Death in Venice

Thomas Mann (1875-1955) is widely touted as one of the greatest German writers of the 20th century. A novelist and essayist of the realist school, many of his works were acknowledged internationally as modern classics even during his lifetime. In 1929, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature for his early novels. In addition to Death in Venice, he is best known for his essays on notable German figures including author Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (The Sorrows of Young Werther, Faust) and composer Richard Wagner (1813-1883), and his other notable works, including The Magic Mountain (1924), Buddenbrooks (1901), and Tristan (1903). Mann’s writing is celebrated for its rich symbolism, realism, and nuanced irony, in addition to the sophisticated technical mastery of his prose.

Mann was born in Lubeck, Germany, in 1875 to a well-off family. Mann was attracted to men throughout his life, though he never pursued relationships with the many men and boys for whom he had documented romantic or sexual yearnings. This was due in large part to the criminalization of relationships between men in his native Germany and across much of the world during his lifetime, as well as his fear of the social stigma surrounding queer sexuality. He instead expressed these conflicted feelings and his experiences with same-sex attraction through his writing. Mann married Katja Pringsheim in 1905. With his wife aware and tolerant of his orientation, theirs was a happy union lasting until his death. They had six children, three of whom would follow in their father’s footsteps by becoming celebrated writers in their own right and coming out as gay.

Mann’s elder brother Heinrich (1871-1950) was a renowned anti-authoritarian writer whose criticism of German involvement in WWI conflicted with Mann’s own conservative and patriotic leanings at the time. In the interwar period, however, Mann came to recant his former convictions, becoming a staunch defender of democracy and leftist ideals. He stood firmly against the rise of fascism in Europe, making numerous speeches and broadcasts in protest of Nazi rule in Germany. The most famous of these was his 1930 An Appeal to Reason in Berlin. He was exiled from Germany during Hitler’s reign, losing his German citizenship, traveling widely abroad, and gaining Czechoslovakian and then American citizenship. He settled in California until frustration with Cold War era McCarthyism saw him relocate to Switzerland, where he died in 1955.