A reading from the margins of Europe's literary playing field  Thomas Mann's echo in Latin America

Though Thomas Mann’s works may appear distant from the Latin American context, they were studied with great care by writers such as Carlos Fuentes, Julieta Campos, and Blas Matamoros. For them, Mann’s texts served as inspiration, provocation, and a vital point of reference.

One of the most important figures in 20th-century European literature was undoubtedly Thomas Mann. Although his works may initially seem to have little in common with the Latin American context, they were closely studied by various authors from the region — including Carlos Fuentes, Julieta Campos, Blas Matamoros, and Juan García Ponce. For these writers, Mann’s texts served as inspiration, challenge, and point of reference. While a direct influence may not be easily traced, his reflections on the role of the writer in society and the tensions between art and morality left a lasting impression on their work. These authors also engaged deeply with the European legacy in Latin America. Reading their texts opens a space for a nuanced dialogue between two worlds that, despite geographical and cultural distance, recognize and question one another.

Neither the Cuban novelist Julieta Campos (1932–2007) nor the Argentine writer Blas Matamoro (b. 1942) ever had the chance to meet Thomas Mann in person. Nevertheless, both openly acknowledged the profound impact his work had on their artistic development. While the Mexican author Juan García Ponce (1932–2003) paid tribute to Mann in his writing, fellow Mexican writer Carlos Fuentes (1928–2012) actually encountered him once — though he ultimately observed him only from a distance. The relationship between these Latin American authors and Thomas Mann in some ways mirrors that between Aschenbach and Tadzio inDeath in Venice: it is marked by a blend of admiration, distance, and a yearning to approach an ideal of perfection. Yet, just as in Mann’s novella, there comes a moment when the gaze of pure observation gives way to reflection, and the admired figure ceases to be merely a model — instead becoming a conversational partner.

In contrast, Thomas Mann’s relationship with Mexico was, at best, distant. During his exile in the United States, Mann lived in Pacific Palisades, a suburb of Los Angeles located just over 200 kilometers from Tijuana. Yet there is no evidence that he ever traveled to Mexico or any other Latin American country. Not even the blood running through his veins could bridge that geographical distance. His mother, Julia da Silva Bruhns, was of German descent but born in Paraty, Brazil, where she lived until the age of seven. Mann was well aware of his “Latinity,” yet he never set foot in these southern regions.

A Model of Ethics, Aesthetic, and the Writer’s Function

Nevertheless, Thomas Mann — committed intellectual, meticulous stylist, and symbol of resistance against totalitarianism — became a kind of role model for several Latin American writers of the 20th century. The Cuban novelist Julieta Campos described Mann as one of the great literary voices that influenced her writing career. Buddenbrooks, Doctor Faustus, and especially The Magic Mountain shaped her understanding of literature: In Argentina, where the first translations of Mann’s novels appeared as early as 1930, the author and translator Blas Matamoro stands out as an avid reader and mediator of his work. A significant portion of Matamoro’s scholarship is dedicated to the study of Mann’s diaries and his connection to Spanish literature — particularly his fondness forDon Quixote. In his 2009 essayThomas Mann y la música(Thomas Mann and Music), Matamoro explores how music in Mann’s writing not only accompanies and dramatizes the narrative but also structures and symbolizes its fundamental elements. In this context, he examines works such asDoctor Faustus, in which music serves as a metaphor for the German soul and the inner conflicts it embodies.

Juan García Ponce, for his part, is known for introducing previously unfamiliar European authors to a Mexican readership — among them Robert Musil, Georges Bataille, and, notably, Thomas Mann, to whom he dedicated a tribute in his 1972 essayThomas Mann vivo(Thomas Mann Alive). Several years earlier, in 1965, he had already written a few words in honor of Mann’s tenth death anniversary. In that text, García Ponce bows before the compelling power of Mann’s narratives and novels, concluding that the true magic of his work lies in its ability to transcend boundaries — whether physical, linguistic, or cultural — as his literature touches the most sensitive chords of the human experience. One of the most meaningful moments in the relationship between Thomas Mann’s Germany and Latin America likely occurred several years earlier: in 1950, a brief encounter took place in Zurich between Carlos Fuentes and the German writer. Fuentes, then 21 years old, observed Mann — already in the late autumn of his life — only from a distance, yet immediately recognized his literary greatness and the profound impact he had on world literature. Decades later, Fuentes recounted this moment in an essay titled Un encuentro lejano con Thomas Mann (A Distant Encounter with Thomas Mann), published in El País in 1998. Although he hadn’t dared approach his idol at the time, the encounter left a lasting impression. In Fuentes’s eyes, Mann embodied not only a writer’s professional ethos but an entire worldview. Fuentes’s admiration for Mann went beyond personal reverence — he saw in him the ideal of the writer as the critical conscience of his time. This admiration was not merely theoretical; it found expression in his own literary work. In his 1962 novel La muerte de Artemio Cruz (The Death of Artemio Cruz), several themes emerge that Mann also explored in depth: decadence, illness, memory, power, and guilt. Added to this are stylistic features that embrace interior monologue, narrative time shifts, and the development of characters who embody the confrontation between the individual and history. Much like The Magic Mountain and Death in Venice, Artemio Cruz is a narrative of decline — of a body, a social class, and perhaps even an entire nation.

The Modern and the Decadent

In The Death of Artemio Cruz, Carlos Fuentes takes up several of Thomas Mann’s central themes and critically reworks them within the Mexican context. As in The Magic Mountain, illness is not merely a physical condition but a metaphor for a society in crisis. Bound to his deathbed, Artemio Cruz reflects on his life from within a decaying body. Similarly, the sanatorium in Davos symbolizes a decadent Europe on the brink of catastrophe. Like the protagonist of Death in Venice, Fuentes’s central character is an ambivalent figure — a man caught between longing, guilt, and physical decline, whose personal story coincides with the collapse of an era. In both works, time does not unfold linearly: the narrative is fragmented, filled with recollections and returns, circling around itself. Fuentes adopts this interplay of temporal layers — a hallmark of Mann’s style — and constructs a narrative in which memory becomes a moral and ideological battleground. Artemio Cruz is thus not a mere imitation, but a reimagining of Mann’s themes from a southern perspective: Fuentes draws on Mann’s legacy and transforms it into a tool for grappling with Mexico’s turbulent history.

The reception of Thomas Mann’s works and their influence on Latin American authors testify to the enduring power of his literature — but also to the complex dialogue Latin America maintains with the European intellectual tradition. While Mann may not exert a direct influence on Latin American literature, he stands as a figure of cultural resonance: his work inspires admiration while also inviting critical reading from the margins of Europe’s literary sphere. His writing reflects both what Latin America inherits and what it seeks to transform. In this way, literature becomes both a bridge — and a boundary — between times, cultures, and worldviews.