I was born in Lübeck on June 6, 1875, the second son
of a merchant and senator of the Free City, Johann Heinrich Mann, and his wife
Julia da Silva Bruhns. My father was the grandson and great-grandson of Lübeck
citizens, but my mother first saw the light of day in Rio de Janeiro as the daughter
of a German plantation owner and a Portuguese-Creole Brazilian. She was taken
to Germany at the age of seven.
I was designated to take over my
father's grain firm, which commemorated its centenary during my boyhood, and I
attended the science division of the «Katharineum» at Lübeck.
I loathed school and up to the very end failed to meet its requirements, owing
to an innate and paralyzing resistance to any external demands, which I later
learned to correct only with great difficulty. Whatever education I possess I
acquired in a free and autodidactic manner. Official instruction failed to instill
in me any but the most rudimentary knowledge.
When I was fifteen,
my father died, a comparatively young man. The firm was liquidated. A little later
my mother left the town with the younger children in order to settle in the south
of Germany, in Munich.
After finishing school rather ingloriously,
I followed her and for the time being became a clerk in the office of a Munich
insurance company whose director had been a friend of my father's. Later, by way
of preparing for a career in journalism, I attended lectures in history, economics,
art history, and literature at the university and the polytechnic. In between
I spent a year in Italy with my brother Heinrich, my elder by four years. During
this time my first collection of short stories, Der kleine Herr Friedemann
(1898) [Little Herr Friedemann], was published. In Rome, I also began to
write the novel Buddenbrooks, which appeared in 1901 and which since then
has been such a favourite with the German public that today over a million copies
of it are in circulation.
There followed shorter stories, collected
in the volume Tristan (1903), of which the North-South artist's novella
Tonio Kroger is usually considered the most characteristic, and also the
Renaissance dialogues Fiorenza (1906), a closet drama which, however, has
occasionally been staged.
In 1905 I married the daughter of Alfred
Pringsheim, who had the chair of mathematics at the University of Munich. On her
mother's side my wife is the granddaughter of Ernst and Hedwig Dohm, the well-known
Berlin journalist and his wife, who played a leading role in the German movement
for women's emancipation. From our marriage have come six children: three girls,
of whom the eldest has gone into the theatre, and three boys, of whom the eldest
has also devoted himself to literature.
The first literary fruit
of my new status was the novel Königliche Hoheit (1909) [Royal
Highness], a court story that provides the frame for a psychology of the formal-representative
life and for moral questions such as the reconciliation of an aristocratic, melancholic
consciousness with the demands of the community. Another novelistic project followed,
the Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull (1922) [Confessions of
Felix Krull, Confidence Man]. It is based on an idea of parody, that of taking
an element of venerable tradition, of the Goethean, self-stylizing, autobiographic,
and aristocratic confession, and translating it into the sphere of the humorous
and the criminal. The novel has remained a fragment, but there are connoisseurs
who consider its published sections my best and most felicitous achievement. Perhaps
it is the most personal thing I have written, for it represents my attitude toward
tradition, which is simultaneously loving and destructive and has dominated me
as a writer.
In 1913 the novella Tod in Venedig [Death
in Venice] was published, which beside Tonio Kroger is considered my
most valid achievement in that genre. While I was writing its final sections I
conceived the idea of the «Bildungsroman» Der Zauberberg (1924)
[The Magic Mountain], but work on it was interrupted in the very beginning
by the war.
Although the war did not make any immediate demands on
me physically, while it lasted it put a complete stop to my artistic activity
because it forced me into an agonizing reappraisal of my fundamental assumptions,
a human and intellectual self-inquiry that found its condensation in Betrachtungen
eines Unpolitischen [Reflections of an Unpolitical Man], published
in 1918. Its subject is the personally accented problem of being German, the
political problem, treated in the spirit of a polemical conservatism that underwent
many revisions as life went on. An account of the development of my socio-moral
ideas is found in the volumes of essays Rede und Antwort (1922) [Question
and Answer], Bemühungen (1925) [Efforts], and Die Forderung des Tages
(1930) [Order of fhe Day].
Lecture tours abroad began immediately
after the borders of countries neutral or hostile during the war had been re-opened.
They led me first to Holland, Switzerland, and Denmark. The spring of 1923 saw
a journey to Spain. In the following year I was guest of honour of the newly established
PEN Club in London; two years later I accepted an invitation of the French branch
of the Carnegie Foundation, and I visited Warsaw in 1927.
