31 Facts About Thomas Mann

1.

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

2.

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.

3.

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

4.

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

5.

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

6.

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.

7.

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.

8.

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

9.

In 1933, while travelling in the South of France and living in Sanary-sur-Mer, Thomas Mann heard from his eldest children, Klaus and Erika in Munich, that it would not be safe for him to return to Germany.

10.

In 1939, following the German occupation of Czechoslovakia, Thomas Mann emigrated to the United States.

11.

Thomas Mann moved to Princeton, New Jersey, where he lived on 65 Stockton Street and began to teach at Princeton University.

12.

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

13.

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

14.

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.

15.

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.

16.

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

17.

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

18.

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

19.

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

20.

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.

21.

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

22.

Thomas Mann's diaries reveal his struggles with his homosexuality, 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.

23.

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

24.

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

25.

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.

26.

Thomas's son Klaus Mann dealt openly from the beginning with his own homosexuality in his literary work and open lifestyle, referring critically to his father's "sublimation" in his diary.

27.

Thomas Mann gave a lecture at the Beethovensaal in Berlin on 13 October 1922, which appeared in Die neue Rundschau in November 1922, in which he developed his eccentric defence of the Republic based on extensive close readings of Novalis and Walt Whitman.

28.

Thomas Mann initially gave his support to the left-liberal German Democratic Party before shifting further left and urging unity behind the Social Democrats.

29.

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.

30.

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.

31.

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