German novelist whose fiction studies desire, illness, art, and the collapse of disciplined identities.
Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short-story writer and essayist. He was born Paul Thomas Mann on 6 June 1875 in Lübeck, the second son of a grain merchant who also sat as a city senator. His first novel, Buddenbrooks, appeared in 1901 and followed four generations of a Lübeck merchant family into decline. He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.
His books set art, desire and illness against the history of Germany. Death in Venice, published in 1912, gives an ageing writer an obsession with a Polish boy on the Venice Lido while cholera spreads through the city. The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, keeps a young engineer in a Swiss tuberculosis sanatorium for years. Doctor Faustus, published in 1947, tells the life of an invented composer alongside the rise and fall of Nazism.
Mann left Germany in February 1933, weeks after Adolf Hitler took power, and never lived there again. He settled first in Switzerland, then in the United States, where he became a citizen in 1944 and taught at Princeton University. From October 1940 he recorded monthly broadcasts in German for the BBC, attacking Hitler by name. He died in Zürich on 12 August 1955, aged 80.
Paul Thomas Mann was born in Lübeck on 6 June 1875. His father, Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, was a grain merchant and a senator of the city. His mother, Júlia da Silva Bruhns, was Brazilian, of German, Portuguese and Native Brazilian ancestry, and came to Germany with her family at the age of seven. She was Roman Catholic, and her son was baptised into his father's Lutheran church. The family belonged to the Hanseatic merchant class that ran Lübeck.[1]
Mann's father died in 1891 and the family firm was wound up. The household moved to Munich, where Mann lived from 1891 until 1933, apart from a year in Palestrina in Italy with his elder brother, the novelist Heinrich Mann. He had studied at the Katharineum in Lübeck. In Munich he attended the Ludwig-Maximilians-Universität and the Technische Hochschule, taking history, economics, art history and literature with a career in journalism in mind. He spent 1894 and 1895 as a clerk at the South German Fire Insurance Company.
He began writing for the satirical magazine Simplicissimus, and his first published story, "Little Herr Friedemann", appeared in 1898. Buddenbrooks followed in 1901, when he was twenty-six. It traces four generations of a Lübeck merchant family through commercial and physical decline, and Mann took its households, habits and quarrels from his own relatives. The book made his name and became the work most often cited when he was given the Nobel Prize. Lübeck's patrician families did not forgive the portrait, and they were still cool towards him when he returned to the city after the Second World War.
In February 1905 Mann married Katia Pringsheim, the daughter of a wealthy secular Jewish industrial family in Munich. She later joined the Lutheran church. They had six children: Erika in 1905, Klaus in 1906, Golo in 1909, Monika in 1910, Elisabeth in 1918 and Michael in 1919. Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann all became writers. The Pringsheim money bought a summer plot at Bad Tölz in 1908, with a country house built on it the next year and kept until 1917. In 1914 the Manns bought a villa in the Munich district of Bogenhausen and lived there until 1933.
In 1911 Mann stayed at the Grand Hôtel des Bains on the Venice Lido with his wife and his brother Heinrich. He was struck there by a ten-year-old Polish boy, Władysław Moes, whom the writer Gilbert Adair identified in 2001 as the model for the novella's Tadzio. Death in Venice, published in 1912, gives the ageing writer Gustav von Aschenbach an obsession with a fourteen-year-old Polish boy on the same beach. Cholera spreads through Venice while the city hides the outbreak from its visitors. Katia Mann later recalled that her uncle Friedberg, a professor of canon law in Leipzig, was outraged by the subject.[2]
Mann's notebooks and diaries record attractions to men and boys throughout his life. As a young man he had strong feelings for the painter and violinist Paul Ehrenberg, from about 1899 until 1904, and those feelings may have kept him from marrying an Englishwoman, Mary Smith, whom he met in 1901. In 1927, on holiday at Kampen on the island of Sylt, the fifty-two-year-old Mann fell in love with the seventeen-year-old Klaus Heuser. In 1950 he met a nineteen-year-old waiter, Franz Westermeier, and wrote in his diary: "Once again this, once again love." The attachments appear to have stayed largely platonic, and Katia Mann tolerated them.
