A. Heilbut (1996). Cite this article COPYRIGHT 2005 Thomson Gale MANN, THOMAS (1875-1955) German writer Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck, Germany , in 1875 and died in Kilchberg, near Zurich, Switzerland , in 1955.

He settled in Munich with his family after the death of his father, remaining until 1936; he then went into exile in the United States . His life and work were dominated by two major questions: Germany and German identity; the status of the artist and art in society. Concerning the question of German identity, Mann began by holding conservative, monarchist, and militarist beliefs until the rise of Nazism. He opposed a Germanic ideal that accepted values held by the rest of Europe . In this he distanced himself from the position of his brother Heinrich Mann, a republican, cosmopolitan, and critic of the Empire. During this time, Mann's literary output began with a lengthy autobiographical novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), in which he describes the decline of four generations of a rich Hanseatic family. The fate of this fictional family can be compared with his own experience of the loss of his father while he was still very young. After dabbling briefly with Nazi ideology, Mann underwent a fundamental change of opinion in the thirties. It was in his novel The Magic Mountain (1924) that he developed his new attitudes toward all the most important areas of thought and action, including psychoanalysis.

Mann contrasted the mediocrity of an average, bourgeois existence with the unconscious drives of the sensitive intellectual enamored of knowledge and beauty. He continued to articulate, throughout the course of his work, series of paired opposites: art and morality, art and civilization, culture and society, the genius of disease and the stupidity of health. He contrasted the North, cold and puritan, where his family had come from, with the South, Bavaria , where he lived. This was the carnal South of Tonio Kröger (1903), the mephitic Venice of Gustav Aschenbach (1910), the voluptuous Egypt of Joseph (1933-1934), the magic mountain of Hans Castorp—all of them fantasies of the experience of forbidden desire, places of love and death, of disease, of castration. He contrasted liberating psychoanalysis with an alienating hypnosis. In Mario and the Magician (1929), Mann created a portrait of a disturbing illusionist who evokes Hitler. And in 1938, after the Anschluss, Mann contrasted Freud with Hitler: "How that man must hate analysis!

I secretly suspect that the furor with which he marched against a certain capital was at bottom directed against the old analyst living there, his real enemy, the philosopher who unmasked neurosis, the great disillusionist, the man who knows so much about belief and genius." Mann praised Freud directly on several occasions. From his "My Relationship with Psychoanalysis" of 1926, where he exposes his ambivalence toward Freudian theories, to the two texts written for the seventy-fifth and eightieth birthdays of Sigmund Freud , where he is compared, using an allegory from a Dürer painting, to the knight between death and the devil, Mann saw Freud as the "pioneer of a humanism of the future." Didier David World Encyclopedia © World Encyclopedia 2005, originally published by Oxford University Press 2005. Mann, Thomas (1875–1955) German novelist and essayist. Perhaps the outstanding figure of 20th-century German literature, Mann linked individual psychological problems to the great decline in European culture. His first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), is an epic family saga.

Shorter works include the novella Death in Venice (1912), and the autobiographical essay Reflections of a Non-political man (1918). The Magic Mountain (1924) is widely acclaimed as his masterpiece. In 1933, Mann left Germany , first for Switzerland , then the United States . Other works include the tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers (1933–43), and Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man (1955). Mann received the 1929 Nobel Prize in literature. Cite this article

Question: Whose first novel was Buddenbrooks, published in 1901?
Answer: Thomas Mann