Thomas Mann and democracy

One of the seminal writers of the 20th century, the German Thomas Mann, was born 150 years ago today in Lübeck, a Hanseatic city that proudly celebrates the universal echo of the character. Mann was born here on June 6, 1875, to a wealthy family of grain merchants, and spent his childhood and early youth there. It was in his grandparents' house—converted into a museum, now closed and undergoing expansion—that he set the plot for his first great novel, Buddenbrooks , published in 1901 and which earned him the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1929.

Shortly after, Adolf Hitler rose to power in Germany, and Thomas Mann, who had been prominent in the defense of the Weimar Republic, realized that, with the rise of the Nazis, exile would be his new home. The Reichstag fire in 1933 caught him out of the country, and he never returned.

One of his daughters, Erika, maintained that her father began with Buddenbrooks , a distinctly German novel, then wrote a European work, The Magic Mountain , published in 1924 and perhaps his most famous book, and then delved into moral foundations with the biblical tetralogy Joseph and His Brothers , published between 1933 and 1943, when European democratic values ​​were crumbling under fascist dictatorships.

Thomas Mann's political reflections are reflected in his literary output and in his public conduct as a man who changed nationalities several times. Therefore, the central exhibition for the 150th anniversary, entitled "My Time: Thomas Mann and Democracy ," which German Federal President Frank-Walter Steinmeier is opening this Friday, focuses on his political development during his lifetime and on the often disturbing implications it has for the present.

The Mann family's white-fronted house in Lübeck, which was already a museum, is now closed and will expand into such a museum with the purchase of the adjacent red brick building.

In the halls of the St. Annen Museum, a former Augustinian convent in Lübeck, we see through articles, essays, radio addresses, interviews, diaries and letters how the young Mann began as a reactionary and traditionalist during the years of the First World War, later embracing the republic, escaping Nazism and gradually becoming a convinced and lucid democrat.

The high point of his transformation and of this exhibition was the famous lecture "My Time ," which he gave in Chicago in 1950, in which he rejected all "totalitarian states" and "dogmatic dictatorships." He had lived in the United States since 1938, but the oppression of McCarthyism forced him to return to Europe and settle in Switzerland. He died in Zurich on August 12, 1955, at the age of 80.

“Analyzing the current crisis of democracy with Thomas Mann sharpens our perspective; his warning against falling for easy answers or populist seductions remains unchanged,” argued Caren Heuer, director of Buddenbrook House—home to his now-closed museum—yesterday at the exhibition presentation. “The republic is in our hands, in the hands of each individual,” Thomas Mann said in 1922. “Democracy needs all of us, or it will fail; this is as true today as it was a hundred years ago,” Caren Heuer continued.

Political legacy of the author In an exhibition, Germany reflects on how Thomas Mann evolved from a reactionary and traditionalist to an anti-Nazi and a convinced and lucid democrat.

The presentation was also attended by someone who lived with the subject portrayed: his grandson, Frido Mann, an 84-year-old German-Swiss psychologist and writer who was 15 when his grandfather died. “People ask me what Thomas Mann would say about today's world; I can imagine that when George W. Bush won the US elections in 2000, he wouldn't have liked it, but perhaps he could understand it; but what has happened later this century, with Donald Trump, in Russia, in Ukraine, in Israel, in the Gaza Strip, would have been incomprehensible to my grandfather.” He also criticized, “as a German citizen that I am now and as the grandson of two grandmothers of Jewish origin,” the unclear political and journalistic analyses in Germany that point out that “there is an Israeli government, and they are criminals.”

Later, in a separate conversation, Frido Mann maintained that “the United States of McCarthyism, as bad as it was, was a paradise compared to the country today,” and asserted that “Thomas Mann would have simply shaken his head; even a mind like his couldn’t understand it; what is happening demonstrates, once again, how unpredictable human history is.”

Frido Mann also recalled that his grandfather modeled him after him for a character in his novel Doctor Faustus . Frido was four years old when Mann began writing it and used him as a model for the boy who falls ill and dies. “There are many theories as to why he did it. I can only say that we had a close relationship, and as a grandson, I have positive memories,” he explained. “A grandfather is usually different from a father; he is always more accommodating. Some of Mann’s children suffered under him, but some of the problems were the children’s own.”

Intellectual and history Frido Mann, Thomas Mann's grandson: "My grandfather wouldn't have understood Trump's America."

Thomas Mann married Katia Pringsheim, a member of a wealthy Jewish family, in 1905 in Munich —where he had moved with his mother after his father's death and the family grain business folded. He married despite the fact that his letters and other writings, including his 1912 novel Death in Venice , reveal a homosexual orientation. Thomas and Katia had six children, the eldest of whom, Klaus, committed suicide.

The ongoing exploration of Thomas Mann, due to the 150th anniversary of his death in Germany and other countries where he lived—when the Third Reich revoked his German nationality, he held a Czechoslovakian, then American, and finally Swiss passport—does not overlook his dark sides, such as the racist, sexist, and anti-Semitic tendencies that emerge in some of his writings.

In the long term, the major project about Thomas Mann—which also concerns his brother, Heinrich Mann, author of The Subject and Professor Unrat —is the expansion of the family house in Lübeck where Thomas set The Buddenbrooks . Buddenbrook House, a museum dedicated to the two brothers, will be expanded thanks to an adjacent historic building acquired by the German government. The new museum is scheduled to open in 2030.