Thomas Mann: A Biography - Hardcover

The "last great European man of letters," 1929 Nobel Prize winner Thomas Mann took great pains to cultivate a public persona of calm, assured elegance. He successfully masked the "interior chaos" and self-disgust that so plagued his private life and, as this fine biography shows, became so much a part of his fiction. Using Mann's copious diaries, his letters, and interviews with his children, Hayman draws detailed autobiographical parallels to Mann's writings. Early stories such as "The Clown," "Tonio Kruger," and "Little Herr Friedemann" contain elements that, when examined next to Mann's diaries, reveal his frustrated bisexuality, his fits of depression, and his frequent illnesses. Mann married in 1905 following an affair with a young painter named Paul Ehrenburg; he admits he "liked" Katia and "admired her" but consciously sacrificed "his natural inclination on the altar of his public image." This psychosexual analysis would grow tiresome, though, if Hayman failed to equally amplify the political, social, and literary man. Mann's vocal opposition to Hitler and the Nazis would result in his exile from Germany during the years 1933 to 1949. In an almost day-by-day examination of Mann's life, Hayman traces the writer's decades-long feud with his brother Heinrich; studies in detail his literary career from its beginnings to The Magic Mountain (1924), Doctor Faustus (1948), and The Genesis of a Novel (1961); and looks at his association with Hermann Hesse, Bruno Walter, Bertolt Brecht, and others. A heavy, heady work, worthy of this German master. Ron Antonucci

German novelist Thomas Mann (1875-1955) played an almost heroic role in keeping German culture alive, and in opposing Hitler, after Germany had surrendered to Nazism; yet this major, dramatic biography reveals a writer who was deeply ambivalent about the Jewishness of his wife, Katia, and who tried, for the first three years of their exile in Switzerland, not to condemn the Nazis publicly. According to Hayman, Mann was terrified the Nazis would get hold of the diaries he had left behind, expose his bisexuality and ruin his reputation. Living behind the facade of married respectability, the guilt-ridden Mann, as the diaries disclose, felt passionate attractions toward boys and young men, including his friend the painter Paul Ehrenburg-though he never "took the step from homoeroticism into homosexuality," in Hayman's analysis. Indispensable for understanding Mann's novels and stories, this literary biography unearths startling connections between his life and work. Prone to convulsive sobbing and fits of nausea, Mann was an aloof father to his six children, two of whom committed suicide. Hayman, biographer of Brecht and Nietzsche, strips away the cultivated mask to plumb a divided soul, "the last great European man of letters" in Hayman's assessment. Photos.
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