Mann Thomas - Death in venice and other stories

For an imaginative work of any significance to make an on-the-spot impact that is both broad and deep, writes Thomas Mann in Death in Venice, there must be some unspoken affinity, indeed basic agreement between the individual destiny of the author and the general one of his contemporaries and fellow citizens. Mann might well have been writing of himself. Together with Franz Kafka, Mann overshadows all other twentieth-century German authors in world fame and importance. He sold millions of books during his lifetime, exerted a literary influence to rival that of Faulkner or Joyce, functioned in American exile during World War II as the premier voice of Germanys humanist tradition, and is still read today throughout the world by both popular and academic audiences. Yet he remains a difficult, problematic figure. Unlike Kafka, whose works take place in a singular alternative nightmare world and whose name spawned an English adjective, Mann wrote in a variety of modes ranging from the everyday-realistic to the surreal, and his authorial presence always seems to hover outside his fictional creations, apart and separate from them. There is no adjective Mannian except among Mann scholars. Instead, there is a continuing fascination with him as a person and with the circumstances surrounding the composition of his works. No fewer than three Mann biographies appeared in 1995.

Paul Thomas Mann was born on June 6, 1875, in Lbeck, the second child of Senator Thomas Johann Heinrich Mann. The Manns had been citizens first-class of the Hanseatic trading city for over a hundred years before Thomass birth, possessing a large import-export firm and holding office in the autonomous city-states government. Thomass mother, Julia da Silva-Bruhns, was of Brazilian descent: his mixed parentage would later become a subject he would explore in his semi-autobiographical Tonio Krger and Death in Venice. Success for Thomas came early, despite the swift demise of the family business after his fathers death in 1892. After his father died, Thomass family moved to Munich, where he was educated and worked as a clerk in an insurance office and served on the staff of the Munich journal Simplicissimus before taking up writing as a career. He published his first novella at the age of nineteen. By 1904 he had completed Buddenbrooks, the novel that was to bring him international fame. In the years to follow, despite occasional financial crises brought on by the vicissitudes in Germanys political fortunes, Mann never seriously questioned his calling as an author and a public figure. Indeed, he saw his career as following in the great tradition of the twin idols of German literature, Goethe and Schiller. After he completed Buddenbrooks, Mann married into a wealthy Jewish family, composed the short stories collected in this edition, and experienced his second novelistic triumph with the epic The Magic Mountain (1924). He was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature in 1929.

Thomas Mann was an enthusiastic, indeed chauvinistic supporter of the German cause in World War I, which led to a prolonged estrangement from his older brother Heinrich, a successful and important novelist in his own right, with whom Thomas had worked closely in the incipient days of his career. The experience of German defeat, however, converted Mann from an adherent of Imperial monarchism to a committed, if culturally snobbish, proponent of democracy. His opposition to the politics of the National Socialists, together with his wife Katias Jewish background, led to his emigration shortly after Hitler became Chancellor in 1933, first to Switzerland, then to the United States (1938). He became a U.S. citizen in 1944, took up various academic posts, and worked closely with the U.S. State Department on scores of anti-Hitlerian essays and radio addresses. In 1947, while he was living in Los Angeles, he completed his last great novel,