Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann ( June 6, 1875 – August 12, 1955) was a German novelist born in Lübeck, Germany, and author of the famed novel, Death in Venice.

From the glbtq online encyclopedia:

Mann, Thomas (1875-1955)

One of Germany's greatest twentieth-century authors, Thomas Mann encoded his own homosexuality in his novels but thought that homosexuality led to the destruction of social institutions and the death of the individual homosexual. Winner of the 1929 Nobel Prize for literature, Mann bridges nineteenth-century realist fiction and the twentieth-century modernist style in his novels, short stories, and essays.

Mann was born the second of five children to parents who embodied the duality that would become the central theme of his writing. Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann, his father, was a very successful businessman as well as influential and respected citizen of the North German port of Lübeck.

His mother, Julia da Silva-Bruhus, was the daughter of a German businessman and a Brazilian mother. Through her, Thomas became interested in music, literature, and art, which, because of his mother's parentage, Mann always associated with Southern cultures and climates. His pragmatism and work ethic derived from the Northern influence of his father, he believed.

When his father died in 1891, at the age of fifty-one, the family business was sold. His father had realized neither Thomas nor his older brother Heinrich would become his successor, as both had shown more interest in literature than in business.

Mann chafed under the rigid order of the college preparatory school he attended in Lübeck and failed two years. Because of this, he completed six of the nine years that comprise the educational sequence in a German Gymnasium and received the lesser diploma of "Mittlere Reife" in 1894. Between 1894 and 1896, he did attend lectures on history, art, and literature at the Technical University in Munich, the city to which his mother had moved in 1892.

Thomas Mann married Katja Pringsheim in 1905, and they had six children, three daughters and three sons. The Mann family contained several extremely gifted members.

His brother Heinrich wrote many novels and dramas, the most well-known of which is the novel Professor Unrat from which the film The Blue Angel was made. His daughter Erika was a stage actress who married W. H. Auden (in order to get British citizenship) and became the caretaker of her father's literary heritage after his death.

His first son Klaus wrote novels, short stories, plays, and essays depicting life for Germany's disaffected bohemian youth in the interwar period. His open homosexuality led to some conflict with his father, who chose to express his homosexual desires in a very different manner. Golo, the second son, became a respected German historian.

For many in the German-speaking world, Mann was the epitome of the "educated burgher," that man of the upper middle class whose comfortable economic status allowed him to acquire not only possessions but a cultural education, a spirit of refinement and good taste. Indeed, his works and his interests reflect such a status. Many of his stories and novels (for example, Buddenbrooks, 1901) depict an upper-middle-class milieu and the concerns of that family life.

Yet Mann struggled against a complete identification with bourgeois society. Indeed, he believed the source of his artistic inspiration lay in a realm antithetical to the bourgeois one he achieved in reality, namely, in the erotic, the sexual, and in particular, within homosexual desire.

Many of Mann's chief works pursue the struggle to maintain a balance between the spheres of the artist and of the everyday, family man. Often at the core of that struggle is one male's urge to love another, an urge that teeters between expression and repression.

In the letter to his friend Count Hermann Keyserling, published as "Über die Ehe" ("About Marriage," 1925), Mann tries to separate the creative and enduring institution of marriage, which creates families and, ultimately, states, from the artistically necessary, but eventually destructive force of homoeroticism. "There is no blessing in it save that of beauty, and that is the blessing of death," he wrote about same-sex desire.

The essay is a defense against the author's own homoerotic feelings. Mann was the solid burgher of his generation, celebrated author, and family father. He admits, if one reads carefully, that homosexual desire may have inspired his art, but homosexual identity had to be rejected since it threatened not only "society" but his own preeminent status....

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Literary works

• 1893 Vision
• 1894 (Gefallen)
• 1896 The Will to Happiness
• 1896 Disillusionment (Enttäuschung)
• 1897 Death (Der Tod)
• 1897 Little Herr Friedemann ("Der kleine Herr Friedemann"), collection of short stories
• 1897 "The Clown" ("Der Bajazzo"), short story
• 1897 The Dilettante
• 1897 Tobias Mindernickel
• 1897 Little Lizzy
• 1899 The Wardrobe (Der Kleiderschrank)
• 1900 Luischen
• 1900 The Road to the Churchyard (Der Weg zum Friedhof)
• 1901 Buddenbrooks (Buddenbrooks – Verfall einer Familie), novel
• 1902 Gladius Dei
• 1903 |Tristan, novella
• 1903 The Hungry
• 1903 Tonio Kröger, novella
• 1903 The Child Prodigy ("Das Wunderkind")
• 1904 A Gleam
• 1904 At the Prophet's
• 1905 Fiorenza, play
• 1905 A Weary Hour
• 1905 The Blood of the Walsungs ("Wälsungenblut"), novella (withdrawn)
• 1908 Anekdote
• 1907 Railway Accident
• 1909 Royal Highness , novel
• 1911 The Fight between Jappe and the Do Escobar
• 1911 "Felix Krull" ("Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull"), short story, published in 1922
• 1912 Death in Venice (Der Tod in Venedig), novella
• 1915 Frederick and the Great Coalition (Friedrich und die große Koalition)
• 1918 Reflections of an Unpolitical Man (Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen), essay
• 1918 A Man and His Dog (Herr und Hund; Gesang vom Kindchen: Zwei Idyllen), novella
• 1921 The Blood of the Walsungs ("Wӓlsungenblut"), (2nd edition)
• 1922 The German Republic (Von deutscher Republik)
• 1924 The Magic Mountain (Der Zauberberg), novel
• 1925 Disorder and Early Sorrow ("Unordnung und frühes Leid")
• 1930 Mario and the Magician (Mario und der Zauberer), novella
• 1930 A Sketch of My Life (Lebensabriß)
• 1933–43 Joseph and His Brothers (Joseph und seine Brüder), tetralogy
  • 1933 The Tales of Jacob (Die Geschichten Jaakobs)
  • 1934 The Young Joseph (Der junge Joseph)
  • 1936 Joseph in Egypt (Joseph in Ägypten)
  • 1943 Joseph the Provider (Joseph, der Ernährer)
• 1938 This Peace (Dieser Friede)
• 1938 Schopenhauer
• 1937 The Problem of Freedom (Das Problem der Freiheit)
• 1938 The Coming Victory of Democracy
• 1939 Lotte in Weimar: The Beloved Returns, novel
• 1940 The Transposed Heads (Die vertauschten Köpfe – Eine indische Legende), novella
• 1943 Listen, Germany! (Deutsche Hörer!)
• 1944 The Tables of the Law, a commissioned novella (Das Gesetz, Erzählung, Auftragswerk)
• 1947 Doctor Faustus (Doktor Faustus), novel
• 1947 Essays of Three Decades, translated from the German by H. T. Lowe-Porter. [1st American ed.], New York, A. A. Knopf, 1947. Reprinted as Vintage book, K55, New York, Vintage Books, 1957.
• 1951 The Holy Sinner (Der Erwählte), novel
• 1954 The Black Swan (Mann novella)|The Black Swan]] (Die Betrogene: Erzählung)
• 1954 Confessions of Felix Krull, Confidence Man: The Early Years (Bekenntnisse des Hochstaplers Felix Krull. Der Memoiren erster Teil), novel expanding upon the 1911 short story, unfinished
• also see Werke on http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Thomas_Mann#Werke

See also

• Death in Venice
• Death in Venice (film)

External links

http://www.glbtq.com/literature/mann_t.html

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Death_in_Venice