France in Balzac, Hugo, Flaubert, Proust… England, Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, George Eliot or George Orwell. Russia is divided between Dostoevski and Tolstoy. The great German novelist? Thomas Mann. One hundred and fifty years after his birth in a patrician family in Lübeck, the writer enjoys a posthumous aura to make Goethe himself jealous. Across the Rhine, only Hermann Hesse can undoubtedly compete for this title, but the author of Steppe wolf spent most of its existence in Switzerland.
Often, time is ruthless for those who, during their lifetime, pleased to play the “great national writer” while mixing with political debates and philosophical considerations. It is enough to think, with us, from the destiny of the works of Anatole France or Maurice Barrès. But Mann is a rare case of early glory (celebrity at 26, Nobel at 54) with even more favorable posterity. Last year, the Nobel Polish Prize Olgarczuk A, with The Banquet of Puffs (Black on white), offered a beautiful feminist version of The Magic Mountaintransposing the sanatorium of Davos in the chain of Southtes. Three years ago, the Irishman Colm Toibin signed with The magician (Grasset) A jewel of fictionalized biography on Mann and his tribe, from Lübeck to Zurich via Munich and Los Angeles. As pointed out Die Zeit Who devoted his front page to him at the start of the year, this man “obviously leaves us no respite”.
From nationalist to Liberal
For the weekly in Hamburg, there are three reasons for a century and a half later “Thomas Mann shines more than all the other German writers”. First, his personal journey sums up the political evolution, ideological shocks and tragedies of his country. Thomas Mann is the pure product of a Hanseatic city-state, Lübeck. The father is a merchant and senator. The mother has Brazilian origins, to which her son attributes her artistic sensitivity. His first novel, Buddenbrookpublished in 1901, is the last classic of the 19th century. The writer depicts it in a naturalist style, but with an already marked irony, the decline, generation after generation, of a rich Lübeckoise family, even though Germany is uninfined.
His great work, The Magic Mountainis haunted by the First World War. The long genesis of the novel marks the ideological metamorphosis of its author. Initially, in 1912, after a stay of his wife Katia at the Davos sanatorium, it had to be a short satire at altitude on a cosmopolitan elite. But when it was published in 1924, The Magic Mountain Made more than a thousand pages and depicts, through the privileged tuberculosis microcosm, a whole European continent heading towards the apocalypse of the trenches. Nationalist conservative convinced that war will be a “purification”, Thomas Mann turns into a liberal supporter of Weimar’s democracy. The major turning point is the assassination of his friend Walther Ratheau, from a Jewish family, by an extreme right group in 1922.
In 1933, pushed to exile by coming to power of the Nazis, whose dangers he had later denounced, the novelist imposed himself as a civilizational conscience. In 1936, Hitler fallen him from his nationality. “Where I am, there is Germany,” he replied, calling on his compatriots to regain their moral sense. From the United States, he will go so far as to greet the bombings against his own hometown. The novel that is most dear to him, the brilliant Doctor Faustusis the biography of a fictitious musician inspired by Arnold Schoenberg (his neighbor in Los Angeles, who will blame him for a lot), but evokes intellectual decadence and tilting towards the nihilism of an entire nation. It was not until 1949 that the exile deigned to repress the German soil, in Frankfurt and Weimar, on the occasion of the bicentenary of the birth of Goethe.
The German royal family
Thomas Mann is also “his family”, to use the title of a German TV movie broadcast in 2001. As one day suggested the great German literary critic Marcel Reich-Ranicki, the Mann are the royal family of across the Rhine. A dynasty of intellectuals with its elitist rituals, its unsaid, its stiffness, its escapades, its drugs … At the center, there are two brothers, the elder Heinrich and the younger Thomas, who access literary glory and have a stormy, both close and rival relationship. Heinrich, whose novel Professor Unrat Inspire the film The Blue Angelis an anti -capitalist, anti -Bourgeois and Pacifist radical. For a long time, in opposition, Thomas will maintain the posture of the apolitical esthete only swearing by Wagner, Schopenhauer and Nietzsche. All his life, he will keep a stilted style of big bourgeois.
The Mann is also the incredible offspring of Thomas and his wife, the admirable Katia. Unlike their father, they fully live their homosexuality. Klaus is the terrible child of German letters who, after several detox cures, committed suicide in Cannes. Erika, an actress and author of children’s books, marries by convenience with the English poet Wh Auden, becomes war correspondent, the only woman to cover the Nuremberg trial, and stands out as the guardian of the paternal work. Golo, historian and intellectual conscience of the FRG, publishes a monumental German history of the 19th and 20th century. Nicknamed by his own “the magician”, Thomas dominates by his stature all these little people, aware of having transmitted an illustrious name and many neuroses to his children.
Soon an adaptation of “Buddenbrook”
Finally, there is of course the essentials, namely the work, immense, bewitching, ironic, as powerful in its brief form (Death in Venice, Tonio Kröger) than in novels-row. A century later, The Magic Mountain is a monument that does not know the erosion of time, but strikes with its foreknowledge. The World Economic Forum has replaced the sanatorium, but Davos remains the symbol of an ever -cut altitude elite from the “flat country”. The games between the humanist Settembrini and the Jesuit Naphta, who competed for the education of the main character, the Innocent Hans Castorp, announce the current crisis of liberalism. Progressive to caricature, Settembrini is convinced that “the powers of reason and lights will release humanity”. “Revolutionary of the reaction”, Naphta assures that men will always need authority and religion and that science or objective truth are only an illusion. Difficult to make more modern. To which we must add the character of Mynheer Peeperkorn, precursor of Donald Trump. This colonial businessman embodies pure personal charisma, a male vitality which takes precedence over the battle of ideas, an anti-intellectual populist chaining the empty remarks of meaning, but who seduce the assembly.
Only the monologues of Doctor Krokovski, therapist keen on Freudism, are their age. Young promising discipline in 1924, psychoanalysis was, in 2025, more than a pseudoscience. On the other hand, a contemporary reader obsessed with the genre will find in Mann as much pleasures as on the side of Marcel Proust. In The Magic Mountainthe writer transposes for example his attraction for a former classmate in the female character of Clawdia Chauhat, fantasy of Hans Castorp. So no surprise if the “queer studies” also seized him. Luca Guadagnino, the director of the very gay Call me by your name And Queerannounced that he was going to adapt THE Buddenbrookone of his favorite novels. Definitely, Thomas Mann will not leave us respite.