Celebrating 150 years of Thomas Mann Thomas Mann Revisited

Why is Thomas Mann still regarded today as one of the most important German storytellers of the 20th century? Why do his novels and novellas continue to be read, translated, adapted for the stage, reimagined in literature and brought to life in films? What makes them resonate in our contemporary world? Literary scholar and Thomas Mann expert Friedhelm Marx offers insights into the life and legacy of this iconic author.

Thomas Mann’s debut novel Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family (1901) is a compelling family chronicle spanning four generations, which earned him the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929. To this day, the novel remains a timeless blueprint for contemporary family sagas.

Family stories

Mann’s novel charts the rise and fall of a 19th-century north German merchant family. It explores the increasing ruthlessness and recklessness of the family’s business practices, their economically motivated marriages, the stifling constraints of bourgeois etiquette and the terror of school life for the youngest son. These themes are juxtaposed with tales of attempted escape, excess and decadence: wild philosophical readings, the intoxicating power of music, unconventional love affairs, an increasingly nervous stomach condition and sickliness.

The four generations of the Buddenbrooks reflect the societal, cultural and economic changes of their time. Like few other novels, Buddenbrooks combines the realistic narrative style of 19th-century social novels with the psychological depth and insight into the human mind of modernist literature. The rigid intertwining of business and family interests, the ongoing conflict in each generation between bourgeois order and artistic, anarchic sensibilities that resist the constraints of capitalism, remains as topical literarily valuable as ever. This enduring relevance is evident in the numerous contemporary stage adaptations of the novel.

Thomas Mann used the family as a narrative framework to explore the disintegration of bourgeois life and evoke mythically preconfigured family conflicts beyond Buddenbrooks – for example in Disorder and Early Sorrow (1925), a novel set during the time of hyperinflation, or in the epic format of his four-part Joseph and His Brothers (1933–1943).

Intoxication, desire, gender trouble

The inner dynamics of many of Thomas Mann’s novellas and novels are rooted in the motif of affliction, “the intrusion of drunkenly destructive and annihilating forces into a life controlled and bound by all its hopes for dignity and a conditional happiness,” as he himself described it in 1940. The idea that a well-ordered life can be swiftly swept away by overwhelmingly destructive forces presupposes an inner predisposition in those visited by them. They are driven by an unconscious longing to escape their dull, often bourgeois way of life.

Many of these characters grappled with the same open secret that preoccupied the author his entire life: the conflict between homosexual desire and a self-imposed middle-class lifestyle as a father of six. His narrative work repeatedly presents failed conceptions of masculinity, but also androgynous, bisexual and transgressive identities, as embodied by the impostor Felix Krull, among others. According to German studies expert and Thomas Mann editor Hans Rudolf Vaget, Mann’s spectrum of literary explorations of intoxication, desire and gender trouble positions him as the greatest psychologist of sexuality in German literature.

Artistic figures, reflections on art

Few authors of the modern era have focused so intently on artistic lifestyles and attitudes. Even in his early novellas, Mann’s narrative interest was drawn by the worldviews of misfits, individuals who feel set apart from the “rule-abiding”, the orderly and ordinary world.

They include writers, musicians, visual artists – decadents and dilettantes disconnected from reality – fervent preachers of violence (Beim Propheten), but also misguided citizens like Tonio Kröger (Tonio Kröger) or distinguished novelist like Gustav von Aschenbach (Death in Venice), as well as imposters (Confessions of Felix Krull) and hypnotists (Mario and the Magician).

They share an extraordinary irritability and sensitivity, predisposing them to sharp, unsparing observation. These traits serve as a means of self-reflection on their own artistic way of life, but they also facilitate a literary exploration of the complex and often troubling aspects of the modern world, where pathological delusion, seduction and demagoguery can are also examined through the medium of art.

Modern storytelling

From the very beginning, Thomas Mann’s narrative style aligned with both European modernist prose and the musical, compositional principles of Richard Wagner. This is reflected in prominent themes that run through and structure the early novella Little Herr Friedemann (1897).

The relational magic of his prose also results from a very unique way of interweaving quotes. A key example is his almost verbatim use of the “Typhoid” article from Meyer’s Konversationslexikon (an encyclopaedic reference work) to describe the fatal illness of the young Hanno Buddenbrook. These and other textual elements from totally heterogeneous sources blend so seamlessly into his narrative that the breaks are barely perceptible to the reader. Mann later referred to this as “higher copying” – a technique often revisited in the so-called post-modern era. Thomas Mann responded to the specifically modern loss of traditional certainties and truths with narrative irony. This enabled him to leave conflicting viewpoints unresolved and to playfully expose rigid or stubborn beliefs.

In response to the increasing pace of modern life, a trend that is still evident today, Mann adopted a radically decelerated narrative style in his novel The Magic Mountain (1924). This deceleration mirrors Hans Castorp’s subjective experience of time. Exhausted from his studies, seven years in the Berghof sanatorium in Davos seem to pass in the blink of an eye – his perception of time even extending to readers of the novel. The Magic Mountain challenges traditional notions of plot and action through techniques of “defabulisation”, deceleration and encyclopaedic elaboration: a bold and innovative response to the breakdown of traditional narrative forms in the 1920s.

