The Knitting Circle: Literature

Biography, work, bibliography.

German novelist and essayist. Awarded the Nobel Prize for literature in 1929.

When nineteen he settled with his mother in Munich. After dabbling at university he joined his brother (Heinrich Mann (1871-1950), also a novelist) in Italy and wrote Buddenbrooks.

He was forced into exile by the Nazis in 1933.

In 1936 he settled in the U.S.A., and in 1944 he became an American citizen.

In 1947 he returned to Switzerland and was the only returning exile to be féted by both West and East Germany.

His novella, Death in Venice is well-known because of Luchino Visconti's film of the same name (1971), starring Dirk Bogarde as the writer Gustav von Aschenbach who becomes entranced with a Polish boy, Tadzio (played by Bjorn Andresen), who he sees at the Lido in Venice.

Thomas Mann was listed at number 282 in the top 500 lesbian and gay heroes in The Pink Paper, 17th. October, 1997, issue 503, page 17.

His Death in Venice was number 1 of the list of the top 100 gay books compiled in the USA in 1999.

Work

• Buddenbrooks, 1901, translated 1924, first novel.

• Tonio Kröger, 1902, short story.

• Tristan, 1903, short story.

• Königliche Hoheit, 1909, translated to Royal Highness, 1916.

• Der Tod in Venedig, 1913, translated to Death in Venice, 1916, a novella.

  Reproduced in The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing.

• Betrachtungen eines Unpolitischen, 1918, (Reflections of an Unpolitical Man), essays.

• Der Zauberberg, 1924, translated to The Magic Mountain, 1927, a novel, which won him the Nobel Prize in 1929.

  An extract is reproduced in The Penguin Book of International Gay Writing.

• Mario und der Zauberer, 1930, translated to Mario and the Magician, 1934.

• Lotte in Weimar, 1939, a novel.

• Appel an die Vermunft, 1930, translated to Appeal to Reason, 1942, an essay.

• Achtung Europa! and Deutsche Hörer, 1945, collections of his anti-Hitler broadcasts to Germany.

• Leiden und Gröbe der Meister, 1933, translated to The Sufferings and Greatness of the Masters, 1947, literary essays.

• The Beloved Returns, a novel.

• Die vertauschten Köpfe, 1940, translated to The Transposed Heads, 1941, a short novel.

• Joseph and his Brothers, a tetralogy of novels.

• Doktor Faustus, 1947, translated 1948, a novel.

• Der Erwählte, 1951.

• Die Betrogene, 1953.

• Bekenntnisse des Hochstapler's Felix Krull, Part I, 1954, translated to Confessions of Felix Krull: Confidence Man, 1955, a novel.

  JOHN CAREY'S BOOKS OF THE CENTURY in The Sunday Times Books, 15th. August, 1999, page 7. "This is Thomas Mann's only comic novel. It shares themes with his serious work, but surrounds them with mockery. The effect is wonderfully enlivening - like chatting with a brainy friend after he has had a few drinks."

  "Mann kept it by him for years, adding to it from time to time, but never finished it. That is no surprise. It is a novel you never want to stop reading, so stopping writing it would surely have been a wrench."

• Last Essay, translated 1959.

• Sketch of My Life, translated 1961.

Bibliography

• Gerhard Harle, (1986), "Die Gestalt des Schönen: Untersuchung zur Homosexualitätsthematik in Thomas Manns Roman 'Der Zauberberg' ", (Hochschulschriften Literaturwissenschaft, vol. 74), Königstein: Hain Verlag bei Athenäum

• Anthony Heilbut, (1997), "Thomas Mann: Eros and Literature", Macmillan, 638 pages, ISBN 0 333 65659 9

  • Cruising for a bruising, by James Hawes in The Times Higher Education Supplement, 11th. April, 1997, No. 1275, page 24. A review of the book with a colour picture of Thomas Mann. "Using the intimate diaries (whose publication was completed in 1995), Anthony Heilbut's wonderfully lively book reveals Thomas Mann as an intensely, obsessively sexual being, driven throughout his life by a passion for young men which was a secret to all but those with ears to hear and eyes to read."

• E. Heller, (1958), "The Ironic German"

• Hermann Kurzke, (1999), "Thomas Mann: Das Leben als Kunstwerk", Munich: C. H. Beck, 672 pages, ISBN 3 406 44661 2.

  • A Mann's life by T. J. Reed in The Times Literary Supplement, 8th. October, 1999, page 13. The article includes a colour reproduction of Max Oppenheimer's portrait of Thomas Mann, (1926). "Mann's homosexuality was a permanent crisis, though at most smouldering rather than erupting. Still, it has been the most discuseed topic of the years since his diaries were published - another hint that what the works suggest can pass unseen, however obvious, until communicated in the more explicit forms. Where once critics missed or suppressed Mann's homosexual interest, now it sometimes seems they can see nothing else. The theme had found its own biographer with Anthony Heilbut's Thomas Mann, Eros and Literature (1995), a spirited and welcome celebration of the writer and his work and a real attempt at literary biography, though flawed by misreadings of text and mistakings of context which risk turning everybody and everything, from Bismarck to Goerthe's Roman Elegies, into (the phrase is Heilbut's) 'one long queer epic'."

    "Mann's homosexuality gets ample space here too. Not, however, as an all-inspiring and all-explaining origin - for Mann, it was expressly one of the roots of art - nor for any 'dishonest' failure to come out. That has been a common but facile criticism by observers who forget, in these liberal days, what the state of the law was in Mann's German years. He could well have destroyed his career in the way Oscar Wilde did."

  • Thomas Mann and homosexuality A letter from Anthony Heilbut in The Times Literary Supplement, 12th. November, 1999, page 19. "I am glad that T. J. Read (October 8) found my 1996 biography, Thomas Mann, Eros and Literature, 'spirited and welcome', though he clearly found the discussion of homosexual themes a bit tendentious. However, he accuses me of reading all of German history as 'one long queer epic'. The phrase is mine, but the slant was Mann's, particularly in politics. Thus it was a deliriously homophiliac reading of Walt Whitman that impelled his turn towards the Weimar Republic in 1922, and it was his favourite poet, the indisputably gay August von Platen, whom he would continually quote during his years of exile, most poignantly when he yoked his own fate to that of the Jews. His ambivalence about Germany ('we poor Germans, no one really likes us') dovetailed exactly with his mixed feelings toward the desires he could never openly assert, yet spent his career happily, indeed productively, intimating."

• Hans Mayer, (1950), "Thomas Mann".

• Michael G. Paulson, (1993), "A Comparative Study of Thomas Mann's 'Der Tod in Venedig' (Death in Venice) and Reinaldo Arenas's 'Otra Vez El Mar' (Farewell to the Sea)", Ediciones Universal, 87 pages, ISBN 0897297121 (paperback).
  

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Last altered 18th. September, 2003