In 1912 Katia Mann spent several months at a sanatorium in Davos in Switzerland, treated for what was wrongly diagnosed as tuberculosis. Mann visited her for a few weeks, and the visit became The Magic Mountain. Published in 1924, the novel sends the young engineer Hans Castorp to such a sanatorium for a three-week visit and keeps him there for years. Its patients argue about medicine, politics and progress. The book ends with the outbreak of the First World War, and Castorp enlists with his survival left uncertain.
Mann supported the German war effort. He backed the conservatism of Kaiser Wilhelm II, attacked liberalism, and called the war "a purification, a liberation, an enormous hope". His 600-page Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man, published in 1918, argued for spiritual tradition over material progress and for rooted culture over what he called rootless civilisation. In 1917 he put the proceeds of the Bad Tölz house into war bonds, which lost their value when Germany lost the war. His father-in-law did the same, and much of the Pringsheim fortune went with it. The inflation of 1923 and 1924 took more.
His politics then changed. On 13 October 1922 he spoke at the Beethovensaal in Berlin, calling on German intellectuals to support the new Weimar Republic. The speech was published a month later as On the German Republic. He backed the left-liberal German Democratic Party and afterwards urged unity behind the Social Democrats. In 1922 he also signed Magnus Hirschfeld's petition to the Reichstag to abolish Paragraph 175, the law under which men were imprisoned for homosexual acts. In 1930 he gave a public address in Berlin, An Appeal to Reason, denouncing Nazism and calling on working people to resist it.
The Magic Mountain sold well and repaired his finances. In 1929 he received the Nobel Prize in Literature, on a nomination from Anders Österling of the Swedish Academy, with the citation resting mainly on Buddenbrooks. He spent the prize money on a summer cottage at Nida in Lithuania, on the Curonian Spit, where a German artists' colony had formed. He worked there through the summers of 1930, 1931 and 1932 on the first volumes of Joseph and His Brothers.[3]
In February 1933 Mann finished a lecture tour of Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris and travelled on to Arosa in Switzerland. Adolf Hitler had taken power that month. Klaus Mann and Erika Mann sent word from Munich that it would not be safe for their father to come home, and he stayed away. The Bavarian Political Police searched the Munich villa and seized the house, its contents and the bank accounts, and an arrest warrant was issued. Golo Mann smuggled the finished chapters of the Joseph novel and his father's diaries out of the country.
The family settled at Küsnacht near Zürich, after a stop at Sanary-sur-Mer in France. On 17 March 1933 Mann resigned from the poetry section of the Prussian Academy of Arts rather than sign a declaration of loyalty to the new government. His books were not among those burned in public in May 1933, unlike those of his brother Heinrich Mann and his son Klaus Mann. He took Czechoslovak citizenship and a passport in 1936, and the German government revoked his citizenship a few weeks later. In December 1936 the University of Bonn withdrew the honorary doctorate it had given him in 1919, and restored it on 13 December 1946.[1]
Mann moved to the United States in 1939 and lived at 65 Stockton Street in Princeton, New Jersey, teaching at Princeton University. In 1941 he was appointed consultant in German literature at the Library of Congress. In 1942 the family moved to 1550 San Remo Drive in Pacific Palisades, Los Angeles, where a large German exile community had gathered. He became an American citizen on 23 June 1944. Heinrich Mann arrived in California poor and ill, and the brothers' long rivalry did not ease.
From October 1940 Mann recorded an eight-minute talk in German every month. The recordings were flown to London and broadcast to Germany by the BBC German Service on longwave, and they were collected in 1943 as Listen, Germany! He called Hitler and his officials crude philistines with no grasp of European culture. In one broadcast he said: "The war is horrible, but it has the advantage of keeping Hitler from making speeches about culture."
After the war Mann was questioned about his politics in the United States. He was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee as a suspected communist, listed as affiliated with peace organisations and Communist fronts, and described there as one of the world's foremost apologists for Stalin and company. He answered that he was not a communist, and that political inquisitions declared in the name of an emergency were how it had started in Germany. He joined protests against the jailing of the Hollywood Ten, gave up his Library of Congress post, and left the country in 1952.
He settled at Kilchberg near Zürich, renting at first and buying a house there in 1954. He never lived in Germany again, though he travelled there. In 1949, for the 200th birthday of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, he attended celebrations in Frankfurt am Main in West Germany and in Weimar in East Germany, going to both to show that German culture crossed the new border. On the same journey he saw his parents' house in Lübeck, which bombing had partly destroyed.
