A B C D E F G H I J K L M N O P Q R S T U V W Y Z
|
|||
|
Date
and Place of birth: |
|||
|
Life and Works: Paul Thomas Mann, german essayist, cultural critic, and novelist, who was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul use modernized German and Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of Goethe, Nietzsche, and Schopenhauer. Mann 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. His father was the grandson and great-grandson of Lübeck citizens, and his mother Erika Mann, 1905–69, was born 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 and was an actress and author. She was Roman Catholic, but Mann was baptised into his father's Lutheran faith. When Mann was fifteen, his father died and the firm was liquidated. A little later his mother left the town with the younger children in order to settle in the south of Germany, in Munich. Mann attended the science division of a Lübeck gymnasium, then spent some time at the University of Munich where, in preparation for a career in journalism, he studied history, economics, art history, and literature. While at university, Mann became immersed in the writings of the philosophers Arthur Schopenhauer and Friedrich Nietzsche as well as in the music of composer Richard Wagner. In Buddenbrooks, Mann's early masterpiece, he used the technique of the leitmotif, which he adapted from Wagner. He resided in Munich from 1891 until 1933, with the exception of a year-long stay in Palestrina, Italy, with his older brother Heinrich, also a novelist. Thomas worked with the South German Fire Insurance Company 1894–95. His career as a writer began when he wrote for Simplicissimus. Mann's first short story, Little Herr Friedemann (Der Kleine Herr Friedemann ), was published in 1898. In 1905 he married Katia Pringsheim, the daughter of Alfred Pringsheim, who had the chair of mathematics at the University of Munich. On her mother's side his wife was 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 his marriage have come six children: three girls: Erika, Monika and Elisabeth, of whom the eldest has gone into the theatre, and three boys: Klaus, Golo, and Michael, of whom the eldest, Klaus Mann, 1906–49, has also devoted himself to literature and was a novelist, essayist, and playwright. During World War I Mann supported Kaiser Wilhelm II's conservatism and attacked liberalism. In Von Deutscher Republik (1923), as a semi-official spokesman for parliamentary democracy, Mann called upon German intellectuals to support the new Weimar Republic. Afterwards, his political views gradually shifted toward liberal and democratic principles. In 1930 Mann gave a public address in Berlin titled "An Appeal to Reason," in which he strongly denounced Nazism and encouraged resistance by the working class. This was followed by numerous essays and lectures in which he attacked the Nazis. At the same time, he expressed increasing sympathy for socialism and communism. Thomas Mann left Germany in 1933 and edited the anti-Nazi journal Sammlung in Amsterdam. His writings include Alexander: A Novel of Utopia (1929); Pathetic Symphony (1936), 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). 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), 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. Mann became famous with the publication of his first novel, Buddenbrooks (1901), which depicts the rise and disintegration of a merchant family. The book appeared when he was 26. He began writing it during a one-year stay in Italy and completed it in about two and a half years. The book outraged the citizens of Lübeck, who saw it as a thinly veiled account of local incidents and figures, although Mann never mentions the name of the city. There followed shorter stories, collected in the volume Tristan (1903), of which the North-South artist's novellaTonio Kroger, a spiritual autobiography exploring art and discipline, is usually considered the most characteristic, and also the Renaissance dialogues Fiorenza (1906), a closet drama which, however, has occasionally been staged; 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. 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. An account of the development of his socio-moral ideas is found in the volumes of essays Rede und Antwort (1922, tr.,Question and Answer), Bemühungen (1925, tr.,Efforts), and Die Forderung des Tages (1930, tr.,Order of fhe Day).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). Lecture tours abroad began immediately after the borders of countries neutral or hostile during the war had been re-opened. They led him first to Holland, Switzerland, and Denmark. The spring of 1923 saw a journey to Spain. In the following year Mann was guest of honour of the newly established PEN Club in London; two years later he accepted an invitation of the French branch of the Carnegie Foundation, and he visited Warsaw in 1927. Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929, principally in recognition of his popular achievement with the epic Buddenbrooks (1901), The Magic Mountain (1924), and his numerous short stories. Based on Mann's own family, Buddenbrooks relates the decline of a merchant family in Lübeck over the course of three generations. The Magic Mountain follows an engineering student who, planning to visit his tubercular cousin at a Swiss sanatorium for only three weeks, finds his departure from the sanatorium delayed for seven years. During that time, he confronts medicine and the way it looks at the body and encounters a variety of characters who play out ideological conflicts and discontents of contemporary European civilisation. In 1929, Mann had a vacation cottage built in the idyllic fishing village of Nidden (now Nida, Lithuania) on the Kurische Nehrung (English: Curonian Spit), where a German artists' colony had developed. He spent the summers of 1930-32 there, working on Joseph and his Brothers. The cottage survived and now houses a cultural center dedicated to the writer, with a small memorial exhibition. In 1933 Mann left Hitler’s Germany for Switzerland in self-imposed exile and was deprived of his citizenship by the Nazis in 1936. 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. In 1938 he settled in the United states and became an American citizen in 1940 when he entered the U.S. army. From 1941 to 1953, lived in Santa Monica, California, but was disappointed with the American persecution of Communist sympathizers. He was never to live in Germany again, though he traveled there regularly and was widely celebrated. His most important visit to Germany was in 1949, at the occasion of the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, and he received the Goethe Prizes of Weimar (East Germany) and Frankfurt (West Germany), but when he finally returned to Europe he settled near Zürich in 1953. In August 12, 1955, he died of atherosclerosis in a hospital in Zürich and was buried in Kilchberg. He was aged 80. Among the chief works of Mann's later years are the novels Lotte in Weimar (1939, tr.,The Beloved Returns), in which Mann returned to the world of Goethe's novel The Sorrows of Young Werther (1774) and provides the framework for a psychologically and technically ingenious portrait of the old Goethe. Dr. Faustus (1947) is the story of composer Adrian Leverkühn who chooses to pay with self-destruction for the powers of genius, a fate that echoes the last days of the Third Reich the story of and the corruption of german culture in the years leading up to World War II; and Confessions of Felix Krull (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull , 1954), which was still unfinished at Mann's death. Other Mann's works are the collections of essays Leiden und Grösse der Meister (1935, tr.,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). Mann admired greatly Russian literature and wrote several essays about on Leo Tolstoy and his "undying realism". Especially he loved Tolstoy's Anna Karenina. However, he disliked the later Tolstoy and considered him less noble than Goethe. In the essay Dostoevsky - With Moderation (1945) he deals with the author's supposed confession to Turgenev that he had violated an underage girl. Mann's Diaries, unsealed in 1975, tell of his struggles with his sexuality, which found reflection in his works, most prominently through the obsession of the elderly Aschenbach for the 14-year-old Polish boy Tadzio in the novella Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig, 1912). In the story an author, Gustav von Aschenbach, whose character is said to be based on the composer Gustav Mahler, fells hopelessly in love with a young teenager, Tadzio. Obsessed with the boy, he stays in Venice during a cholera epidemic, and also dies of cholera. The story was adapted into screen by Luchino Visconti, starring Dirk Bogarde and Bjorn Andresen. As a theme Visconti used the Adagietto from Mahler's Fifth Symphony. Gilbert Adair's work The Real Tadzio describes how, in the summer of 1911, Mann had been staying at the Grand Hôtel des Bains in Venice with his wife and brother when he became enraptured by the angelic figure of W?adys?aw Moes, an 11-year-old Polish boy. |
www.AbeBooks.co.uk - find more than 110 million out-of-print books worldwide. |
||
|
Selected works:
Bibliography about Thomas Mann:
|
|||
|
|||
Download here our book search engines