Hanseatic Nobel novelist who wrote in exile
Thomas Mann (1875–1955), 1929 Literature Nobel laureate, wrote ironic symbolic epics of bourgeois and artist psyches. Buddenbrooks (1901) sketched his Hanseatic clan; The Magic Mountain (1924), Joseph tetralogy (1933–43), and Doctor Faustus (1947) followed. He fled Hitler’s Germany in 1933 for Switzerland, then the U.S. in 1939.
Brother Heinrich and children Erika, Klaus, and Golo also wrote. Return to Switzerland in 1952 placed him among Exilliteratur’s best-known voices—German letters composed outside the Reich.
He was born in Lübeck, second son of a senator and grain merchant and of Júlia da Silva Bruhns, who came to Germany from Brazil at seven. From 1891 to 1933 he lived in Munich, apart from a year in Palestrina with Heinrich, worked briefly for a fire insurance firm and began writing for the magazine Simplicissimus. In 1905 he married Katia Pringsheim, from a wealthy secular Jewish industrial family, and they had six children.
Katia's months in a Davos sanatorium in 1912, treated for a tuberculosis she did not have, gave him the seed of The Magic Mountain. A self-described German patriot, he poured the proceeds of the family's country house into war bonds in 1917 and lost them, and the inflation of 1923 and 1924 hit harder still. In February 1933, returning from a book tour, he was warned by Klaus and Erika that going home was unsafe and settled in Switzerland; after his German passport lapsed he took Czechoslovak citizenship in 1936.
In 1939 he moved to Princeton, where he lived on Stockton Street and taught at the university. From October 1940 he recorded monthly eight-minute anti-Nazi talks that were flown to London and broadcast to Germany by the BBC German Service, making him one of the few prominent German exiles in America to oppose the regime publicly. After the war he said he understood why Hitler's victims embraced German collective guilt. The Cold War then turned on him: as a suspected communist he was called before the House Un-American Activities Committee, which branded him an apologist for Stalin.
Source: Thomas Mann
