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Overview
A groundbreaking biography of one of the century's most important writers. A portrait of Thomas Mann's Germany, his work, his life, his exile and arrival in America - a life of suffering and courage, of great achievement, a life beset by political hostility from the right and the left, and by the torments of sexual frustration. We see Mann, the wunderkind, transforming the history of his family into Germany's first classic novel, Buddenbrooks...the competition between Thomas and his brother Heinrich, who became his greatest literary rival. We see Mann in turn-of-the-century Munich, always the hyperobservant outsider. And we come to understand his immense loneliness, a loneliness interrupted briefly by an affair with a young violinist, Paul Ehrenberg "that central experience of my heart", that was later dramatized in Doctor Faustus. We watch his unlikely courtship of the brilliant Katia Pringsheim, member of a wealthy assimilated Jewish family. We follow their life together during their fifty-year marriage and observe his complicated relations with his six children, particularly Klaus and Erika, who became the leading political and sexual radicals of their generation. Anthony Heilbut defines Mann's place in literary historyhis relation to his literary ancestors, particularly Goethe and Nietzsche, as well as his contemporaries Gide and Kafka, and to the American writers Whitman and Melville. He provides new social and psychological insights into the interplay of Mann's life with such works as Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, Joseph and His Brothers, and The Confessions of Felix Krull. We watch Mann contend with the major intellectual and political crises of Europe after World War I as he evolves politically from arch defender of Germany to leading antifascist. We discover a link between his humanist politics and his dreams of sexual emancipation. We see Mann alternately enthralled and horrified by popular culture. We follow his increasing identification witEditorials
Publishers Weekly -
German novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955), according to this rich, densely textured biographical-critical study, introduced a new sensibility, ``post-bourgeois but not quite bohemian,'' by transforming his personal circumstances-``the artist... living in comfort, but estranged from his class and origins'' -into a modern type. Troubled, self-doubting Mann, in Heilbut's assessment, was ``a great erotic writer'' whose repressed homosexuality colored all his writings: adventurous explorations of desire, the occult, physical illness, language and modern man's and woman's inability to feel. Heilbut (Exiled in Paradise: German Refugee Artists and Intellectuals) observes that three of Mann's six children-sons Klaus and Golo and daughter Erika-were homosexual, and the closeted, married author watched them living out his desires with mixed emotions. Heilbut reads Mann's career as a tale of profound erotic disappointment and defends him against charges that he was tardy in joining the anti-Nazi fight. Brimming with fresh insights and linkages between the life and the art, this biography is a more sympathetic account than Donald Prater's Thomas Mann: A Life (Forecasts, Nov. 13). Photos. (Feb.)From Barnes & Noble
This study examines, among other things, Mann's 50-year marriage, at once devoted and founded on a lie that reverberated in his writings, his complicated relationship with Germany's Jewish community, and his response to Nazism. Provides insight into the interplay of Mann's life with such works as Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain, more. B&W photos.Book Details
Published
February 13, 1996
Publisher
Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Pages
688
Format
Hardcover
ISBN
9780394556338