MANN, THOMAS
Publié le 22/02/2012
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MANN, THOMAS (1875–1955), writer; the premier literary figure of the
Weimar era. Born in Lu¨beck to a prosperous businessman and city senator, he
began writing small prose works as a youngster. Although he was a mediocre
student—he repeated two classes in Gymnasium—his was nonetheless a disciplined
intellect that, with superb literary skill, merged profound ideas and humor
into loosely autobiographical writings. Abandoning Gymnasium in 1893, he
moved to Munich, where, upon forming a tie with his brother Heinrich (see
Heinrich Mann), he began writing. Buddenbrooks, a novel portraying the disintegration
of a prosperous family, appeared in 1901. Through his 1905 marriage
to Katia Pringsheim, he gained financial independence and entered Munich's
affluent society.
Stimulated by Schopenhauer, Wagner, and Nietzsche, Mann was intrigued by
decadence, decay, and death (all central to Buddenbrooks, Death in Venice, The
Magic Mountain, and Doctor Faustus). But while he formulated a German vision
of culture, his aesthetic speculation remained unpolitical. World War I
infused his writing with politics. Imbued with a conservative patriotism common
in prewar Germany, he was converted to extreme nationalism; the change shattered
his relationship with his Francophile brother. His wartime Betrachtungen
eines Unpolitischen (Reflections of a nonpolitical man), while confused and
repetitious, highlights the theme of Kultur versus civilization that reappears in
a more sophisticated form in Der Zauberberg (The Magic Mountain).
Mann's resolve to support the new Republic was first kindled by Oswald
Spengler's* Decline of the West, a book that repelled him and then blossomed
after the 1922 assassination* of Walther Rathenau.* Der Zauberberg, his 1924
novel symbolizing the varied appeal of sickness and decadence, marked his
break with the suppositions held through the war. (Upon awarding the Nobel
Prize in 1929, the committee conspicuously ignored Der Zauberberg in favor
of Buddenbrooks.) After the September 1930 elections he began lecturing on
the necessity of the middle-class parties to ally themselves with the SPD; this
was, he implored, the one means of defeating Hitler.*
Mann's outspoken rejection of the NSDAP cost him long-held friendships
and generated physical danger. While he was lecturing abroad in February 1933,
he was warned not to return to Germany. From southern France and then Switzerland
he joined the protest against the Third Reich. In 1937 he helped found
Mass und Wert, a journal that published some of the best political opinion in
the late 1930s. He was stripped in 1936 of his citizenship and emigrated to the
United States in 1939. While he maintained his literary activity—the tetralogy
that comprises Joseph und seine Bru¨der (Joseph and his brothers) appeared
between 1933 and 1942—he lectured tirelessly on the need to resist Nazi Germany.
His last major work, Doktor Faustus, which appeared in 1947, evoked
all the anger, agony, and frustrated love that Germany had aroused in him since
1933.
Liens utiles
- Le personnage d'ASCHENBACH Gustave de Thomas Mann
- Le personnage de CASTORP Hans de Thomas Mann
- Les Buddenbrook de Thomas Mann
- ARMOIRE (L’) Thomas Mann (résumé & analyse)
- ALTESSE ROYALE (résumé & analyse) Thomas Mann