Mann Alive
Who Knows What Creeps into Our Writing?
"Jo-Ann must read 'Tonio Kröger' before she goes to Salzburg"
I did indeed read it, and Thomas Mann came alive for me that day and has--in places visited, music heard, books read, and thoughts thought--ever since. Here begin my tales thereof.
Born in Lübeck, Germany, June 6, 1875, he grew to become a foremost writer of the twentieth century.
His output was prolific. Here follows a list of works and events of his life pertinent to this blog.
1903 “Tonio Kröger”
1905 Married Katia Pringsheim, Munich
1911 Death in Venice
1918 Reflections of a Nonpolitical Man
1924 The Magic Mountain
1929 Nobel Prize in Literature
1933 February 13th “The Sorrows and Grandeur of Richard Wagner,” lecture, Amsterdam
April 16/17, 1933 "A Protest from Richard Wagner's Own City of Munich" (Authors against TM, pro-Nazi). Did not return to Germany. Took up residence in Switzerland
1938-41 Lecturer at Princeton University
1942-52 Pacific Palisades, California
1944 Naturalized American Citizen
1947 Doctor Faustus
1955 Died August 12th, Kilchberg, Switzerland
During the eighty years of his life, Thomas Mann would meet Gustav Mahler in the house of the richest man in Munich and marry the daughter of the house, Katia Pringsheim, the first woman to attend the University of Munich. He would go on to create works of fiction and of criticism, speak for democracy for Germany and be heckled to the point of personal danger by young Nazis, take American citizenship and enjoy the privilege of visiting the White House as a guest of the Roosevelts. Only a few years later, with the advent of the House Committee on Un-American Activities, he would leave the United States because his political instincts told him to, never to take up residence in Germany, to visit it, but to live in Kilchberg on the Lake of Zurich until his death.