Mann, Thomas 1875-1955
German novelist and Nobel Prize winner

Thomas Mann was born in L�beck into a patrician family of merchants and senators of the Hanseatic League. His older brother was Heinrich Mann, also a novelist, and his mother was a talented musician of mixed German and Portuguese West Indian blood. The tensions between a conservative background and an artistic disposition, as well as between the Nordic and Latin temperaments inherent in his own personality, were to form the psychological basis of his subject matter.

At the age of 19, without completing school, he settled with his mother in Munich, and after a spell at the university he joined his brother in Italy, where he wrote his early masterpiece, Buddenbrooks: Verfall einer Familie (1901, Eng trans Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, 1924), the saga of a family like his own, tracing its decline through four generations as business acumen gives way to artistic sensibilities. With this work, Mann was a leading German writer at the age of 25.

On his return to Munich he became a reader for the satirical literary magazine Simplicissimus, which published many of his early, remarkable short stories. The novelettes Tonio Kr�ger (1902), Tristan (1903) and Der Tod in Venedig (1913, Eng trans Death in Venice, 1925) all deal with the problem of the artist's salvation; in the last of these, the subject of an opera by Benjamin Britten (1973) and a film by Luchino Visconti (1971), a successful writer dies on the brink of perverted eroticism.

World War I precipitated a quarrel between the two novelist brothers, with Thomas's Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen (1918, Eng trans Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, 1983) revealing his militant German patriotism, already a feature of his essay on Frederick the Great, and a distrust of political ideologies, including the radicalism of his brother. Der Zauberberg (1924, Eng trans The Magic Mountain, 1927), won him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929. It was inspired by a visit to his wife at a sanatorium for consumptives in Davos in 1913 and tells the story of a patient, Hans Castorp, with the sanatorium representing Europe in its moral and intellectual disintegration.

The same year, Mann delivered a speech against the rising Nazis and in 1930 exposed Italian fascism in Mario und der Zauberer (1930, Eng trans Mario and the Magician, 1930). He left Germany for Switzerland after 1933 and in 1936 delivered an address for Freud's eightieth birthday. Both shared an enthusiasm for the biblical patriarch, Joseph, and Mann wrote a tetralogy on his life (1933-43).

He settled in the USA in 1936 and wrote a novel on a visit to Goethe by an old love, Charlotte Buff, Lotte in Weimar (1939). During World War II, he delivered anti-Hitler broadcasts to Germany, which at the end of the war were collected under the titles Achtung Europa! (1938) and Deutsche H�rer! (1942, Eng trans Listen Germany! Twenty-Five Messages to the German People over the BBC, 1943; augmented edition of 55 messages, 1945). In 1947 he returned to Switzerland and was the only returning exile to be f�ted by both West and East Germany. His greatest work, a modern version of the medieval legend Doktor Faustus (1947), combines art and politics in the simultaneous treatment of the life and catastrophic end of a composer, Adrian Leverk�hn, and German disintegration in two world wars.

His last unfinished work, hailed as Germany's greatest comic novel, Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull, Part I (1922; 1953, Eng trans Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man, 1955), written with astonishing wit, irony and humour and without the tortuous stylistic complexities of the Bildungsroman, commended itself most to English translators.

Bibliography: Thomas Mann was essentially a 19th-century German conservative whose cultural landmarks disappeared in World War I, and he resorted in his work to a critique of the artistic. Other later works include Der Erw�hlte (1951, Eng trans The Holy Sinner, 1951), a retelling of the 12th-century legend of an incestuous pope named Gregory Die Betrogene (1953, Eng trans The Black Swan, 1954) and Last Essays, on Schiller, Goethe, Nietzsche and Chekhov.

See also M Swales, Thomas Mann: A Study (1980); Thomas Mann, Sketch of My Life (1960); H Hatfield, Thomas Mann (1951).