Literature and politics

“Even America feels today that democracy is not an assured possession, that it has enemies, that it is threatened from within and from without, that it has once more become a problem. America is aware that the time has come for democracy to take stock of itself, for recollection and restatement and conscious consideration, in a word, for its renewal in thought and feeling,” said Thomas Mann during a lecture tour of the US in 1938. An alarmingly topical statement.

By this time, Mann had long since distanced himself from the (rather reactionary) Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man from 1918, which had been prompted by the outbreak of World War One. From 1922, with his public declaration of support for the Republic, Mann repeatedly and vociferously warned against the threat of National Socialism, immediately going into exile with his family in 1933. During these years, his literary work also took on a political undertone.

Influenced by the war, the 1918 revolution, the Bavarian Soviet Republic and the turbulent early years of the Weimar Republic, The Magic Mountain already grapples with such themes as terror, revolution, state order versus anarchy, the value of labour and the challenges of progress – issues that remain politically relevant today. “Thomas Mann does not, as some believe, dwell in the seclusion of the Zauberberg of his dreams. On the contrary, he reveals here an intense, but not strident, absorption in the immediate fate of humanity,” noted The American Hebrew and Jewish Tribune in September 1932.

This is illustrated by such novellas as Mario and the Magician (1930), The Tables of the Law (1943), the four-part novel Joseph and his Brothers (1933−1943) and the Goethe-inspired novel Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns (1939), which unmistakably allude to the political threats of fascism. Mann’s literary preoccupation with National Socialism culminated with his 1947 novel Doctor Faustus: a landmark in early post-war literature, its themes too challenging for the majority of contemporary German readers.

Thomas Mann Daily

By the 1920s at the latest, Thomas Mann’s reputation as a detached, bourgeois literary figure had become firmly established, fuelled partly by rivals like Bertolt Brecht, who mocked him as the “starched collar”, and Alfred Döblin, who described his “trouser crease as an artistic principle”. The publication of the surviving diaries, which began in 1975, however, brought to light a very different side of Mann. In his writings, he reflects candidly on his homosexual desires and physical state, his use of medication and struggles with apathy and self-doubt. He also expresses irritability towards family, friends and strangers, recounts the escapades of his poodle – seamlessly blending such personal reflections with his assessments of global political events and the oppressiveness of exile.

Reactions on the Twitter account @DailyMann highlight the marked shift in the public perception of Thomas Mann. In April 2022, Felix Lindner began posting quotes from Mann’s diaries every day over the period of a year. Entries such as “Started exercising naked again in the morning” on 20 July 1934 and “Great reluctance to do anything at all in the afternoon” on 10 August 1948 served to dismantle the image of the unapproachable writer. The posts attracted over 30,000 readers.

In recent years, research has increasingly focused on the Manns’ public lifestyle and signs of collective (or even competing) authorship. Thomas Mann’s first important point of reference was his older brother Heinrich, with whom he shared a complex and strained relationship. In the 1920s, Klaus and Erika Mann made a fairly dramatic entrance into the literary world; in exile, the entire family became something of a political think tank. As early as 1936, Klaus Mann noted in his diary: “What a peculiar family we are! One day, people will write books about us – not just about individual members, but about all of us.” This was probably the consequence of the Manns’ involvement, as public intellectuals, in the political upheavals of their time, from the German Empire and Weimar Republic to exile and the post-war period.

Media history, media stories

Thomas Mann actively explored, embraced and reflected on the possibilities of modern media like few other authors of his generation. The first film adaptation of Buddenbrooks appeared in the early 1920s, followed shortly after by the first radio recordings of Mann’s works. In January 1929, he became the first German writer to participate in an audio-visual recording. Later that same year, the Nobel Prize ceremony was broadcast live for the first time.

Thomas Mann’s public presence mirrors the turbulent media history of the Weimar Republic – a trend that continued in his later life. During his exile in the United States, Mann was regarded as “Hitler's most intimate enemy”. Between 1940 and 1945, he delivered 55 radio addresses in New York and Los Angeles, which were broadcast by the BBC to urge German listeners to resist the National Socialist regime.

In addition to editions published by S. Fischer Verlag and numerous translations, Thomas Mann’s literary work is available in a wide variety of formats, adaptations and media. The novels (even the over 1,800-page Joseph and his Brothers) have been adapted for the stage several times, and have inspired ballet and operatic interpretations, comics, Twitter renditions of specific texts, graphic novels and, above all, numerous film adaptations. Many of his novels and novellas have had such a profound and lasting impression on the canon of modern literature that they continue to inspire widespread interest and artistic engagement.

Polish Nobel Prize laureate Olga Tokarczuk drew inspiration from Mann’s Magic Mountain for her 2022 novel The Empusium, while Heinz Strunk released a novel entitled Magic Mountain 2.0 in November 2024, exactly 100 years after the original was published. Thomas Mann’s stories, it seems, are far from fully told.