45 Facts About Thomas Mann

Paul Thomas Mann was a German novelist, short story writer, social critic, philanthropist, essayist, and the 1929 Nobel Prize in Literature laureate.

Thomas Mann is one of the best-known exponents of the so-called Exilliteratur, German literature written in exile by those who opposed the Hitler regime.

Paul Thomas Mann was born to a hanseatic family in Lubeck, the second son of Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann and his wife Julia da Silva Bruhns, a Brazilian woman of German, Portuguese and Native Brazilian ancestry, who emigrated to Germany with her family when she was seven years old.

Thomas Mann's mother was Roman Catholic but Mann was baptised into his father's Lutheran religion.

Thomas Mann's father died in 1891, and after that his trading firm was liquidated.

Thomas Mann first studied science at a Lubeck Gymnasium, then attended the Ludwig Maximillians University of Munich as well as the Technical University of Munich, where, in preparation for a journalism career, he studied history, economics, art history and literature.

Thomas Mann lived in Munich from 1891 until 1933, with the exception of a year spent in Palestrina, Italy, with his elder brother, the novelist Heinrich.

In 1905, Thomas Mann married Katia Pringsheim, who came from a wealthy, secular Jewish industrialist family.

In 1912, Katia was treated for tuberculosis for a few months in a sanatorium in Davos, Switzerland, where Thomas Mann visited her for a few weeks, which inspired him to write his novel The Magic Mountain, published in 1924.

Thomas Mann's father-in-law did the same, which caused a loss of a major part of the Pringsheim family's wealth.

In February 1933, while having finished a book tour to Amsterdam, Brussels and Paris, Thomas Mann recovered in Arosa when Hitler took power and Mann heard from his eldest children, Klaus and Erika in Munich, that it would not be safe for him to return to Germany.

Thomas Mann was doubtful at first, because, with a certain naivete, he could not imagine the violence of the overthrow and the persecution of opponents of the regime, but the children insisted, and their advice later turned out to be accurate when it emerged that even their driver-caretaker had become an informant and that Mann's immediate arrest would have been very likely.

Thomas Mann was no longer able to use his holiday home in Lithuania because it was only a few hundred yards from the German border and he seemed to be at risk there.

Thomas Mann received Czechoslovak citizenship and a passport in 1936, even though he had never lived there.

In 1939, following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Mann emigrated to the United States, while his in-laws only managed thanks to high-ranking connections to leave Germany for Zurich in October 1939.

In 1942, the Thomas Mann family moved to 1550 San Remo Drive in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California.

On 23 June 1944, Thomas Mann was naturalized as a citizen of the United States.

The outbreak of World War II, on 1 September 1939, prompted Thomas Mann to offer anti-Nazi speeches to the German people via the BBC.

Thomas Mann was one of the few publicly active opponents of Nazism among German expatriates in the US In a BBC broadcast of 30 December 1945, Thomas Mann expressed understanding as to why those peoples that had suffered from the Nazi regime would embrace the idea of German collective guilt.

Thomas Mann was listed by HUAC as being "affiliated with various peace organizations or Communist fronts".

Thomas Mann visited Lubeck, where he saw his parents' house, which was partially destroyed by the bombing of Lubeck in World War II.

Thomas Mann was transported to a Zurich hospital, but soon developed a state of shock.

Thomas Mann's work influenced many later authors, such as Yukio Mishima.

Joseph Campbell stated in an interview with Bill Moyers that Thomas Mann was one of his mentors.

Thomas Mann was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929, after he had been nominated by Anders Osterling, member of the Swedish Academy, principally in recognition of his popular achievements with Buddenbrooks, The Magic Mountain, and his numerous short stories.

The pessimistic philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer provided philosophical inspiration for the Buddenbrooks' narrative of decline, especially with his two-volume work The World as Will and Representation, which Thomas Mann studied closely while writing the novel.

Thomas Mann believed that in order to make a bourgeois revolution, the Russians had to forget Dostoevsky.

Thomas Mann believed that disease should not be regarded as wholly negative.

Thomas Mann initially gave his support to the left-liberal German Democratic Party before urging unity behind the Social Democrats, probably less for ideological reasons, but because he only trusted the political party of the workers to provide sufficient mass and resistance to the growing Nazism.

In contrast to those of his brother Heinrich and his son Klaus, Thomas Mann's books were not among those burnt publicly by Hitler's regime in May 1933, possibly since he had been the Nobel laureate in literature for 1929.

Thomas Mann clarified this view during a German press interview in July 1949, declaring that he was not a communist but that communism at least had some relation to ideals of humanity and of a better future.

Thomas Mann said that the transition of the communist revolution into an autocratic regime was a tragedy while Nazism was only "devilish nihilism".

Thomas Mann's diaries reveal his struggles with his bisexuality, his attraction to men finding frequent 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.

In late 1914, at the start of World War I, Thomas Mann used the notes and excerpts already collected for this project to write his essay Frederick and the grand coalition in which he contrasted Frederick's soldierly, male drive and his literary, female connotations consisting of "decomposing" skepticism.

Thomas Mann was a friend of the violinist and painter Paul Ehrenberg, for whom he had feelings as a young man.

In 1927, while on summer vacation in Kampen, Thomas Mann fell in love with 17-year-old Klaus Heuser, to whom he dedicated the introduction to his essay "Kleist's Amphitryon, a Reconquest" in the fall of the same year, which he read publicly in Munich in the presence of Heuser.

In 1950, Thomas Mann met the 19-year-old waiter Franz Westermeier, confiding to his diary "Once again this, love".

Thomas Mann immediately processed the experience in his essay "Michelangelo in his poems" and was inspired to write The Black Swan.

In 1975, when Thomas Mann's diaries were published, creating a national sensation in Germany, the retired Westermeier was tracked down in the United States: he was flattered to learn he had been the object of Thomas Mann's obsession, but shocked at its depth.

Katia Thomas Mann tolerated these love affairs, as did the children, because they knew that it didn't go too far.

Thomas Mann exchanged letters with Klaus Heuser for a while and met him again in 1935.

Thomas Mann had burned all of his diaries from before March 1933 in the garden of his home in Pacific Palisades in May 1945.

Thomas Mann reacted cautiously to Klaus's first novel The Pious Dance, Adventure Book of a Youth, which is openly set in Berlin's homosexual milieu.

The Eulenburg affair, which broke out two years after Thomas Mann's marriage, had strengthened him in his renunciation of a gay life and he supported the journalist Maximilian Harden, who was friends with Katia Thomas Mann's family, in his denunciatory trial against the gay Prince of Eulenburg, a close friend of Emperor Wilhelm II.

Thomas Mann was always concerned about his dignity, reputation and respectability; the "poet king" Goethe was his role model.