Thomas Mann

Paul Thomas Mann was born in 1875 in Lübeck into a family of the Hanseatic merchant class; his father was a grain merchant and city senator, his mother had been born in Brazil. After his father’s death in 1891 the family firm was wound up and the household moved to Munich, where Mann worked briefly for an insurance company, wrote for the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, and published his first stories. His elder brother Heinrich was also a novelist.

His first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), traces the decline of a merchant dynasty over four generations, with the drift from commerce towards art and sickness that would become one of his abiding themes. In 1905 he married Katia Pringsheim; three of their six children, Erika, Klaus and Golo, became writers in their turn. The novella Death in Venice (1912) followed, and a visit to his wife at a sanatorium in Davos became the seed of The Magic Mountain (1924), a vast, ironic novel of ideas that closes with the outbreak of the First World War. Mann’s fiction draws on Goethe, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche to probe the psychology of the artist and the condition of the German soul.

He received the Nobel Prize in 1929, primarily for Buddenbrooks. When Hitler came to power in 1933 Mann went into exile, first in Switzerland and later in the United States, becoming a leading voice of the German emigration. In exile he completed the biblical tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers and wrote Doctor Faustus (1947), an allegory of Germany’s catastrophe. He returned to Switzerland in 1952 and died in Zürich in 1955.