Introduction to Thomas Mann
Thomas Mann’s literary genius, one of the largest writers of the 20th century, reflected a life that was wandering between different worlds, especially to Germany in the early 1930s. Mann rose to global fame when he won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929 – mainly for his great social novel "Buddenbrooks" (1901), but also for his fictions "The Magic Mountain" (1924). But during and after the Nazi dictatorship from which he escaped, Mann wrote political essays and held his countrypeople about the German "catastrophe", which led to the Holocaust. These strict views were often reflected in his work.
Earlier Rise to Literary Importance
Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875 in Lübeck, Northern Germany, in a trade family. He grew up with four siblings and wrote his first prose sketches and attachments as a school boy -even if he repeated a class and was regarded as just a "satisfactory" student of the German. His artistic efforts did not fit well into the bourgeois mainstream, and his passion for literature sadly his merchant father. The struggle of this sensitive Bohemian to continue the old -faith business of the family inspired Mann’s first work "Buddenbrooks".
When his father died in 1891, man left the school before filling his Abitur and moved to Munich with his family. When he lived from his father’s legacy, he soon started working as a freelance writer and had ambitions to become a journalist. At the age of 22, after spending time in Italy with his brother Heinrich, "Buddenbrooks", which was divided into German, was divided into German. The semi-autobiographical debut novel about the demise of a wealthy trade family was such a success that Mann was able to live from now on his letter.
War and Sibling Rivalry
Further works soon followed, first of the Novella Collection "Tristan" (1903), to which "Tonio Kröger", also contained a story about the contrast between artist and citizen, spirit and life. In 1905 the writer Katia Pringsheim, the daughter of a wealthy Munich family of scholars, married. He was also attracted to young men, although this seemed to be not disturbed. The couple had six children. Some of them later entered their father’s footsteps and became a writer.
The First World War (1914-1918) began and Thomas and his brother Heinrich, also as a successful author, fell through the role of Germany in the war. Heinrich published an anti -war blade while Thomas defended the empire and his war policy. It was not until 1922 – at what point in time Germany lost war and democracy with the Weimar Republic – did Thomas Mann changed his attitude and supported democratization.
Exit to the United States and Return to Europe
Thomas and Katia Mann emigrated to the USA in 1939 after Germany’s invasion of Czechoslovakia in the USA. Man recorded a visiting professorship at a university in Princeton. When a reporter asked him on his arrival how he felt in exile, man replied: "Where I am, Germany is Germany! I wear my culture in me." From 1940, Thomas Mann asked the Germans to oppose themselves. The British radio station BBC broadcast its monthly radio speeches to its former homeland and surrounded the German censorship. In over 60 programs he spoke to the conscience of his compatriots and did not shy away from the mass murder of the Jews.
Mann’s public letter from 1945 "Why I will not return to Germany", all Germans held responsible for the atrocities of the Nazis -era. But some critics refused to exile the right to go into life on life under Hitler. Some could not understand Mann’s comment that the fire bombarding of German cities was justified. "Everything has to be paid," he said. The writer continued this topic in his novel "Doctor Faustus" published in 1947. He tells of composer Adrian Leverkühn’s pact with the devil and is a metaphor for the social conditions that have made National Socialism possible.
Legacy
But not everything went well in the United States either: As a "alleged communist", man had to testify to the un -American activities committee of the house, which called him "one of the world’s leading apologists for Stalin and Company". The writer left America again in 1952, but he was not drawn to one of the two German states and instead returned to Switzerland, where he died on August 12, 1955 at the age of 80 in the Zurich Cantonal Hospital. With his literature, but also with his steadfastness in the face of fascism, Thomas Mann set a brave example and a legacy that remains.
