Thomas Mann

Thomas Mann won the Nobel Prize for a novel about the decline of a Lubeck merchant family and spent the Nazi years broadcasting to Germany from California. He was the son of a senator and grain merchant of the old Hanseatic city, and Buddenbrooks, published in 1901 when he was twenty-five, traces four generations of exactly that class from commercial confidence to exhaustion, with the trading house as the measure of everything. The Nobel citation of 1929 named it specifically. Death in Venice, The Magic Mountain and the Joseph tetralogy followed. His politics moved a long way: he defended German cultural authoritarianism against western democracy in a 1918 book he later disowned, and by 1922 was arguing publicly for the Weimar Republic. He was abroad when Hitler took power in 1933 and did not return; his citizenship was revoked in 1936 and his honorary doctorate at Bonn withdrawn, and his reply to the university is one of the sharpest documents of the emigration. From 1940 he recorded monthly broadcasts for the BBC addressed to German listeners. Doctor Faustus, written in California, makes a composer's pact with the devil into an account of what had happened to his country. He left the United States in 1952 during the McCarthy period and died in Zurich. Three of his six children were writers and two, Klaus and Erika, were active anti-fascists in exile. His brother Heinrich, also a novelist, had quarrelled with him publicly over the 1918 book and reconciled afterwards. The Nobel came for Buddenbrooks specifically rather than for the body of work, which was unusual and which he found slightly diminishing.

• Lived: 1875 CE – 1955 CE
• Nationality: German
• Roles: writer