Mann researched a subject at length before writing about it. For Doctor Faustus he consulted Theodor W. Adorno on modern composition and gave his invented composer, Adrian Leverkühn, the features of Arnold Schoenberg's style. Joseph and His Brothers took sixteen years and four volumes, published between 1933 and 1943. Lotte in Weimar, published in 1939, reconstructs the household of the elderly Goethe and the world of his novel The Sorrows of Young Werther.[2]
The sentences are long, formal and level, and the irony sits under them rather than on the surface. Mann took that manner from Theodor Fontane, the older novelist he named as his model, and used it from Buddenbrooks onward. Alfred Döblin, a more experimental contemporary, said that Mann had elevated the pressed crease to a style principle. The register shifts with the subject. Buddenbrooks carries Low German phrases, Joseph and His Brothers turns biblical and fairy-tale, and Doctor Faustus stays mostly serious.
He worked by repeating and varying motifs, and by giving ideas to characters who then argue them out. Arthur Schopenhauer's The World as Will and Representation, which Mann studied while writing Buddenbrooks, supplied the pattern of decline in that book. From Friedrich Nietzsche he took the position that illness and creation are connected, and that a sickness in a Nietzsche or a Dostoevsky produces something ordinary health does not. He admired Leo Tolstoy and praised what he called his courage to be boring. He set most of his fiction in the two cities he knew, Lübeck and Munich.
Music sits inside the plots rather than beside them. Buddenbrooks and the novella Tristan both turn on it, and Doctor Faustus is built around a composer's work. Mann loved Richard Wagner's operas. In his 1933 essay The Suffering and Greatness of Richard Wagner he argued against the Nazi attempt to claim Wagner as a nationalist figure.
The Nobel Prize made Mann the best-known living German writer, and two members of the Swedish Academy nominated him a second time in 1948. Blanche Knopf, introduced to him by H. L. Mencken on a book-buying trip to Europe, made Alfred A. Knopf his American publisher. In 1924 she hired the scholar Helen Tracy Lowe-Porter to translate him. Lowe-Porter went on to translate his complete works, and her versions were how English-language readers met him for decades.[4]
Mann always denied that his novels drew on his own life. In May 1945 he burned every diary written before March 1933 in the garden at Pacific Palisades, keeping only the notebooks from September 1918 to December 1921 because he needed them for Doctor Faustus. He directed that the surviving volumes be published twenty years after his death, and predicted "surprise and cheerful astonishment". Peter von Mendelssohn and Inge Jens edited them in ten volumes.
Publication began in 1975 and caused a sensation in Germany. The entries set out the desire the novels had handled indirectly, including passages from 1920 recording his attraction to his own thirteen-year-old son, Klaus Mann. Readers and critics reassessed the fiction in their light. Anthony Heilbut's biography Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature, published in 1997, argued that this material sat at the centre of the work. Franz Westermeier, the waiter Mann had fallen for in 1950, was traced in the United States and was both flattered and shocked to learn of it.
Later writers and film-makers took the books up directly. Yukio Mishima drew on them, and Joseph Campbell named Mann as one of his mentors. Luchino Visconti filmed Death in Venice in 1971, and Benjamin Britten turned the novella into an opera in 1973. Colm Tóibín's novel The Magician, published in 2021, retells Mann's life through his family and his politics.
Mann turned eighty in June 1955 and went on holiday to Noordwijk in the Netherlands. On 18 July his left leg began to hurt and swelled on one side. A doctor from Leiden named Mulders diagnosed thrombophlebitis, a clot in an inflamed vein, and Wilhelm Löffler confirmed it. Mann was taken to a hospital in Zürich, where he went into shock. He died there on 12 August 1955.
The diagnosis had been wrong. The post-mortem, carried out by Christoph Hedinger, found a burst aneurysm of the iliac artery, which had bled into the tissue behind the abdominal cavity and compressed and blocked the iliac vein. The vascular surgery that could have repaired it did not yet exist. Mann was buried on 16 August 1955 in the village cemetery at Kilchberg. Katia Mann and four of their children were later buried beside him, under a gravestone modelled on a Roman stele.
Born Paul Thomas Mann in Lübeck, the second son of a grain merchant and city senator.
His father dies, the family firm is wound up, and the household moves to Munich.
Publishes his first story, "Little Herr Friedemann", while writing for the magazine Simplicissimus.
Buddenbrooks appears, following four generations of a Lübeck merchant family into decline.