Meanwhile,
in the autumn of 1924, after many prolonged delays the two volumes of Der Zauberberg
were published. The interest of the public, as revealed by the hundred printings
the book ran into within a few years, proved that I had chosen the most favourable
moment to come to the fore with this composition of ideas epically conceived.
The problems of the novel did not essentially appeal to the masses, but they were
of consuming interest to the educated, and the distress of the times had increased
the receptivity of the public to a degree that favoured my product, which so wilfully
played fast and loose with the form of the novel.
Soon after the
completion of the Betrachtungen I added to my longer narratives a prose
idyll, the animal story Herr und Hund (1919) [Bashan and I]. Der
Zauberberg was followed by a bourgeois novella from the period of revolution
and inflation, Unordnung und frühes Leid (1926) [Disorder and Early
Sorrow]; Mario und der Zauberer [Mario and the Magician], written
in 1929, is for the time being my last attempt at compositions of this size. It
was written during my work on a new novel which in subject matter and intention
is far different from all earlier works, for it leaves behind the bourgeois individual
sphere and enters into that of the past and myth. The Biblical story for which
the title Joseph und seine Brüder is planned, and of which individual
sections have been made known through public readings and publications in journals,
seems about half completed. A study trip connected with it led me to Egypt and
Palestine in February-March-April, 1930.
Ever since his early days
the author of this biographical sketch has been encouraged in his endeavours by
the kind interest of his fellow men as well as by official honours. An example
is the conferment of an honorary doctor's degree by the University of Bonn in
1919; and, to satisfy the German delight in title, the Senate of Lübeck,
my home town, added the title of professor on the occasion of a city anniversary.
I am one of the first members, nominated by the state itself, of the new literary
division of the Prussian Academy of Arts; my fiftieth birthday was accompanied
by expressions of public affection that I can remember only with emotion, and
the summit of all these distinctions has been the award of the Nobel Prize in
Literature by the Swedish Academy last year. But I may say that no turmoil of
success has ever dimmed the clear apprehension of the relativity of my deserts
or even for a moment dulled the edge of my self-criticism. The value and significance
of my work for posterity may safely be left to the future; for me they are nothing
but the personal traces of a life led consciously, that is, conscientiously.
Biographical note on Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann (1875-1955) moved
to Switzerland in 1933 shortly after the Nazis had come to power and begun a campaign
of abuse against him. He was formally expatriated in 1936. In 1937 the University
of Bonn deprived him of his honorary doctorate (restored in 1946), which aroused
Mann to a famous and moving reply in which he epitomized the situation of the
German writer in exile. Mann, who had anticipated and warned against the rise
of fascism during the Weimar Republic (e.g., in Mario and the Magician),
continued to combat it in many pamphlets and talks throughout the period of the
Nazi regime and the Second World War. He became an American citizen in 1940 and,
from 1941 to 1953, lived in Santa Monica, California. After the war he frequently
revisited Europe: in 1949 he received the Goethe Prizes of Weimar (East Germany)
and Frankfurt (West Germany), but when he finally returned to Europe he settled
near Zürich, where he died in 1955.
Among the chief works of
Mann's later years are the novels Lotte in Weimar (1939) [The Beloved
Returns], in which the fictional account of a meeting of the lovers of Werther
grown old provides the framework for a psychologically and technically ingenious
portrait of the old Goethe; Joseph und seine Brüder (1933-43) [Joseph
and his Brothers], a version of the Old Testament story which interweaves
myth and psychology; and Dr. Faustus (1947), the story of an artist who
chooses to pay with self-destruction for the powers of genius, a fate that echoes
the last days of the Third Reich; the collections of essays Leiden und Grösse
der Meister (1935)[ Suffering and Greatness of the Masters]; and the essay
on Schiller, Versuch über Schiller (1955). A complete edition of his
works in twelve volumes was published in Berlin (1956) and in Frankfurt (1960).
From Nobel Lectures, Literature 1901-1967, Editor Horst Frenz, Elsevier Publishing Company, Amsterdam, 1969
This autobiography/biography was written at the time of the award and later published in the book series Les Prix Nobel/Nobel Lectures. The information is sometimes updated with an addendum submitted by the Laureate. To cite this document, always state the source as shown above.
Thomas Mann died on August 12, 1955.