Big Ben
Thomas Mann
The Magic Mountain
Prov. 21:28
"A false witness shall perish: but the man that heareth speaketh constantly."
Venecia
Chess: "Big Ben" "Thomas Mann" " The Magic Mountain"Paul Thomas Mann (6 June 1875 – 12 August 1955) was a
German novelist,
short story writer,
social critic,
philanthropist,
essayist, and 1929
Nobel Prize laureate, known for his series of highly symbolic and
ironic epic
novels and
novellas, noted for their insight into the
psychology of the
artist and the
intellectual. His analysis and critique of the European and German soul used modernized German and
Biblical stories, as well as the ideas of
Goethe,
Nietzsche, and
Schopenhauer.
His older brother was the radical writer Heinrich Mann, and three of his six children, Erika Mann, Klaus Mann and Golo Mann, also became important German writers.
When Hitler came to power in 1933, the anti-fascist Mann fled to Switzerland. When World War II broke out in 1939, he emigrated to the United States, from where he returned to Switzerland in 1952.
From The Sunday Times
January 5, 2003
IAN THOMSON THOMAS MANN: Life as a Work of Art: A Biography
by Hermann Kurzke trans Leslie Willson
Allen Lane £30 pp581 When Thomas Mann died in 1955 at the age of 80, he was dismissed by younger readers as a starchy man of letters. His fiction, with its lofty themes of nihilism, decadence and decay, seemed too old-fashioned and patrician for post-war Germany. The image of Mann as a sort of Teutonic Galsworthy, however, was destroyed in the mid-1970s when the embargo on his diaries expired. The journals revealed that Mann was prone to bouts of nausea, his nerves frayed by homoerotic fantasies. Few should be surprised. Mann’s most celebrated novel, Death in Venice, is not just a high-flown hymn to unrequited love; it is about gay desire.
Yet at the height of his success in prewar Germany, Mann represented the perfect paterfamilias: he had fathered six children, and radiated a stolid, mercantile air. The guilty truth lay hidden in his diary entries; towards the end of his life, these celebrated snake-hipped boys, elevator attendants (“Flirt mit dem lift boy”), sailors and actors. Mann was rather too aloof and self-obsessed to be a good father. In Switzerland, where he spent his last years divorced from his children, he became besotted with a Bavarian waiter named Franz. Poor Franz could not have guessed at his fate. When the 10th and final volume of the Mann diaries came out in 1995, German reporters tracked down the startled former waiter to New York and turned him into a minor celebrity. Mann would have been appalled (even though Franz was immortalised in his unfinished comic novel Felix Krull).
This new biography of Mann has been a bestseller in Germany, and not surprisingly it draws heavily on those salacious diaries. The author, Hermann Kurzke, is literature professor at Mainz University and has a flair for windy abstractions. Thus Mann betrays “the pure reality of the dream world”; he also rejects “the laxness of the homily of sympathy” (whatever that may be). Nevertheless, the professor has a thesis to demonstrate and he does so tirelessly: Mann sublimated his guilty sexual urges in his fiction.
One may be sceptical of this sort of cod psychology. But whatever Mann’s true sexual nature, few have written so alluringly about the enigma of human desire. Hans Castorp’s ill-fated passion for Clavdia Chauchat in The Magic Mountain is charged with a sultry eroticism, where sex glitters dangerously in the death- enchanted sanatorium. Clavdia has a conceivably masculine figure, with her willowy frame and boyish hips. Yet, contrary to what Kurzke and other biographers may believe, there is no evidence that Mann ever moved from homoeroticism to homosexuality. After reading Gore Vidal’s novel The City and the Pillar, he demanded in his diary: “How can one sleep with a man?” Ronald Hayman, in his reliable 1996 biography of Mann, mentions this entry, but Kurzke pointedly omits it.
All his life, Mann was afraid of being outed. Exiled during the war to Los Angeles as an anti-Nazi, he had rashly left his diaries behind in Hitler’s Germany. If Goebbels had got hold of them, suggests Kurzke, Mann’s reputation as a virtuous patrician liberal would have been ruined. For the Nazis, Mann was too cosmopolitan, un-German, decadent and snobbish. And the fact that his wife, Katia Pringsheim, was the daughter of converted Jews endeared Mann even less to the regime. In January 1937, Goebbels banned all mention of the novelist from German papers. Mann had left Germany shortly before Hitler became chancellor in 1933, and did not return until the war’s end.
Kurzke defends Mann from charges of anti-semitism, rightly so. From his part-Brazilian mother, Mann liked to think that he had inherited Indian blood, and he opposed Nazi notions of racial purity. His anti-Hitler propaganda, relayed from America to Germany via the BBC, alerted listeners to the destruction of European Jewry. Moreover, as the genocide unfolded in occupied territories, Mann published his biblical saga, Joseph and his Brothers. To portray Jews as the founding fathers of our modern morality — at such a time — showed a rare German humanity. (Unfortunately, the Joseph opus is Mann’s most soporific effort: how many have got to the end of it?) Thomas Mann: Life as a Work of Art is a thick, teeming book that combines first-class scholarship with flashes of awkward humour and somewhat smarty-pants observation. Mann, I think, would have hated it, but then he was an over-sensitive individual who flinched from cremation (“It may hurt”) as much as from biographers.
For many of us, the enduring image of Mann is to be found at the end of Visconti’s film of Death in Venice; Dirk Bogarde as he lies dying in a deck-chair, while gazing at the beautiful boy on the beach.
Ian Thomson’s biography of Primo Levi is published by Hutchinson. Thomas Mann is available at the Sunday Times
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