Marries Katia Pringsheim in Munich. Six children are born between 1905 and 1919.
Publishes Death in Venice, written after a 1911 stay on the Venice Lido.
The Magic Mountain is published and restores the family finances.
Awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, with the citation resting mainly on Buddenbrooks.
Leaves Germany in February after Adolf Hitler takes power and settles at Küsnacht near Zürich.
Takes Czechoslovak citizenship. Germany revokes his citizenship a few weeks later.
Moves to the United States, settling in Princeton, New Jersey, and teaching at Princeton University.
Begins monthly BBC broadcasts in German, collected in 1943 as Listen, Germany!
Becomes a citizen of the United States on 23 June.
Publishes Doctor Faustus, the life of an invented composer set against the rise of Nazism.
Leaves the United States and settles at Kilchberg near Zürich.
Dies in a Zürich hospital on 12 August, aged 80, and is buried at Kilchberg.
Corresponded with · 1948
In 1948 the twenty-two-year-old Gore Vidal sent Mann a copy of his third novel, The City and the Pillar, a story of homosexual life in New York and Hollywood. Mann replied politely and called it a "noble work".
Mishima is named among the later novelists whose work Mann's fiction shaped.
A disciplined writer goes to Venice for rest and stays while desire and disease strip away his control.
Thomas Mann (1875–1955) was a German novelist and essayist who won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. He was born in Lübeck into a merchant family and made his name at twenty-six with Buddenbrooks, a novel about the decline of a family much like his own. His best-known books are Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain and Doctor Faustus. He left Germany in 1933 after Adolf Hitler took power and spent the rest of his life in Switzerland and the United States.
The Magic Mountain, published in 1924, follows Hans Castorp, a young engineer who visits his cousin at a tuberculosis sanatorium in the Swiss Alps and stays for years. Shut in with the other patients, he listens to them argue about medicine, politics, religion and progress. The novel ends as the First World War breaks out and Castorp enlists, with his survival left uncertain. Mann took the setting from visiting his wife Katia, who spent several months at a Davos sanatorium in 1912.
He left because his public attacks on Nazism had made him a target, and his children warned him not to come home. In February 1933, weeks after Adolf Hitler took power, Mann finished a lecture tour in Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris and travelled on to Switzerland. Klaus Mann and Erika Mann sent word from Munich that returning was unsafe. The Bavarian Political Police then seized the family villa, its contents and the bank accounts, and an arrest warrant was issued.
They record a lifelong attraction to men and boys that Mann kept out of public view. He burned the volumes written before March 1933, but directed that the rest be published twenty years after his death, and they began appearing in 1975. The entries name the painter Paul Ehrenberg, the teenaged Klaus Heuser and the waiter Franz Westermeier, and include passages from 1920 about his own thirteen-year-old son, Klaus Mann. Their publication caused a sensation in Germany and changed how the novels were read.
Yes. He received the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, on a nomination from Anders Österling of the Swedish Academy. The award recognised Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain and his short fiction, though the citation dwelt mainly on Buddenbrooks. Mann spent the prize money on a summer cottage at Nida in Lithuania, where he worked on Joseph and His Brothers in 1930, 1931 and 1932.
He died in a hospital in Zürich on 12 August 1955, aged 80, from a burst artery in his pelvis. The trouble began on 18 July, on holiday at Noordwijk in the Netherlands, when his left leg swelled and hurt. Doctors diagnosed thrombophlebitis, a clot in an inflamed vein, and he was moved to Zürich, where he went into shock. The post-mortem found a perforated iliac artery aneurysm that had bled behind the abdominal cavity, which the surgery of the day could not repair.
Corresponded with · 1948
In 1948 the twenty-two-year-old Gore Vidal sent Mann a copy of his third novel, The City and the Pillar, a story of homosexual life in New York and Hollywood. Mann replied politely and called it a "noble work".
The sources below include biographies, scholarly essays, interviews, and primary materials that informed this page. They reflect both the historical record and ongoing critical conversations about Thomas Mann and their work.
The Nobel Foundation's record of the 1929 literature prize, used for the award year and citation.
The Nobel Foundation's biographical note, used for the publication chronology.
Reference article cross-checked for the Lübeck childhood, the marriage and children, the exile years, the diaries, and the final illness.
These references anchor the page in the documented record and in the scholarly conversations around Thomas Mann. Every claim on this page traces back to one or more of the works listed here.
Explore more resources