150 Years of Thomas Mann

Literature
150 years of Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann was one of Germany's most important writers, a Nobel Prize winner and political commentator. He left behind an enduring literary legacy. On the occasion of his 150th birthday, we take a look at his life and work.

Thomas Mann 1916, portrait at desk, colored

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? Literary scholar and Thomas Mann expert Friedhelm Marx offers insights into the life and legacy of this iconic author.

Friedhelm Marx

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.

Thomas Mann, 1938

Film still from “Death in Venice” by Luchino Visconti (Björn Andresen and Dirk Bogarde)

Between two Worlds
Bourgeois and Artist Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann grappled with it his entire life – this inner tension between bourgeois existence and his calling as an artist. We explore a conflict that shaped his literary work more than anything else.

Gina Arzdorf

For beginners
Reading tips for the “Magic Mountain”

Thomas Mann’s novel “The Magic Mountain” has the reputation of being a book for “true intellectuals”. It need not be quite so daunting, however: we have some tips for the less scholarly inclined and for Thomas Mann novices determined to give this literary classic a chance.

Hernán D. Caro

Mann's life
Nobel laureate in literature and “later” democrat

Thomas Mann wrote great literature all his life. Almost three decades after the publication of "Buddenbrooks", the writer received the Nobel Prize for Literature for his debut novel on 10th December 1929.

Stefanie Grossmann

Thomas Mann | ETH Library Zurich, Thomas Mann Archive

Exile in Paradise
Villa Aurora and Thomas Mann House in Los Angeles

During the Nazi regime, many German artists and intellectuals found refuge in Southern California. The authors Lion Feuchtwanger and Thomas Mann were among the most prominent “exiles in paradise”. Join us on our audio voyage to their former homes in Los Angeles.

Katia Mann with her children Klaus, Erika, Golo and Monika (1916)

The Buddenbrooks Family Affairs

Małgorzata Łukasiewicz

Mann and Kafka An interrupted round of golf

Grzegorz Jankowicz

Anti-fascist Radio Addresses 1940–1945
Thomas Mann’s "Listen, Germany!"

From 1940 to 1945, Mann appealed directly to the German public in a series of anti-Nazi radio addresses, "Deutsche Hörer!" (Listen, Germany!). In moving philosophical counternarratives, Mann wages a war on the airwaves against Hitler, Goebbels, and the Nazis — in his own “German” voice — “the voice of a friend.”

Jeffrey L. High

Elaine Chen

Photo: dark birds in front of a light backgroundmonstrators protest in New York against the Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War. The inscription on their protest signs refers to a quote by the writer Thomas Mann against the war

Position
Thomas Mann and the struggle against the enemies of freedom

For democracy to triumph, it must fight, declared Nobel Prize laureate Thomas Mann over 80 years ago. Even today, merely invoking the values of tolerance and freedom is not enough.

Rainer Hank

The Magic Mountain
A trick of self-development

Theodor W. Adorno recommended that readers of Thomas Mann's novel should forego the arduous task of deciphering the symbols and instead read the work three times. The author Katarzyna Trzeciak writes about why it is worth considering this suggestion.